The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Page 14

  ‘Such as what activities?’

  ‘I would say here in Russia, drugs are profitable. Also many new businesses cannot function without extortion. Also we have gambling houses and many clubs.’

  ‘Whorehouses?’

  ‘Whorehouses are not necessary to the vory. Better we own the women and arrange hotels for them. Sometimes we own the hotels also.’

  ‘Is ethnicity a criterion?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Are vory brotherhoods drawn from specific regions?’

  ‘I would say, today we are composed of many thieves who are not ethnic Russians.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Abkhaz, Armenian, Slavs. Also Jews.’

  ‘Chechen?’

  ‘With Chechen, I would say it is different.’

  ‘Is there racial discrimination within the vory?’

  ‘If a vor is good thief and obeys the rules, vory are equal.’

  ‘Do you have many rules?’

  ‘We do not have many rules but they are severe.’

  ‘Kindly give me an example of your rules.’

  He seems happy to. A vor must not work for authority. The state is authority, therefore he must not work for the state, or fight for the state, or serve the state in any way. He must not pay taxes to the state.

  ‘Do the vory love God?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can a vor go into politics?’

  ‘If a vor’s purpose in going into politics is to extend the influence of the vory and not to assist authority, he may go into politics.’

  ‘And if he becomes politically prominent? Popular even? Successful? He can remain a vor at heart?’

  ‘It is possible.’

  ‘Does one vor kill another for breaking vory law?’

  ‘If it is ordered by the council.’

  ‘You would kill your best friend?’

  ‘If it is necessary.’

  ‘Have you personally killed many people?’

  ‘It is possible.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of being a lawyer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can a vor marry?’

  ‘He must be a man above women. He may have many women, but he must not submit to them because they are not relevant.’

  ‘So better not to marry?’

  ‘It is a rule that a vor may not marry.’

  ‘But some do?’

  ‘It is a rule.’

  ‘May a vor have children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But some do?’

  ‘I would say it is possible. It is not desirable. Better is to help other thieves and submit to the vory council.’

  ‘How about the mothers and fathers of vory? Are they acceptable?’

  ‘Parents are not desirable. It is better to abandon them.’

  ‘Because they’re authority?’

  ‘It is not permitted to show emotions and remain within the thieves’ law.’

  ‘But some vory love their mothers?’

  ‘It is possible.’

  ‘Have you abandoned your own parents?’

  ‘A little. Maybe not enough.’

  ‘Have you ever fallen in love with a woman?’

  ‘It is not appropriate.’

  ‘Not appropriate to ask the question or not appropriate to fall in love?’

  ‘It is not appropriate,’ he repeats.

  But by then he is blushing and laughing like a schoolboy, and my interpreter is laughing too. Then all three of us are laughing. And I am pondering, as a humble reader of Dostoevsky, where the morality, pride and humanity are to be found in the contemporary Russian criminal soul, because I have a character in my head who needs to know.

  In fact, it turns out, I have several. They are spread over the two rather unresolved novels I eventually wrote about the new Russia in the immediate post-communist aftermath, Our Game and Single & Single. Both took me to Russia, Georgia and the Western Caucasus. Both attempted to address the scale of criminal corruption in Russia and its continuing wars on its own Muslim south. A decade later, in Our Kind of Traitor, I wrote a third novel about what was by then arguably Russia’s greatest export, second only to energy: dirty money by the billion, stolen from Russia’s own coffers.

  And always close at hand, but never too close, Pusya, our all-Abkhazia wrestling champion. Once only did I fear we might have to call on his more physical services.

  This time the nightclub is in Petersburg. Like Dima’s, it is owned by a rising man of business named Karl, who has a lawyer called Ilya who seldom leaves his side. We have been driven there in an armoured minibus with an armoured Land Rover for a chase car. At the entrance, which lies at the end of a stone footpath decked with paper lanterns, we encounter the usual platoon of armed men, who in addition to submachine guns sport hand grenades hanging from polished brass hooks on their ammunition belts. Inside the club, girls of the house dance languidly with each other to deafening rock music while they wait for the punters to show up.

