Читать книгу Citizen - Charlie Brooks - Страница 7

Nikolai Nikolayev, universally known as Nico, sat on a chrome bar stool in the Voile Rouge. The beachside restaurant was heaving. Its tender rushed busily from the small pier on Pampelonne Beach out to the floating gin palaces that had cruised round from St Tropez. The music was beginning to step up a beat and the ‘models’ from the fashion boutique next door were provocatively working the tables.

At the other end of the bar an overweight, eurotrash rich kid made some desperate girl go down on her knees while he poured Louis Roederer Cristal over her face; he laughed loudly for attention. Nico gave him a sycophantic smile of approval and deftly nodded his head. The girl pretended she was having a good time and squealed. That was what she was paid to do. Her team-mate clapped, yelled and tossed her hair over her shoulder. And adjusted her loose fitting top, so her nipples were visible if you’d paid to be that close.

Nico spooned up the last scrapings of his favourite hangover cure: a lemon sorbet heavily laced with Italian bitters. His predatory eyes flicked between the guy he was talking to on the next stool, a Bolivian gigolo named Ramon, and the entrance. Nico had long cultivated the habit of noting every new arrival at the beach bar. The males were quickly assessed in terms of their influence or wealth; the females for any hint of availability; and both for their vulnerabilities, for the most advantageous angles of attack.

It was how Nico lived, how he funded the Jensen and the five-star hotels and vintage champagnes which were the keynotes of his life. With no capital or inherited standing in the world, he might superficially be bracketed with a pique-assiette like Ramon. Yet he stood apart from the hangers-on of his acquaintance, the gigolos, barflies and male models that infested the Riviera. For one thing, he looked different. With his puny physique and polecat face, he had to get by without the standard obvious good looks of those to whom freeloading came easy. Minus that confident jaw, lacking those soulful eyes, Nico compensated by growing a neat beard, wearing designer shades and working considerably harder, and with deeper insight, to access the playboy yachts, private tables and penthouse party circuits that all of them depended on. Nico would have it no other way. He was not, he considered, a Ramon, an expendable accessory, a pawn. He was a player. And he was clever.

His quick brain had even taken him to Harvard. The public Parisian school system prepared him well, but his father, proprietor of a modest food shop in the French capital’s 6ème Arrondissement, could never have afforded college in America. So Nico won a scholarship and took himself across the Atlantic to learn all about the drug habits and compulsive spending of the East Coast Preppy, the Texas Oilboy and the Jewish Princess. With this preliminary social research under his belt, Nico set forth.

He’d been recruited by Reitchel-Litvinoff, the trouble-shooting New York tax accountants, who found many uses for his chameleon social skills, undoubted numeracy and ability to bluff in six languages—including both American and British. For half a decade he shimmied from country to country on behalf of clients anxious to keep their wealth out of the clutches of the taxman. Whenever it was necessary to sidestep the electronic banking system, Nico was on hand. Here he picked up bearer bonds, title-deeds and attaché cases filled with large denomination bills. There he made discreet trades, deposits in numbered offshore accounts and deliveries at the clients’ Swiss chalets and Mustique beach houses.

Yet he featured nowhere in Reitchel-Litvinoff’s employment register. He was paid in cash, or in kind, and was impregnably deniable if things went wrong. Finally things did. The IRS picked Nico up on its radar, and suddenly the United States was an exclusion zone. Within a few days, his contact at Reitchel-Litvinoff no longer returned Nico’s increasingly desperate calls.

So he had landed, like a hopeful turtle, on the Côte d’Azur, and set about foraging for deals and new contacts. It was a perfect habitat for him. Where rich people took their pleasure they also did business, and Nico found the Riviera a natural base from which to haunt the pleasure domes of Europe. Shopping in Rue de Rivoli and New Bond Street, golf at the K Club, opera at La Scala and going ‘Banco’ at Monte Carlo’s baccarat tables. He convinced himself that he really was one of the high rollers. His skill in manipulating currency for other people frequently came in handy; often that currency was narcotic, equally often erotic; and so he negotiated his way through life, with money enough to pull on a hand-made Italian suit and drive a hand-made English car.

Ramon was half way through some story which involved one of the most beautiful girls in the world falling in love with his body. All of his stories were in this vein, and Nico was only half listening. His attention was caught by a party of Russians, who had clearly just come ashore from a private yacht. They were a couple of girls, chic and silkyblonde, a shiny-suited aide-de-camp and some kind of minder, all bossed by a thickset man with short grizzled hair and a pock-marked face. Apparently unable to speak more than a few words of French, the boss called for blinis and lemon vodka by jabbing the menu with a blunt forefinger. His hands looked like they’d spent most of their lives working on a pipeline in Siberia.

When the food arrived he ignored the little pancakes and shovelled quantities of caviar and sour cream directly into his mouth. Nico could hear his fellow countryman growling comments about the bar staff’s inability to speak Russian. From his accent and behaviour, Nico knew this was no White Russian émigré like himself. The man had emerged from Moscow in the Soviet era, and clearly not in a state of poverty.

The Bolivian was still droning on.

‘Di was becoming a nuisance. She was obsessed with me. And Pam didn’t like it. Pam was driving me crazy too. She just couldn’t get enough of me and that loser of a boyfriend was always on the phone. She’s got no brain, you know. I can’t stick these girls with no brain, I don’t care who they are.’

Nico produced a thin smile, nodded in agreement, slid from the stool and patted Ramon lightly on the shoulder.

‘Back in a minute, Ramon,’ he said.

Then he crossed to the Russians’ table, bowing slightly from the waist as the boss-man turned to him. ‘I wonder if I might be of service to a fellow countryman,’ Nico said smoothly.