Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “It’s not just another challenge to me,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Right, whatever.” His tone warned her off this line of conversation. There was only one thing in Alice’s life that she was happy with as it was, and that was Lewis himself. She’d told him more times than either of them could remember that he grounded her, he saved her from herself; when she shook things up in giant snowstorms of endeavor, he was the constant.

  6

  Saturday, December 28, 1991

  Come summer, the old royal estate of Kolomenskoe creaks at the edges, but at this time of year Ozers and Butuzov had only the crows for company. Both men were dressed in light colors, the better to blend in with the white snow, the gray sky, and the dirty cream tent-roofed Church of the Ascension against which they were standing. The only splash of black was the binoculars against Butuzov’s face, swinging in a long, slow sweep from left to right.

  Kolomenskoe stands at the top of a hill, and Karkadann’s property was at the bottom by the river, almost large and impressive enough to count as a rival estate. Away from the riverbank, a line of poplars traced the manor’s perimeter. Butuzov guessed they’d been planted more for aesthetics than security, to hide the endless march of smokestacks and grimy high-rises. The real security began behind the trees; a razor-wire fence topped with netting to catch hand grenades, a concrete wall behind that. An outsider would see nothing at road level, but from this high up Butuzov could make out stables, a landscaped garden, more outbuildings—garages and guest cottages, he imagined—and finally the main house itself, dark red like a bloodstain on the snow. It had come from Norway; Karkadann had seen it, liked it, bought it and then had it shipped over and reassembled brick by brick.

  Butuzov lowered the binoculars, handed them to Ozers, leaned his head back against the church’s wall and peered up at the gables that climbed like artichoke leaves toward the spire. He could almost have forgotten that they were in Moscow at all; Kolomenskoe was sufficiently far from the main road for traffic noise to be a distant grumble and for the air to be halfway clear. Butuzov closed his eyes and inhaled as though sniffing a fine vodka; even Mafiosi on stakeout are children of nature at heart.

  “Looks almost impenetrable,” Ozers said disgruntledly; irritability was his default setting. “There’s no weak link in the fence that I can see, and the gatehouse is manned. We’ll have to get closer and see if we’ve missed anything.”

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  Butuzov lifted the binoculars to his eyes again and studied Karkadann’s house. A streak of color flitted across the viewfinders, brief enough for him to start. He scanned the area quickly and found it again; a van heading down the drive, away from the house. Butuzov held the binoculars firm and tried to read the name on the vehicle’s side. It was hard to make out—the stenciling was old and the van was moving—but he got it after a few seconds: Comstar.

  Butuzov lowered the binoculars fast and grabbed Ozers’s arm. “Quick! Let’s go.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “I’ve got an idea.” Butuzov was already running toward the parking lot.

  He’d fired the engine of their deliberately nondescript Volga saloon and was already reversing in an extravagant circle before Ozers managed to close his door. The Volga, sufficiently dirty to make the color of its paint work a matter for conjecture rather than observation, shot down the Kolomenskoe access road far quicker than either its suspension or the road surface warranted. Broken nose and straggly beard arranged in violent concentration, Butuzov took two right turns and, after slowing briefly at a junction to get his bearings, a third onto a side street pocked with cheerless apartment houses. He stopped with a lurch and reached under the dashboard for the lever to release the hood catch.

  “What’s wrong?” said Ozers.

  “Pretend we’ve broken down.”

  “In this piece of shit? That won’t be hard.”

  Butuzov walked around to the front of the car, propped the hood open and began to peer at the Volga’s innards. He was not a moment too soon; the Comstar van was already coming around the corner. Butuzov straightened, turned and held out his hand. For a moment, he thought that the driver hadn’t seen him or was simply ignoring him; then the van pulled to the side and stopped a few feet away. The driver leaned out the window.

  “Thanks for stopping,” said Butuzov. “You got some jump cables?”

  “You got some vodka?”

  “A bottle in the boot.”

  “Then I’ve got some jump cables.”

  “He’d have done it for free in the old days,” muttered Ozers. Everybody wanted to be paid nowadays, and vodka was the universal currency.

