One of his bodyguards knocked at the door. Gorsky dismissed them for the night. Then he dismissed me.
‘You did well with this library, Nikolai. I knew you would. I have learned to trust my instincts when I choose my people. I recognised that passion in you. Now go home and take some rest. You deserve it,’ he said, though no one deserved rest less than me.
That was the last time I saw him alive.
I remember the last thing I said. ‘You will get your girl, sir. Very soon. I hope the girl is worth it.’
I briefly looked around, almost as though I sensed that I would never see the library again. We could have been standing in the middle of the Palace at Versailles. I called him sir, half-seriously, half-mocking our strange arrangement. Somewhere along the way I had lost the last atom of any envy I had ever felt for him. He was far too bright to be this wealthy, and far too wealthy to be happy.
‘Worth the wait, you mean?’ he countered. ‘For all this is as nothing compared to the wait.’
Then, as I was leaving, so quietly that I wasn’t even sure he said it.
‘The girl is already mine.’
It feels strange to say that the most important event in my life was one I witnessed only as a grainy image on CCTV. Although I had spent more time with Gorsky in that last year than perhaps anyone else on this planet, I knew little about him. His life remains a mystery. His death is a different matter. His last four or five minutes on this earth were caught on a film I played and replayed twenty, thirty, forty times a day, until I could no longer watch, until I knew the sequence so well that I did not need to watch it in order to see it. At first I tried to remember every detail, then I could not forget.
The scene shows nothing for a minute or so. The camera is somewhere high up, pointing downwards towards the paving stones. There is a path by the Chelsea Embankment, an iron railing behind which you see water, flowing murkily, throwing an occasional silvery spark. There are street lamps, old, black, clearly once gas-powered, their light so weak it barely registers. The film is greyish blue, like a sequence of X-rays. It comes from an American millionaire’s security camera positioned on a wall that runs close to the river path. Two trees partly obscure the path in the corners of the frame. For some reason they look like birch trees to me, although they are probably not: there are few birches in London. The trunks are pale, criss-crossed with short black scars, like stigmata. The leaves are fleshy and serrated. Although the film is silent I can hear them clinking in the wind like coins. A man appears from under the crown of leaves on the left-hand side, walks along the path, leans over the railing, looks into the water for a couple of minutes. Then he turns and faces the camera, searches for something in his pocket, takes out a mobile phone, presses a button as if to call, but pauses, leans with his back against the railing, seemingly reading a message on its small screen. The faint glow lights the familiar Prussian profile. His blond hair looks almost white in its light. Dark circles around his eyes give his face a skull-like appearance. I am not sure if I imagine this, but it looks as though his lips are about to spread into a smile. He puts the phone back in his pocket, buttons up his jacket, and turns as if to continue walking along the path. At that moment a hooded figure runs towards him. He turns. The first flash of a blade catches his left shoulder, the second, the third, the fourth and the fifth sink under the ribs. The attacker grabs him, takes something out of his pocket, walks away slowly, throws the knife into the river. He is wearing a black balaclava, a black leather jacket, a pair of dark trousers on bow legs, and incongruously light trainers with dark stripes. The victim clutches his stomach. For a moment it looks as though he might fall over the railings and into the water, but he bends forward and drops on to the pavement, where he rests on his side, still clutching his stomach. His body curls up into a question mark. A dark circle, like molten tar, slowly spreads around him. The scene is empty for another couple of minutes. The body doesn’t move. The Thames sparkles through the railings behind it and the leaves flutter as if to prove that time passes, that you cannot set the clock back.
Unlike Janice Allaoui, Roman Gorsky and his death captured the front pages immediately. And the inside pages. Pages of text and photographs, day after day. There were pictures of his houses and cars, of his Greek island, of his plane and his enormous yacht. There were attempts to calculate his wealth and explain the source of his money. There were photos of seemingly every party he had ever thrown. On several of them I recognised my own back or caught a glimpse of my profile in the crowd. There were photos of a much younger Gorsky standing next to a tank in front of the White House in Moscow during the Yeltsin coup, wearing a ridiculous astrakhan coat, then an even older picture, in a clumsy suit and a clumsier tie, and with a pair of heavy dark-rimmed glasses, in front of a blackboard covered with mathematical equations.
