She showed no sign of being either pleased or disappointed by my choice. I guessed she spoke no English, and I wondered if she was mute as well. She hadn’t said anything to anyone the whole evening. I assumed that she wasn’t deaf because she danced rather nicely in her loose garment, raising her slim arms into the air to the sound of dozens of thin bracelets she wore on each wrist and ankle. They now jingled as she straddled me and moved her bottom backwards and forwards as I stared into the bouncy see-saw of her small breasts. Behind her, the dying sun was bathing everything in a deep, Saharan glow. It was extremely exciting in a surreal kind of way, beautiful and apocalyptic at the same time, because of the sheer decadence of our coupling. She was as moist as an oyster. I came very quickly. She sighed a little disappointed sigh, pulling a tissue out of the breast pocket of her dress and unfolding it to wipe between her legs, then suddenly spoke.
‘Must dash,’ she said in a cut-glass English accent. She blew me a kiss as she left.
On my way back, while I was still a hundred yards away from the house, I recognised Victor by the small, perfect circle of his bald pate. It made him look like a monk. ‘Friar Fuck’, Fynch has been known to call him behind his back, laughing hardest, as usual, at his own jokes. Victor beamed at me as I approached. He was wearing a garland of dried figs like a tribal necklace over a pale seersucker suit. His grin pushed his receding chin downwards so that he resembled a happy hamster.
‘If you are not careful, young man, you will get used to this,’ he said. ‘You won’t be able to return to the book trade. But, then again, they say that active life in the open air protects one from prostate cancer, and you are never too young to start worrying about that, are you?’
He was staying ‘up the road in Montenegro’, where several of his clients kept enormous yachts in the Bay of Kotor. He had some ‘insignificant issue’ to clarify with Gorsky. Funny how he happened to turn up on the eve of the party, joining the other English men and women who attached themselves to wealthy Russians like oxpecker birds to hippopotami.
‘He is around,’ Victor said, ‘but no one seems to have set eyes on him. Our friends over there have grown a touch impatient.’
He nodded towards the banker who was still sitting in the same wicker armchair. The orb of the dying sun was slowly drowning in the wide balloon of the cognac glass in front of him. He pretended not to notice Victor. His tan had come on very nicely.
I woke up early to prepare for my journey to London. My suitcase was already packed. I walked down to the beach for one last swim. The air smelled of pine, lavender and tar. The day was promising to be as sunny and as clear as the previous four. I hadn’t seen a cloud since I left England. A jug of chilled watermelon juice waited on the table set under a white parasol on the sandy shore of the little bay. The glass next to it was still misted; someone had just taken it out of the freezer. Ice cubes clinked as though they had been stirred a moment ago. The pastries in a basket covered by a gingham cloth were warm. Whoever had laid my breakfast must have been watching me leave the bungalow.
There were pristine copies of the main British and US newspapers – that morning’s: colour scans printed out on better quality paper than the original editions. The British covers carried news about the Prime Minister. His dour Scottish face seemed so remote, his concerns about spending so unreal, that the papers could have come from a different historical era altogether.
I swam in the warm water then spread my limbs and allowed my body to float. I thought about the girl from last night. She did not seem like a prostitute to me, not at all, yet, honestly, whenever I entered Gorsky’s world I lost my bearings, as though money created its own decompression chambers in which even the laws of gravity ceased to apply.
Human noise muffled by the water in my ears reached me from not so far away. I spotted a jet boat a couple of hundred yards from the shore. The Spaniard was at the steering wheel. He had, ridiculously, two pairs of sunglasses on his head: one perched on his nose, while the other held his hair in place, like an Alice band. He was wearing a fresh snow-white shirt. He looked like a retired footballer, or a Formula One driver, the quintessence of a Latin playboy. He was so macho that he was paradoxically almost feminine. At that extreme, the sexes correspond so closely to each other that they become a narcissistic one, in love with no one but their own image.
