I LANDED IN NICE on a fall morning. The air smelled of salt and pine resin. Two heavies in Prada were waiting on the runway to take me to the Château de la Garoupe. What they called a château was actually an unsightly villa built by an English baron at the turn of the twentieth century and afterwards degraded further by a series of subsequent owners. The area had originally been a paradise, but Antibes had gradually become a kind of three-star luxury resort, and though the villas on the peninsula might merit an added half star or so, they hadn’t entirely been spared the general program of uglification to which Berezovsky had become a recent and enthusiastic convert.
Boris, lavish with his millions, had bought several neighboring houses and joined them into a single grandiose property. He greeted me in the forecourt, apparently in good spirits, dressed like a financier on vacation, in khaki pants and a striped shirt. He gave off a sense of overexcited melancholy. “This beach is where Picasso used to draw in the sand,” he said, taking me on a tour of the property. “Cole Porter composed ‘Love for Sale’ in this room.” As he spoke, the culture of the 1920s was transformed into selling points for a real estate transaction.
Once we’d settled in his second-floor office, I laid out the reason for my visit. Our intelligence services had reported a rumor—actually quite a bit more than a rumor—that Berezovsky was one of the main supporters of the Ukrainian opposition, which was beginning to give the tsar serious concerns. The idea that Russia was losing control of what had for centuries been an integral part of its territory was literally driving him mad. “Go see that son of a bitch,” he’d told me, “tell him he’s gone too far, and try to reason with him.”
I was trying to do just that, but as usual, wasn’t having much success. Boris’s perorations had a circular quality, always returning more or less to their starting point.
“Do you know what the problem is, Vadya?”
—Of course I do, Boris, the problem is that Putin is a spy.
—No listen, Vadya, he’s not a spy. Your boss worked in counterespionage. That’s not the same at all! Do you know the difference? Spies look for accurate information, that’s their job. But people in counterespionage, their job is to be paranoid. To see plots and traitors everywhere, and to invent them if necessary. That’s their training. Paranoia is a professional duty. To the tsar’s way of thinking, nothing ever happens spontaneously. There’s always manipulation involved. With protests or the people’s indignation, nothing is ever what it seems. There always has to be someone behind the scenes pulling the strings, a puppet master who’s pursuing his own agenda. That’s how your chief interpreted the submarine incident, when journalists were just doing their job and people had every reason to be angry. And that’s what he thinks now about Ukraine. As if the poor Ukrainians didn’t have their own valid reasons to rebel against the crooks who govern them.
—They certainly have good reasons, Boris, but they also have the thirty million dollars you sent them.
—So what? That’s called politics, Vadya. And you know what else? It’s called democracy. But you’ve already forgotten what that word means.
Beyond the windows, the worn landscape of the Riviera dulled the sharp edge of Berezovsky’s words.
“Do you know,” I said, “who the main supporters of the Ukrainian opposition are? Shall I list them for you? There’s the CIA, the U.S. State Department, the big U.S. foundations, and George Soros’s Open Society. And then there’s you, the man who fought at our side to save Russia from disaster, who held that the Kremlin’s authority had to be restored.”
—And what of it? You’re the ones who threw me out. I’m not here by choice, I might remind you. I live in exile, Vadya. Because if I ever set foot in Russia again, I’ll wind up in jail like your friend Khodorkovsky. You people took everything I had, Vadya, so what am I supposed to do, say thank you?
I looked around at the mahogany tables, the Louis XV mantelpiece, the bronze candlesticks, the acanthus scrolls, the marble busts. All of it slightly wrong for this place, which, after all, was a glorified beach house, but Berezovsky had never quite grasped the concept of minimalism. He followed my gaze.
“All of it is mine, Vadya,” he said. “Earned by the sweat of my brow. Even if you wanted, you couldn’t do anything about it.”
—Be fair, Boris. Up till now, the tsar has stayed friends with you, in spite of your disagreements. That’s why you were able to sell the shares of your companies in Russia. How much did you get? Around one point three billion dollars, if I remember?
