Hearing the whine of the hatch shutting on the waterline, he pads unhurriedly inside, into the vast oval of the owner’s quarters.
—
When he meets Lars, twenty minutes later on the pool deck, he is dressed and doused in Cartier Pasha.
It is pleasantly warm on the sheltered pool deck, in the November sunshine.
Lars stands when he sees Aleksandr coming towards him.
‘Good morning,’ he says.
Aleksandr says nothing, just pats the lawyer’s shoulder and sits down at the table.
Lars also sits. He is wearing linen trousers, a blue T-shirt, leather sandals. He was semi-holidaying at his villa on Corfu when Aleksandr phoned last night to say he was in the area, and asked for a meeting. He has not finished eating the omelette he was served.
‘Finish it,’ Aleksandr tells him.
Lars presses on with the omelette.
‘How are you?’ Aleksandr asks.
‘I’m okay,’ Lars says tactfully. ‘You?’
‘Not so good,’ Aleksandr admits.
Lars wipes his mouth with a stiff linen napkin.
‘The case in London?’ Lars asks.
Aleksandr shrugs, looks depressed.
The major legal action on which he embarked a year ago has just failed. He had sued a fellow Russian and former protégé in a London court. He maintained that this man, Adam Spassky, had swindled him, many years earlier, out of an enormous amount of money. He was suing him for that money, a ten-figure sum. The judgment, issued only last week, was emphatically in favour of Spassky. Not only that, it had explicitly questioned Aleksandr’s own integrity. ‘It’s not just that we lost it,’ he says. ‘It’s what the judge said. That…whore.’
Lars nods. He says, ‘Yes, that was harsh.’
‘And totally untrue!’
‘Of course.’
‘How much do you think he paid her?’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ Lars says, privately doubtful that an English judge would be so easily for sale.
‘How much, do you think?’
Lars shrugs, unwilling to speculate.
And Aleksandr says, excitedly, ‘I was thinking — we should investigate her, find the money. Eh? It would destroy her. And then the whole thing would have to be heard again. And this time we would win, maybe. What do you think?’
‘It’s up to you,’ Lars says.
‘You think we should do that?’
Pressed, Lars says, ‘I’m not sure it would help.’
‘He paid her, fuck!’ Aleksandr shouts.
‘It’s possible.’
‘Did you hear what she said?’
‘Yes…’
‘She said I was a liar, fantasist…’
‘She didn’t use the word “liar”.’
‘Oh, she didn’t use the word! Fuck. She might as well have.’
‘The language was strong,’ Lars admits.
‘Until now,’ Aleksandr says, ‘I always believed in English justice.’
‘It’s not perfect,’ Lars says philosophically. ‘Nothing is.’
‘It’s rotten.’
‘I wouldn’t go so far…’
‘It’s fucking rotten…’
‘There’s not much we can do about it now,’ Lars says. He advised against the whole thing in the first place — it was, he had thought, obviously doomed. He had wanted no part of it. He does not mention that now. He says, ‘We have to look forward.’
Aleksandr almost laughs. ‘What is there to look forward to?’
Lars smiles, slightly sadly. He has finished the omelette and puts down his fork. ‘Life?’ he suggests. He is wearing very expensive sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames.
‘Life,’ Aleksandr murmurs, looking at the sea.
There is a longish silence.
‘Where do I stand?’ he asks sombrely. ‘Tell me.’
This is the purpose of the meeting — to take stock, now that the legal action has definitively failed. And Lars, the steward of his fortune, the lawyer who hid the assets in a labyrinth stretching from Andorra to the Dutch Antilles, says, after a few moments, ‘The picture is not very positive.’
That, Aleksandr already knows.
His principal asset, Rusferrex, once the world’s second-largest producer of iron ore, is worth nothing now. Fatally over-leveraged, it was sunk by the steep fall in the metal’s price, the end of the super-cycle, which Aleksandr had failed to foresee. Lars, and many others, had advised him against embarking on an ambitious, debt-fuelled expansion programme — anyone keeping half an eye on China could see the danger of that. Aleksandr wouldn’t listen. It never occurred to him that he might be wrong.
His other mining assets went down with Rusferrex in a net of interconnected accounts.
The Ukrainian airline he owns is in liquidation.
(‘The timing,’ as Lars put it, ‘was sub-optimal.’)
(Aleksandr’s less equivocal verdict: ‘It was a fucking stupid idea.’)
They talk for a while about the Moscow-based bank, whether that has any life left in it. No, seems to be the answer.
Then Lars says, ‘You do still have a number of significant assets, that I know of.’
‘Tell me.’
Lars takes a little scrap of paper from the pocket of his linen trousers. There seems to be some sort of list scrawled on it. He says, ‘The house in Surrey. The house in London. The Dassault Falcon. The villa in Saint Barthélemy. The Barbaresco estate and vineyards. And this yacht. All of these assets are held by offshore trusts and can be liquidated without tax liability,’ Lars adds. ‘Plus you have a minority stake in a Belarusian mobile-phone operator with subsidiaries in Moldova and Montenegro, worth perhaps twenty million sterling.’
Aleksandr says, ‘Oh, yes, that.’
‘Those shares are held by a trust in Gibraltar,’ Lars says.
‘Why do we have that?’ Aleksandr asks.
‘When you took over the lignite miner,’ Lars says.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You were going to spin it off.’
‘Yes.’
‘So those are your outstanding assets,’ Lars says. ‘Total value, about two hundred and seventy-five million sterling. I would estimate.’
A steward — not Mark — wheels a trolley over to them and pours coffee from a silver pot.
Lars thanks him.
They wait until the steward has withdrawn. Then Lars says, taking another scrap of paper from his pocket, ‘Now, the liabilities.’
Aleksandr releases several pellets of sweetener into his coffee. ‘Hit me,’ he says.
‘Legal fees — at least a hundred million and still increasing,’ Lars says.
This includes, though Lars does not spell it out, the two million pounds Aleksandr owes Lars’s own legal practice, itself an opaque trust domiciled in Liechtenstein.
Lars says, ‘Plus additional liabilities arising from ongoing litigation — another hundred million. That’s just an estimate,’ he tells him. ‘So let’s say two hundred million. Maybe a bit more. Which leaves you with.’ Lars, finally, takes off his sunglasses. The understated tan sharpens the blue of his eyes. He is in his mid-forties: he looks younger. He says, ‘Fifty to a hundred million?’
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.