Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Also by Boris Starling

  MESSIAH

  STORM

  For Mills

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Russian Names

  Prologue: Wednesday, August 21, 1991

  Chapter 1 - Monday, December 23, 1991

  Chapter 2 - Tuesday, December 24, 1991

  Chapter 3 - Wednesday, December 25, 1991

  Chapter 4 - Thursday, December 26, 1991

  Chapter 5 - Friday, December 27, 1991

  Chapter 6 - Saturday, December 28, 1991

  Chapter 7 - Sunday, December 29, 1991

  Chapter 8 - Monday, December 30, 1991

  Chapter 9 - Tuesday, December 31, 1991

  Chapter 10 - Wednesday, January 1, 1992

  Chapter 11 - Thursday, January 2, 1992

  Chapter 12 - Friday, January 3, 1992

  Chapter 13 - Saturday, January 4, 1992

  Chapter 14 - Sunday, January 5, 1992

  Chapter 15 - Monday, January 6, 1992

  Chapter 16 - Tuesday, January 7, 1992

  Chapter 17 - Wednesday, January 8, 1992

  Chapter 18 - Thursday, January 9, 1992

  Chapter 19 - Friday, January 10, 1992

  Chapter 20 - Saturday, January 11, 1992

  Chapter 21 - Sunday, January 12, 1992

  Chapter 22 - Monday, January 13, 1992

  Chapter 23 - Tuesday, January 14, 1992

  Chapter 24 - Wednesday, January 15, 1992

  Chapter 25 - Thursday, January 16, 1992

  Chapter 26 - Friday, January 17, 1992

  Chapter 27 - Saturday, January 18, 1992

  Chapter 28 - Sunday, January 19, 1992

  Chapter 29 - Monday, January 20, 1992

  Chapter 30 - Tuesday, January 21, 1992

  Chapter 31 - Wednesday, January 22, 1992

  Chapter 32 - Thursday, January 23, 1992

  Chapter 33 - Friday, January 24, 1992

  Chapter 34 - Saturday, January 25, 1992

  Chapter 35 - Sunday, January 26, 1992

  Chapter 36 - Monday, January 27, 1992

  Chapter 37 - Tuesday, January 28, 1992

  Chapter 38 - Wednesday, January 29, 1992

  Chapter 39 - Thursday, January 30, 1992

  Chapter 40 - Friday, January 31, 1992

  Chapter 41 - Saturday, February 1, 1992

  Chapter 42 - Sunday, February 2, 1992

  Chapter 43 - Monday, February 3, 1992

  Chapter 44 - Tuesday, February 4, 1992

  Chapter 45 - Wednesday, February 5, 1992

  Chapter 46 - Thursday, February 6, 1992

  Chapter 47 - Friday, February 7, 1992

  Chapter 48 - Saturday, February 8, 1992

  Chapter 49 - 49: Sunday, February 9, 1992

  Chapter 50 - 50: Monday, February 10, 1992

  Chapter 51 - Tuesday, February 11, 1992

  Chapter 52 - Wednesday, February 12, 1992

  Chapter 53 - Thursday, February 13, 1992

  Chapter 54 - Friday, February 14, 1992

  Chapter 55 - Saturday, February 15, 1992

  Chapter 56 - Sunday, February 16, 1992

  Chapter 57 - Monday, February 17, 1992

  Chapter 58 - Tuesday, February 18, 1992

  Chapter 59 - Wednesday, February 19, 1992

  Chapter 60 - Thursday, February 20, 1992

  Chapter 61 - Friday, February 21, 1992

  Chapter 62 - Saturday, February 22, 1992

  Chapter 63 - Sunday, February 23, 1992

  Chapter 64 - Monday, February 24, 1992

  Chapter 65 - Tuesday, February 25, 1992

  Chapter 66 - Wednesday, February 26, 1992

  Chapter 67 - Thursday, February 27, 1992

  Chapter 68 - Friday, February 28, 1992

  Chapter 69 - Saturday, February 29, 1992

  Chapter 70 - Sunday, March 1, 1992

  Chapter 71 - Monday, March 2, 1992

  Chapter 72 - Tuesday, March 3, 1992

  Chapter 73 - Wednesday, March 4, 1992

  Chapter 74 - Thursday, March 5, 1992

  Chapter 75 - Friday, March 6, 1992

  Chapter 76 - Saturday, March 7, 1992

  Chapter 77 - Sunday, March 8, 1992

  Chapter 78 - Monday, March 9, 1992

  Chapter 79 - Tuesday, March 10, 1992

  Chapter 80 - Wednesday, March 11, 1992

  Chapter 81 - Thursday, March 12, 1992

  Chapter 82 - Friday, March 13, 1992

  Chapter 83 - Saturday, March 14, 1992

  Chapter 84 - Sunday, March 15, 1992

  Chapter 85 - Monday, March 16, 1992

  Chapter 86 - Tuesday, March 17, 1992

  Chapter 87 - Wednesday, March 18, 1992

  Chapter 88 - Thursday, March 19, 1992