  But there aren’t any punters, and it has gone half-past eleven.

  ‘Petersburg wakes up late,’ Karl explains with a knowing smile, guiding us to a long dining table that has been set in our honour among the plush seats. He is beaky, donnish-looking and young, with old manners. The lumbering Ilya at his side seems too crude for him. Ilya’s blonde wife wears a sable coat although it is mid-summer. We are escorted to the top row of a steep ring of seats. The dance floor below us doubles as a boxing ring, says Ilya proudly, but tonight there is no boxing. Pusya sits to my left, son Nick to my right. Ilya, at his master’s side, mumbles into a cellphone, one call after another in an emotionless flow.

  Still no punters have arrived. With empty benches all round us, rock music blaring for attention and bored girls dutifully gyrating on the dance floor, the small talk at our table is getting less easy. It’s the traffic, Karl explains, talking across Ilya’s bulk. It’s the new prosperity. With everyone owning a car these days, evening traffic in Petersburg is getting to be a scandal.

  Another hour passes.

  It’s because it’s Thursday, Karl explains. On Thursdays, Petersburg’s glitterati go partying first and nightclubbing afterwards. I don’t believe him, and I don’t think Pusya does, and we exchange worried glances. Too many bad scenarios are running through my head, and I assume Pusya’s also. Do the Petersburg glitterati know something we don’t? Has Karl fallen foul of a business rival, and are we sitting here waiting to be blown up or shot to smithereens? Or – shades of those hand grenades hanging from their brass hooks – have we already been taken hostage, hence Ilya’s mumbled negotiations on his cellphone?

  Putting a finger to his lips, Pusya heads for the men’s room, then veers into the darkness. A couple of minutes later he is back, smiling more benignly than ever. Our host, Karl, has made a false economy, he explains softly beneath the music. The bodyguards with grenades on their belts are Chechen. In Petersburg society, Chechen bodyguards are a bridge too far. Nobody who is anybody in Petersburg, says Pusya, wants to be seen in a nightclub protected by Chechen.

  And Dima? It took another year, but unusually for the times he was actually called to account by the Moscow police, either on orders from one of his rivals or – if he hadn’t been paying his dues – the Kremlin. When last heard of, he was in prison, trying to explain why he had two very damaged fellow businessmen chained to a wall in his cellar. In my novel called Our Kind of Traitor, I eventually had my own Dima, but only in name. He was a hardened gangster who, unlike his original, really might have stumped up for the odd school, hospital and art museum.

  19

  Blood and treasure

  In recent years I have acquired a childish aversion to reading anything that is written about me in the press, good, bad or other. But there are occasions when something slips thro
ugh my defences, as happened one morning in the autumn of 1991 when I opened my Times newspaper to be greeted by my own face glowering up at me. From my sour expression I could tell at once that the text around it wasn’t going to be friendly. Photographic editors know their stuff. A struggling Warsaw theatre, I read, was celebrating its post-communist freedom by putting on a stage version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But the rapacious le Carré [see photograph] wanted a whacking £150 per performance: ‘The price of freedom, we suppose.’

  I took another look at the photograph and saw exactly the sort of fellow who does indeed go round preying on struggling Polish theatres. Grasping. Unsavoury appetites. Just look at those eyebrows. I had by now ceased to enjoy my breakfast.

  Keep calm and call your agent. I fail on the first count, succeed on the second. My literary agent’s name is Rainer. In what the novelists call a quavering voice, I read the article aloud to him. Has he, I suggest delicately – might he possibly, just this once, is it at all conceivable? – on this occasion been a tad too zealous on my behalf?

