‘Nothing.’
Stepanin shook his head incredulously, then finished off the vodka in his glass. Immediately, he poured himself another, then proffered the bottle. Sheremetev declined. ‘What fuckery,’ said Stepanin again. ‘Sometimes everything seems like a fuckery, eh, Kolya?’
Sheremetev watched him for a moment. ‘You know, I’m sorry about Elena,’ he said quietly.
Stepanin sighed. ‘She was a nice girl, that one. Although to be honest, I was getting a bit sick of her. The other one, Irina, what do you think about her? Sexy, huh? Shit, after this, she’ll run a mile. Barkovskaya knows what she’s doing. Come near me and you lose your job.’ He sighed again. ‘First the chickens, now the girls. What’s next, Kolya? That bitch is mad. For three years Pinskaya and I live happily together – suddenly, Marshal Barkovskaya arrives and it’s war. One blow after the next. I tell you, her greed is insatiable. Better that you don’t have some scam going, Kolya – she’d be after you too. She wants every last ruble, every last crumb from the table. Mother of God, leave some for somebody else, you cunt! No, she has to have it all. What do you do with someone like that?’
‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Of course I’ve spoken to her! Twice. I told her: Tell your fucking cousin to stay away. I’m the chef! I order from whoever I want!’
‘Maybe if you go with a proposition . . . ?’ suggested Sheremetev.
‘That’s what Eleyekov said, but I don’t trust him. He just wants chicken wings again. You know the ones I make with the peppers and the onion and the hot sauce? He loves them.’
‘They’re too hot for me.’
‘Really? You should have said. I’ll make a milder sauce for you. Actually, that reminds me. Wait here.’
Stepanin went into the kitchen. Sheremetev heard him yelling at his potwashers for a moment, then he came back with a brown paper packet which he slapped down on the table.
‘What’s this?’ said Sheremetev.
‘Dried apricots!’ said Stepanin. ‘You told me you like them, remember? They’re yours.’
Sheremetev opened the packet and took one for himself, then held out the packet to Stepanin, who extracted a handful.
‘They’re good,’ said Sheremetev, chewing a piece.
‘I told you, top quality,’ replied the cook, his mouth full. ‘I sell them on to this confectioner I know and I get a fantastic price. See, if only you could do something like that, you could get your nephew out of jail.’
Sheremetev shook his head glumly.
‘Have another apricot,’ said Stepanin.
Sheremetev took one and munched it disconsolately. So did Stepanin, his mind drifting back to his own troubles.
‘Vitya,’ said Sheremetev eventually, ‘what do you think about Vladimir Vladimirovich?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My nephew, in his blog, said he had the chance to save Russia, and instead turned it into a mess. And he said he took money from everyone, billions and billions and billions.’
The cook heaved a deep sigh. ‘I don’t know.’
‘If he had done things differently, maybe Russia would be a better place.’
‘And if my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather. What can you say? It is what it is. Russia is Russia, Kolya. To live in Russia is to live in hell – isn’t that what Pushkin said? That’s our lot. If it wasn’t Vladimir Vladimirovich who screwed us, it would have been someone else.’ Stepanin poured himself the last shot of vodka in the bottle and threw it down his throat. He pushed himself up from the table. ‘I’d better go and see what those fuckers are doing.’
Sheremetev watched him disappear unsteadily into the kitchen. The cook, he knew, could hold his drink, but by now he had had enough to knock out a horse.
Sheremetev lingered in the dining room. Now and then Stepanin’s shouts came from the kitchen. Eventually he left.
He walked back towards the entrance hall, along the corridor of the original staff quarters. The housekeeper’s office was here. He thought of everything Stepanin had said about Barkovskaya. Surely she couldn’t be such a witch, as malicious and vindictive as he had made her out to be. Surely it was just a matter of talking to her and—
Her door opened. Sheremetev jumped. There she was.
‘Good evening, Nikolai Ilyich,’ she said calmly, as if she had half expected him to be standing here.
‘Umm . . . Good evening, Galina Ivanovna,’ stammered Sheremetev.
‘Did you want to see me?’