Apparently there had been murder attempts before, in Tallinn and Tel Aviv. Why wasn’t he wearing a bullet-proof vest that night? His bodyguards were not with him: did they know? What exactly did they know? Had he become careless? It was the Russian mafia, said a famous columnist, and listed a number of Gorsky’s so-called friends, including the three I met at Hesperos playing cards, as potential paymasters. It was the FSB, said a Russophobe correspondent. The government liked to have the monopoly on arms deals, and Gorsky was no longer playing the game. It was neither, argued an old Soviet historian. Why would the FSB send an amateur with a knife to the Thames embankment on the off-chance that the oligarch might step out for a late walk alone? It was an attempted robbery gone wrong, said a guest in a breakfast talk show. God knows there were too many in London these days. What a paradox, when you think how these people come to London for safety. It was unlikely to be a robbery, someone now retired from Scotland Yard pointed out. You threaten and intimidate. You don’t inflict multiple stab wounds in order to steal someone’s mobile phone. London’s Mayor reminded people that it was one of the safest capitals in the developed world. The police service was doing all it could to eradicate knife-crime.
At first no one made a connection with the Summerscale case, although the police promptly made a connection with me. Other than the killer himself, I was possibly the last person to see Gorsky alive. This time, my testimony involved hours of videotape, and officers who were going places much higher than the duo investigating Janice Allaoui’s death. I told them about the bookshop, about the library commission, even about my holiday in Greece. I told them everything I knew about Tom and Natalia Summerscale, too, including the details of Gorsky’s pursuit of Natalia, which had previously seemed beside the point. I could not withhold any part of the jigsaw as irrelevant any more, although I was well aware that what I had to say did not help Summerscale who was fighting his case against worsening odds.
It was Natalia, in fact, who inadvertently sealed her husband’s fate, even as she fought to save him. Coming into the court house, she looked like a murder victim herself: shocked and pale beyond grief, beyond devastation. The policeman walking behind her kept raising his arms as if to catch her if she fainted on the stairs. In the courtroom, Allaoui became visibly agitated when Natalia confirmed that she wasn’t troubled by her husband’s dalliance with Janice Allaoui, and even more so when she added that no, she did not believe for a moment that Tom Summerscale was her killer.
‘Was Mr Summerscale ever violent towards you?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘No. Yes. Once,’ she responded. ‘He hit me once, just once.’
‘How did that happen?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘He believed that he was not the father of our child.’
The silence in the room was absolute. Summerscale looked stunned. His lips trembled for a moment, then sagged on one side as though he had just suffered a stroke. Allaoui muttered something that sounded like a curse in Arabic.
‘And was he?’
‘He wasn’t,’ said Natalia.
‘Who was?’ insisted the prosecutor.
‘That is not relevant,’ interrupted the judge
, who looked as smitten by her as I ever was.
The longer I knew her, the less I understood her power to bewitch men, although – it seemed – only the man who married her somehow managed to escape her spell. For Summerscale, she was not the great prize that Roman Gorsky dreamed her to be. She was not even enough.
‘So, if he hit you, how could you say that he is not violent?’ the prosecutor ploughed on.
‘Because he isn’t a violent man,’ she repeated. ‘I tested him beyond endurance. I deserved to be hit.’
Thus the scales tipped against Summerscale. Gery’s testimony did not help either, although she balanced the evidence by describing him as a gregarious character, a life-enhancing man. Her insights helped corroborate the claim that Summerscale was a cocaine addict – a detail that Natalia seemed to have had no idea about – and it was she who knew for certain something that I had for a long time only suspected: that Allaoui provided the drugs. She also knew that Summerscale punched Natalia that day when we all gathered at their pool, and not just punched, but shoved and kicked her while she was on the floor. She carried a bruise on her lower back for several weeks. Gery had massaged her back to health.
