May 19th 2024
The whole team spent an entire week without leaving the hotel if not for a short time. Lenin recommended his companions not to lose any minute in tourism, but collecting as much information as possible about the usual guests. Among them, they should have found for sure more than one member of Putin’s entourage. It was while messing up in the kitchen, trying to remember some good receipt to offer as a traditional novelty, that the Russian leader recollected the name of the chef de cuisine who worked for him until 1924. He was a Putin as well. For some strange reason, Leanin had forgotten so far a relevant detail of his life. Perhaps the surgeons who prepared his body for the mausoleum had not carefully manipulated his brain. It was however easy for him , now accustomed to the latest technologies, to find out that the man who cooked for him for so many years, was indeed Vladimir Putin’s grandfather. An odd coincidence that allowed him to elaborate a plan on how to best approach the current Russian autocrat and thus determine his fate. For a while, Lenin cultivated the sweet illusion to reveal himself and convert Stalin's heir to democracy and capitalism. The Soviet thinker was so well acquainted with the secrets of political plots that he dropped the idea after a few seconds. He was aware that someone who is skillful enough to get the supreme power in a country such as Russia did not care, and had always been, about the great characters of the past. On the contrary, those kinds of people tend to despise those who preceded them and, in the best case, consider them rivals. Putin would have probably claimed Lenin's mummy to be an impostor, a creature of Trotsky or a judaic plot. The father of the Red Revolution would have thus experienced that sort of treatment that he reserved to his political opponents one hundred years before.
The art dealer was trying to secure some contacts. He was aware, from his father’s experience in the Red Hand, that once you had made a decision, there was no way back. At the best he could hope to rely on a plan B, a ticket to guarantee that he could once again the green fields of Ireland. For some strange reason he did not think of Britain anymore, the London art galleries and museums were so far from his mind. He felt the need to speak once again with his mother. Perhaps he was sure that he had pushed his perspectives too far and that he would have encountered only a scarce chance of success. He however knew someone in Putin's entourage who had acquired a couple of paintings from his previous art gallery. Nothing extremely valuable, but kitschy enough to be shown off with friends and colleagues. After all, his contact was the kind of person who hardly accepted his role in human history. An army officer with the ambitions to become a general, but who would have hardly achieved even the rank of major. He was also a bad chess player and even worse at poker. The art dealer doubled his commission by having befriended him while in London, where the Russian officer was serving as bodyguard at the local Embassy. It had been enough to invite him a couple of evenings out, allowing the wannabe Kotusov to lose three months of his wage by playing cards. The art dealer kept the friendship by having sent him, the next day, an expensive set published by Purling, a limited edition usually reserved for the members of the collector club. The Russian officer appreciated such attention, although he never tried his luck again by competing against authentic London gentlemen. Or at least a group of Britons who introduced themselves in such a way.
The former business consultant followed the lead of the art dealer, with whom she had found to be closer than expected. She was aware of the risk and her instinct hinted that the team must work as a sole person. Although it was pretty hard, if not impossible, to include in the group a strong individual as Lenin. Leftist usually boast their own, and their leaders, intellectual skills much more than they deserve. Most of them are just mediocre brains who need a strong organisation behind their minds and their words. Lenin perhaps was one of the few being exceptionally clever, even if most of his writings could appear laughable to a critical reader. His cultural level was nevertheless higher than the average of which a communist bureaucrat is capable of achieving. The business consultant was still shocked from her experience in Zurich, and ended up with an excess of politically correctness and conformism. She thought that if the leftist had never taken over the power in the Swiss economical capital, perhaps she would have kept her job and could have also gotten promoted up to the rank of a senior manager or director. A big bounty for anybody genuinely attracted by the consulting world, but the former apprentice manager was now th eHeidi’s bookkeeper and she felt a much stronger motivation thant by doing nice slides. She was also relying on some good connections, to whom she had been able to communicate how excellent the menu had become. They now had a chef de cuisine who recreated the recipe’s so dear to Vladimir Lenin.
