Part 3
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Outside the Penta a surly group of men in balaclavas, anoraks and gloves stood arguing round a battered Volga saloon with patchwork woollen seat covers and tassels hanging from the headlining above the windows. Veronica strode manfully into their midst and placed herself in the front seat of the car. I quickly leapt in behind her and slammed the door. There was an outraged shouting and banging on the roof but the sight of a twenty dollar bill accelerated the driver into the frozen night. Outside it was minus twenty degrees and all along the roadside we could see the now familiar sight of men and women lighting fires below their frozen diesel tanks in vain efforts to move the fuel. Maybe it would work. Maybe it blew them sky-high. Either way it would bring some sort of change.
God knows where, we alighted from the Volga with its chintzy seat covers and wobbling Madonnas outside a low rise concrete blockhouse. I recognised the word Indian in the electric Cyrillic blitz."You like Indian food Darlink?" it wasn't really a question. It was a warning intended for my stomach concerning the impending feast. I braced myself and we entered, momentarily bathed in violent white downlighting under the canopy. I stumbled inside on Veronica's heels. Two burly men in C&A anoraks stood inside the doorway. Veronica gave them an imperious glare straight from the Urals, her nose held high, a wise precaution as it turned out. They took our coats and handed them to a small Indian wearing a brocade waistcoat. He gave me two grubby tickets and I followed into the dining area. A girl in a costume straight out of an Aladdin pantomime was gyrating slowly on a small stage fringed with golden curtains. There was one other party dining. Two large men wearing sunglasses earnestly fed two scrawny women, prostitutes I assumed, who chewed their food lasciviously, advertising the delights the evening still had to offer. "Bring Champagne, little man." Political correctness is clearly an appendage to long established democracies, not something that features in the vanguard and Veronica took no prisoners when it came to slow waiters. It was impressive. Norma Desmond dealing with a flea. And so we dined. The oily champagne slithering down my throat as I listened continually to Veronica's tales of ruined ballet stars, great productions she had controlled in London in the sixties and now her ambition to make wondrous advertisements here in Moscow with an all-Russian crew. As the TV station where all the planned editing would be done had recently been blown up, we would do the post production on her films in London. She had a hankering to return to Old Soho, as she put it. Old Soho? It was the Soho of the sixties when Jeffrey Bernard still looked like Chet Baker. And all the while the dancer revolved in front of me with no change of expression, no change of rhythm or clothing even. I had assumed it was a striptease at first but realised it was supposed to be a cultural statement on a far higher plane. The fat men troughed on, enticing their escorts with chapattis and small meaty morsels. We picked our way through an assortment of dusky dishes, each one Veronica sampled first with her fingers as if she were seated at a Sultan's feast. I have had superior Indian food in Selly Oak. This was all quite revolting and the bill when it finally came was equally displeasing. We had apparently consumed three hundred dollars worth of chicken tikka and greasy vegetables. With a snap of her evening bag, Veronica handed me a sizable roll of US money. "Pay them. They don't deserve tipping but I shall have to return here sometime. Give them fifty dollars more." So two hundred pounds of the company's money lighter we got our coats back. I visited the gents on the way out and my fears at the airport were confirmed. The toilet smelled worse than a donkey sanctuary. There were no splash-guards.
Outside it was minus twenty five heading for minus thirty. So cold you don't actually feel it. You just don't lick your lips, that's all. The skin will freeze and drop off before morning. Veronica strode out into the middle of the sodium yellow slush and waved at a passing car. It slowed, then on seeing me, accelerated away. The fourth car stopped and Veronica leaned in the front window. "Give me ten dollars." I gave it to her and got in the rear hastily as Veronica sat in the front. "This man is going to work in the night shift at the Volga engineering works," she turned to tell me. "He makes railway carriage axles. He will drop me near my apartment. He will take you on to the Penta. Ten dollars is enough." We drove on in this private car, like an unlicensed minicab. A great idea in theory. All cars are used and owned subject to their being commandeered as taxis at any moment. In effect a very efficient mass transport system, but what if the driver had an accomplice or a gun? Anyone travelling late at night who was obviously Western was likely to be carrying the much prized dollars. Potentially this was a suicide trap.
