Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Kovalenko was the press liaison officer, and he worked out of a windowless bunker in the bowels of Petrovka. An apt reflection, Irk thought, of his status in an organization committed to telling the public as little as possible about what they were (or, more usually, weren’t) doing. Kovalenko’s salary was even more risible than his colleagues’; he was more or less officially expected to make up the difference with payments from reporters grateful for tip-offs.

  Irk set down a bottle on Kovalenko’s desk. “Eesti Viin,” he said. “Rich and creamy, bottled in Tallinn—not the muck the kiosks here sell.”

  Kovalenko was too well mannered to grab at the bottle, but only just. “And in return?”

  “In return, I want you to tell any hack who asks that the body fished from the river by Red October this morning was a drunk.” Drunks were hauled from the Moscow—in it or on top of it, depending on the season—with monotonous regularity, usually with their flies open because they’d overbalanced when taking a leak. It was news when a day passed without such an episode.

  “What was it really?”

  “If you don’t know, you can’t tell anyone, can you?”

  “All right,” Sabirzhan said, “maybe this will convince you: Vladimir worked in a kiosk at the Novokuznetskaya metro station. I hear they had a visit from Chechens the other day.”

  “I’ll go down there later.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because I have to do house-to-house down by the river.”

  “You? You’re a senior investigator.”

  Irk shrugged. Of course a senior detective shouldn’t have been performing such basic tasks; he should have sent his uniformed subordinates instead. But when it came to house-to-house, the uniforms invariably seemed to find other matters worthier of their attention; even the most resourceful policeman found it difficult to extract bribes on such assignments. Irk had given up trying to fight the system; it was easier to just get on and do it himself.

  It wasn’t as if it was going to do any good. Up and down piss-soaked stairs because the elevators were out of order, back and forth across death-race roads, only to discover what he’d suspected all along—that if anybody had seen anything, they certainly weren’t going to tell the police. Even in Moscow, many people were slow to appreciate that a visit from the police was no longer an inevitable prelude to ten years in Siberia.

  On the way to Novokuznetskaya, Irk thought how much Moscow was a city of lines. Pensioners crocodiled outside metro stations, holding summer dresses and sun hats against their chests, in the middle of a Moscow freeze; shop assistants stood in front of their own stores and offered goods cheaper than you could get them inside; kiosks were strung out on sidewalks and underpasses, jostling each other in glass and metal. If you couldn’t find what you wanted at one kiosk, the next one would certainly have it, or the one after that. Japanese electronics and Danish hams here, French cheese and Korean condoms there. Ninja Turtles and Barbie dolls? Three units that way. Snickers, Mars and Bounty bars? Next one along, sir, but I’d check the expiration dates if I were you. Hey, while you’re here, perhaps you’d like some bootleg tapes? We’ve got Elton John, Sting, Genesis, and all the Rod Stewart you could ever want.

  It was typically contrary, then, that the kiosk Vladimir Kullam had helped run stood in proud isolation. Irk came out of the metro station and there it was, a stone’s throw from the Tretyakov Gallery. The kiosk door was divided in two like those found in stables; when he was inside, the operator kept the bottom half closed and served people through the top. The operator in this case was a sullen youth with red hair and freckles.

  “Is this where Vladimir Kullam”—Irk checked his tenses—“works?”

  The redhead regarded him suspiciously. “Yeah,” he conceded eventually.

  “And you are?”

  “You can call me Timofei.” He was framed by hundreds of vodka bottles. Irk held his investigator badge out like a talisman.

  “Well, Timofei, did you know Vladimir?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We fished him out of the river this morning.”

  Timofei shrugged.

  “That doesn’t bother you?” Irk asked.

  “It happens.” Timofei fished under the counter and brought out a couple of magazines. “You want some porn, Investigator?”

  “Do I look like I do?”

