Single & Single
Page 16
“I do not want your pity, thank you. I do not want your tender feelings or your safe ethical concerns. I want your respect, your loyalty, your brains for what they are, your commitment and, for as long as I am senior partner, your obedience.”
“Oh, well, sorry,” Oliver mumbles, and when Tiger does not unbend, returns to his room and telephones Nina, in vain.
What has become of her? Their last encounter was not a happy one. At first he persuades himself that Zoya has launched a spoiling operation. Then grudgingly he remembers that he was drunk and while drunk let slip to Nina—out of the goodness of his lonely heart, no more—a couple of unguarded details of his transactions with her uncle Yevgeny, as she calls him. He dimly recalls remarking in a frivolous moment that, while the Soviet Union might have lost its way, Single’s had lost its shirt. When she pressed him, he had felt it incumbent on him to provide a sketchy version of how Single’s, with her uncle Yevgeny’s help and inspiration, had planned to make a killing out of certain life-essential Russian substances— such as, well, yes, not to put too fine a point on it, blood. At which Nina went pale, and raged, beat her fists against his chest and stormed out of his flat swearing—not for the first time, for she has her share of Mingrelian volatility—never to return.
“She has taken new lover to revenge you, Oliver,” her distracted mother confesses over the telephone. “She says you are too decadent, darling, worse than bloody Russian.”
But what of the brothers? What of Tinatin and the daughters? What of Bethlehem? What of Zoya?
“The brothers have been deposed,” snaps Massingham, who has been simmering with envy ever since the role of go-between was snatched from him and handed to the detested junior partner. “Banished. Exiled. Sent to Siberia. Warned never to show their ugly faces in Moscow or Georgia or anywhere else.”
“How about Hoban and his friends?”
“Oh my dear chap, their lot never go down.”
Their lot? Whose lot? Massingham does not elaborate. “Yevgeny’s on the scrap heap, darling. Not to mention oil and blood,” he retorts nastily.
Communications with strife-torn Russia are chaotic and Oliver is forbidden by standing order to telephone Yevgeny or his outstations. A whole evening long, nevertheless, he crouches in an insanitary public phone booth in Chelsea, cajoling and beseeching the overseas operator. In his imagination he sees Yevgeny in his pajamas on his motorbike, revving up the engine, and the phone ringing inaudibly a few feet from him. The operator, a lady from Acton, has heard that a mob is storming the Moscow exchange.
“Give it a few days, dear, I should,” she advises, like Matron at school when he complained of an ache.
It is as if the last window upon hope has been slammed in Oliver’s face. Zoya was right. Nina was right. I should have said no. If I can go along with selling the blood of poor Russians, where if anywhere will I draw the line? Yevgeny, Mikhail, Tinatin, Zoya, the white mountains and the feasts haunt him like his own broken promises. At his flat in Chelsea Harbour he takes down the map of the Caucasus and shoves it in the waste bucket of his empty white kitchen. Nina’s mother recommends a substitute teacher, an elderly cavalry officer who was once her lover until he lost his powers. Oliver endures a couple of lessons from him and cancels the rest. At Single’s he goes silently, keeping his door closed and ordering sandwiches for lunch. Rumor reaches him like garbled dispatches from the front. Massingham has heard of a store of military electrolyte buried outside Budapest. Tiger bids him to inspect it. After a wasted week, he returns with nothing. In Prague, a stable of adolescent mathematicians will repair industrial computers at a fraction of the manufacturers’ charge, but they need a million dollars’ worth of equipment to set them up. Massingham, our roving ambassador, flies to Prague, meets a couple of nineteen-year-old bearded geniuses and returns declaring that the proposal is a confidence trick. But with Randy— as Tiger is at pains to remind Oliver—you can never be sure. In Kazakhstan, there is a textile factory capable of producing miles of curly Wilton carpet twice as splendid as the real thing and at a quarter of the price. Having purportedly inspected a waterlogged building site of rusted iron girders, Massingham advises that production is some way off. Tiger is skeptical but keeps his counsel. Word has come in of a stupendous gold find in the Urals, don’t tell a soul. It is Oliver this time who squats for three days in a farmhouse in the Mugodzhar hills, buffeted by imperious phone calls from his father while he waits for a trusted intermediary who fails to materialize.
