Moscow Rules

world right now.”
     
     
    “Then I can’t take it.”
     
     
    “Trust me, Mama. You have to take that money.”
     
     
    Her mother looked down and tried to eat, but now she, too, had lost her appetite. And so they sat there for a long time, clutching each other’s hands across the table, faces wet with tears. Finally, her mother picked up the letter and touched it to the flame. Elena gazed at the television and saw Russia’s new tsar accepting the adulation of the masses. We cannot live as normal people, she thought. And we never will.
     
     
    Against all his considered judgment and in violation of all operational doctrine, written and unwritten, Gabriel did not immediately return to his room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Instead, he wandered farther south, to the colony of apartment houses looming over October Square, and made his way to the building known to the locals as the House of Dogs. It had no view of the Moscow River or the Kremlin—only of its identical neighbor, and of a parking lot filled with shabby little cars, and of the Garden Ring, a euphemism if there ever was one, which thundered night and day on its northern flank. A biting wind was blowing out of the north, a reminder that the Russian “summer” had come and gone and that soon it would be winter again. The poet in him thought it appropriate. Perhaps there never had been a summer at all, he thought. Perhaps it had been an illusion, like the dream of Russian democracy.
     
     
    In the small courtyard outside Entrance C, it appeared that the babushkas and the skateboard punks had declared a cessation of hostilities. Six skinny Militia boys were milling about in the doorway itself, watched over by two plainclothes FSB toughs in leather jackets. The Western reporters who had gathered at the building after the attempt on Olga Sukhova’s life had given up their vigil or, more likely, had been chased away. Indeed, there was no evidence of support for Olga’s cause, other than two desperate words, written in red spray paint, on the side of the building: FREE OLGA! A local wit had crossed out the word FREE and replaced it with FUCK . And who said the Russians didn’t have a sense of humor?
     
     
    Gabriel walked around the enormous building and, as expected, found security men standing watch at the other five entrances as well. Hiking north along the Leninsky Prospekt, he ran through the operation one final time. It was perfect, he thought. With one glaring exception. When Ivan Kharkov discovered his family and his secret papers had been stolen, he was going to take it out on someone. And that someone was likely to be Olga Sukhova.
     

 
    56
     
     
    SAINT-TROPEZ, MOSCOW
     
     
    The undoing of Ivan Borisovich Kharkov, real estate developer, venture capitalist, and international arms trafficker, began with a phone call. It was placed to his Saint-Tropez residence by one François Boisson, regional director of the Direction Générale de l’Aviation Civile, the French aviation authority. It appeared, said Monsieur Boisson, that there was a rather serious problem regarding recent flights by Monsieur Kharkov’s airplane—problems, the director said ominously, that could not be discussed over the telephone. He then instructed Monsieur Kharkov to appear at Nice airport at one that afternoon to answer a few simple questions. If Monsieur Kharkov chose not to appear, his plane would be confiscated and held for a period of at least ninety days. After an anti-French tirade lasting precisely one minute and thirty-seven seconds, Ivan promised to come at the appointed hour. Monsieur Boisson said he looked forward to the meeting and rang off.
     
     
    Elena Kharkov learned of her husband’s predicament when she telephoned Villa Soleil to wish Ivan and the children a pleasant morning. Confronted with Ivan’s rage, she made a few soothing comments and assured him it had to be a misunderstanding of some sort. She then had a brief conversation with Sonia, during which she instructed the nanny to take the children to the beach. When Sonia asked whether Elena needed to speak to Ivan again, Elena hesitated, then said that, yes, she did need to speak to him. When Ivan came back on the line, she told him that she loved him very much and was looking forward to seeing him that night. But Ivan was still carrying on about his airplane and the incompetence of the French. Elena murmured, “Dos vidanya, Ivan,” and severed the connection.
     
     
    Gabriel was a