Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “Some kind of demonstration,” said Karkadann, joining him at the window.

  In the street below, placards waved above crowded heads. Karkadann saw a poster of Borzov clutching a bottle of vodka in one hand and a naked girl in the other, with the caption Happy New Year, life is getting better. Fifty yards away, on the other side of the street, he could make out Borzov himself, and Arkin too. But it looked as though their gentle walkabout was turning into a near riot.

  As the crowd surged and jostled, the bodyguards recoiled and pushed back, movements like seawater finding channels on a beach. Some people lost their footing on the icy pavement. In the bitter air—it was seven degrees below—tempers were beginning to fray. A woman with dark roots and thick foundation appeared in front of the presidential group. “What are we supposed to eat?” she yelled.

  “You can slice the president up,” said Borzov, “but that won’t last you long.”

  It was the kind of throwaway line he had been applauded for back when he’d been helping shoulder the Soviet Union to the cliff’s edge. Now it seemed callous and facetious. Arkin, who had been walking half a pace behind, moved forward, all but pushing Borzov out of the way before he could say anything else inflammatory.

  The president was accustomed to being received rapturously wherever he went, hailed as the heroic defender of a nation. Now, for the first time, Borzov was moving out of kilter with the Russian people. The reaction to liberalization, Arkin thought, was proceeding faster than the process itself: from shock to trouble, via hope, in three weeks flat.

  “You’ve misinformed the president, Kolya,” Borzov hissed at Arkin. “You assured him that liberalization was proceeding well and that the people were making the best of it.”

  Arkin had told Borzov no such thing, though saying so would be pointless. When Borzov was in a mood like this, there was no reasoning with him.

  The bodyguards ushered them through the crowds and into the nearest store. Ostankino was dirty and down-at-heel, yet this shop would not have looked out of place on the Arbat. Its stone floors were scrubbed spotless, its paintwork was new and gleaming. The place had clearly been tarted up for their visit.

  The store’s owner, almost overwhelmed by the great honor being paid to his establishment, introduced himself as Artur Kapitonov, took Arkin’s hand in both of his and practically prostrated himself in front of Borzov. It was, he said, a compliment to have such eminent men in his humble store; they could take anything they wanted, on the house, it would be his pleasure.

  Borzov was in no mood to be soft-soaped. He peered at the price labels on the shelves—six rubles for a loaf, sixty for a bottle of vodka—and snapped, “Is this really what you charge people?”

  Kapitonov blinked furiously, as though he hadn’t understood the question. The lines at the edges of his eyes, footmarks of an entire flock of crows, furrowed and deepened.

  “Is it?”

  “It’s what the market dictates, Anatoly Nikolayevich,” Kapitonov stammered.

  “It’s ripping people off, that’s what it is. You will halve all these prices, now.”

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich, my suppliers already charge—”

  “Then you’re fired.” Borzov turned to his bodyguards. “Empty the store, give the goods to the people.” He cut short Kapitonov’s protests. “You did say we could take anything we wanted.”

  Kapitonov could do nothing but watch as the presidential bodyguards cleared his shelves. Bread, biscuits, onions, cabbages, potatoes, eggs, poultry and vodka all went. Borzov led the guards from the store and beamed as he watched them wade into the crowd, where the merchandise was snatched from them before they could even start handing it out.

  When the bodyguards, sweating despite the cold, had extricated themselves from the throng, Borzov asked how much cash they had on them. The president never carried money himself, of course. “Come on, come on,” Borzov said, clapping his hands, “hand it over.” He then plunged into the crowd himself, handing out sheaves of rubles to the startled protesters: a hundred rubles here, two hundred there, five hundred rubles to another. Those people whose hands weren’t full from the previous giveaway could hardly grab the cash fast enough. It was all the bodyguards could do to pull Borzov back from the grasping hands when the last rubles had gone.

