The Senility of Vladimir P

by Michael Honig

  ‘So there’s a way to do it, is there?’

  Despising himself, Sheremetev nodded.

  ‘Good!’ Belkin went to the back of the shop and returned a moment later with two briefcases. ‘Let’s go.’

  A PAIR OF VEHICLES was waiting around the corner. Sheremetev was put into the back seat of a Mercedes between Vasya and Rostkhenkovskaya. Belkin put the briefcases in the boot and then climbed into the front passenger seat. One of the thugs sat behind the wheel – the others piled into the second car.

  Sheremetev told them to head for the Odintsovo. Soon they were in the Moscow traffic

  After a few minutes Sheremetev’s phone rang.

  ‘It’s my brother,’ he said.

  ‘Answer it,’ replied Belkin.

  Oleg had expected to hear from Sheremetev by now and had rung to check that everything was alright.

  ‘There’s been a hiccup,’ said Sheremetev guardedly.

  ‘What kind of hiccup?’ asked Oleg .

  ‘Umm . . . Listen, Oleg, I couldn’t get away today.’

  ‘What do you mean, you couldn’t get away?’

  ‘The relief nurse didn’t turn up.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen?’

  ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘But you told me the watch buyer’s expecting you today!’

  ‘I phoned her. It’s okay. I’ll bring you the money tomorrow. Oleg, I promise, alright?’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you tomorrow?’

  ‘Oleg, I told you —’

  ‘I told Pasha I was getting the money tonight and I’d have him out tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, it might have to be the next day.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Okay,’ said Oleg eventually. ‘I guess another day’s not going to kill him.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Oleg.’

  Sheremetev put the phone away.

  ‘Nice lying, Dad,’ said Vasya.

  Sheremetev glared at his son. ‘What are you doing, Vasya? This is a kidnap. Is this what you do? Go around hijacking people? I should go to the police!’

  Vasya laughed, pointing a thumb at the thug driving the car. ‘That guy is the police. There are four more in the car behind us. Moscow’s finest.’

  Sheremetev frowned. ‘What is this? Some kind of investigation?’

  Belkin chuckled.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Papa!’ hissed Vasya. ‘How naïve can you be? You’re embarrassing me! How do you think a policeman like that earns enough to feed his family?’

  ‘It’s better than taking bribes on the street, Sheremetev!’ growled the driver.

  ‘Sure,’ retorted Vasya. ‘And you don’t do that as well?’

  The driver grinned.

  ‘So you bribe policemen?’ said Sheremetev.

  ‘No, I don’t bribe policemen,’ retorted Vasya. ‘Not if I don’t have to. Look – right now he’s working for me. Why shouldn’t I pay him?’ Vasya sighed impatiently. ‘Papa, I get things done, alright? Someone wants something, I fix it for them. Someone needs help, I get it for them. Anushka rings me up and says she needs some guys with a bit of muscle. Nothing nasty, just a bit of persuasion. So I get them for her.’

  ‘So this isn’t the first time? You help her steal things all the time, do you?’

  ‘Every situation’s different. Sometimes, someone needs protection. People know I always deliver. Word of mouth. I have a lot of customers in the jewellery business.’

  ‘And what about me? Shouldn’t I have had protection?’

  ‘Did you call me?’

  Sheremetev fumed. ‘And you need five guys?’ he demanded. ‘Five guys for me?’

  ‘First of all, I didn’t know who you were, okay? What do you think I am? I wouldn’t have got involved in this if I knew. She didn’t tell me your name.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me, Vasya!’ said Rostkhenkovskaya.

  ‘Alright, fine. Whatever. Secondly, who knows if you’re going to come with anybody else or what weapons you might have? Or what might happen when we get to wherever we’re going to? It’s not for me to question. I get the guys for her – that’s it. It was going to be six, but one pulled out at the last minute, which is why I came myself. Incidentally, Seva, what the fuck happened to Gleb?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ grunted the driver.

  ‘If you see him, tell him, he can forget about me. That’s it for him. Zero tolerance! No one fucks with Vasya Sheremetev. If Gleb thinks I can’t get more where he came from, tell him to have a look around next time he goes to work.’

