I went into a room with painted ceilings, looking for a drink. The bar was massive, twenty feet long, covered in bouquets of white flowers, white roses, white peonies, and along the rest of the surface, gold-colored tubs filled with ice and champagne bottles. Magnums of champagne, Krug, the really good stuff I knew about from Tolya’s club, and ranks of glittering crystal. Tons of caviar was heaped on ice in gold and silver bowls, glistening black and gray and pearly and golden. I thought about Tolya’s caviar deals, and wondered if this was part of it.
Waiters, dressed in black knee pants and tailcoats and those stupid white wigs, served it up on gold plates, and I was betting they were real.
As a child, I’d seen a news item on TV about a dinner at Buckingham Palace attended by the Soviet ambassador where all the plates were made of gold. It was intended to show us how decadent the West was, but my mother and her pals turned down the sound of propaganda and peered at the pictures to work out if there really were gold plates in London.
Drink in hand, mask on my face, I went out to the terrace, scanning the crowd for Greg. I had his picture in my pocket.
The night was warm and damp. The band was playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” with what seemed to me an epic sense of irony. Somewhere close by I could hear a helicopter. On the walls of the tent, I could see the outlines of people dancing, like a puppet show.
“Are you Artie Cohen?” a warm low voice said.
She was tall, slim, brown hair, cut so it fell to her chin, bangs to her eyebrows. She lit a cigarette without any fuss, her hands long, thin, her gestures small and efficient. With her other hand, she pushed the cat mask that covered her eyes and nose onto the top of her head. Her eyes were gray.
“I’m Fiona Colquhoun,” she said.
In spite of a serious expression and not much make-up, or maybe because of it, she was pretty sexy. Plain long black dress, three strands of pearls around her long neck. No wedding ring.
“Le tout Londongrad, eh? I shouldn’t smoke.” She tossed the cigarette into an urn on the terrace and said, “Let’s walk a bit, shall we?” She led me towards a separate building out on the lawns, a huge barn of a place, but beautiful and mostly made of glass.
“What do they call this?”
“The Orangery,” she said.
“You know about this stuff?”
“I was always a history nut, old houses, my grandmother used to take me. This one was a greenhouse.”
“Some greenhouse.”
“Yup, you want to go in? There’s carvings by a guy called Grinling Gibbons, it was so beautiful they probably used it for supper in the summer, and entertaining their pals. Or shall we sit out here?” Gracefully she sat on a marble bench and I sat next to her.
“I needed some air,” she said. “Russian sentimentality makes me gag.”
“You knew my name?”
“I took a flyer on it being you.”
She didn’t offer any other information, so I played along.
From a little silver purse she took a fresh pack and lit up again.
“You smoke a lot.”
“Indeed.”
“It will kill you.”
“Give me a bloody break. My God, look at that,” she added, starting to laugh.
The guy passing, probably an old Russian thug from the 90s, had been recycled for respectability, and was stuffed into his tails and white tie.
Like a penguin looking for his mate, he waddled across the terrace. I was drinking too much. I thought I saw Gorbachev. The real one. Not a guy in costume. Fiona followed my glance.
“You know who all these people are?”
“Some,” she said.
Fiona sat quietly beside me, and when I asked, she pointed them out, relaying names, the football players, fashion designers, wives, mistresses belonging to oligarchs, the businessmen and members of various factions and feuds, British politicians in hock to Russian money. Politics inside politics, she said, like Russian wooden dolls, people who had been allies in Russia, were enemies in London.
“Feuds?”
“Of course. Some of them are creatures of the Kremlin and owe it like they were vassals, others want to overturn it. You’ve heard of Berezovsky, Abramovich, Deripaska. I think your country just refused Mr Deripaska a visa.”
The band moved onto “Ruby Tuesday”.
“You’re wondering how I knew your name?” said Fiona Colquhoun.
“I guessed.” I looked around for Larry Sverdloff.
“Right,” she said, as if she understood. “Good. Then we know what we’re about.”
“These people, at this party, you know them?”
“It’s my job. You’re looking for somebody?”
“Could be,” I said. Suddenly the band stopped. People poured out of the tent towards the house.
“What’s going on?”
“A speech, I imagine,” said Fiona.
“You knew Valentina Sverdloff?”
“I met her once or twice. Let’s go inside.”
In a long room lined with windows, hung with chandeliers, lit with candles, over it all was an immense screen, widescreen, like a movie theater with images of Valentina projected on it. I didn’t want to look. There wasn’t any choice, it hung there over everything, lit up by thousands of candles and dozens of chandeliers. A thousand people looked up.
Then the slide show stopped. A picture of Val was frozen on the screen. In a silver gown, diamonds in her ears, face made up, hair done, she barely looked like herself.
But she knew how to pose. She had earned some money modeling when she was in high school, she had hated it. In that picture, ten feet high, behind the eyes, I could see the self-mockery. The whole crowd was looking at her like she was an icon. And then she spoke. I thought my heart would crack.
“Hello, everybody,” said Valentina. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you. But I want to say hi and thank you for coming and for giving to my foundation.”
From the screen she talked about the girls she tried to rescue in Russia, the little ones, the older ones, girls who worked train stations as prostitutes, some as young as ten or eleven. She asked her friends to give what they could, she smiled and smiled, and then she thanked everyone in that husky voice. She thanked her father and her uncle and blew them kisses. For a few minutes she talked, and when she stopped all that remained was her image on the screen.
She had made the video because even before she was murdered, she knew she wasn’t coming for the party, though Tolya had gone on believing she’d show up. There was something in London that Val hated more, or that scared her more than she had said.
Next to me stood Fiona Colquhoun, not watching the screen, watching me instead. Around us, people began to weep. One woman with a long face cried uncontrollably.
There followed more speeches, by Larry Sverdloff, by friends of Valentina, people sobbing, talking English, Russian. A choir in Russian peasant outfits got up and sang some old folk songs and it was corny but haunting, and I felt I had to get away but I couldn’t. And I remembered something.
One night, when was it? Last year? On a cold fall night we had been walking by the river, me and Val. She was wearing a heavy green sweater and jeans, and she started singing in Russian. She had been learning, she said. She wanted to surprise Tolya. And she sang the old Russian songs, revolutionary anthems, other stuff, and we walked and I had been glad it was dark and she couldn’t see me crying.
“I think you wanted to meet Greg,” said Fiona whispering into my ear while the speeches finished and people began to leave the room.
Where?”
“I saw him go out towards the band,” she said, and took my hand and led me to a white tent where inside the band started up again and people took to the floor.