Cornucopia

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  Alexander Litvinenko, a double agent who spied for both the FSB and MI6, was an example of the fate that awaited Putin’s enemies. He died in London in 2006 after drinking tea laced with polonium-210, a deadly isotope, of which a quantity no larger than a speck of dust was sufficient to kill a healthy man.

  Litvinenko started out in the KGB counter intelligence service and then a lieutenant colonel in an FSB unit specialised in fighting organised crime.

  In 1994, Litvinenko got to know Boris Berezovsky, Russia’s first oligarch, friend and kingmaker of Russia’s post-Soviet president Boris Yeltsin. He had led an FSB investigation into Berezovsky’s attempted murder: a car bombing in which the oligarch’s driver was killed and he was injured.

  Then in 1998, the former FSB officer claimed he was asked whether he could get close enough to Berezovsky, who had since fled to London after having fallen afoul of Putin, to murder him. However, rather than kill Berezovsky he went to him and revealed the plot, thus saving the oligarch’s life, temporarily as it turned out as Berezovsky died in 2013 under mysterious circumstances at his Berkshire mansion.

  Berezovsky had criticised constitutional reforms proposed by the Putin soon after the latter was elected. In an open letter to Putin, Berezovsky, then a Duma deputy, said that he would vote against the president’s project. Shortly after Berezovsky resigned from the Duma in the direction of London.

  The Russian elite was little concerned about the well-being of the proletariat and if proof was needed it was in the hundreds of billions of dollars stashed overseas by men like Berezovsky. One hundred and fifty billion dollars left the country in 2014 alone, slowly draining the nation’s life blood.

  Putin’s power was underpinned by oil, which after rising to more than one hundred dollars a barrel, permitted him to gain absolute power and take control of the media.

  In the decade and a half since he had been elected, complaisant oligarchs became staggeringly wealthy, and even though certain were hard hit by the Great Recession, most rebuilt their fortunes under Putin’s system of crony capitalism, transforming Moscow into the world’s leading billionaire capital.

  SHANGHAI

  His fifteen day China book tour started in Hong Kong and was scheduled to end in Beijing. It was part of a successful writers obligations, and O’Connelly, like all successful writers, travelled to promote his books. His editors required his presence at book fairs, for press and television interviews, readings and book signings. Between was a stop in Shanghai, where he would attend one of its many literary festivals and carry out research for his new book. The megapolis situated at the mouth of the Yangtze River was not only the country’s business and financial centre, but also a focal point of modern Chinese literature and arts.

  The main goal, at least as far as his publisher was concerned, was the launch of the Chinese translation of his latest book, which involved a series of readings and book signing events. His own specific interest was less mercenary, namely the research for his next book, set in part in China and more specifically Shanghai, for which he wanted to get a feel for the atmosphere, notably the French quarter, the Bund and Hongkou, the latter being celebrated as the home of the League of Left-wing Writers and revolutionaries in the twenties and thirties.

  O’Connelly’s new book was a novel based on an idea of Michael Fitzwilliams and set around the history of three banking families: the Fitzwilliams in Ireland, the Smeatons in Asia and the Hiltermans in Amsterdam. Fate and market shocks had brought them together: first the dot-com bubble, followed by the Lehman Brothers collapse and the financial crisis that ensued. It was an intergenerational story, a trilogy, that opened in the nineteen twenties when the families struggled to survive the Wall Street crash and depression, followed by the traumas of WWII and decolonisation.

  O’Connelly’s programme had been arranged by his New York publisher Bernstein Press. Jason Hertzfeld had been pushing him to get more Asia content, because that’s where it was happening he had told him.

  The Bund – Shanghai

  “Look at your Irish pals Pat, Fitzwilliams and Kennedy, that’s where they are today,” Hertzfeld had insisted, “even Tarasov.”

  O’Connelly had to agree, but he was a writer and did not write to order, though it sometimes seemed like that given Hertzfeld’s pushy New York style. He had to admit the idea did fit in with his plans.

  “The Wall Street Journal’s running a story about a deal signed in Vladivostok with Tarasov’s bank …,something about financing a pipeline … for China,” Hertzfeld argued.