‘Do you know why he punched her?’ asked the prosecutor.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘He was jealous of Gorsky. He believed that Roman Gorsky was Daisy’s father.’
Although it had no apparent link with Janice Allaoui’s death, the public revelation of the connection between Roman Gorsky and Natalia Summerscale overshadowed everything else: Tom Summerscale’s complex love life, his violence, his cocaine habit, even the jury’s eventual decision that he was guilty. When she heard the verdict, Natalia looked like an exhumed corpse. Allaoui, though clearly triumphant at being exonerated, declined an opportunity to give a press statement. Tom Summerscale screamed; a strange, strangled, low-pitched scream, which sounded as though he was gurgling his own blood.
I was hit by a wave of unexpected grief, the like of which I had felt neither when my parents died nor when I lost my country.
10
While Gorsky’s body rested in the freezer in the hospital on Fulham Road, the Barracks descended into chaos. The rumours about the estate started circulating immediately. Some papers wrote that he had billions, some that he had no money at all. The cable news channel owned by a rival oligarch claimed that he was worth only twenty thousand pounds on the day he died, and that he had bequeathed the sum to an Israeli charity. If that was true, I thought, the great Gorsky was almost poorer than me.
I had never witnessed him in action in any kind of business, unless one counted the library commission, but I now saw – from the immensity of the vacuum that he left in his wake – just how powerful he must have been. Victor spoke of dozens of condottieri around the world – powerful men appointed by Gorsky, CEOs, fund and asset managers, who individually possessed as much money as many British people in the Top One Hundred list. Perhaps because a murder was involved, not one of them dared step in to take immediate charge. He seemed to employ more housekeeping staff in an array of different houses than a major hotel chain. There were hundreds of unpaid contractors, including the famous Xiulan Xi. There were thousands of employees in his businesses all over the planet facing an uncertain future.
The police issued appeals to anyone who might recognise the murderer on the basis of his distinctive gait and not so distinctive white trainers. There were trails, but they ran cold, one after another. Whoever the man was, it was assumed he must be hundreds of miles away. The web became drunk on conspiracy theories about the reasons for Gorsky’s death.
Meanwhile The Laurels remained shuttered and apparently empty. Natalia had supposedly left the country the day after her husband was convicted, but I had no idea where she was. The windows of Gery’s council flat stayed as resolutely dark as those of The Laurels. Summerscale was in Brixton prison, trying, with the help of his first father-in-law – if the newspapers were to be believed – to find the God he’d last heard about in his school chapel.
Then I received an unexpected e-mail from Gery. I had often seen her texting busily, and laughing over pictures she received on her crystal-encrusted mobile telephone, but we had never communicated in this way before. Her message contained only the simplest of greetings, and an attachment with a photograph: Natalia, Daisy and she, in a cemetery near Montreux, visiting Vladimir Nabokov’s grave. It was an outing organised by Natalia, Gery said. One would have expected her to explain what they were doing in Switzerland, but instead she explained Nabokov. He was a famous Russian writer, she said. It looked like a photo of someone’s funeral. I responded by asking a volley of questions. I received an automated reply that left me none the wiser, then, some hours later, a simple message in Bulgarian, without a sign-off.
‘Still crying’, it read. There was a single, forlorn, frustrating x for a kiss.
The night Summerscale was convicted, Gery came over to my cottage. I was surprised to see her at my door. It was, and I can’t quite explain why, the first time she had called like that. We made love at her place, or we went out. I never invited her over and she never showed any desire to see how I lived. Now she walked in and almost immediately set about tidying up, arranging my books into neat piles, picking up bits of paper, removing and then washing used coffee and tea cups which dotted the place.
I did not try to stop her. I realised that her need to create order in my living space came from some deeper derangement, some less controllable sense of chaos. She was dressed in a pair of old black trousers and a grey cardigan. There was, unusually, not a trace of make-up on her face. Her black hair was plaited, and the plait swung heavily from one side of her back to the other as she worked, like a thick silk cord. She had left her shoes by the door as she came in, and she now shuffled around in a pair of tiny black socks. She saw me looking at her feet and she said, as if to forestall a reaction to some imperfection I had not even noticed: ‘Too many hard landings, my love.’
