‘Alright, fine. Whatever. Secondly, who knows if you’re going to come with anybody else or what weapons you might have? Or what might happen when we get to wherever we’re going to? It’s not for me to question. I get the guys for her – that’s it. It was going to be six, but one pulled out at the last minute, which is why I came myself. Incidentally, Seva, what the fuck happened to Gleb?’
‘Don’t know,’ grunted the driver.
‘If you see him, tell him, he can forget about me. That’s it for him. Zero tolerance! No one fucks with Vasya Sheremetev. If Gleb thinks I can’t get more where he came from, tell him to have a look around next time he goes to work.’
The driver nodded.
Vasya looked back at his father. ‘See, you want some guys, I get them. It’s only a question of money. It’s not only policemen. If Anna had asked for ballerinas, I could get her half the chorus line for the Bolshoi. Trust me, I’ve done it before. You can have whatever you want. Not that any —’ His phone rang. ‘Excuse me.’
Vasya answered the phone. For the next minute or so he gave a series of monosyllabic answers, then put it away.
He turned again to Sheremetev. ‘What was I saying?’
‘Nothing,’ muttered Sheremetev. As if Stepanin hadn’t told him enough, he was sick at what he now understood of his son’s profession, if that was the right word for it. He would never be able to pretend again that he didn’t know.
They were driving stop-start on an eight-lane road with thousands of other vehicles all trying to get out of central Moscow. Sheremetev had lost track of where they were – he only knew that every minute they were in the car brought them closer to the dacha.
Suddenly he looked back at Vasya. ‘Do you think it’s because of Mama?’
‘What?’
‘This stuff that you do. Do you think it’s because of the way Mama died?’
‘Papa…’ growled Vasya.
‘I remember the way you cried—’
‘Papa! Please!’
Sheremetev was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to Rostkhenkovskaya. ‘His mother died when he was nineteen.’
‘Papa!’
‘What?’ demanded Sheremetev. ‘Are you ashamed of it?’
‘Why should I be ashamed of it?’
‘Then be quiet! You were nineteen. A boy’s mother dies. He shouldn’t cry?’
‘Of course he should cry,’ said Rostkhenkovskaya.
‘My mother only died last year,’ chipped in the driver, ‘and I cried like a baby.’
‘Seva, you shut the fuck up!’
‘How did she die?’ asked Rostkhenkovskaya.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’
‘Kidney failure,’ said Sheremetev. ‘We didn’t have the money for the bribes. Others did.’
Rostkhenkovskaya leaned forward and looked past Sheremetev at Vasya. ‘Vasya, is that true?’
Vasya shrugged.
‘Is it?’
Vasya grunted.
‘And did you know it was because your dad didn’t have the money?’
Vasya shrugged again.
‘So is this… what you do, is that to get back at him?’
Vasya didn’t reply.
There was silence in the car – a silence that prickled with the tension of people straining to hear more. Belkin had turned to look at Vasya. Seva, the driver, was frowning, hunched slightly, waiting for the response.
‘Vasily,’ said Sheremetev. ‘Is that why you do this? This life that you live, this work that you do – is to punish me?’
Vasya wiped at his eyes. ‘No, it’s not to punish you! It’s so, if I ever have a wife and I ever have a son, he won’t have to watch her die because I’m so damn honest and so damn noble and so damn upright that I don’t have the pathetic few thousand dollars it will take to save her!’
Sheremetev recoiled.
‘How much was that watch you brought in today, Papa? Ask yourself that. Three hundred thousand dollars. That’s what Anushka offered you, right? And for the sake of how much did Mama die? Was it even three thousand? The watch alone could have saved a hundred of her. And that crook, that man you call your patient, was probably taking that watch from some filthy oligarch the very same day she died. That’s what it is to live in Russia, Papa. That’s something you’ve never understood. You have to be like him – or you end up emptying his bedpan.’
Vasya’s phone went off. ‘Yes?’ he barked.
‘Vasya’s not so bad,’ whispered Rostkhenkovskaya to Sheremetev, as Vasya snapped answers into his phone.
Sheremetev glanced at her in disbelief. How, he wondered, had he come to be sitting in this car beside his son, the gangster, taking comfort from an extortionist in a black pinafore dress?
The car drove on, a capsule full of greed and recrimination and misery travelling through the Moscow night.
IT TOOK ALMOST THREE hours to get to the dacha in the traffic crawling out of the city. When they finally arrived, they stopped out of sight of the gate. Sheremetev had told them that if he tried to get the five policemen into the house, suspicions would be raised – especially now that the whole dacha was on edge and everyone was waiting for some kind of war to break out between the Lukashvillis and whoever had shot Artur, although he didn’t tell them about that. The driver, Seva, got out of the car and went to join his fellow moonlighting cops in the second car, which parked on a verge at the side of the road. Vasya took his place at the steering wheel.
They drove up to the gate. A security guard came out of the booth to see who was there. Sheremetev lowered his window.
‘I’ve got a couple of contractors here who have come to see about installing some equipment for Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ he said.
‘What kind of equipment?’ asked the guard suspiciously.
‘A lift for the stairs. It’s getting harder and harder for Vladimir Vladimirovich to walk up and down.’
The guard looked at his watch. ‘So late?’
‘They had to come from Moscow.’
The guard consulted his clipboard. ‘Did you clear them?’
‘They’re doing me a favour. They agreed to come at short notice.’
The guard peered into the car. ‘Turn off the engine,’ he said to Vasya.
‘You want me to turn it off?’
‘Yes! Turn it off!’
Vasya turned it off. ‘Touchy,’ he said.
The guard gave him a hostile glance and then looked carefully at the other occupants. Rostkhenkovskaya gave him a winning smile. He didn’t react.
‘Do you know these people personally, Nikolai Ilyich?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ said Sheremetev. ‘I can vouch for them.’
The guard looked them over again. Sheremetev waited. Normally, the guard would have waved them through by now, but everyone in the dacha was jittery.
The guard walked around the car. ‘Open the boot,’ he called out. Vasya released the boot lock and the guard looked inside, then slammed the door closed.
He came back to the window. ‘You know you’re meant to get people cleared in advance, Nikolai Ilyich.’
Sheremetev nodded. ‘It was short notice.’
‘I need to see identification.’
Belkin and Rostkhenkovskaya pulled out their driving licences. Vasya did the same.
The guard took the licences and noted down the names and date of birth of each person. H returned them without a word and then went back to the booth.
They could see the guard making a call.
‘Remember what I told you,’ said Belkin to Sheremetev as they waited. ‘If you try anything, we show the watches and say you sold them to us.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Like that! Ten years in jail for you, minimum.’
Still the gate didn’t open.
‘What’s the holdup?’ muttered Vasya.
‘Things are a bit… It’s just takes a little while,’ said Sheremetev. He frowned. ‘Funny he didn’t notice you’ve got the same name as me.’