  The driver nodded.

  Vasya looked back at his father. ‘See, you want some guys, I get them. It’s only a question of money. It’s not only policemen. If Anna had asked for ballerinas, I could get her half the chorus line for the Bolshoi. Trust me, I’ve done it before. You can have whatever you want. Not that any —’ His phone rang. ‘Excuse me.’

  Vasya answered the phone. For the next minute or so he gave a series of monosyllabic answers, then put it away.

  He turned again to Sheremetev. ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘Nothing,’ muttered Sheremetev. As if Stepanin hadn’t told him enough, he was sick at what he now understood of his son’s profession, if that was the right word for it. He would never be able to pretend again that he didn’t know.

  They were driving stop-start on an eight-lane road with thousands of other vehicles all trying to get out of central Moscow. Sheremetev had lost track of where they were – he only knew that every minute they were in the car brought them closer to the dacha.

  Suddenly he looked back at Vasya. ‘Do you think it’s because of Mama?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This stuff that you do. Do you think it’s because of the way Mama died?’

  ‘Papa . . .’ growled Vasya.

  ‘I remember the way you cried —’

  ‘Papa! Please!’

  Sheremetev was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to Rostkhenkovskaya. ‘His mother died when he was nineteen.’

  ‘Papa!’

  ‘What?’ demanded Sheremetev. ‘Are you ashamed of it?’

  ‘Why should I be ashamed of it?’

  ‘Then be quiet! You were nineteen. A boy’s mother dies. He shouldn’t cry?’

  ‘Of course he should cry,’ said Rostkhenkovskaya.

  ‘My mother only died last year,’ chipped in the driver, ‘and I cried like a baby.’

  ‘Seva, you shut the fuck up!’

  ‘How did she die?’ asked Rostkhenkovskaya.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Kidney failure,’ said Sheremetev. ‘We didn’t have the money for the bribes. Others did.’

  Rostkhenkovskaya leaned forward and looked past Sheremetev at Vasya. ‘Vasya, is that true?’

  Vasya shrugged.

  ‘Is it?’

  Vasya grunted.

  ‘And did you know it was because your dad didn’t have the money?’

  Vasya shrugged again.

  ‘So is this . . . what you do, is that to get back at him?’

  Vasya didn’t reply.

  There was silence in the car – a silence that prickled with the tension of people straining to hear more. Belkin had turned to look at Vasya. Seva, the driver, was frowning, hunched slightly, waiting for the response.

  ‘Vasily,’ said Sheremetev. ‘Is that why you do this? This life that you live, this work that you do – is to punish me?’

  Vasya wiped at his eyes. ‘No, it’s not to punish you! It’s so, if I ever have a wife and I ever have a son, he won’t have to watch her die because I’m so damn honest and so damn noble and so damn upright that I don’t have the pathetic few thousand dollars it will take to save her!’

  Sheremetev recoiled.

  ‘How much was that watch you brought in today, Papa? Ask yourself that. Three hundred thousand dollars. That’s what Anushka offered you, right? And for the sake of how much did Mama die? Was it even three thousand? The watch alone could have saved a
hundred of her. And that crook, that man you call your patient, was probably taking that watch from some filthy oligarch the very same day she died. That’s what it is to live in Russia, Papa. That’s something you’ve never understood. You have to be like him – or you end up emptying his bedpan.’

  Vasya’s phone went off. ‘Yes?’ he barked.

  ‘Vasya’s not so bad,’ whispered Rostkhenkovskaya to Sheremetev, as Vasya snapped answers into his phone.

  Sheremetev glanced at her in disbelief. How, he wondered, had he come to be sitting in this car beside his son, the gangster, taking comfort from an extortionist in a black pinafore dress?

  The car drove on, a capsule full of greed and recrimination and misery travelling through the Moscow night.

