‘It’s beautiful.’ She kissed him, and edged herself onto the arm of his chair. They admired the ikon together.
‘Black market, in Moscow. An old woman. She must have kept it under her mattress for decades.’ She seemed to disapprove.
‘I gave her a decent price, Sis, I really did. She’s suddenly rich, and in dollars.’ There was a knock at the door and the imperturbable figure of Stillman, the butler, appeared; an adult come to summon children.
‘Your guests have begun arriving, Madam,’ he announced sepulchrally. Lock, sipping at his champagne, controlled a giggle.
‘Thank you, Stillman — I’ll be right out.’ The door closed behind the butler. Beth sighed, but it was a noise of pleasure, then stood up, smoothing the sheath of her dress. ‘Come to lunch tomorrow. I want time to talk to you …’ Then she smiled, touching his hand with her fingertips. ‘No, just talk. I am going to enjoy my party!’
She glided to the door and he followed her. There were gowned women, black-tied men in the reception hall, where the lights seemed suddenly stage-bright. The grand staircase climbed to the gallery, the chandelier glittered, hired-in maids took topcoats and wraps. A few politically incorrect furs, swathes of silk scarves and bright shawls. Jewellery gleamed as if the bare-shouldered women posed deliberately beneath the flattery of the chandelier. Beth squeezed his hand, then floated forward confidently to greet her guests.
Lock took a cold glass of champagne from a passing tray, relieved and glad. Almost at once, a powerful lobbyist bore down on him and he, too, was drawn into the eddies and whirlpools of power and money and pleasure, the elements of the occasion.
The suitcase lay open on the bed; forlorn in appearance only because Vorontsyev knew what had happened to its owner, lying in his underclothes in the mortuary of the Grainger Foundation Hospital. He had sat on one of the large room’s upright chairs for ten minutes, staring at the suitcase, aware of Marfa’s sniffles and the flatulence of the central heating pipes. Then he knew that the suitcase, packed before Rawls was summoned or taken to his appointment with a professional hit man, had been searched. Expertly, delicately — but searched nonetheless.
There was no briefcase, no Filofax. There was a suit still in the wardrobe, together with a pair of shoes and some underwear, and little else except the toilet bag and its contents in the bathroom. Anonymous. It was too anonymous. There should have been a briefcase, papers, a passport, other things.
He picked up the telephone. Unlit, the room was shadowy with the snowblown day outside the window. He pressed for the cashier.
‘I want to know whether Mr Allan Rawls left anything in your safe — yes, the dead man. Yes, the police.’ His identity had little effect. It was a measure of the passing of an aristocracy. A revolution had occurred and people were no longer cowed by KGB or police. They genuflected before other, imported, gods Amex Gold Cards, money, well-cut suits, fast cars. He was only the police and no longer counted here, in the best hotel in Novyy Urengoy where, uncorrupt, he could not afford a room.
‘Mr Rawls put nothing in the hotel safe,” came the reply.
He put down the telephone. Marfa came out of the bathroom.
‘Found any pills your family can use?’
She frowned, then nodded.
‘He must have had trouble sleeping over here. He got some tablets from the hospital, apparently.’ She rattled them, then put them in her pocket. Marfa’s sister-in-law had trouble sleeping.
The gas company injury insurance and the disability pension paid to Marfa’s brother were inadequate to meet the demands of the town’s new Westernised economy. He’d lost an arm in a rig accident. Soon, they’d have to move somewhere where it was cheaper to live.
‘I have trouble sleeping over here,’ he murmured.
‘Nothing else, sir?’ She slumped into a chair, and then at once was aware that her posture made her appear exhausted and sat bolt upright, leaning eagerly forward. Her black woollen scarf reached almost to the pale carpet, and swathed her throat like the folds of a python. Her small, narrow, pretty face was already clouding with the onset of her cold.
‘No, nothing. Listen, take the next couple of days off-‘ She made as if to protest but he held up his hand warningly. ‘You’ve got a cold coming. I don’t care how much you want to put our drug-smuggling friends out of circulation. One sneeze at the wrong moment and you’d blow the whole thing! So, don’t plead with me.’ She was angry, her frustration that of a child — or someone deeply just. Innocent, anyway. ‘OK? You’ll just have to leave us incompetent males to tie the parcel.’ He smiled.
Eventually, after her face seemed to have wrestled itself into acquiescence, she said: ‘Agreed. Just don’t cock it up, sir.’ It appeared she was about to add a homily of some kind; probably concerning the dead or damaged victims of the heroin operation, their bereaved families. He really needed her on the drugs raid.
How many of his people could he really trust not to fire off a warning shot that would took like an accident or the result of over-stretched nerves — or sound a car horn to warn the pushers and the suppliers? ‘What about this business, sir?’ she added, gesturing at the room. To her, it was a matter of indifference; a crime among the rich with only well-heeled victims.
Vorontsyev rubbed his hand through his greying hair. ‘Who knows? He was searched and stripped of everything by his killer.
The same man must have searched this room and removed his briefcase and any papers. Agreed?’
‘Just a minute, sir-‘ She sneezed, to her own anger. She pulled the telephone off the bedside table and returned to her chair. Consulting her notebook, she dialled a number. Her impatient breathing was loud in the room.
‘Antipov?’ she asked. ‘Police — yes, it’s me. You’re the night commissionaire at the Gogol. I don’t care if I woke you up, I’ve got some questions for you.’ She paused, listening. ‘Good. An American guest at the hotel, Mr Rawls — medium height, dark hair, small build, dark topcoat … he left the hotel around two or two-thirty this morning. Did he ask you to get him a cab?’
She sniffed with exasperation. ‘How many guests are in and out at that time? Look, we know you’re on the take from the whores, do you want me to come around and ask you about that? Right. You remember …? Good. Taxi. You know the driver — what? Noskov. Address? Cab number?’ She scribbled in the notebook perched on her knee. ‘What? Yes, I see. Don’t leave town, someone will be around this evening to take a statement.’
She put the receiver down loudly. Expelled an angry, mucusthick breath at the ceiling.
‘Well?’
‘I’ll check on the driver, sir — after I’ve had a couple of aspirin and a lie-down!’
‘Was there anything else?*
‘Antipov said he thought Rawls was going to get into a limousine.
A black Merc. It had been waiting outside the hotel for half an hour or more. But it wasn’t for Rawls. It just drove off in the same direction, following the taxi.’
TWO
An American Tragedy
‘You know what’s wrong? You guys from State — and there’s no offence in what I’m saying, nothing personal — but you should all butt out and let guys like me and Billy Grainger go in there with a free hand!’ The CEO of an oil exploration company had Lock backed into a panelled corner of the vast dining room, so that his head was almost resting against the large splash of a Jackson Pollock. ‘I mean — you guys with your handouts and your Harvard outlook, where’s that going to benefit us or the damned Russians either?’