  The Comstar driver got out of his van. His trousers flapped an inch or so above his ankles; his socks were thin enough in places to be leaking skin, and his shoes were cheap Soviet plastic.

  There were several bottles in the Volga’s trunk; few Russian motorists venture onto the roads without. Butuzov picked the cheapest and fished out three glasses from a cardboard box; it’s the height of bad manners to swig straight from the bottle.

  “Here we go,” he said, handing them each a glass. “Keeps the cold out.” He pulled the foil top off the bottle and poured them each one hundred grams. “I’m Kiril, he’s Eduard.”

  “Maltsev, Yaroslav.” The Comstar man shook their hands; his palm was slippery from patting the gel on his hair. “My friends call me Yarik.”

  “Well, Yarik, your good health.” They clinked glasses. Maltsev downed his in one, Ozers and Butuzov sipped, for Lev banned any more than moderate drinking. “A drunken person has no secret,” the vor liked to say, “and I’ve never met an alcoholic man of honor.”

  Butuzov indicated the Comstar logo on the side of the van. “Fixing phones?”

  “Installing them.” Maltsev jerked his head back toward Karkadann’s estate. “Fancy house back there. Some coon with more money than sense. Top-of-the-range stuff, high-speed lines, nothing but the best. Black-ass could call the space station with that lot.”

  “It’s Saturday; must have been a big job, to get you out at the weekend.”

  “That’s the way it is now. Weekends, holidays—you need the money, you work whenever they say. If they pay you, who cares? Anyway, I’ve finished now.”

  “Let’s get on with it, then,” Ozers said.

  Maltsev emptied his glass, went around to the back of his van and yanked open the rear doors. Butuzov turned to Ozers and whispered, “Pretend the car won’t start. Make a big song and dance. Keep your foot on the throttle and flood the engine if you can—just enough to distract him for a minute or so.”

  Ozers nodded. The bags under his eyes were sufficiently pronounced to be knife scars.

  Maltsev reappeared with jump leads dangling from his hand like grass snakes. He opened the van’s hood, attached the clips to his battery and repeated the process under the Volga’s hood. When all the clips were attached, he started his engine and signaled to Ozers that he should follow suit.

  Butuzov heard the Volga’s engine cough asthmatically and die. He walked quietly around to the back of the Comstar van and looked inside. Everything he needed was within reach of the door, which was good; climbing inside would shift the van’s weight and alert Maltsev. It would of course have been easier simply to shoot Maltsev and steal the van, but keeping civilians safe was one of Lev’s most sacred tenets. Mafiosi could harm fellow Mafiosi, Lev said, but never the man in the street.

  “Try again,” Butuzov heard Maltsev shout over the noise of his engine, followed by, “Don’t keep pumping the gas, you’ll flood the fucking thing.”

  Three abortive efforts at starting the Volga later, Butuzov reappeared and gave Ozers a discreet nod. When Ozers next turned the key in the ignition, he twisted it fully rather than halfway as he had been doing before, and the engine started perfectly.

  “Thanks for your help, Yarik.” Butuzov handed Maltsev the vodka bottle. “Don’t spill any, eh?” With the foil cap r
emoved, there was no way of closing the bottle. Proper drinkers always finish an open bottle; when they go to the fridge, it’s to get a new bottle rather than put the current one back for another day.

  “I won’t. You can count on that.”

  The flush in Maltsev’s cheeks wasn’t entirely due to the cold. Butuzov suspected that Maltsev would opt for the simplest way of avoiding spillage and relocate the vodka from bottle to stomach.

  They watched the Comstar van leave. “If that bottle’s more than glass and air by tonight, I’m a Chechen,” Butuzov said.

  “Would you mind telling me what all that was about?”

  Maltsev’s one working brake light flared dimly as he paused at the junction, and then he was gone from sight. Butuzov walked over to the nearest parked car and bent down to retrieve what he’d left behind the rear bumper; a set of Comstar engineer’s overalls, and a toolbox.

