December. James Steel

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СКАЧАТЬ the hall ahead of the huge room that took up most of the raised ground floor of the house.

      The Entry of the Ever-Virgin Mary, he thought wryly to himself as they walked past. Clearly Shaposhnikov didn’t take his orthodoxy that seriously.

      They handed their coats to a smartly dressed woman by the door and then a waitress with a tray of vodka shot glasses walked up to them. Bayarmaa handed Alex one with a smile that brooked no refusal. He nodded his thanks, threw the drink back and followed her through, savouring the burst of warmth in his stomach.

      Beyond the pole-dancer, the high-ceilinged room was noisy and packed with a couple of hundred guests. A bar stretched all the way down one side with ten uniformed barmen running around frantically trying to supply the crowd of people.

      A band at the far end of the room were enthusiastically belting out a Russian cover of a Stones song. After a few bars Alex worked it out as ‘Brown Sugar’.

      They looked an odd group, dressed in nylon imitation Russian peasant garb and fronted by a plump fifty-year-old woman with peroxide-blonde hair and heavy framed glasses in a long pink medieval robe and traditional Russian headdress. Behind her stood a tall, lugubrious-looking, bearded man in a green smock, tasselled cord belt, baggy Cossack pants and boots. He was playing bass on an enormous balalaika. The guests were too busy drinking and talking to listen to the band, though. No one was dancing yet.

      Alex followed Bayarmaa’s silky black hair as they pushed their way through the crowd to the bar.

      A loud squawk of alarm came from the lead singer on the stage and the music crashed to a halt mid-song. Looking out over the press of heads Alex could see that a drunken businessman had clambered on stage and grabbed the microphone from her. Everyone turned to the stage and a chorus of angry shouts and boos broke out. The man with the microphone began shouting back at them in Russian: ‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!’

      He was middle-aged, a bit above average height and well built, with a mop of straw-blond hair that shone in the stage lights and hung down over his eyes. He was wearing a crumpled suit and tie and had a large diamond stud that glittered in one ear. He stood at the front of the stage swaying and pointing at the crowd.

      ‘You want to party, eh? I’ll show you how to party! I am the Party Commissar!’ He said this in English to get the double meaning and burst into a high-pitched giggle at his own joke. ‘Yes, you’re all miserable Russian fuckers! Your heads are full of dark forests with wolves running around in them and the Party Commissar has detected these anti-revolutionary sentiments, which have led to erroneous political judgements. You’re not dancing!’

      The crowd seemed to know that the man was just a good-natured buffoon and began laughing at his parody of Soviet political rhetoric.

      ‘So as a good agent of the workers’ state I will take all steps necessary to ensure the re-education of the proletariat. Unless you become party-Stakhanovites, I will have you all shot! I want over-fulfilment of your party quotas!’

      The crowd had caught on and cheered loudly now.

      Bayarmaa nudged Alex and said, her eyes sparkling with adoration, ‘That’s Sergey.’

      Alex frowned. He was not at all what Alex had expected.

      Sergey lurched round to look at the lead singer, who had recovered her composure.

      ‘Lyuda, come on, enough of this Western shit. Let’s have some proper dancing!’

      The band hastily rearranged themselves and the lead balalaika player stepped forward.

      Sergey spotted some friends in the audience. ‘Grigory! Katya! Vera! Come on!’ He jumped down into the crowd, who made a ring, whilst the four formed themselves into a quadrille and, when the music started, began a fast Russian dance. Sergey grinned and clapped along as the men waited for the women to complete their delicate shimmying moves—hands on hips and heads thrown back with narrowed eyes and pouting mouths.

      However, when it came to Sergey’s turn for a solo, his expression became deadly serious as he threw himself into the jumps and kicks—now squatting down, now springing up and whirling round.

      The crowd roared in appreciation at his bravado and even more when his partner, Grigory, fell over. The dance ended with a storm of applause and much back-slapping.

      Sergey blundered away through the crowd, saw Bayarmaa next to the bar and headed towards them.

      ‘Hey, my little Artic fox!’

      He embraced her with a huge bear hug, swinging her off her feet and around. She squealed with delight before kissing him on the lips when he dumped her back down again.

      She collected herself and remembered Alex, standing next to her.

      ‘Sergey, this is Mr Grekov.’ She rested a light hand on Alex’s arm and drew him towards Sergey.

      ‘Eh? Grekov?’

      Sergey looked confused and leered at him from under his shock of hair, now slicked flat over his ears with sweat. He had a broad-boned face with fleshy lips and pale skin. Laughter lines creased the corners of his eyes, which had a slight Slavic slant to them. The chaotic hair, rumpled suit and diamond earring gave him a piratical air.

      ‘Yes, the geologist you said you wanted to talk to,’ she prompted him.

      ‘Ahh!’ he slurred in recognition and stuck his hand out towards Alex. It was wet with sweat.

      A man barged through the crowd and threw an arm around Sergey. He looked like an old-style Mafia don: in his fifties, black-suited and heavily built with steel-grey hair brushed straight back.

      ‘Hey, you crazy fuck—“Party Commissar!”’ he laughed at the joke again. Ignoring Alex, Sergey turned to the man, became animated again and roared along with him in an eager-to-please way.

      ‘Vladimir Ilarionovich,’ he said, using his patronymic as a sign of respect, and then saw that he had an empty glass, ‘you’ve run out of magic party liquid! I’ll send you to the camps for that!’

      The man wheezed with laughter: ‘Yes! Ten years with no rights of correspondence!’ he said, repeating the euphemistic death sentence handed out in the 1930s purges.

      Sergey giggled manically and mimed shooting someone in the head: ‘That’s right! Shoot the bastards!’

      He turned to the bar. ‘Hey, Ivan!’ he shouted at the nearest barman. ‘Three Litvinenkos!’ He put a hot sweaty arm around both Alex and Vladimir and bent them over the bar.

      ‘This is my favourite cocktail, in memory of that bastard.’

      Vladimir nodded grimly. ‘Yes—we fucked him up good and proper.’

      Ivan the barman grinned as he lined up three highball glasses and poured lavish quantities of the ingredients, snapping off the stream of liquor with a flick of his wrists.

      Sergey listed them as they went in: ‘Vodka, crème de menthe, apple schnapps, melon liquor, a squirt of lemonade and then the final ingredient—not Polonium-210.’ He winked at Vladimir as Ivan pulled a packet of Alka-Seltzer out of his barman’s apron and clunked two into each glass so that the bright green contents fizzed radioactively.

      Sergey СКАЧАТЬ