Sheremetev nodded, flabbergasted by the sums of money the young woman seemed to be throwing him. ‘But are you sure…’ he began, thinking of how Rostkhenkovskaya had said she wouldn’t make any money on the Rolex even at the price she had paid him, and wondering if she had been so moved by his story of having a nephew in jail that she was bankrupting herself to help him.
‘I’m sure!’
‘But—’
You know, with an amount like this, we’d be happy to bring it to you…’
‘No,’ said Sheremetev. ‘I’ll come here.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’ Rostkhenkovskaya smiled. ‘Don’t forget the watch!’
Outside, hunching his shoulders to reduce the bulges in his jacket, Sheremetev walked back along the Arbat. He wasn’t aware of it, but a smile was plastered across his face, and as he walked, the smile got bigger. Passersby wondered if the little man with the grin had some kind of mental defect. Three hundred thousand! Not to mention the extra seventy-five that Rostkhenkovskaya wanted to give him. Enough to get Pasha out, and all from one watch. He couldn’t wait to tell Oleg.
He felt guilty for taking the money for the other two watches. Twenty-five thousand dollars! And the same again when he came back. His smile went as he thought about it. He didn’t need that for Pasha, and he felt that he was taking advantage of Rostkhenkovskaya’s sympathetic nature. Somehow, getting the money required to get Pasha out of jail was justifiable – but taking money for the other watches, that was theft, pure and simple.
Only four watches though, he said to himself – no one would notice that. Four amongst all the watches in that cabinet… But the one he still had, the one worth three hundred thousand dollars that was nestled in his pocket – maybe if anyone ever checked, they would want to know where that one was.
He felt a sense of panic. For a moment he doubted that he could go through with it. Calm down, he told himself. One watch, however valuable it was, was more likely to go missing than ten or twenty, which was what he might have to sell in order to get Pasha out if he didn’t sell that one. And he was going to get Pasha out. That much, he had decided.
Three hundred thousand. From one watch. And what if there were more such watches in the cabinet? He had selected four and had found one like that. Maybe that was lucky. But what if every fifth, or tenth, or even twentieth was worth such a sum? As he waited for the train at Arbatskaya station, the sheer scale of the wealth locked up in that cabinet suddenly hit him. He did some simple multiplication – and the result staggered him. Had he overestimated by a zero or two? He did the sum again. If there was so much wealth locked away in one cabinet of watches that everyone seemed to have forgotten about, how much else must Vladimir have had? And how had he got it? Was a president of Russia paid in watches? Was that how he got his salary?
Pasha had written that the biggest crook in Russia was Vladimir Vladimirovich. To a man like Sheremetev, who had lived all his life on a nurse’s salary, the true scale of the sums involved in Vladimir’s embezzlement as president of Russia, if he had known them, would have been inconceivable. Perhaps they would be inconceivable to any man, including the one who had stolen them. But the number Sheremetev produced in his head from the contents of that cabinet was not inconceivable. It was big enough to boggle his mind, but not too big for his mind to contain. For the first time, what Pasha had written about the scale of Vladimir’s theft was real to him.
The train pulled into the station. Sheremetev stepped on, jacket buttoned and coat zipped, laden down with more wealth than any of the people in that carriage would see in a lifetime.
At that moment, in a room behind the shop in the alley off the Arbat, Anna Rostkhenkovskaya sat at her desk, while her mother reclined in an armchair nearby. The Patek Philippe she had seen was a tantalising prize. A watch like that didn’t come along every day. Even if she paid three hundred thousand dollars for it, she would probably make a hundred thousand in profit, and possibly more, when she sold it on. But the story of the watches she hadn’t seen tantalised her more. How many were there? Ten? Twenty? Could there be even more? And what other prizes would she find amongst them? The strange little man had mentioned Vacherons last time he came. What if there was a Tour l’Ile amongst the collection? Why not? After seeing that Patek Philippe emerge from its handkerchief, anything was possible. She imagined a kind of Aladdin’s cave, and if only she could get into it, then in one fell swoop she might make more than her father had made in thirty years.
But what if the little man decided, after all, that he didn’t want to sell her any more pieces? What if the prices she had offered weren’t high enough? What if he came back with the Patek Philippe – and that was it?
What if he didn’t even come back with the Patek Philippe? But she had offered to give him another seventy-five thousand for the other ones she had taken. She was glad that she had had the impulse to do it. That would bring him back even if he didn’t want to sell her the Patek Philippe. She would have one more chance, at least.
Rostkhenkovskaya glanced at her mother. The older woman had never been very strong, often depressed, and her husband’s death a month earlier at the age of fifty-nine had totally floored her. Anna didn’t know how much she even registered now of what was happening around her. She had her mother mind the shop when there was a customer and she had to do something in the back, but that was more of a bluff than anything else. If the customer actually reached under the counter and grabbed something and ran off, she doubted her mother would even cry out.
Of her two parents, it was her father Anna took after. As the Soviet empire tottered and fell, the young Mikhail Rostkhenkovsky had been a junior manager, an apparatchik in the making, in charge of one of the forty sections of one of the four vast warehouses through which the centralised planners of the Soviet economy routed Moscow’s food supply. Such was life in the communist paradise that the job was greatly coveted for the opportunity to put a handful of pilfered sausages on the table at home or to earn a ruble or two by selling a bunch of stolen tomatoes and Rostkhenkovsky had been widely and enviously congratulated when he was awarded the position. But now, for a short moment in time, it offered riches beyond imagining. As starvation threatened the city, as officials abandoned the pretence of fulfilling their responsibilities and scrambled to seize what they could of the disintegrating infrastructure of the Soviet economy, Rostkhenkovsky, like so many of the younger generation who would soon style themselves Russia’s new entrepreneurs, took his chance. He walked into the warehouse and filled lorries with food and drove them into Moscow, not worrying about such niceties as his legal right to purloin entire container loads of cheese, sausage or flour, and proceeded to sell the contents as if they were his own – not for rubles, that were devaluing by the day, but for dollars, and if people didn’t have dollars, for anything small, moveable and valuable. And what is small, moveable and valuable? Jewellery! Rings, watches, necklaces, brooches, bracelets. A pair of earrings, Madamoiselle, for a kilo of bread. Your wedding band, Madam, for a stick of salami. Soon he had whole cupboards stashed with trinkets. By the time the crisis was over and some kind of order was restored, Mikhail Rostkhenkovsky was out of the warehouse and into the jewellery business.