  7

  Sunday, December 29, 1991

  The guards at Karkadann’s gatehouse—all Chechens, naturally, for Chechens trust only their own kind—frisked Butuzov and searched his van before letting him through. The precautions were standard, and there was no reason for the Chechens to be suspicious. They had no way of knowing that the Comstar logo had been painted on the van only last night, or that the sign writer responsible had been paid five hundred dollars for his services and five hundred more to keep his mouth shut.

  At the front door of the mansion itself, however, Sharmukhamedov was more suspicious. His head was freshly shaved and his beard trimmed neater than usual; neither detracted from his air of menace. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “There’s a problem with your lines,” Butuzov said.

  “Not that we’ve reported.”

  “You wouldn’t have. We picked it up at the central exchange about an hour ago.”

  “Who else is affected?”

  “Hundreds of people. But our most valuable customers get priority.”

  Sharmukhamedov nodded, as if priority was no more than his right. “What happened to the other guy? The one who was here yesterday?”

  “Yarik? Sick. Stupid bastard drank some dodgy vodka.”

  Maybe it was the use of Maltsev’s name, or the all too plausible intimation of vodka poisoning; either way, Sharmukhamedov’s suspicions seemed to be allayed. He jerked his head back toward the interior of the house; in you come. A moment, a decision; a mistake.

  Ozers had wanted to come too, of course, but Butuzov had disagreed and Lev had supported him. Two people for what was one man’s job might arouse suspicion; unlikely, perhaps, but Karkadann was as paranoid as they came, so it wasn’t worth taking the chance. If Butuzov was discovered and things turned nasty, an extra person would make little difference in a house full of armed Chechens. So Butuzov had come alone, unarmed, and very scared.

  “I’ll need to see all the phones,” said Butuzov, impressed at how steady his voice sounded.

  “Sure. But I’m with you all the time, understand?”

  Butuzov shrugged with a nonchalance he didn’t feel. “Whatever.”

  The house was warm, huge and unbelievably gaudy. To Butuzov the place seemed overblown and tasteless. Golden nymphs squatted on banister ends or pranced in crystal fountains. The paintings were hideous art nouveau, more often than not made even more vulgar by being set in relief. Karkadann’s bedroom had spreads of scarlet satin and a mirrored ceiling; his bathroom boasted two Jacuzzis.

  There were thirty-two handsets in the house, but Butuzov knew the best place for him would be Karkadann’s study. It was hard to see across the room; the overhead chandelier was the only light on, and each window was taped over with cardboard packing sheets. A layman might have assumed this had something to do with redecoration, but a Mafioso knew better. The sheets were a precaution against snipers; denying a shooter visual into the room and diffusing the body heat of those inside, thus rendering infrared rifle sights useless.

  Lying on his back under the desk, Butuzov made a big show of unscrewing the wall socket and poking around among the wires in there; they’d taught him this at the KGB institute, of course, it was the kind of thing he could have done in his sleep. Even if Sharmukhamedov had been lying under the desk with him, he’d have seen nothing. Butuzov had the bug hidden between two fingers, and he simply pressed it among the wires as he fiddled, pushing hard to compensate for the shaking in his hand. But crawling on the floor with a telephone repairman was several notches below Sharmukhamedov’s dignity; he stood and watched, missed and failed.

  Butuzov replaced the plastic covering on the socket and sat up fast. He was too much of a professional to wince in anticipation of his head hitting the underside of the table, even though he knew it would have to hurt if it was to be convincing. He spluttered a couple of expletives and rubbed his skull; a quick, almost imperceptible movement of his right hand from scalp to the underside of Karkadann’s desk and the second bug was in place, stuck fast in the middle of the table, far from the reach of straying hands. One device on the phone line and one in the room; all bases covered.

  Butuzov emerged from under the table with a wince—his head really ached, there was nothing fake about that—and packed up his toolbox. Sharmukhamedov didn’t ask whether he was hurt.

  “All done,” said Butuzov, picking up the handset and making a show of checking for the dial tone.

