We were heading towards a cluster of eight wooden houses that had been tucked out of sight behind some fir trees, about fifty metres from the gates. They were new-looking, completely featureless and almost identical. In the West, they would be called portakabins, although they were a little larger and they’d been built two high with external staircases connecting them. I noticed that there were no bars on any of the windows. These weren’t cells. I guessed they provided accommodation for the people who worked here. A larger, brick building stood nearby perhaps with a dining room attached.
I glanced behind me. And although I hadn’t been given permission, I came to a stumbling halt. Where the hell was I? I had never seen anything like this.
A gravel drive with lamps and flower beds on each side led from the entrance through the parkland and up to a monumental white house. Not a house. A palace … and not one that had come out of any fairy tale. It was a modern building, newly built, pure white, with two wings stretching out from a central block which alone must have contained about fifty rooms. There were terraces with white balustrades, white columns with triple-height doorways opening behind, walkways and balconies, and above it all a white dome like that of a planetarium or perhaps a cathedral. Half a dozen satellite dishes had been mounted on the roof along with television aerials and a radio tower. A man stood there, watching me through binoculars. He was wearing the same uniform as the man at the gate – but with a difference. Even at this distance I could see that he had a machine gun strapped to his shoulder.
Closer to the house, the gardens became more ornamental with statues on plinths, marble benches, beautifully tended walkways and arbours, bushes cut into fantastic shapes, more flower beds laid out in intricate patterns. An army of gardeners would have to work the whole year round to keep it all looking like this and even as I stood there I saw some of them pushing wheelbarrows or on their knees weeding. The drive broke into two as it reached the front door, sweeping round a white marble fountain that had gods and mermaids all tangled together and water splashing down. I saw two Rolls Royces, a Bentley and a Ferrari parked outside. But the owner didn’t just have cars. His private helicopter was parked on a concrete square, discreetly located next to a summer house. It was under canvas with the blades tied down.
“Why are you waiting?” one of the twins demanded.
“Who lives here?” I asked.
His answer was a jab in the side of my stomach. It had been aimed around my kidney and it hurt. “I told you. No questions.”
I was very quickly learning the rules of this place. I was worth nothing. Anyone could do anything to me. I swallowed a grunt of pain and continued to the smallest cabin, right on the edge of the complex. The door was open and I looked into a room with a narrow metal bed, a table and a chair. There was no carpet, no curtains, nothing in the way of decoration. A second door led into a toilet and shower.
“You have five minutes,” the man said. “Throw those clothes away. You will not need them. Wash yourself and make yourself presentable. Do not leave this room. If you do, the guards will shoot you down.”
He left me on my own. I stripped off my clothes and went into the bathroom. I used the toilet, then I had a shower. I knew I was in danger. It was quite likely that I would soon be dead. But that shower was still a wonderful experience. The water was hot and there was enough pressure to soak me completely. There was even a bar of soap. It had been three weeks since I had last washed – that had been in the banya, the bathhouse in Moscow – and black dirt seemed to ooze out of my body, disappearing down the plughole. Thinking of the bathhouse reminded me of Dima. What would he be doing now? Had he seen me being bundled into the car by Sharkovsky and, if so, might he come looking for me? At least that was something to give me hope.
My face still hurt though, and when I examined myself in the mirror, it was as bad as I had feared. I barely recognized myself. One eye was half closed. There was a huge bruise all around it. My cheek looked like a rotting fruit with a gash where the man’s fist had caught me. I was lucky I still had all my teeth. Looking at the damage, I was reminded of what lay ahead. I hadn’t been brought here for my own comfort. I was being prepared for something. My punishment was still to come.
I went back into the bedroom. My own clothes had been taken away while I was washing and, with a jolt, I realized that the last of my mother’s jewellery had gone with them. Her ring had been in my back pocket. I knew at once that there would be no point in asking for it back and I had to hold down a great wave of sadness, the sense that I had nothing left. She had worn that ring and touching it, I had felt I was touching her. Now that it had been taken from me, it was as if I had finally been separated from the boy I had once been.
I had been supplied with a black tracksuit, black socks and black slip-on shoes. I dried myself, using a towel that had been hanging in the bathroom, and got dressed. The clothes fitted me very well.
“Are you ready?” The twins were standing outside, calling to me. I left the cabin and joined them. They glanced at me, both of them still showing a complete lack of interest.
“Come with us,” one of them said. They appeared to have a fairly limited vocabulary too.
We walked up the drive all the way to the big house. As we went, we passed another security guard, this one with an Alsatian dog on a leash. A television camera mounted above the front door watched our approach. But we didn’t go in that way. The twins took me in through a side door next to the dustbin area and along a corridor. Here the walls were plain and the floor black and white tiles. The servants’ entrance. We passed a laundry room, a boot room and a pantry next to a kitchen. I glimpsed a woman in a black dress and a white apron, polishing silver. She didn’t notice me or, if she did, she pretended not to. My feet, in the soft shoes, made no sound as we continued through. I was feeling queasy and I knew why. I was afraid.
