Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin Read online

  Then there was Pavel, about fifty years old, short, twitchy, always dressed in whites. He was very important to me because he was the chef and it was his cooking that I would be tasting. I’ll say this for him, he was good at his job. All the food he prepared was delicious and I was given things I hadn’t even known existed. Until I came to the dacha, I had never eaten salmon, pheasant, veal, asparagus, French cheese … or even such a thing as a chocolate éclair. Pavel only used the very best and the freshest ingredients, which were flown in from all over the world. I remember a cake he made for Maya’s birthday. It was shaped like a Russian cathedral, complete with gold-leaf icing on the domes. Heaven knows how much he was given to spend.

  I never got to know Pavel very well, even though he slept in the cabin next to me. He was hard of hearing so he didn’t talk much. He was unmarried. He had no children. All he cared about was his work.

  The staff included a personal trainer and two chauffeurs. Sharkovsky had a huge fleet of cars and he was always buying more. Six armed guards patrolled the grounds and took turns manning the gatehouse. There was a general maintenance man, who was always smoking, always coughing. He looked after the tennis court and the heated swimming pool in the conservatory. I will not waste time describing these people … or the gardeners, who turned up every morning and worked ten hours a day. They are not really part of my story. They were simply there.

  But I must mention the helicopter pilot, a very quiet man in his forties, with silver hair cut short in a military style. His name was Arkady Zelin and he had once flown with the VVS – the Soviet Air Force. He neither drank nor smoked. Sharkovsky would never have put his life in the hands of a man who was not utterly dependable. He was always on standby in case his master needed to get somewhere in a hurry, so he might spend weeks at the dacha between flights, and once the helicopter had been tied down there was little for him to do. Just like Maya, he read books. He also kept himself fit, doing press-ups and running around the grounds. Sharkovsky had a gymnasium as well as the pool but Zelin wasn’t allowed to use either of them.

  Zelin was one of the few people who bothered to introduce himself to me and I was quick to let him know about my old love of helicopters. He piloted a two-bladed Bell 206 JetRanger with seating for four passengers – Sharkovsky had ordered it from Canada – and although I wasn’t allowed near it, I often found myself gazing at it across the lawn. Escape was too dangerous to consider, but even so, in my wilder moments, it sometimes occurred to me that the helicopter might be my only way out. I couldn’t hide in it. I’d have been spotted at once unless I crawled into the luggage compartment and that was always kept locked. But maybe, one day, I would be able to persuade Zelin to take me with him – if he was flying alone. It was a foolish thought but I had to keep some sort of hope alive in my head or I’d go mad. And so I stayed close to him. The two of us would play Durak together, the same game that I had played with Dima, Roman and Grigory. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to them. But as time went on, I thought about them less and less.

  One other member of the staff was important to me. His name was Nigel Brown and he was English, a thin, elderly man with straggly ginger hair and a pinched face. He had once been the headmaster of a prep school in Norfolk and still dressed as if he worked there, with corduroy trousers and, every day, the same tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Zelin told me there had been some sort of scandal at the school and he had been forced to take early retirement. It was certainly true that Mr Brown never talked about his time there. Sharkovsky had hired him as a private tutor, to help Ivan and Svetlana pass their exams. Other tutors came and went but he lived at the dacha permanently.

  All the staff met every evening. Just as I had thought, the brick building which I had seen beside the cabins was a recreation room with a kitchen and dining area, where we ate our meals. There were a few battered sofas and chairs, a snooker table, a television, a coffee machine and a public telephone – although all calls were monitored and I wasn’t allowed to use it at all. After dinner, the guards who weren’t on duty, the chauffeurs and sometimes the chef would sit and smoke. Mr Brown had nothing to say to any of them but perhaps because I was so young, he took an interest in me and decided for no good reason to teach me English. It soon became a personal project and he took delight in my progress. It turned out that I had a natural aptitude for languages and after a while he began to teach me French and German too. Most of the languages I speak today, I owe to him.

  While he taught me, he drank. Maybe this was what had led to his downfall in Norfolk, but at the start of each lesson he would open a bottle of vodka and by the end of it I could hardly work out what he was saying, no matter what the language. By midnight he was usually unconscious and there were many occasions when I had to carry him back to his room. There was, however, one aspect of his drinking habit that was useful to me. He was not a cautious man and under the influence of alcohol he didn’t care what he said.

  It was Nigel Brown who told me what little I knew about Sharkovsky.

  “How did he make all his money?” I once asked. It was a warm evening about six months after I had arrived. There was no breeze and the mosquitoes were whining beneath the electric lights.

  “Ah, well, that’s all politics,” he replied. We had been talking in English but now he slipped back into Russian, which he spoke fluently. “The end of Communism in your country created a sort of vacuum. A few men stepped in and he was one of them. They’ve sucked all the money out of your country, every last ruble. Some of them have made billions! Mr Sharkovsky invested in companies. Scrap metal, chemicals, cars… He bought and he sold and the money flowed in.”

  “But why does he need so much protection?”