The girl I had been puzzling over sat immediately behind him. A tiny neon green bikini covered the now familiar cones of her breasts. Just thinking about them gave me the stirring of an erection. She was facing backwards, playing the spotter for the waterskier who was leaning back on his skis, passing his weight from one foot to another with practised comfort as he turned to signal something to her with his left hand. She raised her fist in the air, showing an ace sign with her thumb. The wetsuit and the sun visor made the man look even more alien than usual but his equine muzzle was unmistakeable.
When I returned to the bungalow, my suitcase had already been whisked away. I left a twenty-pound note under the vase of cornflowers on the side table, but I was not even sure that there was a chambermaid here who would welcome my tip. The house was meticulously cleaned every day; glossy magazines were delivered with baskets of fruit; jugs of fresh orange juice, bottles of champagne and supplies of three kinds of water were replenished in the fridge. When I read two books by John le Carré during my first two days, a further four were added to the library, but I never saw anyone going in or out. There was no one to bid my farewells to.
While I was leaving, facing backwards on the golf buggy which had delivered me four days earlier, I noticed the three Russian women leaving the main house in the direction of the jetty where their boat was already waiting. They waved and blew air kisses in my direction. Their menfolk were nowhere to be seen.
I was a lone traveller in the helicopter as it took off, although I spotted two others coming in to land. They hovered in mid-air like vast birds of prey. I now regretted the soundproofing of our cabin. I would have enjoyed my part in this scene from an oligarch’s take on Apocalypse Now, yet I could barely hear the sound of the rotor blades above my own head. The incoming machines seemed completely silent. The wistful voice of the pilot startled me. He was speaking to someone on his radio.
‘Those are the latest Sikorskys, Bud. Those guys could have a shower onboard if they wanted. The boss is putting on a show. Moscow, you bet.’
The little airport was as deserted as before. The same hostess welcomed me on board with a parting gift, a flacon of home-pressed olive oil as dark as sea kelp. It was delivered in a small wicker case, with a handwritten note. Hope you had a good rest, it read, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. The handwriting was girly, the final n ending in an elaborate flourish of black ink. But it was signed in sepia, in a different hand: the jagged and hurried initials RBG, in Russian Cyrillic. The lid of the G trailed upwards like a dagger.
Back in London the drizzle was as persistent as when I left. It was part of the cityscape, as constant as the buildings and the streets. The same solitary border agency official checked my passport. Gorsky’s driver helped me get into the car and asked me to wait as he disappeared and returned with a small attaché case which he put on the front seat. Then Gorsky emerged immediately behind him. I am not sure if he was on the same plane. The timing of my private flight did not entirely tally with his waterskiing performance, yet here he was, as though teleported. I was getting used to his antics but, surely, even he wouldn’t fly two jets on the same route within minutes of each other. He opened the car door himself. He glanced at my lap – the blue hat tube and the wicker basket with olive oil.
‘How was Hesperos?’ he asked.
‘How does one buy an island like that?’ I responded with a question. ‘Just curious. I am not thinking of getting one.’
He smiled.
‘It came with the Karagiannis portfolio. The ship builder, you remember. In the nineteen nineties I spent much of my time in Sofia. It’s a claustrophobic town, and it
was even more so before they joined the EU. It’s one of those places where having money doesn’t help because however much of it you have, there’s nothing much to spend it on. You still drive along potholed roads and know that people are living in leaky concrete blocks behind billboards advertising tobacco. I had to escape every now and then. I was trading with Serbia in those days – sanctions busting, you remember? And, whatever anyone says, I wasn’t in it for the money. Your people were suffering needlessly and the West … well, you know all about it. I had this ideal of helping people – what else can you do with your life that makes as much sense?’
I had no idea what he was talking about. Fond though I was of my nation, I had few illusions about my co-nationals. He was clearly spinning a myth out of shady mafia deals. He pulled a slim card-case out of his pocket and showed me a photograph inside its flap: a picture of himself looking younger, next to a woman I recognised as one of my country’s most eminent surgeons, a former minister of health. She had famously built one of the most modern children’s hospitals in Europe with an anonymous donation. In the picture, she and Gorsky were standing in front of an Orthodox chapel with a distinctive red and yellow façade.
