Sashenka

“How much?” asked Pasha.

“I told them it was ridiculous.”

“Look,” said Pasha, “I don’t mean to sound…I’m older than you so…I’m sorry I lost my temper in London. Mama told me off. But you’re so unworldly. I meet a lot of greedy girls. I understand you’re not like that. Mama says too that you’re not doing this for the money—that you genuinely want to help us. So I hope you’ll keep working on this day and night. How much do they want?”

“But we shouldn’t pay them,” Katinka objected. “Not the Organs! These are not decent people.”

“Just tell me how much they’ve asked for.”

“They mentioned…it’s so much, it’s a crime and they’re Mafiosi…,” she sighed. “Fifteen thousand dollars. A sin! What has happened to Russians these days?”

Pasha shrugged, the juggling paws opening and closing. “Well, this is my gift to Mama. Truth is expensive, but I think family is priceless. Understand that, understand everything. I’ll pay it.”

“No.”

“Stop telling me what to do!” he growled and crumpled up the tablecloth, almost sending all the cups to the floor. “It’s my money, and we need their information.”

“Well, OK…,” Katinka said at last. “And there’s one other thing. Satinov gave me this and said I must meet this person and not leave it too long.” She handed over a scrap of paper.

“But this is a Tbilisi number. In Georgia.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? You must go immediately, Katinka.”

“Now?”

“Sure, pick up your passport and suitcase from the hotel. When you get back, I’ll give you the cash and you can meet your KGB crooks.” He dialed on his cell phone. “It’s me. Book a flight to Tbilisi for this afternoon. Four o’clock? Fine. Ekaterina Vinsky. Put her in the Metechi Palace Hotel. Bye.” He called to the next table. “Hey, Tiger!” One of the bodyguards lumbered over. “Take Katinka back to the hotel and then on to Sheremetyevo. Right now.”

13

It was already dark in Tbilisi—once known as Tiflis—when Katinka arrived at the airport, a bazaar of shouting taxi drivers, gunmen, traders, soldiers and footpads. But there was a driver waiting for her with a sign that read Vinsky—and a Volga that apparently could only be started with two wires and a hummed song. As they drove into town, the gunshots of a small wild land in the midst of a civil war ricocheted over the half-lit city. The Metechi Palace Hotel, an ugly modern construction with glass elevators and a big open foyer with ranks of green metal balconies reaching up toward a giant skylight, was patrolled by Georgian gunmen in glittery gun holsters toting battered Kalashnikovs.

Leaving her bags at the hotel, Katinka caught a taxi into the city, passing through checkpoints manned by militiamen of motley uniform belonging to any of several private armies. The police themselves looked shabby and lost in their own city. The buildings were grandly decayed, and the streets had the flavor of a Levantine dream of a Paris that never was.

Katinka had never been to Georgia—her family spent their holidays in Sochi on the Black Sea—but she had heard a lot about it, of course: the fruit basket, the wine barrel, the playboy capital, the jewel in the crown, the pleasure dome of the Soviet Imperium with its luscious harvests of grapes and vegetables, its sulphurous Borzhomi water in those famous green bottles, its earthy red wines, its privileged, corrupt Communist bosses who lived like sultans, its argumentative intellectuals and its flashy Casanovan lovers. But Georgia had its dark side too. It had produced Stalin and Beria—and other famous Communists with unpronounceable, slightly ridiculous Georgian names: Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Abel Yenukidze—and Marshal Hercules Satinov.

The taxi took her right to the city center through Freedom Square (once Yerevan Square under the Tsar, then Beria Square, then Lenin Square) and into the broad and handsome Rustaveli Avenue (Golovinsky during Tsarist times) with its theaters and palaces. The driver did not know the way to the house she wanted: he shouted at people to ask. He turned the car round, oblivious to the hooting traffic, and showed her the burnt-out wreck of the Tbilisi Hotel, once the grandest south of Moscow. Finally they stopped on a steep cobbled hill, beneath a church with a round tower in the Georgian Orthodox style, and the driver pointed into the dark.

“There!”

Katinka paid him in dollars then walked carefully down the darkened street. Behind high walls the mansions were embraced by long-fingered vines, their courtyards overhung by flower-draped balconies where laughter and lanterns flickered. A bearded man with the thick white hair that Georgians never seem to lose held up a lantern.

“Where are you going? Are you lost?”

She saw he had a shotgun but did not feel afraid. “Café Biblioteka?” she asked.