Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “This item’s so big that it needs two of you to tell me?”

  “We’re not performing this service for charity, you understand. My colleague will take the same commission I will; he doesn’t trust me not to pocket it all.”

  Butuzov gave Sharmukhamedov a you-know-how-it-is smile, and saw no recognition whatever in the nod he received back. The Tsentralnaya had their tame officials at Sheremetyevo as much as any other gang; such cooperation was only to be expected. Sharmukhamedov would not have obeyed the orders of authority, but he would indulge them in a situation that showed the Tsentralnaya’s dominance.

  If Sharmukhamedov hadn’t already been thinking of the beaches he was going to strut upon and the women he was going to fuck, perhaps he’d have been more suspicious; a man’s reactions are always conditioned by the mood he’s in. He gestured at Ozers to lead the way.

  Ozers and Butuzov ushered Sharmukhamedov into their “office.” The room was small and minimally furnished: a table and three chairs hemmed in by olive walls, solitary window gazing disconsolately onto a row of generators. There was nothing on the table, and no closets. Sharmukhamedov was just starting to ask where this precious item was when Ozers unsheathed the truncheon from his belt and swung it in a wide arc, rising to the base of Sharmukhamedov’s skull, just below the ridge where the back of his head swelled outward. Butuzov, standing in front of the Chechen, saw Sharmukhamedov’s eyes widen in angry surprise before he pitched forward onto the table.

  They draped his arms over their shoulders and carried him out, staggering under the weight. Sharmukhamedov’s head lolled back, his mouth open to the ceiling as though hoping to catch flies. At that angle, no one could see the bruise that was already spreading across the back of his naked scalp. “The vodka,” they explained to any passerby who gave them more than a glance, “it was the vodka,” and everyone nodded understandingly; it’s never too early to be dead drunk in Russia.

  Sharmukhamedov was pegged out on a metal table like an animal hide left in the sun to dry, a Gulliver roped down by Lilliputians. Thick steel bands secured his ankles, knees, waist, elbows and neck; any more than the slightest movement was impossible.

  Sabirzhan walked all the way around the table. Sharmukhamedov’s eyes, blazing with fury, swiveled in their sockets as they tracked Sabirzhan’s progress.

  Sabirzhan stopped, tapped his finger against his mouth and rocked back on his heels, the way people do in art galleries. “The problem we have,” he said thoughtfully, “is this. Karkadann’s home is too well defended, and trying to pick him off in traffic is too risky.” He gestured with one hand, inviting Sharmukhamedov to help him solve the puzzle; they could have been chess players, crossword fanatics. “So what we need is somewhere less secure, somewhere he’s more vulnerable. Somewhere we can isolate him. The element of surprise is crucial, you understand that, Baltazar. This has to work the first time, or not at all.” He cocked an eyebrow over the pince-nez. “Any thoughts?”

  Sharmukhamedov was silent. From the moment he’d regained consciousness and realized what had happened—more specifically, who’d seized him—he knew two things: firstly, that he’d have to resist for no longer than four days, because the moment he wasn’t back from Dubai as planned Karkadann would get suspicious; and secondly, that no matter what he did or didn’t tell them, they would kill him.

  Sabirzhan’s forehead prickled with sweat under his widow’s peak. “No? Perhaps this will make you more talkative.” Sabirzhan held a syringe up to the light and rubbed at Sharmukhamedov’s arm. It was as hard as an oak banister; he must have been almost as strong as Lev, the two of them together could have formed a gang all on their own. Sabirzhan found a vein and jabbed the needle in with unnecessary force. Sharmukhamedov didn’t flinch.

  “Caffeine,” Sabirzhan explained. “I’ve increased the dose to take account of your size. You’d have to drink ten, fifteen cups of coffee to get the same kick. You could recite War and Peace in the time it’ll take to wear off.”

  Hours and hours of talking: Sharmukhamedov’s fury at being suckered by such a simple trick; all the women he was going to have fucked this week; how not to cut yourself when you shaved your head every day; how he should have known that the phone engineer was a fake; all the women he’d fucked in his life, especially the one whose cervix he’d split, now, that was a tale; how the caffeine was making his heart flutter … An endless monologue about himself, telling Sabirzhan everything other than what he wanted to know.

