Hot Siberian (23 page)

She picked up. Her hello was sleepy, but he believed it had a lot of hoping-it-was-him in it. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Leningrad.”

“You were supposed to go to Moscow.”

“I did but I didn't stay over.”

“I tried reaching you at the hotel, the one where you said you'd be, the Kosmos. I had a devil of a time making them understand. They told me you were registered. They paged you and everything. Why would they tell me that unless it was true?”

“I didn't even go to the hotel. I came on to Leningrad instead.”

“How was I to know? Honestly, I must have tried to get you at least twenty times. It ruined my concentration.”

“I thought you were going to be home last night,” Nikolai told her calmly.

“I intended to be.”

An interval of silence asked why she hadn't been.

“I went with Archer to his club.”

“For dinner?”

“For poker. You know, my regular game at Brooks's.”

“He sneaked you into it again?”

“I wish he hadn't,” she thought aloud.

Nikolai jumped right on that. “Why?”

She diverted him brightly with: “How's the old hometown?”

“No different.”

“I miss you enormously. You know how mumpish I get even when we're apart in the same city, so think what I'm like when you're far away in another country.” Then, in her unhalting manner: “Where did you spend the night?”

“My apartment.”

“I also called there twice.”

“Must have been when I was out.”

“With whom?”

“Leningrad. A long walk.”

More silence while she accepted that.

“It's your fault, you know,” she said. “If you weren't so fucking special maybe I wouldn't be so fucking jealous.”

He laughed. God, he loved her. “Did you get all your errands run yesterday?”

“That dumb dealer gave me forty-two thousand for the table. That ugly thing.Imagine!”

“Cash?”

“Good as. A cashier's check.”

“And?”

“I went straight to my bank with it. The sweet, understanding man in mortgages who usually tends to me wasn't there. Seems he was transferred or something. Anyway, there was a dreadful fellow in his place. Dried up old priss never even glanced at my knees. He kept harping about how often and how much I'd been in arrears. He was a mess, couldn't talk without spraying spittle.”

“You put him in his place.”

“You bet I did. I iced him with a look, threw him a high shoulder, and left.”

“Without making the mortgage payments?”

“I had to get out of there. Either that or suffocate. Banks do me that way. I think I react negatively to the presence of so much cash.”

“What bills did you pay?”

“I had a nice late lunch at the Berkeley. I rather enjoy observing married female boredom, but not so much when they don't have the pluck to do anything about it. There they sit, libidos squirming, while they put polite tiny bites into their tight tiny mouths.”

Nikolai only half-heard her words, because he was mentally assembling her yesterday. He believed he had it. “How much did you lose?” he asked.

“I got phenomenal cards,” she said, “for a while. Then it leveled off to just my winning my share of pots. We were playing stud and I'd get aces or kings but always open and everyone would fold on me, so few of the pots I won were large. It was maddening.” She sighed as though to erase that part of it and brought her mood up a notch. “I was a sport, though,” she said. “I didn't bitch at all about the cigar smoking, nor did I even pretend to be shocked at the obscenities.”

The five men she played poker with owned much of London. They were older, the sort who very likely had once put down their Pimm's Cup No. whatever just long enough to shoot an ambling tiger from a well-appointed tree blind.

“It was a bloody strange night,” Vivian went on. “What with my having to get up from the table to try to phone you every twenty minutes and all the good but second-best hands I was dealt.”

“Did you lose it all? All forty-two thousand?”

“And a bit more,” she said blithely, “counting the markers I signed.”

“Shit!”

“A description of me or just my luck?”

Nikolai didn't reply.

Vivian took that as his answer. “You're angry.”

He sure as hell was. Perhaps someday, he thought, someone would invent a device that would allow the person on one end of a phone conversation to press a button and deliver an electric jolt to the person on the other end.

“Don't be angry,” she advised pointedly. “You've got no right to be angry. I blew the money, but it's my affair.”

