Part 16 (2/2)

Cut too quickly to a bearded beautiful boy in a glittering magenta cape making lavish conversation with two bejewelled matrons: 'Karl der Kleine's latest pet,' Hector announces. 'Sentenced to three years' hard labour by a Madrid court last year for aggravated a.s.sault, got off on a technicality, thanks to Karl. Recently appointed non-executive director of the Arena group of companies, same lot that own the Prince's yacht ah, now here's here's one to watch' flick of the console ' one to watch' flick of the console 'Doctor Evelyn Popham of Mount Street, Mayfair; Bunny to his friends. Studied law in Neuchatel and Manchester. Licensed to practise in Switzerland, courtier and pimp to the Surrey oligarchs, sole partner of his own flouris.h.i.+ng West End law firm. Internationalist, bon viveur, b.l.o.o.d.y good lawyer. Bent as a hairpin. Where's his website? Hold on. Find it in a moment. Leave me alone, Luke. There you are. Got it.' Evelyn Popham of Mount Street, Mayfair; Bunny to his friends. Studied law in Neuchatel and Manchester. Licensed to practise in Switzerland, courtier and pimp to the Surrey oligarchs, sole partner of his own flouris.h.i.+ng West End law firm. Internationalist, bon viveur, b.l.o.o.d.y good lawyer. Bent as a hairpin. Where's his website? Hold on. Find it in a moment. Leave me alone, Luke. There you are. Got it.'

On the plasma screen, while Hector fumbles and mutters, Dr (Bunny-to-his-friends) Popham continues to beam patiently down on his audience. He is a rotund, jolly gentleman with chubby cheeks and side-whiskers, drawn straight from the pages of Beatrix Potter. Improbably he sports tennis whites and is clutching, in addition to his racquet, a comely female tennis partner.

The home page of The Dr Popham & No Partners website, when it finally appears, is mastered by the same cheerful face, smiling over the top of a quasi-royal coat of arms featuring the scales of justice. Beneath him runs his Mission Statement: My expert team's professional experience includes: successfully protecting the rights of leading individuals in the international entrepreneurial banking sphere against Serious Fraud Office investigations successfully representing key international clients in matters regarding offsh.o.r.e jurisdiction, and their right to silence at international and UK tribunals of inquiry successfully responding to importunate regulatory inquiries and tax investigations and charges of improper or illegal payments to influence-makers.

'And the b.u.g.g.e.rs can't stop playing tennis,' Hector complains as his rogues' gallery recovers at its former spanking pace.

In short order, we're in the sporting clubs of Monte Carlo, Cannes, Madeira and the Algarve. We're in Biarritz and Bologna. We're trying to keep up with Yvonne's captions, and her alb.u.m of fun photographs plundered from society magazines, but it's hard, unless like Luke you know what to expect and why.

But however swiftly faces and places change under Hector's volatile management, however many beautiful people in state-of-the-art tennis gear whisk by, five players repeatedly a.s.sert themselves: jocular Bunny Popham, your lawyer of choice for responding to importunate regulatory inquiries and charges of illegal payments to influence-makers ambitious, intolerant Aubrey Longrigg, retired spy, Member of Parliament and family camper, with his latest aristocratic and charitable wife Her Majesty's Minister-of-State-in-Waiting, and specialist-to-be in banking ethics the self-taught, self-invented, vivacious and charming socialite and polyglot Emilio dell Oro, Swiss national and globe-trotting financier, addicted we are told by a scanned press cutting that you have to be quick as lightning to read to 'adrenalin sports from bareback riding in the Ural Mountains, heli-skiing in Canada, tennis in the fast lane, and playing the Moscow Stock Exchange', who gets longer than his due, owing to a technical hitch, and finally: patrician, urbane public-relations maestro Captain Giles de Salis, Royal Navy, retd., influence-pedlar, specialist in bent peers presented to the background music of: 'one of the slimiest b.u.g.g.e.rs in Westminster' from Hector.

Light on. Change memory stick. House rules dictate: one subject, one stick. Hector likes to keep his flavours separate. Time to go to Moscow.

10.

Hector has for once taken a vow of silence: which is to say that, released from his mawkish technical preoccupations, he is sitting back in his chair and allowing the baritone-voiced Russian news commentator to do his work for him. Like Luke, Hector is a convert to the Russian language and, with reservations, the Russian soul. Like Luke, each time he watches the film that is running, he is by his own admission awestruck in the presence of the cla.s.sic, timeless, all-Russian, bare-faced whopping lie.