We passed through a hallway; this was the main entrance to the house. A magnificent staircase swept down to the front door with a marble pillar on each side. The hallway itself was huge. You could have parked a dozen cars there. A bowl of flowers stood on a table – it must have emptied a flower shop. The central light was a chandelier, hundreds of crystals twinkling brilliantly like a firework display. It made the lights I had seen in the Moscow Metro look cheap and gaudy. There were more doors on every side. It was all too much for me to take in. If a spaceship had grabbed me and deposited me on the moon, I would have felt as much at home.
“In here…”
One of the twins knocked on an oak door and, without waiting for a reply, opened it. I went in.
The man from the Moscow apartment was sitting behind an oversized antique desk. There were bookshelves behind him and on one side a globe that looked so old that quite a few of the countries were probably missing … yet to be discovered. He was framed by two windows with red velvet curtains and a view out to the fountain and the drive. The room was very warm. One wall contained a stone fireplace – two crouching imps or demons supporting the mantelpiece on their shoulders – and a Dalmatian, lay stretched out in front of it. The walls were covered with paintings. The largest was a portrait of the man I was facing and I have to say that the painted version was the more welcoming of the two. He had not looked up from his work. He was reading a document, making notes in the margins with a black fountain pen.
There was a gun on the desk in front of him.
As I stood there, waiting to be told what to do, I found myself staring at it. It was a revolver, a very old-fashioned model with a stainless steel barrel, five inches long, and a black, enamel grip. It wasn’t like an automatic or a self-loading pistol where you feed the bullets into a clip. This one had a cylinder and six chambers. A single bullet lay beside it.
“Sit down,” he said, pointing to an empty chair in front of him.
I stepped forward, although it felt more as if I was floating, and sat down. The door clicked shut behind me. Without being instructed, the twins had left.
I waited
for the master of the house to speak. He was wearing a suit now and somehow I knew that it was expensive and that it hadn’t been made in Russia. The material was too luxurious and it fitted too well. He had a pale blue shirt and a brown tie. Now that he wasn’t wearing his coat, I could see that he was very muscular. He must have spent hundreds of hours in the gym. He had also removed the hat and I saw that he was completely bald. He had not lost his hair. He had shaved it off, leaving a dark shadow that made him more death-like than ever. I waited in dread for his heavy, ugly eyes to settle on me. My face was hurting badly and I wanted to go to the toilet again. But I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t move.
At length he stopped and lay the pen down. “What is your name?” he asked.
“Yasha Gregorovich.”
“Yassen?” He had misheard me. The side of my face was so swollen that I had mispronounced my own name. It would be very unusual to be called Yassen. It is Russian for ash tree. But I did not correct him. I had decided it would be better not to speak unless I had to. “How old are you?” he asked.
“I’m fourteen.”
“Where are you from?”
I remembered my mother’s warning. “A town called Kirsk,” I said. “It’s a long way away. You won’t have heard of it.”
The man thought for a moment, then he got up, walked round the desk and stood next to me. He took his time, considering the situation, then suddenly and without warning slapped me across the face. The blow wasn’t a particularly hard one, certainly not as hard as the night before, but nor did it need to be. My cheekbone was already broken and the fresh pain almost knocked me off the chair. Black spots appeared in front of my eyes. I thought I was going to be sick.
By the time I had recovered, the man was back in his chair. “Never make assumptions,” he said. “Never assume anything about me. And when you speak to me, call me ‘sir’. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded. “Do you have parents?”
“No, sir. They’re both dead.”
“And last night, when you broke into my flat, were you alone?”
I had already decided that I wasn’t going to tell him about Dima, Roman and Grigory. If I told him their names, I had no doubt he would send his men round to Tverskaya to kill them. I still thought he was going to kill me. “Yes, sir,” I replied. “I was on my own.”
“How did you come to choose that flat – as opposed to any other?”
“I was walking past. I saw that the window was open and the lights were out. I didn’t even think about it. I just went in.”
The answer seemed to satisfy him. He took out a gold cigarette case. I noticed the initials V.S. on the cover. He removed a cigarette and lit it, then lay the case on the desk, close to the gun. “Vladimir Sharkovsky,” he said. “That is my name.”
I didn’t tell him that I knew. I simply sat there and watched as he smoked in silence. I would have liked a cigarette but I needed the toilet more. My insides were churning.
“You must be wondering why you are still alive,” he continued. “In fact, you should not be. Last night, as I drove over the bridge, I thought of dropping you in the Moscow River. I would have quite enjoyed watching you drown. When I drove you here, my intention was to give you to Josef and Karl to be punished and then killed. Even now, I am undecided if you will live or if you will die.” His eyes rested briefly on the revolver. “The fact that you are sitting in this room, talking to me, is down to one reason only. It is a question of timing. Perhaps you have been lucky. A week ago it would have been different. But right now…”
He trailed off, then took another drag on the cigarette, the blue smoke curling into the air. A log snapped in the fireplace and the dog stirred briefly, then went back to sleep. So far, Vladimir Sharkovsky had shown no emotion whatsoever. His voice was flat, entirely disinterested. If machines had ever learned to speak, they would speak like him.
