An excerpt from John's book "Confessions of an Art World Insider" - Prologue

February in Moscow is the kind of cold that bites and doesn’t let go. The kind that makes you wonder if your fingers will still be there when you take your gloves off. And yet, somehow, my room at the Belgrad Hotel was a stifling furnace. Windows painted shut, radiator clanking like an old man clearing his throat. The air was thick, stale. The walls seemed to sweat.

I needed out.

Not outside—no way. The wind would chill you to the bone, strip the heat right off your skin and leave nothing but ice in its place. But downstairs, on the first floor, directly across from the front desk, there was a row of semicircular booths pressed tight against the floor-to-ceiling windows. The kind of place where you could drink a bad coffee or a worse vodka and watch the world move past in the street.

I slid into one of those booths, the vinyl seat cracked and sticky under me, and tried to tune out the drabness of it all. That’s when I heard it—English. Two guys a few booths down, talking too loud, their voices bouncing off the glass. Tourists, I figured. Maybe businessmen.

Hearing English in a place like this is like spotting a lifeboat when you’ve been treading water too long. So, finally, I lean in.

"Couldn't help but overhear," I said. "Haven't heard a word of English in ages."

They turned. Smiled. Yugoslavs, they said. In the art game, like me. Friendly enough. We talked, we drank, and then—just as I was settling in, just as I was thinking maybe this place wasn’t so bad after all—they hit me with it.

“Meet the Consul for dinner tomorrow night. Our embassy.”

I didn’t hesitate. It had been weeks since I’d had a real conversation with someone who spoke my language, and the idea of dinner at an embassy, with good food, real drinks, and decent company? I accepted eagerly, maybe too eagerly.

The next day, when I met with my partners from Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga, they casually asked if I had any plans for the evening. That’s when they found out.

The room changed in an instant.

They weren’t handlers, not some bureaucrats watching my every move—these were my business associates, people I actually liked. And right now, they were looking at me like I was already dead.

One of them, a guy who usually carried himself with that unshakable Soviet cool, was sweating through his shirt. He grabbed my arm. Tight.

"Mr. Sumner," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "Don't you realize where you are?"

Then came the story. A man from Paris, a gallery owner, just last month. Invited, just like me. Showed up. A few drinks, a little small talk. Then he was gone. Robbed. Beaten. Dissolved in acid. The KGB found a few teeth. That’s all.

They didn’t just warn me. They yanked me out of the Belgrad so fast my feet barely touched the ground. And here’s the thing—where they took me, the Intourist, was almost always fully booked. Soviet officials, foreign dignitaries, visiting party members—if you didn’t have pull, you weren’t getting a room.

Yet, somehow, there I was. Instant reservation.

The Intourist wasn’t just any hotel. It was a stone’s throw from Red Square, close enough to the Kremlin that you could feel the weight of it, like a presence just outside your line of sight. Every phone had ears, every corridor had eyes. If the Belgrad was a back alley, the Intourist was center stage.

Someone, somewhere, had pulled a string. Or cut one.

I didn’t think much about the Belgrad after that. I was just glad to be out. A few weeks later, I flew home, got back to my routine, tried to shake the whole thing off.

Then, one evening, I flipped on the TV.

The news anchor’s voice was steady, almost indifferent. Moscow. Explosion. A car bomb. The Belgrad Hotel.

The booth I’d sat in? Vaporized.

And if I hadn’t mentioned my little meeting with the Consul?

Well.

Let’s just say I’d be nothing but teeth, too.