“You’re not going to get me on this, Investigator.”
“Wasn’t he?”
German cast more panicked glances toward the four corners of the room. “Vova didn’t ask to be. We didn’t ask for him to be. Sabirzhan just … he just decided. He took a liking to Vova, and that was that. It’s not like we could have stopped it.”
“Are you afraid of Sabirzhan?” Irk smiled; softer, flatter. “It didn’t seem so back there.”
“No, I’m not afraid of him. Not … not when there’s lots of people around, or even when it’s just me and him, face-to-face, sometimes. But if I’d told you …” German looked down at his tea. “What would have happened then? You’d have ignored me, or told me not to try and pin the blame on other people. He’s one of yours, Investigator.”
“He’s not one of mine. He’s KGB. I’m from the prosecutor’s office.”
“Different names, same thing. Doesn’t matter what you call yourselves, it all ends up the same.”
“If you’d told me, I’d have questioned him—which is exactly what I’m going to do now.”
“OK, Investigator, so you question him—then what? He’s got friends in high places, hasn’t he? He’ll know I talked to you—there’s probably someone reporting back to him right now—and then he’ll really make my life a misery.”
“You signed a confession rather than land him in the shit? I can’t believe this.”
“Then you can’t understand how things work around here. Nothing personal, Investigator, but I wish I’d never met you.”
“What more evidence do you need?” Lev asked. He ticked off the points on his fingers. “I tell you what Karkadann said. Vladimir was working at a kiosk run by the 21st Century. A couple of those black bastards threatened my secretary this morning on her way to work—and still you don’t seem to take me seriously, Investigator.”
“If I could find a Chechen connection, I would. If only so I could hand this case over to Yerofeyev and be finished with it. I want to get rid of it as much as you want to get rid of Karkadann. But all that’s circumstantial at best. It’s certainly not enough for me to start poking around the Chechen gangs. All that’s going to do is piss them off and piss Yerofeyev off, and being pissed off is the only thing that makes Yerofeyev even more objectionable than he is normally.”
“Then I’ll have to deal with the Chechens myself.”
“You will anyway.” Irk saw Lev shrug slightly, conceding the truth. “The main reason I’m not convinced it’s the Chechens is that another suspect has come to light; someone much closer to home.”
“‘Someone’ as in German Kullam?”
“No. Someone as in Tengiz Sabirzhan.”
Rule five of the vory code was that members of the Communist Party were to be despised—and never, Lev thought, had this been more true than with Sabirzhan. Oh, Sabirzhan seemed utterly innocuous at first glance, even given the ancestral suspicions of the brotherhood. His gray cardigan, pince-nez and big head reminded Lev of an owl, and his outward manner could be gently and abstractly benign—the amiable professor. Sabirzhan could speak better Russian than anybody else Lev knew, even though he was a Georgian. When he wanted to, he could wind his phrases through subsections, qualifications and subtleties, all hinting at the coldly precise brain behind.
But as Lev had gotten to know him, he realized that Sabirzhan was a man with no friends, only informers. Not for nothing had his fellow KGB agents christened him Dripping Poison.
They had an accommodation, of course. It dated back five years, to the vory summit at Murmansk where it had been decided that Lev could take over Red October. The 21st Century had had the distribution and transportation networks necessary to keep the distillery running; KGB involvement was the government’s price for handing over control—essential if they were to keep tabs on their investment. At the time, Lev and Sabirzhan had found use for each other. Since then, however, power had shifted Lev’s way. His empire was expanding; Sabirzhan’s influence was on the wane. The one thing they still had in common was Red October and their interest in its successful privatization. Because Sabirzhan’s natural instinct was to reject the free market, Lev had offered him a generous stake in the auction. Lev knew that every man had his price, and that in the final analysis greed would always beat ideology. He also remembered the words of Don Corleone: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
But there was a limit. There was always a limit.
