‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Of course I’ve spoken to her! Twice. I told her: Tell your fucking cousin to stay away. I’m the chef! I order from whoever I want!’
‘Maybe if you go with a proposition…?’ suggested Sheremetev.
‘That’s what Eleyekov said, but I don’t trust him. He just wants chicken wings again. You know the ones I make with the peppers and the onion and the hot sauce? He loves them.’
‘They’re too hot for me.’
‘Really? You should have said. I’ll make a milder sauce for you. Actually, that reminds me. Wait here.’
Stepanin went into the kitchen. Sheremetev heard him yelling at his potwashers for a moment, then he came back with a brown paper packet which he slapped down on the table.
‘What’s this?’ said Sheremetev.
‘Dried apricots!’ said Stepanin. ‘You told me you like them, remember? They’re yours.’
Sheremetev opened the packet and took one for himself, then held out the packet to Stepanin, who extracted a handful.
‘They’re good,’ said Sheremetev, chewing a piece.
‘I told you, top quality,’ replied the cook, his mouth full. ‘I sell them on to this confectioner I know and I get a fantastic price. See, if only you could do something like that, you could get your nephew out of jail.’
Sheremetev shook his head glumly.
‘Have another apricot,’ said Stepanin.
Sheremetev took one and munched it disconsolately. So did Stepanin, his mind drifting back to his own troubles.
‘Vitya,’ said Sheremetev eventually, ‘what do you think about Vladimir Vladimirovich?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My nephew, in his blog, said he had the chance to save Russia, and instead turned it into a mess. And he said he took money from everyone, billions and billions and billions.’
The cook heaved a deep sigh. ‘I don’t know.’
‘If he had done things differently, maybe Russia would be a better place.’
‘And if my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather. What can you say? It is what it is. Russia is Russia, Kolya. To live in Russia is to live in hell – isn’t that what Pushkin said? That’s our lot. If it wasn’t Vladimir Vladimirovich who screwed us, it would have been someone else.’ Stepanin poured himself the last shot of vodka in the bottle and threw it down his throat. He pushed himself up from the table. ‘I’d better go and see what those fuckers are doing.’
Sheremetev watched him disappear unsteadily into the kitchen. The cook, he knew, could hold his drink, but by now he had had enough to knock out a horse.
Sheremetev lingered in the dining room. Now and then Stepanin’s shouts came from the kitchen. Eventually he left.
He walked back towards the entrance hall, along the corridor of the original staff quarters. The housekeeper’s office was here. He thought of everything Stepanin had said about Barkovskaya. Surely she couldn’t be such a witch, as malicious and vindictive as he had made her out to be. Surely it was just a matter of talking to her and—
Her door opened. Sheremetev jumped. There she was.
‘Good evening, Nikolai Ilyich,’ she said calmly, as if she had half expected him to be standing here.
‘Umm… Good evening, Galina Ivanovna,’ stammered Sheremetev.
‘Did you want to see me?’
‘No. No, no.’
The housekeeper made no move to let him pass.
‘Have you been talking with Viktor Alexandrovich?’
Sheremetev nodded.
‘You often talk with him.’
‘It’s nice to wind down at the end of the day.’
‘What do you talk about?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘It must be something, Nikolai Ilyich.’
‘Gossip.’
‘What gossip? I love gossip.’
‘Not gossip! I mean, chat.’
‘What chat?’
Sheremetev stared at her.
The silence went on, an uncomfortable silence that he didn’t know how to break. The housekeeper let it continue.
‘Well, I’m glad we bumped into each other, Nikolai Ilyich,’ she said at last. ‘I wanted to tell you that I had to get rid of Elena Dimitrovna today. Although I presume, if you have been talking to Viktor Alexandrovich, you are aware of that already.’
Sheremetev nodded.
‘She was stealing things.’
‘Really?’ said Sheremetev.
The housekeeper came closer. ‘Nikolai Ilyich, you should be careful who you spend your time with. Particularly now, after what’s happened.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Everyone’s heard about your nephew. The ex-president is an important man. He’s a symbol. There are security issues. No one wants any oppositionists near the ex-president.’
‘I’m not an oppositionist!’ said Sheremetev. ‘I’ve looked after him for six years. Would I do that if I was an oppositionist?’
Barkovskaya raised an eyebrow.
‘My nephew, who should have known better, wrote a very wrong thing. I’m sure that he will soon learn to see things in the proper way.’
‘I’d just watch who I spent my time with, if I were you, Nikolai Ilyich. Who I chat with. You know what they say: there’s always us and them.’ Barkovskaya gave him a thin, sour smile. ‘Goodnight, Nikolai Ilyich.’
She went back into her office. Sheremetev stood for a moment, suddenly conscious that his heart was thumping, then hurried out of the corridor.
At the security post in the entrance hall of the dacha, the guard seemed to be absorbed in something on his phone. Sheremetev climbed the stairs and walked slowly along the upper floor hallway. He had denied his own nephew! He had called him wrong, he had said that he didn’t see things in the proper way. And what was the proper way to see something? The way the police told you to see it? Sheremetev was stunned at what he had said, revolted at himself. There was nothing wrong about Pasha. He was decent, honest and good. If Russia could put someone like him in jail, there was something wrong with Russia!
He got back to his room and put the baby monitor down, then slumped on his bed, fully dressed.
Thoughts of Karinka came into his mind. He missed having her to talk to when he turned out the light. He missed drinking tea with her in the morning. Sometimes the feeling came upon him out of the blue, and the ache was as bad as it was in the months after she died. Six years, she had been gone. More – seven years in March. Seven years since those awful last months.
He sighed. The relief nurse, Vera, who came to look after Vladimir on his days off, carried a flame for him, and did nothing to hide it. In fact, she held it out like a blazing torch and sometimes almost singed his face with it. The truth was, he did sometimes think about her, and even fantasise about what might happen between them. He was a man, after all. But in the cold light of day, it always seemed like just that, a fantasy.
He looked around his solitary little room, thinking of Karinka and the apartment they had had in Moscow. Over the past few years, the dacha had become his home. But tonight, after what he had learned about the things its other inhabitants were really getting up to, in the air that was poisonous with the growing animosity between Stepanin and Barokovskaya over spoils to which neither of them had a right, it felt less like a home and more like a nest of vipers.
9
THE NEXT DAY WAS bright and blowy, a real autumn day. Sheremetev was looking forward to getting out of the dacha, if only for a few hours. For the trip to the lake that he had booked with the Eleyekov Chauffeur Company, as he thought of it now, he decided to dress Vladimir in something more appropriate for the outdoors than the suit he had chosen for the last, aborted attempt. After all, as any Russian citizen who had been alive in the past thirty years couldn’t fail to know – at least, any Russian citizen who hadn’t put out his own eyes to get away from the all-pervasive images of the great leader on television, in newspapers, on the internet, in paintings and in any other medium the Kremlin controlled or could influence – the Leningrad-born ex-president had supposedly revelled in the great Russian wild, whether in hunting gear, fishing gear, riding gear, camouflage gear, flying gear, or skiing gear; whether in furs, denims, khakis, snowsuits or even – quite often in the earlier years – insouciantly bare-chested for the entire world to see.