 for $25,000: "Not a bad profit." He returned to Germany with 10 friends, and built an empire.
In the late 1990s, the Kremlin started bumping off Boris's friends, so he came to London. When he arrived he had an armoured Mercedes, and six Home Office minders. In his first week the car was stolen, and Boris was mightily impressed by English criminals. He told his wife, who said, "Don't worry. Our car will be parked outside our house two days in the morning."Two days later it was.
"Was professional job," Boris recalled with a smile: the Russian embassy, checking out his car, saying hello.
We were at the Frontline, the war correspondents' club in west London, where Boris had given a talk. One of our party was an attractive and flirtatious young woman, dressed as if for an orgy on a yacht, in a tight matelot sweater, off the shoulder and showing a lot of red bra. I asked her if she had worn red underwear to excite him, and she said yes, she had.
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| In the late 90s, the Kremlin started bumping off Boris’s friends, so he came to London |
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At first he politely ignored her, but when the first course was taken away, he swung round, lit another Parliament, and put an arm around her shoulder. He mentioned his yacht, and she said, "Oh, you sail!"
"I have crew," he said.
He mentioned his collection of paintings by Egon Schiele, the erotic artist of fin de siecle Vienna, and asked if she'd like to see them, and she said yes, she would. We felt as if we were engaged in a le Carre 'honeytrap', and some at the table seemed rather miffed by the attention he was paying our friend, particularly a chap from the BBC.
When dinner ended, the BBC man said, "I must give you my number, Boris," and wrote it on a piece of paper. Boris took it, looked at it, turned it over, took out a pen, wrote down his own number, and gave the piece of paper to the girl in the red underwear. 
FIRST POSTED JULY 20, 2007
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