Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “You have a week, until New Year’s Eve, to consider my offer,” said Lev. “The price will be fair; I’m a man of honor.”

  “Spare me. The world has moved on.” Karkadann’s eyes were glittering black holes, and behind them was endless night. “No one gives a shit about the vory generation anymore, Lev; the hell with you.”

  In the banya, silence but for the hissing of water on hot rocks.

  It’s tradition that, if the meeting results in reconciliation, the men will go upstairs and eat. They’ll be offered bagels, cream cheese, borscht, and some of the specialties of the house: traditional baked bread stuffed with thin layers of cheese; fried strips of eggplant rolled around a walnut paste filling; or perhaps some tsatsivi, cold chicken and turkey in a soupy walnut sauce.

  Neither man suggested going upstairs.

  Since Lev had been the one to call this meeting, he stayed in the banya until Karkadann had showered, changed and left. It’s embarrassing to be in a man’s company once you’ve failed to find agreement with him.

  3

  Wednesday, December 25, 1991

  A soft package wrapped in brown paper arrived at Red October just before lunchtime, brought by a courier because only a fool trusted the Russian postal system. The word “Lev” was scrawled across the front of the package; there was no sender name or return address. Red October’s security guards checked for protruding wires and grease stains where any explosives might have sweated; finding neither, they made doubly sure by passing the parcel through the rickety fluoroscope that had been liberated from KGB headquarters following the August coup. Only when four men had satisfied themselves that it wasn’t a bomb—the Soviet Union hadn’t encouraged individual initiative in its citizens—did they take it upstairs.

  Lev unwrapped the package with efficiently minimal movements; his hands may have been bigger than any stevedore’s, but they were also supple as a cellist’s. When he pulled the item free from the wrapping, there was a short but dreadful hiatus while he grappled with the importance of this gesture of Karkadann’s. Then he gave a low whistle and a head shake, as if the Chechen’s capacity to insult was simply beyond his comprehension, and looked up at his secretary, Galina. Her eyes were pea green and her hair was like a gypsy’s, jet black and scarcely tamed.

  “Galya, go and get Tengiz Lavrentiyich, will you?” he said.

  Tengiz Sabirzhan was Lev’s deputy at the distillery and head of security for the 21st Century Association. Where Lev had come from the gulag, Sabirzhan was KGB to his bootstraps; the Sixth Directorate, to be precise, which had been responsible for industrial security and economic counterintelligence. That the Sixth Directorate had now been subsumed into a new body, the MSB, altered the nature neither of the organization nor the man. Sabirzhan had been appointed political officer at Red October in Brezhnev’s day—every enterprise had a political officer, to recruit informers among the workforce and ensure ideological hegemony—but, as stagnation had grown deeper under Andropov and Chernenko, so the KGB had been forced to collaborate with the enemies of the state. Only by striking deals with the organized crime gangs could they prevent internal trade from grinding to a halt. Keeping the vodka industry running had been top priority; the people would accept the shortage of many commodities, even staples such as potatoes and timber, but vodka? Never.

  Sabirzhan came immediately, as he always did, waddling into Lev’s office with shirt straining at his gut and eyes bright with sweaty intrigue behind his pince-nez. Lev gestured toward the package. “This sweater—this … thing,” he said, putting a yard of clean air between himself and the word, “is made of goat’s wool.”

  To a vor, goat’s wool—homosexual overtones aside—was the mark of a traitor, one who collaborated with the authorities against his own.

  Lev stretched his arms out in front of him; from the end of one sleeve appeared a tattooed crest, the double-headed imperial eagle commemorating the troops of the White Guard who’d fought the revolutionary Red Army. He shook his head again. “That black bastard’s gone too far this time.”

  Sabirzhan kept his wet-lipped mouth shut. Even after four years as Lev’s deputy, he knew little of the vory. This was not through lack of interest on his part but a complete lack of informers. Though they made use of his services, to the vory Sabirzhan would always be an outsider, someone to be kept at arm’s length.