  “Every man looks like he does. Here, I’ve got Penthouse—fifteen rubles a peek, four hundred to buy. Or you can have Andrei for half that.” Andrei was a home-grown and blurred version of Penthouse; the women were prettier, the production values inevitably much worse. All in all, thought Irk, it evened itself out. “Or there’s Rabotnitsa for the wife.” Rabotnitsa—literally “Woman Worker”—owed its circulation of ten million to an anodyne selection of knitting patterns, recipe cards and porridge diets; there was nothing on career women, nothing on sex.

  “I don’t have a wife. Who runs this place?”

  “I do.”

  “No, bonehead. Who really runs it? Who do you pay your protection to?” Irk’s expression warned Timofei off repeating his claims to grandeur.

  “The 21st Century.”

  That made sense. Kiosks were not only lucrative; as a cash business, they were also good for laundering dirty money. However, while the world was no poorer for one more dead Mafioso, Vladimir Kullam’s loss meant something. Even in Moscow, children were different.

  “Not the Chechens?”

  “Do the 21st Century look like Chechens? I don’t think so.”

  “Ever had trouble from any Chechens?”

  “No.” Too quick. Irk cocked his head.

  “Timofei, no one’ll know what you tell me.”

  “What I’m telling you is this; the Chechens have never given me any trouble.”

  It was extraordinary, Irk thought; Timofei was protected by one of the most powerful gangs in the city, but still the Chechens had struck such terror into him that he’d lie about them.

  “And what I’m telling you is this: tell me the truth, or I’ll haul you down to Petrovka.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “I don’t need grounds, you know that as well as I do.” Irk was bullying; he hated himself for it, but he needed to find out what had happened.

  Timofei glanced left and right to make sure no one was looking, and beckoned Irk closer. He believed Irk’s threats, and that depressed Irk even more. Like most people, Timofei clearly assumed that all officials were corrupt.

  “They came around on Monday.”

  “Was Vladimir with you then?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did the Chechens want?”

  “The action—what else?”

  “Had they ever been around before?”

  “Once.”

  “When?”

  “Last week.”

  “What did they do?”

  “The first time, nothing. The second time, they reached in here, grabbed us by the collar, yanked us clean out of the kiosk and told us to go with them rather than the 21st Century.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That they should sort it out with the 21st Century themselves. That’s how these things work.”

  Timofei didn’t tell Irk how he’d yelped as his shins had scraped the sill, and again when the Chechens had dropped him onto the sidewalk. He didn’t say how he’d pleaded when the leader had pulled a switchblade from his pocket: “Don’t stab me, please don’t stab me, not with the gut straightener,” he, Timofei, gabbling in panicked soprano, a frightened child the moment he was out of his protective box. He didn’t say how his eyes had brimmed with fear as the Chechen had flicked the blade, placed the knife against his shirt and sliced two triangles out of the fabric; why, he didn’t know. He didn’t say how, though they were on a main street, no drivers had slowed to offer help and no pedestrians had checked their stride as they walked past. He didn’t say how the man’s silence had been more frightening than any amount of threats.

  He d
idn’t tell Irk any of this, nor did he need to. Irk knew, the gist if not the details. He’d seen too many gangsters put the frighteners on too many of Moscow’s little people.

  The Chechens could have killed Vladimir as a warning, Irk thought. It was possible, no more.

  “Would you recognize them again?” he asked. “The Chechens?” Timofei shook his head. “Not even one of them? Come on, Timofei, you can do better than that.”

  “There was one, yes. The leader, the guy who pulled me from the kiosk.”

  “Describe him.”

  “White streak in his hair.”

  “You didn’t hear a name?”

  “We weren’t on a date, Investigator. Besides, he never said a word.”

  “No matter.” Every official in Moscow knew what Zhorzh looked like. Irk changed tack. “How does it work? You and the 21st Century?”

  “They take a bit, I take a bit.”

  “How much of each?”

