Part 4
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It was a sumptuous feast to be sure. On the ground floor of the Penta, beyond the floor to ceiling windows, the diners should have been able to see a deserted stretch of road with two billboards advertising cigarettes. Kent and Pall Mall -"Wherever particular people congregate". However these particular people couldn't see any such tantalising delights as the windows were steamed over, there being a difference of about forty degrees between the two locations. I sat for a while taking in the panorama. Elbowing past to be seated all around me, men in large sweaters tucked into plates piled high with pink meats, pineapple, fried eggs, mushrooms and porridge. One pretty blonde waitress and four swarthy waiters skulked round the edges of the room, until, at any sign of a raised hand, like startled deer they scurried back to the kitchen eyes averted leaving the diners to fend for themselves. Which is what was intended, it finally dawned on me. It was a self-service buffet. I approached the sumptuous feast spread before me on smooth marble slabs. There was everything here the world traveller could crave. It was as if all possible meals were constantly being served simultaneously, which as it turned out they were. It was feasible to breakfast on a selection of pastas, stews or cold salmon. I could lunch or dine on muesli. Perhaps this was the way Lufthansa liked it. They were the hoteliers after all. Maybe their aircrew, some of whom were grazing nearby, ate according to their own personal time zones. If you'd just jockeyed a 747 in from New Zealand, regardless of what the sun was doing outside, your body clock might put you in mind for some Boeuf Bourguignon. I plumped for the traditional breakfast fare and helped myself from a vat of scrambled egg. A curious device that the Russians presumably thought was to be found in every 1950's American kitchen caught my eye. It was a long metal box with a conveyor belt trundling through it. I watched, fascinated, as a skilled Lufthansa pilot launched a slice of white bread onto one end of it, helped himself to a spoonful of mushrooms in the meantime then safely landed them on top of the toast as it fell off the end of the conveyor belt onto his plate. This was perhaps one of those gizmos Khrushchev had remembered seeing at the World's Fair in 1959 in between arguing the nuclear toss with Richard Nixon. Or perhaps it was something he'd half accurately described to the Sputnik designers on his return and quite by chance they had invented a gadget that symbolised the American conveyor belt of progress. I returned to my table with a modest breakfast, reassured that the day ahead would hold further culinary delights.
But first to the office. With the self important swagger Rod Steiger manifested in Dr. Zhivago, I pushed aside the arrivistes at the Penta front door and stepped miraculously through the open door of a waiting Volga. I showed my scrap of paper with the address. Off we lurched in a cloud of black diesel smoke. The courtyard where the agency was situated looked slightly more agreeable in the morning light. There were tall scrawny trees bringing a sense of sylvan bliss to the setting of concrete apartment houses and the odd mixture of brick and plaster work that was the company's Eastern front. It was scarcely the Jardin Des Tuileries, but people apparently chose this courtyard as a cut-through preferring its quiet to the deep-throated roar of heavy trucks on the main road.
Helen the receptionist and office organiser greeted me and showed me to a brown cork-lined room. This is where I would work. It had a small window looking out onto the tree-lined courtyard. I was honoured. It also had a Japanese businessman apparently super-glued to the telephone receiving information from his headquarters in Tokyo. Our international triumvirate breathed the air in this room for a few minutes in a silence occasionally punctuated by Ah-so grunts from the Oriental. Helen decided she might as well show me the kitchen. It was here that I would be able to enjoy fruit tea and plum juice. Adjoining the kitchen was a small dining room where I was told we would be able to have lunch. A matronly woman in an apron was already slicing up a large cabbage. A rabbit hung by it's feet from the fridge door handle. Next door were the toilets, minus splash guards. And just down the corridor, I was shown the conference room. It had a long polished wooden table and twelve chairs. In pride of place against the wall, a 1970's Sony U-Matic and Trinitron TV set combo on a stand built to survive another Hiroshima. This was the battleground. This was where new Russian businessmen would have their old Communist ways stripped from them and be enticed and enmeshed by the seductive wiles of the West's hidden persuaders.
I returned to my room. Mr. Ahso still grunted on the phone. I decided to study the brief that I had come so far to address - the launch of a lottery - first in Moscow, then in St. Petersburg. Above all it must be seen to be run in a way that was scrupulously honest. So honest that armed guards would be in charge of the money on live prime time TV every Saturday night . What would become of the winner though, the minute he'd won? Did he get the guards too, or did they simply leave him to fend for himself in the midst of a nation who would gouge their mother's eyes out for a Big Mac? Still that was not my problem. All I had to do was name the lottery and come up with a campaign to persuade people to cough up the price of a packet of Marlboro on the slim chance of them winning $50,000. A packet of Marlboro cost apparently the same as the weekly wage earned by most people. To them $50,000 must have seemed like ...El Dorado. Aha!...well at least that was the first part of the work done. Lotto Eldorado it would be. Time for a cup of plum tea.