  Lev clapped his hands, as he did to shed excess talcum powder before lifting his weights. “Enough musing, Tengiz—to practicalities. If you want to drive out a wedge, hit it with another.”

  “You want Karkadann killed?” Lev found Sabirzhan’s excitement at the prospect almost indecent; but then, what else did he expect? KGB members had been tutored extensively in the science of inflicting pain; it was hardly surprising that many took enjoyment as well as pride in their work.

  “Killed? No.” Not for an insult, however heinous. Besides, Banzai’s murder was pricking at Lev’s conscience. “But … warned, yes. Threatened.”

  “How many men?” said Sabirzhan, eyebrows clinging to his skin like slugs.

  “Two.” They’d need no more if Sabirzhan chose the best. Lev preferred to avoid employing small-time Mafia thugs, men with the intelligence of bullfrogs and the morals of camp guards. Instead, he picked men who knew for themselves the value of physical training: wrestlers, weight lifters, martial arts experts and those who, like Sabirzhan, had worked in the security services. Yes, vory tradition prohibited fraternization with the KGB—Banzai’s accusation still stung—but Lev had always been quicker than most vory to appreciate how the country was altering, and if something benefited him, then he was happy to accommodate it, always with the caveat that it was on his terms. He didn’t have to be friends with all his men, but he had to trust in their abilities. So the 21st Century’s gangsters went to the gym every second day and to the shooting range every week; they all knew that their professional value was in direct ratio to their physical fitness. The imperceptible tremor of a trigger finger, the slightest wavering of an eye, or a split second’s hesitancy at the crucial moment could spell the difference between success and failure.

  “I know just the ones,” Sabirzhan said.

  “Who?”

  “Ozers and Butuzov.” Two whom Sabirzhan had recruited personally from the Army Institute for Foreign Languages, the school for aspiring KGB members that taught its pupils the darker arts of the service’s tradecraft. Had they been born a decade earlier, Vyacheslav Ozers and Gennady Butuzov would have been pursuing minor dissidents around godforsaken Baltic towns. But if you were smart enough for the institute, then you would also be smart enough to see which way the winds of change were blowing under Gorbachev.

  Lev nodded in approval. “Excellent. Excellent.”

  At 7 p.m. Gorbachev went on the air to take his leave of the Soviet people; the first, and last, Soviet leader to have departed office voluntarily, if one could describe his evident reluctance to step down as in any way elective. In every public place with a television set, people fell silent and watched, their eyes narrowed in stoic acceptance of this latest twist in their history.

  “I am ceasing my work as president of the USSR,” Gorbachev said, dignified in his sadness. “I am very much concerned as I leave this post, but I also have feelings of faith and hope in you, your wisdom and force of spirit. We are inheritors of a great civilization, and it now depends on one and all as to whether this civilization makes a comeback to a new and decent living today.” Behind owlish glasses, the twinkle seemed to be dying in his gray-green eyes; and then he rallied, proud to the last, the forehead with the famous birthmark still unwrinkled by worry or stress. “I have never had any regrets; never had any regrets. I consider it vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements that have been attained in the past few years. We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these achievements and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances. Otherwise all our hopes will be buried.”

  He closed the
thin folder containing the text and dropped it onto the table in front of him. When he went to sign the order authorizing the transfer of the nuclear arsenal, however, his pen ran out. And so it was that Gorbachev’s last signature as Soviet leader was made with a ballpoint borrowed from the American producer overseeing the broadcast. It was Christmas Day in the West, but not in Russia; Gorbachev’s PR had always been better abroad than at home.

  “I wish everyone all the best,” he said, and then he was gone.

  Lev was one of the millions who watched, and he felt no pity either for Gorbachev or the hated union he’d taken with him. Almost the first thing that Gorbachev had done on becoming general secretary was to introduce an antialcohol campaign, and by way of example Lev had been singled out as Moscow’s premier vodka crook and thrown in the Lefortovo jail. In typically Russian fashion, this was both a compliment and an insult: a compliment to Lev’s perceived standing, in that Lefortovo was usually reserved for those committing crimes against national security; and an insult in that it effectively categorized Lev as a political prisoner—something akin to pond life in the eyes of the vory. Being inside mattered little to Lev; he ran his empire just as easily from behind bars, even extended it, and besides, he was released after only a few months in order to strike his deal with Sabirzhan. But Lev had never forgotten Gorbachev’s slight, nor forgiven him for it.

