Swimming in money and speaking Russian

EVIL VADIM’S parting shot to Alex last week — “Give my regards to your family” — began to come creepily true in episode six of McMafia, as EV pondered the many ways in which he could make Alex suffer for scuppering his plans for international world domination — heroin smuggling a speciality.

The big news this week, of course, was Alex speaks! In Russian, and apparently clearly enough for his father, Dopey Dmitri, to understand him.

But first Alex had to have one of those it’s-not-you-it’s-me conversations with fiancée Rebecca, which might well have been in another language for all the blank incomprehension with which he was greeted.

Stiffening her British upper lip, Rebecca moved out to a luxury apartment building, almost literally swimming in money. Too dim to wonder why there is nobody else in her pool except the over-friendly Sylvie, Rebecca was unaware of what was brewing in the background.

Alex, however, finally showed some sense and wooed the lovely Joseph away from bodyguarding Semiyon Kleiman, his erstwhile Israeli business partner. In short order, Joseph appeared in London and produced his ex-IDF mate, Allon, who now runs a tough and tight security operation in the UK. The Godman family was assigned a bodyguard each; meanwhile, Evil Vadim instructed his own team of hitmen and women to stalk all of Alex’s family , muttering darkly to himself, “He’s lucky he doesn’t have kids”.

But kids proved to be everyone’s downfall this week, from Carolina, daughter of Karel Benes, Alex’s man in the black market Prague operation to the pregnant Masha, having Dopey Dmitri’s baby and who, in an astonishing scene, was offered £20,000 a month by Alex and his sister Katya if she’d just have the decency to go away and bring up their half-sibling somewhere else. Plus let us not forget Sylvie’s baby, whom she appeared to have been renting by the hour.

If ever there were an illustration of the Scott Fitzgerald assertion that “the rich are different from you and me” (leading to Ernest Hemingway’s riposte, “Yes, they have more money”), it was the casual assumptions of monied life. I particularly liked Mrs Dmitri’s attempt to outfit her bodyguard Jennifer in a frock manifestly unsuited to concealing a handgun (fortunately, she didn’t buy it), but cash was splashed in many other unsuitable ways.

Now the net is drawing in and Alex is fighting the endgame. Those Russian krav maga sessions are about to come in handy, I think.