Ludmilla listened to Jamie’s explanation with a frown, but gradually her faced relaxed and she stroked the brightly patterned scarf. ‘Spasibo.’ She accepted the gift with a little curtsy.
The bone-chilling Siberian cold hit them the moment they left the train. As the long line of coaches rattled off for Taishet another three hundred miles east, they stood on the platform amongst their luggage and watched with a feeling almost of nostalgia that lasted all of thirty seconds.
Jamie instructed the taxi driver to take them to an internet cafe where they could charge their laptops and phones. He made a mental calculation and decided that, give or take a few hours either way, Fiona would probably be in her bed or just getting out of it, and decided to wait until later to get in touch. It was too early to book into a hotel, so they lingered in the cafe and drank hot coffee and nibbled at the ubiquitous sweet pastries. Magda checked out flights from Krasnoyarsk to Sydney and Tokyo and discovered that the only connections were through Peking or Moscow, but they decided to delay making a decision till later.
Jamie sipped his coffee and pondered their next important step. ‘I was thinking that for security reasons we should book a twin room wherever we end up. After the visit from our Chinese friends and your drunk Russian, it would seem sensible and safer for us to be … together.’
Magda’s eyes narrowed with mock suspicion. ‘I hope you’re not propositioning me, Jamie?’
He rubbed his unshaven chin thoughtfully. ‘For an English gentleman that would naturally be unthinkable and probably a flogging offence into the bargain. I just thought that since we’d shared a six foot by eight foot cell for three days and managed not to intrude too much on each other’s modesty, we could probably manage it in a hotel room for one night.’
She considered for a moment. ‘All right, that’s fine with me, but only as long as I get first chance at the shower.’ She pulled at her blouse. ‘I feel like this thing is part of me. You really think we can get this done in one afternoon?’
‘If we get access to Arkady Berzarin I don’t see why not.’ Jamie finished off another pastry. ‘Either he has the head or he doesn’t. If he has, either he’ll agree a price or he won’t. If he won’t we’ll walk away and leave the negotiating to Devlin.’
‘And what makes you think he’ll see us?’
‘Because I have a message for him from an old friend.’
Guilt froze the smile on his lips, but Magda didn’t seem to notice.
She looked around at the figures hunched over the cafe’s computers. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘For all its undoubted charms, Krasnoyarsk isn’t the kind of place I want to hang around in.’
Jamie knew what she meant. The moment they’d stepped off the train he’d sensed that Krasnoyarsk had an atmosphere unlike any European city. It radiated all the confidence and immediacy of a place that was going somewhere fast, a boom town, but with an added element. The only way he could describe it was the feeling a lone cowboy would have had riding into a western frontier town during the Gold Rush: a sense of adventure laced with a considerable dash of vulnerability, if not outright danger.
Once they’d booked into their hotel they searched for a taxi and Jamie handed over the address provided by his new best friend Alexei. They drove out through a mixture of factory districts and thickly wooded suburbs into the hills west of the city centre until they reached a well-paved road unlike most of Russia’s potholed public thoroughfares. It wound upwards through a long, tree-lined valley and ended at a high wall surrounding what appeared to be an enormous country estate. It was only when the driver slowed well short of the wall and he noticed the sweat on the man’s brow that Jamie realized this might be just as hazardous as his experience in Moscow.
‘Impressive,’ Magda said.
‘Mmmmh.’ Jamie’s eyes were on the barrier outside the estate’s main gate a hundred metres ahead. The last time he’d seen anything like it had been in a TV documentary about the Green Zone in Baghdad, where it had been designed to stop suicide bombers. Excessive was the word that came to mind. Then you noticed the gun-toting guards whose eyes never left the approaching taxi, and the little towers where you could almost feel the dark eyes of the rifle muzzles on you. Camouflage parkas, combat trousers and boots. Not military. Not with the array of designer sunglasses on display and the sophisticated communications equipment normally only seen riding shotgun for presidential cavalcades.
The taxi braked sharply as one of the men stepped into the road and raised a hand that was as effective a stop sign as any red light.
‘Here we go again.’ Magda gave Jamie a familiar look, the one that said: What have you got me into this time?