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich, you can’t go around doing that,” Arkin remonstrated. “It runs counter to all prevailing economic policies. We can’t conjure up cash from thin air.”

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich can do what he likes,” Borzov said. “Shef darit.” The chief gives.

  They piled back into the presidential limousine and were gone.

  Watching from his window, Karkadann shook his head. “How hard can it be to win the war, when that buffoon is Lev’s biggest protector?”

  Back in the Kremlin, Borzov slurped at his vodka. “This isn’t a country; it’s a mass of bruises,” he wailed. “Ach, this whole thing is going to be a disaster. Is it too late to stop it?”

  “Yes, it is. And you mustn’t think like that, Anatoly Nikolayevich.”

  “But, Kolya, there’s no precedent for this. No country has ever shed an empire, reformed its economy and developed a democracy all at once. And now it falls to Anatoly Nikolayevich to accomplish it all. The Russian people are in a different country than the one they knew, and they don’t like it. And who are they blaming? Anatoly Nikolayevich, that’s who. It’s Anatoly Nikolayevich who has to mount the scaffold, Anatoly Nikolayevich who has to put his head under the fucking guillotine. It’s all going to turn out for the worst, Kolya.”

  “You know what I’m thinking about?”

  Borzov regarded him sullenly, a petulant child. “What?”

  “Your plane crash last year. You remember the pain, Anatoly Nikolayevich?”

  “How could the chief forget it?” Borzov had been taken to a hospital in Barcelona with a displaced disc. “It was horrible, impossible.”

  “Exactly. You couldn’t move your legs. The doctors operated immediately, there was no time even to return to Moscow. The next day, they told you to get up and walk.”

  “And Anatoly Nikolayevich laughed in their faces.”

  “Exactly. If this had been Russia, you said, you’d have been in bed for six months. But they insisted: Get up and walk.” Arkin lit a cigarette. “You looked around for crutches, and found none. Get up and walk. So you did. One step, another, the sweat pouring off you. You made it to the wall and back, and again, and again.” Arkin exhaled a stream of smoke. “If you could do it, why can’t Russia? We’ve hooked up market electrodes to the frail body of the Russian economy. We’re rousing our paralyzed system and making its vital centers work. We’re dragging the patient off the bed and forcing him to walk.”

  32

  Thursday, January 23, 1992

  Lev was full of surprises, not all of them pleasant. If Alice had thought that the privatization agreement—not to mention their behavior at the party two nights ago—would suddenly turn him into a model of cooperation, it took him three hours to change her mind. The three hours, in fact, between the time they were supposed to meet and the moment he deigned to turn up.

  “I know you’re a busy man, but we’re really pushed for time.” Alice was careful to make her tone reasonable; she’d already run the full gamut of reactions to his lateness, from irritation to resignation via anger and exasperation. “Punctuality is…”

  “… a trait foreign to most Russians, Mrs. Liddell.” Mrs. Liddell, still; it threw Alice. Hadn’t they crossed some sort of bridge at the party? If so, why was he being as formal as ever? If not … Well, if not, she must have just been reading too much into something that wasn’t there. She pulled herself back to his words. “You never lived under the old system, Mrs. Liddell, when people had to wait five years for a new car and ten for a private telephone line.”

  “I see your point, but I still think you’re full of shit.” She smiled to take the sting from the words. “I’ve got another meeting back at the
ministry starting in half an hour. Now I have to cancel it. I thought we’d be through by now—long before now, in fact.”

  “If you want to see two people in the same day, schedule one for early morning and the other for late afternoon.” Lev was unfazed, even amused. “Find the most liberal estimate of time needed to do something, and double it. The fast stream never reaches the sea, Mrs. Liddell.”

  Wasting time is a very Russian trait; it’s how Russians remind themselves that life is more than just a series of goals and results spiced with numbers.

  Lev tapped a bottle. “Here. Take some vodka with me.”

  “You can’t soft-soap me with that ‘take some vodka with me’ shit anymore,” Alice snapped, angry above all that he could rouse her to ire so easily.