‘No. No, no.’
The housekeeper made no move to let him pass.
‘Have you been talking with Viktor Alexandrovich?’
Sheremetev nodded.
‘You often talk with him.’
‘It’s nice to wind down at the end of the day.’
‘What do you talk about?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘It must be something, Nikolai Ilyich.’
‘Gossip.’
‘What gossip? I love gossip.’
‘Not gossip! I mean, chat.’
‘What chat?’
Sheremetev stared at her.
The silence went on, an uncomfortable silence that he didn’t know how to break. The housekeeper let it continue.
‘Well, I’m glad we bumped into each other, Nikolai Ilyich,’ she said at last. ‘I wanted to tell you that I had to get rid of Elena Dimitrovna today. Although I presume, if you have been talking to Viktor Alexandrovich, you are aware of that already.’
Sheremetev nodded.
‘She was stealing things.’
‘Really?’ said Sheremetev.
The housekeeper came closer. ‘Nikolai Ilyich, you should be careful who you spend your time with. Particularly now, after what’s happened.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Everyone’s heard about your nephew. The ex-president is an important man. He’s a symbol. There are security issues. No one wants any oppositionists near the ex-president.’
‘I’m not an oppositionist!’ said Sheremetev. ‘I’ve looked after him for six years. Would I do that if I was an oppositionist?’
Barkovskaya raised an eyebrow.
‘My nephew, who should have known better, wrote a very wrong thing. I’m sure that he will soon learn to see things in the proper way.’
‘I’d just watch who I spent my time with, if I were you, Nikolai Ilyich. Who I chat with. You know what they say: there’s always us and them.’ Barkovskaya gave him a thin, sour smile. ‘Goodnight, Nikolai Ilyich.’
She went back into her office. Sheremetev stood for a moment, suddenly conscious that his heart was thumping, then hurried out of the corridor.
At the security post in the entrance hall of the dacha, the guard seemed to be absorbed in something on his phone. Sheremetev climbed the stairs and walked slowly along the upper floor hallway. He had denied his own nephew! He had called him wrong, he had said that he didn’t see things in the proper way. And what was the proper way to see something? The way the police told you to see it? Sheremetev was stunned at what he had said, revolted at himself. There was nothing wrong about Pasha. He was decent, honest and good. If Russia could put someone like him in jail, there was something wrong with Russia!
He got back to his room and put the baby monitor down, then slumped on his bed, fully dressed.
Thoughts of Karinka came into his mind. He missed having her to talk to when he turned out the light. He missed drinking tea with her in the morning. Sometimes the feeling came upon him out of the blue, and the ache was as bad as it was in the months after she died. Six years, she had been gone. More – seven years in March. Seven years since those awful last months.
He sighed. The relief nurse, Vera, who came to look after Vladimir on his days off, carried a flame for him, and did nothing to hide it. In fact, she held it out like a blazing torch and sometimes almost singed his face with it. The truth was, he did sometimes think about her, and even fantasise about what might happen between them
. He was a man, after all. But in the cold light of day, it always seemed like just that, a fantasy.
He looked around his solitary little room, thinking of Karinka and the apartment they had had in Moscow. Over the past few years, the dacha had become his home. But tonight, after what he had learned about the things its other inhabitants were really getting up to, in the air that was poisonous with the growing animosity between Stepanin and Barokovskaya over spoils to which neither of them had a right, it felt less like a home and more like a nest of vipers.
9
THE NEXT DAY WAS bright and blowy, a real autumn day. Sheremetev was looking forward to getting out of the dacha, if only for a few hours. For the trip to the lake that he had booked with the Eleyekov Chauffeur Company, as he thought of it now, he decided to dress Vladimir in something more appropriate for the outdoors than the suit he had chosen for the last, aborted attempt. After all, as any Russian citizen who had been alive in the past thirty years couldn’t fail to know – at least, any Russian citizen who hadn’t put out his own eyes to get away from the all-pervasive images of the great leader on television, in newspapers, on the internet, in paintings and in any other medium the Kremlin controlled or could influence – the Leningrad-born ex-president had supposedly revelled in the great Russian wild, whether in hunting gear, fishing gear, riding gear, camouflage gear, flying gear, or skiing gear; whether in furs, denims, khakis, snowsuits or even – quite often in the earlier years – insouciantly bare-chested for the entire world to see.
