Finn gets up off the bed and throws his jacket on to a chair. It is a gesture of doing something to distance himself from any awkwardness between us.
‘“We” naturally includes Mikhail, who procured the pictures,’ he says with his back to me, confirming what I already know.
‘It wasn’t Sergei who got the pictures, then,’ I say.
‘No, it was Mikhail. He’s going right out to the edge,’ Finn says. ‘Taking big risks.’
But Finn’s perfectly reasonable argument, the protection of Mikhail, causes a flame of anger to rise in me. By now I realise just how big a toll the stress of being four different people is taking on me. Finn’s lover. Finn’s helper. The Forest’s agent. And still, in some twisted form, someone who believes that Russia can be something other than the prisoner of the
But most of all, perhaps, I need to believe that the two sides, the Forest and Finn, believe in me, despite my own clear deceit towards the former. It has become almost unsustainable, this split, and on this afternoon in the presence of the pictures I feel the unease rushing to the surface.
Naturally, I do not expect trust from my masters and so my need for Finn’s total openness, complete trust in all things, becomes the greater. I feel myself like a child wanting to know who Mikhail is, just so I know that Finn has told me everything.
‘He only wants to use you.’ Patrushev’s words run through my head.
The more I need the sureness of our relationship, the oneness of Finn and me, the more inconsistencies lie in the path I am following and the more fear I feel that Finn will be gone once, with my help, he has found what he wants. I don’t stop to think for one moment that, in fact, Finn has never asked anything of me in the first place.
But my anger and despair are welling up at the sight of the pictures, not at Finn.
I begin to weep quietly. But I don’t really know why I cry. Out of fear for Finn and me? At the content of the pictures? At the trap I’m in? I don’t know, perhaps all of these. And eventually I cry for the reason that finally uses up our tears. I cry for all the evil in the world.
And when I know that I am crying for everyone and everything, I stop and smile at this great futility. Finn holds me and I feel in the closeness of his presence one of those brief moments of truth that I know we both gain from each other in times of chronic self-doubt.
‘Don’t worry, Rabbit,’ Finn says after a while. Then he smiles. ‘I’ll give you more than enough to betray me.’
‘Don’t say that,’ I reply.
‘But that’s the choice. Eventually,’ he adds. ‘I’d like you to have the choice, Anna. Having the choice is what will bind us. Because I know of course you’ll make the right choice,’ he says. ‘And leave Russia.’
I stand up and go to the bathroom. I look in the mirror to see if there are traces of four different people in my face. But I look as I always look, though paler, perhaps, from shock. And as I look at myself I think how easy life would be without choice and yet how such a possibility never exists, even when we are enslaved. I see my finely balanced act of doing my work and being so close to Finn, not as a brilliant exercise of skill and craft, but as simply a refusal to choose, to choose to leave Russia for ever.
When I return from the bathroom, I am ready for what we have to do.
‘How do you plan to use them?’ I ask.
Finn sits down on the bed and we both turn and look again at the pictures.
The sixty-one-year-old president of the Banque Leman, an elegant if bland nineteenth-century building artfully lit across the street from our Geneva hotel room, is dressed in various leather straps and thongs, studded or not with silver metal. His paunchy white stomach protrudes over a tight black leather strap above his naked genitals and in his right hand, in a studded glove, he holds a leather stick. There are open bottles of liquor everywhere in the room, some knocked over, their contents spilled over the carpet. In one picture white powder, possibly cocaine, is visible in a disorderly pile on a side table. In another picture there are stains on the wall-wine, blood, bodily fluids? The black-and-white photographs leave this to the imagination, which is somehow worse.
In some of the pictures the bank’s president Clement Naider is laughing like a satyr, his prick fully erect. In others he is snapping or snarling and raising his hand and, judging from their expressions, apparently bringing it down from time to time, with its stick gripped firmly, on to one or other of the girls. Without them, without the girls, it would be almost comical.
But it’s the girls who have broken me. They are no more than ten years old, twelve at the most. One of them looks as if she might be even younger. It is hard to tell how many of them there are–they are never all in one picture. One is lying on the floor like a dead body. But in each picture he is inflicting on them one or more depraved acts that outdoes the ones before, in an escalating gallery of foul and hellish images that threaten once again to break my composure.
The girls? They are provided for his purposes by my own people, of course, colleagues at the Forest. From where? I don’t know. Orphanages, perhaps. Or off the street. One or two of them have central Asian faces, so they’re from one of the southern republics, I suppose. Perhaps they are stolen from their homes, abducted in the cruel war in Chechnya. I don’t know, I don’t know who they are. But I realise it doesn’t matter where they come from. They are just children inserted brutally into this torment of the Forest’s making.
And it is at this moment that I decide the time has come for me to leave everything behind, to leave this–if this is what Russia has become again–for good. It is time to spend a life looking over my shoulder for the Forest’s retribution. It is time to defect, and even Nana and all the memories of my childhood can no longer hold me. I wonder if this is why Finn has shown them to me.
Finn gathers the pictures into a pile and puts them in an envelope.
‘Naider goes on Saturdays to visit his wife in a sanatorium outside Vevey,’ he says. ‘His wife has motor neurone disease. He has lunch with her there and then takes a walk alone through the woods if the weather’s OK. I’ll make contact with him then, when he’s on his own.’
At last I snap my mind away from contemplation of my own situation and consider Finn’s words from a professional point of view, glad to have something else on which to focus my thoughts.
‘No. You have to go to the bank, Finn. It’s more of a risk, but that’s where the details are. Account numbers, names, whatever it is you’re after. He won’t have those in his head. If you force him without getting the full details, you risk losing him.’
‘I have the photographs,’ Finn argues.
‘What if the photographs push him too far?’ I say. ‘He can’t take it. He’s trapped. He kills himself. No, you must hit him just once. It might be too late for a follow-up.’
Finn thinks for a moment, pacing the room, stopping by the window and, perhaps, looking across the streets at the bank itself. He knows I am right, but he doesn’t like the prospect of entering the bank any more than I do. There are too many people inside a building, too many things that can go wrong. But he agrees.
Finn has prepared himself in all sorts of ways for what he’s going to do. He has offshore financial vehicles tucked away, shell companies that Frank or the Troll have fixed up for him all over the world. He has an account in the Cayman Islands.
He also has a set of friendly lawyers, in Switzerland, personal contacts of the Troll and perhaps trolls themselves.
And he has a passport for the purpose, or more than one passport, for all I know. This one, however, is in the name of Robinson, and the Englishman James has acquired it for him.
He has painstakingly set up all the trappings of a privately wealthy international individual with strings of companies, but without the actual cash that would normally be concealed by such trappings. Concealment is his purpose but it is to conceal that he has nothing.
And so, on the following day, Finn drafts a letter from his Swiss lawyers to the Banque Leman which will be sent on their official paper from their true and verifiable address in Interlaken.
‘Our client is a high-net-worth individual who wishes any contact with the bank to remain discreet for the time being,’ Finn writes in the imagined hand of his lawyers. ‘Our client wishes to put on safe deposit several tens of millions of dollars’ worth of gold bullion, transferable to stocks, bonds or cash at short notice. For the time being our client has decided to amalgamate from disparate investments around the world a modest quantity of his total
