Which is exactly what Lars was hoping would not happen.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Tell him I’ll be along in a while.’
When he presents himself, half an hour later, Enzo is there informing Aleksandr that he expects to dock in Monte Carlo at about midnight.
Lars sits down. He is wearing a sweater and his hair is still damp from the shower.
‘I had a phone call this morning,’ Aleksandr says, when Enzo has left, ‘from my solicitor in London.’ Aleksandr does not sound pleased.
Lars, eating scrambled egg, looks up quickly.
Aleksandr says, ‘They’ve heard from Ksenia’s lawyers, with her demands.’
‘Yes?’ Lars says, still eating hungrily. ‘What are they?’
‘The two houses…’
‘London and Saint Barthélemy?’
‘Yes.’
‘And…?’
‘And twenty-five million,’ Aleksandr says.
‘Sterling?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Lars says, forking egg into his mouth. ‘You’ll fight it?’
Aleksandr nods. He is drinking some sort of effervescent liquid — probably he too has a hangover. He looks, anyway, as though he did not sleep well. Actually, he looks as though he did not sleep at all.
‘It’s just an opening shot,’ Lars says. ‘They want to get more than ten, so they ask for twenty-five. They’ll settle for fifteen. And even that’s too much. Fight it,’ he advises. ‘Don’t go above ten.’
‘I will fight it,’ Aleksandr says.
Lars accepts some tea from the steward with the pot.
‘Don’t go above ten,’ he says again. The tea is extraordinary, the finest he has ever tasted — it is like some new thing; not tea at all, something finer, subtler, more intense. He says, ‘Is she aware of your…’ He is not sure how to put it. ‘Impaired position?’
For a moment Aleksandr says nothing. He is still staring at the sea, at the waves pursuing each other towards the grey horizon. He says, ‘I don’t know.’
‘So perhaps she doesn’t understand,’ Lars says, trying to be helpful, ‘that in asking for twenty-five she is in fact asking for…’
Everything you have, he was going to say.
‘You will have more money than me, Lars,’ Aleksandr says desolately, ‘at the end of this.’
Again unsure what to say — it may well be true — Lars just has another taste of his tea, and then says, after a few seconds, ‘We need to discuss the disposal of assets. As we agreed yesterday. The details.’
He looks at Aleksandr, worried that he may have upset him again.
Aleksandr seems okay.
He is eating grapes now — slowly and methodically tearing them from their stems and transferring them to his mouth.
Lars takes out one of his scraps of paper.
For the next hour they talk about the disposal of assets — the sale of the Dassault Falcon, and the Barbaresco estate, and the house in Surrey, and the super-yacht. For most of these assets, Lars has possible buyers in mind.
Aleksandr, eating grapes, is matter-of-fact. He seems more interested in the long green grapes than in the subject under discussion.
Lars expresses the hope that he will end up with some millions in cash, when everything is settled, as well as the shares in the Belarusian mobile-phone operator.
‘This isn’t the first time,’ Aleksandr says, ‘that I’ve been wiped out, you know, Lars.’
‘Ninety-eight, the Russian default?’ Lars ventures, still making notes.
‘Exactly.’
Lars is still writing. He says, ‘Yes, that must have been quite something.’
‘It was, sure,’ Aleksandr says.
Lars murmurs, his thoughts elsewhere, ‘Total mess, wasn’t it.’
‘Sure.’
In fact Aleksandr now thinks of that time with something like love. In his memory, it is one of the most vivid periods of his life, along with the period earlier in the decade when the Soviet Union just suddenly vanished, and he was in his early forties and already a fairly senior official in the Ministry of International Trade. All international trade had been handled by the ministry. The individual enterprises that might wish to trade internationally — most importantly in the natural-resources sector — just had no idea how to do so on their own, and had no access to trade finance. He saw the opportunity. Still, what happened next exceeded anything he might have imagined. For a while nothing seemed impossible. He set up his own bank, InTradeBank, to provide trade finance, and soon it was accumulating stakes in industrial enterprises — especially after the loans-for-shares scheme that financed the second election of Boris Yeltsin and transferred gargantuan portions of formerly state-owned industry into the ownership of a few men. Some ended up with oil, some with nickel, or aluminium, or Aeroflot. He ended up with iron. The Emperor of Iron. In just a few years he went from modestly pampered Soviet official to world’s number-one iron-ore magnate.
The default of ’98 didn’t actually wipe him out. It had the potential to; and though InTradeBank went under in a storm of litigation, he managed to save the Empire of Iron by secreting the shares in an offshore labyrinth — this was when Lars started to play his part — in trusts with mysterious names in the Cayman Islands, and other distant, tranquil places.
Aleksandr is sitting at the table staring, it seems, at something far away, over the horizon. Lars is still writing things down.
The panic of ’98. When he thought he might lose everything, and somehow managed to preserve it. His fiftieth birthday happened that summer, in the middle of the meltdown. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I want a party.’ Blenheim Palace hired for the occasion. A party for a thousand people. His hero, Rupert Murdoch, there. Helicopters on the lawn. In his prime, then. New woman on his arm: Ksenia. Fireworks. Those were the days.
Those were the days, my friend.
‘Those were the days, Lars,’ he murmurs.
Lars looks up. ‘When?’ he asks.
‘Then.’
4
And then it sinks, from light into darkness. Up there it was all sunlight, all sun-filled, squint-inducing blue. Then darkening. Deepening. Ever deeper, and ever darker. And then, suddenly, the wet November morning. The sodden land, still lurking in semi-darkness. It is the morning rush hour in south-east England, under a lid of weeping cloud. Headlights hurry along motorways. Houses huddle in dull towns. They are near now, as the jet descends. Drops of water smear across the window, through which he sees a sewage-treatment plant, wind-flattened grass, whizzing tarmac…
Last night they docked at Monte Carlo just after midnight.
The jet was already at Nice airport, having flown in from Venice the previous day.
Early this morning it took off for London. Lars, humiliatingly, had to lend him ten thousand euros for the fuel. The pilot had phoned and said, embarrassed, that Total were wanting payment up front.
Smoothly, the plane is taxiing. The English morning is very real now. It is right there, on the other side of the window’s oval, where the rain is steadily falling.
The small terminal building shines in the twilight.
He was not supposed to see this place again.
The plane stops with a slight jerk.
Ten minutes later he is in the Maybach, on his way into London, slumming it on the packed tarmac with everyone else — visibility is too poor, he was told, to use the helicopter. So it takes an hour of rain-lashed traffic-jamming to reach the Mayfair office, where the solicitor is waiting for him.
Aleksandr is late. He apologises and they sit down. The offices — Iset Holdings, it says on the polished plate next to the front door — are in an eighteenth-century town house near Park Lane. The room they are in is on the first floor — high ceiling, heavy hardwood doors, some contemporary office clutter too.