‘I do not need money now,’ he said as Vasya parked the Range Rover. ‘Money has become like toilet paper.’
I looked him in the eye. He knew it wasn’t true. He was still playing a game.
‘But I do have story for you,’ he added.
Together we watched the puppy chase pigeons along the promenade. It was a handsome creature with intelligent eyes, a muscular body and a dark red coat.
‘He’s a corgi, yes?’ I asked as it gambolled in the balmy air.
‘The best. His genes are from your old queen’s dog Monty,’ he told me, explaining how he’d bought the puppy from a ‘top high-class’ Kennel Club breeder, hired France’s leading trainer and entered it in Geneva’s prestigious Exposition Canine. ‘Trainer spent ten days with him, learning Swiss technique and what judges like: good posterior, strong back quarters. All very expensive but no matter, all was for good ending. My puppy dog won best in show.’
Purebred dogs had become the latest status symbol for the powerful. Putin owned both an Akita Inu and a Central Asian Shepherd dog. His prime minister kept two English setters, a Golden Retriever and also – in a respectful nod – another Central Asian Shepherd dog. His defence minister had a Mongolian Tuva and his press secretary a Pomeranian spitz. Now Dmitri – like both Roman Abramovich and the First Deputy Chairman of the Russian Government – had a Pembrokeshire corgi. Every time it tumbled over its oversized paws, Dmitri barked at Vasya, ordering him to look after his ‘prize-winner’.
‘I didn’t know you were interested in dogs,’ I said.
‘Not so much,’ he admitted with a shrug.
‘Then why?’
‘Why?’ he repeated as if the answer were obvious. ‘So people in Moscow say that Dmitri Denisovich raises top dog. So they not say Dmitri Denisovich is dust.’
As well as money, Dmitri had lost more than a little of his edge. He still strolled about with haughty self-confidence, thrusting out his chest, flaunting his newest Rolex, but he no longer had the air of a fighter. The wild wolf tattoo that had leapt across his torso, bringing onto the surface that which lay beneath it, seemed to be at rest after a long hunt. The change in him also affected our relationship of course. Yet he remained a survivor, and in more ways than I then imagined.
When he sent Vasya off for vodka and champagne (the latter for me as I’d said it was too early to drink), he chatted about Gorbachev’s infamous successor.
‘To common Russians – to bydlo – Putin is superman,’ he told me with new and surprising candidness. ‘But any clever dick apparatchik could do same job.’
‘That’s not what you said before.’
He ventured that Putin was a symptom, not a cause. Another charmless and little-known bureaucrat could have become an action-man president, posing without a shirt, practising judo and scheming to reassert the nation’s power. In Russia politics is simple, he said vote for the leader and then move on.
‘No oligarch likes him or his KGB. You know about Berezovsky?’
I nodded. Boris Berezovsky was the oligarch who had made Putin, then turned against him.
‘After he died, Putin told other businessmen, “Support me or say goodbye like Boris”.’[23]
‘And he took a cut for himself?’ I asked.
‘Fifty per cent,’ Dmitri told me, a figure that I found hard to believe. Surely no individual – even in such an audacious kleptocracy – could pocket so much of a nation’s wealth.
‘Now when we see his face on TV, bragging about latest Russian victory or new nuclear torpedo, we think, “Oh God, not this thief again. Time to leave country and learn new language.”’ Dmitri sighed and added, ‘For sure, I could not tell you this in Moscow.’
Again I wondered aloud about patriotism, and how Putin’s actions often seemed at odds with the national good.
‘He is proud to be Russian,’ replied Dmitri. ‘But with his billions who needs to love his people?’
As morning turned to afternoon, and Montreux residents strolled to silver service tables at La Véranda, Dmitri swigged vodka from the bottle. Vasya fed the dog morsels of steak tartare that he’d fetched from the Brasserie des Alpes.
‘Cut it up so he does not choke,’ ordered Dmitri.
It was pleasant in the sun, rolling Moët bubbles across my tongue, waiting for Gorby. But I couldn’t relax with Moscow, the Solovetsky Islands and the homeless shelters of Budapest not so very far away.
‘I will survive crack-up,’ said Dmitri, all but reading my mind.
‘What crack-up?’ I asked. I couldn’t imagine what he might say next.
‘Crack-up of Europe,’ he replied. ‘End of Europe. End of Euro. End time coming and I will survive.’
Doomsday fears were as old as religion, as old as man. On the day of the Last Judgement, Jesus will descend from Heaven to battle Masih ad-Dajjal and Vishnu will ride a white horse to end the Kali Yuga. But before that day, Europe really was at another liminal moment, on the threshold of a perilous new age.
‘I’m not joking,’ insisted Dmitri, in his cups yet with eyes full of brightness. ‘My money is now in land, and sheeps.’
‘Sheep?’ I repeated. ‘In Russia?’ I’d heard rumours of unnamed oligarchs buying vast tracts of Siberian forest. One was said to have acquired a retired Soviet missile silo and converted it into a hardened bolthole. Likewise a few hundred wealthy Americans – including hedge-fund managers and dot.com executives – had bankrolled extreme makeovers on Atlas missile silos in Kansas and Wyoming. But I couldn’t imagine any of them linked to sheep farms.
‘I won’t live in hole. I go away, for sure.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘New Zealand,’ answered Dmitri, lowering his voice in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I have Learjet on standby.’
‘You’ll need a pilot,’ I said.
‘Vasya is pilot,’ he replied, again with a twinkle as I hadn’t spotted the obvious. ‘Balls and brains,’ he said again, tapping his temple.
Dmitri explained that, in common with more than a thousand foreigners over the past decade, he’d purchased New Zealand residency. The process was easy enough, especially if one was willing to drop a couple of million into a 100-acre South Island property. He’d done just that, equipping it with solar panels, generators and thousands of rounds of ammunition. In exclusive chatrooms he’d then discussed second passports, gas masks, electrified fences and air filtration systems. He insisted that as many as half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires had taken out similar ‘doomsday insurance’.
‘But you once told me that man without a homeland is like a nightingale without song,’ I reminded him. Chelovek bez rodiny, kak solovei bez pesni.
‘I tell you, I will survive,’ he repeated with a shrug. ‘But why you not writing this in your notebook?’
On the lush lakeshore, over vintage champagne and nibbles of a Maï Thaï green curry takeaway, we talked about economic meltdown, plutonium half-life and the top ten DVD films needed to see out a nuclear winter. Vasya returned from town with another bottle and sat between us on the bench, the corgi dozing at his feet. Around five o’clock an old man walked out of the sun and seemed about to stop but then carried on towards Chillon Castle. As dusk gathered around us, and birds took to their evening roosts, it seemed less and less likely that Gorbachev would make an appearance.
23
Another critic, the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov – who’d called the president a ‘specialist in lying’ – was assassinated in 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin. Fresh flowers still appear every morning on the spot where he was gunned down. Every night the police sweep them away.