  Sabirzhan gave Sharmukhamedov a second injection, barbital sodium to depress his will.

  “I want to wash my face,” Sharmukhamedov said.

  “You can wash it in your own blood by the time I’ve finished with you.”

  “Beat me all you want. I’ll give it to you so that you’ll be paying the medical bills for the rest of your life.”

  “Don’t drag the cat by its tail. Come on, out with it; you’ll save us both a lot of trouble.”

  “The entire collective’s fucking your last girlfriend, you know.” Sharmukhamedov laughed. “And your prick drips because a whore gave you a double-barreled bouquet; the clap and syphilis. Ha!”

  The barbital sodium proved as ineffective as the caffeine had. Sharmukhamedov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. At some point he closed his eyes; he may even have gone to sleep. At least he wasn’t talking anymore.

  Lev sat at his desk, his chair pushed back to make room for his legs.

  “Give him a steam bath,” he said at length. It was prison slang for a no-holds-barred interrogation.

  “Just what I’d have suggested,” said Sabirzhan. He was hopping around like a pea on a hot griddle, flushed not only with elation at the prospect of inflicting untold pain on his prisoner, but also with eagerness for Lev’s approval if he did it well.

  Sharmukhamedov smiled when Sabirzhan showed him the stun gun. He’d used one many times himself, on those who wouldn’t sign contracts or who quibbled about protection money.

  Sabirzhan held the barrel against Sharmukhamedov’s chest, glanced at his watch, and pulled the trigger. A terrible jerking against the restraints—one second—those sapphire eyes screwed tight shut, the first time the Chechen even looked to have felt pain—two seconds—how extraordinary, one hand was splayed open like a starfish, the other was clenched into a massive fist—three seconds and here they came, the unmistakable sounds and smells of a body involuntarily emptying itself. A lake bloomed suddenly across Sharmukhamedov’s crotch; sludge oozed from between his legs. Sabirzhan gagged on the cloying sweetness and held the stun gun aloft.

  “Every time after this, Baltazar, I keep it on for a little bit longer. Three seconds, five, seven, ten. Irreparable paralysis begins to set in at ten seconds, you know?”

  9

  Tuesday, December 31, 1991

  Alice arrived at the McDonald’s on Pushkin Square ten minutes early. She’d chosen the venue deliberately; if privatizing Red October was to be the real start of Russia’s road to capitalism—capital couldn’t function without private property, after all—where better to plot its course than in the bastion of consumer capitalism itself?

  Harry and Bob were already there. Even though Alice had never met either of them before, she recognized them instantly, and would have done so even if she hadn’t been sent files on them beforehand. The locals were dressed in dull, earthy colors, they were eating their hamburgers with the reverence one accords to an exotic delicacy and hard living had lined their faces with trenches of strain. Healthy of countenance and with bright windbreakers draped over the backs of their chairs, Harry and Bob were tucking in without ceremony. Oh—and Bob was black, which in Moscow was enough to single him out to a blind man.

  Alice walked over to them. “Hey, guys. I’m Alice”—she adopted a jokingly girlish voice—“and I’m going to be your boss for the next few months.” She stuck out her hand. “Welcome to the lion’s den.”

  They were on their feet, laughing with her, glad to have another in their
gang.

  “Bob Craig, Houston, Texas”—thickset in a heavy sports jacket—“great to meet you.”

  “Harry Exley, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania”—like an excited freshman—“heard so much about you, Mrs. Liddell. It’s a real honor to be working with you, I was so thrilled to be asked …”

  “Easy!” Alice chuckled to hide her embarrassment and take the sting from her reproach. “Harry, you’re gonna have to kiss more ass than a toilet seat sees all year before this thing is out; don’t waste your butt licking on me. And the next time you call me Mrs. Liddell, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week, understood?”