The guard held his rifle – it looked like the latest variant of Kalashnikov – pointed almost carelessly in their direction. While they waited Jamie noticed a tiny red light in the shadow of one of the watchtower openings. Some kind of high-tech camera was analysing the car and its number. ‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her. ‘They’re just checking us out.’
Two or three minutes passed before the guard waved the car up to the barrier. As they reached it the driver lowered his window. ‘Your business?’ the man in camouflage demanded. The driver nodded to Jamie and Magda and the guard backed away slightly to give himself some rifle room. The barrel of the AK twitched. Jamie took it as a signal to get out of the car and Magda emerged behind him.
‘Your business?’ the guard repeated.
‘We would like to talk with Mr Berzarin on a personal matter,’ Jamie said. Beside him, Magda gave a little hiss of exasperation and he realized how lame it sounded.
The guard thought so too. His lips twitched into a smile. ‘I do not believe Mr Berzarin is receiving today,’ he said solemnly. ‘Not to discuss personal matters.’
‘His old friend Sergei from university sent his regards and assured me he would be pleased to see us.’
‘I don’t think so.’
They stared at each other for a few moments, Jamie’s image bright and clear in the lens of the sunglasses, his breath misting the chill air. A Mexican stand-off – in the middle of Siberia. The other guards stood chatting to each other and he sensed the man’s patience waning. He looked back, ready to return to the taxi, only to hear the engine rev and the tyres squeal as it reversed and drove away up the long road between the trees.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Magda groaned.
‘Enjoy your walk,’ the guard dismissed them and turned away.
Magda waited till they were out of sight of the barriers before she exploded. ‘That was it? We would like to talk to Mr Berzarin on a personal matter. That was Jamie Saintclair’s grand plan to bust into Siberia’s answer to Fort Knox?’
‘I was assured that mentioning Sergei would get us inside,’ he said defensively.
‘Only if you’d warned me in advance I’d have faked a ladylike faint and distracted their attention while you slipped past all the machine guns and cameras and God knows what else.’
‘I don’t think you’re taking this seriously, Magda.’
‘Seriously?’ She stood with her hands on her hips. ‘We spent days on that miserable train only to drive half a dozen miles and just walk away because of one little setback?’
‘I wouldn’t call a dozen men with machine guns a little setback. What else do you expect us to do?’
‘I thought you might at least try to climb the wall.’
Jamie noticed that when action was required ‘we’ had suddenly become ‘you’. ‘I have an allergy to machine guns,’ he said. ‘There will be at least fifty more inside those walls, and that’s without the infrared beams and the noise sensors and those hidden cameras you mentioned. Oh, and seeing this is Russia, the anti-personnel mines.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘We walk. It’s about six or seven miles back to the city if we don’t freeze to death first.’
‘And?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
She cocked her head to one side and h
e stared at her. ‘I think you’d better do it fast,’ she said.
Jamie heard the sound that had alerted her, the rumble of a car’s engine. They stepped off the tarmac as a large green Jeep emerged from the trees and drew up beside them. Jamie tensed as the mirror window slowly descended.
‘Mr Berzarin will see you now.’
XXV
‘I should shoot you now before you cause any more trouble.’ The words were in English, which had been established as their common language, but the sentiments and the force with which they were produced were unquestionably Russian. ‘There are five hundred square miles of Siberia out there and the wolves are hungry. Your bodies will never be found. Tell me why I shouldn’t do that?’
‘Because your old friend Sergei would advise against it,’ Jamie suggested.
‘I don’t give a fuck about my old friend Sergei,’ their host snorted. ‘I have a policy of not mentioning that bastard’s name in this house. You never know who is listening. But we know who we’re talking about, yes? Someone who has whored himself to the drug lords and the war lords and spy lords.’ Jamie nodded. He sensed Magda’s consternation but now wasn’t the time for explanations. Fortunately, the other man didn’t seem to notice the change in atmosphere. ‘What are you? FSB? Not with that accent. CIA? No, you’re one of those cock-sucking English homos from the SIS or MI6 or whatever they’re calling it these days.’ He looked Jamie up and down, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Her Majesty would weep if she could see what had happened to James Bond. The English secret service couldn’t wipe its own arse without American help. Oh, yes, I’ve met your Queen, a true lady, lovely and honest, not like those shits in Westminster; clever, too, unlike most of the rest of her brood.’