  Chapter 89 - Friday, March 20, 1992

  Chapter 90 - Saturday, March 21, 1992

  Chapter 91 - Sunday, March 22, 1992

  Chapter 92 - Monday, March 23, 1992

  Chapter 93 - Tuesday, March 24, 1992

  Chapter 94 - Wednesday, March 25, 1992

  Chapter 95 - Thursday, March 26, 1992

  Chapter 96 - Friday, March 27, 1992

  Chapter 97 - Saturday, March 28, 1992

  Chapter 98 - Sunday, March 29, 1992

  Chapter 99 - Monday, March 30, 1992

  Chapter 100 - Tuesday, March 31, 1992

  Epilogue : Saturday, May 9, 1992

  Copyright

  Vodka was a very personal labor of love, and yet I couldn’t have written it without being helped by scores of people, all of whom have my gratitude and affection.

  My publishers and agents were endlessly patient as deadline after deadline vanished into the ether, and infinitely wise in their judgment on the drafts that did finally appear; my thanks to Julia Wisdom, Nick Sayers, Anne O’Brien, Brian Tart, Caradoc King and Nick Harris, and to Kelly Edgson-Wright for marketing services beyond the call of duty.

  My family—David and Judy Starling, and Mike and Belinda Trim—were, as ever, my most trenchant critics, most ardent supporters, and finest chefs. Richard Fenning first fired my interest in Russia; Samantha de Bendern, Guy Dunn and David Lewis fanned the flames. Mark Burnell, Godwin Busuttil, Charles Cumming, Juliette Dominguez, Fiona Kirkpatrick, Fiona McDougall, Rory Unsworth and Iain Wakefield all spent more time than they could spare to read a gargantuan first draft and give me their thoughts. Ben Aris took me under his wing in Moscow; the Apple workshop in Granada performed miracles with a sick iMac; and the Fell-Clark family rented me their tower by the sea, the most magical place to write.

  I read more books than I care to remember during research, many of them by authors who clearly share my passion for Russia. It is for me the most fascinating and inspiring country on earth, and I hope that in Vodka I’ve done some small measure of justice to an extraordinary nation and a unique people.

  Boris Starling

  RUSSIAN NAMES

  All Russians have three names: their given name (what Westerners would call their Christian or first name), their patronymic (a derivative of their father’s name) and their family name (surname). To show respect, formality or distance, Russians use both the given name and the patronymic. Friends and family use only the given name or a nickname derived from it (e.g. Kolya for Nikolai).

  PROLOGUE

  Wednesday, August 21, 1991

  Moscow at dusk, the great city hanging suspended in all its contradictions: halfway between day and night, past and future, east and west, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid, good and evil.

  The coup was over. For the first time since it had begun, the night was dry and moonlit. The troops had that afternoon started to withdraw from a
round the White House, the Russian parliament building. They were retreating from Moscow as Napoleon and Hitler had done before them, but they were doing so with pleasure, relieved that they’d not had to massacre their countrymen, and pursued by the grateful cheers of demonstrators who threw sweets, cakes and coins in through the hatches of their armored vehicles. Four tanks were left empty on the grounds of the White House, garlanded with flowers and Russian tricolors; the rest snaked away in long columns of belching gasoline and churned asphalt, and the parliamentary defenders had never smelled anything sweeter.

  They’d been there since the very start, three days and a lifetime before, flimsy lines facing down the Soviet army and the world’s press, and this was their moment. They picked their way through rocks and crushed machinery, sidestepped the armfuls of flowers laid on the street to cover dried bloodstains and grinned in joyful disbelief that the building—that Russia itself—was safe.

