When they had finished listing Osageyfo’s crimes the group of young radicals said they wanted to encourage protest against him, and to support a possible coup. The more the opposition exposed what was going on the easier it would be to get rid of him. Kofi would be a valuable addition to the editorial board, because, they said, he was well known to have been a protégé of the President, but one who had rejected Communist propaganda and fled Russia in disgust. In spite of this he had been given a secure billet in Accra from which he might have joined in the looting, but instead he had retired to London, his removal signalling his distaste for his mentor’s tactics and his support for those radicals who had been imprisoned.
This interpretation of his movements had startled Kofi. It was true that he had made his objections to certain practices clear. One day dropping into a hotel bar for a drink after work, he had run into a woman he knew slightly. She was English, a young woman who had been, on and off, in the country since independence, and who worked as a public relations expert for a firm which had its roots in South Africa. She doubled as a reporter, from time to time despatching to the English newspapers a series of articles passionately defending Osageyfo’s government.
At the bar she passed him a magazine which he assumed featured one of her articles.
‘Look at it,’ she said insistently.
Inside was a brown envelope full of hundred dollar bills, and Kofi knew immediately what he was being asked. The woman’s firm was bidding for an engineering project connected with the planned hydro-electric dam.
‘You can talk to the big man,’ she murmured, ‘or to any one of those guys. We’re not asking for any guarantees. Just put in a good word.’
He’d taken the envelope without comment. Later on he heard that the contract had been awarded to the woman’s firm. In London he’d told this story to Caroline and a couple of others at a party, emphasising that he’d reported the bribe to his superiors without result. Somehow it had got around, and now these radicals were convinced he was one of them. Without thinking about it he turned down the offer to join them, pointing out that everything of which they accused Nkrumah was part and parcel of the region’s politics. Opposition, he told them, was not the same as betrayal. Immediately afterwards he had the uneasy feeling that he had been wrong. It had truly been disillusion of a kind which had barred his return to Africa, and his refusal to join the opposition had been nothing to do with loyalty or his political beliefs. Instead he had shrunk from driving the final nail into the coffin of his youthful hopes. A year later, Nkrumah had been deposed. In retrospect he had been a coward, Kofi thought. In comparison, Valery had learnt to live in the world he had inherited, taking it by the scruff of the neck and refusing to sit on the sidelines sulking.
‘We have a problem,’ Kofi said abruptly.
Valery’s eyes were suddenly sober and intent.
‘If I can help.’
‘It’s my son,’ Kofi told him.
‘One moment,’ Valery interrupted. He got up, walked over to his desk and pressed a button. ‘We eat while we talk.’
Two women in aprons came in and set up a table. Then they came back with a couple of trays and distributed the contents round the table.
‘Zakusky,’ Valery said jovially. ‘It’s too early for serious eating.’
These were Ukrainian snacks, Kofi remembered. Black and red caviar, pyrizhky, beruny, little stuffed dumplings, holubtsi, stuffed cabbage rolls, cottage cheese, sour cream, and a variety of breads, pampushki, khrusty and medivnyk. The centrepiece was a big cut-glass bowl of fruit.
‘This is not a snack,’ Kofi teased. ‘It’s more like a banquet. Your expectations are inflated now you’re a great man.’
Valery shook his head.
‘Oh, you don’t know. I can’t go out and walk around like you. If I want to go to a restaurant I’m followed by three bodyguards. My security has to clear the place. It’s easier to have a cook and a kitchen.’
‘I thought that was only bankers.’
Valery gestured.
‘Any businessman.’ He frowned. ‘Here is the irony. In the days when minor officials were drawing up lists which would send men and women to their deaths, they could walk safely in the streets. Now, to be engaged in business you need a bodyguard. That is one of the benefits of economic liberalism. Equal opportunity violence.’ Suddenly, he burst out laughing, pounding the table with his fist as he spewed gust after gust of explosive guffaws. ‘In any case,’ he shouted, ‘I own three banks.’
While they ate, Kofi told him the whole story, the smuggled pictures, the killings in Hamburg, the beheading across the river in Smichov, leaving nothing out. Valery glanced up a few times, his eyebrows arching, but he said nothing, concentrating on his food and occasionally encouraging Kofi with a grunt when he paused to think or remember some detail. When Kofi told him what had happened to Joseph, he frowned and taking a pencil out of his pocket wrote the names, Liebl and Zviad Abuladze, on a piece of paper.
‘When Valentin came to Katya,’ Kofi said eventually,‘she should have stopped him.’
Valery shrugged.
‘I don’t know why. It was a good idea.’
‘I don’t want my children killed,’ Kofi said.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Valery told him. ‘I think I might be able to talk to these people.’ He paused, reflecting. ‘Do any of these things come from the Ukraine?’
‘Perhaps,’ Kofi said. ‘I don’t know.’
After the meal they toasted each other in Zubrowka.
