‘And your mother, how did she get to be here?’
‘She was a member of a choral group that travelled to Italy in the sixties. She met my father after one of the performances at a party and the rest is history.’
‘And she’s never been back?’
‘No. She still has relatives in Perm. Her parents died some years ago.’
‘That must have been hard.’
‘She doesn’t talk about it much. Somehow she put it all behind her, put down roots and a family here. Do you have a family back in Leningrad?’
Misha shook his head.
‘My father was a refusenik.’
Ilaria frowned.
‘He was Jewish… trained as a doctor. The authorities refused him permission to emigrate and then stripped him of his job. I only have vague memories of him. He found a job as a street cleaner and a month or two later was arrested for supposedly making a joke about some communist official… six years hard labour in a gulag. He died pretty much broken a couple of years after his release and my mother two years ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ilaria.
‘Your mother was lucky.’
‘Yes… and your friend?’
‘Ivan is as close as there is to a brother to me. Our mothers met in the play park when we were barely out of prams… school… conscription… Afghanistan… you name it.’
Misha took a bite of the bruschetta that the waiter had placed between them.
‘This is really good,’ he said, and took another bite. It tasted so fresh. ‘And the modelling, did you find them or they find you?’ he said, changing the subject.
‘Spotted at a college fashion show. Only showroom stuff, though, and the odd bit of catalogue work. This isn’t my career of choice. But it neatly fills the financial gaps. It’s good for contacts, though.’
That was something Misha did understand; if you didn’t have svyazi, you were nowhere.
‘Which brings me to the reason, the official reason,’ he corrected himself, ‘I invited you this evening. Would you be a buyer and fashion coordinator for me, run my Milan office, not that I have one at the moment… set it up? I can’t promise to pay much to start, but as I’ve said there is a massive opportunity here, and not just one.’ He had already begun to think of other possibilities. Wasn’t Russia short of just about everything?
‘To the Soviet there is no such thing as a consumer, only the proletariat, but when the proletariat,’ he said mockingly, ‘start spending…’ He didn’t finish the sentence. ‘There are fortunes to be made… if you can leverage the system.’
‘And what about you?’ she cut in, half teasing.
‘Oh, the biggest fortune of them all, of course,’ he said, joking. It was not something he had thought about in any depth until now; making money yes, but not serious money. They fell silent for a moment. ‘But not until you accept this job. That will be the first step. It will be hard work. As I say, not much pay to start… we wheel and we deal.’
‘So, what do you think, Ilaria?’ Misha knew he was taking a risk with someone he hardly knew, but he decided to go with his instinct as he had on so many other occasions.
‘Do I get a contract or anything?’
Misha took a serviette and wrote down a number and signed it.
‘Will that do?’
She looked at him, slightly embarrassed, before breaking into a broad smile.
‘I think that will do fine. When would you want me to start?’
‘Tomorrow. I’m heading back to Leningrad in the morning. If this goes down as well as I expect, I’ll be back on the phone to you in the next few days and you can put together the next order with Luigi.
‘And one more thing.’ He reached into his inside pocket and fished out two small 35mm film cassettes.
‘The shots from today?’
‘Not quite.’ He handed her the new-looking film case. ‘These are the photos from today. Can you get them back to the showroom and developed by eleven tomorrow morning?’
She nodded.
‘And this one…’ it was obviously a lot older than the first, the casing duller. ‘Do you know a private photographer who could develop this? Eight by tens. Some of them may be partly exposed.’
‘Yes, of course.’ She looked at him questioningly. ‘A bit cloak and dagger?’
‘Maybe, but the less you know about this the better. When you speak to the photographer, make sure he understands you want the negatives and all the photos back. He’s not to keep any copies.’
‘Can I ask what they are of?’
‘To be honest, I don’t know, but the people who have been after them don’t play around.’
Chapter 10
LENINGRAD
The return flight was uneventful. A distance that under the old Soviet had seemed almost infinite was suddenly commutable. Still, Misha did not think the average Russian would be making the journey any time soon.
In the baggage hall at Pulkova he and Ivan stacked six tightly packed canvas bags on two airport trolleys and pushed them towards the military customs point. An officer waved them over to a long steel table.
‘Your declaration,’ he said abruptly, snapping his fingers. Misha handed over the list of items and the invoice from Venti.
‘Import permit?’
Misha handed him the permit. The officer looked at it briefly.
‘Unzip the top bag.’
The custom’s man rifled through its contents, glancing occasionally at the permit. He held it up to the light.
‘This permit is a forgery. You will need to leave these bags here.’ He handed back the invoices.
That nagging doubt about Gleb came to the fore. He shouldn’t have trusted him.
‘Come to my office. I will take your details. There will be a fine to pay,’ he said, indicating a glass-paned wooden box.
Misha folded a fifty dollar bill inside the invoice and handed it back to the customs officer once inside the dingy cubicle.
‘Officer, I am sure if you look again you will find this permit in order.’
The officer sat down, unfolded the invoices, pocketed the dollar bill and stamped the declaration approved.
‘There you are, that’s all in order,’ he said. He pointed at an import permit taped to the cubicle window. Misha could see the difference. A large watermark in the shape of an asterisk was missing.
‘You have my address’ said Misha. ‘If your girlfriend or wife would like an outfit, she can have her pick.’ Misha wrote down his telephone number.
‘That would be good, comrade,’ the officer said, pleased with the added bonus.
‘That Gleb, he’s a chancer,’ said Ivan as they wheeled their load through to Arrivals. ‘You could have had the whole lot impounded.’
‘Well I can assure you he is not going to get away with it.’ Misha had to have people he could rely on, not risk losing everything because someone tried to shortcut him.
Ivan’s friend Rodion met them at the exit. They piled the bags into the back of a heavily scratched and dented van with the words ‘Leningrad Freight’ on the side and squeezed themselves into the front. It didn’t take long to negotiate their way through the city. They stopped at a building just east of Anichkov Bridge. One of Ivan’s security contacts had suggested it, a small nondescript manufacturing unit that was no longer manufacturing. Alina, Rodion’s girlfriend, had already assembled mobile clothes rails around a large empty office.
The three of them unpacked one of every style, while Misha wrote out and affixed price tickets. The main stock they sorted tidily on shelves in the second room. It was early evening by the time they finished. Misha decided to stay the night and slept on an ex-army canvas fold-up that Rodion seemed to procure from nowhere.