Spring 1998
The shrink made me give up alcohol and showing up at the office. A regular Doctor Loder! After lying under an IV drip for a while, I planned to spend the May holidays exactly as the doctor ordered. Take a trip to Nice, say – I’d apparently ended up owning a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer. Somewhere to lie low and catch my breath.
Ida shot the idea down before it took off: the place was occupied by the second family of Neftesibirsk governor Alexei Gerasimovich – a family I wasn’t supposed to know about. The governor’s first family occupied another one of my houses, in Kent, England. From there they kept an eye on the offspring Proma Holding had gotten into the private school Sevenoaks. The boy was studying alongside Yeltsin’s grandson and Chubais’s son, getting into trouble together, spending together. We covered the Neftesibirsk prince’s fun, and through those expenses smoothed over problems back in Neftesibirsk Province.
– Whew! So where am I supposed to vacation?
– Let me check what’s going on with Malaga and Miami. – Ida buried herself in her notes; I was baffled: «What Malaga? Is there a house there too?»
A minute later, I got my report:
– Malaga’s taken starting next month through fall. Miami’s the opposite – in two weeks Eleonora Maksimilianovna comes back to Moscow until October. The tomatoes at the dacha in Zhukovka aren’t going to grow themselves!
– Turned my private property into a tourist camp, – I grumbled.
Half an hour later, I was dictating to Yana:
– Book two tickets before the May holidays to Milan or Paris. A couple of days there to recover, then a transfer to Monaco or Nice, whichever works out better. Line up a hotel for a week and rent something fancier for a car, also a week. Then rent one of those bottomless barns, so we can drive down to Malaga with overnight stops along the way. Book us some little hotels, three or four hundred kilometers a leg, no rush. In Malaga, rent a proper little runabout for as long as we’re there – something that can handle the curves and isn’t too embarrassing. For mid-May, book a flight to Miami out of Madrid or Lisbon. Check which is more convenient. Afternoon flight, don’t need a morning one. Book the return Miami–Moscow tickets with an open date. Late May, early June. All business class.
The holding’s affairs kept getting worse and worse. I had no idea how to fix things. Any intervention I made just caused more problems. I needed a distraction! Called Liza and suggested we go air out our heads in Europe and the States.
We flew to Paris, which, unlike my previous visits, turned out to be a charming little town: I’d seen this street in a movie, and this one too, and look, Boulevard des Capucines! I’d watched a lot of French films as a kid, and Soviet ones too.
Three days later, we arrived in Nice and checked into the Hilton. In the morning, we drove out in the Aston Martin to see Alexei Gerasimovich, who flew in every month to spend two weeks in my house. I’d assumed I owned some villa off in a backwater far from the sea, one Zhorik had squeezed out of someone and put up for sale at an absurd price.
I looked over the villa and figured: fix a couple of things and it’s perfectly livable, why sell it? A conversation over langoustines and rosé pulled me away from further calculations: someone hinted there was money to be made. Our eternal headache, the Rassvet Holding, was betting on the Deputy Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation. With that kind of backing, they’d been acting unscrupulous and brazen, and everyone was sick of them. And the deputy himself was getting in the way of plenty of players inside the Prosecutor’s Office. He was still smoldering along for now, but a deadline had been set: by New Year’s. And once that hits, don’t blink!
A great hint!
After eating seafood delicacies with a couple more useful little people, it felt like luck was in my hands. Got stuck for a second week, downing slimy critters in the company of a third set of useful little people. What had felt like a hint turned into actual numbers scribbled on napkins and a wish: it’d be nice to open a genuine French seafood restaurant in Moscow. Either way, we’d be in touch after the holidays. We’d get it sorted!
Phew!
Liza and I set off west along the coast in the bottomless Audi A6 Avant. The drive itself was nothing memorable. But the red couch shaped like scarlet women’s lips – that I remembered plenty well. I wandered through the Dalí museum in Figueres and figured that little red couch was the fruit of visions much like my own, except the artist had actually managed to render his in physical form. Modest but tidy.
Malaga turned out lovely.