‘Have you been in Prague before?’ Valery asked Kofi, who shook his head. ‘Good. My chauffeur will take you round the city. When you come back I might have some news about this little business of yours. Then you can go back to Berlin.’ He paused. He waved his hand. ‘One thing. We’re not in some quiet little country like England. This is like the Wild West. If I do what you want there may be some killing. Just understand that.’
TWENTY-NINE
Radka disappeared for most of the day, to the house of a friend where Serge would visit the park and play with the other children. The doctor arrived shortly after she had gone, examined Joseph and said there was no sign of serious infection, but gave him a course of antibiotics to make sure. Katya saw the doctor out, before leaving the apartment; shopping, she said, although George had the feeling that she was escaping and going somewhere to be alone.
Around lunchtime Joseph got up and limped into the kitchen, where he sat with George drinking coffee.
‘Time for explanations I suppose,’ George said.
Joseph nodded, without speaking, and George guessed that he wasn’t certain what questions to ask.
‘You must understand this,’ he said. ‘It’s my fault. If you hadn’t been with me this would not have happened, but I didn’t mean any harm to come to you.’
For a moment Joseph thought that he hadn’t wanted to know George’s secrets because he’d felt that if he did he would have crossed some sort of line. Now it was too late.
‘Tell me.’
‘Okay, but this is between brothers.’
Joseph nodded again, and slowly George began, searching for the right words, with how Valentin had turned up.
‘Okay. I was with Valentin. We were moving some things from Russia and selling them. Then there was some trouble and we decided to stop. We thought it was all over until that night in Prague when you came to Smichov.’
The blood-drenched head sitting on the bonnet of the car in the silent warehouse flashed through Joseph’s mind, and in the same moment the image was replaced by the idea that had haunted him since then.
‘Is it drugs?’
George sat up straight, his eyes narrowing in surprise.
‘No, no. I have nothing to do with drugs. This is art. Paintings and sculpture. Not even stolen.’ He shrugged, grinning. ‘Not really stolen. But not legal, you know.’
Joseph felt a relief which was almost physical. He’d been prepared to hear that George was involve
d in some vicious and violent crime which it would be impossible to forgive. Instead he was only a smuggler or some kind of black market hustler. Joseph had heard about such things, and he knew that more than one respectable businessman in this part of the world had started from similarly dubious origins. At least his brother didn’t go around chopping off people’s heads.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked.
‘The trouble didn’t start until they tried to hijack us in Hamburg.’
Looking back, George could see how tangled everything had become since the incident with the Georgians. The decision to move to Prague and set up a legitimate business had seemed a perfect escape route, but after the Smichov murder Prague was finished for them. Now they were trying to figure out how to stay alive and what to do next. Liebl, he said, was a complication, but not the most dangerous one. The problem was his Georgian associates. If Liebl gave up hope of making a deal from which he could profit, there’d be nothing to stop him telling the Georgians all he knew and turning them loose.
‘That’s not how it seems to me,’ Joseph said.
George laughed.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ve talked with him. We’re safe as long as they don’t know where to find what they want.’
‘How about Radka?’ he asked. ‘How does she feel?’
George gestured.
‘Oh, she’s okay. We have Serge you know.’ He paused, his expression suddenly downcast. ‘Things are difficult between us. I can tell you this as a brother. She’s not so happy always. But this is different. She seems different.’ He thought about it. ‘When I had to go away she was angry. Last night was not good. Then Liebl called. I went crazy, like, oh my God.’
Within a few minutes everything seemed to have changed between himself and George. The last time they’d been together he’d found it next to impossible to speak openly. Now, all of a sudden, it was as if they could tell each other everything. For an hour or so, Joseph even forgot about Radka, and the problem of how he felt about her. In the afternoon they drove through the eastern districts of the city, George pointing out places where he’d worked or well-known landmarks with the cynical pride of a typical Berliner. Joseph kept looking in the mirror, wondering whether he could spot anyone following them.
‘You won’t see them if they don’t want you to,’ George said. He laughed. ‘You never see the bullet that hits you.’
Katya got back to the apartment shortly before dark, then Radka and Serge, the boy tumbling, boisterous with shrieks of laughter, punctuated with tears. He was exhausted, Radka said, and rushed him off to the bath. Valentin arrived next. He had spent most of the day, he said, trying to grow a beard. The result was that he looked exactly the same, except that his chin was covered with a reddish stubble. Katya greeted him, then, refusing any company, went off to Tempelhof where she was to meet Kofi.
The men ate a takeaway Chinese meal of the sort you could get anywhere in the world. Radka went out to purchase it, after she put Serge to bed, but once she’d delivered the bags of food, she retired to her room where she lay on the bed watching TV. She had hardly said a word to either her husband or his brother, going about her business with a polite abstracted air which made it clear that she had nothing to say.
‘What I still can’t make out,’ Joseph said, halfway through the meal, ‘is why they think this guy can do anything. What is he? Head of the mafia or something?’
‘Mafia doesn’t exist in Russia,’ Valentin uttered. ‘He’s a businessman.’
