Sila's Fortune (16 page)

There was one thing to be said in Ruffle's favour: he had felt no fear. His faith in the future was such that he had racked up debts for several generations to come. He was supremely confident: he sold credit and he lived on credit. His business was connected to the banks by a constant IV drip. Expenses were colossal but he believed in his own success.

When his father came to visit, in a rental Chrysler from the airport, he stood open-mouthed, staring at the house. Then he sniggered, his fat paunch jiggling as though someone had just
told him a dirty joke, and announced boorishly: ‘Now that, my son, is some house, that's really some house.'

And it was impossible to tell whether he was thrilled by this spectacle, which humiliated him and made the Clarimont house look like a ridiculous suburban monstrosity. But perhaps it was simply his ingrained common sense as a foreman – however wealthy he'd become - protesting at such Pharaonic extravagance. For all its glittering, brilliant appearance, the house before him was neither as substantial nor as lavish as he had imagined; on the contrary it was open, gossamer-like, luminous, something that obscurely disturbed his small-town American values forged by dogged years of hard work, as though all this were tainted by the sin of excess. This house, so white, so modern, as though
wafted
onto the seafront … This business with its absurdly pretentious name, Ruffle Universal Building. Ruffle Senior was a working man, crafty and cutthroat, obscenely rich, yet he was still rooted in the clay of the first house he had built with his own hands, still deeply committed to ensuring the survival of his business, of his family, and now here before him loomed the new America, a globalised country where no one spoke English any more, where he was met at the airport by a babble of languages, Spanish, obviously, but Russian, French and Chinese too, a wild, extravagant land, completely out of kilter; and now here was his own son moving into this gewgaw, this
thing
nestled by the sea, as though the whole country was doomed to be swallowed up with all its delusions of modernity.

Perhaps somewhere in the wrenching anxiety he felt a stab of pride, since both father and son agreed on the essential values:
business and money, they whispered the hallowed word ‘entrepreneur' between them like a secret code. Nonetheless, now, as they all gathered in the dining room to be served exotic, ostentatious dishes by copper-skinned Cubans, the former building-site manager, huge elbows planted on the table, exchanging worried glances with his wife, could not help but feel a vague sense of impending ruin which was simply the portent that a new world, one utterly alien to him, was emerging, one in which men like him, men of the old generation, would be nothing but dinosaurs.

The following morning he was astonished to find they had been joined for breakfast by a past pupil of Clarimont High School, someone he didn't recognise and who Mark had barely known at school but who, through the convolutions of the city of Miami, like the coils of a snake, had ended up in touch with his former classmate. Ruffle Senior did not know that Mark had invited him in order to crush him with his wealth and opulence, by his extravagant display of friendship, because the head of R.U.B. still saw him as the cruel teenager whose mocking laugh had been genuinely hurtful. And Mark had been good enough to invite him round like a buddy to talk about old times in this spaceship about to blast off, and to watch this man struggle in order to exist, to sell
his
story, his scheme, his dream here on the lip of this vast swimming pool, this guy who'd got into fashion and was running the local franchise for a French jeans company and trying without much success to launch a line of distressed vintage T-shirts. Oblivious to this secret settling of scores, Ruffle Senior gawped at the tall gangling man in front of him in his ripped jeans and his paint-spattered T-shirt, who talked like a teenager about the ‘raves' he went to where he
mingled with famous stars. His boss in France, he explained, the man who owned the franchise, used stars as a marketing strategy, he knew a lot of stars and paid them to come to his parties so people would talk about him, talk about his jeans, because it was all about the stars. And since people wanted to look like stars, they started wearing his jeans and the brand was really taking off big-time. He and Mark high-fived and Ruffle Senior, who'd never met a
star
and never had the slightest interest in that world, stared at them in astonishment.

‘My question is this,' he said later to his wife. ‘Is that what passes for a man these days? You saw the guy, he had paint splashes all over him, he talked like a teenager, all that stuff about stars and nightclubs and parties, and his clothes – you couldn't leave the house dressed like that … He was a sort of mutant, you know, with his tattoos and his stories about fashion. He's not what I'd call a man, I can tell you. All this stuff, it's not good, and I'll tell you something else, it's not making Shoshana happy. And you know me, I can sense these things, I can tell when something's not right in the family.'

