Quiller Balalaika

7: CAVIAR

It would do, at least for the time being.

'But you know the worst thing in all this?' The colonel fixed his bloodshot eyes on me. 'The worst thing?'

I looked away to watch other people's faces, committing them to memory. In a moment I would ditch this man and move on. He didn't know Vasyl Sakkas.

It would do, at least for the time being, the safe-house. The actual room was on the second floor. Ferris had given me the key to the only solid door left in the building, which was an abandoned ruin along Pushechnaya, the Street of the Cannon-makers near the Boulevard Ring, and I'd gone there alone to look at it after we'd shut down the rendezvous. It was nineteenth-century, had once been beautiful, if you care for Russo-Victorian, until the whole area had gone into decline and half this place had been gutted by fire and the other half left to rot with its paint peeling and its walls cracking and its windows missing, smell of decay and despair.

'Do you know?'

This colonel was a bloody bore. 'What? You mean the worst thing?'

'Yes.'

'No, I don't.'

'The caviar.'

'I thought it was rather good.' This was an official party launched by the Federal Counterintelligence Service, and Ferris had given me an invitation passed on from the British Embassy, thought I might make some useful contacts.

'The caviar is excellent, yes,' the colonel said. 'But it is doomed!'

'Oh.'

Make no mistake, when the Federal Counterintelligence Service throws a party it's to make another attempt at cleaning up the image of the organization that hides beneath the sheepskin – the KGB – before the very eyes of foreign diplos from the major embassies, ranking journalists from the international press, local bankers, deputies, entrepreneurs, here to feast on the caviar and roast sturgeon and stuffed crab while the women in their miniskirts and minks and sables stalked the captains of industry and other selected prey with diamonds flashing on their wrists and fingers – though none of them were making a play for the Service brass, who had brought their shabby, overdressed wives for the occasion.

It was on the second floor, the room in the abandoned building, because the executive's refuge in any safe-house is always there. The ground floor is too vulnerable to access and the third floor is too far from the ground if he needs to get out fast. This room was on a corner and Legge had put two windows in and smeared them with grime, giving me the view of an abandoned soap factory from one of them and a side street from the other, this furnished with battered trash cans and a broken ladder and the rusting wreck of a Trabant halfway down, useful cover only if I managed to get that far if the street became a target zone.

'It is doomed!'

'The caviar?'

'But of course! Ninety percent of the sturgeon swim in the Caspian Sea, which has now been turned into a chemical waste dump by the shit coming down the Volga, not to mention the years of oil-drilling near Baku.' The colonel went on watching me for my reaction, the heat of his eyes on me as I took in the woman in the gold sequined dress who was passing behind him, an exquisite imitation Parisienne with the gloss of a porcelain Lladro; she prowled with grace through the packed banquet room, radiating the confidence of a newly anointed mafiya moll: I was beginning to recognize them as they glowed like butterflies in their short-lived heyday before they made some kind of mistake or spoke out of turn and got beaten up and thrown back onto the street. There'd been women like this at the Baccarat Club, one of them sitting with a mobster, thick make-up over her bruises.

'And worse than that,' the colonel said as I decided to move on, 'the breakup of the Soviet Union' – moving with me, gripping my arm – 'has brought Russia into competition with Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan for the fishing grounds, which are producing fortunes from the dwindling shoals of sturgeon that are still there!' He stopped me, and I waited. 'Can you imagine, in two or three years, an evening like this, without caviar?'

'Terrible,' I said.

'Can you imagine life without caviar?'

'Pretty shitty,' I said. 'Thank God for McDonald's.'

I prised his hand away and moved for the buffet, taking it slowly, choosing the groups that looked interesting, that comprised the Service brass or had one or two of the mafiya dons in their midst, sleek in their silk suits, hair-oil gleaming, diamond rings on their fingers, some of them certainly former KGB officers who'd dropped out of the service to exchange the huge power of authority for the even greater power of the megabucks. Six months ago it wouldn't have been possible to invite them here, but with Yeltsin staggering on the tightrope and Zhirinovsky in the ascendant anything was possible today in Moscow, though I couldn't see any bodyguards here: presumably our hosts had decided to draw the line at that.

A girl from the British Embassy playing the little wallflower in traditional dress: a beige woollen cardigan and knee-length skirt with a single string of pearls and a circumspect perm, the pearls small but not cultured, an innocuous-looking drink in her pale hand but with the passion of her own kind latent in the soft blue eyes, I know her breed and am grateful that they walk the earth, my life being owed to one of them.

'And how is the queen?' I asked her, the accent broken but not thick – I've got my pride.

