‘And now Barkovskaya is trying to stop it?’
‘Stop it?’ Eleyekov shook his head incredulously. ‘We tried perestroika once in Russia and look where that got us. No one wants to try that again.’
ELEYEKOV WAS ONLY PARTLY right. There had been an arrangement between Stepanin and Pinskaya – but it wasn’t simply a matter of double invoices. Over the years that the cook and the housekeeper had worked together, it had evolved into something more elaborate and complex, hinging on the fact that one of Stepanin’s old army friends – not the chicken rustler, but one who had worked with him in the kitchens – ran a restaurant in the nearby town of Odintsovo and that Stepanin, for some reason, had seen fit to add an extra loop into the process whereby he would send provisions to this old comrade. In short, Stepanin ordered provisions for the forty people he fed each day at the dacha, but the suppliers delivered enough for eighty, doubling their prices so they didn’t lose out. Stepanin then sold the extra forty people’s worth of food to his friend’s restaurant, pocketing the money. Initially, this had involved Stepanin hiring a van to take the extra provisions to the restaurant, but by now the operation was so efficient that the suppliers delivered to the restaurant direct, bringing only the cash to Stepanin and recovering it in the bloated invoices they directed to the housekeeper every month. Pinskaya, in turn, had kept ten percent of the sum of the invoices for herself, as was normal practice. The suppliers not only knew this, but gave her the ten percent in cash, then inflating their invoices by an extra twenty percent, allowing not only for the housekeeper’s ten percent but for a little additional profit on the side. Altogether it was a perfectly satisfactory, if not exemplary and truly patriotic arrangement, and everyone was content. Stepanin’s suppliers had double the business they would have had and an extra ten percent on the top. Stepanin was steadily salting away the capital for his restaurant month by month. And Pinskaya, for whom the arrangement with Stepanin was only one block in a towering edifice of arrangements relating to every other product and service that was provided to the dacha, was busily paying off the loan for the villa in Cyprus to which she and her husband couldn’t wait to decamp.
Inevitably, there was what some might have naively considered to be a flaw in this brilliant strategy, namely, that as a result of all these extra little percentages piled on top of more percentages, the provisions for the dacha cost two and a half times as much as they should have – and if anyone who knew about large-scale provisioning had bothered to take the ten minutes it might have taken to compute the number of people being fed and the amount of money it was costing to feed them, and took the two minutes to do the division to work out how much this amounted to per head, this little flaw would have stood out like a glaring red beacon with a screaming siren on top. But Stepanin and Pinskaya had not been stupid enough to start with the additional percentages at the level they had eventually reached. They had begun much more modestly, and the percentages had grown more audacious over time, as it became apparent that they could accumulate with impunity. Nothing is free, of course, and they were perfectly well aware that the extra money was coming from somewhere, so someone was paying for the restaurant in Moscow and the villa in Cyprus, but even if they had wanted to thank their unwitting benefactors – which would have been ill-advised, if not foolhardy – they wouldn’t have known how. Was it the state paying the bills? Was the money coming from Vladimir’s own fabled wealth? Or was it from some other donor? Whoever it was didn’t seem to care. Each month, Pinskaya gathered up the ludicrously inflated invoices and receipts for all the goods and services provided to the dacha and sent them off to a firm of lawyers in Petersburg, and each month the bank account from which she withdrew the funds to pay the suppliers was replenished, ready to be emptied again.
Had he known the full scale of the cash generated by the arrangement between Stepanin and Pinskaya, Sheremetev would have been flabbergasted. After what Eleyekov had told him, he would have imagined it was a few hundred dollars a month – which to him would already have been a substantial sum – not a racket involving more than doubling the total value of all the food and alcohol that came into the dacha to feed the forty people who nominally lived there.
It was into the middle of this comfortable situation that Barkovskaya plummeted, like a goose crash landing on a lake, after Pinskaya ran off with her ill-gained riches to Cyprus. Unlike the lawyers in Petersburg, she did take the ten minutes required to compute one thing and another, and the two minutes – in fact, sixteen seconds, with the aid of a calculator – to do the division, and being well practised in all the arts of housekeeping, immediately put two and two together and got the eight that Stepanin was extracting. It was this about which she had spoken to Stepanin on the memorable day that he had felt moved to make chicken fricassee for her delectation. Confronted with the invoices, he made no attempt at denial. Not only was the evidence incontrovertible, but he guessed – correctly, as it turned out – that Barkovskaya’s objective wasn’t to cleanse the Augean stable of kickbacks and commissions that the dacha had become, but to ensure that she knew where to dip her bucket in the sludge of filthy money that seeped out of its every crevice. Stepanin explained the arrangement he had had with the suppliers, his friend’s restaurant and Pinskaya, which he thought was perfectly fair to all involved. In response, Barkovskaya was non-committal about the terms of the deal, leaving him worried and disturbed – hence the chicken fricassee that evening, which he had made in an all too transparent attempt to curry favour. The housekeeper wasn’t easily curried. When Barkovskaya made her move against the chicken supply a few days later, Stepanin knew that the fricassee was too little, too late.
But how far was she planning to go? By switching the poultry supply to her so-called cousin – and Stepanin had his doubts about the family relationship, because the cousin, as far as he could see, was as much a Kazakh as the monstrous thug who accompanied him each day – she was cutting him out. Certainly, it was only chickens, but if Barkovskaya could find a Kazakh to deliver chickens, surely it wouldn’t be beyond her to find Kazakhs – or others, for that matter – to deliver everything else, and where would he be then? If he let her get away with this, he was finished.
Each day the chickens arrived, and each day they were thrown into the stinking hole. Stepanin hadn’t even meant seriously that such a hole should be dug, but how was he to know that the idiot of a potwasher, who normally couldn’t put the lid on a pot without being reminded and instructed three times over, would actually follow his orders this time? By now, taking the chickens out there each morning had become an established ritual in the kitchen, one which the potwashers carried out with a degree of ceremony and even relish. The situation made Stepanin ill, and not only because of the choking off of his cashflow that it portended. As a chef, it offended his sensibilities to throw out two dozen perfectly good chickens every day, not to mention the other birds which Barkovskaya’s cousin added to the nonexistent orders that he was fulfilling, all of which were of top quality and priced, no doubt, accordingly. Whoever he really was, Barkovskaya’s cousin had access to fine fowl, Stepanin had to give him that. Barkovskaya, as the cook had realised soon after he decided to stop ordering chickens, could withstand this situation a lot longer than he could. She probably wasn’t perturbed in the slightest by the latest turn of events. After all, she was now earning a cut of the chickens whether he used them or threw them into the charnel pit. He, on the other hand, had lost his portion of the revenue, and the fear that Barkovskaya would soon move onto another part of his business filled his sleep with nightmares.