  Less than half an hour after Gorbachev had finished speaking, the hammer and sickle was taken down from the Kremlin flagpole and the Russian tricolor hoisted in its place, to scattered applause and a few whistles from the handful of tourists in Red Square. A light snow was falling.

  The twentieth century had ended, eight years before time.

  4

  Thursday, December 26, 1991

  “Why do we have to wait around here? Why can’t things just work properly?”

  “I don’t know what your problem is, Lewis, but I bet it’s hard to pronounce.” Alice Liddell put her hand over her husband’s and stroked at the fine hairs on his wrist. “Getting hoopie ain’t going to help. Cool your liver. Enjoy.”

  “Enjoy? This is the VIP lounge, right?” The languor of Lewis’s New Orleans cadence accentuated his incredulity; his wife spoke twice as quickly as he did. “Come on, Alice. Port Authority’s classier than this place.”

  He had a point, Alice conceded silently. Seat cushions were struggling free of their upholstery; unshaven men wrapped in ankle-length coats puffed cigars and eyed girls in skirts short enough to pass for belts. Sheremetyevo Airport clearly had a more elastic definition of VIP than she was used to, but wasn’t that part of the fun?

  Lewis looked around the room twice in mute defiance before turning back to Alice, by which time she’d started on the nearest copy of Pravda, testing the Russian she’d spent the last four months learning. Gorbachev’s resignation speech had coincided to the minute with Pravda’s deadline, but the paper made no mention of it; the Soviet Union’s most notorious mouthpiece hadn’t held the front page for its own funeral.

  The Liddells had been assigned a triumvirate of officials—a man from the finance ministry, another from the airport and a third from the American embassy—and now all three came back at once, dodging a splash of technicolor that Lewis recognized through the murk as a huddle of African state dignitaries in robes. The apparatchiks were almost running in their childlike eagerness to be first back to the new and exciting visitors, each brandishing sheaves of papers like wise men bearing gifts: passports, currency declaration forms, hotel reservations, tourist brochures—as if, thought Alice, there’ll be time for that. Each seemed caught in confusion about who they should hand the papers to, because Lewis was a decade older than his wife, more conservatively dressed and, most importantly, male, all of which put him in charge until proven otherwise, but even by Russian standards Alice was so striking in her bootcut jeans and leather jacket that eventually, beholden to the masculine reflex of lustful gawping, they went to her instead.

  When the embassy man escorted Alice and Lewis into the taxi and climbed into the front seat, he gave the other two a small involuntary smirk of triumph, and it was all they could do not to lean in through the window and ask the rich Westerners for a little baksheesh, a goodwill gesture in these times of glorious international cooperation.

  Alice was surprised that the embassy man—Quarrie, he said his name was; Raymond Quarrie, from Trenton, New Jersey—had come personally. As an International Monetary Fund adviser she was technically employed by the UN rather than the US. But America was the only superpower left now, which meant that Washington called the shots when it came to international aid. US, UN—what was a consonant between friends? Even friends who’d spent the best part of half a century eyeballing each other across Checkpoint Charlie and the Straits of Florida.

  Quarrie swiveled in his seat to face them. His face was pale and blotchy; he’d not be shy of a vodka or two, Alice reckoned. “Don’t worry about your luggage,” he said. “It’ll be sent directly to your hotel. You’re staying at the Metropol, yes?” The Metropol had reopened earlier in the month, refurbished by Scandinavian companies. For the average Muscovite, a room there cost five years’ wages. The ruble was trading at ninety-six to the dollar; clerks and technicians earned four hundred rubles per month, pensions were half that.

  “Until we find somewhere more permanent,” said Alice. “Or the IMF runs out of money, whichever is the sooner.”

