Moscow Rules

moment longer and imagined the FSB listeners having a good laugh at his expense.
     

 
    13
     
     
    MOSCOW
     
     
    On Moscow’s Tverskaya Street, the flashy foreign cars of the newly rich jockeyed for position with the boxy Ladas and Zhigulis of the still deprived. The Kremlin’s Trinity Tower was nearly lost in a gauzy shroud of exhaust fumes, its famous red star looking sadly like just another advertisement for an imported luxury good. In the bar of the Savoy Hotel, the sharp boys and their bodyguards were drinking cold beer instead of vodka. Their black Bentleys and Range Rovers waited just outside the entrance, engines running for a quick getaway. Conservation of fuel was hardly a priority in Russia these days. Petrol, like nearly everything else, was in plentiful supply.
     
     
    At 7:30 P.M., Gabriel came down to the lobby dressed in a dark suit and diplomatic silver tie. Stepping from the entrance, he scanned the faces behind the wheels of the parked cars before heading down the hill to the Teatralnyy Prospekt. Atop a low hill loomed the hulking yellow fortress of Lubyanka, headquarters of the FSB. In its shadow was a row of exclusive Western designer boutiques worthy of Rodeo Drive or Madison Avenue. Gabriel could not help but marvel at the striking juxtaposition, even if it was only a bit of pantomime for the pair of watchers who had left the comfort of their air-conditioned car and were now trailing him on foot.
     
     
    He consulted a hotel street map—needlessly, because his route was well planned in advance—and made his way to a large open-air esplanade at the foot of the Kremlin walls. Passing a row of kiosks selling everything from Soviet hockey jerseys to busts of the murderers Lenin and Stalin, he turned to the left and entered Red Square. The last of the day’s pilgrims stood outside the entrance of Lenin’s Tomb, sipping Coca-Cola and fanning themselves with tourist brochures and guides to Moscow nightlife. He wondered what drew them here. Was it misplaced faith? Nostalgia for a simpler time? Or did they come merely for morbid reasons? To judge for themselves whether the figure beneath the glass was real or more worthy of a wax museum?
     
     
    He crossed the square toward the candy-cane domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, then followed the eastern wall of the Kremlin down to the Moscow River. On the opposite bank, at Serafimovicha Street 2, stood the infamous House on the Embankment, the colossal apartment block built by Stalin in 1931 as an exclusive residence for the most elite members of the nomenklatura . During the height of the Great Terror, 766 residents, or one-third of its total population, had been murdered, and those “privileged” enough to reside in the house lived in constant fear of the knock at the door. Despite its bloody history, many of the old Soviet elite and their children still lived in the building, and flats now sold for millions of dollars. Little of the exterior had changed except for the roof, which was now crowned by a Stalin-sized revolving advertisement for Mercedes-Benz. The Nazis may have failed in their bid to capture Moscow, but now, sixty years after the war, the flag of German industrial might flew proudly from one of the city’s most prestigious landmarks.
     
     
    Gabriel gave his map another pointless glance as he set out across the Moskvoretsky Bridge. Crimson-and-black banners of the ruling Russian Unity Party hung from the lampposts, swaying drunkenly in the warm breeze. At the opposite end of the bridge, the Russian president smiled disagreeably at Gabriel from a billboard three stories in height. He was scheduled to face the Russian “electorate,” such that it was, for the fourth time at the end of the summer. There was little suspense about the outcome; the president had long ago purged Russia of dangerous democratic tendencies, and the officially sanctioned opposition parties were now little more than useful idiots. The smiling man on the billboard was the new tsar in everything but name—and one with imperial ambitions at that.
     
     
    On the other side of the river lay the pleasant quarter known as Zamoskvoreche. Spared the architectural terror of Stalin’s replanning, the district had retained some of the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Moscow. Gabriel walked past flaking imperial houses and onion-domed churches until he came to the walled compound at Bolshaya Ordynka 56. The plaque at the gate read EMBASSY OF ISRAEL in English,