Kofi’s flight to Prague took off from Tempelhof in the middle of the morning. After breakfast, Katya had taken a telephone call from a young woman who spoke German with a snooty Wessi accent, and who said all the arrangements had been made. A couple of hours later a young man wearing a dark suit and dark glasses picked him up in a limousine and drove him to the airport. Before that, George, Joseph and Radka had all insisted that someone should accompany him to Prague, but he had shrugged off their arguments.
‘I’ve done more difficult things through most of my life,’ Kofi told his sons firmly, ‘and this will be hard enough without having to look after you as well,’ he said with finality. ‘Stay here, and don’t go out. I’ll telephone you when I get there.’
A fortnight ago he would never have spoken to his younger son with such an assumption of authority, but now Joseph’s manner had changed towards him, and, as if in imitation of George, he treated his father with a new respect.
The flight was uneventful. At the airport outside Prague another young man, also dressed in a dark suit and dark glasses, picked him up in another limousine. The car and the chauffeur were so much like the other one that Kofi was tempted to look over his shoulder to check that he wasn’t back at Tempelhof.
They came in through Holesovice, swung right out of the Letenské Tunnel, drove along the embankment. It was a bright day, and the sun danced on the river beside them. He thought of George walking here, a solitary figure. It had been the same in Berlin. Looking at the landscape his mind had kept returning to the idea of George’s footsteps branded on the pavement, trying to imagine what his son had been feeling as he passed through the streets. A phrase from the Bible occurred to him as he did so. A certain man had two sons. The prodigal son, he remembered, had been the younger one. Did that make a difference? Would Joseph eventually reproach him for what he felt about George? He craned his neck to stare up at the trees in the park, feeling as if they were acquaintances he had not seen for many years. Katya had said she loved him, but he didn’t know how to respond. His emotions seemed to have been frozen for so long that he couldn’t work out what they meant. Perhaps they could stay together. He smiled, thinking of her presence while he slept.
Opposite the old town, they crossed over the bridge into Narodni, and drew up in front of a huge office building. Like most of the new buildings in the city, it seemed barely finished, as if the workmen had only just packed up their tools and hurried off round the corner when they saw the car approach.
In the lobby of the building there was a reception behind which an elegant young woman sat, a telephone to her ear. Next to her was another desk which housed two men in what seemed to be the regulation dark suits. Kofi was just about to walk across the marble floor to the reception when another elegant young woman intercepted him.
‘I hope you had a smooth flight,’ she said in English as she shook hands with him. Her accent had a strong American tinge. ‘Mr Kirichenko is waiting for you.’
When they got off the lift she led the way to another door.
‘May I bring you something? Coffee, tea, vodka?’
‘Coffee,’ Kofi told her.
He had expected to be tense or disturbed on the brink of this meeting, but what he felt was an intense pleasure at the thought of seeing Valery again, and the building, the decor, and the evidence of his old friend’s success gave him an odd sense of reassurance as if he was part of this power to shape the world.
She turned the handle of the door and pushed it open. It was a huge room which ended in a glass wall that framed a panoramic view of the river, beyond it the castle and the wooded heights of Letna. Valery was sitting at a desk placed in a corner of the room, where the curtain had been drawn over a section of the glass, blotting out the view and providing the illusion of a dark cubbyhole. As his visitor came in he rose up out of the shadows and came towards him.
Kofi would have recognised him anywhere. He had changed, of course, but it was as if his features had simply become more clearly what they had been. He carried his head now with a tilt which made his chin stick out, and his body had grown thick, not fat but massive, like something carved out of a giant pine in the Siberian taiga, the world’s largest forest. He still had all his hair, which seemed to spring from his head in a brush of grey wire, and he wore a loose white shirt draped over his trousers and on his feet, a pair of trainers, with the tongues flopping out. He saw Kofi looking and he gestured at his feet.
‘I lost part of a toe in Siberia,’ he said in English, ‘and these are the only comfortable shoes I can find.’
He shook Kofi’s hand, then hugged him. They sat down in a little group of armchairs which had been arranged in the middle of the room, facing the window.
‘This is the strangest experience of my life,’ Valery said. ‘To find us here, like this, after so many years.’ He looked intently at Kofi. ‘I never thought I’d see you again.’
‘I never thought I’d see you again either. Your English is better.’
Valery laughed.
‘It was always better than you thought.’
His face fell as if the memory had sobered him.
‘Katya told you what happened? I’m sorry.’
Somehow Kofi didn’t want him to apologise or be humble.
‘It was a long time ago. I didn’t come for revenge or apologies. I understand. You did what you had to do.’
Valery looked him in the eyes for a few seconds, a hint of curiosity in his expression, as if he was trying to make out whether Kofi was telling him the truth. Eventually he sighed.
‘That is true,’ he said. ‘But you are a great man, Kofi.’
‘What about you?’ Kofi asked. ‘I thought you were going to be an engineer and serve the people. Instead of which I see you’ve wasted your time becoming a billionaire.’