‘The Rayevsky memorial chapel in southern Serbia, near the Bulgarian border,’ Gorsky explained, ‘designed by a Russian architect. Even the saplings for the avenue of lime trees were brought over from the motherland. Remember Vronsky from Anna Karenina? Tolstoy used the story of a real man, Count Nikolai Rayevsky, who fought the Turks in Serbia in the eighteen seventies and died there. Vronsky was my kind of hero: one part pan-Slavism; two parts death-wish, if you will. I had a similar story back in Russia. A woman to forget. But instead of dying in battle, I got to deal with old Vassilis Karagiannis and I received Hesperos in part-payment …’
I watched the streets of London unfurl past us. I never knew what I was allowed to ask, what was appropriate. We sat like that for a few long minutes.
‘Have you ever been married?’ I finally ventured.
He turned towards me, threw me a long searching look, and ignored my question. We crossed London in silence, entering it from the east without even noticing, then through the City where huge blocks shone with fully lit windows and no sign of human activity, along a moribund Fleet Street and into the West End where thousands walked, shopped, and spoke and peered into their telephones. We circled around Trafalgar Square, along the Mall, closer and closer to his Tower of Babel.
The Summerscales’ windows were dark, although the front lawn was floodlit like a football pitch. Gorsky’s palace was beginning to take shape, its late-seventeenth-century self carefully restored, but now wrapped in billowing new curves in a thrilling post-modern dance – one of the most fashionable architects in the world showing off her genius. We came to a stop in front of my gatehouse. The driver was already out and walking around to hold open the door for me when I had the flash of an idea so obvious that it was baffling why it hadn’t occurred to me before. Halfway out already, my bottle of oil and my panama hat in my hands, I turned and asked:
‘Have you met Natalia Summerscale? She lives opposite. A Russian woman.’
His face froze for a moment.
‘Summerscale? I know of no Summerscale. What kind of a name is that?’
Two days later I ran into Gery Pekarova in the same supermarket on the King’s Road. Of an evening, the place was full of singletons like us, people unable to plan further than the next meal, carrying single pints of milk to the till. This time, she was pushing a trolley with a large bunch of kale and texting furiously. I half hid behind a display of cereal boxes, trying to decide whether to speak to her or not, but she made a U-turn and pushed straight towards me. She grabbed me by the lapels. Her nails were cut almost to the quick and painted a ridiculous shade of blue. She leaned so close into me that I could feel her faintly sweaty, powdery smell. She planted a big wet kiss on my lips.
‘Hey, Nikita, I was just thinking that I can’t face shopping tonight. Join me at the Eagle for a salad and a glass of wine. I have a story to tell. I was given a special task, you could say.’
‘Natalia?’ I asked, suspecting another matchmaking plot. I had been avoiding the Summerscales ever since my strange dinner with Tom Summerscale, Janice and Sally.
‘No. Well, yes. It’s not her. It’s about her. We should have guessed long ago.’
She walked me out of the supermarket, leaving her trolley and the kale in the middle of the store. I dropped my empty basket by the entrance.
Gery started the tale over a plateful of lentils and goat’s cheese and ended it in her bed with its view of St Luke’s. It kept us going through two hours and two bottles of wine, then a couple of joints in her flat. (She refused cigarettes religiously but always had a small stash of weed hidden behind the protein shakes in her kitchen cupboard.) It took us through love-making and a shared shower in her tiny bathroom. Gery’s pubic hair, a mat of tight black curls, was now shaped into a heart. Given the story she was telling, one had to laugh at the idea that it was with an eye to Gorsky that she had commissioned that piece of intimate topiary. I think I mentioned already that I was not a jealous type, and certainly not so in relation to this woman. The idea of Gorsky falling for a detail like that would have been ridiculous long before she suggested that he had apparently been celibate for at least the past five years.
