The Senility of Vladimir P (2 page)

Vladimir pulled his hand away. ‘You're a crook, Kostya Lebedev! You were always a crook.'

‘Well, if I was a crook, I had Russia's greatest teacher,' replied Lebedev out of the corner of his mouth, the smile still on his face. ‘Come on, let's be honest, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'

‘Honest? Fine, let's be honest. You're nothing but a thief.'

Lebedev leaned forward, still smiling. ‘And you? You knew how to get your share. Where should I start? The Olympics? The World Cup? Or what about Kolyakov's ring road? That was the best! That'll choke Moscow like a noose for the next hundred years. How much did you get on the ring road, Vova? Twenty percent?'

‘I should have you thrown in jail. You're worse than anyone.'

‘Me? Look, I'm the president now. Put a smile on your fucking face, Vova, and congratulate me.'

‘Go and fuck yourself, Kostya.'

‘Say: I wish you all the best, Constantin Mikhailovich. In your hands, Mother Russia is safe.' Lebedev waited. ‘Well, Vladimir Vladimirovich? Say it.'

Vladimir laughed.

‘I wish you all the best, Constantin Mikhailovich. In your hands, Mother Russia is safe.'

‘In
your
hands? You'll never be president, Kostya Lebedev. Not even Russia would do that to itself.'

‘Okay, I'll never be president. Fine. It's just a game. Let's pretend. Say: I wish you all the best —'

‘Can you smell something?'

Lebedev stopped. ‘What?'

‘Smell!'

Lebedev sniffed. ‘I can't smell anything.'

‘Sure?'

‘Is this a joke?'

‘You can't smell it?'

‘What?' said Lebedev.

Vladimir gazed at him, then smiled to himself knowingly.

Lebedev took a deep breath. ‘Okay,' he growled. ‘Look. Say this for me: I wish you all the best, Constantin Mikhailovich. In your hands —'

Vladimir beat his fist on the arm of his chair. ‘I am not satisfied, Constantin Mikhailovich! The Ministry of Finance is a disgrace. You promised me a year ago that you would clean it up. Now it's worse than ever!'

Lebedev looked around at the producer. ‘Have we got enough pictures? I've had it with this old fool.'

‘Just a moment, Constantin Mikhailovich.' The producer huddled with a couple of technicians behind a computer monitor. They looked through the footage at double speed, trying to see if there were enough shots they could extract to make it seem as if the two men in front of the cameras had had an amiable meeting. There were images of Vladimir smiling to himself, laughing at Lebedev. Maybe with the right cutting and splicing . . .

The security men stood around scoffing the snacks that the cook had laboured to produce.

Vladimir beckoned to Sheremetev. ‘What's my next appointment?' he whispered.

‘You have time for a break now, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'

‘And then?'

‘Lunch.'

‘Who with?'

‘I'm not sure, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'

‘Find out.'

‘If we have to, we can stitch something together,' the producer informed Lebedev. ‘But it's not great. Maybe try again, Constantin Mikhailovich.'

‘Mother of God!' hissed Lebedev. ‘Whose idea was this anyway?' He glanced at Vladimir, then shook his head in disgust. Unable, or unwilling, to restrain himself, the new president told Vladimir again what he thought of him. Vladimir responded with gusto. Soon the two men were swearing at each other without restraint, the reeking guts of a decades-old animosity spilling out in front of everyone in the crowded room.

Abruptly, Lebedev stood up.

‘Constantin Mikhailovich,' said one of his aides, ‘please, perhaps try once more.'

Lebedev gritted his teeth. Then he reached for Vladimir's hand with about as much pleasure in his expression as if he was reaching for an orang-utan. ‘I wish you all the best, Constantin Mikhailovich,' he hissed. ‘In your hands, Mother Russia is safe.'

‘I'm not Constantin Mikhailovich, you idiot. I'm Vladimir Vladimirovich.'

Lebedev forced a smile for the cameras. ‘No, you say that to me.
In your hands, Mother Russia is safe.
Say it.'

‘You want me say it, Kostya?'

‘Yes, Vova, I want you to say it.'

