reflected life’s knocks. There was a lived-in look in his eyes, exaggerated by a dolefulness from his heavy eyelids that slanted downwards towards the outside. They gave him a seen-it-all look. But the pupils were hard points that seemed to bore into whatever took his attention.
He wasn’t on duty tonight and had arrived wearing a ski jacket, now hung on the stool beneath him, a blue sailing sweater, and jeans. But he suspected he still stood out as being a cop, even though that was only half right. He was an officer in the SBU, Ukraine’s intelligence service, with a stalled career due to his father’s murky business dealings, and a stalled ambition to match. But perhaps cops, security officers, and spies all looked the same to the carefree crowds of youth at the Golden Fleece.
Despite not being on duty, he still looked at the faces and studied the attitudes of the club’s youthful occupants. One persistent thought that wouldn’t leave Taras’s mind on this preelection night: they’d all been too young to vote in 2004. When the Orange Revolution had swept through Ukraine, toppling Viktor Yanukovich from an illegal election victory, and installing Viktor Yuschenko, the current incumbent, most if not all of the club’s occupants had been barely teenagers. And yet though the Orange Revolution was only six years ago, as far as the youths in the club were concerned it might just as well have been half a century ago. The Orange Revolution was something remote to them, like a black-and-white film or a pop song that was now derided for its old-fashioned museum quality and—let’s face it—naivete.
The world and his own country with it had moved on with astonishing speed and the kids in the club had grown into their voting years under the shadow of the failure of that revolution. What they knew about politics, if anything, was the disappointment of those expectations: the continued corruption, the economic failure, and—as the inevitable consequence of that—the political exclusion of Ukraine from the European Union and NATO. There was a sense of national humiliation that came from Ukraine being defined by the outside world for its faults.
Taras had been brought up from childhood in Odessa, but in his teens his father had bought the farm outside Sevastopol in the Crimea. That was the reason he and Masha decided to rendezvous in Odessa rather than in Kiev where he worked. His father, now dead, had been a
Odessa had always been a great trading city, but within a few months in 1991, Taras’s family had moved to the Crimea, into the farmhouse outside Sevastopol, and the Odessa residence became his father’s office. By that time, his father had warehouses in Odessa and other offices in Kiev, thanks to payments in the right places. The family—minus his father—had moved out from the fringes of Odessa to a place his mother loved and where, Taras suspected, his father was only too happy to keep her out of the way. It was for their protection, as his father had put it, and after that the family hardly saw him when the business took off.
How had his father done it? Connections, of course. His father had also been with the SBU and was able to capitalise on the looser commercial rules more quickly than most. From being a company man in the SBU he had elided into another, this time commercial, company with ease but one which consisted of business entrepreneurship. His father, however, had a natural talent for rising in the new economy, which had made him rich where others with the same opportunities had squandered them.
It was his father who had eased Taras’s way into the country’s intelligence services, but he’d failed to interest him in making money. From the elite school of intelligence, his father had created what he’d hoped would be a place in the elite school of business—and a dynastic continuity. But Taras had found himself more interested in working for his new country than stacking up money. Money for what?
And then his father had died, shot on the streets of Berlin in 1994. He was murdered by the Chechen mafia, voices at the SBU had said. Creditors had arrived. And then all Taras had left was the farmhouse outside Sevastopol and his job. He had no interest in, or talent for, business.
He looked around his surroundings now and thought that he’d come about as far as he was ever likely to go in the intelligence world, too. Even without the suspicion with which he was regarded by the intelligence agency after his father’s murder, he feared that he lacked ambition. And he certainly lacked the greed of his fellow officers for turning his privileged position into cash.
Tonight the Golden Fleece nightclub in Odessa was summing up all he didn’t like about the quest for money. He casually looked at the cocktail card on the bar top advertising a “Blow Job Shooter,” whatever that was.
No venue that Taras could recall—no billionaires’ club, no flashy joint or grubby dive or bootlegger’s den he had ever visited—had achieved anything quite approaching the individual mix of astonishingly vulgar wealth openly on show with its extreme, outlandish kitsch.
From the snaking menace of the reflective aluminium bar top, dotted with flashing diamonds of light, which disappeared some indeterminate distance away from where he stood into clouds of purple and magenta dry ice; to the walls of glass that changed colours in giant banks of plastic green, yellow, orange, red, and blue; to the glass dance floor, ringed with small explosions of fireworks and similarly flashing livid circles of coloured light from below; and then right on up to the cages suspended above the dance floor, Taras looked for some relief from the brightness and the hideously unnatural tones that bore no relation to anything he recognised in nature. And all of these eye-numbing, brain tissue–scarring sensations that besieged his brilliant, meticulous, though underused mind assaulted him before he could even begin to take in the ear-splitting cacophony of techno-funk to which the bodies and the lights and the artful, flashing explosions of glittering fireworks that flanked the dance floor paid homage.
Not for the first time his eyes lingered for a moment on the cages that hung from a ceiling too far above him to see. Inside each cage writhed a mostly—no, looking more closely now—an entirely naked girl. They were even more beautiful than the Kiev girls. The designer topiary of their pubic hair was apparently adorned with real gold dust, mined from the gold fields that belonged to Viktor Aaronovich, the billionaire Russian oligarch from eastern Siberia and the owner of the Golden Fleece. At least, that was what it said on the club’s Web site.
For a moment the massed gold dust of contorting female pudenda above his head that—indelicately, he thought—gave the Golden Fleece its name, made him feel giddy and slightly sick. He looked down swiftly, only to be met once again by the writhing bodies on the dance floor, the rich and extremely rich of Ukraine’s youth who were here to dance and drink and drug and—who knew—probably fuck, until dawn. Lucky them, he thought—though Taras wondered about the truth of that.
In the midst of this deafeningly glitzy freak-beauty show of Ukraine’s gilded youth—and in the case of the girls in the cages, literally gilded—Taras drank stolidly from the bottle of beer.
His mind turned to the meeting in Kiev with Logan Halloran that he’d almost forgotten to cancel. Halloran was a strange figure. He’d been sacked by the CIA, according to his research at the office, then had worked freelance. And now he was working for an outfit called Cougar whose annual returns the year before were counted in the billions of dollars. Halloran seemed to him a peripatetic character, however, rarely at ease, always striving for something he didn’t have. He was too hungry, Taras thought, that was his problem. But he had a soft spot for Halloran, after their two or three meetings. Perhaps it was because few people in the intelligence world in Kiev seemed to like him. Taras wondered if he just liked him out of pity, or if he was really interested in the inevitable offer he expected Halloran to make him. He knew Halloran’s interest in him wasn’t out of friendship.
He looked in the mirror behind the bar and surveyed his appearance as closely as he dared. As someone who rarely looked at his reflection, he was surprised. Instead of the slightly formless creature he took himself to be, he saw a well-built man who was only let down—in here at any rate—by his clothing. When he looked back at the crowd of mostly girls at the bar he decided that they weren’t grimaces of contempt after all, but smiles, some of which now seemed quite seductive and enticing. It was his clothes that were weird, not the club itself, he decided, and they were making him the most noticeable figure in the entire place. That was what unnerved him as much as anything. He wished Masha would arrive and they could go somewhere else. He liked to remain in the background. The small bar he had in mind would suit him better.
He turned towards the barman and ordered another beer and noted the man only spoke Russian, not Ukrainian. Unless he was refusing to speak the national language.
Taras sipped from the neck of the bottle. Always a bottle, and opened in front of him, that was the rule. You never could tell what else might be tipped into a glass.
At least no one tried to talk to him. He was gratifyingly shunned. He was stationed at the end of the