After lunch, Sheremetev laid out the clothes on a sofa in Vladimir’s sitting room. A pair of jeans, a white T shirt, a black turtleneck sweater, a leather bomber jacket with a fur collar, thick woollen socks and a pair of black boots.
‘Let’s get changed, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Shall I help you?’
‘No,’ replied Vladimir. He got up, took off his trousers and pulled on the jeans. After that promising start, he sat on the sofa, still in his shirt, and stopped. Sheremetev waited for a couple of minutes, but it was obvious Vladimir had forgotten what he had been doing. Sheremetev glanced at his watch. He had a feeling that Eleyekov wouldn’t wait long if they were late. He prompted Vladimir once more, then quickly helped him to finish.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, as Sheremetev knelt in front of him to put on his socks and shoes.
‘Sheremetev. I’ve worked for you for six years, Vladimir Vladimirovich.’
‘Do you know my mother?’
‘No, Vladimir Vladimirovich. I never had the honour of meeting her.’
‘Shame. I’ll make sure you do.’
‘Lift this foot up, please, Vladimir Vladimirovich. That’s it. Let me put the boot on . . . that’s it . . . Push Vladimir Vladimirovich . . .’
‘Are we going out?’
‘Yes, we’re going out. I told you already.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To the lake. Now the other boot . . . Okay, please stand up.’ Sheremetev helped Vladimir into the bomber jacket, then stepped back. Before him stood the Vladimir Vladimirovich of the photographs Sheremetev had seen over the years. Older, of course, balder, thinner, but still recognisable, still upright, and altogether in excellent physical shape for a man of his advanced years, or even for one of ten or twenty years younger.
He smiled. ‘You look good, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Wait. Let me put a watch on you.’
Sheremetev went into Vladimir’s dressing room and opened the doors to the cabinet that contained the ex-president’s watches. He opened one of the drawers – a tray of gold watches, slim, very elegant, not exactly what he was looking for. He opened another tray, and then another, until he found one that he considered more appropriate, a thick watch in black and silver with mini-dials on the face and big silver buttons poking out of the case. A real sportsman’s piece. He went back to the bedroom and put it on Vladimir’s wrist.
‘This one’s from Trikovsky,’ said Vladimir, watching him as he fastened the clasp.
‘Is it?’ replied Sheremetev, for whom the name meant nothing. ‘Do you remember when he gave it to you?’
‘Of course.’ Vladimir chuckled. ‘In the early days, we were almost friends. That’s what Trikovsky was like. If he thought he could use you, you were his blood brother. Nothing was too much.’
‘Okay,’ said Sheremetev, stepping back. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Where?’
‘The lake.’ Sheremetev looked at his own watch. ‘Come on, Vladimir Vladimirovich. We’ll be late.’
Downstairs, Artur was waiting with his deputy, Lyosha, a stocky man with a totally shaven head, and three other guards, all dressed in dark suits and dark shirts, about as inconspicuous for a trip to the outdoors as a flashing light on a police van. While Artur was tall and slim, with facial features that were even delicate, Lyosha was more what you might expect of a security man, thickset, strongly muscled and gruff in manner.
The cars drew up outside the front door.
Eleyekov was driving the Mercedes, a bulletproof beast of a vehicle much favoured by his private clients, many of whom had enemies and good reasons to fear them. His son drove the Range Rover, which was also armour-plated. Vladimir sat in the back of the Mercedes beside Artur. Sheremetev sat in the front beside Eleyekov. Lyosha and the other guards bundled into the second car.
‘All ready?’ asked Eleyekov, eyeing Artur in the rearview mirror.
Artur nodded.
Off they went. At the bottom of the drive, the guard in the security booth opened the gate onto the little-used road that ran to the main highway to the town, and one after the other the cars turned out.