  Lev smiled. Alice wondered whether it was recognition of the effect he was having on her. “Ah, but this vodka is very special,” he rumbled. “I’m trying out a new process, and I’d like your input. You’ve already proved yourself a connoisseur.”

  She twisted her wedding ring against her finger, pulling at the skin. “We don’t have …”

  “It’s a new process of triple rectification. The first distillation takes the purity up to eighty percent, the second and third to the high nineties. Try some.” He poured her a glass. After a moment of resistance, Alice took it, sniffed, drank and wrinkled her nose in disappointment.

  “Tastes bad?” he asked.

  “No, not bad. Not anything. Bland. Boring.”

  “Exactly!” He slapped his hands together. “It emphasizes purity at the expense of character, that’s just what I feared. Peter the Great loved triple-distilled vodka, you know. Maybe we need to dilute it with some anise, perhaps some other congeners too, because as it is, it tastes like Absolut. Typical Swedes—take the danger out of driving and the character out of vodka.”

  “Enough! I need you to give me the company books,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “So Harry—my colleague, Mr. Exley—can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Red October’s commercial position.”

  “Why does he want to do that?” Lev looked genuinely puzzled.

  “So we can show the public what kind of company they’ll be buying into.”

  “I can tell them that.”

  “With all respect, you’re hardly unbiased in this matter.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Don’t make this personal. It’s not a question of trust.”

  “That’s how it seems to me.”

  “What I’m asking is standard procedure. No one in the West would think twice about it,” and then, catching herself, she forestalled his reply. “I know, I know—we’re not in the West now.”

  The sewage system is divided into sectors, and individual workers tend to operate only in one, two at most; the legacy of Soviet bureaucracy and its mania for compartmentalization was everywhere. Irk hadn’t managed to find anyone with a working knowledge of the entire labyrinth, nor had he located a map of the sewers, or at any rate not a complete one covering the Moscow metropolitan area. The public works department had told him to try the mayoralty, the mayoralty had told him to try the water agency, the water agency had told him to try the public works department. Everyone he’d spoken to had been sure that there was a map somewhere, or at least there had been once upon a time, But you know how it is, Investigator … Thousands upon thousands of documents had been lost in a transition so chaotic that people would have mislaid their heads if they hadn’t been screwed on. Even the offer of a half-liter of Eesti Viin had no effect. The map really was nowhere to be found.

  Not that it mattered. Irk thought he knew the sewers as well as anybody. He’d spent countless hours down there, hooked from the moment he’d first seen the metro tunnels from the train cabin. That was how it had started: by memorizing the configurations and conjunctions of all the different lines, he’d come to know every dip and dogleg in the track, learning the lie of the city from the bowels up. He’d gone beneath the metro platforms and gotten into the machinery that drives those massive escalators. Then he’d followed the municipal service tunnels and the ventilator shafts, just to see where they led. Stuck in a sprawling gray city without friends, where else was there to go but down? It was his version of rebellion, a private obsession that didn’t count because it took place in the reverse world. He’d never mentioned it to any of his colleagues.

  Irk splashed through the subterranean labyrinth. He walked down a trunk sewer where two or more channels came together, the pipes stretching high and wide around him, freeways of waste, before veering off down a side duct so low and narrow that he had to lie on his stomach and crawl through, his nose and mouth inches from illegally dumped chemical refuse, petroleum spirit and calcium carbide. He flicked a butane lighter and checked the flame, looking for a slight orange tinge that might indicate trace levels of natural gas. The pipelines climbed and dipped, twisted and went straight, now following the contours of the ground above, now swerving around cellars and electrical lines, now kinking to make room for a drain outlet.

