The entrance to the bar was ahead of us, at the end of the landing; in front of the doorway lurked three more women, all peroxide blondes, all smoking. We pushed past them into a dark cavern thudding with a disco beat and headed for the bar on our right.
"Pivo, pozhaluista," I said, trying out two of my best words.
"Tn."
"Three beers?" said the barman in good-sounding English.
I nodded, and he pulled three tall glasses of Heineken, the only brand on offer. The beer was OK, but it cost the equivalent of k3 apiece.
As our eyes became accustomed to the dim light, we realised that the whole room was heaving with hookers, all dressed in minimalist kit. Two were dancing with each other under strobe lights on a small circular floor in the centre; the rest were sitting at tables or standing against the walls, gyrating in time with the beat. A quick head-count put the total at sixteen. The three other men present were paying them no attention whatsoever.
Soon it was clear that Rick had spotted someone he fancied. I saw him getting eye contact, and his gaze kept wandering off across the room.
"Bloody hell!" he muttered.
"There's going to be some crack when the rest of the lads get here." Then he said, "Look at that, too."
Above my head and behind me, on a high shelf in the corner, sat a television set. I turned to look at it, and saw a guy, with his bare arse to the camera, humping a woman, going at her hammer and tongs.
When I turned back, the two girls had left the dance floor and their place had been taken by a single, pasty-faced man. The guy, who looked to be in his twenties, was pissed out of his mind. He could still just about stand upright, but he staggered whenever he tried to walk. Lurching, faltering, tripping over his own feet, he seemed oblivious to his surroundings, but at the same time hell-bent on staging a grotesque solo dance.
Only when he started a strip-tease did he become too much for the management. Two security heavies hustled in and took him away.
We had another round of beers, watched the hookers vainly circulating, and then decided to get our heads down. At least, Whinger and I did. Rick said he was staying on for one more round.
"Watch yourself," Whinger told him.
"This place is hopping with Aids."
"How d'you know?"
"I can smell it."
Out in the corridor we were accosted by yet another pair of tarts, one dark, one fair. The blonde came straight for me, stopped a foot away and said, "We go to the bedroom."
It was a statement, not a question. I twisted a smile into position and said, "No thanks. I'm happy."
"I make you more happy." She moved even closer and ran her fingers down my chest.
"It's OK." I gestured towards Whinger.
"I'm with a friend."
"All four go to the bedroom." She pointed at her companion.
The blonde was slim and quite pretty, with a good set of tits on her, but the dark girl was a nightmare, flat chested, and with a complexion like the surface of the moon. I shook my head, pushed past them and made it to the lift.
Safe inside my room so I thought I had a shower and stretched out on the bed to watch CNN news.
The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. The light and the TV were still on. I looked at my watch: 1:30.
I picked up the receiver.
"Meester Sharp?" It was a woman s voice.
"I think you are lonely."
"Am I hell!" I spluttered.
"Get lost. Valite otsuda!"
I slammed the phone down, switched everything off and lay down again.
Fifteen storeys below, traffic was still surging along Tverskaya. Opposite my window, huge, bright neon advertisements for Panasonic and Technics blazed on the top of another high-rise building. What a place, I thought. What a shit-heap: overrun by commercialism, yet scruflV as hell. Nowhere else in the world had I ever known such unpleasant vibrations: nowhere had I sensed so clearly that if I got into trouble, nobody would help or protect me. When the rest of the team came out, we were going to have to take care.
Back in Hereford Valentina had told us all about babushkas literally grannies the old ladies who do menial jobs like sweeping the streets, shovelling snow and sitting at desks on the landings of big hotels. Sasha had mentioned how they also run little kiosk shops and sell illicit vodka to soldiers.
Whinger and I clocked our first specimen when we went down for breakfast: eighteen stone if she was a pound, with eyes set too close together in a huge pudding of a face, and a stack of violet-tinted grey hair piled six or eight inches above her head.
On the wall behind her was a notice half in English, half Russian: CONTINENTAL ZAVTRAK: 50 ROUBLES, and the babushka's function was to intercept people on their way to the dining room and take the number of their room, so that she could make sure no one sneaked in twice or let somebody else in on their ticket.
