Snowdrops by A. D. Miller Read Free Book Online

and Cristal champagne.
    On a Friday night at the sharp end of October--two or three weeks before I was introduced to Tatiana Vladimirovna at the door of her apartment, I guess about the same length of time after my first night with Masha--I took the two girls to Rasputin. It was then one of the city's most elitny nightclubs, on a corner between the Hermitage Gardens and the police station on Petrovka (the station where they film the Russian version of
Crimestoppers
, embellished with corpses and considerately staged shoot-outs). At least, I tried to take them to Rasputin.
    We weaved through the pride of parked, tintedwindow automotive monsters to the entrance. It was fortified by agents of what Muscovites call
feis kontrol:
two or three Himalayan bouncers and a haughty blonde wearing a headset, whose job it was to keep out insufficiently glamorous women and undersalaried men. The blonde looked the girls up and down in the frankly competitive way that Russian women do. Katya was wearing a leopard-print miniskirt above her white boots, and I remember Masha had her long hair in a sort of tousled mane, and a silverbracelet with a miniature watch in the shape of a heart attached. I think it was my fault that they stopped us. I was trying to fit in with the mafia ambience by wearing my dark work suit and a black shirt, but I probably looked like a member of the chorus in some school production of
Guys and Dolls
. I could see the woman on the door guessing how much pain I could call down if I got angry, estimating the seriousness of my
krisha
--the protective human "roof" that every Russian needs, preferably in one of the security services, if they want to get off the hook, into a lower tax bracket, or into Rasputin on a Friday night. From the market trader with his friendly policeman who looks the other way, to the oligarch with his obliging Kremlin overlord, anyone who wants to prosper needs a
krisha:
someone to bend an ear or twist an arm, a relative maybe, or an old friend, or just someone powerful whose compromising secrets you are lucky enough to know. The woman whispered something to one of the bouncers, who ushered us around a corner into a roped-off line of rejects. We might be admitted later, he told us, if there was room for us among the A-listers.
    It was snowing. It was light, October snow, the type Russians call
mokri sneg
, damp snow, which settles on kind surfaces like the branches of trees and the roofs of cars, but is obliterated when it hits the unfriendly Moscow pavements. Some of the flakes weren't making it that far, getting caught in up gusts as they passed the tops of lampposts,pirouetting up again in the artificial light as if they had reconsidered. It was cold--not seriously cold, not yet, but flirting with zero Celsius. The other people in our rejects' line drew their hands up into their sleeves, making them look like a race of amputees. Assorted gangsters, off-duty colonels from the security service, and midrange officials from the Ministry of Finance were waved through by the bouncers, each trailing a high-heeled personal harem. I was cross and embarrassed and ready to give up and leave. Then the Cossack arrived.
    He was with two or three other men and four tall girls. I called out to him, and he hung back behind his friends as they went through the velvet curtains on the door. It was one of those moments when parts of your life that are supposed to be strangers collide, like running into your boss in the foyer of a cinema or the changing rooms of a swimming pool.
    "Good evening," he said. He was talking to me but looking at the girls. "Not bad."
    "Good evening," I said.
    I'd seen the Cossack again a couple of days before. He came to Paveletskaya to sign papers, make promises, and burp. He'd agreed to our appointment of a surveyor, who was to visit the site of the oil terminal every few weeks and confirm that construction was on schedule. That would help to prove that the repayments would eventually be