Moscow Rules

sued many times by people who didn’t like what we wrote about them but we’ve never lost, not even in the kangaroo courts of Russia.”

“So you started asking questions?”

“We’re reporters, Mr. Golani. That’s what we do. Our investigation unearthed a few intriguing bits but nothing specific and nothing we could publish. We decided to send one of our reporters to Courchevel to follow the arms dealer in question. The dealer owns a chalet there. A rather large chalet, actually.”

“The reporter was Aleksandr Lubin?”

She nodded her head slowly. “I assume you know the details from the news accounts. Aleksandr was murdered within a few hours of his arrival. Obviously, it was a warning to the rest of the Gazeta staff to back off. I’m afraid it had the opposite effect, though. We took Aleksandr’s murder as confirmation the story was true.”

“And so you kept digging?”

“Carefully. But, yes, we kept digging. We were able to uncover much about the arms dealer’s operations in general, but were never able to pin down the specifics of a deal. Finally, the matter was taken out of our hands entirely. Quite unexpectedly, the owner of the Gazeta decided to sell the magazine. I’m afraid he didn’t reach the decision on his own; he was pressured into the sale by the Kremlin and the FSB. Our new owner is a man with no experience in journalism whatsoever, and his first move was to appoint a publisher with even less. The publisher announced that he was no longer interested in hard news or investigative journalism. The Gazeta was now going to focus on celebrity news, the arts, and life in the New Russia. He then held a meeting with Boris Ostrovsky to review upcoming stories. Guess which story he killed first?”

“An investigation into a possible deal between a Russian arms trafficker and al-Qaeda.”

“Exactly.”

“I assume the time of the sale wasn’t a coincidence.”

“No, it wasn’t. Our new owner is an associate of the arms dealer. In all likelihood, it was the arms dealer who put up all the money. Rather remarkable, don’t you think, Mr. Golani? Only in Russia.”

She reached into her handbag and withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you mind?”

Gabriel shook his head, and glanced around the restaurant. One of the mobsters had his hand on the bare thigh of his date, but there were no signs of any watchers. Olga lit her cigarette and placed the pack and lighter on the table.

“The sale of the magazine presented us with a terrible dilemma. We believed the story about the missile sale to be true, but we now had no place to publish it. Nor could we continue to investigate the story inside Russia. We decided on another course of action. We decided to make our findings known to the West through a trusted figure inside Israeli intelligence.”

'Why me? Why not walk over to the U.S. Embassy and tell the CIA station chief?”

“It is no longer wise for members of the opposition or the press to meet with American officials, especially those who also happen to work for the CIA. Besides, Boris always admired the secret intelligence service of Israel. And he was especially fond of a certain agent who recently got his picture in the paper for saving the life of the daughter of the American ambassador to London.”

“And so he decided to leave the country and contact us in Rome?”

“In keeping with the new mission of the Gazeta, he told our publisher he wanted to do a piece about Russians at play in the Eternal City. After he arrived in Rome, he made contact with your embassy and requested a meeting. Obviously, the arms dealer and his security service were watching. I suspect they’re watching now.”

“Who is he? Who is the arms dealer?”

She said a name, then picked up the wine list and opened the cover.

“Let’s have something to drink, shall we, Mr. Golani? Do you prefer red or white?”

Stalin brought the wine. It was Georgian, bloodred, and very rough. Gabriel’s thoughts were now elsewhere. He was thinking of the name Olga Sukhova had just spoken. It was familiar to him, of course. Everyone in the trade had heard the name Ivan Kharkov.

“How much do you know about him, Mr. Golani?”

“The basics. Former KGB turned Russian oligarch. Passes himself off as a legitimate investor and international businessman. Lives mainly in London and France.”

“Those are the basics. May I give you a more thorough version of the story?”

Gabriel nodded his head. Olga braced herself on her elbows and held the wineglass near her face with both hands. Between them, a candle flickered in a red bowl. It added blush to her pale cheeks.

“He was a child of Soviet privilege, our Ivan. His father was high-ranking KGB. Very high-ranking. In fact, when he retired, he was the chief of the First Main Directorate, the foreign espionage division. Ivan spent a good part of his childhood abroad. He was permitted to travel, while ordinary Soviet citizens were kept prisoner in their own country. He had blue jeans and Rolling Stones records, while ordinary Soviet teenagers had Communist propaganda and Komsomol weekends in the country. In the days of shortages, when the workers were forced to eat seaweed and whale meat, he and his family had fresh veal and caviar.”

She drank some of the wine. At the front entrance, Stalin was negotiating with two male customers over a table. One of them had been at the cemetery. Olga seemed not to notice.

“Like all the children of Party elite, he was automatically granted a place at an elite university. In Ivan’s case, it was Moscow State. After graduation, he was admitted directly into the ranks of the KGB. Despitehis fluency in English and German, he was not deemed suitable material for a life as a foreign spy, so he was assigned to the Fifth Main Directorate. Do you know about the Fifth Main Directorate, Mr. Golani?”

“It was responsible for internal security functions: border control, dissidents, artists and writers.”

“Don’t forget the refuseniks, Mr. Golani. The Fifth Directorate was also responsible for persecuting Jews. Rumor has it Ivan was very diligent in that regard.”

Stalin was now seating the two men at a table near the center of the restaurant, well out of earshot.

“Ivan benefited from the magic hand of his famous father and was promoted rapidly through the ranks of the directorate. Then came Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika, and overnight everything in our country changed. The Party loosened the reins on central planning and allowed young entrepreneurs-in some cases the very dissidents whom Ivan and the Fifth Directorate were monitoring-to start cooperatives and private banks. Against all odds, many of these young entrepreneurs actually started to make money. This didn’t sit well with our secret overlords at Lubyanka. They were used to picking society’s winners and losers. A free marketplace threatened to upset the old order. And, of course, if there was money to be made, they wanted what was rightly theirs. They decided they had no option but to go into business for themselves. They needed an energetic young man of their own, a young man who knew the ways of Western capitalism. A young man who had been permitted to read the forbidden books.”

“Ivan Kharkov.”

She raised her glass in salutation to his correct answer. “With the blessing of his masters at Lubyanka, Ivan was allowed to leave the KGB and start a bank. He was given a single dank room in an old Moscow office building, a telephone, and an American-made personal computer,something most of us had never seen. Once again, the magic hand was laid upon Ivan’s shoulder and within months his new bank was raking in millions of dollars in profit, almost all of it due to State business. Then the Soviet Union crumbled, and we entered the roaring nineties period of gangster capitalism, shock therapy, and instant privatization. When the State-owned enterprises of the Soviet Union were auctioned off to the highest bidder, Ivan gobbled up some of the most lucrative assets and factories. When Moscow real estate could be purchased for a song and a promise, Ivan snatched up some of the gems. During the period of hyperinflation, Ivan and his patrons at Lubyanka Square made fortunes in currency speculation-fortunes that inevitably found their way into secret bank accounts in Zurich and Geneva. Ivan never had any illusions about the reason for his astonishing success. He had been helped by the magic hand of the KGB, and he was very good at keeping the magic hand filled with money.”

A waiter appeared and began laying small dishes of Georgian appetizers on the table. Olga explained the contents of each; then, when the waiter was gone, she resumed her lecture.

“One of the State assets Ivan scooped up in the early nineties was a fleet of cargo planes and container vessels. They didn’t cost him much, since at the time most of the planes were sinking into the ground at airfields