Most of Russia was still dirt poor and suffering a near Depression-era economy. But Moscow — the new Moscow — was a hedonistic epicenter.
Gone were the days of drab storefronts and empty shelves. The new Moscow was awash in dazzling colors and pulsating neon. The world’s ritziest shops and boutiques battled for the best real estate on the city’s biggest boulevards. Tiffany’s. Chanel. Versace. Zegna. Ralph Lauren. Benetton.
Everything was for sale in the new Moscow.
Drugs. Sex. Booze. Of every variety.
But something didn’t fit. Russia’s nouveau riche — the jet-setters clogging Moscow’s streets with their brand-new Mercedeses and Porsches and Audis and Beemers — were not distinguished gray couples who’d built a fortune over a lifetime. Many were Gen Xers. Some were worth hundreds of millions, and the number of Russian billionaires was rising annually.
It wasn’t all drug and casino and mafiya money. But much of it was.
There were also the new oligarchs, Communist bureaucrats who woke up one day after the collapse of the Gorbachev regime and decided to become gangster-capitalists, looting newly “privatized” companies and gunning down anyone who got in their way. How long could such a system survive?
Bennett checked his watch.
She was late. He tried to keep his mind off her, at least for now.
So much about this city had changed, and not all for the better, he mused.
From the age of six until his thirteenth birthday, he had been a latchkey kid in the vortex of the Evil Empire. His late father, Sol Bennett, had been the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, winning a Pulitzer along the way and earning two other nominations during some of the coldest years of the Cold War. Bennett’s mother, Ruth — now retired and living outside of Orlando — had taught English literature to children of State Department employees assigned to the U.S. Embassy.
Even when the Bennetts weren’t officially on the clock, they still kept a grueling schedule, and typically it did not include time with their only son in the cramped, two-bedroom flat across the river from Gorky Park to which their mail was delivered. Embassy functions, dinner parties, university lectures, concerts, and evenings at the ballet were routine, as were weekend trips to Soviet and Warsaw Pact cities, shopping in Paris, and even an occasional romantic getaway on the Black Sea. There were sources to cultivate, appearances to keep. Far from finding it burdensome, Sol and Ruth Bennett relished their fast-track lives even as their son began to resent it all.
In those precious, formative years when a boy learns to read, learns to fish, discovers the world, discovers himself, discovers girls, and becomes a man, Jonathan Meyers Bennett found himself isolated and alone. What’s more, he was eight time zones away from his childhood companions in New York, without siblings or cousins or even many friends in a city where darkness pervaded a man’s day and his soul.
His saving grace was a Russian nanny, to whose flat he went after school to do his homework, have dinner, and fall asleep on her couch. She was a frumpy, flat-faced Russian woman with beefy arms and warm eyes and the worst teeth he’d ever seen. Widowed at a young age, this babushka named Naina (nai-ee-na) seemed to him at least a hundred years old at the time, though she was actually only in her fifties. She had no hope of learning English, or owning a car, or teaching him any of the things he wanted to know. Still, in her own way she loved him, and he knew it, and every time he thought of her death from stomach cancer, it still brought a lump to his throat.
She would have been proud of him, he told himself. His Russian was a bit rusty after all this time, but he hadn’t turned out too badly after all.
Naina, of course, would not have measured success like he did. She’d lived a hard and simple life, without a passport or a desire to use one. The woman barely knew how to read. She owned only one book — her great-grandmother’s tattered New Testament, printed before the murder of the czar and the Communist revolution — and she had tried to teach little “Jon-Jon” only one enduring lesson during all the winters they’d huddled together, trying to stay warm on a pensioner’s income.
“Blazhenny mirotvortsy, ibo oni budut nazvanny det’mi Bozhyimi,” she’d said again and again until he could repeat it in Russian.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
The muscles in Bennett’s face tightened.
Naina Markovna Petrovsky had been the first woman besides his mother — perhaps including his mother — who had ever really loved him. And as he looked over the crowded streets of Moscow now, Bennett would have given anything to talk with her one more time, to tell her that her prayers had been answered. Not only had he become a peacemaker among men, he had finally made his peace with God.
The night air was warm and sultry.
Bennett’s once-starched white collar was now damp and wilted. His face and the back of his neck were covered with perspiration. He slid off his jacket and draped it over the back of a wrought-iron patio chair beside him, then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and forehead dry.
The storm was approaching. Thunder crashed nearby. The winds off the Moskva River were beginning to pick up. He folded the handkerchief and slipped it back into his pocket. He took a sip from an icy-cold bottle of mineral water, tried to steady his nerves, and then saw her car pull up under the portico directly below.
It had been almost seven years since Erin McCoy had first taken his breath away. Yet just seeing her emerge from the black sedan brought back a rush of emotions all over again.
Bennett had been the senior vice president and chief investment strategist of Global Strategix, known to insiders as GSX, the company started by James MacPherson in his pre-politics days. Impressed with McCoy’s Wharton MBA and her experience at the World Bank, Bennett had first hired her as a research assistant. Two years later, he promoted her to run the GSX London office.
With her playful Southern accent and honed geopolitical instincts, she was a good manager and an impressive market analyst. People seemed to gravitate to this woman. Her relaxed, optimistic, almost breezy manner contrasted sharply with his dark intensity. She possessed a nearly photographic memory that consistently put her a step ahead of her colleagues, yet she never seemed to betray the slightest trace of arrogance or ambition. Nor, of course, had she ever given any indication that she was actually an undercover operative of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Even after the president told Bennett that he had personally assigned McCoy to infiltrate GSX and watch Bennett’s back as he developed his oil deal with the Israelis and Palestinians, Bennett still had had trouble believing it. Would he have still hired her and paid her $200,000 a year plus stock options and bonuses if he’d known about her double life? It was a question he had thought about a great deal in the years since he’d learned the truth about McCoy and been drafted into government service himself. Never a big fan of the CIA, a somewhat jaundiced view he no doubt had picked up from his father, Bennett nevertheless wanted to believe the answer was yes.
Now thirty-four, Erin McCoy had become the most trusted member of his staff. She’d traveled with his team to twenty-three countries, and she’d been at his side through three years of grueling negotiations with the Israelis and Palestinians and through every wrenching day of the final status negotiations, for which they were now back in Moscow.
It was Bennett who had first seen the economic and political implications of the discovery of huge reserves of oil and natural gas in and around the Dead Sea and off the coasts of Israel and Gaza. It was Bennett who had persuaded his superiors at GSX to invest a cool $1 billion into a joint Israeli-Palestinian petroleum company known as Medexco to build the pumping stations, offshore drilling platforms, refineries, and other infrastructure necessary to bring such reserves to market. And it was Bennett who had drafted for the president a plan to turn his oil deal into a peace deal that just might be capable of ending decades of hostilities.