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Oil?”
    “Of course.” How could he forget? It was a notorious act of expropriation which seemed to reverse the trend towards privatisation begun under Yeltsin, and warned that the Russian state could still bare its autocratic Communist teeth whenever it wished.
    “Tarkov was slated to become a senior official in the new nationalised company. After twenty years in the Kremlin, he was looking forward to working somewhere else—and to the perks of the job. At the last minute, Putin gave the post to someone else. Who knows why? But it served to alienate Tarkov from Putin. He still has a government position but is no longer on the inside track. Which may explain what he told me.”
    Fane could see Adler was enjoying himself, so he took a sip of his drink and leant back. There was no point in trying to rush the old boy.
    “Last summer, Tarkov attended a wedding, at a dacha outside Moscow. It was a lavish affair—the groom’s father had made a fortune in platinum during Yeltsin’s time, I believe—attended by many senior political figures and businessmen. There was a lot to drink—perhaps you have been to a Russian wedding—and towards the end of the evening Tarkov found himself sharing a bottle of vodka with a colleague named Stanislav Stakhov.”
    Fane nodded. Stakhov was one of the few senior Yeltsin aides who had managed to prosper under Putin.
    “He and Tarkov have known each other since they were boys. They grew up together in Minsk; they even joined the Party in the same year. Yet, Tarkov told me, he was careful when they talked, since Stakhov is a Putin man and always much in favour. Tarkov says he didn’t grumble about the president or about his own fall from grace, though I take that with a grain of salt since the man seems incapable of opening his mouth without complaining.”
    Fane smiled. He had long ago learnt that Victor Adler performed best before an appreciative audience. Adler continued, “However, according to Tarkov, the drunker Stakhov got, the more he became critical of Putin. He said Putin was starting to act erratically, power was going to his head. He was growing insecure, almost paranoid.”
    Fane nodded, not entirely surprised. It was almost an axiom in his experience that the greater the accumulation of power, the greater the fear of losing it. One had only to look at Stalin, without a challenger to his authority in sight, yet obsessed with conspiracy phobias by the time he died. Fane asked quietly, “Any particular people he’s paranoid about?”
    “That is the odd thing.” Adler paused and took a sip of whisky. “Apparently, he’s not worried by the Russian mafia—most of them are on his side anyway—and internal political opposition is negligible. What seems to concern Putin are the new oligarchs.”
    “But they’re utterly dependent on him. He can ruin any one of them just by nationalising their company.”
    “Indeed, so. But it’s the oligarchs who’ve
left
Russia that he’s scared of.”
    “Most of them are here,” said Fane. There were said to be thirty Russian billionaires living in London alone.
    “Exactly. Putin is terribly uneasy that so many are in one place.”
    Fane frowned. “What does he think, they’ll form a government in exile?” he asked. “That’s just the old Bolshevik neurosis about émigrés, like the White Russians congregating in Paris before the war. They never stood the slightest chance of toppling the Communists.”
    The little man in tails reappeared, and placed a bowl of macadamia nuts on the table next to them. Adler offered them first to Fane, who shook his head, then took a handful himself, with a large hairy hand, munching thoughtfully for a moment. Then he said, “I doubt it’s anything that extreme. Stakhov can be a little dramatic.”
    “I know Putin a little,” Adler continued, and Fane knew this was true. “I don’t view him as paranoid. Stakhov might call him that, but I think the appropriate word would be ‘careful.’