who is pretending he can’t make up his mind whether to buy his wife a Cartier gold watch or a Dior gown or a diamond necklace or a fifty-thousand-dollar suite of reproduction Imperial Russian furniture.
I have arrived in the floodlit forecourt of the Grand Hotel and Casino Pupp, formerly the Moskva. The illuminated flags of all nations undulate in the evening breeze. I am admiring the brass paving stones engraved with the names of illustrious guests from past and present. Goethe was here! So was Sting! I am thinking it is time I caught a cab, and here is one pulling up not five yards from me.
A family of Germans clambers out. Matching tartan luggage. Two children’s bicycles, brand new. The driver nods to me. I hop in beside him and toss my travel bag on to the rear seat. Does he speak Russian? Scowl. Niet. English? German? A smile, a shake of the head. I have no Czech. On winding unlit roads we climb into the forested hills, then steeply descend. A lake appears on our right. A car with full headlights comes racing at us on the wrong side. My driver holds his course. The car gives way.
‘Russia rich,’ the driver pronounces in a hiss. ‘Czech people no rich. Yes!’ – and at the word yes, jams on the brakes and slews the car into what I take to be a lay-by until a crossfire of security lights freezes us in their beam.
The driver lowers his window, shouts something. A blond boy of twenty-odd with a starfish scar on his cheek sticks his head through, peers at my travel bag with its British Airways label, then at me.
‘Your name, please, sir?’ he demands in English.
‘Halliday. Nick Halliday.’
‘Your firm, please?’
‘Halliday & Company.’
‘Why do you come to Karlovy Vary, please?’
‘To play badminton with a friend of mine.’
He gives an order to the driver in Czech. We drive twenty yards, pass a very old woman in a headscarf pushing her wheeler. We draw up in front of a ranch-like building with a porch of Ionic marble columns, gold carpet and grab-ropes of crimson silk. Two men in suits stand on the bottom step. I pay off the driver, collect my bag from the rear seat and under the lifeless gaze of the two men ascend the royal gold stairway to the lobby and breathe in the aroma of human sweat, diesel oil, black tobacco and women’s scent that tells every Russian he is home.
I stand under a chandelier while an expressionless girl in a black suit examines my passport below my line of sight. Through a glass partition, in a smoke-filled bar marked ‘Fully Booked’, an old man in a Kazakh hat is holding forth to an audience of awestruck oriental disciples, all men. The girl at the counter is looking over my shoulder. The blond boy with the scar stands behind me. He must have followed me up the gold carpet. She hands him my passport, he flips it open, compares the photograph with my face, says ‘Follow me, please, Mr Halliday’ and leads me into a sprawling office with a fresco of naked girls and French windows looking on to the lake. I count three empty chairs at three computers, two dressing mirrors, a stack of cardboard boxes bound in pink string and two fit young men in jeans, sneakers and gold neck chains.
‘It is a formality, Mr Halliday,’ the boy says as the men move in on me. ‘We have endured certain bad experiences. We are very sorry.’
We Arkady? Or we the Azerbaijani Mafia who, according to a Head Office file I have consulted, built the place out of the profits of human trafficking? Thirty-odd years back, according to the same file, Russia’s Mafiosi agreed among themselves that Karlovy Vary was too nice a place to kill each other. Better to keep it a safe haven for our money, families and mistresses.
The men want my travel bag. The first is holding out his hands for it, the second stands at the ready. Instinct tells me they are not Czech but Russian, probably ex-special forces. If they smile, look out. I hand over my bag. In the dressing mirror the scarred boy is younger than I thought and I guess he is only acting bold. But the two men who are examining my travel bag don’t need to act. They have felt the lining, popped open my electric toothbrush, sniffed my shirts, squeezed the soles of my trainers. They