—A lot less than they were worth.
—But enough all the same to guarantee a life of comfort for you and your descendants, I should think.
—If I’d wanted a comfortable life, Vadya, I’d have stayed at the university and taught math.
For a moment, the ghost of Berezovsky as a graying professor in corduroys and a Shetland sweater hovered in the air between us.
“What I’m trying to tell you, Boris,” I said patiently, “is that you’d be wise not to underestimate what you have. Anyone else would take full advantage of it.”
—Or else what? You send your hired killers after me? Look around, Vadya, I’ve got my sidemen too. And mine are better than yours because I pay them ten times as much.
—Don’t be vulgar, Boris. I didn’t come here to threaten you. Just to appeal to your sense of patriotism. I understand your resentment, but I can’t believe it’s blinded you to the point of turning on your own country.
—Putin’s Russia is not my country, Berezovsky shot back. I don’t recognize it anymore. We had our faults, but for the first time in Russian history, we’d managed to build a free country, one where people could do and say what they wanted. For the first time in eleven centuries of history, Vadya, think of it. And in a few years, you ripped the whole thing up, everything. You turned Russia back into what it’s always been: a gigantic prison.
—No one should feel too sorry for the Russians. They have one hundred and twenty television channels.
—But those channels all tell the same story, Vadya, like in Brezhnev’s time.
I was about to answer when we were interrupted by a butler dressed in white. Lunch was served. We went downstairs to join a small group of people gathered in the drawing room.
“Dear friends,” said Berezovsky, “allow me to introduce Vadim Baranov, the real brains of my friend Vladimir Putin, tsar of all the Russias.”
A chance for hyperbole was something Boris could never pass up. The lunch guests turned to look at me with mild interest. Theirs were the tired eyes of people who habitually dine at places like the Château de la Garoupe. An elegant elderly lady. A real estate developer in his fifties who left the lower button on his jacket sleeve undone to show that it had been custom-tailored. Two decorative young ladies who spoke mostly to each other. And a competent-looking Nordic businessman who was visibly ill at ease with the Mediterranean ambience.
I was about to launch myself at the drinks tray, as being the sole antidote to the hours of deadly boredom ahead, when I suddenly felt a strong burst of energy, like a radioactive beam, emanating from the dining room. I turned to discover its source. Beyond the wide-open double glass doors stood a perfect creature, a lustrous presence. Lightly tanned, she wore a white tunic that came to just above her knees. Her gray shark eyes looked at me without a trace of emotion. It was Ksenia. She’d lost none of her splendor, which seemed in fact enhanced by the passage of time. A kind of warrior virtue seemed to inhabit her features, replacing the childish capriciousness I’d known. Ksenia in Berezovsky’s dining room radiated the beauty of an army drawn up in battle formation. We nodded at each other, unsmiling. Everything, past as well as present, enjoined us to behave as enemies. Yet I detected no hostility on her part, nor did I feel any animosity toward her. It seemed instead as though I’d found a lost talisman, one that had been long forgotten but whose power the passage of time had left unaltered.
My main occupation during lunch was not to look at her. In the early going, the conversation was no help at all. The tanned quinquagenarian, who did in fact turn out to be a London mega-realtor, was comparing the services offered by the private aircraft terminals at Nice with those at Cannes. One of the young women was describing a contemporary art opening at a Monte Carlo gallery. Someone else was decrying the fact that the Hôtel du Cap now allowed the use of credit cards. My attention zeroed in on the small lobsters we’d been served, their shells already cracked to spare us the least inconvenience.
At a certain point, Berezovsky directed the conversation toward every Russian’s favorite topic: Russia, Russians, and our characteristic idiosyncrasies and paradoxes. He spoke to his guests in the bantering tones he’d once used with his acquaintances at Logovaz House.
“We don’t belong to the same race as the rest of you, I’ll have you know. We have white skin, yes, and a few other things in common, but the difference in mentality between a Russian and a Westerner is as great as between an Earthling and a Martian. If I may, Baroness, I’d like to tell you a story about a character from early in the last century, probably an ancestor of our friend Vadya.”