Breakfast was self-service: rolls, bread, butter, jam, cheese and so on. There were sachets of instant coffee, tea-bags and a big samovar of boiling water with a tap that spat on your fingers when you turned it. We helped ourselves and went to sit at a table in the outer room. The little packets of butter were Finnish, the redcurrantjam German; the local bread was dry and papery, and the cheese, presumably home-made too, tasted of nothing.
But I wasn't in critical mood. I'd slept pretty well, it was a fine morning, and I was looking forward to seeing the camp.
Whinger was also in good nick. He too had had a midnight call, but he'd sensibly seen it off Then in came Rick, face pale, T-shirt on back-to-front.
"Rough night? What time did you hit the pit?"
"Dunno," he mumbled.
"Had a couple more drinks."
"Don't try bullshitting us," I warned.
"I know what you were hanging around for."
He leered.
"Don't tell me you... Bloody hell! Which one was it?"
"That little blonde in the corner." He blushed scarlet, then said, "Wait a minute."
He put two sachets of sugar into his black tea and got a couple of mouthfuls down him. Then he said, "Natasha, she's called."
Whinger went, "You bastard! How much did she take you for?"
"Nothing."
'What? Come on.
"Honest. She wants help."
"I should think she bloody well does after you've been through her a few times."
"It's not that. It's her sister."
Whinger and I looked at each other. Then Rick began to explain.
Natasha's home was in Rostov-on-Don, a thousand miles south of Moscow, he said. She was eighteen, a student, and supposed to be starting her autumn term at university. But like hundreds of other provincial girls she'd done a runner and come to the capital to earn some money and make a better life for herself. And along with all the rest, she'd fallen into the clutches of the Mafia.
"The point is, she's shit-scared," Rick went on.
"They all are.
They have to hand over half their earnings. If they don't pay, they're liable to have their faces carved up."
"Is that what's happened to the sister?"
"Not yet. But she's deep in it. Irma, she's called. She went to New York on the job, with a friend, but both of them got caught up in a money-laundering racket run by the Mafia. Apparently it's got a hold on the States like a tick in a dog's arse."
"So what was this slag doing?" Whinger asked.
"Something in a restaurant. There's drug money pouring through: she has to bank it and make out phoney bills for meals that nobody's eaten. Last week the friend got murdered, and now Irma thinks she's for it too."
"And what is the great, all-shagging, all-conquering hero supposed to do about it?" Whinger shot a steely look across the table.
Rick scrubbed his eyes.
"Natasha wants me to rescue her sister."
"Fucking roll on!" Whinger cried in alarm, so loud that a Japanese couple at the next table jumped in their seats.
"Who does she think you are?"
"Part of a film company. Don't worry I stuck to the cover.
It's just that, because I'm a Brit and have dollars, she thinks I can whip across to America, sort the Mafia and bring her little sister safely home."
"What did you tell her?" I pushed back my chair.
"How did you get rid of her?"
"I haven't yet. She's still there."
"Where?"
"In the bed."
"Bloody hell! For Christ's sake, Rick she's nothing but a whore. Otherwise she wouldn't be in a dump like this."
"No, no," he protested.
"She's a really nice kid."
"What did she do to you?" Whinger asked sarcastically.
"She emptied your head as well as your balls."
Sasha was in the foyer at 8:30, still in civilian clothes, evidently not wanting to show any military presence in the hotel. Leaving the others, I got up, greeted him and walked him over into the area near the ground-floor bar, where a few tables and chairs were so widely scattered round the large atrium that I felt sure they couldn't be covered by microphones.
"These girls," I began.
"The ones that hang around the hotel.
What basis are they on?"
"I'm sorry?"
"I mean, are they employed by the hotel, or what?"
"No, no Mafia. All Mafia. You have a problem?"
"Just that Rick laid one of them last night."
"Does he not pay her? She is angry?"
"No she's OK."
"And he doesn't tell her who he is?"
"No, no.
"In such case, not to worry."
"All right, then. One other thing..." I described the incidents on the embankment first our own little set-to, then the heavy hit.
Immediately Sasha was apologetic.
"This man nothing to do with me," he insisted.
"Nothing." From the way he reacted, I knew he was telling the truth.
"No sweat," I said.
"We didn't lose anything. As long as the wrong people don't know we're here."
He shook his head.