White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

‘No, my buyers are less interested in that area.’

  ‘Textile? Popova design in factory after Revolution. Poster, commercial art, architect drawing?’

  ‘Not textiles.’ Bianca was bound to go for the rest of the list. She was sentimental about textiles and he had to acknowledge she had a good instinct for collectables, the area where art met shopping. She could keep that market, it was too small for him.

  ‘Silver, metalwork, jewellery, little objets?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe?’ Histrionically, Kolya dropped his head and raised his eyebrows. ‘Very big market, very good.’

  ‘Is there much new stuff coming out?’

  ‘All time.’ He leaned unsteadily forwards and from behind a stack of papers dragged a silver candelabra, upending it to show the hallmark. ‘This one, I buy yesterday, come from Kiev. Mark is Kiev, see here. In Soviet Union, every week, workman knock down a wall and inside – silver, gold, diamonds, porcelain, coins, certificates, banknote – everything family hide from Bolsheviki. Even my father, I see him do this. I tell you … before. In your house.’ His hand made an irritated sideways movement, pushing away a troublesome memory. ‘So – workman give, everything to Soviet government? What for – he get nothing. Black market he get dollars, pounds – hard currency.’

  Every detail of his last weekend under the same roof as Bianca was branded in Lovat’s recall. He examined the candelabra with interest. This was the area in which he was most acutely interested. He knew better than to ask outright who sold the piece. ‘I thought exporting from Russia was illegal.’

  ‘Y-e-e-s! In USSR, everything is forbidden. Simple. So you get three sources.’ He held up three fingers of his right hand. ‘Official negotiation. No good now, today, but for next year – it will come. My advice, begin now, it will take a long time but you will be one of first. Two – works already here, in West. You know already some, I give you names. Three – black market. Everything forbidden, everybody cheat. My advice, come here to France, because nobody ask many question. In England, law is different, always problems.’ He refilled the glasses.

  Lovat made it clear that he had American buyers, specific interests and no great difficulty with black-market goods although he was planning a London show for which he needed authenticated works. Kusminsky, satisfied that there was business here for himself, pulled the tattered Roladex towards him and gave the younger man contacts. ‘I make deal with Miss Berrisford,’ he explained. ‘She get Moscow, you get Leningrad. Good?’

  Lovat bit back his annoyance but the old man tapped his hand like a co-conspirator. ‘Leningrad is more open city, I think things leave more easy. Moscow is better for art nouveau, costume, textile – better for woman. Paintings better in Leningrad. Moscow is more difficult, believe me.’

  Sitting in a café on Boulevard St Germain an hour later, an anxious melancholy clouded his thoughts. The instinct not to trust Kusminsky was strong. He chafed at the inevitability of encountering his ex-wife around every new corner and was angry with himself for letting her get to the old man first.

  In the stream of passers-by his eye landed on a woman plainly dressed in a grey skirt, white shirt and cardigan, with light brown hair pulled loosely off her narrow face. Her undulating walk, which moved her full breasts at every step, attracted him. His gaze lingered an instant while he tried to analyse her elegance, and a few minutes later he was aware that she was sitting at a table behind him.

  He had forgotten about Paris – more truthfully, he had never dared to share the city’s obsession with erotic adventure. The woman leaned forward and asked him for a cigarette. Feeling stupid, he replied that he did not smoke. She did not smoke either, but she liked a little glass of wine on a fine evening, she found it sympa. Unhappily, she was alone, her boyfriend was out of town. She crossed her arms, her breasts pressed together, one hand raised and a fingertip toying inside her blouse with the satin strap of an undergarment. When she left him, early the next morning, she stroked his cheek, purred in his ear and called him a real animal. It was the most genuinely affectionate gesture he had won from a woman in ten years.

  The world looked brighter afterwards, and as a consequence he allowed himself to trust Kusminsky. There was no point in fighting Bianca too fiercely for the Russian pictures already in the West, since a major sale at Berrisford’s could only generate interest and drive up prices. If he mounted his own exhibition first it would be in danger of going unnoticed. Let her go to Moscow with the Minister and endure a formal banquet with the Politburo, she would get nothing out of it. He contented himself by sending on to their saleroom a dealer with two dubious pictures ascribed to Lubov Popova, and a third which was an outright fake, over-restored and signed on the front, which was not the artist’s custom.