  And always there was water, dripping through cracks in the brickwork, racing itself through the conduits, making sodden sounds and soggy noises. Beyond the constant chords of water, Irk could hear a low chattering: human voices. People made homes for themselves here, complete with chairs and sofas, bare bulbs, stoves, vodka bottles. They set up camp by hot water pipes, for the warmth; and sometimes those pipes burst and boiled alive anyone who happened to be nearby.

  Irk was ostensibly looking for clues, but he’d have been down there even if not for Emma Kurvyakova. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, only that he was looking. Through the alkalic twilight came more sounds: the movements of sex. There were plenty of places down there where people could screw without fear of disturbance, certainly more than there were up above. Young Muscovites had few ways of testing their feelings. There was nowhere to meet for romance, to flirt and learn about making out; apartments were small and offered little privacy, restaurants and hotels were too expensive, few people could afford to own cars, and bars and discos were only for the rich. No wonder people came down here to fuck.

  The tunnels were shaped like eggs. Irk had to walk with one foot on each slope, as though he was hoofing along a ditch, and his ankles ached. A white fungus slicked across the walls, and shafts of watery light trickled down from the streets high above. There were manholes every two hundred yards or so, as well as at each change of gradient and all points where two sewers intersected. The underbelly of Moscow is six levels deep on average, and in some places as many as twelve or fifteen, going down almost a half a mile. You start with gas and electric and telephone lines, then the sewer systems and the subways, both mapped and clandestine—Stalin was rumored to have built a second ring of metro lines on the city outskirts, probably to shuttle bombs around the capital. Then you find where the Soviets burrowed deeper: secret tunnels, KGB listening posts, fallout shelters for the elite.

  The city’s jumbled secrets, Irk thought, pressing on each other like tectonic plates.

  He ended up by the screen where Emma Kurvyakova’s body had been found, and surfaced at the nearest manhole. Orienting himself, he felt his memory jolted by the red, green and white blocks of the flag that drooped above the Madagascan embassy. He’d seen the flag recently, but where? From the window of Sabirzhan’s apartment, that was where. And sure enough, there it was—right next door to the embassy. Why hadn’t he made the connection when they’d first found Emma, then? Because they’d come from a different direction, he remembered, via Ostozhenka rather than the embankment.

  He remembered something else too: he had never been convinced of Sabirzhan’s innocence.

  33

  Friday, January 24, 1992

  The first thing Alice saw when she arrived at Red October was her Mercedes, sitting inside the main gates and looking as good as new. It had even been cleaned, a genuine rarity in Moscow. She went to Lev’s office and t
hanked him profusely and genuinely, momentarily tempted to kiss him in gratitude. “How did you find it?”

  “With my eyes shut, it was so easy. The dealership you bought the car from is run by the Solntsevskaya group. I had a word with Testarossa, my fellow vor, and presto! Your car.”

  “The dealership?” Alice looked puzzled. “What’s the dealer got to do with my car being stolen?”

  “Who else do you think took it, Mrs. Liddell? Koskei the Undying? You’re not that naive, surely? They kept a spare set of keys, noted your address, and took it back as soon as they could without arousing suspicion.”

  “Then what? They’d resell it?”

  “Of course. Change the license plates, forge the papers and repeat the process. If you do that twenty or thirty times…”

  “You make a million dollars.”

  “On each car, yes. If there’s an easier way of making money, do let me know.”

  “This place.” Alice shook her head. “This place. Just when I thought I was comng to grips with it. Anyway”—she shrugged—“I’ve got the car back, and that’s what matters, so thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Mrs. Liddell. And the Solntsevskaya knows not to do it to you again.”

  It was no idle boast. Alice saw the return of the car for what it was: a kind gesture, yes, but also a glimpse of the awesome power Lev could wield. “I bet they do.”

  He looked at his watch. “Will you excuse me? I have to be on the factory floor.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No. I won’t be long, and I’m sure you’ve got plenty to do here.” Alice felt like an errant child, duly chastised. “Sabirzhan will give Harry the books either today or Monday,” Lev added. “You have my word.”

  He touched her hand and was gone.