Vladimir gazed at him, a smile forming on his lips. Somewhere in the depths of what was left of his mind, he still knew that power is power, and there is no greater manifestation of it than the ability to thwart the will of another person, no matter how slight the occasion or how trivial the apparent consequence – even if it is only refusing to utter a sentence that would cost nothing to yourself.

Lebedev waited for a moment – then turned and stormed out.

The room drained of people. Security men and aides ran after him, stuffing the last of the snacks into their mouths. In a minute, only the television technicians were left.

‘You can take him,' said the producer to Sheremetev over his shoulder, as the television people began packing up. ‘We're finished.'

Vladimir looked around in confusion.

‘The meeting's over, Vladimir Vladimirovich,' said Sheremetev.

‘But I leave first! I'm always the one to leave first.'

‘I know. This was unusual. It doesn't mean anything. Let's go upstairs now.'

Sheremetev got Vladimir to his feet. By the time they reached the door, Lebedev's convoy was already gone, sweeping down the drive to the gate.

As far as Sheremetev
could tell, he had been given the job of caring for Vladimir because of a reputation for probity. This was quite surprising – not because he didn't deserve the reputation, but because previously it had earned him only laughter and contempt.

The Soviet Union was in its final days when Nikolai Ilyich Sheremetev, born to a foreman who worked in a pharmaceuticals factory and a mother who was a bookkeeper with the Moscow metro, was finishing primary school. By the time he completed high school, it was dead and buried with a stake through its heart. Sheremetev dutifully did his army service, spending most of his time digging foundations on construction sites in Omsk. Naively, he imagined that he was working on military buildings – although even he was not so naïve that he didn't wonder why the army had decided that it needed several large apartment-style blocks in a residential district of a city on the edge of Siberia. Eventually a fellow conscript enlightened him, revealing what everyone else apparently already knew, that the platoon was being hired out by the captain as labour to private builders. Sheremetev's expectation that this abuse would soon end with the exposure of the captain's criminality, followed by swift and exemplary punishment by the regimental colonel, was dashed when another conscript revealed that the colonel himself was not only aware of the exploitation, but was being paid a commission by the captain. The conscripts were not exactly choirboys either. Equipment went missing from the construction sites, only to be glimpsed briefly in a corner of the barracks before disappearing again the next day. Others would go off for days with one of the sergeants on missions from which they would return with wallets bulging. For some reason, no one involved Sheremetev in anything, and he became aware of the goings-on only after they were finished. Even if he had known, he would have been too scared to take part, which presumably was obvious to his comrades. Next time they do something they'll get caught, he thought to himself – and then he thought it again each time after they weren't.

The captain, incidentally, was promoted to major shortly before Sheremetev's conscription ended, for heroic action in the service of construction, as the joke in the barracks ran.

Following his army service, Sheremetev trained as a nurse, encouraged by his mother, who said the profession suited his caring nature. Laughably, he then tried to raise a family in Moscow on a nurse's salary. Not that he didn't see what was happening around him. Doctors took money from families to put patients in hospital. Nurses took money to look after them once they were there. Cooks took money to feed them. Launderers took money to wash their sheets and cleaners took money to clean their wards. Nothing happened without a few rubles greasing the way. Somehow, he couldn't do it. Maybe it was simply the fear of being caught again. Maybe it was something else as well. When he looked at two patients on the ward, something always drew him to the poorer one. Saint Nikolai, his coworkers called him, but not admiringly, in the tone one might use for a revered and incorruptible colleague, but tauntingly, at best, pityingly, in the tone one would use for an idiot.

His wife's tone oscillated between one and the other. At times Karinka told him what a good, humble man he was and how much she loved him for his honesty – at other times she told him he was a fool. They had one son, Vasily, who was now twenty-five and had had to make his own way in the world, Sheremetev having nothing to offer but advice – which Vasily had never listened to, anyway. He was involved in some kind of business that Sheremetev knew little about, and from the little Vasily did tell him, he didn't want to know more. He said his job was to help people, but when Sheremetev asked what kind of help, there was never a straight answer. Without even knowing the details, Sheremetev had the same thought he had had in the army and the hospital. Someone would find out. Something would happen. Vasily laughed. ‘It's okay as long as you keep the right people happy,' he would say, as if he were the father and Sheremetev the artless son. ‘In Russia, there's no other way. Everyone does it but you, Papa.'

