Sila's Fortune (19 page)

Lev walked across his office, picked up his coat and went down to the street. He needed to walk. When he walked, he
thought more clearly. Time was, at the Institute of Economics, ideas would come to him too.

The thunder of jackhammers assailed him. He walked faster. The two Chechens behind him were almost running. They were probably cursing him. He was convinced they despised him. They would be only too happy to put a bullet in his head. They were just waiting for the word. All it would take was for him to fall out with the wrestler. Not just some fit of pique, obviously. This he had to admit, the wrestler did not easily get worked up. Business was business. He was a professional. But if they were to have a serious disagreement on their strategy for dealing with Liekom and the Brotherhood …

What would Litvinov do about Riabine?

The answer was obvious. And if he, Lev, did not make a decision, in a matter of days Litvinov would be the winner. Whatever happened, Riabine was lost.

And besides, why was he so concerned about some
muzhik
? Did Stalin think twice? Millions of peasant farmers died during the
forced collectivisation
. Not to mention the war. No leader in history, even those whose benign names are celebrated, had hesitated to kill.

It was a fact: they had to get rid of Riabine. After all, if he was reasonable, everything would be fine. He would take the money. He'd understand immediately. The men would march into his house. How many? Three or four maybe? Heavy-set men. Maybe the wrestler himself. He would have no qualms about getting his hands dirty for something like this.

Lev looked up. He no longer recognised the district he was in. Next to him loomed a huge building, a tower under
construction. Huge cranes swayed, drunken birds, black against the grey sky.

Though the country had changed radically in a few short years, the shockwaves from the original blast petered out as they moved away from the cities, meaning that the remote backwoods were still as they had always been, the crash of the present collapsing on the ancient empire of the steppes. But Moscow had been at the epicentre of the upheaval. This dreary, petrified city suffocated by torpor had exploded, for better and for worse. A luminous, modern city now thrummed, sometimes repossessed by the silence and the stillness of the vast monumental avenues with a sort of icy coldness reminiscent of Soviet greyness. Huge property fortunes had been amassed thanks to deals struck with the state and the city council, the result of which was this modern metropolis, both disturbing, since it shook up the lives and the memories of the inhabitants of old Moscow, and exciting because it was a city of money and pleasure.

He hailed a taxi. Without even looking at the driver, he gave his address. He needed to talk to Elena. But fresh arguments now presented themselves.

Yes, Riabine was lost. But what sort of justification was that? Litvinov could do as he saw fit. Why did he have to show himself to be just as brutal? If Litvinov was corrupt and violent to the point of adopting the most savage methods of the Brotherhood, Lev had no truck with such corruption. He would do better to
save his soul
. The expression sounded almost comical to his ear.
Save his soul
.

When he got home, Elena was in the library. She was reading.
She was surprised to see him home.

‘I wasn't expecting you so early,' she said.

‘I was bored at the office.'

He sat in an armchair, studied the books that lined the four walls of the room. He always found this room calmed him. He had been born surrounded by books, given that in the tiny apartment his parents lived in the family's vast collection of books took up every nook and cranny. As a child, his bed had been surrounded by books. Though he did not read as much now as he used to, at heart this room was still his favourite place, all the more so since Elena had bought all the writers banned under the Soviets, which added quite a few titles to those he knew by heart.

‘I should have been a professor,' he said, settling back into the armchair.

Elena considered him curiously. She didn't for an instant believe this myth, which Lev came out with at regular intervals. If he had wanted to be a professor, he would be one, end of story. Lev needed money and power, and he was a man of action. Perhaps he had something of the intellectual in him, like many of the first-generation oligarchs. But this phrase invariably presaged an explanation. She waited.

‘We've found this field.'

‘An oilfield?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where?'

‘In Siberia, near Garsk.'

She said nothing.

‘The field belongs to a farmer,' Lev went on, ‘a man called
Riabine. A pig-headed peasant. His family has been working the land for generations and he wants to keep working it till he dies. We've made various offers to him, but he's turned them down.'

He was hoping for a question, a comment. Nothing. He had to carry on, but the words were heavy.

‘He really should accept our offer,' he repeated forcefully. ‘Because if he doesn't, Litvinov will end up with his land.'