And the Moscow-based television news service can manage very well on its own, without help from Hector or anybody else. The baritone voice is more than capable of imparting its revulsion at the grisly tragedy it is recounting: this senseless drive-by shooting, this wanton cutting-down of a brilliant and devoted Russian couple from Perm in their very prime of life! Little had the victims known, when they decided to visit their beloved homeland from distant Italy where they were based, that their journey of the soul would end here in the ivy-clad graveyard of the ancient seminary they had always loved, with its onion domes and thuja trees, set on a hillside outside Moscow at the edge of gently swelling forest: On this dark, unseasonable afternoon in May, all Moscow is in mourning for two blameless Russians and their two small daughters who, by the mercy of G.o.d, were not present in the car when their parents were shot to pieces by terrorist elements of our society.

See the shattered windows and bullet-riddled doors, the burned-out carca.s.s of a once-n.o.ble Mercedes car tossed on to its side between silver birch trees, the innocent Russian blood mingling in brutal close-up with the fuel oil on the tarmac; and the disfigured faces of the victims themselves.

The outrage, the commentator a.s.sures us, has aroused the justified anger of all responsible Moscow citizens. When will this menace end? they ask. When will decent Russians be free to travel their own roads without being gunned down by marauding bands of Chechen desperadoes bent on spreading terror and mayhem?

Mikhail Arkadievich rising international oil and metals trader! Olga L'vovna selflessly engaged in procuring charitable food supplies on behalf of Russia's needy! Loving parents of little Katya and Irina! Pure Russians, homesick for the Motherland they will never leave again!

Against the rising tide of the commentator's indignation a crawling column of black limousines escorts a gla.s.s-sided hurdy-gurdy up the wooded hillside to the seminary gates. The procession halts, car doors fly open as young men in dark designer suits leap out and form ranks to accompany the coffins. The scene changes to a grim-faced Deputy Chief of Police in full uniform and medals posed rigidly at an inlaid desk surrounded by testimonials and photographs of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin: Let us take comfort in the knowledge that one Chechen at least has already voluntarily confessed to the crime, he tells us, and the camera holds his face long enough for us to share his outrage.

We return to the graveyard, and the strains of a Gregorian funeral lament as a choir of young Orthodox priests in flowerpot hats and silky beards proceeds with icons aloft down the seminary steps to a double graveside where the princ.i.p.al mourners are waiting. The picture freezes, then zooms in on each mourner as Yvonne's subt.i.tles surface beneath them: TAMARA, wife to Dima, sister to Olga, aunt to Katya and Irina: poker upright, under a wide-brimmed beekeeper's black hat.

DIMA, husband to Tamara: his bald, racked face so sickly in its stretched smile that he might as well be dead himself, despite the presence of his beloved daughter.

NATASHA, daughter to Dima: her long hair swept down her back in a black river, her slender body swathed in layers of shapeless black weed.

IRINA and KATYA, children of Olga and Misha: expressionless, each clutching a hand of Natasha.

The commentator is reciting the names of the great and good who have come to pay their respects. They include the representatives of Yemen, Libya, Panama, Dubai and Cyprus. None from Great Britain.

The camera fixes on a gra.s.sy knoll halfway up a hillside darkened by thuja trees. Six no, seven neatly suited young men in their twenties and early thirties are cl.u.s.tered together. Their beardless faces, some already running to fat, are directed at the open grave twenty metres down the slope beneath them, where the erect figure of Dima stands alone, his upper body tilted backwards in the military manner that he favours as he stares, not into the grave, but at the seven suited men gathered on the knoll.

Is the photograph still or moving? Dima has remained quite motionless, so it's hard to tell. So also have the men gathered on the knoll above him. Belatedly, Yvonne's subt.i.tle appears: THE SEVEN BROTHERS.

One by one, the camera takes a look at each of them in close-up.

Luke has long ago given up trying to judge the world by its face. He has studied these faces numberless times, but still finds nothing in them he wouldn't find across the desk from him in any Hampstead estate agent's office, or in any gathering of black-suited, black-briefcased, business types in the bar of any smart hotel from Moscow to Bogota.

Even when their long-winded Russian names appear, complete with patronymics, criminal nicknames and aliases, he can't bring himself to see in their owners' faces anything more interesting than another edition of prototypes from the uniformed ranks of middle management.