'The who?' In a tone of slight shock, since we hadn't been introduced.

'Your Queen Elizabeth.'

'Oh.' A gusty giggle. 'I don't really know.' She was eyeing my London-tailored blue serge, the two inches of linen at the wrist and the heavy gold links, the two diamond rings, courtesy of Legge, outfitter to the executive. Did she know the mafiya uniform? She didn't look scared, just alerted, intrigued: the Russian accent can be quite seductive.

'I admire her,' I said, 'very much. We need a symbolic head of state like that in my country. Do you think she would accept the job if we asked her?'

Laughter like a peal of troika bells across the snow. 'It's very nice of you, but I think she's rather busy.'

'But of course. I was disappointed when your Prince Andrew declined Latvia's offer to re-establish the throne there for him and bring the country stability. There is no romance left for us today, do you not agree?'

'I don't really know.'

'And how many DI6 agents do you have at your embassy at the present time?' I asked her and got her eyes wide open and stayed for a moment to admire them before I moved on to the group where an American was holding the attention of two Japanese diplomats and a woman loaded with Chanel No. 5 and her fifth vodka.

'… common knowledge in my department that these are still the same bastards that masterminded the whole peristroika policyto re-establish themselves in the security field and then set up the coup attempt on Gorbachev to entrench themselves deeper still.'

'Then you don't believe,' one of the Japanese asked him, 'that real democracy is possible in Russia with the KGB still wielding influence behind the scenes?'

'Absolutely not. But even if we could nail these guys, who's going to nail the mob? Who's going to nail Zhirinovsky? You know what? There are so many goddamn road-blocks in the way of any real democracy coming to this country that I give Yeltsin another two months in power, and then we better all of us head for the shelters, because who the hell's going to finish up in charge of all those nukes?'

A good question, but I was more interested in the Federal Counterintelligence Service major standing over there near the massive copper samovar under the potted palm. He'd been sweeping a glass of vodka from the tray every time a waiter had gone past, and might by this time have his guard down.

'You people are doing a very good job,' an FCS lieutenant-colonel told me as I began moving towards the other man.

'I'm glad to hear that.'

'I mean it.' A heavy face with several chins, eyes chipped off an iceberg, an ineradicable seven-o'clock shadow framing a greedy mouth, greedy, I thought, not so much for caviar or mille feuille but for blood, for surrender, for the first scream as the high-voltage current hit the testicles under the blinding glare of the lamp: I'd seen, known, so many men like this one, had killed two, one of them in the street near the Lubyanka, on that occasion for a lapse in manners. 'You're doing a very good job indeed.' His eyes serious, intent.

'We like to feel appreciated,' I said.

'But of course you are. Continue to destroy the economy at this pace, and when the price of bread hits five thousand rubles a loaf the citizens will storm the streets to hang Yeltsin from a lamp-post and we shall be called in to restore order and put Zhirinovsky into undisputed power. We can then stop calling ourselves the Federal Counterintelligence Service and resume our role in regulating the masses for their own protection as we did so diligently before. The nuclear missiles can be trained once more on Washington and the Western powers invited to acknowledge the new Russian Imperial reality.' A hand on my arm: 'Nor will the princes of commerce be forgotten for the part they will have played in the grand scheme of things. There'll be room enough in the hierarchy of the state for men of ambition and imagination, let me assure you.'

'The prospects are overwhelming.'

'I thought you would understand.'

'I hope you'll find a good position for Sakkas.'

The colonel inclined his head. 'Please favour my left ear.'

I hope you'll find a good position for Vasyl Sakkas.'

His eyes changed as he raised his head again, the light glancing across them as if they had no depth. 'I think that might not be so easy.'

'You know him?'

'Our paths hardly cross. But I know his reputation.'

'And you don't see him as, say, chief of international trade in our new government?'

'Sakkas?' Eyeing me, wanting to know if I were serious.

'He's reported to be a gifted man,' I said, 'in that field.'

'I've no doubt.' He looked away as a woman broke from the group near us, looked back to me. 'I'll put it this way. Since so many of Vasyl Sakkas' competitors have met such untimely deaths, I'm not sure his opponents in the Duma would sleep too well if he were offered a role in the affairs of state.

I shrugged. 'Maybe you're -'

'Colonel Primakov! I've been looking for you everywhere!' A flash of iridescent eyes taking me in before the woman enveloped the colonel in an aura of Nuit de Folie and shimmering silk, the decolletage plunging to scented shadows, the nails gilded and long enough to draw blood in the instant if any male of the species were to take an uninvited liberty.