The matronly chef was busy skinning the rabbit. At my approach she gestured with a sharp knife to a chair across the peeling veneer of the dining table in the next room. I seated myself out of sight of her work. With bloody hands she set a Duralex mug containing what looked like potpourri on the table. She reappeared with an ancient blackened kettle and poured hot water into my glass. A purplish liquid rose up the glass with bits of flowers floating on top. It tasted like soil. But it was warming so I clasped the drink and sipped, occasionally catching sight of the butchery in the next room. This was not like being in any advertising agency I had been in before. Not even Cardiff. Through the steam rising from my plum tea I began to devise an advertising campaign. Escape. Winning a lottery must be about escape from reality. A leap from black and white into colour. Your chance to move to El Dorado. All the way from Housing Block Z in Section 29 in the North Western Segment six miles beyond the ring road to Eldorado. It was your ticket out of here. Write it down. Knock off a couple of scripts. Easy. And then, lunch with Veronica.
Emerging from the warm cabbagey lobby of the agency, the sun greeted me with a watery glare through a high thin sky. It was almost one o'clock in the afternoon and I could still see my breath in the air. Passing through an arch led me onto the main road, or rather a slip road alongside a flyover. On the pavement was a rusting wreck of a Moskvitch car that looked as if it had been hit by a truck, pushed along the pavement at speed for several yards and left where it now stood. One side was pushed in so far that the two doors almost met inside. It had been stripped and looted , the bonnet open revealing little other than the engine block, the four cylinders full of oily slush and cigarette ends. It would make a useful landmark. I struck off to my right following Veronica's helpful barks over the office phone. "Out of the agency, turn right, cross the road, then the Georgia is two hundred metres on your left. Can't miss it. Be there at one". Crossing the road proved tricky. It was a six lane highway roaring up and down the flyover. Peering through the brown haze I could make out some traffic lights three hundred metres away. I set off along the pavement while massive trucks, seemingly driven by men on life or death missions thundered by. Trucks are almost more common than cars in Moscow, and all of them pelt past, clattering and empty as if on return trips from outlying farms or scrap metal dumps. A knot of people had gathered at the traffic lights. Just as I arrived they ran across the road in a small posse. Judging this would be my last chance to cross for a while, I hurled myself after the group praying that the Grim Reaper who was prowling round my family at this time wouldn't chose this moment to cut me down first. The traffic had screeched to a halt at the lights and was panting and quivering to be off again just as we made it to the other side. It had paused for all of ten seconds. Our security posse dispersed and I looked up and down the wall of the building facing me. There outside a first floor window hung a sign, the text completely illegible to me, but it did have a picture of a wild boar with an apple in it's mouth. It could well be the Georgia. It's not like Charlotte Street where every building is a restaurant, here they are few and far between . There was an alley next to it and I went in, up some wooden stairs and into a lobby decorated with painted wood. Zhivago again. Apparently the film is banned in Russia for being unsympathetic to the Revolution, but so far it seemed spot on to me. Beyond an etched glass screen sat Veronica, knocking back a tumbler of vodka. As one window was jammed open, perhaps to let out the smells of cooking and lure in more customers, I kept my coat on like everyone else. An over made-up woman sat at the end of the room, her peroxide back combed hair falling onto her wolf's fur coat, which in turn was open at the neck to reveal an ample pink bosom. She was toasting her two businessman companions in pink champagne. Lunch in Moscow was clearly a more exotic affair than might be found in say, Barnsley, although the participants would look equally at home in either place. "Darlink. Drink some vodka. It's good for the cold". I sipped from the glass Veronica offered me. It tasted like diesel fuel. "Now I shall order for you. Georgia is the home of cuisine in Russia. Do you like offal?"
I had Chicken Kiev, praying that the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl had blown the other way. Veronica talked endlessly of actors and ballet stars and the problems Simon the agency's Managing Director was having getting money into the country to pay everyone. It seemed that the Mafia had taken over the KGB as a going concern no doubt thinking "these are our kind of guys" and as a result all companies operating in Moscow had to pay protection. And not just a percentage of their billing . Apparently the Mafia wanted a slice of each company's global profits to let them operate here. What's more they were using legitimate companies as money-laundering fronts for their drug running and extortion. "You realise Darlink that our company here is totally Mafia controlled?" "No." "Grow up. How do you think they got the lottery account? You'll see this afternoon when you meet the clients." Veronica had some assignation to go to so she left me holding a half decent cup of black coffee. She paid the bill as she left and I gazed out of the window watching the roaring traffic. The blond in the fur coat was leaning on one elbow talking to the man opposite while with her left hand seemed to be fiddling under the table with the man sitting next to her. I actually blushed and involuntarily looked away. It was time to leave and meet my dangerous clients back across the treacherous highway.
