Sashenka (51 page)

“Katinka, trust no one out there,” he warned her, between gaping silences.

“They’re terrified of us here, Papa. In the hotel, they think I’m a gangster or a spy!”

“Promise me you’ll take no risks, darling,” he said.

“Oh, Papa. OK, I promise: no risks. I kiss you, Papa. Love to Mama and Baba and Bedbug!”

She laughed to herself—how could he understand? She adored her father but she could imagine him on the phone by the bookcase, smoking a cigarette late at night, in that faraway cottage in a village “lost in deafness”—while
she
was in London now. But when she got into her sumptuously soft bed with its incredible wealth of pillows, she closed her eyes and wondered what on earth she was doing there. A spiked barb of anxiety lodged deep inside her drumming heart.

4

Next morning, after an English breakfast of toast, marmalade and fried bacon and tomatoes (she ordered much of the menu), Katinka found a shavenheaded Russian man of military bearing standing in the lobby and staring at her with illconcealed contempt. So this was Artyom, she thought, as he nodded toward the door and directed her to a large black Mercedes that smelled deliciously of new leather.

Artyom climbed stiffly into the seat right in front of her and she heard the locks click shut on all four doors. As he swung the car aggressively into traffic, pressing her against the passenger door, Katinka examined his hulking shoulders and muscleknotted neck with foreboding. She felt small and helpless and wondered if her father, whom she’d so recently mocked for his caution, had been right after all.

What if her entire trip was a wicked trick arranged by some Russian master criminal? Was she about to be sold into white slavery? But why would a ThiefinPower, as Russian gangster godfathers were known, bother to ask Academician Beliakov, author of the classic work
Lawmaking and Statebuilding under Catherine II: The Legislative Commission
, to place an advertisement for him in the
Humanities Department Gazette
? Beliakov had been invited to put forward his top history graduate. And why would a gangster want a historian when surely the provincial villages and Muscovite streets were seething with booted, miniskirted girls eager to be sold into white slavery in London or New York?

“Where are we going?” she asked Artyom anxiously.

“The house,” muttered Artyom, as if this answer was already causing him considerable weariness.

“Who am I meeting?”

“The boss.” These two words fatigued him even more.

“Mr. Getman?” she asked.

Artyom did not answer.

“Is he very rich, Artyom?”

Artyom snorted with heavybreathed superiority, and altered the airconditioning on his gleaming dashboard as if he were piloting a supersonic MiG fighter.

“How did you come to work for Mr. Getman?”

“I served in the Spetsnats in Afghanistan,” he replied.

Katinka was amused that every thug and nightclub bouncer in Russia claimed to have fought with the Special Forces in Afghanistan. If all of them had been telling the truth, Russia might have won the war.

“Is Mr. Getman one of the oligarchs?”

There was another long, sneering pause as the Mercedes swung from the inner circle of Regent’s Park into a discreet driveway. High gates shivered, then opened slowly. Katinka heard the crunch of the Mercedes’s wheels on thick gravel and gasped at the beauty and scale of the house, a perfectly proportioned Queen Anne mansion hidden in the woods of Regent’s Park, right in the middle of London, one of those secret places that had been owned, she was told later, by several of the legendary millionaires of the past.

Artyom marched round to open Katinka’s door. “This way, girl,” he said, without looking at her. He turned and loped up the steps.

Katinka followed him nervously into a blackandwhitefloored hall breathing fresh paint and polish, and where portraits of ruddycheeked English earls in bulging pantaloons and velvet frock coats glared down at her. A charging redcoated cavalryman, saber outstretched, caught her eye roguishly from a broad goldframed canvas hanging on the sweeping staircase with the shiny oak banisters. But where was Artyom? Katinka looked round frantically, but the house seemed silent and forbidding. Then a door concealed in the opulent chinoiserie wallpaper swung on its hinges. She opened it and saw Artyom’s broad back turn a corner. Relieved, she ran after him into a gloomy corridor lined with framed English cartoons. He opened a black door. Bright sunlight pouring through a line of windows blinded her momentarily. Raising a hand to her eyes, she blinked and tried to gather herself.

She was in the biggest kitchen she had ever seen. Black marble covered every surface. A chrome fridge extended from floor to high ceiling. The gadgets—the oven, the washing machine, the dishwasher—seemed as wide as cars with control panels that belonged in a Sputnik, not a kitchen.