Arkady Berzarin, son of the former diplomat Gennady and, as it turned out, sole proprietor of Siberia’s aluminium industry, sat back in his chair and sipped tea from a china cup. Casually dressed in a dark blue T-shirt, jogging pants and sports shoes, a fluffy white Samoyed hound lay across his feet with its eyes closed, breathing softly. He was fifty-five, but looked ten years younger, with a full head of mouse-brown hair, narrow, shrewd features and a slim build. Opposite him, Jamie and Magda attempted to look equally composed on a couch of soft white leather so broad they’d have had to send semaphore signals if they’d sat at either end. It was all a bewildering contrast to their welcome a few minutes earlier in a sterile metal box inside the gates when they’d been individually strip-searched – by a female guard in Magda’s case – and body-scanned for electronic bugs. Now the warm glow of polished pine surrounded them in a large room at the heart of an enormous and particularly opulent Swiss-style chalet. The wooden floor was scattered with dense Persian carpets in vibrant hues and an explosion of what looked to Jamie like genuine Jackson Pollock paintings filled an entire wall. Great spattered vortexes of shape and colour filled with hidden messages, they threatened to swallow you up if you stood too close. Studying them, Jamie was reminded of Keith Devlin’s ‘collection’, and he reflected distractedly that great art was to the billionaire what the Ferrari was to the futures trader, a sort of giant phallic banner waved from a hilltop. Not exactly a fresh or particularly relevant insight, he admitted to himself, but a genuine enough reflection of the new reality.
A beautiful girl in a tailored business suit appeared from a disguised entrance. She handed the Russian a brown paper envelope and whispered in his ear before exiting by the same route. Berzarin weighed the package in his hand.
‘Your passports,’ he said. ‘Apparently genuine, or somebody has built you a very good background. It wouldn’t be the first time.’ He shook the contents carelessly on to the low glass table that separated them.
‘Genuine, sir, I can assure you.’ Jamie picked up the maroon oblong with the gold lion and unicorn coat of arms. Odd how comforting it felt to have it back in his hands. He handed the second passport to Magda, and she smiled her thanks.
‘So, Mr Jamie Saintclair, art dealer, and Dr Magda Ross, museum curator, you have come to talk to Berzarin about his father,’ the Russian nodded absently. ‘That is curious enough in itself, but Berzarin would be wise to ask himself why his visitors think it is good manners to force themselves into his presence by the use of a threat?’
‘I don’t believe we threatened anyone.’ Jamie covered his defensiveness with the upper-class Englishman’s disdain he’d learned at Cambridge. ‘If anything, it was the other way round.’
‘So you don’t understand that the use of the name Sergei is a threat? That for Berzarin it is the equivalent of a bullet in the mail or a horse’s head in the bed?’
‘No, I—’ Magda’s voice reflected her bewilderment, but Berzarin cut her off.
‘Sergei was the work name he used when he was a KGB recruiter at the St Petersburg State University – it was still Leningrad State, then – and it was as feared then as his own name is now, at least in certain quarters. Sergei would get you by the balls and he would never let go; I can feel the grip of his cold fingers yet.’ He sat forward with a long sigh and the dog at his feet moaned in sympathy. ‘Do you understand how difficult it is to be both honest and rich in today’s Russia? To hold on to what you have without taking on the form of the creatures who would kill to take it from you?’