  “OK. Alice.” Harry pushed a paper bag toward her. “We were too hungry to wait lunch for you; sorry. And the lines were awful, so we bought you a hamburger meal to save you waiting. No cheese; is that OK?”

  “Cheese, no cheese—they all taste the same anyway.” Alice sat down on a plastic chair with too much yield in it to be truly comfortable and hoped she’d handled things all right. A vodka might have made her feel less awkward; sober, she was shy, and—especially when in authority—she tended to compensate by being abrasive. No matter, she thought. She’d know Bob and Harry soon enough, and then they’d forget their first impressions of her.

  She began to sketch out the second revolution over hamburgers and fries.

  When it comes to reforming command economies, there are two schools of thought. The first, shock therapy, holds that it’s best to enact all reforms at once; the social and economic upheaval is so great that a short, sharp jolt is preferable to prolonging the torture with a piecemeal approach. The gradualists take the opposite view; for them, reforms should be staggered in order to avoid large drops in output and mass unemployment, which will in turn threaten political stability and therefore the reform process itself.

  Borzov had decided to go with the former. They were going to raze the entire communist structure—clearly the institutions of the communist state were inimical to the spirit of enterprise—and in its stead erect a market economy. If this was implemented quickly and vigorously, the essentials of such an economy would begin to function almost immediately, and the economy would then gain the momentum it needed. The role of the state was simple: to establish the rules of the capitalist game and watch the new society unfold. This was where privatization came in; more specifically, Red October.

  “We’re just going to do one auction to start with,” Alice said. “The Red October distillery.”

  “Only one?” It was Harry; Alice bet he’d sat in the front row at varsity lectures.

  “Yes, only one, to show it can be done. Parliament meets March ninth, and we need to have everything wrapped by then. So the auction will take place the Monday before that, the second.”

  “Two months?” Bob’s bottom lip bumped against the straw of his Coke. “That’s absurd.” He gestured around the restaurant. “It took McDonald’s fourteen years to open this place.”

  “You really think it’s impossible, Bob, walk out now and I’ll find someone else, no hard feelings. Yes, two months is very short—and even shorter because we can’t go see Red October until next Monday because they’re all on New Year vacation—but it’s not absurd.”

  “We’re gonna have to work twenty-four seven.”

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “My wife might. She wasn’t that keen on coming here in the first place.”

  “She should meet my husband. Harry?”

  Harry shook his head. “Bring it on.”

  “No wife?” A redundant question. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

  “Boyfriend? Hardly. No, none of the above. Young, free and single.” He looked around the room. “And keen-to-mingle. Bob, have you seen the chicks in here? I’m fouling my gutchies.”

  “Harry, you’re depriving some village of an idiot,” Alice said. “You’re happy to give yourself to me for two months?”

  “Is that an offer?”

  Alice clicked her tongue. “It’s a phase you’re going through. You’ll grow out of it.”

  “This afternoon, if there’s a God,” Bob said.

  She saw herself suddenly as Harry must have seen her: smart and sassy and sexy, the girl everyone had wanted to befriend at school, the one who’d share a smoke and drink behind the bike stands, the first one to have a boyfriend, the one who never studied but got good grades. He couldn’t have guessed, this soon after meeting her, the depths below. No one ever could.

  “OK.” Alice’s tone was serious. “Enough. We’re gonna show these bastards a bit of good ol’ American kickass. First up, division of labor. Working on the kind of model we used in Eastern Europe, I think the best way is to establish six working groups—we’ll take charge of two each.” She reached into a plastic folder and brought out four small dossiers. “I’ve tried to tailor these to your individual strengths and experience, so if you’ve got a problem with them, I want to hear it now rather than in a month’s time.”

  She pushed the top two dossiers over to Bob. “Bob, you’re a banker, and you’ve also done a bit of recruitment in your time, am I right? So I want you to head up procedures and staffing. Procedures involves devising a workable auction system in as much detail as possible: finding and preparing an auction center here in Moscow, establishing communication links to the EBRD in London and the IMF in DC—and then pretending those links don’t work whenever they say something we don’t want to hear. Staffing means finding, hiring, training, paying … and firing when they’re not up to it; and some of them won’t be, you can count on that. Any questions?”