  Quarrie laughed much louder and much longer than the joke was worth.

  Armed guards stamping their feet to keep warm slid from view as the taxi eased out of the airport. Quarrie peered through the rear windshield and then sneaked a surreptitious look at Alice when he thought she wasn’t looking. She hardly noticed, it happened so often, even with her auburn hair cropped short enough to bristle up the back of her neck. She loved it; from one angle it made her look bold, and from another vulnerable. Lewis hated it. He called the cut a duck’s ass and said it made her look like a dyke.

  “It’s quite a ride into town, so please take your coats off if you want to,” Quarrie said, playing the old Moscow stager. “Are you warm enough?”

  “Fine,” said Alice. The heat was on full blast.

  “You’ll be used to the weather, anyway. Moscow winters aren’t much worse than Boston ones.” He smiled. “Your accent gives you away.”

  “My husband’s from New Orleans,” she said, realizing that Lewis hadn’t exchanged a single word with Quarrie.

  “New Orleans?” Quarrie laughed. “You guys don’t even have winter there, right?”

  They passed the antitank hedgehogs that marked the place where the Red Army had halted the Wehrmacht’s advance half a century before. Alice stared rapt as Moscow flashed changes at the window, rolling out for her delectation every cliché about Soviet cities, and then some: massive buildings of uniform gray with crumbling facades, roads with potholes large enough to be bomb craters. There were pockets of beauty—a Byzantine church here, a prerevolutionary house there—but they only served to accentuate the gloom.

  The taxi swayed left and right as the driver glided between the hollows.

  The ugliness and dereliction didn’t bother Alice. For her, the first glimpse of a new country was always exciting, vista on a world pregnant with promises of adventure and challenge. She glanced across at Lewis, knowing that he didn’t share her animation. Lewis was still ambivalent about coming to Moscow. He was looking at exactly the same city as Alice, but she knew that for him it spelled discomfort and difficulty, an experience to be endured rather than enjoyed. After two years living on different continents—the IMF job had started out as a temporary assignment in Warsaw, which then led to another in Budapest and then another and another—Lewis, having failed to talk her out of accepting the Moscow posting, had decided to join her. As soon as her work was done there, they would head back to Boston to settle down and have kids while he was still young enough not to be taken for their grandfather.

  Alice reached for Lewis’s
cheek and ran her hand down it, past the silvering hairs at his temples. He gave her a weak grin.

  Quarrie leaned toward Lewis. “You’re taking up a post at the Sklifosovsky, I understand.” Lewis nodded, a blip in Quarrie’s monologue. “Finest emergency department in Moscow; they say it’s far better than the Kremlinovka, or whatever they call it now—the Central Clinical Hospital, something like that. Even an old Russia hand like me finds it hard to keep up with all the name changes. No more Leningrad, no more Sverdlovsk; streets and metro stations switch from one day to the next. In Moscow, only the weather’s still the same.”

  The driver cut across three lanes without indicating; Quarrie, unconcerned, pointed out the window. In the gathering darkness, the most radiant objects in the skyline were the ruby-red stars shining above the Kremlin towers. “Five points, for the proletariats of five continents,” he said. “Fat lot of good it did them.”

  The Kremlin itself, so familiar from photographs and television footage, looked slightly out of kilter. It took Alice a few moments to realize that it was because the hammer and sickle no longer rippled from the flagpole. In its place was the Russian tricolor, striped in white, blue and red; the same colors, Alice thought, as those of America, Britain and France, the countries tasked with helping revive the stricken Russia.

  “They put it on upside down last night, can you believe?” said Quarrie. “Down comes the hammer and sickle, up goes the tricolor—and the red stripe’s at the top! Stupid asses. Too much vodka, I wouldn’t doubt. Then the artificial wind machine to make the flag flutter didn’t work. They had to give it a good kick to get it going. Percussive maintenance, I think they call it. That’s the way most Russian problems get solved. To cap it all, they launched an enormous hot-air balloon in the same three colors. It rose a few feet, then crashed back to earth. Not the most auspicious start.”