Sometimes as we turned I saw Mitzi sitting at the end of the bar, the rainbow colours of its lights playing across her face. She hadn't looked in this direction since my partner and I had moved onto the small raised floor.
'Can you get me in?' I asked Claudette.
'To see him?'
'Yes.'
'Why should I?' Her eyes were huge, glinting with the sheen of black sable under snowlight as she watched me, amused, I think, because I couldn't dance with this serpentine grace that she possessed, give me a chance for God's sake, she was the soul of Africa and I was a runt from London.
'Because I want to do business with him,' I said. 'Mitzi said you might do me a favour.'
We were talking about Vishinsky. He was in the private room across there behind the podium where the band was playing. Vishinsky the Cougar. He had come in twenty minutes ago, two of his bodyguards pushing open the twin gilded doors and leading him along the wall past the rose-shaded lamps where people sat with their drinks. Reproduction? They could be original – this was a rich man's haunt, appointed with an understated splendour: the owner was French, Mitzi had told me.
'I'm needed at the bar,' she had also told me when Vishinsky and his entourage had swept into the place. 'Go and dance with the black girl – her name's Claudette. Tell her I want her to help you.'
We turned, turned again, borne along by the music while these huge eyes watched me, never looked away. More than one man, I thought, must have drowned in them.
I didn't think Mitzi was needed at the bar. I thought she'd got cold feet at the last minute. We'd been sitting at a table near the doors waiting for Vishinsky to come in, and she'd said she would intercept him and introduce me, but the very pace of his entrance had made any interruption seem unthinkable, and she hadn't even got up.
'Mitzi thought I might do you a favour?' Claudette asked me.
'Yes.'
'I don't owe her.'
'So will you do me a favour anyway?'
I didn't put a price on it yet. She'd do that if she decided to.
'You say you want to do business with him.'
'Yes.'
'What kind of business?'
I made the gesture of looking around before I spoke. 'I've discovered a source of sable.' The Cougar's reket was mainly protection, Mitzi had told me in the fast food cafe, but he also dealt in sable.
A smile glowed in the huge black eyes. 'Vishinsky is the source of sable.'
'Not all of it.'
'All of the highest quality pelts. The rest aren't worth his attention.'
We turned again, her arms undulating like willow boughs stirred by a summer breeze. 'I'm told he's taken by you,' I said.
'Sometimes he pays me attention, yes. But that doesn't mean I can talk any kind of business with him.'
'I don't need you to. Just get me in there and introduce me.'
'You make it sound so easy. That's because you don't know the Cougar.' The music stopped and we moved to the edge of the floor.
'Would you like a drink?'
She glanced across at the patron, who was standing near the bar, hands tucked behind his dinner jacket, small spade beard, eyes everywhere. 'I think so,' Claudette said.
She asked for a Fernet Branca; I ordered Narzan, no ice. She watched me with her chin on her folded hands.
'No,' I said, 'I don't know the Cougar. So tell me about him.'
'There isn't very much one can tell about any of those people, without getting beaten up, maybe killed, according to what one has said, and to whom.'
'Then just tell me why you can't introduce me to this one.'
She shrugged, her bare ebony shoulders lifting and falling like a ballet dancer's. 'It might go all right, but then it might not. It would depend on his mood. If I took you in there and he didn't think the business you discussed with him was worth his time, he would have me beaten up for wasting it. What he would do with you I don't know.'
I thought it was time to change my mind, not wait any longer. 'I'm not asking you to help me without recompense, Claudette, if that's how you'd prefer things.'
The heavy gold earrings swung as she shook her head. 'Men don't understand what happens to a woman when she gets beaten up. The bruises are nothing.'
And suddenly it was over. Unknowingly she had presented the one argument that stopped me in my tracks. Before going out on a mission I always tell the clearance officer the same thing: my only bequest is to Home Safe, and when he asks me if it's a bank I tell him no, it's the abused women's shelter in Shoreditch.
'Then we'll talk,' I said, 'about something else.'
It took me ten minutes, a little more, to assemble a full picture of the huge ornate room in my mind as we sat talking – had she been born in Africa, and if so, how could her grasp of formal Russian be so perfect? And where had she learned to dance like that?
The patron hadn't moved, was still near the bar, still watching the girls, some of them drinking with members, some of them dancing. There were two heavy-bodied men in dinner jackets, standing and watching the room, like the patron. Bodyguards wouldn't be formally dressed. There were fourteen of them standing around, five of them in black jump suits, six in striped track tops, two in clean crisp karate gis and black belts, and one in a white workout suit with a gold cougar emblazoned over the left pectoral, like all Vishinsky's team – he'd brought six of them in with him, so there would be five inside the private room behind the podium. This one was guarding the door.
Two of the mob were dancing, one with a Japanese girl in a jade kimono; the men wore London-tailored silk dinner jackets and both sported carnations. Another mafiya boss was at a table against the red velvet-covered wall, sitting with a Russian woman of great beauty. I could tell which bodyguards were in whose employ by their focused attention.
'How long have you been in Moscow?'
'Five or six years.' The black sable eyes watching me as Claudette sipped her Fernet. 'And you?'
'Since the Reds bit the dust.'
In a moment she said, 'I would advise you to think again.'
I'd looked twice at the door of the private room, often enough to clue her in. This wasn't important in terms of security: she knew why I'd come here. The man guarding the door wasn't big, but thick-necked and a degree muscle-bound: there was too much bulge under the skin-tight suit.
'Think again about what?' I asked Claudette.
'Trying to see the Cougar. That bodyguard would stop you anyway, and if you tried to insist, he'd have you thrown out of the club. There are five more inside. They are not gentle.'
'I appreciate your concern.'
'And hopefully my advice.'
'The thing is,' I said, 'it's very important I talk to this man. Strictly entre nous, millions are involved.' She'd know I wasn't talking in rubles. 'Another Fernet?'