Lev thought of Sharmukhamedov strapped to the table and hung upside down by his hands. He thought of the glee with which Sabirzhan had gone about the torture. He thought of how Sabirzhan had chosen to spend New Year—the most historic New Year of their lives—inflicting pain on another man. He thought of all the times he’d gone over to Prospekt Mira and found Sabirzhan there. Lev thought of all this, and remembered something Sabirzhan had once said: Suspicions can only be proved, never disproved, because a suspicious person will not be satisfied with anything but affirmation.
Irk arrived at Sabirzhan’s office to find it empty. He resisted the temptation to sit in Sabirzhan’s chair and act as though he owned the place; instead, he stood by the window and let the gentle cadence of the distillery floor far below soothe him. There was little urgency in people’s movements, and Irk thought he understood why. The Russian worker wants a place where he can talk about fishing, his wife, the hash the government’s making of things, whatever—above all, a place where he’ll be understood. He wants not only his colleagues but also his boss to accept him in this way. He wants work to feel like home; he needs time on the job to chat, time off the job for special occasions. The atmosphere he seeks is one of serenity.
Sabirzhan returned a few minutes later, shaking water from his hands. “First I come to you, now you repay the compliment,” he said. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
“I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“About what?” Sabirzhan’s tone was lightly curious; Irk could detect no defensiveness.
“About Vladimir Kullam and Raisa Rustanova.”
Sabirzhan waved an expansive hand. “Anything. Anything I can do to help.”
“I’d rather do it at Petrovka.”
Sabirzhan was suddenly very quiet. His eyes simply weren’t those of a human being, Irk thought; they seemed to be made of some yellowish resin.
“Do you mean what I think you mean?” he asked eventually.
“It’s just a few questions.”
“You have absolutely no idea, do you?”
“No, Tengiz,” Irk said. “You have absolutely no idea.”
“Lev will have your balls for cuff links when he finds out.”
Irk shrugged, and Sabirzhan knew: Lev was letting this happen.
No one has faith in the Russian justice system, least of all someone who knows its workings from the inside. Sabirzhan should have shouted and screamed. That was what Irk would have expected an innocent man to do. That was what he would have expected a Russian to do. Sabirzhan’s anger, ice-cold rather than red-hot, was dangerously alien.
A squad car came to pick them up. Irk sat in the back with Sabirzhan and started counting the pimples on the back of the driver’s neck. He gave up when he reached fifty.
“I’ve heard of you,” Sabirzhan said. “Irk the incorruptible. Just my luck. Ninety-nine percent of cops are on the take…”
“I’m an investigator, not a policeman,” said Irk.
“… and I get the one who isn’t.”
Irk bit down on his anger. In return for risking their lives the police were paid a pittance. Nowadays they didn’t even qualify for special housing, even though many officers were from beyond the city limits and desperate to get their hands on a Moscow residence permit. So was it any wonder ninety-nine percent were on the take? Only those with no alternative would take on such a thankless job with such low prestige, and the low quality of recruits in turn perpetuated the poor reputation of the force. Even the name by which they were
known belied a reluctance to take the job seriously: in the Soviet Union the police had been the militsia, as if they were just a group of civilians working together. Only bourgeois societies had police, because only bourgeois societies had crime.
Irk could afford to be principled—he was a senior investigator in the prosecutor’s service, paid just about enough to live comfortably—and having integrity was healthy for his conscience. Maybe it was the Estonian in him, he conceded, the civilized half-Westerner feeling morally superior to the primal Russian; but, if so, if he walked the straight and narrow purely to feel pleased with himself, did that vanity negate all the good?
An hour in Sabirzhan’s company had left Irk feeling clammy. He put him in a cell and went back to his office, where he found a message from Sidorouk. The pathologist had asked around, and found nothing. Irk wondered how hard Sidorouk had really tried.