‘So what can he do? Those guys cut people’s heads off. They’re not going to stand around listening to lectures in business ethics. We don’t even know who they are.’
‘You have to imagine what it was like before,’ Valentin said.
He spoke carefully, choosing his words, but he wanted to tell Joseph about this because it was part of the life which had made him what he was. Outside of Russia and the republics, no one seemed to understand or care how the nature of people like himself had been twisted, this way and that, by forces which were too powerful to withstand.
‘Everything businessmen did,’ he told Joseph, ‘was a crime. There are guys who used to be fartsovy, selling jeans or anything else you wanted in the street. Now they are millionaires. But before private enterprise was permitted they were criminals. The thing was that when they created private enterprise anything was permitted. No one knew the difference. Some people became bankers by lending money. Sometimes to get their money back they had to make an example of those who would not pay.’ He pointed a finger. ‘Bang. Bang. You pay or you die. They made work for gangsters, and so business grew together with the trade of bodyguard and assassin. And in the republics it was worse because the Georgians and the Ukrainians and the Azerbaijanis wanted to keep their business for themselves. In the old days when Russians tried to do business in those places they sent people to negotiate and they never came back.’
Several of his comrades in the old regiment had become bodyguards or private security men, and several of them had died in a hail of bullets along the major thoroughfares in Moscow and St Petersburg. Two friends, Mikhail and Anastas, had found themselves shooting at each other in the street outside a restaurant near Pushkinskaya. Luckily neither had been killed. But this was how it was for a while. The gangsters worked for the businessmen and became businessmen themselves. The bankers laundered the money until the gangsters killed them and took over their banks and laundered their own money, until another businessman came along and became a more efficient gangster. The most successful existed at the centre of a spider’s web of the most violent and effective hoodlums. A man as rich as Valery would have had to manage and control the most ruthless network of associates.
‘Business in our country,’ Valentin said, ‘is about influencing people,’ he pointed, ‘upstairs and downstairs. Valery Vasselievich Kirichenko is more powerful than any general used to be.’
Kofi and Katya returned halfway through the evening. They were smiling and cheerful, as if his efforts had been successful.
‘What a great way to travel,’ Kofi said. ‘No waiting. No baggage. Just on and off the plane. One minute you’re in Prague, next minute you’re in Berlin.’
The journey had taken about an hour, and at both ends he’d been whisked back and forth by car. The whole thing had taken less energy than a trip to the supermarket. Kofi’s sons listened to the description without enthusiasm.
‘So what happened with the man?’ George asked.
Kofi took his time, running through his memory of the day. He had walked across the Charles Bridge, pausing in the middle to admire the statues which lined it. When he eventually got back to the office Valery was standing by the windows watching the sunlight fade on the river.
He had talked with a politician who was also director of a rival company. This was Abuladze’s patron, and eventually Valery had spoken to the security man himself. He knew Liebl. He didn’t control his actions, he said, but he could certainly clear up any little problem that had arisen. The men who had worked with Liebl in Hamburg were freelance bandits, but they had many relatives and friends who would need to be satisfied. Clearing up the mess would be expensive. On the other hand, considering aside the value of the missing relics, a bargain was possible. In the end Valery had made a deal. They would return everything which remained in their possession, pictures, sculptures, jewellery. In exchange the Georgians would pay them three million US dollars.
‘A small portion of what we have would be worth three million dollars in the West,’ Valentin muttered.
‘If you could stay alive for another week,’ Katya said sharply. ‘Take it and hope that they think the bargain is worth it.’
‘We’ll take it,’ George said.
They could pick the time and the place, Kofi told them, but it had to be soon, otherwise any number of things could go wrong. The other thing was that they would have to make themselves scarce for a while, in England perhaps, or somewhere further afield, like Aus
tralia. After the exchange Valery would be unable to protect them, but in a year or two this would be ancient history among the feuds and assassinations which had taken place, and it would be forgotten. Either that or the Georgians who knew the story would be dead.
‘We must talk,’ Valentin told George, and they got up and went out of the room. In a second the front door slammed behind them.
They stood under the tree in the courtyard below the apartments. Behind the illuminated windows, George thought, there were people eating and drinking and making love and children going to bed, who had no life or death decisions to make, and for a moment he felt an intense envy of their peaceful lives.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Valentin.
‘I don’t know what to think,’ Valentin said. ‘I hate to be robbed like this. Most of the stuff doesn’t even come from Georgia.’
‘We’ll be rich. A million each,’ George told him. ‘That’s what we wanted. And I can’t live like this any longer.’
Valentin shrugged.
‘Okay. To keep you happy. Screwing that fat Liebl is good too.’
‘What about Victor?’
‘Victor would like this to end. The sooner it does the sooner he can go off to the USA and become a rich American.’
Back in the apartment George told Kofi they’d decided on making the exchange within two days. That would give them time to reconnoitre a likely spot and work out the best way to do it. They would pass on the details at the last possible moment. Immediately Kofi telephoned the number Valery had given him. The conversation was brief.
A Shadow of Myself Page 35