"Any messages, Helen", I gaily essayed, untwining my scarf and struggling out of the Crombie. "The lines are bad at this time", was her standard answer. "Your clients have arrived. They're in the boardroom". Then gesturing at a slight young man standing beside her, "Meet Yuri. He's the - how do you say - account executive on the lottery." I shook hands with Yuri. It was a slight floppy thing that he placed in my hand. He wore a suit that looked like it had been made for his father in the 20's. Its material hung stiffly as if lined with cardboard. " I have some good ideas for this lottery," he announced. "I show you." Without more ado he opened a layout pad and began reading out slogans to me. " Visit El Dorado and win!", is my favourite. I think our people will really go for it." "Wait a moment Yuri. Let me explain to you how this works. You are the account man and your job is to liaise with the client, distil his requirements into a brief and then submit it to me in a form that will help me come up with an idea. Then when we're all happy with it, it is your job to sell it to the client. That put in a nutshell is your job." "Can't I have ideas?" Not wishing to discourage him, "of course, and I'm glad to hear them, but I would think you should have other things on your mind to occupy you. Like why is the client here so soon and have I got anything to present to them?" "Have you?" "Yes, luckily I have. A name which you seem to have already noticed and a basic idea." "Eldorado I like. It is a faraway country, yes?" "No...well, yes. It's ...paradise. Somewhere to escape to, and your lottery ticket is your ticket out of here." "We go see the clients now. In the meeting I will translate." " OK Yuri, but don't tell them anything about the work, until I speak about it, then just translate what I am saying ... please?" "I understand now." "Good then we'll get along fine."
I followed Yuri into the boardroom not at all sure who or even what I would find. Would they be wearing dark glasses and carrying machine guns, or would it be some suave, agreeable frontman who would liaise with his godfather later on between other more basic business deals? I was surprised that the first person I saw on entering the room was a woman, or rather a person in a dress. Apart from that there was little that revealed her sex, certainly no suggestion of a figure. She was built like a bunker and must have weighed twenty stones. Her face was lined and jowly and her hair was grey and swept up into a French plait. There was an inch of yellowish petticoat sticking out from under the floral print dress. She wore a pink cardigan, unbuttoned, naturally. She was Mrs. Browski and grunted like a bear disturbed while eating when Yuri introduced me. Next to her stood a man straight from the Central Bureau of Information. He was reading a document. Scrawny where she was fat, he wore a shapeless black suit and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. His steely eyes penetrated my skull for two seconds then returned to his reading matter. I felt as if I had been scanned for traces of insurrection. At the end of the table was a man in a smartly cut dark Western suit. He wore the dark glasses. His hair was slicked back. He stood up to greet me and we shook hands. He spoke in a lazy drawl, feigning any serious commitment to the day's proceedings "Julian... I'm Vance Chamberlin, from San Diego. .....I'm just here to.... well... keep an eye on things. It's their show... so don't mind me." Riding shotgun, as it were, eh Vance? Well well. And guess what? He opened his briefcase and inside it. there was a gun. A Heckler and Koch automatic. "You can't be too careful," I said indicating it with a nod of my head. "Right you are," said Vance. The meeting began, well at least it did for everyone but me. Even Vance seemed to understand Russian. As far as I was concerned and for the next three hours I would only understand one third of what was going on. Those were the bits in English which Yuri translated back to me. Here's how it went. Yuri would speak, quickly tell me what he'd said then, a lengthy reply would could back from the Russian pair, a synopsis of which Yuri would give to me, occasionally scrambling for the right words in English. Then I would speak again and Yuri would translate. While waiting for this to happen I was able to take a mental holiday and think about what was actually being said. It turned out that the clients had designed their own logo and - why bother with me at all ? - done their own advertising campaign. A relative of Mrs. Browski, who was a designer, had drawn some layouts. Now they would present them to me. I wondered if anyone had bothered to explain the etiquette of advertising to these people. Probably no-one considering Yuri's ideas. What were their qualifications for sitting round this table anyway? Probably this time last year, Mrs. Browski was building tractors. Her colleague was obviously working as an interrogator for the KGB.
And so they presented their logo designs to me. I didn't know whether to admire them politely or embark on a ground-up critical commentary on the development of graphic design over the last hundred years. Considering that Russian graphics from the 1920's are some of the most striking designs ever, what I was shown here had little national affinity. It was as if they had just encountered the Thin Lizzy logo on a 1970's record sleeve. After a period of ruminative silence I opted for the straight from the shoulder approach. I instructed Yuri to translate as accurately as he could. I then spoke with barely suppressed rage and disdain.' These designs are poor. They are shit. And are quite inappropriate for the lottery. You need to grasp some basics here. The design in question must be flexible enough to appear everywhere from a small black and white newspaper advert to an illuminated neon sign. Tomorrow I will show you our proposals. Yuri translated as accurately as he could. When I used the shit word, I spat it out and both Mrs Browski and KGB man recoiled. When Yuri translated it, they looked hurt and then angry. The meeting was not going well. I excused myself, smiled at Vance Chamberlin who seemed to be smiling behind his dark glasses, and left the room. Helen handed me a piece of paper on which she had written: "Mrs. Moseley called about Mrs. Moseley." "Who took this message?" " I did", said Helen. "The lines are bad. They've been down all day, I couldn't understand..." "OK I'll go back to the Penta and call from there." Some shit, indeed.
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