  “Seventy-five, twenty-five.” The tone of Timofei’s voice told Irk that he wasn’t the one ending up with the lion’s share. “But they sort out any crap for me. And I still earn in three days what my parents do in a month.”

  “What about school?”

  “What about school? What’s the point? There are special schools for chess, math, languages, sporting prodigies, but none for people like me at the other end of the class. I got punished the whole time, ignored if I was lucky. Normal life is lousy, Investigator. I can get richer here than anywhere else.”

  Irk gestured to the vodka bottles. “You drink this stuff?”

  “These particular bottles? They let me have one a week.”

  “You ever take any more? On the sly?”

  “They’d kill me if I did.”

  “Literally?”

  “Literally.”

  Irk felt his ears prick. “They told you that, or you’ve seen them do it to other people?”

  “Not with my own eyes, no. But you hear things.”

  “And Vladimir—would he have tried to rip them off?”

  Timofei shrugged again. “Maybe. Vova was a bright boy, and you get people who think they’re too smart to get caught. If he was selling some under the counter without telling them and they got wind of it, then yeah, they’d have killed him. But it wouldn’t have been because he’d taken it for himself. Vladimir never drank vodka.”

  “Why not?”

  “He thought it would stunt his growth.”

  Men from all three Slav gangs—the 21st Century Association, the Solntsevskaya, and the Podolskaya—crammed into the ballroom of the Rossiya Hotel; hundreds upon hundreds of them, reeking of aftershave and anticipation. The chairs were arranged in strict order of rank, ranging from the lowest orders at the back to the higher echelons in the front rows. On the podium was a table at which sat the vory troika: Lev in the middle, flanked by Testarossa and Gibbous, the Podolskaya’s new leader.

  Their years in the gulags had taught the vory to appreciate the value of organization. Their command structures were as vertical and rigid as those of an army or political party, and this was just as much a gathering of the faithful as any party conference had been, though these men dressed better and exercised more than any communist delegates ever had. Waiters traversed the rows with hundred-gram glasses and bottles of vodka. The gangs rarely came together like this, for there was danger as well as safety in numbers: a single bomb would have wiped out an entire generation of vory.

  When Lev stood and called for silence, he looked like a bear balancing on its hind legs. They watched him as raptly as any ideologue had ever been transfixed by Lenin or Trotsky.

  “Brothers, we stand on the threshold of a vast conflict. We’re up against an evil man, a man who will not listen to reason; a man who has chosen to launch his campaign with the most despicable and cowardly act imaginable: the murder of an innocent child.”

  This was the rub. Karkadann was a new creature for Lev, and one that he wasn’t entirely sure how to handle. It wasn’t just that the man was clearly psychotic; it was that there seemed such a simplicity to him. Most gang leaders play a tactical game, weighing the odds, waiting for the right moment to make their move. For Karkadann, it appeared, the only moment was now; everything was either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, and the odds could go to hell.

  “We outlasted Soviet power. The Communists failed to destroy us because no matter what they did to us we remained true, we kept our structure, our ideology, we survived. Now we face a different enemy, but we’ll triumph just the same. We’re superior to the Chechens in culture and morality. We pay the hospital bills of our wounded, we provide for the families of jailed men. We’re better trained, better disciplined and better armed than they are. We will annihilate them, I promise you that.”

  They applauded when Lev paused; they stopped when he held up his hand for silence. Lev motioned that they should stand. It was time for the toast.

  “We must remember that what’s more important than anything else to us is not money, but brotherhood. That’s what gives us our strength.”

  Glasses brimmed in sweating hands; there wasn’t a man there who wouldn’t have killed for Lev, and that was one of his greatest strengths.

  “So let’s drink to our cause, which is always to support one another, to remain united. If a person is alone, he counts for nothing. But if we are united and support each other, then we are strong and everyone will fear us. Let’s drink, Brothers! To unity!”

  “To unity, Father!”

