Christopher Jones - The Silent Oligarch

Marina was quiet for a moment. “That’s good. That is. We’ll help you. I’ll help you.”

“I know.”

Another silence, broken by Marina. “Konstantin called.”

Lock said nothing.

“This morning. He wanted to know where you were.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I didn’t know anything.”

“Was that it?”

“He wanted to know if I had lost trust in him as well.”

“And?”

“I told him I didn’t leave Moscow just to get away from you.”

Again, Lock was silent.

“He said… he told me that he was trying to save you.”

Lock closed his eyes. “There’s no point in telling me that.”

“I thought you should know.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I think he no longer knows what he is saying.”

Lock nodded slowly to himself. Could Malin really expect him to believe that? There was no point in wondering. He felt tired.

“Listen, darling, I should go. It’s going to be a busy few days. I’ll… I’ll call again.”

“OK.”

“Will you kiss Vika for me?”

“Of course. Be careful. Please.”

“I will.”

“If it doesn’t work, I’ve found you a lawyer.”

BY TWELVE THE NEXT DAY Lock was anxious. Nina hadn’t called and he had begun to regret the letter; it was time to stop delaying. His first call to her went unanswered, but he left no message. So did his second, two hours later; this time he told the machine who he was, that he was in Berlin and would welcome the chance to see her. He could go to her or she could come to him at the Hotel Daniel.

At three she called; it was a short conversation. She told him that she didn’t want to see anyone associated with Dmitry’s old world, that he shouldn’t take this personally, and that she would be grateful if he left her alone. He tried to tell her that he no longer worked for Malin but it was clear that she had made up her mind. As he put the phone down he wondered what Webster would have done to keep her talking—and what would he do now to force a meeting?

Lock had been in his hotel room all day, reading Middlemarch and the guidebook and drinking Scotch. He had had breakfast, but no lunch, and his head felt light and tense at the same time. He didn’t know what to make of Nina’s refusal: was it the end of everything, or merely an obstacle? Part of him, he realized, had never thought that Nina would make any difference; part of him longed to think that she would. Snow had settled thickly overnight and was still falling outside his window.

He decided to walk into town. He couldn’t leave today in any case, not in this snow, and he wanted to see people and breathe fresh air. And he needed new shoes. The pavement sludge had frozen in places and in his leather soles he made precarious progress north, across the canal and up Friedrichstrasse, leaning forward slightly for balance and correcting himself with a jerk every time he started to slip. If the snow would only stop he could drive to Switzerland in a day—less, probably. He wondered how far south it was falling. He passed Checkpoint Charlie and stopped for a moment to read the screens that enclosed the construction sites on either side of the road. People had crossed the wall in suitcases, in cars decked out in mourning, suspended from balloons, on death slides, in a hundred ways that defied imagination. Plenty had tried and not crossed at all, shot down by the automatic machine guns trained on every inch of the wall or by the border guards who longed to cross it themselves. Some had been left to die in the death strip between the two walls, the soldiers of neither side prepared or allowed to go to their aid. All in one direction. No one had ever crossed the other way.

He was in a camping shop trying on shoes when Webster rang. The phone gave an irritating chirrupy ring that was strange to him, and it took him a moment to realize it was his to answer. He took the phone out of his pocket and looked at it for some time, hoping that voice mail would pick up, but it simply rang and rang, chirruped and chirruped.

“Hello,” he said at last.

“Richard, it’s Ben. How are things?”

“Ben, hi. OK. They’re OK.”

“How are you getting on?”

“She won’t see me.”

“Why not?”

“She says she won’t see anyone from my world. I tried to tell her it wasn’t my world anymore but I didn’t get through.”

“So what are you doing now?”

“Trying on shoes.”

Webster said nothing for a moment. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. It’s snowing like crazy here.”

“Richard, do you want to see Nina?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Why don’t you go and see her?”

Lock thought for a moment. Priorities shuffled in his mind. “Would you see her?”

The line was quiet for a moment. Please. I need help.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Webster said at last. “I’ll text you my plans.”

“Thank you. She might see you.”

“She might. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine.”

“Hang in there. We’ll crack it together.”

Lock left the shoe shop with his old shoes in a plastic bag and his new ones dry and tight on his feet. They had jagged soles and made short work of the ice. He felt newly in control, and set off in search of the café where he had eaten the night before. Two nights in the city and already he had worked out a routine. He was too tired to do otherwise.

This part of Berlin was all wide streets and solid apartment blocks. Something about the rhythm of the buildings—the narrowness of the windows, the space between them, the height of the floors—reminded him strongly of Moscow. Their colors too: creams, dirty yellows, grays. And the streets empty of people in the snow, the pavements a slithery mess, the streetlights giving out a harsh blue light. It came to him suddenly and with a panicked chill that this was an eastern city, that he’d been tricked into thinking it was the incorruptible West, that he wasn’t safe here. They could get you here, if they wanted to; it wasn’t so far away. They probably knew he was here already. He could feel his heart beating fast in his chest and his throat felt swollen, unable to swallow.

He walked quickly now to the café, not quite rushing, and when there ordered beer again, and ate soup, and sausages with sauerkraut. He began to calm down, and scolded himself for not having eaten sooner. He wished he’d brought his book. He had his notebook, though, and for a while he sketched in it absentmindedly. First Webster came out, wearing a mac, a trilby and dark glasses, a flower in his buttonhole and a folded newspaper under his arm. Then Lock himself astride a high wall, one arm and one leg in view. He looked at the images for a second, shook his head as if to clear it and opened a fresh page. He would think this thing through. He drew two lines down the page and gave a title to each of the three columns: Cooperate, Return and Run. Then he ruled two lines across, and marked the rows Likely Outcome, Risks, Obstacles. It took him half an hour to fill up the grid with a neat, close hand and he could feel his mind disentangling as he wrote. This was an odd document, he realized; he wondered what someone would make of it if they came across it. It was odd in part, he understood, because nowhere did it address what he wanted. It hadn’t occurred to him to include it, and he wasn’t quite sure where it should go.

So on the opposite page he wrote two things. See Marina and See Vika. He stopped and looked at the words for a while, and wished that he’d known this so clearly five years before. What they told him now was that he had no choice but to wait for Webster and see this out. He shut the book flat with his hand, as if swearing on it. Then he put it back in his pocket next to Marina’s letter, paid the bill and went out into the night.