She was annoyed. It would be painful for him, worse than anything, to have her miffed at him. He wouldn't let it get to that. Softly, he explained, “It's only that I hoped your making the mortgage payments and paying off all your other bills would get you out from under so much stress.”

“What stress?” she said satirically. “Really, Nickie darling, don't be upset. Don't fret for a minute.”

“Not me.”

“And don't be disappointed in old Viv, either. Are you?”

“No.”

“Good. Believe me, something will come up. As a matter of fact, I think it already has.”

“What?”

“Well, Archer came by a short while ago to commiserate and to make sure I hadn't taken strychnine. Only stayed for a minute. It seems he left something on the hall table.”

“
Seems
that he did?”

“He did. At first, seeing that it was an envelope, I thought it might be one of his huge, timely checks, in which case, bless his heart, I would have torn it to shreds or scribbled ‘canceled' across the face of it and returned it immediately, believe me. As you know, I've done both any number of times. However … are you still there, Nickie?”

“Yes, go on.”

“For a moment I thought we'd been cut off. Is this call being monitored?”

“Possibly.”

“For heaven's sake, why? It's so innocent. Anyway, the envelope is addressed by a German someone in Hamburg to a German someone in New York and sent by way of the
Hindenburg
on its last trip. It has the special
Hindenburg
stamp on it, and the paper is even a bit singed. It might be one of the few pieces of mail that wasn't destroyed. Worth a bundle, wouldn't you think?”

“I'd think.”

“But hell, Nickie, I'm not a collector of such things. I haven't the slightest interest. More than likely I'd forget what it was and end up sharpening the point of an eyeliner pencil on it.Right?”

Archer, gigantic-hearted Archer, Nikolai thought. True, he liked Archer well enough, close to well enough to consider him a friend, but wasn't it evident that Archer encouraged Vivian's squandering at every opportunity? Wasn't Archer a veritable conspirator to it, often supplying the means
and
the ways? That being the case, Archer's motive was also obvious: provide now and, through habit and necessity, become the legal provider later. Ironic as it might be, Nikolai told himself, he was being killed by friend Archer's kindness. What steps might he take to avoid that? One thing came immediately to mind. It was something Nikolai had considered doing for the past year, but until now he hadn't been in the right place at the right time. It was something that could substantially interrupt the cycle of dependency Archer had going, or at least take some of the momentum out of it. Never mind the logical reasons against, Nikolai thought, he'd heard them from himself before and now refused to listen.

Vivian was saying: “I'm going to call Archer and urge him to take back this
Hindenburg
letter. But I doubt he will. You know how he is. That, of course, will leave me no recourse but to quibble over a price for it with some scroungy stamp dealer. Come to think of it, I know of one on New Bond.”

“I'll tell you what to do with it,” Nikolai said.

“What?” Surprised he had a suggestion.

“Get into a taxi, go to Archer's flat, don't say a word, just leave it on
his
hall table.”

“Don't be daft! I've accounts to pay. There are the mortgage loans. I owe four bookmakers.”

“Trust me, do it.”

A skeptical grunt from her, and some hums and sibilant mumbles as she carried on her inner argument. Finally, she asked: “Are you absolutely sure?”

“I'll be there tomorrow.”

“Hurry, lover.” She hung up before she could change her mind and he picked up his business case and left his office before she could call back.

CHAPTER

12

HE WAS COMMITTED
.

He went down the stairs and out the main door of the talented ballerina's mansion. He glanced down the wide gravel walk to the gate that gave to Fontanka Quay. A car was stopped in front of the gate, a bright red car, a convertible with top down. As he proceeded down the walk, Nikolai realized that it was a Mercedes-Benz 450SL. It had to be the car of someone of the
nachalstvo
, someone who was above giving a damn about being obvious with such a privilege. Nikolai saw the back of a blond female head on the passenger side and then, from beyond her, like a jack-in-the-box, up came Lev. Too anxious to bother with the door, Lev vaulted up over the side of the car with Nikolai's name coming so joyously from him it was like a victory cry. He charged at Nikolai and caught him in a two-armed hug that squeezed out Nikolai's breath. Nikolai returned the hug and the elation. They kissed on the lips, a brief man-to-man kiss.

