She was drunk now, very drunk, riled and losing it. “You are backward, lazy, devoid of initiative and living in the past,” she yelled.
“And you, Mrs. Liddell, are blinkered, imperialist, patronizing and rapacious. I don’t like being treated as an aboriginal in my own country, and I don’t like the prospect of your privatizing this factory merely to make money. You’re trying to rape us, pure and simple.”
And with that, Lev pushed his chair back and stormed out of the room. If the door had been shut, his fury would surely have propelled him straight through it.
Lewis was shaking Alice awake with enough force to make her slap his hand away in irritation. “What time is it?” she slurred.
“Half past ten. Where have you been, to get this drunk?”
Alice felt synthetic fabric against her cheek; the sofa in their room at the Metropol. When she lifted her head, a line of saliva stretched from the corner of her mouth to the upholstery.
“Where have you been?” he asked again.
“Red October.”
“That was this morning.”
“Lasted all day … Lev … Fucking asshole.”
“Why’s he an asshole?”
“Fucking fuckstick.”
“You got hammered with this guy?”
“Trying to get him to agree to privatization.” Lewis’s face swam in her vision. The skin under his chin was beginning to pouch, she saw; he was going to get jowly if he wasn’t careful.
“You could have done that without getting drunk.”
“I’m a Westerner. I’m a woman. Why make things harder than they already are?”
“Did Harry and Bob get drunk?”
“’Course not.”
“So why did you?”
“Had to drink their share for them.” She giggled.
“Alice, getting drunk at work is not the way normal people behave.”
She forced herself to focus on him. He was being patronizing; she wanted to slap him again, harder. “Lewis, it’s a distillery. That’s what they do in distilleries: they make vodka, then they drink it.” Alice giggled again, a hand to her mouth like a naughty teenager. “And if you had to deal with someone like Lev, you’d be drunk too.” She wagged a finger. “I’m gonna get him, Lewis. I’m gonna get Lev, I’m gonna teach that fuckstick not to mess with me. Next time will be different.”
16
Tuesday, January 7, 1992
The temperature had dropped again, down to minus twelve. Everywhere, like a mantra, could be heard the phrase golod y kholod: famine and freezing.
It was Orthodox Christmas, the first in almost three quarters of a century reclaimed from the godless embrace of communism. The first, then, when worshipers needn’t fear a visit from the ubiquitous KGB. Lev and his phalanx of bodyguards—he always took twenty men wherever he went; no gang leader in Moscow ever took his safety for granted—went to the Kazan Cathedral at the northeast corner of Red Square. “Cathedral” is something of a misnomer; the Kazan is little bigger than a church and painted as brightly pink as a child’s birthday cake. Stalin had destroyed the original and replaced it with a public toilet; only the quick thinking of the architect Pyotr Baranovksy, who had made plans of the cathedral even as Moustaches was tearing it down, had enabled Gorbachev to rebuild it as original, right down to the ornate window frames, ogee-shaped gables and domes in green and gold.
Lev bowed three times before the icon of Jesus above the door, and between each bow stood and crossed himself, from head to stomach and right shoulder to left, using three fingers rather than two in the approved Orthodox fashion. Inside the cathedral, it was almost dark; the only light came from candles and weak wall-brackets. The air was close and quiet, heavy with incense and short on oxygen. From the walls, icons looked dolefully and impassively down, unsteady in the flickering haze.
As in all Orthodox churches, there were no pews; the congregation stood. Feet shuffled, clothes rustled; no one spoke. In the murk, Lev’s bodyguards forced worshipers into the corners, meeting resistance only from an old woman dressed in black and holding a brass contribution plate covered in red felt. A can of oil to keep the flames alight was at her feet; in her free hand was a box of candles in various sizes. The prices for each size had been crossed out and marked over several times. When she tutted at the wrestler who’d tried to move her, Lev came over and placed five hundred dollars on the contribution plate.