  It was eighteen months before he travelled to Leningrad; he had dim memories of a student visit, of his philistine companions leaving him to wander alone in the Hermitage, through room after room of Meissen and Sèvres, until he sat down exhausted on the staircase below a colossal canvas by Picasso.

  With four other cultural businessmen, a film director, a concert entrepreneur and two actors, he was escorted on a brief tour of the neo-classical sights of the city, then left to follow his approved itinerary with an interpreter. She was a short, stocky woman who conversed eagerly from the moment he met her in the bustling lobby of his hotel. The excessive make-up favoured by the Russians did not disguise her white Scandinavian complexion, fresh although she was certainly not young. Her bushy blonde hair hung in a firm pigtail that reached to her waist.

  At meetings mediated by Anya at least as much time was devoted to the two Russians assessing each other’s position in the web of influence as was taken up by Lovat’s ambition to buy paintings. He made little progress in three days. In her bright conversation, questions soon appeared to test his own integrity. Appreciating that he was in a country where the question to be asked of a citizen was not if they took bribes but what they wanted to be offered, Lovat was relieved when she began the preliminary negotiation.

  ‘You like caviar?’ They were waiting for lunch in the hotel’s cavernous restaurant. A smell of non-specific soup hung in the air.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Russian caviar is the best in the world. You try it?’ She picked a packet of Benson & Hedges out of her red shoulder bag and extracted a cigarette.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t like it.’

  ‘Caviar is very healthy food. When I was little girl, my mother make me eat caviar sandwich every day. Good for slim, no calories. Your wife like caviar?’ She tucked the cigarette between smiling lips and waited for him to light it. The idea of a man who did not smoke carrying a lighter just in case a woman should want a cigarette was hilarious, but it also made her feel sentimental.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Vitamins in caviar very rare, vitamin E, vitamin K. Make more sexy. Your girlfriend like caviar?’

  ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend.’

  ‘You learn like caviar, you get girlfriend.’ When she laughed her breasts shook inside her camel polo-neck.

  ‘There’s no point buying caviar, it’s illegal. You can’t export it without the receipt from the state shop at the airport.’

  ‘I show you how to pack it so no one ever find it. How much you like?’

  ‘All right, I’Il buy a tin.’

  She chuckled as if he had said something idiotically stupid. ‘The more you buy the better the price. Look, when you make your exhibition in your gallery, you have party with real Russian caviar, everybody is very pleased, very impressed – it will be good, I think. Fifteen tins.’

  ‘Two.’

  In the end he agreed to ten, she exchanged a few words with the waiter and he brought them from the kitchen under a napkin. As they left Anya strode off in the same direction, swinging her hips, and returned with a plastic bag in which he glimpsed packets of butter.

  Her next move was to test his interest in black-market goods. It was obvious that she h
ad very little appreciation of art and when he began to mention particular painters’names she looked blank. Her opening offer was an introduction to a man who traded in icons, well known for the number of forgeries he supplied. ‘And the market for icons in the West is dead, I’m really not interested. I’m after early twentieth-century pictures, nothing else.’ Eventually, she made him write the names down.

  As a token of advancing trust, she conducted him to his appointments and left him alone with the dealers, whose English was in some cases better than hers. He was thus able to negotiate freely for five excellent pictures, to be exported by processes into which he would not inquire and paid for in dollars in cash.

  He was noticeably more cheerful by the end of the day. Anya suggested that they should drop in on a friend, and had their taxi leave them near the Bank Bridge. She seemed unfamiliar with the address, and with the arrangement of the apartments in the old building, even though their destination proved to be the principal dwelling in it, on the second floor over the street door, with a balcony along four long windows.

  The door was opened by a man of around thirty-five with a loose-fleshed, Ashkenazi face and receding brown curls. ‘I am Mitrokin, Simeyon, good afternoon.’ His keen eyes looked Lovat over as he shook hands, leaving a trace of moisture from his palm.