  Rainer is emphatic. Quite the reverse. Since the Poles are still in the recovery ward after the collapse of communism, he has been a total pussycat. To prove it, he recites the terms he negotiated with the Polish theatre. We are not charging the theatre £150 per performance, he assures me, but a measly £26, the minimum standard rate, or have I forgotten? Well yes, actually, I have. In addition to which we’ve thrown in the rights for free. In short, a sweetheart deal, David, a deliberate helping hand to a Polish theatre in time of need. Great, I say, bewildered and inwardly seething.

  Keep calm and fax the editor of The Times. He is a man whose life and writing I have since learned to admire greatly, but in 1991 I was less aware of his virtues. His response is not soothing. It is lofty. Not to put too fine an edge on it, it is infuriating. He sees no great harm in the piece, he says. He suggests that a man in my fortunate position should take the rough with the smooth. This is not advice I am prepared to accept. But who to turn to?

  Why, of course: the man who owns the newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, my old buddy!

  Well, not exactly buddy. I had met Murdoch socially on a couple of occasions, though I doubted whether he remembered them. The first was at Boulestin’s restaurant in the mid-eighties, where I was lunching with another literary agent of the time, and in walked Murdoch. My agent made the introductions, Murdoch joined us for a dry martini. He was my age exactly. His war to the death with Fleet Street’s print unions was gathering heat. We discussed it a bit, then I asked him in a casual way – maybe it was the martini talking – why he had broken with tradition. In the old days, I said lightly, needy Brits had set out for Australia to seek their fortunes. Now an Australian who wasn’t needy had come to Britain to seek his. What had gone wrong? It was an asinine question at the best of times, but Murdoch leapt at it.

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ he retorted. ‘It’s because you’re wood from here up!’

  And he made a slicing gesture across his throat to show where the wood began.

  At our second meeting, which took place in a private house, he had treated the table in the frankest terms to his negative views on the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the end of the evening he had generously handed me his card: phone, fax, home address. Any time, and the phone rings right on his desk.

  Keep calm and fax Murdoch. I have three conditions, I say: number one, a generous apology prominently printed in The Times; number two, a handsome donation to the struggling Polish theatre. And number three – was that dry martini still talking? – lunch. Next morning his reply was lying on the floor beneath my fax machine:

  ‘Your terms accepted. Rupert.’

  The Savoy Grill in those days had a kind of upper level for moguls: red-plush, horseshoe-shaped affairs where in more colourful days gentlemen of money might have entertained their ladies. I breathe the name Murdoch to the maître d’hôtel and am shown to one of the privés. I am early. Murdoch is bang on time.

  He is smaller than I remember him, but more pugnacious, and has acquired that hasty waddle and little buck of the pelvis with which great men of affairs advance on one another, hand outstretched, for the cameras. The slant of the head in relation to the body is more pronounced than I remember, and when he wrinkles up his eyes to give me his sunny smile, I have the odd feeling he’s taking aim at me.

  We sit down, we face each other. I notice – how can I not? – the unsettling collection of rings on his left hand. We order our food and exchange a couple of banalities. Rupert says he’s sorry about that stuff they wrote about me. Brits, he says, are great penmen, but they don’t always get things right. I say, not at all, and thanks for your sporting response. But enough of small talk. He is staring straight at me and the sunny smile has vanished.

  ‘Who killed Bob Maxwell?’ he demands.

  Robert Maxwell, for those lucky enough not to remember him, was a Czech-born media baron, British parliamentarian and the alleged spy of several nations, including Israel, the Soviet Union and Britain. As a young Czech freedom fighter he had taken part in the Normandy landings, and later earned himself a British army commission and a gallantry medal. After the war, he worked for the Foreign Office in Berlin. He was also a flamboyant liar and rogue of gargantuan proportions and appetites who plundered the pension fund of his own companies to the tune of £440 million, owed around £4 billion that he had no way of repaying, and in November 1991 was found dead in the seas off Tenerife, having apparently fallen from the deck of a lavish private yacht named after his daughter.