“I am a careful man,” he went on. “One of the reasons why I have prospered is that I have always used everything that has been given to me. I never miss an opportunity. It may be an investment in a company, the chance to buy my way into a bank, the weakness of a government official who is open to bribery. Or it may be the chance appearance of a worthless thief and guttersnipe like yourself. But if it can be used, then I will use it. That is how I live.
“There is something you need to understand about me. I am extremely successful. Right now, Russia is changing. The old ways are being left behind. For those of us with the vision to see what is possible, the rewards are limitless. You have nothing. You steal because you are hungry and all you think about is your next pathetic meal. I have the world and everything in it. And now, Yassen Gregorovich, I have you.
“A large number of people work for me in this house. Because of the nature of my work and who I am, I have to be careful. Josef and Karl, the two men who brought you here, are my personal bodyguards. They are standing outside and I should perhaps warn you that there is a communication button underneath this desk. If you were to try anything, if you were to threaten me again, they would be in here in an instant. Be glad they were not with me in Moscow. That was the private apartment of a friend of mine. The moment you picked up that knife, your own life would have been over.
“I will not kill you – yet – because I think I can use you. As it happens, a position has arisen here, a vacancy which it would not normally be easy to fill. You are, as I said, very fortunate with the timing. I have no doubt that you are stupid and uneducated. But even so, you might be acceptable.”
He paused and it took me a few seconds to realize that he was waiting for me to reply. I couldn’t believe what he had just told me. He wasn’t going to kill me. He was offering me a job!
“I’d be very happy to work for you, sir,” I said.
His eyes settled on me, full of contempt. “Happy?” He repeated the word with a sneer. “You say stupid things without thinking. It is not my intention to make you happy. Quite the opposite. You broke into my apartment. You attempted to hurt me and in doing so you ruined a perfectly good overcoat, a jacket and a shirt. You even cut my flesh. For this, you must pay. You must be punished. If you decide to accept my proposal, you will spend every hour of the rest of your life wishing that the two of us had never met. I am not offering to pay you. I will own you. I will use you. From this moment on, I will expect your total obedience. You will do whatever I tell you. You will not hesitate.” He gestured at the fireplace. “You see the dog? That is what you are now. That’s all you mean to me.”
He stubbed out the cigarette. I could see that he was bored with the interview, that he wanted it to be over.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “What sort of work?”
I had no choice. I had to survive. Let him employ me in whatever capacity and somehow I would find a way out of this place. In the back of a car, over the wall … I would escape.
“You will clean. You will carry messages. You will sweep floors. You will help in the garden. But that’s just part of it. The main reason that I need you is something quite different.” He paused. “You will be my food taster.”
“Your…?” I almost laughed out loud and if I had, I am sure he would have shot me there and then. But it was ridiculous. At school, we had been taught about the Roman emperors – Julius Caesar and the others – who had employed slaves to taste everything they ate. But this was Russia in the twentieth century. He couldn’t possibly mean what he had just said.
“It is unfortunately the case that I have many enemies,” Sharkovsky explained. He was completely serious. “Some of them fear me. Some are jealous of me. All of them would benefit if I was no longer here. In the last year, there have been three attempts on my life. That is how things are now. Several of my associates have been less fortunate – which is to say, they have been less careful than me. And they have died.
“Apart from my wife and my children, I can trust no one and even my immediate family might one day be bribed
to do me harm. I employ a great many people to protect me and I have to employ more people to watch over them. I trust none of them.” His dark eyes bore into me. “Can I trust you?”
I was trying to make sense of all this. Was that really to be my fate? Sitting at his dining table, digging my fork into his blinis and caviar?
“I’ll do whatever you want,” I said.
“Will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything?”
“Yes…” This time I was uneasy.
It was what he had been waiting for. It was the very worst thing I could have said.
“We will see.” He reached out and took the gun. He jerked open the cylinder and showed me that it was empty. Then he picked up the bullet – a little cylinder of gleaming silver – and held it between his finger and thumb like a scientist giving a demonstration. I watched silently. I didn’t know what was about to happen but I could feel my heart pounding. He slid the bullet into one of the chambers and snapped the cylinder shut. Then he spun it several times so that the metal became a blur and it was impossible for either of us to tell where the bullet had lodged.
“You say you will do anything for me,” he said. “So do this. The gun has six chambers. As you have seen, one of them now contains a live bullet. You do not know where the bullet is. Nor do I.” He placed the gun back on the desk, right in front of me. “Put the gun into your mouth and pull the trigger.”