At that, the eyes of the lunch guests turned briefly toward me before reverting once more to our host.
“He belonged to the aristocracy, this Sergei, and when the October Revolution broke out he went north to fight the Bolsheviks. After the Red faction wiped out the last resistance, he fled into exile, first to Berlin, then to Paris, where he immediately became a pillar of the White Russian community. It included princes who drank with horse thieves, Cossacks who’d become nightclub bouncers—a fringe group, living above their means, believing that the Bolsheviks would eventually be thrown out and all the palaces and estates returned to their rightful owners. ‘To next year in Saint Petersburg!’ they chorused, their glasses raised, pretending not to know their time was past, once and for all.”
A great sigh emanated from the baroness, who clearly belonged to that backstairs nobility in England whose members can, at reasonable rates, be rented to fill out a weekend gathering or a boardroom vacancy. Berezovsky sailed on.
“Sergei was always the first to call for a party and the last to leave the table—a quality, as you know, that Russians respect highly. After a time, however, his finances began to show the strain, and he had almost nothing left. Until one night, a friend took him aside and said: ‘With the money you have left, Seryoga, there’s just enough to buy yourself a taxi license. Think about your future, or you’ll end up living under a bridge.’ What would any of you have done, you Westerners of good sense and extensive education?”
Boris reined himself in and glared at his guests around the lunch table.
“I’ll tell you what you would have done, you’d have quietly taken off your riding boots, pulled your taxi driver’s beret low over your forehead, and resigned yourself to a lifetime of making runs between the Étoile and the Gare de Lyon, which was the only logical course. But what did Sergei do? He thought for a long moment. He gave his friend’s shoulder a squeeze. He got to his feet, walked over to the maître d’hôtel, and in the voice he’d used to sound his regiment’s last charge at Arkhangelsk, called out: ‘Champagne all around!’ That, don’t you see, is a Russian. A Russian is somebody who buys everyone a last round of champagne with his taxi license money!”
The baroness trilled appreciatively. It was the least she could do, as the master of the house had seemingly told the story for her benefit. For my part, I doubted its authenticity; I seemed to remember that Joseph Kessel had told a similar anecdote in one of his early short stories. I also had the suspicion that Berezovsky had dug it up on my behalf. I am a real Russian, he was telling me, and I’ll never trade in my crazy ways for a taxi license.
“I don’t think it’s anything to brag about, Boris,” said Ksenia, speaking up for the first time. “Look at them all, racing through the streets of Moscow in their Mercedes, with their SUV escorts, their rotary lights, and their cell phone scramblers. Doesn’t it look as if they’re playacting? Auditioning for a part in the Russian Mission: Impossible?”
—Everyone is always playacting, I’m sorry to say.
—But only the Russians do it so badly, she retorted.
—I don’t know how things work in Russia, said the developer, who’d decided to thrust himself into the conversation, but in Africa, to take an example, there can also be a practical aspect. The policeman knows that if you have the money to buy a big car, you also have the money to buy his boss. So he stays away from Mercedes 600s.
Ksenia looked at him as if he were a speck of mud that had dropped from her shoe. “That didn’t work so well in our case. We had a fleet of Mercedes, but the cops came for us anyway.”
Silence, smiles of embarrassment. This time, people carefully avoided looking at me. I knew from experience that the important thing when you’re attacked in conversation is not to alter your position, to remain impassive while preparing a counterattack. Without batting an eyelid, I opted for a diversionary tactic.
“There, Boris, you see? Contrary to what you think, Russia is not a banana republic!”
It was a monstrous lie, of course. But who has the courage to call out a lie when it issues from the mouth of power? Especially at a social gathering around a lunch table. Even the master of the house offered no reply. It would have been a sign of weakness, and Berezovsky had learned over the years that any sign of weakness can cost you. After a brief hesitation, the conversation set off again along smoother paths. For a moment, I thought I saw a distant flame shoot up in Ksenia’s eyes, then just as suddenly go out.