  Conspiracy theories abounded. To some it was a clear case of suicide by a man ensnared by his own crimes; to others, murder by one of the several intelligence agencies he had supposedly worked for. But which one? Why Murdoch should imagine I know the answer to this question any better than anyone else is beyond me, but I do my best to give satisfaction. Well, Rupert, if we’re really saying it’s not suicide, then probably, for my money, it was the Israelis, I suggest.

  ‘Why?’

  I’ve read the rumours that are flying around, as we all have. I regurgitate them: Maxwell, the long-term agent of Israeli Intelligence, blackmailing his former paymasters; Maxwell, who had traded with the Shining Path in Peru, offering Israeli weapons in exchange for strategic cobalt; Maxwell, threatening to go public unless the Israelis paid up.

  But Rupert Murdoch is already on his feet, shaking my hand and saying it was great to meet me again. And maybe he’s as embarrassed as I am, or just bored, because already he’s powering his way out of the room, and great men don’t sign bills, they leave them to their people. Estimated duration of lunch: twenty-five minutes.

  But today I wish we’d had our lunch a couple of months later, because by then I would have had a much more interesting theory to offer him about why Bob Maxwell died.

  I’m in London, writing about the new Russia, and I want to meet Western carpetbaggers who have joined the gold rush. Somebody has told me Barry is the man I am looking for, and somebody is right. Sooner or later there’s a Barry, and when you find him, you best stick to him like glue. Friend A gives you an introduction to his friend B. Friend B’s sorry he can’t help, but maybe his friend C can. C can’t, but it so happens that D’s in town, so why not give old D a ring, say you’re a pal of C’s and here’s D’s number. And suddenly you’re in the room with the right man.

  Barry is a natural-born East Ender who’s made it big in the West End: classless, fast-talking, likes the idea of meeting a writer but doesn’t read a book unless he’s got to, has a reputation for making effortless fortunes fast, and is indeed taking a more than academic interest in the possibility of making a serious killing in the disintegrating Soviet Union. All of which, he tells me, explains why Bob Maxwell called him up one day and told him, as only Bob could, to get his arse round to Bob’s office now, and advise him how to make a Russian fortune inside a week, or Bob would be in serious ordure.
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  And, yes, it so happens that Barry is free for lunch today, David, so it’s Julia, darling, scrub my afternoon engagements, will you dear, because me and David are slipping round to the Silver Grill, so call up Martha and tell her it’s for two, and a nice quiet corner.

  And what’s really important to remember, David, Barry urges me sternly, first in the cab, then again over a nice fillet steak done the way he likes, is the date when Bob Maxwell makes that call to me. It’s July 1991, so it’s four months before his body is found floating in the briny. Got that? Because if you haven’t, you’re going to miss the whole point. All right, then. I’ll begin.

  ‘I own Mikhail Gorbachev,’ Robert Maxwell announces to Barry as soon as they are sitting head to head in Maxwell’s grandiose penthouse office. ‘And what I want you to do, Barry, is take the yacht’ – meaning the Lady Ghislaine from which Maxwell later fell to his death, if he wasn’t dead already – ‘and sit on it for three days maximum, then come back here to me with a proposal. Now fuck off.’

  And of course there was a nice piece of change in it for Barry too, or he wouldn’t have been sitting there, would he? – a consideration up front for his thoughts, plus a percentage of the action down the line. He doesn’t take the yacht because yachts aren’t his thing, but there’s a place he’s got in the deep countryside where he likes to put his thinking-cap on, and twenty-four hours later, not the three days Bob was on about, he’s back in the penthouse suite with his proposal. Or in point of fact, David, three proposals. And all of them sure-fire winners, all guaranteed to yield very big returns, though not necessarily all at the same rate.

  First, Bob, he tells Maxwell, there’s your oil, which is obvious. If Gorby could slip you just one of the state concessions shortly to be on offer in the Caucasus, then you could auction it off to the big oil boys, or lease out the wells for a royalty. Either way, you’d be making a very large killing indeed, Bob—

  And the downside? Maxwell interrupts. What’s the fucking downside?