He had had no training in investment, no background in economics, no tuition in finance. With a squeaky, not yet broken voice, he told Reuven Weissberg where the fees for the roofs should be put, what should be bought and how the money could be hidden. In the city of Perm, a portfolio had built and a treasure chest of bicycles, leather jackets and alcohol had gone into store for selling on when shortages dictated there was demand for the unobtainable. The new business had broken out of the perimeter walls of the school and had moved on to the city’s streets. Kiosk-holders had received visits from the hugely muscled Weissberg, who had explained the risks of fire engulfing a kiosk, and from Josef Goldmann — with a pimpled face and large spectacles perched on a shallow nose — who made fast estimations of what a kiosk business should take in a month and therefore what should be the cost of protection. Where there was refusal, there followed fire. Where there were rivals and a roof already in place, there were skirmishes. Reuven Weissberg was never bested.
Defectors came. Tongue-tied and awkward, kids from other teenage gangs pleaded to be allowed to join the Weissberg brigada. Loyalties shifted. At eighteen, in one of the toughest cities in the Soviet Union, Weissberg was acknowledged as an avoritet, and Goldmann as a brigadir, and there were more than twenty gofers, couriers and hooligans behind them who were at the level of a boevik in the expanding banditskaya krysha. Then Weissberg was gone.
More memories. With Weissberg a conscript into the army, Josef Goldmann, only thirteen, had no roof. Power shifting. The banditskaya krysha collapsing. The city of Perm, without the roof over him, was a frightening, threatening place. He had lain low, had concerned himself with his studies and with the money accumulated before Weissberg had left. Three times, in the following two years, he had been beaten — clothes ripped, spectacles smashed — and had thought himself lucky not to have been tied at the wrists and ankles and thrown into the waters of the Kama river.
Two years later, Reuven Weissberg had returned to Perm — harder, fitter, leaner — and Josef Goldmann’s roof was once more in place. He owed everything to the man. In the shadow of the krysha, they had climbed together. Goldmann owed Weissberg his town house in Knightsbridge, his villa outside Albufeira on the Algarve coast, his penthouse in Cannes, where the motor yacht was moored, and his stature as a multi-millionaire who required bodyguards for his and his family’s protection.
He dressed. In the adjacent room, his wife slipped over her head the little black dress that had been delivered that afternoon. They were due in the early evening at a reception for the launch of a new collection at a Cork Street gallery, and probably he would bid in the auction for a watercolour landscape, go to a quarter of a million and be applauded for his generosity — because half of the work’s fee would go to a charity. Esther came to him. He smelled the scent on her, kissed her shoulder and made to fasten the clasp of her necklace. But his fingers — normally so certain — fumbled with the clasp because his mind was distracted, and he heard his wife’s brittle intake of breath when he pinched her nape. Why?
Because Viktor, on family business, had travelled to Sarov two months before. Because an offer of an item to be sold had been made. Because, via a courier, Josef Goldmann had told Reuven Weissberg of the item that was for sale, and a price had been agreed. Because a purchaser had been found for it, and the process of the sale was in place. Because the item was beyond the limits of anything ever handled before. Because he and his colleague could make vast sums, even though neither had need of money. Because money was power, was confirmation of power.
Because two old men had set off, that morning, on a journey.
He could not see the reddened pinch mark at the back of Esther’s neck. He said they would take Viktor and Grigori to such a public place as a gallery on Cork Street, and that Johnny would stay at home with the children.
‘Is Simon not coming?’ she asked.
‘He’s off duty tonight. It’s not a problem … Johnny’s all right for the children.’
‘They like him. I like him.’
He said, as if it were of no importance, ‘Simon is best for us. Johnny will do the children.’
Offered the item, Reuven Weissberg had snatched at it, as if the risk didn’t concern him. Perhaps, today, Josef Goldmann saw too little of his protector and was too far distanced from the aura of confidence Weissberg provided. The deal terrified him.
Esther frowned. ‘Are you all right, Josef?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Is it because Simon has to have a night off? He’s—’
He spat, ‘Forget Simon, forget Johnny, think only of looking pretty tonight. Do what you do well, and I’ll do what I do well.’
‘You don’t bust your balls when there’s no need, Christopher. Sit and scratch them, let the world go by. Then when the need comes out of a clear sky, you go after it and get frantic.’
The sayings of Clipper Reade, if written down, would have made a Bible for Lawson, but he had had no need to write them down because he remembered them, each emphasis and inflection.
He had gone after it, was frantic. And Lucy with him. Sarov, its importance, was not a problem; he knew all about Sarov. Any veteran, laced with Cold War experience, and any desk officer in Non-Proliferation was familiar with it. His screen and hers had pumped up a map of Knightsbridge, a particular street and a particular trio of properties. Number twelve was the workplace of a practice of architects with studios below and the senior partner occupying the top floor. Number fourteen was leasehold, forty-nine years to run, in the name of Josef Shlomo Goldmann and lived in by his family and staff. Number sixteen was a freehold property in the name of a charitable trust that aided ‘gentlewomen’ who had fallen on ‘hard times’. Lucy had led with the matching of mobile-telephone calls into one of those terraced, fat-cat houses, and the links splayed out to Sarov and to the forest wilderness by the Bug river. He knew about the Bug river, knew almost everything about where the Red Army had been in former times. He had gone past her, as if he had his chest out and the tape loomed, and had identified the ownership of the three.
Clipper Reade had said, ‘Better believe me, Christopher. You may get, in this business, a small window that’s ajar. It’s criminal not to jump through it. Windows, my experience, slam shut if you’re too finicky to take the opportunity of advantage. Don’t call for a committee to sit — just jump.’
He doubted, profoundly, that a firm of architects had links to Sarov or to a marshy and forgotten corner of eastern Poland; beside him, Lucy had scratched out the charitable organization from the list of three. She had been with him since 1980. If he had been sacked when he’d refused to work any longer on Middle East associated desks, she would have left on that same Friday evening. She lived in a tiny apartment across the river in Victoria and spent her evenings in the company of a long-haired blue Norwegian Forest cat. She did not ask a question when she knew the answer, did not speak unless to make a necessary contribution: she was rewarded. Christopher Lawson had never barked at her, and he had never criticized her work or contradicted her opinions. On other desks it was suggested by some that he shagged her, but a more general opinion was that she loved only her cat and he loved only his work … yet they were soul-mates.
Lawson went now for the liaison officer from ‘that shambles across the river’ to demand from the Box 500 building on the north side of the Thames a detailed breakdown of the occupants of number fourteen — Josef Shlomo Goldmann and everyone living under his roof — and he snarled into the phone that he wanted it ‘yesterday’ and would not accept delay. Lucy tracked, with greater politeness, to a source in Special Branch at Scotland Yard. She had never remonstrated with Lawson for his rudeness to others, and those who had felt the whip of his tongue, then seen him speak with her were astonished to find him capable of minimal pleasantries.