There was a large map of Moscow on the wall opposite the window. Irk looked at it, and saw something he’d never noticed before. As the river meandered through the city, it seemed to trace the profile of Mother Russia herself, the great lady in repose. The locks of her hair flowed from the statue of Yuri Gagarin up to the site proposed for a monument to Peter the Great; the crown of her head abutted the Kremlin; her nose swelled beneath the Novospasskiy; her mouth pressed up against the Simonov; her bosom stretched beyond Andropovka Prospekt and down to Kolomenskoe; while her legs reached languidly out toward the east.
Irk wondered when Mother Russia would next cough up one of her children.
23
Tuesday, January 14, 1992
The meeting was scheduled to start at ten. Alice had hammered down the arrow on that, confirming it with Galina on three separate occasions. As it was, Alice arrived to find that Lev had been delayed.
“Annoying, huh?” Galina said.
“Not all men are annoying,” Alice replied. “Some are dead.”
Lev called her into his office just after eleven. She was alone, which not only surprised him but, he was loath to note, pleased him too. He made her wait for another hour while he went through his correspondence line by line. She’d known that he made every major decision at Red October; she hadn’t expected him to make every minor one too. He refused to let even the most trivial of letters, payments, invoices or contracts be issued without both his signature and the imprint of the company stamp, of which—surprise, surprise—he possessed the only model.
Alice didn’t let it get to her. She stood by the external window and looked across the river toward the eruption of onion domes that marked St. Basil’s, Russia’s most famous symbol. Ivan the Terrible had built the cathedral with money taken from Kazan in 1552, and St. Basil’s eight domes symbolize the eight assaults Ivan’s troops had been forced to make before Kazan had finally yielded. Even by Russian standards, Ivan’s troops had been bloodthirsty, and yet from the carnage of their conquest had come this impossibly exquisite building, its cupolas rich in texture and shade. It was no wonder that, when the cathedral was complete, Ivan had blinded the architect to prevent him from building anything so beautiful ever again.
“Where’s Sabirzhan?” she asked when he finally turned his attention to her.
“Sorting out some figures.”
“That’s more important than meeting with the privatizers?”
“I don’t see your colleagues here either, Mrs. Liddell.”
She smiled: touché. “Harry and Bob are up to their eyes in background work. Besides, it’s not as if any of them got the chance to say much last time.”
He took it as it was meant, a peace offering, and shook her hand. “We start from a clean slate today, yes?” he said. “Let bygones be bygones.”
“Well, if we argue again, you might find that I bite.”
He laughed. “I’ll take your word for it. Let’s get things off on the right foot, then.”
He sat her down and gave her two vodkas to taste. Russkaya had been filtered through birch-tree charcoal and quartz sand, and tasted of cinnamon. Alice preferred the Altai Siberian. It was sweet, rich and oily, smoothed with glycerine and lingering long on her palate, without a background burn worth mentioning.
Her skin was Elizabethan pale, almost translucent; he could see the veins beneath the surface, the blood pulsing through them, as though there was nothing to mar her beauty within or without.
He showed her how not to get drunk. “Smell the vodka first, take a sip and hold it in your mouth for a couple of moments. Then you swallow, and right after that you eat something. After every toast, a chaser; it’s the beauty without which the beast is incomplete. Getting drunk is all well and good, but it’s not the entirety of what vodka’s about. If you equate vodka purely with inebriation, it’s like saying love’s the same as venereal disease.”
Alice was unaccountably happy that Charming Lev had turned up, as opposed to Angry Lev. It wasn’t just that she wanted things to run smoothly. Accustomed to dealing with adversaries she could manipulate, she had been caught off guard by Lev. She had allowed him to goad her into losing control. If this privatization were to happen in nine weeks, she needed to maintain control. And since browbeating clearly wasn’t going to work, charm seemed her best ploy.
For insurance, she’d brought a pin with her, which she held in her left hand. If she felt herself getting angry, she would jab it into her palm as a reminder to calm down. Not that she needed it to start with. Gently, gradually, as though she were massaging a lover, Alice worked on convincing Lev that privatization was in his best interests.
