“In Russian, of course,” Betty said.
“Russian orders. And an obviously completely Russian regiment from an Air Force Cadet school and some Russian funeral lament played by the band. The crowd went wild. They may be Moslems but they had certainly been hitting the vodka. They broke through the Azerbaijani mili-men guarding the route and stormed across Lenin Prospekt. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cheer. One minute you’ve got these smart young Russian cadets goose-stepping like they owned creation, and the next they’re drowned in a sea of Azerbaijanis, knocking off their caps, tearing at their collars, punching and booting them down the Prospekt. You talk about the problem of the nationalities, this was it before our eyes.”
“So there never was a parade,” Carole said.
“Not in Baku there wasn’t. And I just wonder whether there was in a lot of the other national capitals.”
“In Tallinn Estonia it was called off at the last moment,” David Butler said. “In Frunze, the Kirghiz Republic capital, rioters called for a return to the old Kirghiz town name of Pishpek. In Kiev they just got away with it by using virtually all-Ukrainian military units and playing Ukrainian national songs.”
“How the hell did you get hold of all that?” Bennerman said.
Butler rolled his eyes. “I have friends everywhere,” he lisped deliberately.
“You never passed it on to me,” Bennerman said aggrieved.
“We sent it straight to Washington, via London as an A report,” Butler said.
“Bastard. Are you trying to ruin my career?” Bennerman said, mollified.
Butler rocked back in his chair, his watch-chain stretching across his stomach. “Superb dinner, Harriet. I shall guard the memory of that sixty-one Margaux for the rest of my days. I shall have to,” he added, “there is no chance of it being repeated.”
“Unless you come here again,” Bennerman said. “My newly rich wife has three dozen bottles stacked in the kids’ playroom.”
“And why not?” Harriet flared.
“You won’t find me protesting, honey,” Bennerman said.
“Do not call me ‘honey,’ please. And that’s exactly what you were doing, protesting.”
Around the table everybody knew she was drunk. It wasn’t uncommon these days.
“No,” Bennerman said slowly. “I wasn’t exactly protesting. Tell you the truth, I get a belt out of it, too, when someone like David here drinks the stuff. He actually knows the difference between Château Margaux sixty-one and the contents of a piss-pot.”
“It’s all the aftertaste,” Butler said. “And one would hope the color.”
Nobody even smiled.
“Listen,” Harriet leaned toward her husband. “I drank much more great wine with my horny-handed Midwestern stepfather than…”
“Horny was he?” Bennerman said. “Well, it’s the first time you’ve mentioned that.”
“You bastard.”
Carole looked desperately at David Butler, but he shrugged.
“Listen,” Harriet said, pouring herself another brandy, “count yourself lucky.”
“I do,” Bennerman said. “My wife just inherited several million dollars.”
“So does that make me any different? Okay, maybe I even buy myself a really decent dress…” She plucked at her low-cut gown, half spilling her breasts, “… for the first time in my life.”
“Tell them it cost six thousand dollars from Paris, dear,” Bennerman murmured.
“Okay, it cost six thousand dollars from Paris,” Harriet shouted. “But that’s all I do. I spend money. My money! I’m not screwing around Moscow with Russian bureaucrats. I’m not being felt up in the back of some Zhuguli-Fiat by some smooth Moscow gigolo. I’m not risking your career. I’m buying a few bottles of wine and a pretty dress, goddammit!”
Carole sat white-faced.
David Butler leaned toward her. “Do you know, Carole darling, I think it’s probably time I took you home.” He put his lips close to her ear. “Boris would never approve,” he whispered.
Driving her home, David Butler was unusually silent. Then as the car crunched to a stop at the traffic lights just before the foreigners’ compound, he turned at the wheel.
“Do you feel like a nightcap?” he asked.
“Your place or mine?”
“Neither,” he said. “You must come to my club.”
She laughed as he pulled away from the lights. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Now you’re going to tell me you’ve an authentic British gentlemen’s club hidden away here in the heart of Moscow.”
“Not exactly, dearest,” he said.
They left the car in a small back-street courtyard, walked back onto the main Prospekt and hailed a taxi. Even then they had a maze of side streets to negotiate after letting the cab go.
The rebuilding of Moscow is a planner’s dream turned nightmare. Skyscrapers lurch from street level into the frosty air. New buildings exhibit all that tattered sadness of London’s failed architectural confidence of the fifties. But these buildings were only built three or four years ago. Between stalks of concrete, older structures remain. Courtyards are reached through coach doors, broken cobbles beneath the snow threaten ankles, rusting iron stairs lead down to basements where cobblers or home matchbox makers plied their trades in the days of the Czar.
Those days seem but a muffled cry away if you stand in such a courtyard, the snow softly falling, the icicles hanging from the low eaves like rows of sparkling Damoclean swords in the lamplight. Music penetrates the clapboard walls, an old song, a slurred male voice. If a drunk slumbers in a doorway, you kick him hard, an act of kindness in such numbing cold.
“I never knew such places still existed,” Carole said as Butler led her by the hand toward a basement staircase.
“Indeed, dearest,” he said. “They not only exist, they flourish.”
The iron staircase had been sprinkled with salt. It spiraled down to a chipped deep-red painted door. The bell was hidden behind the thick Russian architrave. Butler found it and pressed it four times.
“Does it work?”
“It works.”
They waited two or three minutes. The basement led on the left into two dark coal-holes, the doors long rotted away. Broken splints of wood hung from twisted hinges. Standing there, Carole had an overwhelming feeling that she was being observed.
A lock clicked. Bolts were drawn back. The battered red door opened and a man with an open-neck silk shirt and gold chains to the navel stood in the doorway. He was short, dark-skinned and his wavy Mediterranean hair was flicked with gray.
“This,” said David Butler, “is Mother Hubbard.”
It was a gentleman’s club sure enough [Carole wrote later], but not the sort I’d in mind. In London or Amsterdam or San Francisco Mother Hubbard’s would perhaps have been a gas. In Moscow I could not believe my eyes. There were few foreigners there, and those that were all spoke excellent Russian. There were no women except myself.
Mother Hubbard couldn’t have been more attentive if I’d been Tony Curtis in his “Viking” days. He brought excellent vodka and smoked sturgeon on blinis and sat with us. “Why should only the vlasti live well?” he said gulping a whole vodka with that special ring-finger elegance which was pure self-parody.
It didn’t take me long to see where at least some part of David’s extraordinary knowledge of the Moscow scene came from. Among the chatter and gossip I heard names that astounded me.