December. James Steel

she moved past Alex, her head turned towards him and they looked at each other for a split second. The woman strode on and made her way down the stairs.

      

      She walked out of the gate in her long fur coat and stepped into the back of one of Sergey’s chauffeur-driven, black Range Rovers with tinted windows. As the driver moved off, she pulled the ornate box out of her handbag and turned it over in her hand, thoughtfully examining the gold whorls and the precious stones set into it.

      After looking at it for a while she flipped the clasp open with her thumbnail and took out the single folded sheet of plain, white paper. On it were two lines of Sergey’s appalling scratchy handwriting: cramped, unevenly spaced and with occasional spikes up and down.

      She recognised the verse. It was Pushkin:

      Past sorrow to me is like wine

      Stronger with every passing year.

      The woman closed her eyes for a moment in a look of pain. She folded the note, put it back in the box and looked out at the dark city sliding past.

      

      Sergey suddenly switched on his normal, manic persona and threw his arms open towards Alex: ‘Ah-ha! Grekov!’ He gestured into his office.

      Alex put his drink down and stalked through the open door, his dark brows knit in a frown of disapproval. He was not impressed by what he had seen of Sergey so far.

      The room was a long rectangle, dimly lit with a large boardroom table down the middle and elegantly curtained windows along the left-hand side. On the opposite wall and between the windows were enormous bookshelves running up to the high ceiling. Alex glanced at the titles—both Russian and Western, mainly literature but also poetry, art, science and technical manuals, architecture and travel.

      Sergey seemed oblivious to Alex’s glowering and rushed ahead, flamboyantly waving him past the table—‘No, no, no!’—to a large oriental day bed set on top of a waist-high brick platform, in the Central Asian style, against the far end of the room. The bed was covered in expensive oriental carpets and pillows and surrounded by a low rail.

      Portraits of various tsars, along with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Tolstoy, and other bearded Russians that Alex didn’t recognise, hung on the wall above the day bed.

      Alex perched awkwardly on the edge of one side of it, whilst Sergey busied himself opening a cast-iron door to a stove built into the brick base and chucking a couple of logs into it from a wicker basket. He slid onto the opposite side of the platform from Alex, stretching his legs out and chuckling, ‘I always like to warm up my butt a bit.’

      The platform was covered in a clutter of books, newspapers, laptops and DVDs. Sergey wriggled his backside and then fidgeted and pulled a DVD out from under him. He looked at it and then showed the simple cartoon front cover to Alex. ‘Vinni Puh?’ he said quizzically.

      Alex frowned. What the hell was he on about now?

      ‘Vinni Puh?’ Sergey said insistently. ‘Ah! No, you say, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’? This is the Soviet version from 1971. Used to watch them as a kid—much better, much deeper, complete with existentialist angst. Check it out on YouTube—Vinni Puh Goes Visiting.’ He looked at the cover again, laughed and chucked it aside.

      He ignored Alex’s stony silence and proceeded to make tea in a small ornate copper pot by alternately spooning in tea leaves and pouring hot water from a kettle with a long thin spout. He muttered from under the shaggy fringe of hair hanging over his face, ‘I like the Kalmyks’ style with bay leaves,’ and added some.

      As he stirred the tea he looked up and said chirpily in English: ‘So you are enjoying my party?’

      Alex looked at him, startled, his anger disarmed by Sergey’s sudden switch of language. He struggled to reply in a more civil manner in English than he had intended: ‘Yes…you’re the life and soul.’

      Sergey stopped stirring the tea and stared at him. His smile cut out as if someone had switched off a light. He looked Alex gravely in the eye. ‘And do you know why I am the life and soul?’

      Alex looked straight back, again caught out by his change of tone.

      Sergey said very slowly, ‘Because in my soul I am alone.’

      There was a long moment before he nodded, looked down at the pot and went back to stirring it and adding water.

      The episode seemed to have brought a calmer mood on him. He started again in Russian: ‘So you are fucked off and wondering what you are doing at a party, sitting on a bed with a crazy Russian who wants to send you on a suicide mission to Siberia?’

      Alex couldn’t have put it more succinctly himself so he just waited for Sergey to answer his own question.

      ‘Well, you are at a party because I always do my business at parties. I love business, I love parties.’ He held his hands out and smiled. ‘For me they are one and the same. It also means that I can see everyone without suspicion.’

      ‘Meaning?’

      ‘Well, all of us oligarchs are powerful so Comrade Krymov likes to keep us all under surveillance. But me,’ he gestured to himself, ‘I invite the bastards to my parties. You have just been drinking Litvinenkos with Colonel Vladimir Ilarionovich Gorsky, the station chief of the SVR in London.’

      Alex narrowed his eyes and looked more intently at Sergey. The SVR was the foreign intelligence arm of the FSB—the Federal Security Service—the successor to the KGB.

      ‘We drink a lot of vodka together and he thinks he knows everything that goes on inside my head.’ Sergey shrugged. ‘He does know a lot of it but there are many rooms inside my head. So he tells me he thinks I am a clown who isn’t worth wasting any of his men on.’ Sergey nodded with satisfaction, seeming to take this as a compliment.

      Alex began to unwind some of his early anger. Maybe Shaposhnikov wasn’t such an idiot as he had first appeared.

      ‘So Harrington says to me that we have you “by the short and curlies”.’ He pronounced the idiom with mock hesitancy and then grinned.

      Alex replied curtly, ‘It wouldn’t be my first choice of operation.’ He decided the time had come to press for more reassurance on it. ‘I mean, what the hell chance does it have of succeeding? Krymov looks pretty well entrenched. He’s an unshakeable dictator.’

      Sergey seemed to ignore the question, put the lid on the pot, poured a little tea into an engraved silver thimble cup and sipped it. He made a face, lifted the lid and poured the cupful back into the pot and then replied, ‘Hmm, well, from the outside, yes, but then nothing is as it seems in Russia. There are significant weaknesses in my country at both an élite and a popular level.’ He made a horizontal slicing action with one hand high up and then lower down to indicate where the problems lay in Russian society.

      He was sounding like he might actually have a point. Alex was prepared to listen and leaned back against the rail on the bed.

      Sergey warmed to his theme. ‘You see, Russia is not a state as you know it in the Western sense. The Soviets and then the Yeltsin anarchy undermined the rule of law. Everything was so inefficient and fucked up that people had to develop alternative currencies, and “informal practices”,’ he made speech marks with his finger, ‘to make it work. It’s what you call the favour system or patronage networks.’

      He hurried on: ‘Look, there used to be two ideologies in the USSR—communism and criminalism. Now there is only one.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, we used to have a Communist Party that could actually control the KGB but now there is no Communist Party so the secret police have no limits on their power.’ He paused to consider the irony and then smiled. ‘Only in Russia would you get rid of communism and then bring back the secret police to run the country.’

      He continued carefully, emphasising his points with slow hand movements. ‘So the combination of all these things means that the country is controlled not by the normal