Sashenka

“Ahhh, look at her!” cried the Magician theatrically. “Look at that worried pretty face! Ha ha. You’re new in Moscow, just a kitten in the big city, I can tell. Yes, everything has its price. The Colonel and I are embracing the new mentality! More whiskey, Dima. Let’s drink to it!”

12

Just after midday next day, Katinka walked through the high halls, past window displays and along vestibules of the new shops in the GUM arcade on Red Square. She had an appointment at the Bosko Restaurant, where slim, tanned girls with long legs in boots and skirts and gleaming Versace chains sat with squat men in Italian suits. The aromas of ground coffee and scented skin filled the air. The place was so chic that Katinka felt she might be in Venice or New York, even though she had never been anywhere but London.

What a place! she thought, not noticing the maître d’, an Italianate Tatar with the profile of a pigeon, scowling at her spangled skirt and white boots. “Oh look!” she burst out. “What a view!”

She sighed with the sensual pleasure of a provincial girl at Bosko’s wall-sized panorama of Red Square and its expanse of shiny cobbles. From here, the gaudy ice-cream cones of St. Basil’s seemed more Tatar than Russian. Just under the Kremlin walls stood that strangely unslavic Egyptian mausoleum in freckled red granite wherein lay the mummified Lenin. There, farther away, almost hidden against the Kremlin Wall, was the little green marble bust of Stalin himself, rudely removed from its resting place in the Mausoleum. The Russianness of the Kremlin, with its Orthodox churches, its green and ocher Tsarist palaces, even those red stars, filled Katinka with Slavic pride.

She could see the domed roof of the Council of Ministers Building, where Lenin and Stalin had worked. Now President Yeltsin held office there. Sashenka had known Lenin and Stalin in the early years of Soviet power, Katinka remembered—and her obsession jolted her: she was relating to a woman whom she knew only from a photograph and a file.

“Can I help you, mademoiselle?” said the Tatar maître d’. “A table with a view?”

“She’s with me,” said a voice behind her. Pasha Getman towered awkwardly over her. He moved clumsily and none of his clothes quite seemed to fit even though they looked expensive. The trousers were too baggy; the shirt, open necked, was wrongly buttoned, yet he exuded cosmopolitan confidence, and Odessan haughtiness with the pungent smoke of his oversized cigar.

Katinka had spoken to Roza after her meeting with the Magician and the Marmoset, and Roza had asked her to talk to Pasha, who had agreed to meet her straight away.

She was now not sure if he would embrace her. Both leaned toward each other but at the last minute he withdrew and offered his hand. Katinka blushed but was rescued by the maître d’.

“Welcome, Gospodin Getman! Your usual table in the alcove? Sir and mademoiselle, please follow me!”

Getman’s three bulky, shaven-headed bodyguards, tattoos peeping over their shirt collars, sat at the neighboring table. Katinka followed Pasha, noticing that he walked like a juggling bear with his paw-like hands ready to catch the balls.

“I haven’t got long,” said Pasha when they were seated.

“I didn’t know you were here. I thought you were in London.”

“Water?” Pasha reached for the water and spilled it. Waiters rushed to clear up but he did not seem to care. “I came home again. There’s going to be an election soon. The President needs our help—we must keep out the Communists. Mama’s on her way back from London. You understand that this is her last chance to find out who she really is. Imagine not knowing, Katinka! I knew my parents so well, so intimately, but she has always this burning sense of loss inside her. Do you know your parents?”

“Of course.”

“Happy childhood?”

She nodded, unable to conceal her pleasure in the thought. “My father’s a doctor. They really love me and we live with my grandparents in their old house.”

“We’re so lucky, you and I. Now I know you’ve been talking to Mama”—Katinka was amused that this bear of a billionaire in his mid-thirties still called his mother “Mama”—“but I’d like to know myself what you’ve found so far.”

As Katinka explained, Pasha’s mobile phone continued to ring. Once the bodyguards took a call and gave him a message; a red-haired girl in a leather miniskirt and Chanel boots and belt greeted him; and several businessmen came to shake hands—but navigating these interruptions, she managed to reveal her story. While she talked, Pasha leaned forward and listened to her, chewing on his cigar, his sharp, dark eyes looking straight into hers.

“So Satinov does know something but he’s very old and mysterious. Typical of that generation for whom secrecy is a fetish. You’re doing well.”

Katinka flushed with pleasure. “But the documents were incomplete and I met with the KGB to discuss the ones that were missing and I’m so embarrassed—and of course, I told them it wasn’t possible—but they asked…”

“Asked what?”

“For money! It’s disgusting!”