The cook toyed with his vodka glass. Whatever was worrying him, for once he had apparently decided not to say anything else. He picked up his glass and downed the rest of the spirit, then got up. ‘Better see what those fuckers I have to work with have been up to,’ he said, heading to the kitchen. ‘Enjoy the fricassee, Kolya. There’s more if you want it.’
Sheremetev stayed alone in the dining room. A couple of the security guards wandered in and took servings of cold cuts from the sideboard, and he exchanged a few words with them before going upstairs. He slept with the baby monitor on his bedside table. The vague rustlings and mumblings that were always coming out of it didn’t disturb him. It was the nights when Vladimir suddenly started shouting that he dreaded.
Just after three am, the monitor squawked into life. Sheremetev woke and lay for a couple of minutes, listening groggily.
‘Come here, you fucking Chechen!’
Thump.
‘You stinking dead Chechen!’
Sheremetev groaned. The door to Vladimir’s suite was only a few metres from his room. He got up and opened it quietly. Inside, there was a small antechamber with two doors. The one on the left led to Vladimir’s sitting room, and one directly in front of him was the door to the bedroom.
Warily, Sheremetev turned the handle of the bedroom door and peeked in.
Bathed in the dim glow of the night light, Vladimir stood by his bed in his sky-blue pyjamas, his wispy grey hair awry, fists raised, legs spread in a judo pose, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere towards the window on the far side of the room.
Quickly, before Vladimir could notice him, Sheremetov closed the door. If he got to him early enough, he could sometimes calm Vladimir and get him back into bed, but by the time Vladimir had reached this point, by the time he was striking his judo poses, there was only one way to handle the situation. Vladimir might seem like any other old man, frail and hesitant, but when the delusions took hold of him, he had the strength of a man thirty years younger and a martial arts technique with which to channel it. Sheremetev went to a phone on the wall outside the suite and called the security man who was posted in the entrance hall of the dacha. The phone rang for what seemed like minutes before someone answered. Then Sheremetev went to a locked cupboard in his room and took out a vial of tranquilliser. There were fifty milligrams in the vial – he carefully drew up five milligrams into a syringe, the dose prescribed to calm Vladimir when he was acutely agitated.
In his bedroom, the ex-president took a silent, stealthy step forward, then stopped again, muscles tensed, his eyes fixed on the spot in the air where he saw the Chechen’s head hovering, its sunken eyes cloudy and blind, its huge swollen tongue thrusting out from between its clenched, yellow teeth. Vladimir knew what it wanted – what it always wanted: to plant that black tongue on his face and smother him with the slime of death like a giant mollusc suffocating him in the putrid mucus of its muscular foot.
During the Chechen war, a Chechen prisoner about to be executed in front of Vladimir by a Russian firing squad – one that had got into the interesting habit of shooting their prisoners from point blank range in the face, usually after cutting off their ears – had prophesied to him that he would die a slow and excruciating death. Vladimir knew that if that tongue ever planted its poison on him, the prophecy would come true.
Suddenly the head shot off around the room, weaving, darting, bobbing. Then it swung and came straight for him. Vladimir leapt into action with a judo manoeuvre. Tsukkake! He struck hard and the head went spinning away, ricocheting off the window. It stopped, hanging in the air, the blind eyes watching him, the black tongue dripping its toxic slime.
Vladimir bounced softly from foot to foot, poised, ready to spring into another judo manoeuvre. ‘You fucking Chechen!’ he cried. ‘What now, huh? Come on! Give it a try! Let’s see what you’ve got, you boy-fucker!’ That he was engaged in a mortal combat, Vladimir had no doubt, just as Russia, it was no exaggeration to say, had been caught in mortal combat with the Chechen rebels in their tiny, faraway republic. Yet at the same time, there was something exhilarating about the fight. Just him and the Chechen’s head, one on one – winner take all. He had already written – or ghostwritten – three books about judo, but they were about the conventional art. No one, he thought, had laid down the principles of this type of combat before. He would write a book, he thought, about the art of judo against a head.
It flew at him again. He was ready. Sode-tore! Ushiro-dore! Then down on his knees – Tsukkomi! The head shot up and smashed into the ceiling. Ha! The Chechen wasn’t expecting that.
‘Now, what, you stinking head?’ he shouted, as the head bobbed under the ceiling. ‘Go! Crawl back into the toilet with the rest of your body! Let the maggots crawl back into your eyes and finish their feast—’
Suddenly he was flat on his face.
‘Careful!’ cried Sheremetev at the two security guards. ‘Don’t hurt him.’
One of the guards yelled as Vladimir elbowed him.
‘Hold him down carefully. That’s it! Careful!’
‘Ah! What the fuck!’ yelled the guard, as Vladimir elbowed him again.
Vladimir’s legs thrashed. Sheremetev struggled to pull down the former president’s pyjamas with one hand while holding the syringe in the other. In the end he gave up and simply rammed the needle into Vladimir’s buttock through the fabric and injected the tranquilliser.
A minute or so later, the thrashing lessened.
‘Let him go,’ said Sheremetev.
The two guards stood up warily. One of them, Artur, a tall fair-haired man with green eyes and prominent cheekbones, was the leader of the security detail at the dacha. ‘Shall we put him on the bed?’ he asked.
Sheremetev nodded. ‘Gently.’
They turned Vladimir over and lifted him onto the mattress. He lay motionless. Under his part-closed lids, his eyeballs had rolled back, leaving two slivers of white as if in a face out of a horror movie.
The other guard, whose nose was bleeding from the blows he had taken from Vladimir’s elbow, gave a slight shiver. ‘Is he dead?’ he whispered.
Sheremetev shook his head.
‘Shame.’
Artur looked at him sharply. ‘Get the hell out of here!’
‘But—’
‘Out! Now! And clean your nose. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.’
The guard put his hand to his nose and looked at the blood on his fingers. He muttered something and left.
‘I apologise for that, Nikolai Ilyich,’ said Artur.
‘He was hurt.’
‘Still, it’s not acceptable. I’ll speak with him. He needs to improve his attitude. If he can’t, I’ll get rid of him. To be entrusted with the safety of Vladimir Vladimirovich is a sacred duty. I see it as a privilege, Nikolai Ilyich, not a job. A bit of borsht from the nose is nothing to complain about!’ Artur paused, as if overcome with patriotic emotion. He took a deep breath. ‘Will there be anything else, Nikolai Ilyich?’
‘No. It’s a shame. We’d had quite a good month up to now.’ He paused, gazing at Vladimir, who was breathing steadily, eyes fully closed now. ‘Thank you, Artur. I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble tonight.’
‘If you do,’ said Artur, ‘just call. We’re here to help.’
The guard left. Sheremetev straightened Vladimir’s pyjamas, then covered him with the quilt.
It was a terrible thing, dementia, a disease that struck at the very core of what made a person who he was. No matter how many times Sheremetev saw it, it never became less sad. And for such a thing to have happened to Vladimir Vladimirovich, five times president of Russia…