“We pray for Russia’s future,” he said, “and for its soul.”
Alice heard the key click-clack in the lock, and Lewis came in trailing cold.
“Raw out there, huh?” she said.
“And the traffic was awful,” he replied. He took off his coat and rubbed his shoulders. “I’d give anything to be back in New Orleans again. How long does winter last here?”
“Till May, sometimes.”
“May? No chance. This goes on till May, I’m out of here. Oh.” He felt in his jacket pocket. “I brought you this.”
He handed her a banknote in fuchsia pink. It was a five-hundred-ruble bill, officially issued yesterday, the first she’d seen; the previous highest denomination had been two hundred. The banknote was folded and creased from being in his pocket; she had to put down her vodka glass to straighten it out and examine it properly.
“What are you watching?” he asked.
“News.” The reporter was saying that those coping best were country people who, having chickens and gardens, could feed themselves. It was not hard to detect a note of schadenfreude in the reporter’s voice; Moscow has always been resented by the rest of Russia.
Alice switched channels. Now Borzov was touring the upmarket Arbat Gastronom. Its red-and-white awnings were cheerful and clean. The shelves and floors had been swept free of litter. Clerks in spotless aprons stood in front of rows of canned food, imported vegetables and jars of pickled spices, all neatly sorted by category and size. Cellophane-wrapped packages of meat and poultry were piled invitingly in a large, modern freezer. Two pounds of chicken was forty-eight rubles, two pounds of smoked fish, forty; eggs were selling at twelve rubles for ten. The place radiated enterprise and profit. It was the kind of blatant propaganda that would have made any Soviet commissar proud.
“I don’t care how much food they’ve got,” Lewis said. “This place is Third World until I can find a muffuletta.” If there was one thing above all others that Lewis missed about New Orleans it was the cuisine, and the muffuletta sandwich—a round seeded loaf split and filled with ham, Genoa salami, mortadella, Provolone cheese and marinated olive salad—was a particular favorite. “So they got vegetables?” The word had four syllables—vedgetibbles. “Bully for them.”
Back in the Kremlin, tricolor at his shoulder, Borzov addressed the nation. “The hardest time is from now until the summer. After that, there will be stabilization and improvement. Next winter will be easier than this one. Today we must all make a choice: well-fed slavery or hungry freedom? To make this decision requires the will and wisdom of the people, the courage of politicians, the knowledge of experts…”
He looked sincere and pained; Alice fancied that he was addressing her personally.
“Your president has made this choice. He has never looked for easy roads, but the next months will be the most difficult. If he has your support and trust, he is ready to travel this road to the end with you.”
Borzov took a sip from the glass on his desk—Alice hoped and doubted that it was water. He narrowed his eyes. “For too long, our economy has been run on lines that can only be described as antihuman. As a result, we have inherited a devastated Russia. But we mustn’t despair. We have the chance to climb out of this pit and to stop our constant preparation for war with the whole world. This will be a special year. We will create the foundations of a new life. We are abandoning mirages and illusions, but we are not going to lose hope. Hope we do have.”
Vladimir Kullam was hurrying home. Brezhnev had once boasted that Moscow was the only capital city in the world where a
person could walk the streets at any hour without fear of attack; no more. Vladimir had made good money on the kiosk today, more than he wanted to carry alone for too long. When he thought of the Chechens who’d threatened him yesterday, he upped his pace a little more and checked to make sure they weren’t following him. The streets were badly lit; if anyone was there, he might not see them until it was too late. His youthful imagination ran merry riot in his head; he’d heard tell of what the black-asses did to people who’d crossed them.
An exclamation—“Vova!”—cut through Vladimir’s thoughts. He was off before he knew it, three strides into a sprint, when the voice said “Vova!” again, and he realized who it was. He stopped running. “You want to be careful, coming up on people like that—you almost gave me a heart attack!”
The streetlight caught the dull glint of a vodka bottle. “You want to take a hundred grams with me?”
