“They’re not all bad, you know.”
“Name one good Russian, Mr. Allon.”
“I’ve always been rather fond of Tchaikovsky.”
“What about Pasternak?” she asked.
He quoted a line fromZhivago. “‘And remember, you must never, under any circumstances, despair.’”
She finished the passage for him. “‘To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.’”
Gabriel regarded her for a moment, then asked, “Why on earth were you always posting all those silly photos of yourself online?”
“It wasn’t me, Mr. Allon. It was just a role I was playing. Dazzling Alice Winter, glamorous wife of a billionaire. But it turns out that Edward would have gone under if Dmitri Savin hadn’t thrown him a lifeline.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
“Difficult to say. But if I were to hazard a guess, it would have been in the neighborhood of two billion pounds. Once Edward accepted Dmitri’s money, the Knight Group was little more than a Russian subsidiary.”
But all that, Alice added quickly, was long before she came on the scene. In the winter of 2009, as Edward’s business was crumbling, she was a recent graduate of Cambridge looking for work as a journalist. In her mind’s eye she saw herself as a muckraker andcrusader, a defender of the poor and dispossessed, an exposer of corruption, a righter of wrongs. And yet even with her vaunted Cambridge education she found it difficult to land a job in an industry that had been cast into disarray by the rise of the Internet. Eventually she found work at a magazine that catered to the posh set. After spending a few years writing about restaurants and dim-witted pop stars, she landed an interview with a notoriously publicity-shy real estate investor named Edward Knight.
“And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“It was love at first sight?”
“Not exactly. Edward hated my story and told me so in no uncertain terms. He rang a few days later to apologize and asked whether I might have dinner with him. I felt obliged to accept.”
“You began an affair?”
“That very night.”
“He was married at the time.”
“To Mildred,” said Alice. “Or Mildew, as I used to refer to her. It wasn’t one of my finest hours. But if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else.”
“The divorce was rather costly.”
“Which was the reason Edward insisted I sign a prenuptial agreement. The terms were draconian.”
“But you signed it nevertheless.”
“I was in love.”
“Were you really?”
“Close enough,” she admitted.
“There was a sizable age difference.”
“And how old is your wife, Mr. Allon?”
“No comment.”
“Rascal,” she hissed.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