Valery chuckled.
‘This is an accident.’ He waved his hand around the room. ‘You should come to Siberia with me and see where I started out.’
‘I expect you’ve got buildings like this in a lot of cities,’ Kofi said. ‘No one does all this by accident.’
‘Oh no. The accident was Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The rest was my own work.’
‘What happened?’
Valery looked away from Kofi, staring out at the river, then he began to talk, launching into his forty-year-old memories as if they were fresh and recent in his mind.
He had still been in his early twenties in 1960 when he set out from Yekaterinburg in Western Siberia for the oil fields which were just being discovered to the north.
‘Sverdlovsk, they used to call it.’ Valery laughed. Yakov Sverdlov, Kofi remembered, had been the official charged with overseeing the executions of the tsar and his family in Yekaterinburg. As a reward he had had a city named after him. ‘No one wants to remember Sverdlov now. Boris Nikolayevich was born near there too, in Butka, and east of there Rasputin.’ He laughed again. ‘They produce tough guys up there. They grow up pickled in vodka. You can’t kill them.’
All this was tame country in comparison to where he started.
‘There were no roads. In winter fifty degrees below zero was normal. One of the ways we used to amuse ourselves was coming out of our hut and throwing a cup of hot coffee in the air. It never reached the ground. It didn’t freeze, it evaporated into a kind of vapour. Look down on the snow and all you’d see was a little brown powder. At first we lived with the Khants. They were nomads, living off the reindeer and the fish they took out of the river. Nowadays I can’t even look at reindeer meat. Sometimes I see all that stuff about reindeer at Christmas. It makes me laugh. They were vicious brutes. Go near them and they try to hook you with their horns. But in those days when you walked out in the country your feet sank in up to the ankles. Look back and you could see the oil welling up in your footsteps.’
But even though they could smell the oil on his clothes, when he went into Sverdlovsk to argue with the Ministry for permission to begin drilling test wells, it wasn’t until a few years later that they started hauling the equipment through the swamp. Over the next decade it turned into a mess. Valery’s engineering background had taught him a precise approach to development and construction, but this was no place for careful techniques. Even at the time he understood that the rush for Siberian oil would be as wasteful, and as extravagantly greedy as the gold rush in Alaska a hundred years before. They were taking a quarter of the Soviet Union’s oil out of the district, but they were injecting the fields with water to push the top of the field out, and then moving on to new ones because it simply wasn’t worth pumping the water out to get at the remaining oil. They were burning the natural gas which would later be worth more than the oil they were pumping. They were leaving timber, which could have built houses for the workers, to rot in the swamps, and all the time the workers who were taking unimaginable wealth out of the ground inhabited a city of flimsy shacks in a giant clearing in the taiga.
‘An entire quarter of Nizhnevartovsk was metal wagons in which they lived,’ Valery said. He shook his head. ‘You had to see it to believe it.’
He had learnt the trade from the bottom up. His major achievement, he told Kofi, had been nothing to do with engineering. It was his ability to keep the workers happy and increase production targets every year. To this end he racked his brain to create incentives, freeing gangs to rescue timber and build housing for the families, finding space to fly sick children into the regional capital at Tyumen, and even flying to Moscow to return with cans of film for private showings at the Komsomol centre in Nizhnevartovsk.
‘When Gorbachev came in the eighties he was horrified,’ Valery said, ‘that there wasn’t a single cinema anywhere in the region. He lectured to the Party in Tyumen. Then he went away and started banning vodka. Somehow he didn’t notice that only two men in the entire country supported him – Ligachev and Solomentsev, and they were both mad. Then the oil prices dropped to nothing and everyone else went mad. This was the worst time.’
That was the first accident, he said, the one with Gorbachev’s name on it. But by then Valery was a senior manager, liaising with the Party and the Ministry over restructuring the state enterprises. When privatisation came in ’92 he was already president of a company which he took over without much difficulty, converting the five per cent of stock given to the managers into a staggering twenty per cent by dint of his ability to sweet talk his employees. That was the second accident, caused by Yeltsin, but this one had put his engine back on the rails.
‘Up there the state used to be king,’ he said, smiling at Kofi. ‘Now it’s the company.’
‘I don’t have a story,’ Kofi told him.
The fact was that listening to Valery’s tales of his progress embarrassed and depressed Kofi. When his own opportunities arrived he had failed to recognise them. In the mid-sixties, for instance, he had been approached by a group of his countrymen who belonged to the opposition to the government. Their intention, they said, was to start a journal, which would be circulated in the country and abroad, detailing Osageyfo’s corrupt practices and the waste and incompetence he had fostered. From one of the most prosperous colonies on the continent, he had created an impossible burden of debt and a vacuum which sucked up millions. He had converted a proud nation into an international beggar.