  “Thousands.”

  “I’ll hear them later.” The other two dossiers went across the table to Harry. “Harry, your responsibility is all legal and company work. You have to study the relevant corporate documents to ensure that everything’s aboveboard, arrange for incomplete or illegal documents to be rewritten and ensure that everyone understands what’s legal and what’s not. And you’ll need to go through Red October’s books with the finest-tooth comb you can find. Accounts, figures, prospects, viability, strengths and weaknesses. Shove a microscope up their ass.”

  “How come I get the shitty jobs?”

  “The shitty jobs?” Alice couldn’t tell whether Harry was joking or not.

  “Alice, no one here has the first clue what the law even is right now. How am I going to work out what’s legal and what’s not? And have you ever seen a set of Soviet accounts? My nephew’s ten months old, and he makes more sense than they do.”

  “Your charm will overcome all obstacles, I’ve no doubt.”

  “And while we slave at the coalface, what are you going to be doing?”

  “Oh, nothing much—just trying to stop the whole damn thing from sinking, that’s all. And kicking your butts when you start bitching. I’ll supervise the steering group, which will be in overall charge of the assignment, and will”—she made a show of checking her notes to get the phrasing correct—“‘obtain rapid and effective decisions on all aspects of the case,’ or so it says here. I’ll also look after PR; we have to promote and publicize this thing, and I’m prettier than either of you.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Bob said. The stubble around his goatee was like patches of blackened wheat. “I hate to sound negative, Alice, but—this could all go to shit, right?”

  They were both looking at Alice intently, and she saw the depth of their apprehension.

  “Yes,” she said eventually. “Yes, it could. Even if we work our buns off, it could all go to shit. But it definitely will if we don’t. Come on, guys. Be positive. It’s an adventure.”

  When they left the restaurant—barely after three, and already dark—a dozen or so vegetarian protesters had gathered outside, led by a young man wearing a fake silver beard and a padded coat. A placard around his neck read Tolstoy says: “forget meat, stay with wheat.”

  “Tolstoy?” Alice said.

  “I am the great Lev Tolstoy himself, reincarnated.”

  �
�What’s your real name?”

  “I told you, I am the …”

  She skewered him with turquoise eyes until, shamefacedly, he muttered: “Vasily.”

  Above the beard, his skin was smooth. “How old are you, Vasily?” she asked.

  “Sixteen.” He offered her a veggie burger. “I’m a business student, you know.”

  The McDonald’s crowd ebbed and flowed around them with haughty indifference. Most Russians find even the idea of vegetarianism absolutely bewildering; it’s hard enough to find food as it is, let alone when you halve your options by refusing to eat meat. Vasily gestured disconsolately around him. “They don’t understand,” he said. “That’s always the way it is in Russia. Any good idea you have here, it’s ten years too early.”

  Sabirzhan had made Sharmukhamedov stand stock-still for hours, until the Chechen thought that the veins in his legs were going to burst. Then Sabirzhan had cuffed Sharmukhamedov’s hands together, placed them between the Chechen’s knees, attached the cuffs to a pulley and hung him upside down. His belly was beach-ball round but hard as a quarried boulder; it didn’t sag.

  “The sparrow,” Lev said when he came to check on progress. “A gulag favorite.”

  “One of the KGB’s premier techniques,” Sabirzhan agreed. “I’m applying it according to recognized methods.” “Applied,” as one would apply a soothing unguent.

  Lev had twin lightning bolts tattooed on his right arm, a sign of never having confessed to anything. “What’s he told you?”

  “Nothing useful. But he will.”

  “We haven’t got much longer.”

  “Forty-eight hours? He’ll break long before then.”

  “And you can take a break too. We’re leaving for the Vek in half an hour.” The Serebryany Vek was a banya near the Bolshoi now converted into a restaurant where caviar was piled into mountains on the sideboards, chandeliers bowed deferentially from the ceilings and liveried waiters whipped domed metal covers from dishes as though they were magicians performing tricks.