As the subject of the inaugural auction, she said, Red October would secure better terms than those enterprises that came into the process later. Lev’s foresight would also free him from the influence of apparatchiks, and give him access to Western capital, which in turn would help attract a strategic foreign investor. Society was changing, she reiterated; better to move with it and help shape it than stand, Canute-like, on the shore and be swept away.
“I despise the rationality and harshness of the new market economy,” he said.
“Why? Russia’s a harsh country.”
“Yes, but it’s not rational.”
They went at it all morning, Alice and Lev, Beauty and the Beast; Alice’s prettiness as Russian as her attitudes were alien, Lev a towering presence that she found unnervingly unreadable. He’d spent decades in the gulag, and now he was one of the most powerful men in Russia. She’d never felt so aware of and intrigued by someone. How long would she have to spend with him, she wondered, before she could fathom what made him tick?
“What I propose is that Red October has minority insider ownership,” Alice said. When Lev tried to interrupt, she held up her hand, determined to assert herself. “Hear me out, please. Twenty-five percent of shares go free to employees and managers. Another ten percent will be sold at discount. Then there’s a final five percent that top managers can buy if they want. The remaining three fifths are sold to the public at auction.”
“That’s totally unacceptable. It doesn’t give the workers enough rights—not even close.”
“What you mean,” said Alice, getting angry despite herself, “is that it doesn’t ensure that you retain control of this place.” She jabbed the pin into her palm and imagined the ire draining out around it, as though her rage were a boil that could be lanced.
Lev shot Alice a look that took her a second to read. It was not that she was wrong in her assessment of his reasoning; rather, he was disappointed in her vulgarity at enunciating a truth that was tacitly and best left unspoken. She felt gauche, teenage.
“I’ll make you a counteroffer,” he said. “Insider control—management and workers combined—is set at seventy-five percent. The remaining twenty-five percent is offered for sale to the public, with a cap on how much any one individual or institution can own. Oh—and no foreign involvement.” He tried to make it sound like an afterthought, but Alice knew better.
“What?” He hadn’t demurred when she’d talked about Western capita
l earlier. To Alice, it was a no-brainer; American and European firms would bring expertise, cash, technology and access to world supply chains, and would make bidding more open and pricing more important.
“You heard me perfectly well, Mrs. Liddell. Bidding must be restricted to Russians only.”
“Why? Foreigners are already involved in the process.”
“As advisers, yes; not as participants. In Poland, you planned national investment funds to manage and have equities in privatized enterprises, didn’t you? And who was to manage these funds? Foreign firms. Foreign firms who’d gain control of Polish assets, who’d strip such assets for short-term profits, who’d sell off Polish firms at bargain-basement prices or shut them down altogether. You must be a fool if you think I’m going to allow you to repeat that here.”
It was ironic, Alice thought; it had been that very privatization program in Poland that had first introduced her to this kind of xenophobic paranoia. British Sugar and Peat Marwick had been accused of trying to destroy local rivals. The Polish accountants and lawyers who had helped Alice had been denounced as traitors; some had even received death threats.
“That’s a total lie,” said Alice. “No one intends to take your country over or wreck your economy. Quite the opposite—Western business could be a great help to you, if you’d only let it.”
“If I wanted help, Mrs. Liddell, don’t you think I’d have asked for it?”
Alice couldn’t think of an answer. Trying to buy time and defluster her thoughts, she looked around Lev’s office, and saw that it was full of presents: an engraved paperweight here, a picture with an inscription there. That was how people had expressed their appreciation in Soviet Russia.
“I don’t see what’s wrong with my original scheme, to be honest,” she said at last, and cursed herself for how uninspired it sounded. “The free and discounted stock offered to management and workers is effectively giving you the option of a leveraged buyout through a no-interest, long-run state loan. With inflation going through the roof, this is a giveaway.”
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