'If you'll excuse me,' I said.

When I reached the major he was still alone. 'Terrific party.'

'Thank you. We try to make sure our guests enjoy themselves.' His glass of vodka was tucked into an elbow against his chest for security.

'Berinov,' I said. 'Dmitri Berinov.'

'Major Milosevic. You're not drinking?' He looked round for a waiter.

'I'm drying out for a while.'

He considered this, his eyes tucked under the lids for shelter now, the drunk watching me, the man somewhere inside. 'I see,' he said in a moment.

I glanced around. 'You didn't invite Sakkas here tonight?'

The eyes were suddenly tucked deeper. 'Vasyl Sakkas?'

'Yes.'

'Vasyl Sakkas doesn't ’ppear – appear in public. In any case I'm not pleased with him at the moment.'

'Oh really?'

'He ordered a hit on one of our people.'

'When was this?'

'Two days ago. He should have tel – telephoned me before he did that.' The tip of a palm frond was brushing his ear; he didn't notice.

'To warn you.'

'What?'

'You could have' – I shrugged – 'suggested an alternative.'

His head began shaking slightly. 'When Sakkas orders a hit, there's no poss – possible alternative. But I could have asked him to do it more discreetly. Instead of on the steps of our headquarters.' He watched me as if from a distance. 'He likes steps,' he said. 'A lot of his hits are made on steps. Judges, officials.'

'You telephone him often?'

'I don't telephone Sakkas. But he knows my number. I was use – useful to him once.'

'You've got an understanding.'

'All I understand is that he must be treated with great caution.'

'So I've heard. He's in Moscow now?'

'I don't know. No one ever knows where Sakkas is. But he was in Mos – Moscow two days ago. He always watches the hits.'

'To make sure they're successful.,

'No. They're always successful. He watches them because he likes it. People say – ' he broke off as I tilted his glass straight for him; its rim had been catching under one of his medals. 'What are you doing?'

'Don't worry about it. How often have you met Sakkas?'

'How – how often have I met him? No one ever meets Sakkas. Unless he wants them to.'

'Likes his privacy.'

'Yes. You know what those bastards did to me?' He was watching someone going past, head of grey hair, general's tabs.

'What did they do?'

'They passed me over for promotion again.'

'Rather short-sighted.'

'What? Of course. You know – you know how long I've been working in this bloody outfit?'

'Tell me.'

'Nine years. Nine bloody years.' He watched the general join a group near the buffet. 'His fault, you see. Head of Personnel. Some – sometimes I wonder if I'm not in the wrong business.' He looked back to me, his eyes taking time to focus. 'You people do pretty well, don't you?'

'Mustn't grumble.'

'You make mil – millions. I know that. Dollars. American bloody dollars.'

'There are good times and bad. Tell me, where does Sakkas stay when he's in the capital?'

'You know what I make in this outfit? I make peanuts.'

'So why don't you come across?'

He watched me for a long time. 'You deal in nickel, do you?'

'Sometimes.'

'I know someone with a whole – whole train load of nickel stuck at the Latvian frontier.'

'He should offer the customs a bit more.'

'If I left the service, I could help people like that.'

'Help yourself, too.'

'Of course. It's tem – tempting.'

I got out my wallet and gave him my card. 'Phone me any time, major. Perhaps we can work something out. But you'll have to steer clear of Sakkas if you start up in business. Where does he stay when he's in Moscow, by the way?'

'Steer very clear, yes. House – he's got a house in Sadovaja Samotecnaja Ulica.'

'On the Boulevard Ring.'

'Yes.'

'What number?'

'Don't know what number.'

'A mansion, probably. An old mansion.'

'Don't know.'

'Would any of your colleagues know? What department -'

'No one – no one knows a thing like that.' The sunken eyes were steady for a moment; I couldn't tell if he was alert enough to lie. 'The big money,' he said, 'is in plutonium. You know that.' It was either a jump in his thought-train or just a vodka-induced non sequitur. Was Sakkas, perhaps, in plutonium?

'When you can find it,' I said.

'Not difficult. When that stuff is made in a fast-breeder reactor, they can turn out a kilo – kilogram more than the standards require for every hun – hundred changes of fuel.' He watched me from under his heavy lids, didn't say any more, had lost his train of thought.

'And then?'

'What? Yes, and then the official amount is reg – registered in the books, and the surplus goes onto the black market. Some of the plants, they just throw the stuff over the wall, it's as sim – simple as that.'

Then he dried up again, his head moving a little as someone came up behind me, and when I turned round I found myself looking straight into the eyes of the Cougar.