Vladimir shook his head. “I haven’t the head for that stuff.”
“Good lad—” And then Vladimir felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull, saw an explosion of light entirely at odds with the smoggy blackness of a Moscow winter and heard his own sharp cry of surprise give way to a yawning silence.
17
Wednesday, January 8, 1992
Lev had boasted that his door was always open to his workers and, just before the start of his shift and in a state of some agitation, German Kullam was the latest to prove the truth of this.
“Vladimir’s gone missing,” he blurted out.
Lev poured German a hundred grams, sat him down and made him recount what had happened.
German and Vladimir had argued on Sunday afternoon about Vladimir’s working at the kiosk, something German had repeatedly told him not to do. (German omitted to mention Sabirzhan’s presence; it would have raised all sorts of questions he’d rather Lev didn’t ask.) Vladimir had stormed out. That was the last his parents had seen of him.
“Your son disappears on Sunday afternoon and you wait till now to tell me?”
“We thought he was being a hothead.” German listened to himself and realized that he’d smeared the truth somewhat. “I thought he was being a hothead. Alla was worried right from the start. But this happens all the time: we fight, he leaves and doesn’t come back for a night. Sometimes even two.”
“And where does he go?”
“To friends.”
“These friends—did you call to see if Vladimir was with them?”
“With what phone calls cost nowadays?” The price of local calls had been almost negligible under communism, but telecommunications were no more exempt from rampant inflation than anything else. “Besides, it was up to him, wasn’t it? To call, to come back, I mean. He was in the wrong, not me. He should obey his father.”
“He’s your son, German.”
German looked at his hands. “I went down to the kiosk. They haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“Have you been to the police?”
“What’s the point? Those guys couldn’t find their own assholes with a mirror.”
“Too true. OK, German. You tell me everywhere you can think of where Vladimir might be, every place you’ve ever known him to go, and I’ll have my men check them out for you.”
Endless pairs of men, wrestlers and weight lifters in dark overcoats who clutched smudgy photocopies of Vladimir’s photograph, fanned out across the city like blips on a radar sweep. They went to every one of Moscow’s eight mainline train stations, ticking them off as though they were destinations on a journey—Belarus, Riga, Kiev, Yaroslav, Leningrad, Kazan, Kursk, Pavelets—striding through air heavy with fried food and urine, ignoring the beggars who swarmed out of the pistachio gloom and tugged at the brightly colored plastic bags that families were carting home across the federation’s expanse. The searchers stood at ticket barriers in metro stations and thrust Vladimir’s picture in the faces of commuters and station workers. They went to Red Square and questioned the hustlers who tried to sell tourists fur hats for ten times their value. They went to the vast GUM department store and prowled beneath advertisements for the Canary Islands promising eleven months’ sunshine a year. They went to the Bolshoi theater, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Lenin and Dynamo stadia, and to Gorky Park, where families skated and wrapped their faces in sticky pink cotton candy.
In every place the same result: no sign of Vladimir, no sign at all.
18
Thursday, January 9, 1992
It was just past eight in the morning. A British embassy staffer was walking along Sofiyskaya, the road that ran along the north side of the drainage island, directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The wind tore her copy of Izvestiya from her hands and sent it whirling toward the river; when she looked over the parapet to see whether the paper was retrievable, she saw a dark shape below the ice, hidden briefly and then visible again as the sheets of newsprint skittered across the top of it.
Juku Irk, once of the Estonian capital Tallinn and now senior investigator with the Moscow prosecutor’s office, wanted to go home and start the day again. Russia really is the home of winter, he thought bitterly; the sun hauls itself wearily over the horizon after breakfast and is back in bed by teatime. The ground was gray with ice, the snow gray with dirt, the buildings gray with exposure; it was as though the bleak winter had robbed the world of its color. Beneath Irk’s feet, the mud was as hard as concrete, and the puddles might have been made of marble.
