The English Girl: A Novel

bring your total compensation to something like this.”
    Lazarev placed the sheet of paper in front of Mikhail and pointed to the figure near the bottom of the page. Mikhail looked at it for a moment, scratched his hairless head, and frowned.
    “Well?” asked Lazarev.
    “Not even close.”
    Lazarev smiled. “I thought that would be your answer,” he said, delving into the folio again, “so I took the liberty of preparing a second offer.” He placed it in front of Mikhail and asked, “Any better?”
    “Warmer,” said Mikhail, returning Lazarev’s smile. “Definitely warmer.”

49
    RED SQUARE, MOSCOW
    B y four that afternoon, they had the broad outlines of an agreement. Lazarev drew up a one-page deal memo, booked a private room at Café Pushkin for the celebration, and sent Mikhail back to the Ritz for a few hours of rest. He made the short walk with no escort other than Gabriel, who was shadowing him along the opposite pavement, his coat collar around his ears, a flat cap pulled low over his brow. He watched Mikhail turn into the hotel’s grand entrance and then continued along Tverskaya Street to Revolution Square. There he paused briefly to watch a Lenin impersonator exhorting a group of bewildered Japanese tourists to seize the means of production from their bourgeoisie overlords. Then he slipped beneath the archway of Resurrection Gate and entered Red Square.
    Darkness had fallen and the wind had decided to give the city a reprieve to go about its evening business in peace. Head down, shoulders hunched, Gabriel looked like just another jaded Muscovite as he hurried along the northern wall of the Kremlin, past the blank stares of the frozen guards standing watch outside the Lenin Mausoleum. Directly ahead, awash in white light, rose the swirling candy-cane domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Gabriel glanced at the clock in the Savior Tower and then made his way to the spot along the Kremlin wall where Stalin, the murderer of millions, slumbered peacefully in a place of honor. Eli Lavon joined him a moment later.
    “What do you think?” asked Gabriel in German.
    “I think they should have buried him in an unmarked grave in a field,” Lavon responded. “But that’s just one man’s opinion.”
    “Are we clean?”
    “As clean as we can be in a place like Moscow.”
    Gabriel turned without a word and led Lavon across the square to the entrance of GUM. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, it had been the only department store in the country where Russians could reliably find a winter coat or a pair of shoes. Now it was a Western-style shopping mall stuffed with all the useless trinkets capitalism had to offer. The soaring glass roof reverberated with the chatter of the evening shoppers. Lavon stared at his BlackBerry as he walked at Gabriel’s side. These days, it was a very Russian thing to do.
    “Gennady Lazarev’s secretary just sent an e-mail to his senior staff about tonight’s dinner at Café Pushkin,” Lavon said. “Pavel Zhirov was on the invitation list.”
    “I never heard his voice when Mikhail was inside Volgatek today.”
    “That’s because he wasn’t there,” Lavon replied, still gazing at his BlackBerry. “After leaving his apartment in Sparrow Hills, he went straight to Yasenevo.”
    “Why today of all days? Why wasn’t he at Volgatek to meet the new boy?”
    “Maybe he had other business to attend to.”
    “Like what?”
    “Maybe there was someone else who needed to be kidnapped.”
    “That’s what worries me.”
    Gabriel paused in the window of a jewelry store and gazed at a display of glittering Swiss watches. Next door was a Soviet-style cafeteria where plump women in white aprons joylessly spooned cheap Russian food onto gray Brezhnev-era plates. Even now, more than twenty years after the fall of communism, there were still Russians who clung to the nostalgia of their totalitarian past.
    “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?” Lavon asked.
    “It’s December in Moscow, Eli. It’s impossible not to.”
    “What do you want to do about it?”
    “I’d like the hotel to give Nicholas Avedon his special amenity a little earlier than planned.”
    “Amenities like that are frowned upon at Café Pushkin.”
    “Anyone who’s anyone carries a gun at Pushkin, Eli.”
    “It’s risky.”
    “Not as risky as the alternative.”
    “Why don’t we skip dinner and go straight to dessert?”
    “I’d love to,” said Gabriel, “but the rush-hour traffic