  “Because he’s an evil bastard.” He smiled as if was surprised by what he had just said but decided to continue anyway. “Mr Sharkovsky is connected with the police. He’s connected with the politicians. He’s connected with the mafia. He’s a very dangerous man. God knows how many people he’s killed to get to where he is. But the trouble is, you can’t go on like that without making enemies. He really is a shark.” He repeated the last word in English. “Do you know the word ‘shark’, Yassen? It’s a big fish. A dangerous fish. It will gobble you up. Now, let’s get back to these irregular verbs, past tense. I buy, you bought. I see, you saw. I speak, you spoke…”

  Sharkovsky must have had plenty of enemies. We lived our life under siege at the dacha, and as I had discovered, painfully, there was no way in or out. There were X-ray machines and metal detectors at the main gates – just like at a modern airport – and nobody was allowed in or out without being searched. The gardeners arrived empty-handed and were expected to leave their tools behind when they finished work. The tutors, the drivers, the housekeepers … each person’s background had been checked except for mine, but then my background didn’t matter. Josef and Karl always stayed close to their boss. The CCTV cameras were on at all times. Everyone watched everyone else. Other businessmen in Russia were careful but none of them went to these extremes. Sharkovsky was paranoid but, as I had seen for myself in that basement refrigerator, he had good reason to be.

  He was extremely careful about what he ate and drank. For example, he only accepted mineral water from bottles that he had opened himself after checking that the seal had not been broken. The bottles always had to be glass. His enemies might be able to contaminate a plastic one using a hypodermic syringe. He sometimes ate food straight from the packet or the tin, pronging it into his mouth with no sign of pleasure, but if it arrived on a plate, I would have to taste it first.

  Most times, I would report to the kitchen before the meals were sent out and I would eat straight out of the pans, with Josef or Karl watching over me and Pavel standing nervously to one side. It’s hard to describe how I felt about this. On one level, I have to admit that there was a part of me that enjoyed it. As I have said, the food was superb. But at the same time, it was still an unpleasant experience. First of all
, one mouthful was all I was allowed and I was always aware that one mouthful might be enough to kill me. In a way, every tasting session was the same as the Russian roulette I had been forced to play on my first night. I learned to attune my senses to look out for the acrid taste of poison or simply the suspicion that something might not be right. The trouble was, by the time I detected it, it might well have killed me.

  After a while, I put the whole thing out of my mind. I simply did what I was told, robotically, without complaining. You might say that I had a very strange relationship with death. The two of us were constantly together, side by side. And yet we ignored each other. In this way, we were able to get by.

  What I most dreaded were the formal dinners that I was forced to attend in the huge dining room with its brilliant chandeliers, gold and white curtains, antique French table and chairs, and countless flickering candles. Sharkovsky often invited business associates and friends … people he knew well. To begin with, I was worried that Misha Dementyev, the professor from Moscow State University, might show up. He knew Sharkovsky. Indeed he – along with my own stupidity – was the reason I was here. What would happen if he recognized me? Would it make my situation worse? But he never did appear and it occurred to me that he was probably a minor employee in Sharkovsky’s empire and that it was very unlikely that he would receive an invitation. Nearly all the guests arrived in expensive cars. Some even came in their own helicopters. They were as rich and as vicious as Sharkovsky himself.

  I had been given a grey suit with a white shirt and a black tie for these events – the same uniform as his bodyguards – and I would stand behind him as I had been instructed, looking down at the floor with my hands held behind my back. I was not allowed to speak. As each course was served, I would step forward and, using my own cutlery, would take a sample directly from his plate, eat it, nod and step back again. There was no doubt that Sharkovsky was afraid for his life but at the same time he was enjoying himself. He loved playing the Roman emperor, showing me off to his other guests, deliberately humiliating me in front of them.

  But if the father was bad, his son was much, much worse. Ivan Sharkovsky first became aware of me at one of those dinners and although I wasn’t supposed to look at the guests, I noticed him examining me out of the corner of my eye. Ivan, a year older than me, resembled his father in many ways. He had the same dark qualities but they had been distributed differently – in his curly black hair, his heavy jowls, his down-turned mouth. He seemed to be constantly brooding about something. His father was solid and muscular. He was fat with puffy cheeks, thick lips and eyelids that were slightly too large for his eyes. Sitting hunched over the table, spooning food into his mouth, he had something brutish about him.

  “Papa?” he asked. “Where did you get him from?”

  “Who?” Sharkovsky was at the head of the table with Maya sitting next to him. She was wearing a huge diamond necklace that sparkled in the light. Whenever there were guests, he insisted that she smothered herself in jewellery.

  “The food taster!”

  “From Moscow.” Sharkovsky dismissed the question as if he had simply picked me up in a shop.

  “Can he taste my food?”

  Shakovsky leant forward and jabbed a fork in the direction of his son. He had been drinking heavily – champagne and vodka – and although he wasn’t drunk, there was a looseness about the way he spoke. “You don’t need a food taster. You’re not important. Nobody would want to kill you.”

  The other guests all took this as a joke and laughed uproariously, but Ivan scowled and I knew that I would be hearing from him soon.

