‘Why?’
‘Because…’ Because like other prudent men he had committed adultery once, got drunk and insulted his boss once, stolen something moderately valuable once so that he could tell himself that life was not an entire barren expanse.
‘Where did this happen?’
‘The Aragvi.’
‘Who was with Viktor?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Why not?’
‘I was drunk.’ Viktor failed to turn up on time for their appointment. Ostrowsky hung around in the park moving from pavilion to pavilion in a state of terror, thinking that the Fraud Squad had got Viktor and it was only a matter of time before they got him. So he trailed through halls of exhibits, losing imaginary tails, and with a burst of imagination he decided that in darkness he could wipe out his fears and his pursuers, and accordingly he left the park by the main entrance to Prospekt Mira and bought a ticket to the cinema near the space obelisk. And there he shivered in the darkness and watched the film Iron Harvest. Afterwards he felt an excess of courage and returned to the park. Viktor was there, full of drink, good cheer and apologies; arm around his good friend Ostrowsky; pressure of other business; never let a friend down; make it up to you. The jeweller consented to a drink, and a few drinks later he wound up at the Aragvi with no clear recollection of what followed.
‘Who was with you?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘The girl?’
Yes, the girl — Nadia Whatsherface. Ostrowsky recalled her now. Maybe another couple of girls as well, Viktor was passing them round like cigarettes.
‘Including this Nadia?’
‘No, not her. She was special.’
‘Special?’
‘Special! Special! I don’t know what makes that kind of woman special.’
‘And the men?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Names?’
‘I can’t remember. It wouldn’t help. Viktor used to give people different names.’
‘Georgians?’
‘Georgians — Armenians — who knows?’
‘Which?’ Kirov insisted.
‘Georgians!’ Ostrowsky answered sharply. ‘Two of them, one of them a gangster and the other one an apparatchik.’
‘You could tell?’
‘The clothes. One of them waved his arms all the time. He wore expensive jewellery — gold bracelets like Americans wear. The other man was quiet.’
‘Could you recognise them again?’
Ostrowsky didn’t answer. His eyes began to swim as if to remind him he was drunk. Kirov proffered the bottle.
‘Who the hell are you?’ the other man asked limply.
‘A friend. Have that drink.’
From the shadows at the end of the underpass came a clatter of boots and a shout of voices. Ostrowsky drank deeply and subsided into silence. Kirov got to his feet, his legs aching from squatting. The focus on the pains of his own body made his companion disappear, as though Ostrowsky were drinking himself to physical as well as mental oblivion. Somewhere in the darkness a fight was going on: he could bear the dull smack of fists and boots, the sharp grunts and exhalations of breath. It occurred to him briefly that that was what Ostrowsky was looking for in his nightly excursions. Someone to beat the guilt out of him.
At the end of the passage he found the two Sluzhba men beating up a youth. A second lad lay doubled up on the ground holding his abdomen. As Kirov approached the two policemen left off kicking and looked blankly in his direction through eyes misted by violence. Kirov pointed down the passage and told them that Ostrowsky was there; they should clean him up and take him home.
‘Be polite to his wife. They’ve just lost their daughter.’ Kirov reminded himself that in due course he would have to file a report on Ostrowsky’s involvement with the diamond smuggling ring. The penalty was theoretically death but the jeweller was likely to be more lucky.
THE ANDROPOV VERSION
Gorki’s death took place in the crudest possible circumstances. A box of evidently poisoned sweetmeats had been given him and he and two male nurses to whom he offered some all died quickly. An immediate autopsy showed that they had indeed been poisoned. The doctors kept silence.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Aeroflot flight terminated in Sofia, a small airport with the shabby provincial charm of a village bar in a southern clime, where the airline desks stand as dingy as fairground booths and people mill in the hall clutching cardboard suitcases and packages tied with string, and the air is aromatic with Balkan tobacco.
Kirov took a yellow Mercedes cab to the Hotel Vitosha, where he checked in under the cover of Hans-Jürgen Becker, a West German businessman selling industrial air compressors to the foreign trade organisation Isotimpex. The Vitosha was a high-class hotel built by the Japanese in the seventies and starting to show its age. It sported a swimming pool, a bowling alley of erratic reliability, and a collection of African students who sat in the foyer bar drinking Astika beer, as a relief from cooking in their hostel rooms and worrying how to explain their Bulgarian wives to the folks back home.
Jack Melchior, who had travelled a great deal on business before the matter of bigamy limited his area of operations, schooled Kirov in the ways of Westerners in his supposed line of business. ‘Have a shower and go to the American bar. All these hotels are the same, but once you’re in the bar it doesn’t matter where you are.’ As evidence Jack had described the restaurant at the Holiday Inn in Abu Dhabi. ‘The bloody place wouldn’t stay still! It was French on Monday, Chinese on Tuesday and Indonesian on Wednesday. The day I left, they were preparing for the Oktober Bierfest, complete with oompah band!’ Jack had been under stress in Abu Dhabi. ‘Had case of Businessman’s Blight. I thought I was irresistible to women and could drink the world dry.’ The changing restaurant unsettled him. He took to visiting the Sheraton to eat in the Mexican restaurant and drink in the English pub. ‘I went up-country and stayed in the Al-Daffrah Ramada,’ he mused. ‘There was a band out from England, doing gigs at spots all around the Gulf — a jazz band — used to be famous in the sixties.’ He paused and thought about the sixties. Why are we talking about this now, Jack, here in the Mezhdunarodnaya with snow on the window-ledges and a KGB listening post in the next room? ‘Do you know what tune they played, Peter?’ ‘No, Jack, I don’t know what tune they played.’ ‘Moscow Nights, Peter! Moscow — bloody — Nights!’
Kirov showered and changed and had a cocktail in the American bar on the top floor of the Vitosha. Outside it was night-time and the mountains brooded on the horizon among the stars. Yellow tramcars rattled down the hill towards the city. Kirov drank slowly and watched the whores parade round the bar and listened to the man at the white piano fumble over an old Sinatra song. Then he went downstairs to the Lozenets restaurant and ate a light meal of shopska salad and fish. The interior of the restaurant was empty of customers. A group of Japanese sat at a table on the terrace around a bottle of whisky, and the waiters in their red folk-costume lounged in a corner and told jokes. From the gallery two musicians descended bearing an accordion and a violin and went to the corner. And there they struck up their music and serenaded the waiters with a love song. Kirov watched the Japanese talking, silent on the other side of the glass, and listened to the music from across the empty tables. Watching, listening, observing the distant world. As Melchior had hinted, travel offered poignant pleasures. To sit in a deserted restaurant, and there to dine on loneliness.