  8

  Monday, December 30, 1991

  Butuzov and Ozers took turns manning the listening post; four hours on, four hours off, like naval watches. They both spoke decent Chechen, enough to understand the gist of conversations, if not their finer nuances. Much of the material was workaday and mundane—Karkadann discussing dinner arrangements with his wife, Karkadann arranging what sounded like a tryst with a mistress—but two dialogues were sufficiently interesting for Butuzov and Ozers to make transcripts in Russian and pass them on to Sabirzhan.

  The first was a late-night disagreement—another disagreement, by the sound of it—between Karkadann and Ilmar about the wisdom of engaging the Slavic Mafia alliance in battle.

  K: Are you working for those Slav fuckers or something? I don’t understand you.

  I: And I don’t understand you. This is business, not a pissing contest.

  K: This is war, and we’re going to win.

  I: This is idiotic, and I tell you again: it’s not too late to use common sense.

  The second, timed just before nine in the morning, was a brief exchange between Karkadann and Sharmukhamedov.

  S: Boss, I’m off now.

  K: When’s your flight?

  S: Lunchtime; I can’t remember exactly what time.

  K: And you’re back when?

  S: Thursday.

  K: New Year in Dubai, one man and his libido … I pity those poor Arab girls. Bring some of them back with you, yeah? I hear they’re lush.

  S: Why else do you think I’m going?

  K: You don’t like the girls I get you?

  S: I’d like them better if you could get me sunshine and sand too.

  Sabirzhan handed the transcript back to Ozers and nodded to them both. “Well done, lads.”

  Sheremetyevo Airport is drab at the best of times, let alone on a sunless morning which spat uncertain flakes of snow as though the sky were trying to get rid of a bad taste. No wonder Sharmukhamedov was so looking forward to his holiday. Ozers and Butuzov prowled the airside beyond passport control and stepped smartly through drifts of arriving passengers. The foreigners penguin-walked with suitcases dangling from both hands and griped about the lack of carts. The Russians were almost invisible under mountains of boxes daubed with stylized drawings hinting at the contents within: cheeses and cognacs from Paris, children’s bicycles from Abu Dhabi, Japanese stereos and video recorders from Frankfurt, discount computers from Prague. These cargo mules were ordinary workers who’d left Russia a few days earlier with all the savings they could muster, and were now returning in the hope that selling long-forbidden items from distant lands of plen
ty would recast them as wealthy merchants—as long as they could persuade bored customs officers that their goods were for personal use only, of course. Oratory usually failed; bribery usually succeeded.

  There was only one flight to Dubai that day, and twenty dollars to the check-in girl had given Lev’s men a look at the passenger manifest. There he was: Baltazar Sharmukhamedov, traveling first class. Ozers and Butuzov had then visited the customs and excise officer to whom Lev paid a handsome annual retainer in return for ensuring that vodka imported by the 21st Century Association received an uninterrupted passage, and impressed on him that the retainer also covered the loan of two customs uniforms, the requisite area passes and a spare office.

  All they had to do now was recognize Sharmukhamedov, which, since he was twice the size of everyone else, shouldn’t prove too taxing. Whether Sharmukhamedov would recognize Butuzov was a different matter. It was a risk, but Sharmukhamedov didn’t seem the type to have paid much mind to a menial telephone repairman, let alone one he’d never have expected to see again. In any case, Ozers and Butuzov had been obliged to formulate their plan on the hoof and there wasn’t time to change it now.

  They found Sharmukhamedov striding toward the departure gate, taking two strides for everyone else’s three. He noticed them when they were still several yards away, fanned out subtly but unmistakably to prevent him going anywhere but backward.

  “Baltazar Sharmukhamedov?” Ozers was the one who spoke; he had the less threatening face. “Customs and excise. If you’d just come with us for a second?”

  “What the fuck for?” Sharmukhamedov’s eyes glowered sapphire beneath beetle brows.

  “Nothing serious, of course. It’s just that your boss has asked us to pass you an, er, an item, for your vacation, one he didn’t want going through the security checks, and we’d prefer not to do it in public.” Ozers looked almost apologetic, even overawed, as though dealing with gangsters was a huge but daunting thrill for a lowly customs officer.