‘What if he doesn't want to sell?' Elena protested. ‘If he's not prepared to sell to you, he's not likely to sell to Litvinov.'

‘You don't refuse an offer from Litvinov.'

‘You mean …'

Elena was reluctant to draw the conclusion.

‘Of course,' Lev muttered, ‘Litvinov will decide for him, by force if necessary.'

Elena set her book down on the coffee table.

‘To think we've had him here in our house … and
this
is what he's become,' her face contorted in disgust.

‘This is what everyone has become! They've lost all sense of morality. The slow day-to-day drip of corruption. All it takes is a single action, you know, the first time you turn away from morality, that first step is the most difficult. Then there's a second and a third … each more serious than the last.'

Elena was staring at him.

‘Who are you talking about? What do you mean,
everyone
? Who are you talking about, Lev?'

Lev, embarrassed, ran his hands over his face.

‘Everyone, yes, more or less. Because business is tough. Because the country has gone through a revolution that
destroyed the old corrupt order, and replaced it with a new form of corruption. Because we have no choice.'

Elena was silent for a moment.

‘
We
have no choice?' she asked.

‘That's right,' Lev's tone was firm. ‘We have no choice.'

Elena got to her feet.

‘So you've made your decision. This Riabine, you're going to make him a … final offer.'

‘I shouldn't have mentioned it to you.'

‘On the contrary,' said Elena, ‘you were right to talk to me about it.'

‘I haven't made a decision, Elena,' said Lev, alarmed by the expression on his wife's face. ‘That's why I wanted to talk to you. In fact, I decided to leave Riabine to Litvinov. Let other people do whatever they like, I won't be like them.'

Elena stared hard at him, as though trying to discover the truth in him. ‘But you're tempted, aren't you, Lev? Tempted to take that oilfield by force, because that's what Litvinov would do, because you're afraid that Liekom will get it and the name Lev Kravchenko will be synonymous with failure? Because you're afraid everyone will walk all over you?'

Lev didn't answer.

‘You're scared, Lev. I know you are. That's why you're hesitating, that's why you talked to me. You're afraid to be brave. You were never scared of anything, now you're terrified. You're tempted by violence, but it's fear that's eating away at you.'

‘What fear?' Lev said scornfully. ‘I've never in my life felt fear.'

‘Not physically, maybe, though even that has changed. It's
true that once even in a street brawl you wouldn't have been scared. But you've got older and fatter, and most of all from a moral point of view you've completely changed. But none of that matters. The fear I'm talking about is more deep-seated. You're afraid people will snatch your whole life from you. Your company, your wealth, your reputation. You're afraid of becoming so weak in people's eyes that they'll crush you. But I'm asking you to be brave, Lev. I'm asking you to overcome your fear and act according to your conscience. Think about it, Lev, please. There's never been a more important moment in our whole life. I swear, this is the most important moment, the moment of choice.'

And suddenly, tears were streaming down her face.

‘Be brave, Lev. For us, I'm asking you, I'm begging you.'

She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Lev went to her, took her in his arms, hugged her tears, her pain. He hugged this woman who, from their very first conversation, he had admired for her dazzling intelligence. For that dagger of terrifying lucidity that was her mind. It was even possible that this was why he had married her, this feeling of intellectual inferiority he felt when he was with her. He kissed her.

‘I'll be brave, Elena.'

Lev trudged out of the room. He sought refuge in his office. For some time he sat motionless, his face a blank. Then he got up, looked at himself in the full-length mirror, a tarnished mirror, and through the black spots of tarnish, the marks left by time, in this same mirror where once the prince must have looked at himself, Lev saw a man with a fleshy face, bloated with fatigue, with food, with alcohol. His thoughts sharpened
by what his wife had said, he could discern the corruption and the fear.

He contemplated this man with a sort of detached contempt.

The corruption and the fear.

He grabbed the phone. Called the Chechen.

‘Go and find Riabine. Make up his mind for him.'

Things were now clear: money was their master. It had taken Simon some time to realise it but the uneasiness he felt when he was with the traders had eventually clarified the situation. No one took any notice of him because he earned nothing – or nothing much – even if he thought he earned a lot.