  And among all these Russians, there was not a bottle of vodka in sight; not one.

  Inside the White House, Lev—parliamentary deputy, distillery director, criminal godfather, champion weight lifter, his shoulders as wide as two men’s, the crown of his head seven feet above the floor—walked the corridors and surfed waves of intelligence and rumor. Gorbachev was on his way back from the Crimea. The coup leadership had disbanded and flown out of Moscow. The three ugly sisters—the Party, the KGB and the Ministry of Defense—were in disarray. Between them, they hadn’t even managed to produce a decent coup.

  Lev felt a hand on his elbow. It was Nikolai Arkin, the brightest of the young reformers and, if parliamentary gossip had any credence, hot favorite to be the new prime minister. He grinned at Lev with teeth white enough to suggest German dentistry, and steered him toward the nearest balcony. Out on the Moscow River, bobbing tugboats let off flares and called themselves the Russian navy. The crowd was singing now. “We’ve won! Victory is ours!”

  Arkin waved a papal arm over the throng. “Is there a greater nation in the world?” he said. “They’ve been repeatedly beaten to their knees, but they’ve never forgotten how to stand up. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” A breeze caught his dark forelock and lifted it from his brow. “You know what that is?” Arkin asked, the euphoria making him ever more melodramatic. “It’s the wind of change.”

  Lev looked at Arkin with the weary indulgence a parent grants an excitable child. “Change?” he growled. “Change? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?”

  1

  Monday, December 23, 1991

  Television newscasters, metro workers, shop assistants and old women in the market all said the same thing: “the Soviet Union is no more.” Eleven of the fifteen constituent republics had met in Alma-Ata over the weekend and agreed to dissolve the union, nine days short of its seventieth birthday. “The Soviet Union is no more,” indeed, but no two people said it exactly the same; the phrase came loaded with hope, fear, relief, apprehension, joy, anger, excitement and nostalgia, and each person’s mixture was different.

  “No matter how much we hated the old system”—Lev never used the words “Soviet Union”—“it provided a kind of order. It was predictable. But now the authority is gone, the police are weak and afraid to deal with the black-asses from the south—especially the Chechens. They’ve been allowed to establish a presence here in Moscow, and it looks like it’s up to us to send them back home, back to their blood feuds and their tribal armies. We haven’t survived communism just to let a bunch of niggers fuck us in the ass.”

  There were three men at the table, Lev, Testarossa and Banzai, all of them vory—thieves-in-law who had abandoned their given names in favor of noms de guerre and relinquished their right to a home or family in favor of the brotherhood of criminals. Between them, they ran Moscow’s three largest Slav gangs. Lev was in charge of the 21st Century Association, Testarossa the Solntsevskaya and Banzai the Podolskaya. They had come to this dacha northwest of Moscow for a summit meeting. Each man had an ashtray in front of him. There was vodka on the table and smoked fish on the sideboard. Outside, the snow was falling again, whirling against a wan sky. Cigarette ends glowed like fireflies through the windows; three gang leaders meant scores of bodyguards.

  Lev ran his hands over his head. In accordance with tradition, as the man with the most jail time (and the only one to have been officially designated an enemy of the state), Lev had seniority over the other two.

  “As it stands,” Lev continued, his voice croaking, “we’re not organizing ourselves in the most productive manner. We compete with each other for control, be it of Moscow districts or business sectors. Testarossa, you want some of my pie in Kitaigorod; Banzai, I want your counterfeit vodka interests. In normal times, this is perfectly healthy; honorable vory come to a mutually acceptable arrangement, and if they can’t do so, then the strongest man wins. But these aren’t normal times, my brothers. If we keep fighting among ourselves, the Chechens will take over. They’re the enemy now. So I propose a truce; we suspend operations against each other and join forces against the Chechens.”

  “Until when?” Banzai said.

  “Until we’ve beaten them.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we take their interests and divide them up between us, equally.”

  Banzai’s features—the narrow eyes and plate-broad cheekbones of Sakhalin, just across the water from Japan—arranged themselves into something the far side of skepticism.

  Lev turned to Testarossa. “What do you think, brother? This can’t go ahead without your agreement; it’s your men and your firepower we’ll be calling on the most.”