When they had finished listing Osageyfo’s crimes the group of young radicals said they wanted to encourage protest against him, and to support a possible coup. The more the opposition exposed what was going on the easier it would be to get rid of him. Kofi would be a valuable addition to the editorial board, because, they said, he was well known to have been a protégé of the President, but one who had rejected Communist propaganda and fled Russia in disgust. In spite of this he had been given a secure billet in Accra from which he might have joined in the looting, but instead he had retired to London, his removal signalling his distaste for his mentor’s tactics and his support for those radicals who had been imprisoned.
This interpretation of his movements had startled Kofi. It was true that he had made his objections to certain practices clear. One day dropping into a hotel bar for a drink after work, he had run into a woman he knew slightly. She was English, a young woman who had been, on and off, in the country since independence, and who worked as a public relations expert for a firm which had its roots in South Africa. She doubled as a reporter, from time to time despatching to the English newspapers a series of articles passionately defending Osageyfo’s government.
At the bar she passed him a magazine which he assumed featured one of her articles.
‘Look at it,’ she said insistently.
Inside was a brown envelope full of hundred dollar bills, and Kofi knew immediately what he was being asked. The woman’s firm was bidding for an engineering project connected with the planned hydro-electric dam.
‘You can talk to the big man,’ she murmured, ‘or to any one of those guys. We’re not asking for any guarantees. Just put in a good word.’
He’d taken the envelope without comment. Later on he heard that the contract had been awarded to the woman’s firm. In London he’d told this story to Caroline and a couple of others at a party, emphasising that he’d reported the bribe to his superiors without result. Somehow it had got around, and now these radicals were convinced he was one of them. Without thinking about it he turned down the offer to join them, pointing out that everything of which they accused Nkrumah was part and parcel of the region’s politics. Opposition, he told them, was not the same as betrayal. Immediately afterwards he had the uneasy feeling that he had been wrong. It had truly been disillusion of a kind which had barred his return to Africa, and his refusal to join the opposition had been nothing to do with loyalty or his political beliefs. Instead he had shrunk from driving the final nail into the coffin of his youthful hopes. A year later, Nkrumah had been deposed. In retrospect he had been a coward, Kofi thought. In comparison, Valery had learnt to live in the world he had inherited, taking it by the scruff of the neck and refusing to sit on the sidelines sulking.
‘We have a problem,’ Kofi said abruptly.
Valery’s eyes were suddenly sober and intent.
‘If I can help.’
‘It’s my son,’ Kofi told him.
‘One moment,’ Valery interrupted. He got up, walked over to his desk and pressed a button. ‘We eat while we talk.’
Two women in aprons came in and set up a table. Then they came back with a couple of trays and distributed the contents round the table.
‘Zakusky,’ Valery said jovially. ‘It’s too early for serious eating.’
These were Ukrainian snacks, Kofi remembered. Black and red caviar, pyrizhky, beruny, little stuffed dumplings, holubtsi, stuffed cabbage rolls, cottage cheese, sour cream, and a variety of breads, pampushki, khrusty and medivnyk. The centrepiece was a big cut-glass bowl of fruit.
‘This is not a snack,’ Kofi teased. ‘It’s more like a banquet. Your expectations are inflated now you’re a great man.’
Valery shook his head.
‘Oh, you don’t know. I can’t go out and walk around like you. If I want to go to a restaurant I’m followed by three bodyguards. My security has to clear the place. It’s easier to have a cook and a kitchen.’
‘I thought that was only bankers.’
Valery gestured.
‘Any businessman.’ He frowned. ‘Here is the irony. In the days when minor officials were drawing up lists which would send men and women to their deaths, they could walk safely in the streets. Now, to be engaged in business you need a bodyguard. That is one of the benefits of economic liberalism. Equal opportunity violence.’ Suddenly, he burst out laughing, pounding the table with his fist as he spewed gust after gust of explosive guffaws. ‘In any case,’ he shouted, ‘I own three banks.’
While they ate, Kofi told him the whole story, the smuggled pictures, the killings in Hamburg, the beheading across the river in Smichov, leaving nothing out. Valery glanced up a few times, his eyebrows arching, but he said nothing, concentrating on his food and occasionally encouraging Kofi with a grunt when he paused to think or remember some detail. When Kofi told him what had happened to Joseph, he frowned and taking a pencil out of his pocket wrote the names, Liebl and Zviad Abuladze, on a piece of paper.
‘When Valentin came to Katya,’ Kofi said eventually,‘she should have stopped him.’
Valery shrugged.
‘I don’t know why. It was a good idea.’
‘I don’t want my children killed,’ Kofi said.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Valery told him. ‘I think I might be able to talk to these people.’ He paused, reflecting. ‘Do any of these things come from the Ukraine?’
‘Perhaps,’ Kofi said. ‘I don’t know.’
After the meal they toasted each other in Zubrowka.
‘Have you been in Prague before?’ Valery asked Kofi, who shook his head. ‘Good. My chauffeur will take you round the city. When you come back I might have some news about this little business of yours. Then you can go back to Berlin.’ He paused. He waved his hand. ‘One thing. We’re not in some quiet little country like England. This is like the Wild West. If I do what you want there may be some killing. Just understand that.’