Vodka

by Boris Starling

  She got out of the Mercedes and walked over to the policeman. Sometimes it’s better to play the dumb foreigner and hope they get bored of trying to elicit a bribe from you, but usually it’s easier just to pay whatever they ask and go on your way. You can stand and fight, but then they confiscate your license and you have to pay the fine anyway to get it back. It simply isn’t worth the hassle—which is almost certainly why the system evolved that way to start with.

  The policeman’s nose was curved like a cucumber and large enough to cleave his face in two. His features were too adjusted to meanness to be anything but ignoble. Alice looked at the name badge on his lapel: Uvarov, Grigori Eduardovich.

  “This is a one-way street,” Uvarov said.

  “And how many ways did you see me going?”

  The joke did not register. He squatted down by the bumper. “Your headlights are faulty.”

  “My headlights are fine.”

  “Driver’s license.” Uvarov put out his hand and she gave him her license. His eyes traveled slowly down the page. “What is your nationality?”

  “I’m a drunkard.”

  “What?”

  “It’s from Casablanca. Major Strasser asks Rick Blaine…”

  “Ah, Casablanca, Casablanca.” He switched to bad English, more amused now. “‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’”

  “Exactly.”

  “A hundred bucks.” He was speaking Russian again; playtime was over.

  “Shall we go and sit in your car?” It’s illegal for policemen to accept money in public. He shrugged; there was no one around to see them, why not do it here? Alice handed over five twenties; Uvarov licked his finger and counted them.

  “You want some caviar?” he asked. “I have some in the car. Good price.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Very good price. Very good caviar—Caspian. Not the shit from the Far East.”

  Alice shook her head. Uvarov shrugged again. “Very well. A hundred dollars, for violation of traffic direction and faulty headlamps.”

  “I told you, my lights are fine.”

  He whirled sharply and drove his baton into the offside lamp. Serrated splinters of glass plopped onto his shoe. “You don’t buy my caviar, your headlights are definitely faulty.” He handed her a card. “This is my brother’s number. He runs a repair garage on Dolgoru-kovskaya. He’ll fix it cheaply for you. Don’t take it to those crooks at the big places, they’ll rip you off.”

  Alice took the card and turned it over. On the back, she wrote down Uvarov’s name and badge number. “Grisha”—she used the diminutive deliberately and patronizingly—“I work for the IMF, and I report directly to Nikolai Valentinovich Arkin. I’m going to mention this little incident to him, and I imagine the only way I’ll ever see you again is if I happen to find myself looking for a parking space in Tomsk.”

  Uvarov looked horrified. Alice walked back to the car and got in.

  “My brother will do it for free,” he said. He’d gone white. Alice backed the car up a touch, mimicked his shrug—little more than a twitch of the shoulders—and pulled out from the curb in an arc wide enough to avoid both Uvarov and the puddle of glass for which he was responsible.

  Alice knew that the police didn’t get paid a salary worth the name and depended on petty extortion for a living. She didn’t begrudge Uvarov the cash—she had been breaking the highway regulations, after all—but smashing the headlight when she wouldn’t buy his caviar had overstepped the mark. That was why Alice had taken his name. And she was going to tell Arkin, of course she was. She’d been in Russia long enough to know you should never make a threat you’re not prepared to carry out. More important, you should never up the ante unless you were sure who you were dealing with. It was Uvarov’s fault if he’d forgotten that.

  35

  Sunday, January 26, 1992

  Sabirzhan was on the move just after breakfast. For Irk, who’d pulled up across the road barely ten minutes before, it seemed like serendipity. He put his car in gear and followed Sabirzhan through the light Sunday traffic, taking care to keep at least one vehicle between them; Sabirzhan was KGB, trained in countersurveillance techniques, and it wouldn’t do for him to recognize Irk in his rearview mirror. Irk had no idea where Sabirzhan was going or even whether this would yield anything useful, but he felt he was doing something positive, and that was the main thing.

  Irk tracked Sabirzhan’s silver BMW as far as Khlebny Avenue, where Sabirzhan entered an apartment building just down the road from the Egyptian embassy. Irk half got out of the car and then thought better of it. There would be at least fifty apartments in that building, and there was no way he could find out which one Sabirzhan was visiting without risking exposure. So he sat and waited, a hunter in repose. The shops nearby had plastered their doors with dollar-only signs. Gorbachev should have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, Irk thought: he’d turned the ruble to shit.

  Sabirzhan came out forty minutes later. Irk looked for a jaunty step or the jerkiness of anger, and saw neither. Sabirzhan gave nothing away, even when he thought he was alone. He got back into his car and the trail began again: out west to Kudrinskaya Square, north around the Garden Ring, left onto Krasina and then left again toward the zoo. Another apartment building, another visit; another wait in the car for Irk with nothing to do except note the address and speculate whom Sabirzhan might be visiting. Family members, whores, friends—Irk couldn’t tell.

  Friends? Did a man like Sabirzhan have friends?