  The Solntsevskaya was the largest single gang in Russia, let alone Moscow. Testarossa could call on four thousand men and at least five hundred Kalashnikovs, one thousand machine pistols, fifty Uzi rifles and a handful of Mukha grenade launchers. The 21st Century Association had no more than half this capacity; Banzai’s Podolskaya only half that again.

  “Do you even need to ask, brother?” When Testarossa smiled, his eyes were liquid smoke beneath a blaze of red hair. His hairline sat low on his brow, virtually nudging his eyebrows. In the prison camp at Magadan, he’d tattooed his forehead: Fucked by the Party. The authorities had pulled down his scalp to cover it. “A vor should support another vor in any circumstance; isn’t that our first rule? What have we become, if we don’t define ourselves against the enemy? We’ll band together against the narrow films, and be proud of it.”

  “Spoken like a true vor. I thank you.” Lev looked at Banzai. “And you, little brother? You need this alliance more than either of us.”

  “Little brother. That’s it, isn’t it? I lend you my men and my weapons, and when it’s over you two divide the spoils between you and I get fucked.”

  “When it’s over”—Lev’s voice was suddenly hard—“we’ll negotiate freely and fairly. We’re men of honor. I won’t let petty money-grabbing undermine the criminal brotherhood which we’re all sworn to defend. Remember, vory must always tell the truth to fellow members.”

  It took Banzai a moment to recognize the implicit threat behind Lev’s words. “What are you saying?” he asked. “What truth?”

  “There’s nothing you haven’t told us, little brother?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “A trip to Kazan, perhaps?”

  Banzai’s head went back and up a fraction; back in surprise, up in defiance. The Tatar capital of Kazan was the processing center for 3MF, trimethyl phentanyl, a dry white powder several times more potent than heroin and impossible to detect when mixed with water.

  “The thieves’ code specifically bans traffic in drugs,” Lev said. “Whatever else we fight them for, the Chechens can have the narcotics, all of them. They’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.”

  “The drug trade’s worth millions of dollars, Lev. Better we control it than them.”

  “Banzai, have you forgotten what it means to be a vor? It’s not just money.”
<
br />   “Don’t talk to me of what a vor should or should not do, Lev,” hissed Banzai. “A true vor should not cooperate with the authorities, right? But you’re a parliamentary deputy. A vor must never accept a job at a state-owned institution, right? But you run the country’s largest distillery. A vor must not fraternize with communist organizations, yet you have a KGB man, Tengiz Sabirzhan, as your trusted deputy.”

  Lev pushed his chair back and stood. Upright, his dimensions came into sharper focus. He rarely used his size deliberately to intimidate; he knew that it usually did so without his having to try. He placed his hands on the table; then, suddenly, he reached out and slapped Banzai across the face, the traditional punishment for a vor who’d insulted another vor. When Lev spoke, his voice was Vesuvian.

  “The Russian parliament, whose resistance helped destroy the Soviet Union. The distillery whose appropriation was approved by the vory at the Murmansk summit back in ’87, because it benefited us and hurt the KGB, all at once. As for Sabirzhan, he’s simply a tool to be used when it suits my purpose, nothing more.”

  He subsided back into his chair. “Everything’s up for grabs—cars, weapons, haulage, prostitution, gambling, banking, vodka. Everything. Smuggling income’s going to go through the roof; each successor republic will now exercise jurisdiction only within its own borders, so goods stolen in Russia can be legally traded anywhere outside. The central finance system’s gone to shit, so there’s millions to be had from currency speculation. We’ve a freedom of movement unthinkable even a year ago. The country’s changing day by day. It’s the revolution all over again. If we’re to take our rightful place in the new Russia, now is the time to strike. But in order to seize this opportunity we too must change.”

  Lev fingered the homemade aluminum cross that dangled from his neck. The cross, like his habit of wearing his shirt outside his trousers with a vest on top, was a deliberate homage to the vory who’d ruled the camps in the last years of Stalin’s reign.

  “No.” When Banzai shook his head, his braided dreadlocks jerked like a Turkish bead curtain. “You talk about the Chechens as though they’re an organized army. They’re nothing of the sort. They’re ignorant, undisciplined psychopaths who’d as soon murder their own brothers as any of us. Their idea of refinement is to take their meat rare rather than raw. Thank you, but no. I prefer to take my chances alone.”