The question was this: how much did you have to earn a year to exist? Five hundred thousand dollars, a million, five million, ten million? At first Simon didn't really understand the indifference of his colleagues towards him, but though he hid away behind his computer, assimilating, sorting and exploiting statistics for every asset, option and option of an option in this world, the knowledge of his social status inevitably reached him through looks, tones of voice, a thousand little signs. And he quickly realised that his position in the Kelmann hierarchy was not high. He was a quantitative analyst – a quant – meaning nothing very important. He was, as he put it, a ‘cost centre' rather than a ‘profit centre'. A necessary, indeed an essential cog, but poorly paid compared to the traders because he took no risks. He calculated risks, he didn't take them. He didn't take positions worth tens or hundreds of millions, making a fortune for the bank – if the market moved in his favour – part of which would come back to him as a bonus. A good trader took risks,
a good quant
eased
them. Traders were men, they were manly, the way they talked was hyper-masculine, with frequent use of the word ‘balls': ‘I've got balls, I'll cut off his balls and make him eat them, I've got him by the balls,' and so on.

How much did you have to earn a year to exist? Simon remembered a conversation he had had with a Paris taxi driver who told him twenty thousand was what you needed to live decently. In ordinary life, most people would have agreed on that figure. As soon as someone was earning thirty or forty thousand, he was rich and you envied or despised him for it. When you were working in finance, the same salary was evidence of failure. And the more you climbed the greasy money pole, the higher the price of failure: a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. You had to start counting in dollars, otherwise the sums took too long to say. And you had to leave the bank and move into investment funds where managers, who randomly kept 20 per cent of the profits they made, earned sums that were beyond comprehension: fifty, a hundred, two hundred million dollars a year! Even a billion! A billion dollars for buying stocks with other people's money in a bull market.

The taxi driver calmly went on driving, the teacher passing on his knowledge, the doctor healing and the researcher … actually, the maths researcher was beginning to hesitate. Young graduates with PhDs in games theory realised they could earn ten, a hundred, a thousand times more on the stock markets. And though they loved pure mathematics, boasted about the absolute freedom of research, still the great, dark energy emanating from London or New York exerted a terrible magnetism.
First and foremost, the money, but also its more reputable corollaries: a game played in real conditions with all the thrills of the biggest casino in the world, the competition, the insistence on results, the action, the stress … it was like a gauntlet thrown down to their youth. And as the tide began to swell and as they heard that other engineers, researchers, friends were banging on the doors of the banks, so gradually, deep underground, the thought began to spill out like a wave, carrying off more of them. Money swept them up, each in unconscious imitation of the others, and they cut their ties with their home countries and headed for London or Tokyo, or more rarely the US, where they lived as expats in a bubble of money, utterly oblivious to the Paris taxi driver. This was exactly what Simon had been told: the banks were draining the brains of the entire planet. But in doing so, the banks transformed them, forced them to evolve in a bubble the like of which had never existed, one entirely divorced from the life of the country, in which everyone spoke English, moved with astounding speed, almost as fast as funds closely followed a particular geographic area only to desert it at the first sign of trouble. They were drunk on this life of stress, targets, bonuses, and the rest of the time, they partied. Simon could see this. He and Matt went out all the time: once you reached a certain level, London restaurants were very good, much better than they'd been in the 1980s, because they'd been forced to adapt to the demands of these young tycoons, in particular to the refined palates of the French, more than 300,000 of whom lived in the city working at various different professions. The elegant parts of town had also become very expensive as property prices exploded – bankers' salaries triggered an
inflation that relegated English people in other professions to the distant suburbs, to gruelling journeys on overpriced trains that were invariably late. Simon and Matt routinely booked tables for eight or ten, all bankers, all under thirty, and they would spend as much money as they could. They showed up in Ferraris, in Porsches, in Mercedes which they casually handed over to valet parking, they were like lords, they threw money around then went on to nightclubs where they drank to excess and beyond. Stressed by their work, full of themselves, obsessed with an image fuelled by money and results, an image that was shattered when the money and results failed to materialise, something was happening all too often in 1998 as crises in Asia and Russia caused the markets to plummet, they needed to live large, physically and financially. They needed to express this intoxication.