Jamie couldn’t hide a blink of amused disbelief. Berzarin noticed and went on the attack. ‘I saw you looking at my paintings, art dealer, sneering at a rich man’s conceit; but let me tell you what they mean to Berzarin. For me they are Russia after the fall: vast, confused and chaotic, but full of potential if a man can only read the messages hidden there; valuable enough to provoke envy, even perhaps to kill for. Like my country, they are the product of a flawed genius, who was eaten alive by the things he loved. What Russian would not like to make such an end, driving his car into a tree with a quart of whisky inside him while his girlfriend gave him a blow-job?’ The billionaire laughed, but his eyes betrayed a zeal that revealed the true Berzarin. ‘I look at those paintings and I see Siberia twenty years ago. If you don’t understand what you are looking at they are just a big mess that it is impossible to make sense of, and therefore of no value to you. But if you can visualize the patterns behind the confusion, the genius of the construction, and discover the treasures hidden beneath the surface, then …’ the words had tumbled out like rocks in an avalanche and he was forced to pause for breath ‘… then you have something that is literally priceless.’
He ended with a long sigh and called for another pot of tea and three cups. From the hidden entrance came the sound of someone filling a kettle. ‘I would offer you something stronger,’ he apologized, ‘but I no longer have alcohol in this house. It was altogether too seductive for me and I saw the destruction it caused among my countrymen.’ When the tea arrived they drank in silence and nibbled at the dainty almond cakes that accompanied it.
Jamie took advantage of the lull to change the conversation’s direction. ‘Your father was in Berlin before the war. He met Adolf Hitler.’
Berzarin’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment Jamie felt like a fish wriggling on a spear. To tell, or not to tell – what would his answer be? Any other man of his class would have thrown them out for their impudence, but it seemed that Arkady Berzarin needed to prove he was different from his peers. He nodded.
‘He did not reveal this until many years later. Gennady Ivanovich Berzarin travelled to Nazi Germany in the winter of nineteen thirty-six as part of a secret delegation to assure Hitler that the Soviet Union had no aggressive intentions against any other part of Europe. Stalin regarded the mission as a great success, because my father returned with a suggestion from the Führer that would bear fruit a few years later.’ He saw Jamie’s eyes widen. ‘Oh yes, Mr Saintclair, the destruction and subsequent partition of Poland was conceived on the day my father met Hitler.’
‘But Kaganovich—’
‘Ah,’ Berzarin snorted, ‘you have spoken to The Rat – that’s what my father called him. I thought he would be long dead
but hatred can be an elixir in the right kind of man. Of course,’ he shrugged with an eloquence that was almost French, ‘this means I can tell you anything and you will not believe me. What did he say about my father?’
Jamie hesitated. ‘That he led the mission; that he was a greedy man who took everything the Nazis offered. And that he betrayed him.’
Berzarin nodded slowly. ‘All true, apart from being greedy – Gennady Ivanovich was under orders from Litvinov not to reject any gift from the Germans in case the rejection caused annoyance or upset – and that any hesitation to report Kaganovich to the NKVD would have been viewed as treason. I see you still doubt me. My father used to say there was no greater patriot than Dimitri Kaganovich when he was sober, but when he was drunk his mouth had a mind of its own. Gennady Ivanovich warned him, but the Germans would deliberately get Dimitri drunk. He would tell them everything he knew about the mission and, worse, criticize Stalin and the leadership. Of course, my father reported him, and of course, he helped the NKVD watchers incriminate him, but he also helped save his life at the risk of his own.’
‘Did Dimitri know that?’ Jamie was trying to reconcile what Kaganovich had told him with this new version of the Berlin story.
‘I doubt it,’ Berzarin admitted. ‘He was a prime candidate for a bullet, but at that time there was still a semblance of Soviet justice and my father was allowed to give a character reference. Later, when Dimitri was sent to the gulag, my father arranged his transfer to the Krasnoyarsk ITL – you would call it a corrective labour camp, I think – where he could ensure he was not badly mistreated. How else do you think such a man survived all those years in the camp system?’
‘He said he was a hero.’
‘There were many heroes of the Great Patriotic War, but quite a few ended up in the camps. Unlike Kaganovich the majority did not live to enjoy their freedom. My father too was a hero who marched into Berlin and what he took from there laid the foundation for all this.’ He waved a hand at the paintings and the house. ‘Oh, yes, Mr Saintclair and Dr Ross, I hide nothing from you. My success, such as it is, is based on gold looted from the Nazis. Should I be ashamed of that? I do not think so.’
The Samurai Inheritance Page 17