  IT TOOK ALMOST THREE hours to get to the dacha in the traffic crawling out of the city. When they finally arrived, they stopped out of sight of the gate. Sheremetev had told them that if he tried to get the five policemen into the house, suspicions would be raised – especially now that the whole dacha was on edge and everyone was waiting for some kind of war to break out between the Lukashvillis and whoever had shot Artur, although he didn’t tell them about that. The driver, Seva, got out of the car and went to join his fellow moonlighting cops in the second car, which parked on a verge at the side of the road. Vasya took his place at the steering wheel.

  They drove up to the gate. A security guard came out of the booth to see who was there. Sheremetev lowered his window.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of contractors here who have come to see about installing some equipment for Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of equipment?’ asked the guard suspiciously.

  ‘A lift for the stairs. It’s getting harder and harder for Vladimir Vladimirovich to walk up and down.’

  The guard looked at his watch. ‘So late?’

  ‘They had to come from Moscow.’

  The guard consulted his clipboard. ‘Did you clear them?’

  ‘They’re doing me a favour. They agreed to come at short notice.’

  The guard peered into the car. ‘Turn off the engine,’ he said to Vasya.

  ‘You want me to turn it off?’

  ‘Yes! Turn it off!’

  Vasya turned it off. ‘Touchy,’ he said.

  The guard gave him a hostile glance and then looked carefully at the other occupants. Rostkhenkovskaya gave him a winning smile. He didn’t react.

  ‘Do you know these people personally, Nikolai Ilyich?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Sheremetev. ‘I can vouch for them.’

  The guard looked them over again. Sheremetev waited. Normally, the guard would have waved them through by now, but everyone in the dacha was jittery.

  The guard walked around the car. ‘Open the boot,’ he called out. Vasya released the boot lock and the guard looked inside, then slammed the door closed.

  He came back to the window. ‘You know you’re meant to get people cleared in advance, Nikolai Ilyich.’

  Sheremetev nodded. ‘It was short notice.’

  ‘I need to see identification.’

  Belkin and Rostkhenkovskaya pulled out their driving licences. Vasya did the same.

  The guard took the licences and noted down the names and date of birth of each person. H returned them without a word and then went back to the booth.

  They could see the guard making a call.

  ‘Remember what I told you,’ said Belkin to Sheremetev as they waited. ‘If you try anything, we show the watches and say you sold them to us.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Like that! Ten years in jail for you, minimum.’

  Still the gate didn’t open.

  ‘What’s the holdup?’ muttered Vasya.

  ‘Things are a bit . . . It’s just takes a little while,’ said Sheremetev. He frowned. ‘Funny he didn’t notice you’ve got the same name as me.’

  Vasya rolled his eyes, as if his father’s naivete knew no bounds. ‘That’s not the name on the licence, Dad.’

  By the time Sheremetev understood what his son meant, the guard inside the booth had put down the phone. The security gate opened a few seconds later.

  Vasya restarted the engine and they headed up the drive.

  16

  WITHOUT UTTERING A WORD, the security guard in the hall ran a metal detector over them and checked the briefcases that Belkin and Rostkhenkovskaya carried. Lyosha stood beside him, watchful and silent. When the guard was finished, Lyosha gestured for them to come through.

  Upstairs, Sheremetev left Vasya, Belkin and Rostkhenkovskaya in an empty room while he went to get rid of Vera. Vladimir was in his sitting room, mumbling aggressively.

  ‘How has he been?’ asked Sheremetev.

  Vera rolled her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sheremetev. He would need Vera again the next day so that he could take Oleg the money that he was going to get from Belkin. ‘Listen, Verochka, can you come again tomorrow?’

  ‘Kolya, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Please. One more day. He’s getting used to you.’

  She looked unconvinced.

  ‘Come on, Verochka. It’s important.’

  ‘What are you doing every day, anyway?’

  ‘I just need to get away a little. I told myself, this week, I’ll take a few afternoons off.’

  She looked at him knowingly. ‘Have you met someone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have!’

  ‘I haven’t,’ he said impatiently. Vasya and the two extortionists were sitting in a room not ten metres away, and although he had told them explicitly to stay there until he came for them, he knew that if he left it too long they might decide he was trying to pull some kind of trick – and there was no knowing what they would do then.