But keep looking, and you begin to realize that six of them, either by design or chance, form a protective ring round the seventh at their centre. Look still more closely, and you observe that the man they are s.h.i.+elding is not a day older than they are and that his creaseless face is as happy as a child's on a sunny day, which isn't quite the face you expect to meet at a funeral. The face is such a picture of good health, in Luke's view, that you are almost obliged to a.s.sume a healthy mind behind it. If its owner were to pop up uninvited on Luke's doorstep one Sunday evening with a hard-luck story to tell, he would have a difficult time turning him away. And his subt.i.tle?

THE PRINCE.

Abruptly, the said Prince detaches himself from his brothers, trots down the gra.s.sy slope and, without shortening his stride or reducing his pace, advances with arms outstretched on Dima, who has turned to confront him, shoulders back, chest out, chin thrust proudly forward in defiance. But his curled hands, so fine in contrast to the rest of him, seem unable to leave his sides. Perhaps it crosses Luke's mind each time he watches perhaps he is thinking that this is his chance to do to the Prince what he dreamed of doing to the husband of Natasha's mother 'with these these, Professor!' If that is so, then wiser and more tactical thoughts finally prevail.

Gradually, if a little late, his hands grudgingly rise for the embrace, which begins tentatively but then, by force of men's desire or mutual detestation, becomes a lovers' clinch.

Slow motion to the kiss: right cheek to left cheek, old vor vor to young to young vor vor. Misha's protector kisses Misha's murderer.

Slow motion to the second kiss, left cheek to right cheek.

And after each kiss, the little pause for mutual commiseration and reflection, and that choked word of sympathy between grieving mourners which, if spoken at all, is heard by none but themselves.

Slow motion to the mouth-to-mouth kiss.

Over the tape recorder that sits between Hector's lifeless hands, Dima is explaining to the English apparatchiks why he is prepared to embrace the man whom, most in the world, he would prefer to strike dead: 'Sure we are sad, I tell to him! But as good vory vory we we understand understand why was necessary to murder my Misha! ”This Misha, he became too greedy, Prince!” we shall tell to him. ”This Misha, he stole your G.o.ddam money, Prince! He was too ambitious, too critical!” We do not say, ”Prince, you are not true why was necessary to murder my Misha! ”This Misha, he became too greedy, Prince!” we shall tell to him. ”This Misha, he stole your G.o.ddam money, Prince! He was too ambitious, too critical!” We do not say, ”Prince, you are not true vor vor, you are corrupt b.i.t.c.h.” We do not say, ”Prince, you take orders from State!” We do not say, ”Prince, you pay tribute money to State.” We do not say, ”You make contract killings for State, you betray Russian heart to State.” No. We are humble humble. We regret. We accept. We are respectful. We say, ”Prince, we love you. Dima accepts accepts your wise decision to kill his blood disciple Misha.”' your wise decision to kill his blood disciple Misha.”'

Hector switches the player to pause and turns to Matlock.

'He's actually talking here about a process we've been observing for some time, Billy,' he says, almost apologetically.

'We?'

'Kremlin-watchers, criminologists.'

'And you.'

'Yes. Our team. We too.'

'And what is this process your team has been observing so closely, Hector?'

'As the criminal Brotherhoods draw closer to each other for reasons of good business, so the Kremlin is drawing closer to the criminal Brotherhoods. The Kremlin threw the book at the oligarchs ten years ago: come back inside the tent, or we tax the s.h.i.+t out of you or chuck you into prison, or both.'

'I do believe I read that for myself somewhere, Hector,' says Matlock, who likes to deliver his shafts with a particularly friendly smile.

'Well, now they're saying the same to the Brotherhoods,' Hector continues unruffled: 'Organize yourselves, clean up your act, don't kill unless we tell you to, and let's all get rich together. And here's your irrepressible friend again.'

The news footage restarts. Hector freezes frame, selects a corner and enlarges it. As Dima and the Prince embrace, the man who now calls himself Emilio dell Oro, clad in black amba.s.sadorial overcoat with astrakhan collar, stands midway up the slope, gazing down in approval on the match while over the tape recorder Dima reads in staccato Russian from Tamara's script: 'The chief arranger for the Prince's many secret payments is Emilio dell Oro, corrupt Swiss citizen of many former ident.i.ties who by wickedness has obtained the Prince's ear. Dell Oro is the Prince's advisor in many delicate criminal matters for which the Prince being very stupid is not qualified. Dell Oro has many corrupt connections, also in Great Britain. When special payments must be arranged for these British connections, this is done on the recommendation of the viper dell Oro after personal approval by the Prince. After a recommendation is approved, it is the task of the one they call Dima to open Swiss bank accounts for these British persons. As soon as honourable British guarantees are in place, the one they call Dima will also provide names of corrupt British persons who are in high positions of State.'

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