Pravda (10 page)

"My father was a bloody fool. He liked to pretend that he was friends with the big men, but he wasn't. I doubt they even knew who he was. He was peripheral, small-time, and he never got the top job."

"The ambassador?"

"He liked to believe he could have been the top dog if not for his greater use elsewhere. But it's bloody rubbish. He was like a randy little rat—and he got caught inseminating half of Moscow. Both sides can smell a man like that straightaway. Totally compromised from early on ... And the others, as you call them—well, perhaps they were in it for principles, so one is asked to believe. But my father—my father, it turns out, was in it for nothing more than cheap Russian skirt. And bribes. Took it from anyone and everyone like a rent boy." Nicholas made a conscious effort to relax his jaw. "He was a cheat and probably a thief too. All those paintings we have are the rewards of his conniving, bribing, smuggling. He lined his pockets by lining the pockets of the people who let him line his pockets. The clash of ideologies could have been a game of bloody brag for all he cared. It only mattered insofar as he could bet on it."

Alessandro sucked his coffee spoon. "But he was still a sort of ... mystery man?"

Nicholas shut his eyes a moment, determined not to allow the Italian's insistent banality to exasperate him. "I suppose ... I suppose-pose he must have been up to something, because the British let him go to Leningrad as the unofficial consul instead of recalling him. Which also means the Soviets must have let him go to Leningrad. Which means
something
was going on. Because—yes, you're right—ordinarily our Red friends didn't want Englishmen snooping around the naval yards. I doubt, though, that he was of much actual use to anyone. Probably only got away with it because he was so easily blackmailed by all sides and ... Christ, you have no idea how very sick the whole world was then." He paused. "And my father was the sickest person in it."

"God, it must have been so weird."

Nicholas looked at the ceiling. That the great dark leviathans' struggle of the cold war should now be reduced to "weird"...His mind turned away. And suddenly he had an image of himself as a boy, playing backgammon with his nanny in the courtyard of the embassy, every single summer holiday afternoon of his adolescence wasted—not allowed to leave the house, not allowed to do anything but wait. That was Russia. Waiting for it to end.

"It was lonely," he said after a moment.

"Hmmm ... I bet your father wasn't very good at expressing his emotions." Alessandro's face betrayed thought. "And you know, probably that's why
you
don't like expressing emotions. No, seriously. You were not allowed to feel, so you learned to touch. These things"—he rested his chin on his cupped hands—"they
so
get passed on."

Nicholas smiled tightly. Perhaps he had Alessandro wrong after all. Perhaps there was an intelligence in there, lurking beneath all the crème caramel.

"I have no idea," he said. "We hardly spoke to each other for the last thirty years of his life."

"Anyway," Alessandro continued, as if it were all part of the same thought, "I still think being an art dealer is pretty glamorous and enigmatic, and your father made a lot of money in his business, didn't he?"

"Business." Nicholas finished his wine. "What exactly
is
business?"

"You told me he even conned the president into swapping a picture. Buy them as bargains, sell them as treasures." Alessandro tilted his head first one way, then the other. "Equals make a tidy profit."

"The general secretary, not the president. And not the general secretary himself, but his dealer." Nicholas sighed. "Yes, he did, Alessandro. He made a lot of money shafting everyone. He understood corruption intimately and it was the one thing he was very good at. Probably because he believed in absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not even art. A curious sort of freedom. But he must have surprised even the Russians with his venality." Nicholas looked directly at his lover again. "Let s go to Berthillons and get an ice cream. I want to walk. I m tired of sitting. And you are not really listening."

But Nicholas was wrong. Alessandro had been listening as never before. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, this was the most interesting conversation they had ever had—the first emotional confidences that Nicholas had shared. And the first real hint, therefore, that he, Alessandro, might have acquired some purchase on what was going on inside. (The display of feelings: very important.) The only problem being, Alessandro reckoned, as he now stood up and squeezed the side of his tongue hard between his perfect teeth, that the moment to ask for an allowance had gone. Maybe later, though—maybe on the walk down the quay. Or maybe tonight was a bad time altogether. Hard to judge. Maybe all of this was because Nicholas was—would you believe it?—upset. Now
that
was a new one.