I was surprised to hear myself addressed like that. Perhaps the words meant less in Bulgarian.
Finally, and with everything tidied away, she sat next to me and we looked out towards the unlit windows of the Barracks as the night thickened around us. Natalia did not know what to do with herself, Gery told me. It seemed impossible to leave Tom, and impossible to divorce him now that he was in prison; the reason to abandon him had vanished as well. It seemed impossible to stay in London a day longer, but everywhere else seemed just as bad, or worse. And she couldn’t even talk about Gorsky. If you so much as mentioned him, she screamed. The only thing she wanted, Gery said, was to die. But she couldn’t do that either. Not with Daisy.
‘Poor girl,’ Gery shivered. ‘And now all this money. How could she be happy?’
I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking about Daisy or Natalia. I struggled to understand. She had been speaking to me in Bulgarian all evening, and that was different too, for she had always addressed me in English.
I had never seen her cry before. Now she did. At first her face contorted with the effort, as though she was trying to squeeze the tears out and did not know how. I wrapped my arms around her. Another shiver ran through her like electric current. She took my arm off her shoulder.
‘Dear little Nikolai,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to know how good you are. It won’t help either of us.’
I was accustomed to having my decisions made for me in this way. I was used to strong women. The Bulgarian was perhaps the strongest of them all.
Fynch, who had by a stroke of luck cashed the last of Gorsky’s cheques only a couple of days before the murder, declared that we would use the money to organise Gorsky’s funeral as soon as the body was released. Since there seemed to be no next of kin able to fulfil the duty, it was, he said, the decent thing to do in return for all the money he had spent on, and in, the shop. Victor joined in, wanting to do ‘the decent thing’. He had organised every conceivable aspect of Russian life in London but he hadn’t organised a death, he said.
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br /> Had it been possible, we would have followed the Jewish custom and buried him the following day. Instead it was going to be a cremation, followed by a memorial service. We arranged the latter in a synagogue off Edgware Road, one of several he had endowed. It was a liberal, accommodating sort of place, and Victor knew someone who knew the rabbi well. We had no idea how many people would turn up for the service, or for the reception that was supposed to follow it, so we catered generously for three hundred, as many as the synagogue would hold.
Far too generously, in the event. We feared the prurient, and we expected at least some of those hundreds who had availed themselves of Gorsky’s hospitality, yet something must have held people back. Now there was nothing for anyone to gain any more to offset a fear of publicity and its negative associations, or fear full stop, for who knew what an oligarch’s obsequies could bring. Fynch, Victor and I were the only mourners and none of us was Jewish.
When it became clear that no one else was going to show up, the rabbi, whose open-mindedness about the rite might have been stretched to its limit by a congregation consisting of two Anglicans and a Serbian Orthodox Christian, dispatched the woman cantor to summon a small group of elderly men and women away from some business that they had been pursuing in the bowels of the building. The group stuck together and kept a polite distance, seemingly as bewildered as we were in the echoing emptiness of the temple. At least they knew the form. Fynch, Victor and I waited for the instructions, shuffled the service booklets, holding them back to front, then upside down. We read the words of the Kaddish and lit the candles for Gorsky’s soul.
It was difficult to think of a more impersonal service. No one knew enough about the man to make it less so. Fynch read a speech about the Russian love of books. Victor recited a poem by Pushkin in a soft, lilting Cambridge Russian. That sound moved me more than anything else. It echoed with unexpected losses, a sadness well beyond the life we were mourning. I imagined Victor as an undergraduate struggling with Russian declensions inside some medieval quad and I remembered myself poring over Paradise Lost at the other end of the continent, trying desperately to make sense of both the English language and the verse, and then I saw Gorsky as a young academic – much further north – explaining a long algorithm while his students whispered the news of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’. I beheld the promise of a shiny new world which had been contained in those two clunky words.
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