  Irk thought about ringing Petrovka for more people to help tail Sabirzhan, in case Irk was spotted, or someone to find out who lived in the apartment buildings. He felt in his pockets for two-kopeck pieces and found none. With inflation what it was, public phones were the only thing kopecks were used for now. Enterprising old women sold stacks of them outside the central post office; ten two-kopeck coins for thirty rubles, 150 times their face value!

  Even if he’d had the change, there was little point making the call. Petrovka barely had the manpower to investigate a loaf of bread. Irk knew of detectives who were reduced to tailing suspects by bus, using phone booths rather than radios, and even charging foreign journalists to accompany them on patrol. Under current reequipment schedules, it would take the police twenty-five years to get equipment parity with any half-decent gangster. Twenty-five years! Twenty-five years from now would mark the centenary of the revolution.

  The problem, Irk thought, was fundamental: Russians didn’t understand crime. Lambasting criminals as “socially dangerous,” the Soviets had equated crime with politics. As socialism was perfected, the theory went, so the social base for crime—and therefore crime itself, of course—would gradually disappear. Consequently they had seen no point in spending money on modernizing the police, training prosecutors or improving the courts. It was wholesale institutional blindness, and it was men like Irk who were suffering. How could he do his job when all he could find was a small piece here, another piece there? It was like trying to do a jigsaw by touch alone.

  Irk was so lost in thought bordering on self-pity that he almost missed Sabirzhan when he came out of the apartment building on Zoologicheskaya. Gears ground and tires squealed as he strove to keep his quarry in sight. The chase, such as it was, went on all morning and through lunch, a slowly unwinding procession of street names and building numbers: Petrovsky, Zvonarsky, Kolokolnikov, Ipatevsky. It was at the seventh destination, just as Irk was about to give this up as a waste of time—though what else would he have done with the day?—that he had some modicum of success. Sabirzhan drove down Bolshaya Ordynka, past the Convent of Martha and Mary, and was just pulling in to the curb, when Irk recalled that he had been here before. This was where German Kullam lived.

  Sabirzhan got out of his car and went up the steps to the Kullams’ building. Irk slowed just enough to be sure that he’d gotten the right place, and then turned tail and headed for home.

  The guy who ran the bookstall on Irk’s street was packing u
p when Irk arrived.

  “All over for another day, Nikulsha?” Irk asked.

  “All over, full stop. I’m closing.”

  “Closing? Russians love to read.”

  “Books are expensive, Investigator, and food even more so. Can you eat a book?”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  Irk wished him good luck and went inside his apartment house, happy as ever to be home. He always felt uplifted the moment he walked through the front door. Perhaps he was becoming more Russian than he liked to concede; a Russian’s apartment is more than a physical living space, it’s a sanctuary from life outside, even when it’s as nondescript as Irk’s. He had few items that were new, and even fewer that were valuable. His sofa doubled as a bed, his phone was the old rotary-dial model and his books were old and tattered. According to tradition, a host is bound to hand over any item that a visitor praises, though there was little enough danger of that happening here. Irk’s possessions were junk, and he never had anyone around.

  The police file on Sabirzhan was in the drawer of Irk’s desk. It should have been at Petrovka, of course, but it was safer there. If Sabirzhan had enough connections to get himself released from questioning early, he had enough connections to make files disappear.

  Irk flicked through the file—his own reports, photographs of Sabirzhan’s apartment and office, sundry correspondence—until he found the list of informers he’d copied from Sabirzhan’s records. He ran his finger down the address column—it was in alphabetical order, of course; neither Sabirzhan nor Irk would have stood for anything else—and the street names popped up for him like targets on a shooting range:

  Bolshaya Ordynka, 328/34—Kullam, German G.

  Zvonarsky, 96/8—Durakov, Filipp V.

  Zoologicheskaya, 263/52—Ossipov, Innokenty S.

  Ipatevsky, 14/25—Myshkin, Alexei D.

  Kolokolnikov, 58/2—Tupikov, Mark S.

  Petrovsky, 82/11—Zaitsev, Otar K.

  Khlebny, 47/9—Serdzekorol, Vasily M.

  Not relatives, whores or friends. Sabirzhan had been visiting his informers. Irk felt the spearing thrill of connection, and hot on its heels the gentle anticlimax of deflation. Sabirzhan had been visiting his informers; so what? In some ways, it would have been strange if he hadn’t been. Did it make any difference to Irk’s hunt for whoever had killed those three kids? Not that he could see. Perhaps Lev would like to know what Irk had worked out. But if Lev was worried about it, Irk thought, he could tail Sabirzhan himself.

  Irk made chicken soup with boat-shaped pastries and turned on the television, flicking through the channels in an attempt to find something that wasn’t a commercial. Soviet television had shown reports of beggars scavenging for food in New York trash cans or miners in Yorkshire battling with the police; modern Russian stations carried advertisements for cash machines and dishwashers. Few viewers had fully believed the news reports; everyone wanted the commercials to be true.

  36

  Monday, January 27, 1992

  “Good morning, Mrs. Liddell. I believe I owe you an explanation.”