What Karinka would have said had she seen how Vasily had turned out, Sheremetev didn't know. She had died of an inflammatory disease that eventually destroyed her kidneys. At that time Sheremetev was working as a senior nurse on a public ward for dementia patients. A few months after Karinka died, Professor Kalin, the director of the unit, summoned him to his office. This was a surprise to everyone, not only Sheremetev. Professor Kalin normally found time to visit the ward which he supposedly directed roughly twice a year, and unless everyone had magically fallen asleep for five months, it was only four weeks since his previous appearance. Yet there he was, walking down the ward without the slightest sense of impropriety and asking for Sheremetev.

In the office that day, Kalin said he had been told that Sheremetev was a nurse not only of the highest competence but of exceptional integrity, if such a description didn't make him an oxymoron in Russia. Sheremetev shrugged, not knowing what an oxymoron was, much less if he was one. Kalin said that he had recently diagnosed someone with dementia who had been an extremely important public official. Even today, the diagnosis was a matter of the strictest secrecy. He asked if Sheremetev would be prepared to leave his hospital job and care for this person. Sheremetev hesitated, thinking of the patients on the ward whose families were too poor to produce the rubles required to lubricate the wheels of care. Kalin wondered what could possibly be going through his head. He leaned forward across his desk. ‘Nikolai Ilyich,' he said. ‘Your nation calls you. You can't say no.' Sheremetev felt obliged to respond to this patriotic exhortation – and thus discovered that the patient was none other than Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Naturally, Sheremetev knew that Vladimir had recently stepped down from the presidency, but like the rest of Russia he had no idea yet of the real reason. He hadn't even heard the rumours. Despite his long experience as a nurse, at first he was somewhat awestruck. It was no small thing to discover that the man who had been president of the federation only a few months earlier was suffering from dementia, and that he was now your patient. Still, he tried to overcome this reaction and treat the ex-president as he would treat any other patient, pragmatically, sensitively and gently. But Vladimir didn't make it easy.

When Sheremetev first came to him, the ex-president retained considerable insight into what was happening to him. He was aware of his ever more frequent memory lapses and what they portended, and would frequently get into rages, which could sometimes go on for hours. Sheremetev did his best to be a calming influence, but still he often suffered volleys of verbal abuse. After all, his very presence was a reminder to the ex-president of his condition. Sheremetev absorbed it all. Agitation and anger, he knew, are common in the early stages of dementia, when people can still understand the future that confronts them, and he had often encountered them in other patients. Why should Vladimir Vladimirovich, just because he had been five times president and twice prime minister of the Russian Federation, not have the right to rail against the cruelty of fate as others did? A man who had been president, thought Sheremetev, must have a superior intellect, and the loss of it must be proportionately painful. Why shouldn't he mourn it?

Yet the rages threatened to become more than verbal, and there was a danger that Vladimir would injure not only others but himself. So Professor Kalin prescribed tranquillisers – tablets at night, and injections, if required, when the tablets weren't enough.

The tranquillisers didn't stop the rages, but they muffled them, turning the outbursts from roof-raising hurricanes into gusts of wind that rattled the shutters and passed on. Only occasionally would some whirling eddy of frustration erupt into a full blown storm. Eventually, over time, the rages petered out. As Vladimir's condition progressed, his awareness of it diminished, and with it the anger that it had engendered. Instead, different preoccupations became manifest, ones that rose up out of the past.

By this point, Vladimir's memory for the people and events of recent years had dissipated. His mind wandered in a world constructed of events that had happened ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago. He spent his time in animated conversations with invisible people who weren't there, most of whom were long dead. Sometimes Vladimir became disturbed by what he was seeing, especially if he awoke at night, when he would be disorientated and bellicose. So Professor Kalin continued the tranquillisers for Vladimir's agitation at his delusions that he had originally prescribed for the ­ex-president's agitation at reality, checking on the effects each month when he came to the dacha to assess the progression of Vladimir's dementia.

