“Mr. Vladimir Azarov?” he asked, as if the hotel were full of Azarovs.
“Indeed,” Helena said.
“Did you call his room?” he asked in a tone that implied he may not want to see her even if he was in his room. But his eyes travelled to the left, past the two giant palm trees, and came to rest there for a second before returning to inspect Helena. “Perhaps you wish to leave a message?”
“Oh,” she said. “I think I will just join him in the bar.” Helena wove her way among the tables to the back of the bar where a pianist was attempting to entertain guests with a bit of Chopin. Vladimir was sitting alone behind one of the palms at a large marble-top table. He wore a burgundy velvet jacket that stretched over his broad shoulders. As the son of a Ukrainian prison guard at a Gulag labour camp, he would not have attended one of the Communist Party’s elite schools, but he still somehow managed to accumulate a significant fortune by the time he was thirty. Not long after, Putin annexed a chunk of Ukraine where Vladimir had real estate interests. Unfazed by such small misfortune, Vladimir handed over the title to his buildings to Putin’s choice of Russian oligarchs, thus establishing himself as a man to be trusted in the Kremlin.
Azarov was nursing a fat goblet of something amber that Helena assumed was brandy — his drink of choice on gloomy days, he had once told her.
He tensed when her shadow fell over his glass, but he did not look up. When she lowered herself into the leather armchair next to his, all he said was “No, madam.” He took a sip from his goblet and added in a lower voice, “Maybe another day.”
“Good evening, Vladimir,” Helena said cheerfully. “I’ve decided to accept your earlier invitation. I thought it possible, just possible, that you would be inclined to share some information.”
“Helena,” he said with a wide grin that displayed his even white teeth. But she had known him a long time and she remembered the uneven yellowish teeth he had when they first met fifteen years ago. His teeth then had been a legacy of his impoverished childhood spent somewhere near Vorkuta, where water was scarce and wells were contaminated with coal dust from the mines. It was not the kind of place where you would eat green vegetables or fruit during the long winters and, as Vladimir had told her once, his family had not been better off than the slave labourers. “Always delighted to see you,” he said. “And what information would that be?”
“I wondered whether you had managed to find the Strasbourg archer on your own? Or has your man just been following me?” she asked.
“Berkowitz? Yes. He was not so hard to find once we got his picture. I assumed he was from Hungary and, in fact, that this whole thing is some kind of Hungarian swindle that maybe we should both avoid getting mixed up in. And you do look quite lovely tonight. I don’t think I have seen this outfit and it does lend you an air of — what? — mystery, maybe.”
Helena didn’t believe he was backing away. He rarely gave up, and he would hardly have stayed in Budapest had he decided to abandon his quest for the painting. “Have you found out more than his name?”
“You mean who he works for? I think you established that when you tracked him into the parliament buildings. Still not sure how you did that, but we saw you coming out of the politicians’ and employees’ entrance.”
“That doesn’t pinpoint whom he works for, nor does it provide a name.”
“You’re right. It’s just a connection. It was your slicing up one of Grigoriev’s men that provided the answer. You were there to find out about Zoltán Nagy. Grigoriev’s man was doing the same thing.”
“Looking for Berkowitz?”
“Berkowitz works for Nagy and sometimes for Árpád Magyar. He is a kind of odd-jobs man, though he has also been an enforcer. Your buddy the police officer or private dick could have told you that. Don’t you wonder why he hasn’t?”
“No.”
“I assume he didn’t mention that Berkowitz may also be connected to Vaszary? I thought not. He lurks in a lot of government news photographs, as a kind of background, like a plant or a distant view over the Danube. He is not named in the captions.”
“Why did Berkowitz, or the men he works for, want to kill Magoci?” Helena asked.
“That,” Vladimir said, “should be your next question. Assuming you are determined to carry on with this nonsense. If I were you, Helena, I would leave it to the professionals and go back to Strasbourg where you could maybe establish the provenance of that painting, or declare it a fake, or a copy, and go home with your well-earned reward.”
“Funny, that was also my friend’s advice — the private dick, as you call him.”
“You are not interested in taking it,” Azarov said with a grin.
“Not until I know what’s going on with that painting and why.”
Vladimir sighed. “Come, stay,” he said as he saw Helena getting ready to leave. “Let me get you a glass of wine, and I will tell you something of what I know.
“For some people, paintings are, as you know, just another form of currency. They may not be as easy to handle as other forms, but they are an effective way to launder money. You buy a painting, and no one knows what it cost you; you sell it, and, unless you seek publicity for your sale as Christie’s might to encourage other buyers or sellers, no one needs to know exactly how much you got for it. You can then reinvest your money in something clean. Like a building. Or a villa on the Mediterranean. The two gentlemen I mentioned are both richer than they have any right to be on government salaries.