  Despite the failing light of the autumn afternoon and the heavy velvet curtains the colour of claret, the main room blazed with gold, reflected from ormolu statuary, cloisonné vases, silver-gilt table ware, chalices and icons encrusted with gems, brass votive lamps and the massive gilded picture frames which crowded the walls. Several glass cases displayed jewellery and precious trinkets. One was devoted to Fabergé, mostly minor items, photograph frames in pastel guilloche enamel and hardstone carvings. Marble statues, some of life size, were arranged in an alcove beside the fireplace, behind a table of magnificent bronzes.

  For thirty seconds Anya looked around the Aladdin’s cave of treasures with wide eyes and a mouth gaping in astonishment, then recollected that she ought to be giving the appearance of familiarity with the place and asked briskly about early twentieth-century paintings. The dealer drew Lovat to the long rear wall, which was crowded with pictures, and began to talk him through them. Two portraits were outstanding, an elderly woman in black smiling merrily as she held on to her hat in a strong wind, and a young woman with a ripe smile standing by a balustrade at night. This picture was so subtly coloured it was almost monochrome. The figure was pale against the satiny darkness; large cream roses were pinned in her dark red hair, and a few more blooms lay by her feet. She wore a trailing dress of white silk and lace, and rows of diamonds sparkled around her long neck. The only focus of colour was the split-fruit mouth.

  When he expressed interest, Mitrokin told him it was a portrait of a ballerina, executed for the famous artists’bar, the Stray Dog. He had other pictures from their collection – Akhmatova, poet, another dancer, Karsavina, sketches by Larionov, caricatures by Legat … An instinct prompted Lovat to ask the name of the woman in the portrait. It was Lydia Kusminskaya.

  ‘Her son is a dealer in Paris.’ Lovat looked the man briefly in the eye.

  ‘Kolya. I used to see him sometimes. Now he is very ill.’ The dealer was searching for words in English. ‘Doctor cut’ – he struck his knee with the side of his hand to illustrate – ‘cut his leg.’

  ‘Very sad.’ Now a real introduction had been made. Lovat was suspicious that Mitrokin was not among the names that Kolya had provided. Obviously he was well connected, a business on this scale could not survive without substantial protection, obviously he was not a friend of Anya, but perhaps found through a contact, or perhaps part of a conspiracy to mire him in illegal activities; Kolya would know.

  An elderly man in a cardigan brought tea and the three of them sat down at an inlaid fruitwood table crowded with massive silver ink-wells. Lovat slowly assimilated the significance of the room and its contents. Most of the treasure belonged in a museum, nothing he could see was less than a masterpiece, and some things, especially the nineteenth-century realist studies of peasant life, were surely of significant worth as historical documents. These things were the country’s birthright, and Mitrokin’s avidity to sell them, and the whole clumsy conspiracy which had brought him to the room, saddened Lovat. If the man was genuine he could make a killing here. The metaphor suddenly seemed ironic. There was no dignity in the affair.

  He decided to give the man the respect he was not claiming himself, and establish his own connection with Kusminsky. Perhaps, in a minor way, it would put the dealer in touch with his heritage if he heard the story of the old man’s flight from St Petersburg as a small boy. Mitrokin’s eyes widened at the description of the jewels sewn into the child’s clothes and the necklace – presumably the very one in the portrait – left behind. Anya was moved to jump up and examine the picture again at close quarters.

  ‘Perhaps it is still there.’ The dealer did not speak frivolously. ‘House is well preserved. It’s Pioneer Palace. Headquarters for Soviet boy scouts. Pity you don’t know where they hide it.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, he described exactly where it was.’

  ‘To look for something like that – it can be done, of course.’ Nothing further needed to be said. Anya was drifting around the room, marvelling at the untouched pre-Revolution decor, stroking the pink damask wallpaper and fingering the silk tassel at the end of the brocade bell-rope. Tactfully, she slipped through the door, but Lovat was not tempted to advance further along the line of conversation until he had spoken to Kolya.