We sped down deserted wide brown sodium-lit streets that glistened with frost. Occasionally an ex-army lorry would rumble across an intersection, its cab festooned with tassels, dolls and stickers from all points east. Its driver usually a man in yet another turquoise and purple anorak. Near the giant Dynamos soccer stadium we passed what looked like the final resting place for every ex-British Railways newsagent kiosk. "Damned kiosks", spat Veronica . "The new markets. All Mafia owned, of course." These kiosks were indeed the new marketplace. In the absence of goods in the shops the Mafia, local and international branches, had invented a new shopping experience. Whereas we in the West may be enjoying the out of town US shopping mall, here in Moscow the exact reverse was taking place. Derelict sites were taken over and armadas of kiosks - all identical, rounded at the ends with roller shutters on two sides and sloping display shelves - appeared by night. They stood there usefully dispensing Absolut vodka and Marlboro cigarettes. In the absence of any bars the Muscovite pays a visit to the kiosks, buys his vodka and drinks it there and then. Afterwards he lies, or rather, falls down in the gutter next to it and dies of frostbite. Some customers were to be seen that night in temperatures of minus thirty and descending wearing nothing but old army blankets, their lips frozen to their bottles of vodka, their minds becoming as numb as their bodies. Our car ground on towards shelter or a chance sudden death.
"I'm getting out here" Veronica barked." My friend from the Bolshoi who lives nearby is not well. I shall see you at the agency tomorrow. For lunch." She ordered the driver to stop - this a private motorist in his own car, remember - and got out. With a hasty 'Dos verdanya' thrown over her shoulder she was gone and my chauffeur rumbled off into the gloom, Penta-wards hopefully. It is a strange thing to find yourself alone in a faraway city late at night in a strange car driven by a total stranger with whom you have not a word in common. It falls into the category of 'I never dreamt the day would turn out like this when I left my home and children in London this morning'. What a difference a day makes, as the song went. Occasionally as we bumped across vast empty streets he would mutter something beneath his breath presumably - hopefully - a comment on the state of the roads. After one of these guttural utterances he looked at me expectantly. I pulled a dour face and shook my head as if in sympathy. His gaze returned to the road ahead. Either it was the wrong response or my reply was causing him to ponder the matter as deeply as a game of chess. The car was climbing out of a slight hollow which may have been caused by Nazi mortars when there at the top of the hill I thankfully spied the Penta, gleaming in preformed concrete and chrome, looking for all the world like any Western cityscape. The car stopped two hundred yards short and the driver leaned across me to shove open the door. "Thank you" I gasped, not expecting the words to mean anything to him. "Is OK ", he mumbled, his English sounding like a man in the grasp of heavy catarrh. He accelerated away, the car door closing through momentum as I slogged up the hill, my exhaled breath playing briefly round my head like grey candy floss. It occurred to me later that to have dropped me just in sight of the hotel was very kind of him considering that if he had been seen depositing an obvious Westerner outside the Penta he would have let himself in for a punishment beating by the taxi drivers for meddling with their cartel arrangements. He would no doubt have been immediately hunted down and run off the road. Getting his car and himself repaired in Moscow would be both physically and financially impossible. This was the chance he took for ten bucks.
I scrambled towards the glittering lights and its queue of Volga taxis, the drivers like taxi drivers anywhere, huddled together in one car playing cards. Unlike London taxi drivers however, they were not out prowling the streets for trade, their welcome yellow For Hire lights a beacon to any lonely reveller. Here, those out revelling were in no state to see them, let alone afford them. They were by now face down in the gutters, their thinned blood almost at a standstill inside rigid arteries. The revolving door twirled toward me emitting a warm blast of air into the night. I carried a quarter section of cold air into the lobby with me and grinned at the surveillance camera for all those keen to see my safe return. I ascended to the VIP suite.
At reception the blonde had been replaced by a mousy-haired woman who gave me a scowl. These degenerate Westerners, she doubtless thought. Out till all hours when there is work to be done. I strolled past the VIP lounge packed with businessmen still drinking $20 bottles of beer. Their peals of laughter followed me down the corridor to my room. One of the Tsar-size beds had been turned down revealing sheets as crisp as frozen snow and an eiderdown as thick as a life raft. I called home. Sue said she had some bad news for me. My mother had contracted a chest infection and was on even stronger antibiotics. The doctor had said the situation was not good. I wandered round the room. Peering through the long opaque curtains at the frosted street below. Nothing was moving down there. I found myself staring at my face in the bathroom mirror. A face formed from my mother and father's genes. My father had died twenty years ago and these intervening years had seen me grow from a youth to a man. Would my father recognise me today if he came back? How would he look twenty years older than my last memory of him? My face looked both like the one I was used to and simultaneously like a stranger. Someone I'd seen somewhere and couldn't quite place. The man in the mirror knelt down on the bathroom tiles and prayed. He had never been a religious man but he put all his efforts into the hope that his mother's soul would be received by her God. It was all that he could do for her now, so far from home.
I couldn't sleep. I watched hot items of news, rallies of tennis, snatches of porn. TV on the hoof. I ordered a ham sandwich which came with a gherkin at two thirty in the morning. I took a shower at five and finally at five to six fell into some sort of sleep. At nine I again dressed in most of my clothes and somnolently wandered off to find some breakfast.
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