Mark Blair - Stroika

‘Any more on your break-in and that unfortunate girl?’

Misha shook his head, but she sensed he was not telling her everything; Ivan had been much the same, despite her prodding. And why had Misha flown to Italy so soon after the incident? She didn’t believe it was all about business.

They pulled up at the solid steel gate that separated the street from the rear of the building. An armed guard turned to a speakerphone and the heavy doors moved back electronically. Three cars lay on the far side of the oval courtyard, a truck parked at the warehouse entrance. Viktoriya had not been to his office for several weeks; each time she visited it had morphed into something different.

On the first floor a young model showed off a new collection to a group of buyers. In an adjacent room three men sat at desks busily engrossed in telephone conversation. The older of them waved at Misha and replaced his receiver.

‘Grigory Vasiliev,’ he said, introducing himself. Viktoriya took in the heavily set man, his jowly face and alert eyes.

‘Meet our new currency and – soon to be – commodity trading floor,’ said Misha. She looked at him quizzically.

‘Roubles for US dollars, yen, Deutschmarks… it’s just another trade when it comes to it.’

‘Perhaps a bit more complicated than that,’ countered Grigory, clearly not wanting to be downgraded.

Misha ushered her to a meeting room on the first floor overlooking the courtyard to the rear. A van that hadn’t been there when they arrived had pulled in close by the warehouse door. The movement of an armed man on the rooftop caught her attention. She counted at least ten men in the yard. What had happened to the man who never bothered with security? Two men were busy hauling boxes from the rear of the vehicle into the warehouse. The driver skirted round the side of the vehicle trying to get a look in. A security guard blocked his way and pushed him back with the barrel of his gun. She wondered what the van contained that was so valuable. When she turned around she found Misha quietly studying her, a look of faint amusement on his face.

‘So what is this new idea?’ she said, trying to sound enthusiastic. He was clearly inured of her cynicism.

‘It’s not so new. I’ve been thinking about it for a while… well, a couple of weeks at least. It was you who planted the seed.’

‘Well it can’t be all bad then,’ she said, sitting up straighter.

‘I’m going to register one of these new cooperatives tomorrow – you know, private companies by another name. The city gorkom have been pushing me to do something; those communists are not so dumb that they can’t smell an opportunity. It’s the how that baffles them. Nothing is for free; they’ll want their cut, of course.’

‘To do what precisely,’ she asked, intrigued.

‘Trade in diesel to start… you’ve told me Leningrad Freight runs half-empty trucks all over the country to meet some ridiculous quota that has nothing to do with efficiency. Am I right?’

‘Yes.’ She had been complaining about it since she joined.

‘Well no one cares about quotas anymore. Tell your director boss that you are going on a maximum economy drive. I want Leningrad Freight to transfer its surplus diesel to our new cooperative enterprise… at cost.’

Viktoriya could see where this was going.

‘At the state subsidised price, which is nowhere near the market price?’ she filled in.

‘Precisely, and we ship it over the border at Smolensk where we sell it for quadruple what we pay for it… in hard currency, US dollars. No loss to Leningrad Freight – they charge us what it cost them. We repay them in six months, a year with depreciating roubles. And the second phase… you start requisitioning fuel in much greater quantity than you use now and pass it through.’

‘And if the director won’t cooperate…?’

‘…the gorkom will lean on him. He’ll have nothing to complain about anyway. He’ll be looked after, as he always has been. And before you say anything, I’m going to make you a significant shareholder in the new cooperative… I couldn’t do this without you, Vika.’

Misha got up from the table and walked over to the window. From where she was sitting she could see another van had taken the place of the previous one, and the same unloading process was underway.

‘Come,’ he said firmly as if he had suddenly made up his mind about something.

Misha led her downstairs to the ground floor. For an instant she thought he was going to give her another guided tour of the warehouse and show her his latest favourite thing, but instead he pointed to another flight of stairs she hadn’t noticed before. She followed him down.

Misha had not said a word since leaving the meeting room. As they stepped around the last curve of the newly constructed concrete stairwell, she was totally unprepared for what she saw next. She let out a gasp. A large open vault door, perhaps six feet in diameter, set in the middle of a recently cast grey concrete wall, stretched floor to ceiling, from one side of the building to the other.

‘A Mosler ,’ Misha said proudly, pointing at the name engraved on the vault door. ‘One of these even survived the blast at Hiroshima.’

A man pushing a trolley with two of the boxes she had seen being taken out of the van exited the service lift and steered past them and the two armed guards at the strong room door.

‘After you.’ Misha gestured with his hand, a huge grin on his face.

She stepped inside the steel and concrete sarcophagus; it was a step up from the old lock-up she remembered on the English Embankment. The intensity of the light inside was almost painful. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She blinked hard, not believing what she was seeing. In a space as large as the warehouse above, piles of dollars lay on open shelves wrapped tightly in clear polythene. The man with the trolley emptied a box of dollars onto a large counting table, where two men sorted through mixed denominations.

Misha took one of the packets off a shelf and threw it to her. She caught it.

‘Ten thousand US dollars. Hold on to that; it will help oil the wheels of our new venture.’

She was dumbfounded.

‘It’s not all mine… I hold some for other people. I’m officially a bank now – Moika Bank… Grigory’s idea.’

She looked around the room again, trying to calculate how much might be sitting there.

‘There must be what… fifty million here?’ she guessed wildly.

‘Not even close! Let’s walk over here.’

Misha led her to the back of the vault and a small safe embedded in the concrete wall. Misha spun the dial lock with his fingers.

‘Russian dolls,’ she said.

‘Yes, a safe within a safe. Ivan, Grigory and I have the code for the main vault but this one is just you and me, Vika.’

She stood there about to ask what it contained and the combination number, but he had already turned his back on her and was halfway back to the steel door.

SMOLENSK

Misha rose from the table. He was freezing. A lone paraffin heater struggled vainly to cast off the winter chill gripping the small barrack meeting room and the Arctic air that forced its way past the newspaper stuffed into the gap between the rusting metal window frame and the sill itself. The state of decay only seemed to reinforce the low mood that had set in when he and Viktoriya had landed at Smolensk an hour earlier. Like some ghostly armada, row upon row of rotting aircraft fuselages lined the taxiways and airfield, engines stripped and cavities boarded over, standing there useless, abandoned and desolate, somehow a symbol of what the Soviet Union was or had become. Misha wondered how long it would be before the whole edifice collapsed and whether he would be dragged down with it.