  ‘Kolya, it’s six years since your wife died. It’s time you met someone. Give yourself some credit. You’re very attractive to a woman if she likes small men.’

  ‘Thank you, Verochka, but now’s not the time.’

  ‘Now is the time!’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Sheremetev, ‘it isn’t.’

  ‘Kolya, it’s too easy to keep saying that. How much longer will you wait?’ Vera shook her head, eyes filled with emotion. ‘Kolya, if you’re not careful, you’ll be an old man before you know it and your whole life will have passed. You deserve more than that.’

  ‘We’ll discuss it,’ he said, trying to push her out the door.

  She held firm. ‘When?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Kolya, don’t pretend.’

  ‘Pretend what?’

  Vera batted her eyelids coyly. ‘You know what.’

  Sheremetev felt like tearing his hair out.

  She came closer.

  ‘Vera,’ he said, trying again to usher her out of Vladimir’s suite, ‘let’s talk about this tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Really?’

  ‘When you come to look after Vladimir Vladimirovich.’

  Vera sighed. ‘Oh, I’m really not sure I can come tomorrow.’

  ‘Vera, please! I need you tomorrow. We can talk then.’

  ‘But you won’t be here.’

  ‘When I come back. I’ll only be gone for a few hours. I’ll put Vladimir to bed, then we’ll have plenty of time.’

  ‘All night?’

  ‘If we need it.’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Wait and see,’ he said, finally shoving her out the door and into the corridor.

  She stopped. ‘Kolya, you devil! You’ve been playing hard to get. The things you made me say! Shall I bring something special tomorrow for when you get back?’

  ‘Whatever you like,’ he replied hurriedly, pulling on her arm to get her moving again.

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Lingerie?’

  ‘Whatever!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ He stopped at the top of the stairs.

  Vera ran a finger under Sheremetev’s chin. ‘Until tomorrow, Nikolasha.’ S
he gazed at him, and then sashayed down the stairs.

  He stayed, stifling his urge to run back, knowing that she would turn at the bottom and look at him again. She did. He smiled, seeming to remember that he had heard Vera mention lingerie and only now thinking about what he had said and wondering how he would get out of it tomorrow. She walked past Lyosha, who was still there with the other security guard, and disappeared

  Sheremetev turned to go back but caught a glimpse of Stepanin crossing the lobby below him. As Sheremetev watched, the chef leaned close to Lyosha and whispered something in his ear. Lyosha nodded and they walked away together.

  What was Stepanin, who hardly ever emerged from the kitchen, doing in the entrance hall? And where was Lyosha going with him?

  Suddenly he remembered the three interlopers. He ran back to the room where he had deposited them. ‘Wait!’ he said breathlessly. ‘Five more minutes. Stay until I come to get you!’ Then he ran back to Vladimir’s sitting room.

  Vladimir was still mumbling to himself.

  ‘How are you this evening, Vladimir Vladimirovich?’ asked Sheremetev, trying to slow himself down and keep his anxiety out of his voice.

  Vladimir looked around at him. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Sheremetev, Vladimir Vladimirovich.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m looking after you.’

  Vladimir sniffed. ‘Can you smell him?’

  ‘No,’ said Sheremetev. ‘I think he’s gone.’

  ‘He’s never gone,’ growled Vladimir.

  ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, I have a couple of visitors.’

  ‘Who is it?’ demanded Vladimir. ‘Is it Monarov? I told him to have the latest on Trikovsky on my desk this morning. Where is he? Has he got it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Vladimir Vladimirovich.’

  ‘He’s been twelve years in prison. I don’t understand why no one’s arranged an accident!’

  ‘It’s just three workers who need to check something in your dressing room.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people who are here. They’ll only take a few minutes. Just stay here, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and they won’t disturb you.’

  ‘Go on, then! Why are you taking my time up with such a thing? What do I care? I’ve got more important things to attend to.’ He paused. ‘That fucking Chechen is here somewhere, I’m telling you. If you find him in the dressing room, let me know.’