On the morning that Vladimir met the new president, it was clear that he had mentally been far in the past. Even so, Sheremetev disliked the way Lebedev had presumed to tell Vladimir what to say, walking in and expecting to put words in his mouth. He might have been the president, but it was barely a week since he had taken office, and he was talking to someone who had occupied the position five times, even if Vladimir wasn't quite the man he had once been. Sheremetev had been shocked at the language that ensued between them, but he felt a flicker of satisfaction – if not pride – that his patient had given back as good as he got.

Afterwards, they went up the stairs together and back to Vladimir's suite on the second floor. ‘I'll get you some other clothes, Vladimir Vladimirovich,' said Sheremetev as he settled him in his chair, and he left him there as he went to the dressing room.

Dima Kolyakov was sitting in an armchair opposite him. Initially Vladimir was surprised to see him, but soon the businessman was explaining a scheme he had hatched to build a new ring road around Moscow. Vladimir listened patiently, not allowing so much as a flicker of an expression to betray what he was thinking. The billionaire was nothing to look at – heavy jowls, bags under his eyes and a pair of moist lips that wriggled lubriciously as he spoke – but there was plenty of lipstick on the pig. He wore a beautifully cut suit, probably from London, where his wife, children and two of his mistresses lived. The neck tie was Hermès. The diamond embedded in his pinkie ring was five carats at least, and brilliant white. The wrist watch, which the billionaire flashed more than someone who wasn't conscious of it would have done, was a Vacheron Tour de l'Ile, worth probably two million dollars. At the sight of it, Vladimir's fingers twitched. He had two of his own that had been given to him over the years, amongst Pateks, Breguets, Piquets, Richard Milles and anything else that the most elite Swiss horologists could devise in their mountain workshops. In the early days, he had taken Rolexes, but after a while anyone who turned up with one would get a quiet word in their ear from Evgeny Monarov, his closest consigliere, even before they were brought in to meet him, and a courier would turn up the next day with something more select.

Vladimir heard the businessman out. At the end he said simply: ‘So you think Moscow really needs this new ring road?'

Kolyakov shrugged. ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, would I be suggesting it if I didn't? The traffic problems are immense.'

‘But another ring road? Is that the best way to solve them?' Vladimir raised a vodka. ‘Your health,' he said, and took a sip. ‘How long is it that we've known each other, Dima?'

‘Twenty years,' said the billionaire.

‘I remember the first time you came and sat in that chair.'

‘I do too! Without you, I'd be nothing, Vova.'

Vladimir laughed. ‘No one would be anything! Russia would be nothing! Do you know what a shitheap it was when I got hold of it? If you think you do, think again. Tell me, how much did you pay the first time?'

‘To see you?'

Vladimir nodded, downing his vodka.

‘A million dollars.'

‘That was cheap.'

‘Very cheap. Ridiculous.'

‘Today it's five million, Monarov tells me. Maybe it's more. I don't even know.'

‘It should be more. Your time is priceless, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'

‘So, was it a good investment?'

‘A very good investment,' replied Kolyakov without hesitation. ‘At ten times the price it would have been a good investment.'

Vladimir nodded. Not as good an investment as it was for me, he thought. To make people pay to meet him, only so that they would have the chance to offer him even more money – who could imagine such a business? The first time he saw how this kind of thing could be done, when he came back to Russia and found himself in the city government in St Petersburg during the wild days as the Soviet Union collapsed, he could barely believe it. An eye-opener. At the start he was barely a spectator, getting the crumbs of the crumbs, a percentage of the percentages, but as he rose in influence and got the hang of the game, the money came flooding in. Commissions, fees, markups, kickbacks – call it what you want. Set up a company and watch the businessmen queue up to route their business through it and leave you twenty percent as they did. Sometimes thirty or forty percent. Import, export, food, oil . . . Never in his life had he imagined it could be so easy or that he could take so much. But as it turned out, even that was small beer. Once he got to Moscow, everything would have an extra zero on the end, or two, or three.

‘I'm not sure about another ring road,' he said. ‘Didn't the latest report say another ring road would make things worse?'

‘That's just a report, Vladimir Vladimirovich,' said Kolyakov, waving a hand airily. ‘A word from you, and it's forgotten.'

‘I thought it said extensions to the metro or even a light rail system would be better.'

Kolyakov shook his head gravely. ‘That's very expensive.'

‘This isn't?'