Tiger himself has chosen the path of solitude and contemplation. His gaze is remote. Twice, it is rumored, he has been summoned to the City to explain himself. Ugly words like foreclose are being whispered in the Trading Room. Mysteriously, he starts to travel. On a visit to Accounts Department Oliver happens on a statement of expenses showing that a “Mr. and Mrs. T. Single” took the royal suite at a grand hotel in Liverpool for three nights and entertained lavishly. For Mrs. Single, Oliver presumes Katrina of Kat’s Cradle. Petrol vouchers rendered by Gasson, the chauffeur, reveal that Mr. and Mrs. traveled by Rolls-Royce. Liverpool is an old stamping ground of Tiger’s. It is where he earned his spurs as a defending barrister of the oppressed criminal classes. The trip is followed a week later by the appearance in Curzon Street of three wide-shouldered Turkish gentlemen in glistening suits who record their address in the janitors’ book as Istanbul and are appointed to see Tiger personally. Most ominously, Oliver could have sworn he heard Hoban’s nasal voice alongside Massingham’s issuing through the Wedgwood double doors when he calls on Pam Hawsley under a pretext, but Pam as usual is opaque:
“It’s a conference, Mr. Oliver. That’s all I can tell you, I’m afraid.”
All morning he waits tensely for the summons that doesn’t come. At lunchtime Tiger departs for Kat’s Cradle with his burly guests, but they are out of the lift and into the street before Oliver can grab a sight of them. When a few days later he undertakes a second inspection of Tiger’s expenses, he finds a string of entries with the one word Istanbul against them. Massingham too has resumed his travels. His most frequent destinations are Brussels, northern Cyprus, and the south of Spain, where an offshore Single company recently spawned a chain of disco bars, time-share villages and casinos. And since Randy Massingham is regarded by the Trading Room as a sort of go-getting Pimpernel, there is speculation about why he seems so sunny, and what secrets he may be carrying in his black ex–Foreign Office briefcase.
Then one evening, when Oliver is locking up his desk, Tiger himself appears in the doorway to suggest they pop round for a bite at the Cradle, just the two of them, like old times. Kat is not in evidence. Oliver suspects Tiger told her not to be. They are tended instead by Alvaro, the headwaiter. Tiger’s corner table, which is permanently reserved for him, is a low-lit red nest of velveteen. He has chosen duck and claret. Oliver chooses the same. Tiger orders two house salads, forgetting that Oliver detests salad. They begin as always by discussing Oliver’s love life. Reluctant to admit to the breakup of his affair with Nina, Oliver prefers to embellish it.
“You mean you’re settling down at last?” Tiger cries, greatly amused. “Good heavens. I’d pictured you as a dashing bachelor of forty.”
“I suppose there are things you just can’t plan for,” Oliver says, all dewy eyed.
“Have you told the good news to Yevgeny?”
“How can I? He’s out of touch.”
Tiger pauses in midchew, suggesting that the duck may not be to his liking. His eyebrows draw together to form a broken pediment. To Oliver’s relief, the jaw resumes its rotation. The duck gives pleasure after all. “You went up to that country place of his, I seem to remember,” says Tiger. “Where he plans to grow fine wines. Yes?”
“It’s not a place, Father. It’s a bunch of villages in the mountains.” “But a decent house, presumably?”
“I’m afraid not. Not by our standards.”
“Viable sort of project, is it? Something we ought to take an interest in?”
“It’s a bit of a pipe dream, I’m afraid, quite honestly. Yevgeny’s not a businessman in our sense. You’d be standing under the proverbial shower tearing up ten-pound notes.”
“Why’s that?”