They drove through the forest in silence. From time to time Sheremetev glanced over his shoulder at Vladimir, who sat belted up in the back, staring out the window. He wondered what was going through his mind, where he thought he was being taken. Now and again Vladimir sniffed, wrinkling his nose in distaste.
‘What’s happening with Stepanin?’ murmured Eleyekov to Sheremetev quietly.
Sheremetev had been about to ask the driver the same thing. He shrugged, thinking of Barkovskaya’s veiled threat to him the previous evening. ‘Things are getting crazy.’
‘He has to learn to live with her. If he wants to fight it, it’s his own fault.’
Sheremetev didn’t want to talk about it. The thought of all the thieving and extortion that apparently surrounded him in the dacha sickened him – and right here, in this very car, with Eleyekov sitting beside him, he was in the thick of it.
‘He talks to you,’ persisted the driver. ‘Well? When are we going to have his spicy chicken wings again?’
‘Can you smell something?’ said Vladimir to Artur in the back.
‘It’s up to him what he does,’ murmured Sheremetev.
Eleyekov shook his head in frustration.
‘Can you smell something?’ demanded Vladimir insistently.
‘What’s his problem back there?’ muttered Eleyekov, still irritated by the thought of Stepanin’s futile resistance that was costing him so many dishes that he relished. ‘Why does he keep saying that? The car’s as clean as a whistle. I made sure of it myself.’
‘He thinks there’s a Chechen,’ said Sheremetev.
‘In the car? A Chechen?’ Eleyekov threw a glance at Artur. ‘Are you a Chechen, Artyusha?’
Artur shook his head.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, there’s no Chechen,’ said Eleyekov. Then he turned to Sheremetev, dropping his voice to a whisper again. ‘You’re not Chechen are you, Nikolai Ilyich?’
Sheremetev shook his head.
‘See, Vladimir Vladimirovich?’ Eleyekov glanced back again. ‘There’s no Chechen in the car.’
Vladimir smiled craftily. ‘That’s what you think.’
‘Does he think there’s someone in the boot?’ whispered Eleyekov to Sheremetev.
‘I checked the boot before we got in,’ said Artur, as if the driver had offended his professional pride.
‘Forget it,’ murmured Sh
eremetev. ‘He always thinks there’s a Chechen.’
‘Who is it? Someone he knew?’
‘No idea. He always says he can smell him.’
‘You can smell Chechens?’
‘I knew some Chechens,’ said Artur. ‘They always smelled of . . . what’s that thing you cook with?’
‘Garlic?’ offered Eleyekov.
‘No.’
‘Onions?’
‘No. Fennel. That was it, fennel.’
‘Fennel?’ said Eleyekov. ‘What’s fennel?’
‘It’s a thing.’
‘A herb,’ said Sheremetev.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, can you smell fennel?’ asked Eleyekov loudly.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ retorted Vladimir. ‘And where’s Monarov? You were meant to get him. He was meant to be in the car waiting for me. Let’s go back now!’
Eleyekov glanced questioningly at Sheremetev.
‘Just keep going,’ said Sheremetev quietly.
AT THE LAKE, ARTUR jumped out of the Mercedes to make sure the situation was safe before Sheremetev helped Vladimir out. Behind them, the other guards got out of the Range Rover.
‘Where do you want to walk?’ said Artur to Sheremetev.
‘What difference does it make?’ muttered Eleyekov, leaning against the car. He pointed at his watch. ‘No more than an hour, Nikolai Ilyich. Remember what we said.’
‘We’ll go for as long as Vladimir Vladimirovich wants,’ retorted Artur. He turned to Sheremetev. ‘As long as he wants, Nikolai Ilyich. Don’t rush.’
Eleyekov said nothing to that. Sheremetev smiled. At least there was someone else who wasn’t here only to see how much he could extort from the ex-president. Artur was unfailingly polite, concerned only with doing his job and making sure Vladimir was safe. It was a matter of pride for him, Sheremetev knew, and he could tell that the question of money was irrelevant. Having Artur around on the outing did something, at least, to lessen the aftertaste that the previous day’s revelations had left.
The Senility of Vladimir P Page 12