Was something not right with Shoshana? Marooned in this dazzling white spaceship, did she spend her days longing for her lofty European mansion? Let's just say that with the move to Miami, she'd lost the reference points she'd had in Clarimont. There was nothing here for her to hold on to. If nothing else, the dreary little gardens of her home town brought back memories of childhood, and even if these gradually faded, at least they were a familiar backdrop, garlanded with the glory of memory. The monotony of her life was marked by memories of her childhood, her adolescence, her first tentative steps as a young woman.
Clarimont was where she had grown up. But here in Miami she had lost her bearings, trapped as she was between a child so gripped by television and tantrums that he didn't do what he was told, didn't even listen to her any more, and a husband, a gargoyle bloated with rage, whom she had come to despise over dinner in that Paris restaurant. Oh, there was the house to take care of, but she had lots of help, what with the cook and the maids; who really needed her? What was her purpose in the world, with no career, living with a husband whose whole life was taken up with his search for recognition? His life as the football pro of business, playing a new game every day. From time to time he noticed her, but only when he wanted her to make herself beautiful, to dress up, so he could have the pleasure of seeing her, of flaunting her, showing off her breasts, like a camel being paraded for tourists. This obsession with her breasts he'd had since they first met, his constant comments about how beautiful, how firm they were, his suggestions that she wear tight sweaters to show them off, contrasted with the slight reluctance in his eyes now when she was naked, when he saw them limp and sagging, his faint embarrassment as though for a faded star. Time and motherhood … It was true she could catch his eye when she put on a bra, and under her sweater her breasts were as firm as they'd ever been. But when she needed love, when she finally needed to make an intimate connection with someone she loved, she couldn't turn to Mark because what she felt for him was no longer really love, more a vague affection soured by irritation and contempt. No, it was her son, this pasty, blond child that she wanted to kiss, to hug.

‘Chris, baby! Sweetie!'

She smiled hopelessly, unconsciously remembering his early
childhood when the bond between them had seemed natural, almost organic, but the pale robot who now turned to look at her was not the child he had been, his eyes were vacant, apathetic, already jaded as though sated with love.

What could she do? How was she supposed to fill her days? Apart from keeping herself in shape, obviously, swimming in the pool and taking aerobics classes in town, which meant she got to meet other women. For half an hour, to a musical soundtrack, Shoshana sweated and panted, shaking her body, finishing off with slow stretching exercises on the floor, chatting to the women next to her. She liked meeting women who were as idle as she was, and preferred to avoid the midday class at which there were too many businesswomen skipping lunch for a quick workout before heading back to the office. Too many busy, strong-minded women whom she assumed were much more intelligent than she was, and not as lost.

When she came out of her fitness sessions, she'd walk around down town, gazing in the shop windows, frequently buying things and coming home with bags full of clothes which she used to fill the yawning wardrobes in the house.

One day, leaving the leisure centre at noon, eager to avoid bumping into her hard-working foes, she took a stroll down Lincoln Road. She was wearing dark glasses and luxuriating in the warmth of the sun. Strolling past a French restaurant, she stopped, thinking perhaps she and Mark might go there some night. She took off her sunglasses and peered through the window to see inside. Suddenly, she froze.

The man in the suit moving between the tables; it was the waiter her husband had punched.

Across the vast steppe, huge metal insects siphoned their plunder from the bowels of the earth. With regular movements, the horse-heads rammed into the soil; as far as the eye could see these steel monsters slashed the ground to bring the oil to the surface.

It was late 1997, and Lev had come on an inspection visit. He stood, motionless, fascinated by the spectacle, gazing across this mechanised plain where the very earth itself seemed to shake with strange, incessant spasms, as drills pounded the boreholes, and rock-bits hacked and chewed away the rock and sucked up the precious liquid. There was nothing now but these insects, they stretched across the horizon, a vast swarm of predatory locusts. Hundreds of metres down, they ate and drank, soaked up the crude oil, bringing it to the surface to be transferred to the refineries of ELK, Lev's company.