“He hasn’t costed the infrastructure, for a start”—remembering Hoban’s contemptuous dismissal of the project. “It could be a bottomless pit. Roads, water, terracing the fields, God knows what. He thinks he’ll use local labor but it’s not skilled; there are four villages and they’re all at each other’s throats.” A reflective pull of claret while he urgently thinks up other reasons. “Yevgeny doesn’t even want to modernize the place. He just thinks he does. It’s a fantasy. He’s sworn to keep the valley as it is, but also to industrialize it and make it rich. He can’t do both.”
“But he’s serious?”
“Oh, as the Pope. If he ever makes a few billion, that’s where they’ll go. Ask his family. They’re terrified.”
Tiger’s many doctors have advised him to drink an equal quantity of mineral water with his wine. Aware of this, Alvaro sets a second bottle of Evian on the pink damask cloth.
“And Hoban?” Tiger asks. “He’s your peer group. What sort of fellow is he? Keen? Handy at his job?”
Oliver hesitates. As a rule he is unable to dislike anyone for more than a few minutes, but Hoban is the exception. “I haven’t much to go on really. Randy knows him better than I do. He seems a bit of a lone wolf to me. A bit too much on the make. But okay. In his way.”
“Randy tells me he’s married to Yevgeny’s favorite daughter.”
“I don’t know that Zoya is his favorite,” Oliver protests anxiously. “He’s just a proud dad. Loves all his children equally.” But he is watching Tiger intently, if only in the pink mirrors round the wall: he knows, Hoban’s told him, he knows about the letter and the paper heart. Tiger takes a peck of duck, follows it with a sip of claret, a sip of Evian and a kiss of the napkin.
“Tell me something, Oliver. Did old Yevgeny ever chat to you about his maritime connections?”
“Only that he was at marine school and in the Russian navy for a while. And that the sea’s in his blood. As the mountains are.”
“He never mentioned to you that he once held sway over the entire Black Sea merchant fleet?”
“No. But you learn about Yevgeny in fits and starts, depending what he decides to dole out.”
An intermission while Tiger conducts one of those internal dialogues with himself that end with a decision but withhold the reasoning that leads to it. “Yes, well, I think we’ll give Randy his head for a little while yet, if you don’t mind. You can take over once the show’s back on the road.” Father and son stand on the pavement of South Audley Street and admire the starry sky. “And look after that Nina of yours, old boy,” Tiger advises sternly. “Kat thinks the world of her. So do I.”
Another month and, to Massingham’s undisguised fury, the Post Boy is dispatched to Istanbul, where Yevgeny and Mikhail have pitched their tent.
9
In the gloom of a wet Turkish winter Yevgeny looks as drab and ashy as the mosques round him. He hugs Oliver with half his old force, reads Tiger’s letter with distaste and hands it to Mikhail with the humility of an exile. The rented house, in a new suburb on the Asian side of Istanbul, is gimcrack and unfinished, set in a puddled mess of abandoned builders’ hardware and surrounded by unfinished streets, shopping malls, bancomats, petrol stations, fast chicken stops, all empty, all going gently to the devil while crooked contractors and frustrated tenants and immovable Ottoman bureaucrats slug out their differences in some archaic courthouse devoted to insoluble lawsuits in this sweltering, howling, heaving, traffic-suffocated city with an uncounted population of sixteen million souls, which as Yevgeny never tires of repeating is four times as many souls as inhabit the whole of his beloved Georgia. The one moment of enchantment comes as daylight dies and the friends sit drinking raki on the balcony under an enormous Turkish sky and smell the unlikely scents of lime and jasmine that somehow prevail against the stench of an unfinished drainage system, while Tinatin reminds her husband, as by now she has a hundred times, that it’s the same Black Sea out there and Mingrelia is just across the border—even if the border is eight hundred mountainous miles away, the roads to it are impassable in times of Kurdish insurrection, and Kurdish insurrection is the norm. Tinatin cooks Mingrelian food, Mikhail plays Mingrelian music on an old gramophone that takes seventy-eights, the dining table is strewn with yellowing Georgian newspapers. Mikhail carries a pistol on a lanyard under his bulky waistcoat, and a smaller one in the top of his boot. The BMW motorbike, the children and the daughters are gone—all but Zoya and her small son Paul. Hoban’s movements are mysterious. He is in Vienna. He is in Odessa. He is in Liverpool. One afternoon he returns unannounced and leads Yevgeny into the street, where they are to be seen walking up and down the sliver of unfinished pavement with their jackets over their shoulders, Yevgeny bowing his head like the prisoner he used to be, and little Paul trailing after them like an undertaker’s mute. Zoya is a woman waiting and she is waiting for Oliver. She is waiting with her eyes and languid, spreading body, while she derides the new supermaterialist Russia, recites details of the latest wholesale robberies of state property, the names of overnight billionaires, and complains about the lodos, a Turkish south wind that gives her a headache every time she doesn’t want to do something. Sometimes Tinatin tells her to find herself an activity, look to Paul, take herself off for a walk. She obeys, then comes home to wait and sigh about the lodos.