  19

  Friday, January 10, 1992

  What Timofei had said wasn’t enough to get Irk off the case, not nearly. He went to see German Kullam, a visit he knew should have been his primary concern right from the outset. The man of the family is always the prime suspect in Russian homicide cases. This is a matter not of cynicism but of fact.

  The Kullams lived next to a convent founded by a grand duchess who had been thrown down a mine shaft by the Bolsheviks. The relics of the revolution were everywhere, Irk thought, watching impotently as Alla sobbed into her husband’s shoulder. German cradled his wife awkwardly and half shrugged, half smiled over her head at Irk. He seemed embarrassed at his wife’s display of grief.

  Alla eventually disentangled herself from German and looked at Irk through wide, red-rimmed eyes. “Would you like some soup?” she asked. “I made it myself.”

  He nodded numbly, more to avoid causing offense than because he was hungry, and avoided German’s gaze as Alla busied herself in the kitchen. She came back with a bowl on a tray depicting the battle of Borodino. It was cold summer soup: beets, cucumber, sour cream and egg, the yolk floating in a sea of lilac. A soup for lazy days in the woods with friends and vodka; not a soup for the man who came to your house after your child was dead.

  Irk made all the right noises about how sorry he was, this was a real tragedy, but he had to ask some questions and he hoped they understood. Yes, Investigator, yes, of course, anything he needed. So he asked and Alla answered: what they did for a living, when they’d last seen Vladimir and in what circumstances, when they’d first become worried about his safety. He didn’t ask them why they hadn’t gone to the police sooner; they all knew the answer to that one.

  They’d gone over the same ground with Sabirzhan yesterday, Alla said. Irk was annoyed and surprised in equal measure; annoyed that Sabirzhan seemed to be everywhere before him, surprised that the KGB man should have bothered questioning the Kullams when his own suspicions so clearly lay elsewhere. Perhaps he was covering his bases.

  Alla was both bright and pretty enough not to be cleaning offices. Maybe she’d been offered other jobs, secretarial posts, in return for sleeping with the boss, and she’d refused. Good for her, Irk thought. German was easier to read: life savings going in the transition to capitalism, vodka, a job that paid little, vodka, emasculated because his wife was forced to work to make ends meet, vodka, insulted because his son was offering him money, vodka, going stir crazy on these long w
inter nights, vodka, arguments with a willful son who was not quite a teenager, vodka …

  German Kullam had the look of a drinker. His nose was an archipelago of broken blood vessels, his eyes swiveled in viscous pools. Irk was unsurprised. Most murderers were drunks first and killers second, more so now than ever before. Many had assumed, at least implicitly, that people would drink less following the demise of the Soviet Union. A democratic society would surely provide more means of escapism than alcohol, and all of them constructive—books, a free press, foreign travel, consumer goods. Fine, when you could afford such things, but for now there was still only one escape when times were hard: half a liter of temporary paradise. There was talk of a magic water source in the Vologda region that could cure drunkenness. The source was at a disused well that had not been blocked properly; wives were taking their husbands there by the trailerload. If they could somehow arrange a shuttle to and from Moscow, Irk thought, he could put his feet up for good.

  “If you’d prefer,” Irk said to German, “we could do this down at Petrovka.”

  “Whatever for?”

  It was the first time Irk had heard him speak, he realized. German’s voice was high and reedy; no wonder he’d let his wife do the talking. Irk wanted to shake him and say, Come on, you know how it is, you know the score, this is the way things are done around here, and we have to play along whether we like it or not.

  German looked as though he would burst into tears at any moment. Irk could forgive him that, whether he was innocent or guilty. For obvious reasons if innocent, and if guilty because the Russian prison system could have given Satan nightmares.

  Irk filled in German’s details on a badly photocopied arrest form. He could recite the categories in his sleep: family name, given name, patronymic, address, date of birth, place of birth, age, sex, nationality, profession, marital status. Irk was on autopilot to the point where he was halfway into his first question about the night Vladimir had disappeared before he realized what German had said.