Was this where she was supposed to be? Perhaps she should have waited in the hall?

Katinka was about to turn back and retrace her steps when a slim greyhaired woman rose from a pine table with a generous, uninhibited smile. Katinka stopped as Artyom marched past her toward a highbacked scarlet chair—almost a papal throne, she thought—which was occupied by a large, crumpled man with curly dark hair who was watching a wall of television screens that showed different rooms and approaches to the house.

“Boss,” said Artyom, halting before the papal throne. “Here’s the girl. Where do you want her?”

This was all a horrible mistake, Katinka decided, longing to escape, to go home, worrying about how to get a lift to the airport. But the scruffy man, who wore a checked seersucker jacket, jumped to his feet and greeted her exuberantly, hands outstretched.

“You must be Ekaterina Vinsky? Welcome, come in! We’ve been longing to see you!” He spoke Russian in a thick Jewish, Odessan accent that she’d heard only in old movies.

“Thank you for coming to see us.” Us? Who was us?

The man glanced at the driver. “All right, Artyom, see you at eleven.” Artyom looked disappointed and lumbered away, leaving the kitchen door swinging behind him, but his dismissal lifted Katinka’s spirits.

“Now,” said the scruffy man, “come and sit down. I’m Pasha Getman.”

So this, thought Katinka, was what a real oligarch looked like, a billionaire who breezed through the corridors of the Kremlin itself—but he was already showing her to a chair.

“Come on, Mama,” he called to the slim lady. “Bring the honeycakes. Are they ready?”

Then to Katinka, “What sort of tea do you like? What sort of milk? Let’s get started!”

Pasha seemed incapable of sitting down or even keeping still. He was bursting with sparky energy. But before he could continue, a telephone gadget, which appeared unlinked to any wires, started to ring and he answered it in Russian, then switched to English. He seemed to be discussing oil prices. Then, covering the phone with his large soft paw, he said, “Katinka, meet my mother, Roza Getman,” before giving orders into the phone again.

So these people were her new employers, Katinka thought. She looked more carefully at the woman approaching her with a silver tray. Steam curled out of a blue china teapot; cakes and apple strudel were arranged on plates; and teacups stood graciously on matching saucers. Placing the tray before her, Roza Getman started to pour the tea.

“Pasha’s always in a hurry,” she told Katinka, smiling at her son.

“No time to spare. Life’s short and my enemies would like to make it shorter. Understand that, understand everything,” explained Pasha, who seemed to be able to conduct several conversations simultaneously. Katinka didn’t know what to make of these Odessans, who seemed so haughty, so sophisticated, so unRussian (she knew from her grandfather’s rantings that most oligarchs were Jews) that they made her feel gawky and provincial. But just as her spirits were sinking again, Roza handed her a plate.

“Try one of my honeycakes. You’re so slim, we need to feed you up. Now tell me, dear, how was your flight and did you like the hotel?”

“Oh my God, it’s beautiful,” answered Katinka. “I’ve never flown before and the hotel’s palatial. I couldn’t believe the breakfast and the fluffy towels…” She stopped and blushed, feeling provincial again, but Roza leaned toward her and touched her hand.

“I’m so pleased,” she said in the same Odessan accent as Pasha. She was dressed with understated elegance, thought Katinka, admiring the silk scarf around her neck. Her hair was greying but it must once have been blond and it was curled like that of a film star from the fifties. Her blouse was cream silk, her skirt pleated and tweedy, and she wore no jewelry except a wedding ring and a butterfly brooch on her cashmere cardigan. But none of this impressed Katinka as much as her once beautiful—no, still beautiful—face, her pale skin, and her warm eyes that were the most extraordinary shade of blue she’d ever seen.

Pasha finished his call but almost instantly the big phone on the table started to ring. He pressed a button on a flashing control panel and started talking in Russian about an art auction—“Mama, you start, don’t wait for me,” he said, covering the mouthpiece again—

so that Katinka was able to concentrate all her curiosity on this somehow alluring older woman who seemed to have everything, she suddenly realized, except happiness. What am I doing here? she asked herself again, biting into a honeycake so sweet it made her shiver.

“I’m so glad you could come,” Roza said. “We wanted a historical researcher so I consulted Academician Beliakov.”

“Are you a specialist in the eighteenth century?” Katinka asked earnestly, pulling a notebook out of her rucksack.