  There was a scream in the passage outside. She had found a lavatory, panelled in glowing mahogany, pink and red art nouveau carnations writhing decoratively around the bowl, the wash basin and all the matching porcelain fitments. There was a red silk cord to pull the flush. Having alarmed the men, Anya herself was pink with embarrassment.

  Lovat invited her to have dinner at the hotel and she flirted with him heartily. ‘You are handsome man, you don’t like your wife – yes, this I can see, I know it – so why no girlfriend?’

  He muttered something about morality, unsure what to say, unsure, since the question had been bluntly asked, what the true answer was. Isabel had a deadening effect on his libido, but at bottom he was afraid to endanger even the hollow shell of his marriage.

  ‘What about you?’

  She was transparent. That tense, retreating smile, the narrowing of the eyes, hiding them in supposed merriment. ‘You want to know if I have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Isn’t it a fair question?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You asked me.’

  ‘If I had a boyfriend, would I have dinner with you now?’

  The hotel had a basement bar that called itself a discotheque. She pulled him through the weekend crush of drunken Finns to the dance floor and as soon as he put his arms around her he resolved that he would make love to her that night. Then he thought of his dismal room, the coarse sheets on a lumpy palliasse and the pillow which was redolent of a thousand greasy heads, and changed his mind. He was acutely sensitive to beauty, and in its absence had less heart for living.

  Her hands barely reached around his neck, but somehow she pulled his head down until she could reach to kiss him. It was a competent, energetic kiss; momentarily it became languorous but when it was completed she pulled away and patted his lapel with an air of finality. Perhaps she felt his depression, or read disappointment in his eyes, because she said, ‘Tomorrow evening you come to my apartment, yes? You bring caviar, I cook for you.’ It was after she had gone, as he was walking down the interminable corridor to his room, that he felt a surge of desire, and an immediate counter-flow of disgust. She was pathetic, an ageing woman prostituting herself for a few paltry comforts – but would he be any better if he raided her for synthetic intimacy and phoney passion?

  She lived on the western outskirts of the city, on the top floor of a modern five-storey building, with a view out across the grey water of
the Gulf of Finland. The wind hummed in the power cables and thrashed the young trees whose tops were level with her green-painted iron balcony. The smell of frying butter filled the room. He looked at the cheap attempts at decoration: theatre posters, a large red Chinese fan, photographs of Anya with unrecognizable celebrities, strings of beads draped over mirrors.

  She hummed around the stove in the cooking alcove, a frayed apron tied over a red wool dress. It was soothing to sit and watch a woman cooking, and in a primitive way, he supposed, flattering. It no longer happened in his life that anyone cooked for him, personally, specifically, voluntarily, with the sole purpose of making him feel good. Lovat found that he felt good.

  She passed close by him, crossing the room to find matches, and he put out an arm to catch her around her thighs and pull her to the arm of his chair. They began to kiss, and he wanted the touch of her flesh more than anything he could imagine. The dress, and the ill-matched underclothes, were pulled off and thrown to the floor. In nakedness she was magnificent, spine braced with regal pride, her skin matte like velour and evenly pale, all her rich contours firm in motion. He thought of ripe tomatoes bursting, swelling pumpkins, of opening a pomegranate, splitting a watermelon.

  Giggling and scolding, she lay across his lap and offered him whichever portion of her flesh he wanted to kiss, or suck, or crush in his fingers to try its density. She stroked his hair and then, feeling him hard, slipped to the floor, opened his jeans and pressed his cock between the cushions of her breasts. Her eyes glistened with desire, her curled cat’s tongue bathed him. Desperate to collect himself before it was too late, he pulled her up into his arms, and then fell to the floor; her hospitable thighs parted and he lay in their heat, feeling that he was truly taking possession.

  Afterwards he expected her to make a pitch for whatever the larger agenda was, and was saddened when it came. They ate first, companionably half naked; she made blinis to eat with the caviar, and fried chicken with potatoes. He had brought a bottle of imported champagne; imported from where it was hard to tell, but it was a relief after the sickly Russian substitute. It was still half drunk when she raised the question of Kusminskaya’s house and the location of the valuables in it.