David Szalay - All That Man Is

Aleksandr, still wearing his own sunglasses, looks away and says, in a hard neutral voice, ‘There’s something you don’t know.’

‘What’s that?’

The wind is up. Whitecaps are appearing on the vivid blue water. Just perceptibly, the immense yacht moves in the steepening swell.

Aleksandr says, ‘Ksenia is leaving me.’

Lars looks surprised, says nothing.

‘Yes,’ Aleksandr says.

She had sat next to him every day at the trial. Those long hours of lawyers’ voices. Of shuffling feet, and shuffling papers. She had sat next to him, sometimes looking worried and engaged, sometimes stifling a yawn in the middle of the afternoon as the lawyers whispered to each other up near the judge. For more than a month, that had lasted.

And then, on Thursday morning, the judgment.

And it wasn’t just that he had lost — that financially his wipeout was now final, an immovable fact, and all the implications of that.

It was what she had said, the judge.

‘The language was strong,’ even Lars had admitted.

And then while she was speaking, Adam Spassky’s smile — the way he had smiled, nearly imperceptibly and with that usual strange look of vacancy in his heatless blue eyes. Seeing that smile — that’s when Aleksandr understood that this was actually happening, that it was not in fact a nightmare. That it was his life.

Facing the media scrum on the steps outside he had been in a state of shock. Not sure where he was. Still seeing that smile. Minders hurried him to the Maybach, Ksenia hanging on his arm.

Then the house in Lowndes Square. Shadowy hotel-like spaces. Impersonal work of interior designers. And it was then, in the shocked hush of the house, that she told him.

‘I’ve waited long enough, she said. ‘I didn’t want to do it during the trial,’ she said. ‘The trial’s over now.’

She said, ‘It’s no use, Aleksandr.’

He was shouting at her.

‘You say that,’ she said. ‘When was the last time you actually noticed me? When was the last time you thought about what I might want? What do you want me for? You’re not even interested in sex any more…’

That’s when he threw the Japanese vase.

When he threw the Japanese vase, she froze up.

She said, ‘I’m taking the twins to St Barts for two weeks.’

And that afternoon, when the twins got home from their expensive English school, everything was packed, the huge pile of luggage in the hall, and they went to the airport, she and the twins, and her PA, and her personal trainer, and the two English nannies, and all the earpiece-wearing security men — from the window he watched the four-vehicle motorcade move away.

He was too shocked to try to stop her.

His throat was sore from shouting. His eyes were pink.

He was standing at the window, staring out.

‘What does she want?’ Lars asks.

He says, ‘The London house. The villa in St Barts. Money.’

‘How much money?’

‘I don’t know. Her lawyers are talking to mine.’

‘You’re not married?’ Lars says delicately.

‘No,’ Aleksandr says, sounding tired. ‘So what? We’ve been together fifteen years. We have the twins.’

‘How old are they now?’

‘Ten.’

There is a silence.

‘You have children?’ Aleksandr asks.

‘Yes,’ Lars says, surprised.

It is the first time, in all their years of association, that Aleksandr has asked him about his family, has shown any interest in his life.

‘Yes,’ he says again. And then, trying to be friendly, ‘They are a little older than yours. Fifteen and twelve.’

‘Oh, I have older children,’ Aleksandr says. ‘I have been married twice, and divorced twice. The first divorce was okay, not too expensive. The second…’ He sighs heavily. ‘What am I going to do, Lars?’

Lars takes the question to be a practical one. He says, ‘To meet legal fees and other liabilities you will need to sell some assets. I advise you to settle all pending litigation now. The prospect of winning,’ he says, ‘has been materially diminished by last week’s judgment.’ He waits to see what Aleksandr will say.

Nothing. Staring at the sea, he seems to be thinking about something else.

‘To do that,’ Lars goes on, ‘to pay all outstanding fees and settle everything, you will need, as I said, about two hundred million sterling.’

He lets that sink in.

‘With luck,’ he says optimistically, ‘this yacht might fetch that on its own.’

‘No,’ Aleksandr says, evidently listening after all. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘A hundred and fifty?’ Lars suggests.

‘Maybe.’

‘So we need another fifty million,’ Lars says thoughtfully. ‘I think you must sell the Falcon,’ he says. ‘The overheads, I imagine, are very high.’

In fact, Lars does not need to imagine how high the overheads are: he established, some years ago, a trust in the Isle of Man to own and manage the jet and it eats several million pounds a year.

‘So, the jet?’

‘Okay,’ Aleksandr says, absent-mindedly.

‘I hope we will get twenty million,’ Lars says. ‘The market is pretty strong for that sort of aircraft these days.’

‘Okay.’

‘So we need another thirty million.’

Aleksandr says nothing.

‘The London house and the house in St Barts will go to Ksenia?’ Lars asks.

‘She wants them.’

‘And will she get them?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And money?’

‘She will want money,’ Aleksandr says.

‘You don’t know how much?’

‘No.’

‘Not more than ten million, I would say,’ Lars says. ‘She shouldn’t have more than ten million.’

Aleksandr, in his black silk shirt, just shrugs.

‘If you sell the house in Surrey,’ Lars says, ‘and the Barbaresco estate, you will be able to meet your outstanding liabilities and pay her ten million.’

Wind moves over the terrace, which someone is now mopping — an African woman in a white Europa -logoed polo shirt and tracksuit trousers, the uniform of the vessel’s menials, mopping the deck some distance from them.

The wind disturbs the surface of the sea, making it scintillate in places.

Aleksandr says, ‘And what does that leave me with?’

‘It leaves you,’ Lars says, looking at one of his scraps of paper, ‘with that stake in the Belarusian telco.’

‘Only that?’

‘Yes. It’s worth about twenty million sterling,’ Lars points out.

‘Twenty million?’ Aleksandr says vaguely.

‘Yes. And it pays a decent dividend. About five per cent. A million pounds a year, more or less. It is possible, I think,’ Lars jokes, ‘to live off that.’

A pause.

Then he says, no longer joking, ‘With appropriate tax arrangements.’

Lars himself, indeed, manages to live off not very much more than that, with appropriate tax arrangements.

Aleksandr does not laugh at Lars’s joke. He does not seem to have been listening. When he finally looks at him it’s as if he has forgotten what they were talking about. ‘You will stay for lunch, Lars?’ he asks.

—

They eat on the small terrace outside the private dining room — a table set for two. Mark and the young Vietnamese trainee steward wait on them. Aleksandr says he wants sushi. Sushi, unfortunately, is not available. Obviously disappointed, Alexander yells at Mark for a while, while Lars looks the other way. He looks at the sea — a wonderful dark blue, with here and there a foaming wave. In the end, they have grilled salmon with a fennel salad and new potatoes, and a bottle of very nice Pouilly-Fuissé, and Aleksandr tells Lars, forgetting that he already knows the story, about the time when he was in Ulaanbaatar and decided, at some point during the day, that he wanted sushi for his supper.