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feel the painted toenails of her white foot digging into my calf.
    When the light crept into my bedroom in the morning I saw Katya asleep in the chair, her knees curled up under her chin, still dressed, her blond hair spread over her face like a veil. Masha was lying next to me, with her face turned away, her hair on my pillow and her smell on my skin. I fell asleep again, and when I woke up a second time they had both gone.

4

    "This is it," Masha said.
    We were standing outside a classic old Moscow building, with a cracked pastel facade and a wide courtyard where the nobility would once have kept their horses and their plotting servants. Now the courtyard contained two unhappy trees with drooping brown leaves and three or four cars, chichi enough to make it clear that money was in residence. We went through the arch from the street, and across to a metal doorway with a vintage intercom in the far left-hand corner of the yard. The air was wet--heavy with something that isn't sleet and isn't quite snow, a Russian humidity that tastes of exhaust fumes and seeps intoyour eyes and mouth. It was the kind of Moscow weather that makes you want the sky to just get on with it, like a condemned prisoner looking up at the blade of the guillotine.
    Masha punched in the number of the flat. There was a pause, then a crackly buzz. A woman's voice said,
"Da?"
    "It's us," said Masha in Russian. "Masha, Katya, and Nikolai."
    "Come up," said the voice. "Third floor."
    She buzzed us in and we climbed the stained marble stairs.
    "She was once communist," said Masha, "but now I think she is not."
    "She is sometimes forgetting things," Katya said, "but she is very kind."
    "I think she is not so happy," Masha said. "But we try."
    She was waiting for us on the landing. She had one of those miniature shot-putter babushka figures, and a face that looked younger than her grey hair, which she'd trimmed into a pragmatic Soviet bowl. She was wearing lace-up black shoes, tan stockings, and a neat but worn woollen skirt and cardigan that told you straight off that the money didn't live with her. She had clever eyes and a nice smile.
    "Dear one," said Masha, "this is Nikolai ..." I saw her realising that she didn't know my surname. It was, I think, only the fourth time we'd seen each other, not includingthe first day on the Metro. We were strangers, really, perhaps we were always strangers. But at the time it felt right, being introduced to her aunt. It felt like we might last.
    "Platt," I said, and then still in Russian as we shook hands, "Very pleased to meet you."
    "Come in," she said, smiling.
    I am getting ahead of myself, I'm afraid. But I wanted to tell you how I met her--how I met Tatiana Vladimirovna, the old lady.
    I N THOSE GOLD-RUSH days--when half the buildings in the centre of the city were covered in submarine-sized Rolex adverts, and apartments in Stalin's wedding-cake skyscrapers were going for Knightsbridge prices--money in Moscow had its own particular habits. Money knew that someone in the Kremlin might decide to take it back at any moment. It didn't relax over coffee or promenade with three-wheeled buggies in Hyde Park like London money does. Moscow money emigrated to the Cayman Islands, villas on Cap Ferrat, or anywhere else that would give it a warm home and ask no questions. Or it combusted itself as conspicuously as possible, poured itself into champagne-filled Jacuzzis, and took flight in private helicopters. Money especially loved the top-end car dealerships along Kutuzovsky Prospekt, on the way out to the war museum and Victory Park. It decorated its Mercs and fortifiedHummers with flashing blue emergency lights, dispensed for thirty thousand dollars or so by obliging officials at the interior ministry, lights which parted the Moscow gridlock like the seas of Egypt. The cars congregated around the must-be-seen-in restaurants and nightclubs like basking predators at watering holes, while money went inside to gorge itself on caviar