“I haven't seen you for a hundred years,” Lev said, grinning.

Nikolai came right back with: “I see you at least every day.” Then he stemmed the mood by indicating the red Mercedes at the curb in an absolutely forbidden zone. “But tell me, why did you choose a car such as this? If you had to steal a car, why not a nice invisible gray Zhiguli?”

“You like this car?”

“No,” Nikolai kidded.

“If you want this car you can have it. I can give it to you legally.”

“Don't shit me.”

“I bought it yesterday from a Georgian who drove it up from Tbilisi loaded with oranges. He fucked me on the price, but money is shit to a good Communist, right? Isn't it beautiful?” They were beside the car now, and Lev ran his hand over the perfect finish of the rear fender. It was as though he'd touched the girl, for at that moment she turned bright-faced to him, her eyes pleading for attention. Her name was Kecia, and when during the introduction Lev said her name she swished her heavy blond hair back from her cheeks as though proud of her looks, wanting to present them entirely. She was Finnish and could not have been more honestly pretty. Her clean face glowed as if just washed in a cold stream. She spoke no English and very little Russian, but, Lev explained, she had ways of making herself perfectly understood.

“Get in, we'll go for a ride,” Lev said, opening the passenger door.

“What do you have to do today?” Nikolai asked.

“Nothing disagreeable.”

“Can you run me out to the dacha?”

“Sure.”

Nikolai thought that Kecia would climb into the narrow space behind the seats. She was slender enough to make it only a tight squeeze. She surrendered the passenger seat to Nikolai, but then got in on top of him. He spread his legs and she sat on the merest edge of the seat with her buttocks fitted tight into his crotch.

Lev started the car, gave the accelerator pedal a couple of pumps to make the tachometer needle jump all the way around into the red and to cause two appropriate roars. He dropped the gearshift into first and made the cobbles scream as he pulled away, did an immediate U-turn, and sped alongside Fontanki Canal. At the first major intersection, Nikolai expected they would continue straight on, which was the correct way to go, but Lev took a right. That put them on Nevsky Prospekt, Leningrad's main thoroughfare. Traffic was sparse in all eight lanes, with about as many buses as cars. The gray elephantine buses lumbered along, possessive of their own side trail, while the cars moved tentatively, as though fearful of making a mistake. In their muted colors the cars seemed embarrassed to be cars, and, indeed, to Lev's red Mercedes they were merely easy obstacles that might as well have been standing still as he darted past and swerved around and squeezed between them. In the distance where Nevsky Prospekt ended, the lancelike gold spire of the Admiralty was reflecting the sun. Although in years past Nikolai had seen it so often that he no longer noticed it, he appreciated it now and was proud of it. Lev braked suddenly at a pedestrian crossing, not more than six feet from a gray-uniformed
militsioner
in his assigned spot in the middle of the thoroughfare. He was a young policeman but experienced enough to know that when he saw such a car he should pretend he didn't. His eyes raked across the red Mercedes and its passengers without showing the slightest interest, and even when Lev chose that moment to put a cassette in the player with the volume loud, the policeman pretended not to notice. The pedestrians were a different matter. Many stopped and stood to take in the car, to let its happy bright red splash into their day. It caused them to nod and smile, privately confirming secret convictions. There were, of course, the envious too, visibly angered by the sight of it. For both sorts Lev spun the volume of the speakers even louder, and Nikolai knew it was not coincidence that the music being played was from
Cabaret:

“
Money makes the world go round
,

The world go round

The world go round
.

Money makes the world go round
…”

Part of Nikolai wanted to scrunch down and be unseen, but even if that had been the greater part of him, it was impossible, prevented by Kecia's occupation of the space he would need for scrunching. She understood none of the words being sung, and so, innocent of their significance, was just enjoying the sound of them, letting their spirit get to her shoulders and her head.