The two men, thinking very different thoughts about their very different lives, walked side by side until they came to the Quai de Bourbon, where they turned left, homeward, once more along the river s edge. And now, oblivious of the covert impatience in Alessandro s self-conscious step, Nicholas began to linger a little, looking out across the river toward the Quai de l'Hôtel de Ville and the lights of the city rising red beyond. He had started feeling old again. His knees hurt with pain he dared not have confirmed or named, and sixty-two—
sixty-two
—sixty-two felt ... plain elderly. Neither wiser nor mellowed nor yet magnanimous, but merely elderly. Infirm, unwise, uncertain—as though he personally had seen the world repeat the same mistakes too often, leaving him with no intelligent choice but faithlessness and nothing to do about it but await the onset of failing faculties.

They were approaching their entrance when he stopped and exhaled slowly. "You go on in, Alessandro. I m going to wait out here.
I want to ... I think I want to watch the river or go for a walk or something."

"Are you okay?"

"Yes, I'm fine."

Alessandro nibbled at his cone. "What do you—"

"Or go out, if you want to. Out to a club, I mean." Nicholas raised his hand to his lover s back, aware (with the slim fraction of his mind that he allowed to think about it) that Alessandro would be secretly relieved by this sanction but would have to pretend not to have had the thought. A thin grimalkin disappeared beneath a fat black car. To hasten the process, Nicholas turned to face Alessandro and found his most conciliatory tone. "I m serious. I m no good tonight. Go. Phone your friends and have fun. I don't mind. Really."

Alessandro was now at a loss. His earlier reading of the evening was melting with the last of his ice cream. Yet still he was beset by the urgent need to achieve his goal while everything remained possible. He bent his head childishly toward Nicholas s chest, a gesture executed for no better reason than to buy time in which to decide whether or not now was the moment to ask. Oh
God.
No. No—discretion was the better part of, he thought, best to leave it. Best not to risk it. And so why not? Why not go out? After all, maybe Nicholas actually wanted to be alone. A bonus evening! But best not to get back too late and better make sure nothing happened. God, the old general might even cry in the night, and he d really better be there for that.

Nicholas fed him what was left of his own ice cream, wanting the whole charade over quickly, wanting to save Alessandro even the necessity of saying anything else, wanting desperately to be alone. "There s a cab coming. I'll stop it for you. Here, take..." He reached for his wallet.

Alessandro would have liked to have changed but realized that the delay would seriously annoy Nicholas. He patted his pocket, seeking the reassurance of his mobile phone. "Are you sure, Nicholas? I mean, I am happy—I had no plans to—"

"I'm probably going to walk ... down to Notre Dame or something."

"That will be nice. Clear your head."

"Yes."

Alessandro accepted the money with studied casualness.

The cab pulled up and wallowed by the curb.

"I won't be late." Alessandro kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them on Nicholas's cheek.

And Nicholas turned back to the river.

The Seine was as dark as history itself, and only the faint sound of its lapping at the embankment below gave the lie to its seeming stillness. Nicholas leaned forward onto the stone wall so that he could see down to the narrow bank-side path. The trees had been pollarded that afternoon and the night air was scented still with sap. He raised his eyes. The severed branches like great misshapen agonized limbs. And above them, the brightest of the stars—names he had learned and forgotten, learned and forgotten—needling their pinpoint antiquity through the city sky. Paris would be cooler tonight. But he knew he would not be able to sleep, and he knew that neither whisky nor coupling would help. For the first time in more than thirty years, Nicholas wanted the company of his blood—not the amicable converse of friendship, not the parley of a lover, but the marrow-talk of kin and consanguinity.

But there was no kin anymore. No kin save for Gabriel and Isabella, and neither, he knew well, could be persuaded to say so much as a single word to him, even were he to pay them in sweat or tears—not in letter, not by telephone, and never again in person. And he could not blame them. He had never once tried to talk to them.