“Of course not!” Pasha interrupted, banging down the telephone. “I started selling concert tickets in Odessa and things expanded from there, first metals, then cars, now oil and nickel, so no, I know nothing about the eighteenth century and nor does Mama.”

Katinka felt crushed.

“Pasha, don’t be so bombastic,” said Roza. “Katinka, we need the best historian, and the professor recommended you. You’ve done research, haven’t you? In the archives?”

“Yes, in the State Archive, on Catherine the Second’s Legislative Commission and recently for my doctorate on the impact on local government of Catherine the Second’s 1775
prikaz
on…”

“That’s perfect,” said Roza, “because we want you to do genealogical research.”

“We want you to discover the history of our family,” added Pasha, hovering over them impatiently and lighting a monstrous cigar.

“In the eighteenth century? Your family origins?”

“No, dear,” said Roza, “only in the twentieth century.” A trickle of unease ran down Katinka’s spine. “You’ll be paid well. Does a thousand dollars a month plus expenses sound about right to you?”

Katinka sat up very straight. “No, no,” she said. “It’s not necessary.” The money worried her, it was much too much, and this meant something was wrong. What would her father say? As for Bedbug, he regarded these oligarchs as the Antichrist. “I don’t think I can do this job. I only know the eighteenth century.”

Pasha looked at his mother, exhaling a noxious cloud of smoke. “Are you saying you don’t want the job?”

“Pasha,” said Roza, “take it easy on her. She’s right to ask questions.” She turned to Katinka. “This is your first job, isn’t it?”

First job, first trip abroad, first oligarch, first palace, first everything, thought Katinka, nodding.

“Look,” said Pasha, “you’ve worked on one set of archives so why not another? What’s the difference? Catherine’s archives, Stalin’s archives.”

Katinka stiffened. The Stalin era! Another alarm bell! It was not done to look into that period. “Never ask people what their grandfathers did,” her father once told her. “Why? Because one grandfather was denouncing the other!” Yet now her esteemed patron, Academician Beliakov, had tossed her into this snakepit. She had come all this way and now she had to escape—but how? She took a deep breath.

“I can’t do it. I don’t know that period and I don’t want to be involved in matters that concern the Party and the Security Organs,” she said, her face hot. “I don’t know Moscow well enough, and I can’t accept this excessive salary. You’ve got the wrong person. I feel guilty because you’ve flown me all this way and I’ll never forget the hotel and I promise I’ll repay the cost of the—”

“That’s it!” Pasha slammed down his cup and saucer, spilling tea across the table, muttered something about “Sovietminded girls from the provinces” and clamped the cigar between his teeth.

Katinka was shocked by his outburst and was about to stand up to say goodbye when two lines and the mobile started to ring simultaneously in a screeching cacophony.

“Pasha, take these calls in your study,” said Roza briskly, “or I’ll throw all those phones out of the window. And that repulsive cigar!”

When he was gone, she took Katinka’s hands in her own. “I’m so sorry. Now we can talk properly.” She paused and looked searchingly at Katinka. “Please understand, this isn’t about vanity or even curiosity. It’s not about Pasha’s money. It’s about me.”

“But Mr. Getman is right,” said Katinka. “I can’t do this. I don’t know anything about the twentieth century.”

“Listen to me a little and if you still don’t want to help us, then I understand. I want you anyway to have a lovely time seeing London before we fly you home. But if you could help us…” A shadow clouded her deep blue eyes for a moment. “Katinka, I grew up with a hole in my heart, an empty place right here, like a frozen chamber, and all my life I’ve never been able to talk about it and I’ve never even let myself think about it. But I do know that I’m not alone. All over Russia there are people like me, men and women of my age who’ve never known who their parents were. We look like everyone else, we married, we had children, we grew old, but I could never be carefree. All the time I’ve been carrying this sense of loss inside me, and I still carry it. Perhaps that is why I brought up Pasha to be so confident and extroverted, because I didn’t want him to go through life like me.” She frowned and laughed softly at herself; it was, thought Katinka, the gentlest of sounds. “I never talked about this with my late husband or even Pasha, but recently Pasha wanted to buy me a present. I told him that all I wanted was my family and he said, ‘Mama, the Communists have gone, the KGB’s gone and I’ll pay anything to help you.’ That’s why you’re here.”