“I shall become a Natasha,” she announces once, in a silence that she has created for herself.
“What’s a Natasha?” Oliver asks Tinatin.
“A Russian prostitute,” Tinatin replies wearily. “Natasha is the name the Turks have given to our whores.”
“Tiger tells me we’re back in business,” Oliver says to Yevgeny, choosing a moment when Zoya is paying her weekly visit to the local Russian fortune-teller. The statement casts Yevgeny into the depths of gloom.
“Business,” he repeats heavily. “Yes, Post Boy. We do business.”
Oliver remembers with unease how Nina once explained to him that in both Russian and Georgian this innocent English word has become synonymous with crookery.
“Why doesn’t Yevgeny go back to Georgia and live there?” he asks Tinatin, who is filling baked aubergines with a spicy crab concoction that was once Yevgeny’s favorite dish.
“Yevgeny is of the past, Oliver,” she replies. “Those who remained in Tbilisi do not wish to share their power with an old man from Moscow who has lost his friends.”
“I was thinking of Bethlehem.”
“Yevgeny has made too many promises to Bethlehem. If he does not arrive in a gold coach, he will not be welcome.”
“Hoban will build it for him,” Zoya predicts, entering like an estranged Ophelia, and holding her hand to her brow to contain the effects of the lodos. “Massingham will be the coachman.”
Hoban, Oliver thinks. Not Alix anymore. Hoban my husband.
“We have also Russian ivy here,” Zoya remarks, to the long window. “It is very passionate. It grows too fast, it achieves nothing, then it dies. It has a white flower. The scent is most elusive.”
“Oh,” says Oliver.
His hotel is big and Western and anonymous. It is after midnight on his third night when he hears a knock at the door. They’ve sent up a hooker, he thinks, remembering the overfriendly smile of the young concierge. But it is Zoya, which does not surprise him as it should. The room is small and overlit. They stand face-to-face beside the bed, blinking at each other under the fierce ceiling light.
“Do not make this trade with my father,” she tells him.
“Why not?”
“It is against life. It is worse than blood. It is sin.”
“How d
o you know?”
“I know Hoban. I know your father. They can possess, they cannot love, not even their children. You know them also, Oliver. If we do not escape them, we shall be dead like them. Yevgeny dreams only of paradise. Who promises him money to buy paradise commands him. Hoban promises.” It is not clear who strikes first. Perhaps each is the initiator, for their arms collide and must be redirected before they can embrace, and on the bed they fight until they are naked, then take each other like animals until both of them are satisfied. “You must revive what is dead inside you,” she tells him severely as she dresses. “Very soon you will be too late for yourself. You can make love to me whenever you wish. To you it is not important. To me it is everything. I am not a Natasha.”
“What is worse than blood?” he asks her, staying her arm. “What sin am I supposed to be committing?”
She kisses him so gently and sadly that he wishes he could begin again with her in tranquillity. “With blood you destroyed only yourself,” she replies, holding his face in both hands. “With this new trade, you will destroy yourself, and Paul, and many, many children and their mothers and their fathers.”