When the Soviet Union fell apart, Igor left Moscow to open a bar in Samarkand -- a city in Uzbekistan that was once the capital of Tamerlane's medieval Central Asian empire. Serving fine Italian cuisine and the best Margaritas in Central Asia, the Cafe Maracanda attracts a wide variety of clients. It has a tiled courtyard where tourists can enjoy the charms of the old khanates, and discreet inner rooms where drug lords can negotiate the price of heroin. Samarkand is the crossroads of the world, and everyone goes to Igor's. Islamic fundamentalists come to buy arms, Igor's old KGB cronies drop in to chat. Terrorists from Kandahar rub shoulders with car thieves from Warsaw, while Russians and Georgians and Iranians and Chechens manoeuvre for a share in the new pipelines that are being built to carry oil to the West from the Caspian Sea.
By the autumn of 1997, the Maracanda is a thriving concern. Igor stopped thinking about the past a long time ago -- what he did in Munich, what he said in Moscow -- all that is just water under the bridge. But seven years after he betrayed them, Camilla and Rachel find his trace and follow him to Samarkand. One is determined to find out the truth, the other is set on revenge, and Igor begins to understand that his time is running out.
Like its predecessors The Angels of Russia and Music at the Garden House in the ambitious trilogy 'Lenin's Ghost', the final instalment Tamerlane's Grave explores questions of guilt and responsibility in a coercive society where citizens are not free to determine their own actions. How does the individual survive in a society which has turned morality on its head? How does he come to terms with the wrong he has done? And, when the system collapses, what happens then?
ISBN 1-84045-111-3 |
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