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the pattern and initiate a meeting.
    The front door was opened silently by a short, frog-eyed man in a tailcoat. To Fane’s enquiry for Sir Victor, he inclined his head, and without speaking motioned towards an inner room where about a dozen men and a few women sat in groups in high-backed, well-padded armchairs. Conversation stopped for a moment as Fane walked in, and eyes were raised as quick assessments of the newcomer were made. Victor rose from his seat in a corner and indicated the chair opposite him.
    As Fane sat down, he looked around. The room was highly decorated, over decorated in fact, almost vulgar to Fane’s ascetic eye. On the high ceiling were painted scenes of nymphs and swags of flowers, the walls were hung with gilt mirrors and every available inch was covered with assorted pictures in gold frames. The curtains were heavy brocade with tasselled tie-backs and the side tables were fruitwood. It was quite obvious from the general air of opulence that to become a member of Rupert’s Club a man could be tall or short, fat or thin, Christian or (as with Adler) Jew, but the one inflexible requirement was that he be rich.
    Which Adler indisputably was. He had social cachet from birth, since his mother came from one of the earliest Sephardic families in Britain. Any residual doubts about their Englishness had long been assuaged by a series of canny marital alliances made over the course of several centuries—including, a century before, marriage to a Curzon.
    But it was from Adler’s father’s side that Victor had inherited the cash that supported the cachet. The Adler clan descended from a single banking patriarch who, like the original Warburg and the early Rothschilds, had come to London from Germany in the 1840s—as if sensing a hundred years ahead of time that it was better for a Jew not to stick around in Frankfurt.
    Sir Victor Adler himself had never shown the slightest interest in joining the family bank, but then, thought Fane, why should he have? He owned enough of it to finance his other, far greater interest. From adolescence, curiously perhaps considering his own Germanic antecedents, Victor was deeply, passionately interested in Russia. Its art, literature, music, food and particularly its politics.
    Adler was one of a small elite band of international figures who wielded “influence,” that strange, difficult-to-define commodity, which if examined too closely, seemed to dissolve into thin air like a djinn. But it was real to those who believed in it, and there were many such believers who sought Adler’s advice—companies doing business with Russia, banks investing there and, of course, politicians. Fane was not one of the believers, but he knew that Adler talked to people he and his colleagues were interested in. And that was enough for him.
    Now he looked at his host and waited for him to speak. A heavy cut-glass tumbler of whisky materialised on the table by Fane’s arm. Victor pushed across the jug of water, then leant back in his chair, crossing his well-padded legs at the ankles. “Let me tell you why I wanted to see you. As you will know, I returned from a short visit to Russia a few days ago. I was there for a week, seeing mainly old acquaintances. Some of it was social, some political, some business; most of it all three.” He smiled briefly. “Then the day before I left I had a message at my hotel from someone I have known for years. He said he had something of the utmost importance to tell me. I was curious, so we met in the morning before I left for the airport.” Victor paused and leant forward almost imperceptibly in his chair. He didn’t whisper but spoke in a low voice that Fane had to struggle to hear. “I am sure you know the name Leonid Tarkov?”
    Fane nodded. “One of the oil ministers.”
    “That’s right,” said Adler, and chuckled. “That’s part of his problem—that he is
still
a minister. Do you remember when the Russians nationalised Yukos