Spring 1998

The head doctor made me give up alcohol and presence at the workplace. A real Doctor Loder! Having lain under a drip, I planned to spend the May holidays exactly as the doctor prescribed. Take a run to Nice, for instance, where a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer had become my property. Somewhere to lie low and breathe.

Ida shot the idea down on takeoff: the place is occupied by the second family of the Neftesibirsk governor Alexei Gerasimovich, a family I’m not supposed to know about. The governor’s first family occupies another of my houses – in the county of Kent, England. From there they watch over the offspring whom Proma Holding placed in the private school Sevenoaks. The boy studies alongside Yeltsin’s grandson and Chubais’s son, they get into mischief together and spend together. We pay for the amusements of the Neftesibirsk prince and through those expenses settle problems 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 come to, then a transfer to Monaco or Nice, see which is better. Line up a hotel for a week and rent a richer car, also for a week. Then rent a bottomless barn, so we can drive to Malaga with overnight stops on the way. Book the little hotels, three or four hundred kilometers a leg, we won’t hurry. In Malaga rent, for as long as we’re there, a runabout that can take the corners and isn’t the most shameful one going. For mid-May book a flight to Miami from Madrid or Lisbon. See which is more convenient. An afternoon flight, not a morning one. Book the return Miami–Moscow tickets with an open date. End of May, beginning of 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 settled into the Hilton. In the morning we drove in the «Aston Martin» to Alexei Gerasimovich, who flew in every month to live in my house for two weeks. I had imagined I owned a villa in some backwater far from the sea, squeezed out by Zhorik and put up for sale at an outrageous 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 trip was not memorable for anything in particular. Though the red sofa in the shape of scarlet women’s lips was very memorable indeed. I wandered through the Dalí museum in Figueres and allowed that the little red sofa was the fruit of visions like my own, except the artist had managed to render them in the flesh. Poor but tidy.

Malaga turned out lovely.