“Sometimes.”
“And others?”
“We would meet for lunch in the city center. Or for coffee.” She pointed toward the spire of Magdalen College. “There’s a lovely coffeehouse across the street called the Queen’s Lane. Grigori was quite fond of it.”
Gabriel knew it. The Queen’s Lane was the oldest coffeehouse in Oxford. For the moment, though, his thoughts were elsewhere. Two women of late middle age had just entered the garden. One was wrestling with a brochure in the wind; the other was tying a scarf beneath her chin. Gabriel scrutinized them for a moment, then resumed his questioning.
“And in London?”
“A dreadful little sandwich shop near the Notting Hill Gate tube stop. He liked it because it was close to the Russian Embassy. He took a perverse pleasure walking by it from time to time, just for fun.”
The Russian Embassy, a white wedding-cake structure surrounded by a high-security fence, stood at the northern end of Kensington Palace Gardens. Gabriel had walked past it himself the previous afternoon while killing time before his meeting with Graham Seymour.
“Did you ever go to his place?”
“No, but his description made me a bit jealous. Too bad I wasn’t a thug from the FSB. I would have liked a nice London house along with my new British passport.”
“How long did Grigori usually stay when he came here?”
“Two or three hours, sometimes a bit longer.”
“Did he ever spend the night?”
“Are you asking if we were lovers?”
“I’m just asking.”
“No, he never spent the night.”
“And were you lovers?”
“No, we were not lovers. I could never make love to a man who looked so much like Lenin.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“He was FSB once. Those bastards turned a blind eye while many of my friends were murdered. Besides, Grigori wasn’t interested in me. He was still in love with his wife.”
“Irina? To hear Grigori tell it, they nearly killed each other before they finally got a divorce.”
“His views must have changed with a bit of time and space. He said he’d been a fool. That he’d been too wrapped up in his work. She was seeing another man but hadn’t agreed to marry him yet. Grigori thought he could pry her away and bring her to England. He wanted Irina to know what an important person he’d become. He thought she would fall in love with him all over again if she could see him in his new element and in his smart new London mews house.”
“Was he in contact with her?”
Olga nodded.
“Did she respond to his overtures?”
“Apparently so, but Grigori never went into the details.”
“If I remember correctly, she’s a travel agent.”
“She works for a company called Galaxy Travel on Tverskaya Street in Moscow. She arranges flights and accommodations for Russians traveling to Western Europe. Galaxy caters to a high-end clientele. New Russians,” she added with a distinct note of disdain. “The kind of Russian who likes to spend winters in Courchevel and summers in Saint-Tropez.”
Olga dug a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket. “I suspect business is rather slow at the moment for Galaxy Travel. The global recession has hit Russia extremely hard.” She made no attempt to conceal her pleasure at this development. “But that was predictable. Economies that depend on natural resources are always vulnerable to the inevitable cycle of boom and bust. One wonders how the regime will react to this new paradigm.”
Olga removed a cigarette from the pack and slipped it between her lips. When Gabriel reminded her that smoking was not permitted in the garden, she responded by lighting the cigarette anyway.
“I might have a British passport now, but I’m still a Russian. No Smoking signs mean nothing to us.”
“And you wonder why Russians die when they’re fifty-eight.”
“Only the men. We women live much longer.”
Olga exhaled a cloud of smoke, which the wind carried directly into Gabriel’s face. She apologized and switched places with him.
“I remember the night we all left together-the four of us crammed into that little Volga, pounding over the godforsaken roads of Russia. Grigori and I were smoking like fiends. You were leaning against the window with that bandage over your eye, begging us to stop. We couldn’t stop. We were terrified. But we were also thrilled about what lay ahead. We had such high hopes, Grigori and I. We were going to change Russia. Elena’s hopes were more modest. She just wanted to see her children again.” She blew smoke over her shoulder and looked at him. “Have you seen her?”
“Elena?” He shook his head.
“Spoken to her?”
“Not a word.”
“No contact at all?”
“She wrote me a letter. I painted her a painting.”
Gabriel appealed to her to put out the cigarette. As she buried the butt in the gravel at her feet, he watched a group of four tourists enter the garden.
“What did you think when Grigori became the celebrity defector and dissident?”
“I admired his courage. But I thought he was a fool for leading such a public life. I told him to lower his profile. I warned him that he was going to get into trouble. He wouldn’t listen. He was under Viktor’s spell.”
“Viktor?”
“Viktor Orlov.”
Gabriel recognized the name, of course. Viktor Orlov was one of the original Russian oligarchs, the small band of capitalist daredevils who gobbled up the valuable assets of the old Soviet state and made billions in the process. While ordinary Russians were struggling for survival, Viktor earned a king’s ransom in oil and steel. Eventually, he ran afoul of the post-Yeltsin regime and fled to Britain one step ahead of an arrest warrant. He was now one of the regime’s most vocal, if unreliable, critics. Orlov rarely allowed trivial things like facts to get in the way of the salacious charges he leveled regularly against the Russian president and his cronies in the Kremlin.
“Ever had any dealings with him?” Gabriel asked.
“Viktor?” Olga gave a guarded smile. “Once, a hundred years ago, in Moscow. It was just after Yeltsin left office. The new masters of the Kremlin wanted Viktor to voluntarily sell his businesses back to the state-at bargain-basement prices, of course. For understandable reasons, Viktor wasn’t interested. It got nasty-but then it always does. The Kremlin started talking about raids and seizures. That’s what the Kremlin does when it wants something. It brings to bear the power of the state.”
“And Viktor thought you could help?”
“He asked me to lunch. He said he had an exclusive for me: a man whose job was to procure young women for the president’s personal entertainment. Very young women, Gabriel. When I told him that I wouldn’t touch the story, he got angry. A month later, he fled the country. Officially, the Russians want him back to face tax and fraud charges.”
“And unofficially?”
“The Kremlin wants Viktor to surrender his majority stake in Ruzoil, the giant Siberian energy company. It’s worth many billions of dollars.”
“What did Viktor want with Grigori?”
“Viktor’s motives for opposing the Kremlin were hopelessly transparent and hardly noble. Grigori gave him something he never had before.”
“Respectability.”
“Correct. What’s more, Grigori knew some of the regime’s darkest secrets. Secrets Viktor could wield as a weapon. Grigori was the answer to Viktor’s prayers and Viktor took advantage of him. That’s what Viktor does. He uses people. And when they’re of no value to him, he throws them to the wolves.”
“Did you say any of this to Grigori?”
“Of course. But it didn’t go over terribly well. Grigori thought he could take care of himself and didn’t like being told by a journalist to watch his step. He was like an older man in love with a pretty girl. He wasn’t thinking straight. He liked being around Viktor, the cars, the parties, the houses, the expensive wine. It was like a drug. Grigori was hooked.”