  And the very next day, he came outside and found me. It was a cold afternoon. I was washing one of his father’s cars, spraying it with a hose. As soon as I saw him coming, I stopped my work and looked down. This was what I had been taught. We had to treat the whole family as if they were royalty. Part of me hoped he would simply walk on, but I could see it wasn’t going to happen. I knew straight away that I was in trouble.

  “What is your name?” he asked, although of course he knew.

  “Yassen Gregorovich,” I answered. That was the name I always used now.

  “I’m Ivan.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  He looked at me questioningly and I could feel the sense of menace hanging in the air. “But you don’t call me that, do you?”

  “No … sir.” It made me sick having to say the words but I knew that was what he wanted.

  He glanced at the car. “How long has it taken you to clean that? he asked.

  “An hour,” I said. It was true. The car was the Bentley and it had been filthy. When I had finished with it, it would have to look as if it had just come out of the showroom.

  “Let me help you.”

  He gestured for the hose, which was still spouting water onto the ground, and, dreading what was to come, I handed it to him. First he pointed it at the car. He placed his thumb over the end so that the water rushed out in a jet. It poured over the windscreen and down over the doors. Then he turned it on me … my head, my chest, my arms, my legs. I could only stand there uselessly as he soaked me. Had this happened in my village, I would have knocked him to the ground. Right then I had to use all my self-restraint to stop myself punching him in the face. But that was exactly what he was showing me. He had complete power over me. He could do anything to me that he wanted.

  When he had finished, he smirked and handed the hose back to me. Finally, he noticed the bucket of muddy water beside the car. He kicked out, sending the contents spraying over the bodywork.

  “Bad luck, Yassen,” he said. “You’re going to have to start again.”

  I stood there, dripping wet, as he turned and walked away.

  After that, he tormented me all the time. His father must have known what was happening – Ivan would have never acted in this way without his authority – but he allowed it to carry on. And so I would get an order, usually transmitted by Josef, Karl or one of the housekeepers. It didn’t matter if it was morning or the middle of the night. I would go up to the big house and there he would be with football boots that needed cleaning, suitcases that needed carrying or even crumpled clothes that needed ironing. He liked me to see his room, spacious and comfortable, filled with so many nice things, because he knew I lived in a small wooden cabin with nothing. And despite what Sharkovsky had said, he sometimes got me to taste his food for him, watching with delight as I leant over his plate. Often, he would play tricks with me. I would discover that he had deliberately filled the food with salt or chilli powder so that it would make me sick. I used to long for the day he would return to his school in England and I would finally be left alone.

  Three years…

  I grew taller and stronger. I learned to speak different languages. But otherwise I might as well have been dead. I saw nothing of the world except what was shown on the television news. The horror of my situation was not the drudgery of my work and the daily humiliations I received. It was in the dawning realization that I might be here for the rest of my life, that even as an old man I might be cleaning toilets and corridors and, worse still, that I might be grateful. Already, I could feel part of myself accepting what I had turned into. I no longer thought about escaping. I didn’t even think about what might exist on the other side of the wall. Once, I found myself looking in the mirror because there was a stain on my shirt. There was to be a dinner that night and I was genuinely embarrassed, afraid I would let my master down. At that moment I was disgusted with myself. I saw, quite clearly, what I was becoming … perhaps what I had already become.

  I never thought of Estrov. It was as if my parents had not existed. Even my time in Moscow seemed far behind me. It was obvious that Dima would never find me and even if he did I would be out of his reach. All I could think about was the work I would do the next day. This was Sharkovsky’s revenge. He had allowed me to keep my life but he had taken away my humanity.

  And so it might have co
ntinued.

  But things changed quite suddenly in the early summer of my third year of captivity. Ivan had just finished his last year at Harrow and was due back any time. Svetlana was staying with friends near the Black Sea. Sharkovsky was having another dinner party and I had been told to report to the dining room to help with the preparations.

  For some reason, I arrived early. As I walked up to the house, a car passed me and stopped at the front door. A man got out, rang the bell and hurried inside. I had seen him before. His name was Brodsky and he was one of Sharkovsky’s business associates from Moscow. The two of them owned several companies together and they were connected in other ways it was probably best not to know. I went into the kitchen and a few moments later, the telephone rang. Mr Brodsky wanted tea. Pavel was busy preparing the dinner – a broiled Atlantic salmon, which he was decorating with red and black caviar. The housekeepers were laying the table. I was there and in my suit so I made the tea and carried it up.

  I crossed the hallway, which was now so familiar to me that I could have made my way blindfolded. The sweeping staircase, the marble pillars, the huge bowl of flowers and the chandelier no longer meant anything to me. I had seen them too often. The door to the study was half open as I approached and normally I would have knocked and entered, set the tray down on a table and left as quickly as I could. But this time, just as I drew close, I heard a single word that stopped me in my tracks and rooted me to the floor.

  “They’re asking questions about it again. Estrov. We’re going to have to do something before the situation gets out of hand…”

  Estrov.

  My village.

  It had been Brodsky who had spoken. Estrov. What could he possibly know about Estrov? Hardly daring to breathe, I waited for Sharkovsky to reply.

  “You can deal with it, Mikhail.”

  “It’s not as easy as that, Vladimir. These are Western journalists, working in London. If they connect you with what happened…”