  Lev’s tone was civil, no more and no less, and it was shot through with an indifference that cut Alice deep. Civil is what you are with clients and acquaintances, she thought, not with someone with whom you’d lain naked in this very office. He’d used the word “explanation,” and her mind shied away from the implications even as her gut tugged them in one by one. As far as Alice was concerned, “explanation” usually meant “excuse.”

  “I thought we’d agreed that you would call me Alice.” Her voice trembled with the effort of stanching; apprehension, anger and tears were all lining up.

  “You asked what was going on with the workers.” He was gone from her, as impassively remote as an Easter Island statue. “It’s very simple. The money they were handing over to Sabirzhan came from several sources.” He ticked them off on his fingers. Alice wished she had the strength to reach across the table and snap them one by one. “Bonuses they’ve earned, free allowances from the trade union, rewards for efficiency proposals, fictitious wages paid for fictitious work.”

  “So why the hell do they give it to you?”

  “Because it’s not really theirs to start with, and because it’s not for my personal enrichment.”

  “And the rest.”

  “You doubt me? You doubt my integrity, Alice?” He spat her name, and she felt sick. “That money provides bribes and gifts for suppliers and contractors; that money, therefore, is needed for the future of this factory. No bribes equals no permits, no raw materials, no retail space. No bribes equals no jobs. They get their wages, but their wages aren’t paid in full unless the plan is met, and the plan will not be met without subterfuge.”

  The plan—that was the way all industry had worked in the Soviet Union. Every last aspect had been planned, no detail too picayune: what should be produced, at what cost, from what materials, for what price, for which customers, on what time schedule, with how many workers and at what wages. The plan. For the atheists of central communism, it had been the Godhead; to the high priests of capitalism, it was devilry.

  “That’s exactly the kind of shit privatization will stamp out.”

  “Maybe so, but until then, things go on just the same as they always have. If I didn’t do this, my workers would starve.”

  “You run a criminal gang. You could afford to pay the lot of them from your own pocket.”

  “They make more from me than I take from them.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? Have you ever heard the saying ne pesh, ne mash—if you don’t drink, you’re not one of us? In this case, it’s slightly different. Ne beresh, ne mash: if you don’t take bribes, you’re not one of us. Either we subordinate ourselves to the laws of corruption governing the trade system, or we find ourselves ejected from that system.”

  “That system is history.”

  “That system is alive and kicking, and the sooner you realize it, the better.”

  Lev had offered Alice, Bob and Harry one of the distillery’s better offices, and Alice spent ten minutes in the ladies’ toilet composing herself before going back there. “Better” was in this case strictly a relative term. The fluorescent swathes on the ceiling washed the room in a milky radiance that highlighted its shortcomings. It was barely a few strides from one side to the other, and the walls were patched with gray paint. Even the smell of cabbage seemed stronger than usual.

  Western executives are used to vast corner offices, tinted glass and brushed steel; this place would have disgraced a student magazine, but Alice loved it. It was suitably humble for the great transformation she would help wreak. The French Revolution had been hatched on a tennis court; the Nazis had met in a Munich beer cellar; the Bolsheviks themselves had plotted on Tottenham Court Road in London. Great changes need unassuming beginnings, she felt.

  Bob was nowhere to be found. Harry was rootling around on all fours beneath a desk all but invisible beneath towers of documents. “The fuck are you doing, Harry?” Alice said.

  “Looking for my pen.”

  “Harry, there’s only one part of you that’s visible, and I have to say, it seems a somewhat unlikely orifice for you to be speaking through.”

  Harry backed out and up, brushing dust off the pen. “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “Fine. Why?”

  He studied her face. “You look … preoccupied, I guess.”

  I should tell him, Alice thought. Harry and Bob had a right to know that children were being killed because of what they were doing. She should tell him—and she didn’t, because she knew what his reaction would be. Lev had said how squeamish Westerners were, and he was right. If Harry or Bob wanted out—and at least one of them surely would—Alice would be back where she started, and she couldn’t afford that, not with so little time left.

  She changed the subject. “How you doing with the books?”
>
  “I can understand about one word in ten, and all of those are probably lies.”

  “Find a recording of Brezhnev’s speeches, and you’ll get used to it fast enough.”

  Harry shrugged. Any information he could glean from the books would probably be insufficient, misleading, irrelevant or all three. The law required that valuation be based on the book values for fixed assets, current assets, current liabilities, net current assets, net assets and capital, but all these were badly distorted. Book values were traditionally overstated to make it appear as though production targets had been reached and quotas filled; these particular ones had been set on New Year’s Day, and therefore took no account of subsequent inflation.

  Decoding Russian balance sheets was more of an art than a science. Russian accounting was still based on the Soviet model, designed to detect misuse of state funds rather than provide information about company performance. A popular Soviet joke had the director of an enterprise interviewing candidates for the post of chief accountant. He asked each candidate the same question: “How much is one plus one?” The man who got the job was the one who answered: “How much do you need, Comrade Director?”

  In Western business, intangibles are usually minor and easily dealt with. Here, the situation was reversed. How could Harry evaluate cash flow when the majority of every enterprise’s dealings involved promissory notes, barter and unpaid receivables? How could he put a value on the underground economy? How could growth figures be taken seriously when everyone had an incentive to exaggerate?