Page 95 of The Oligarch's Daughter

The elevator bore a sign in Russian that said it was under repair. Apartment 6F was probably on the sixth floor. Paul climbed six flights, passing more scattered hypodermic needles, a spill of food garbage on the third floor—orange peels, melon rinds, chicken bones, coffee grounds—and a discarded and evidently used condom. By the time he got to the sixth floor, he was a little winded.You need to exercise more, he chided himself.

He knocked on the door to 6F. There was no bell to ring.

Nothing. He waited a minute, knocked again.

From deep inside, he heard a woman’s voice, high-pitched and harsh and scolding. The voice moved closer to the door. “Shto, shto, shto?” it said. “What, what, what? Who is it? What do you want?”

The voice continued babbling stridently as the door opened a few inches, and Paul found himself looking at a short, broad-faced, portly woman whose eyes looked peculiar, cloudy and opaque.

“Ludmilla Sergeyevna? I called you.”

“Yes, yes. Mr. . . . Langford.”

“Langfitt.” Then he made a decision and said, “I got your name from Galina Borisovna.” He added her surname for good measure: “Belkina.” Galina had indicated that the two women had detested each other, but some personal connection would still be better than none.

The apartment smelled of fried onions, which wasn’t unpleasant. But also of something putrid. He looked around. The place was squalid, the dwelling of a pathological pack rat. Piles of magazines and newspapers everywhere, drifts of dust, food-encrusted dishes.

“Oh,” the woman chastised him, referring to Galina: “Kakaya skuchnaya lichnost.” “What a bore.” Then, still in Russian, “What an idiot. She gives you my address? This Galina, she gives you my address?”

“Just your name,” Paul said, not wanting to detail how he’d located her. “I’ll tell you why I’m here,” he said in English. “I just started working for Arkady Galkin, and I have some concerns.”

She looked in his general direction, her eyes unfocused. She seemed to be blind. Maybe she didn’t understand English. So he repeated the words in simple and, he hoped, correct Russian. Then: “May I come in?” in both English and Russian.

With a deeper scowl, she pulled the door open just enough for him to enter. “You are American?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You work for the great man?” Her sarcasm was sharp and obvious.

“Yes.” He entered the apartment.

The woman backed into a chair, and Paul sat on the piano bench facing it. The lights were all off in this malodorous apartment, and the room was dark.

“Why? You can’t get other jobs in America?”

Paul realized he’d misunderstood Galina’s words about this woman. Ludmilla Sergeyevna may have urged Arkady not to marry his first wife, but she was no friend of Arkady’s. She also spoke excellent English.

He gave an uncomfortable smile.

“I know this man well,” she said. “You see, Arkady was a small, unimpressive man. Not very good looking, but very ambitious. And very very smart. None of the women in his class were interested in him. You think he is now rich and powerful oligarch married to what you call bimbo? Back then, bimbos didn’t even look at him . . . until he started to become rich, and then they flocked like, like . . .” She said it in Russian: “Like moths to the light. I warned him that the gold diggers will come. But men are ruled by their . . .sexual organ, even smart, ambitious ones like Arkady Galkin. Maybeespeciallythat type of man. So he marries this shrew.”

“Galina.”

“Yes, of course.” Her eyes looked just past his.

She was definitely blind, Paul decided. She was also quite elderly looking, like a woman in her nineties.Russia must age people, he thought.Maybe it’s the poverty. He changed tack: “You were one of his professors.”

“I taught economics at the institute and also was on Kremlin advisory committee. This when Russia was changing from communism to capitalism. Back then, I just had bad vision. I didn’t know I had retinitis pigmentosa and was steadily going blind.”

“And he was your student.”

“I discovered him. I was a talent scout. I mentioned him at my weekly committee meeting in the Kremlin. They investigated him, liked his story. . . . He was agreeable. Back then, you know, we were all on one side. We all knew that someone young and energetic and ambitious could be immensely valuable.”

“Valuable how?”

“We needed some of our biggest state-owned companies to go private, and so we needed smart capitalist types. Galkin was a student by day, a black market hustler by night. He’d sell jeans and then cars. Made a lot of money. That attracted our attention. He was a brilliant young man.”

“I don’t understand. You made him rich?”

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