Though wasn't it true that he had not been allowed to talk to them? Not about anything that really counted. Masha had strictly forbidden it. And she was their great protectress. (In some way, he thought, her Russian pride actually measured its strength by keeping secrets.) Then again, he could never quite be trusted. Whatever the cause—fatally distracted, indifferent, drunk, indolent, dissipated, dissolute, or preoccupied, he knew not what—the fact was that he had surrendered all familial sway to her in return for his savage freedom. Ah, grandest of all ironies: that she had been the one to care for them—their minds, their health, their hearts, the well-being of their twin susceptible souls. And thank God, for that was perhaps the only noble act in his entire life that he had managed to stand by. But still, perhaps a call ... No. It was too late, and there was no way to begin. Profoundly, Gabriel and Isabella did not understand him, did not know him—neither as a man nor as a human being. Did not even know who he really was. After all these years ... Christ, the bloody madness of it all. The bloody mess.

He stood up straight and walked another few yards, eyes tracking
from one lighted window to the next. He suspected himself of maudlin self-indulgence. But the truth was, he had not thought it would affect him. Or not like this. His own tedious egotism, he knew, was causing the forefront of his mind to think about her death as a prelude to his own. But deeper than that, behind the facile and the obvious, there was something else, something intangible but real and hitherto unperceived: a hollowness he had not known the shape of before; a hollowness where his conscience should have been, perhaps. And somehow this emptiness, though composed of nothing, had prickled and tremored through the day like some forgotten disease. Slight but certain. Hardly anything. Nothing.

He turned back to the river and now—as a nameless night barge came stealing by, floodlights fore, freight unknown—now her face came back to him, not as he had last seen her but young: black, black hair, those wide turquoise eyes full of tenacity and temerity, the easy disparagement of her cheekbones, the thin cracked lips, the high-bridged nose, the proportions of her frame, taut, wiry, flat-chested (the better to wear her impenetrable breastplate in battle, he had realized)—she struck him in this moment's vision as if she were some princess of the tundra come south for obscure reprisals.

He looked up. Two lovers were walking toward him, the young man with his arm strong around the woman, seeking the Seine's blessing and a quiet place to kiss. They stopped a little way along, his hand on the contour of her body. Ah ... now this he
did
understand. The sweet mercy of lust. The day's anxiety was but a passing mood after all. And what was conscience but mood wearing a uniform?

Barbara was busy amid the flurry and congestion of the ticket desk but she waved him through over the heads of the people in the queue. He was a regular at Fish, though less and less these days, and she had once been his student. He passed inside, inching like a stick insect along the bare wall of the congested corridor, excusing himself in Russian as he entered the cavernous main room, treading gingerly around stretched-out legs and vulnerable hands spread on the floor, squeezing between chairs, picking his way toward the miniature wooden table that was reserved (as promised by Sergei, the manager) in the center of the second row, directly beneath the low vertex of the brickwork arch above his head. Here the acoustics were as good as the room allowed.

He sat down, shut his eyes a moment, then opened the complimentary mineral water provided, which of course was neither complimentary nor mineral—Sergei's "table tax" and the back-room tap giving the lie to both claims. But there was no chance of attaining the body-soaked bar, all the way at the far end of the room. So he took a deep gulp.

Now that he was alone, his mind scrambled to reach a clear understanding of what the news meant—for Arkady, but also for himself. The source was depressingly reliable: Grisha, messenger (dealer) for and associate (henchman) of the even more indeterminately extracted Leary—full name Learichenko—the syndicate-sanctioned regional controller of all matters poppy in Petersburg and the man who usually knew most things most often most quickly. Yes, Maria Glover was definitely dead. No doubt about it. Presumably, therefore, Grisha (and so Leary) thought that he, Henry, was also living off Maria Glover and that her death was the blow that would send him into their arms.

It was Grisha who had twice asked Henry to push among the ever-growing but ultra-cautious expatriate community. Henry knew the reasons why well enough: the money from many of the Russian addicts was desperately difficult to come by, constant work to extract and easily dried up (into corpses), while the better clients—the seriously wealthy Russians—were more than likely connected and went over Leary's head via Moscow or direct; so what Leary wanted most of all was Eurotrash, wealthy expatriates who would trust only a Western dealer.