The oilfields need to be inspected regularly. Lev was constantly checking the company figures, particularly the productivity of the wells. He knew that he had to constantly reassert his authority with the managers of the oilfields, with the foremen and the workers. Oil seeped out everywhere. A steady leak. Everyone stole, and without rigorous checks, they would steal it by the tanker-load. This was especially true in Garsk,
the largest of the oil fields and the principal source of his revenue. But in fact the threat existed right across the supply chain, something the company controlled from prospecting to distribution. This was why he had contracted the Chechens to provide security. Lev had had no choice. Armed guards patrolled the oilfields. At regular intervals, a figure would emerge from the twilight, a dark machine-gun barrel clearly visible above the shoulder. The Chechens had made their presence felt on every ELK site, at Lev's Moscow palace, even in his car. They were a private militia of which he was at once master and prisoner. Gusinsky – one of the biggest oligarchs who'd made a fortune in property and later in television through his close ties with Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov – had a militia which numbered a thousand men, a private army run by a former KGB general. But Lev had left it too late, by the time he tried to raise troops the gangs had formed, had become too powerful: they would never have allowed him to raise an army. Besides, rich though he was, Lev did not have Gusinsky's money.

So far, things were running smoothly. The Chechens had proved obedient and efficient. The silent, deferential bodyguards who accompanied him everywhere did not wear track-suits but dark, well-tailored suits, with only the slightest bulge at the breast pocket. The muscular ex-wrestler always addressed Lev with the utmost respect. And yet beneath this meek exterior, behind the well-oiled, perfectly regulated rounds of bodyguards, even in the impeccable manner of the Chechen in dark glasses who acted as his chauffeur, Lev could not help but see a threat. Lev Kravchenko was neither alone nor free. He was no longer really a man, he was a conglomeration of interests.
And if things should take a turn for the worse, what could he do against these men?

Standing stiffly behind him, the foreman in charge of the oilfield waited for Lev to finish his thoughts.

‘Did you make the offer?' asked Lev.

Some fifty kilometres away was another oilfield, a family operation. A farmer who had struck oil on his own land. A primary development well from which pressurised crude oil spurted from the ground with no need for pumps to bring it up from the depths. The man had set up three derricks and money was flooding in. ELK usually handled refining and distribution. But, like many others, Lev thought that field contained major oil reserves with much of the crude easy to extract. He wanted to buy the field, but the farmer had refused, either because he was hoping for a better offer or because he wanted to develop it himself.

‘Yes. We made another offer. It's been rejected.'

‘You think he's had other offers?'

‘It's possible, but I don't think that's why he's refusing. He wants to hold on to his land, simple as that.'

‘Well then the offer isn't big enough. Wait a while, then up the offer 15 per cent. Tell him that's our final offer. Make that clear. He needs to understand this isn't an auction.'

‘He's stubborn. Very stubborn. I don't know whether he'll sell.'

‘He'll sell.'

Lev turned around. He contemplated the vast steppe. It was colder now, the sun was sinking. The reddish glow slid from the steel frameworks already thick with shadow.

‘I'll go and talk to him myself,' Lev added.

He strode back to his car, which immediately roared into life. It was not far to the farmer's house. What was his name again? Riabine? He'd persuade the man. It was in his best interests. This peasant had no hope of setting up a new company. While that might have been possible during the transition, there was no place in the market now for start-ups. Saturation point had been reached, and the big corporations were buying up the regional companies. There were barely a dozen companies now and the process would accelerate until there were only three or four. Maybe only two. Buyouts, mergers. Obviously, ELK's size made it vulnerable, being midway between the local companies and huge conglomerates like Litvinov's company Liekom, which was already planning foreign oil takeovers, as far away as the United States. In the rush to achieve critical mass, ELK needed to buy up every small business it could, even fledgling companies like Riabine's miraculous potato field. Expand or die.