‘Oh, you know,’ Gery said philosophically, ‘it is the celibacy that excites me almost as much as his money. What a bloody waste. But expensive men often turn out to have cheap tastes in the long run. The exact opposite of you, book moth.’
‘Book worm, you mean.’
‘Moth, worm, whatever.’ She held the tip of my penis and twisted it clockwise by one hundred and eighty degrees. It was still aching as I walked down the King’s Road trying to process the story Gery had told me. Gorsky had shared it with her precisely so that she could ask me a favour, a silly and childish favour, like a plot people might get involved in on the teenage dating scene, or so it would have been but for the complexity and costliness of its proposed execution.
When he was sacked from his university post, Gorsky briefly traded in Chinese toys – buying in China, selling in Russia – working with a Chinese man he had studied with at Leningrad. But toys were boring: a small-time training ground. His move into the Balkans was encouraged by the legendary mayor of Volgograd, Nikolai Semyonovich Volkov, recently retired but still living in the town, and well connected everywhere from East Berlin to Shanghai. And still a Communist, a true believer. He had no interest in money, but every interest in stopping the seemingly unstoppable, the spread of NATO to the borders of Russia itself. Just how Gorsky was selected remains unclear. His Chinese links might have helped. He was invited to Volgograd. He became, for a while, Volkov’s sixth child. He may well have been a substitute son. Volkov’s eldest, Sergey, was killed in Afghanistan in the eighties. He met – befriended – his adoptive siblings; the middle three. The youngest, Natalia, was away from home, reading for an art history degree in what was now again St Petersburg. Gorsky was twelve years older than her. He was too old to be love-struck, yet love-struck he was, the moment he set eyes on her baccalaureate photograph. She was still in her school uniform. A coup de foudre, Gery said. He was a monomaniac in love as in everything else. He had to have her.
Natalia turned up in Volgograd trailing stories of museums and white nights on the Neva and looking even more beautiful than her picture. Gorsky was so determined to marry her that he spoke to her father long before he had spoken to her. She must have encouraged him, nonetheless. One evening, he dropped on a bended knee and produced a small box out of his top pocket. Natalia pushed it away with her hand, trying to prevent the inevitable opening and whispered, ‘No, I can’t, I am too young.’
No, I can’t.
He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Gery had no idea what exactly Natalia promised, but Gorsky had no doubt that she had left an opening, that she would eventually be his. He would wait. He would make money.
He would work and he would wait. He loved her even more because she had turned him down. He promised her that he would return when she graduated and propose again.
And so he did, he told Gery. He kept his word. He returned to Volgograd some three years later only to find that, according to his interpretation of their agreement, she hadn’t kept hers, that she had married an Englishman and left the country. He was so convinced that she was in love with him, and him alone, that the Englishman was nothing but a convenient passport, that he decided to make his millions and offer her another chance to be his wife.
‘Why do you think he is building that place? He thinks that one day soon, when it’s all ready, she will just cross the road, leave Summerscale behind like one leaves a restaurant after a pleasant meal, and be his.
‘In fact, he wants you to arrange a meeting in your little bookshop, in exactly two weeks’ time. The anniversary of his original proposal. She was nineteen when they first met, she is thirty now,’ Gery said, ‘but she is as beautiful as ever and he loves her as much as that first day.’
What Gorsky did not know – what nobody knew except Natalia and Gery; and Gery was now telling me – is that she had loved him for the last nine out of those eleven years, without any plan ever to become his wife. They had another encounter when she was twenty-one, a meeting he had neglected to mention when he told his story to Gery. Natalia had been on the books of an escort agency in St Petersburg for several months when it happened. In those murky days, the city’s cafes were full of pimps pretending to be scouts for modelling agencies, and a young woman as beautiful as Natalia was an obvious target. Out of rebellion, out of her own thirst for experience and money, but at first simply because she was naive, she accepted engagements in expensive hotels.
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