Snowdrops by A. D. Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

met, and that, as the contract we'd drawn up provided for inlavish detail, there'd be something for the banks to repossess if the Cossack and his friends ever defaulted. The surveyor we briefed was a little mole of a man called Vyacheslav Alexandrovich. We'd worked with him before, on the finance for a port development down on the Black Sea coast.
    "Aren't you going to introduce me?"
    "Excuse me," I said. "These are my friends Masha and Katya."
    "Enchante,"
said the Cossack. "Which one of you is Nicholas's wife?"
    He'd rumbled the little lie I'd told him about being married, but he didn't seem to mind. I blushed. Katya giggled. Masha shook his hand. It was the only time they met, as far as I know, and in a way I'm pleased they did. It simplifies things for me, somehow, that memory of Masha and the Cossack together.
    "Do you have a problem?" he asked me.
    "No," I said.
    "Yes," Masha corrected. She was always calm, determined, self-assured. Always. I liked that about her too.
    "Maybe," I said.
    "Just a second," said the Cossack.
    He walked over to the blonde with the headset. He had his back to us so I couldn't see his expression. But I saw his shoulder blade twitch in our direction and the woman look over at us. He kept talking and her face fell, then herhead dropped, and she spoke into her headset and beckoned towards me.
    The Cossack said, "Enjoy yourselves!"
    You know the way, in action films sometimes, they show how soldiers look when they're seen through night-vision goggles--edged in a sort of shimmering thermal glow? The Cossack looked like that all the time, I think. He was outlined in violence. It was invisible but everyone could see it.
    "Thanks," I said.
    "It's nothing," replied the Cossack.
    We shook hands, and he kept hold of me for just a moment too long, a couple of seconds maybe, so I knew he could. "Say hi to my friend Paolo," he said.
    Inside there was a dance floor with three podium dancers--two energetic and topless black girls, and in between them a male dwarf wearing a tiger-stripe thong. Katya pointed up at the ceiling. Two naked girls, sprayed gold to look like cherubs and with wings attached, were flapping above our heads. We headed for the bar. It had a glass floor, and underneath it there was an aquarium filled with sturgeon and a few forlorn sharks. There were a lot of priceless women and dangerous men.
    I ordered three mojitos from a barman wearing the underpaid, harassed frown of barmen on a busy night everywhere, plus a round of the risky sushi that was then standard-issue across Moscow nightspots. I felt like alottery winner, sitting in Rasputin with the high rollers and their surgically enhanced molls--me with my pointless thick hair and pinched English features, and a new mid-thirties pad of flesh around my jaw that I looked for in the mirror every morning, in the hope that it might have gone away of its own accord. I felt like I was somebody, instead of the nobody who could at that moment have been flowing over London Bridge with all the others. I guess that's how I was supposed to feel.
    Katya asked me more about England. The usual questions: Was Sherlock Holmes real? Was it hard to get a visa? Why did Churchill wait until 1944 to open a second front? She was a good kid, I thought, inside the micromini, deferential to her sister, keen to get on in an understandably narrow way.
    Masha asked me about my job.
    "Kolya," she said, "do you know only English law or Russian law also?"
    I said I was trained in English law but understood Russian law well enough too, especially corporate law.
    "What sort of deals are you doing?"
    I said it was mostly loans, and the odd merger or acquisition.
    "It means you are not working on deals for property?" Her voice was almost smothered by the cardiac beat of the Russki dance music and the cawing of thugs.
    I said no, I wasn't. I knew a little about property law,but not much--only really the parts covering long leases for commercial buildings.
    I know I should