He’d had to show his card to gain access to the site. He didn’t look like an investigator. An academic, yes. His features were small and clustered together beneath a slick of back-brushed gray hair; they made a face too soft and genteel for his job.
The police had set up some sort of small crane to lift the corpse out. The job needed two policemen, three at most; there were at least a dozen, arguing, shouting, smoking and getting in each other’s way. Irk knew that scolding them would just make things worse; there was little love lost between police and prosecutors. Police caught criminals, answered to the interior minister, were uneducated and badly paid; prosecutors questioned criminals, answered to the prosecutor general, usually had degrees and were better paid, though in Moscow salary and income tend to be different beasts altogether.
They were right by the spot where Red October’s effluent pipes spewed into the river waste that was warm enough to keep the immediate vicinity from freezing over too heavily. Moscow city ordinances explicitly prohibited such discharge; Moscow city industries explicitly ignored such ordinances.
Shit day, shit job. Irk had traveled here by metro, for heaven’s sake—all the squad cars were on calls or had broken down. It wasn’t the inconvenience that bothered him, still less the implied loss of status, but the fact that on foot he couldn’t help but see things he could ignore from a car. Homeless children jostled for space on metro air vents as they tried to keep warm. Lines formed outside state shops hours before opening, to get the lower prices at the start of the day.
Irk heard a low groaning, whether mechanical or human he couldn’t tell, and the child came free from the water at last, a grappling hook in the back of his coat and his extremities streaming water as they hung limp and pathetic as though reaching for the sanctuary of his icy tomb.
Sabirzhan stood in the mortuary with his hands clasped behind his back and waited, perfectly still, for the attendant to bring out the body. Identification was often the worst part of any death; it was the final extinction of hope, and on such occasions there was nothing Irk could do other than hover impotently while someone nodded numbly and confirmed with quivering lips and red-rimmed eyes that yes, this was their loved one and yes, they were dead.
Irk was grateful to Sabirzhan for sparing Vladimir’s parents this ordeal. Sabirzhan was a KGB officer; dead bodies wouldn’t cause him the slightest discomfort.
There was no sheet over Vladimir’s body. Preserving the dead’s modesty is a Western affectation. Sabirzhan looked up and down the corpse without blinking.
; “That’s Vladimir,” he said.
Was it Irk’s imagination, or did he see Sabirzhan lick his lips as he turned away?
There was only one place the squeamish found worse than a murder scene, Irk thought, and that was the autopsy room. A dead body was repellent enough when first found, whether curled under a forest tree with animals chewing at its face, leaking blood onto the cheap linoleum floor of a dingy apartment or hauled bleached and bloated out of the river as this one had been. It seemed twice as loathsome when laid out on the examination table. Clinical and chemical, pathology was supposed to sterilize and sanitize death; in Irk’s experience, the effect was exactly the opposite.
And there were no autopsies more disturbing than those like today’s, when the body in question was that of a child. The examination table was large enough to take someone of Sharmukhamedov’s size, or even Lev’s; it dwarfed this small, hairless corpse.
“You understand, Syoma; this may not be mine at all,” Irk said.
“Mine,” of course, referred to operational responsibility rather than paternity. If Semyon Sidorouk, pathologist, decided that Vladimir Kullam, deceased, had drowned, then Irk would not investigate the case. Drownings were either suicides, who usually weighted their pockets with stones, or accidents—children overestimating their ability to swim, adults drinking too much vodka. There were plenty of easier ways to murder someone.
“My knowledge of Soviet procedure is still good, Juku.” Soviet procedure, more often than not, had involved deciding the result in advance and shepherding the analysis in that direction. “Though in these trying times, you understand I have to charge for such a service, may Lenin forgive me.” The dark skin of Sidorouk’s shaven head gleamed under the lights; he was a Chechen, one of the very few working in Moscow law enforcement. He stubbed out a cigarette in a knee-high ashtray embraced by lead nymphs.
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