Vodka

by Boris Starling

  These dinners with the Khruminsches had become the high points—the only points, come to think of it—of Irk’s social life. Tonight, they talked about the case—what else?

  “Lev should start negotiating with the Chechens,” Svetlana said.

  “That’s what I told him,” Irk said.

  “That would be giving in to blackmail and threats,” Rodion said. “You can never go down that path.”

  “Rodya, these are our children they’re killing,” Svetlana said.

  “And so the only way is to wipe the Chechens out.”

  “Spoken like a true Russian,” Irk said.

  “And that was spoken like a true, patronizing Estonian.”

  “Stop it, you two,” Svetlana said. “What’s more important? Who runs the factory, or the lives of children?”

  “It’s not that simple, Ma.”

  “It is that simple, Rodya. Galya, you’re closer to Lev than all of us; can’t you persuade him?”

  Galina shrugged. “If Lev’s made up his mind, he’s made up his mind.”

  “Couldn’t you at least talk to him? I can’t believe you approve of this.”

  “Of course not. But I can’t see what difference I can make either.”

  “You could say you tried.”

  “Ma, leave her alone,” Rodion said. “Galya’s right. We’re the little people, all of us—even you, Juku. Every big decision gets made without consulting us or thinking how it’ll affect us. That’s the way it’s always been, and it’s not going to change now.”

  42

  Sunday, February 2, 1992

  The lobby at Petrovka was full of children, most of them half drowned by filthy clothes several sizes too big and looking around with defiant apprehension. Irk skirted around the edge of the throng and buttonholed one of the duty sergeants behind the main desk. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Street kids, all brought up from the sewers this morning.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Denisov told us to.”

  “For their own protection?”

  “It was a nightmare, Investigator. We had to work in shifts.”

  “So the police have got manpower problems—tell me something I don’t know.”

  “No, there were enough men, but we didn’t have enough protective uniforms. Plus the maps were rubbish and the radios didn’t work, so we all got lost.”

  One of the sergeant’s colleagues was talking to a group of children while filling in forms—arrest forms, Irk noted with disbelief. “You’re booking them?” he said. “On what grounds?”

  “There are always grounds, Investigator.”

  Irk went straight up to Denisov’s office and marched in without knocking. “Why are the police hassling these children instead of protecting them?” he shouted. “It’s all for show, isn’t it, for statistics that’ll be falsified anyway? Those kids will be back underground the moment they’re released. The whole thing is unutterably pointless, Denis Denisovich.”

  “Once again, Juku, you’ve failed to see the bigger picture. The prime minister has—”

  “The prime minister has bleated about curfews for children, that’s what he’s done. He’s blamed aid agencies for encouraging the homeless to come to Moscow because they reckon life’s better here. Who does he think he’s kidding, Denis Denisovich? Moscow controls four fifths of Russia’s revenues—is it any wonder people think the streets are paved with gold?”

  Posters started to go up around Moscow later that day. They were written as a message from Lev, with pictures of the four victims and—in bigger type than everything else—a reward for anyone who provided information leading to the perpetrator’s capture. The 21st Century had slapped the placards onto every surface they could find, overlaying bulletins advertising sports events, or the circus, or dance schools and theaters. To the cynical, the hunt for the killer seemed another form of mass entertainment for a city that craved diversion.

  “We need to talk,” Lewis said.

  Alice was midway through pouring herself a vodka. She filled her glass, put the cap back on the bottle, and walked back to her chair. “OK. You go first.”

  “I think we should leave here.”

  “Because of the murders?”

  “Yes, because of the murders. Don’t sound so dismissive, Alice. I’ve seen people who’ve lost kids—I’ve operated on some of those kids—and when they’re gone, there’s nothing worse. Maybe you think those lives are casualties of war, a price worth paying. I don’t.”

  Lewis spoke so slowly that, as always, Alice was itching to get her reply in way before he’d finished talking. “I think giving in would be worse than going on.”

  “For God’s sake, Alice, you’re not the government, you don’t have to impress me with how tough you are. These people are killing kids because they want the distillery. Do you really think they won’t come after you, if it suits them? Or me, to get to you? What are we to them? I’ll tell you: we’re prey. This thing’ll go ahead with or without you. It’s not worth getting killed over.”

  “This thing won’t go ahead without me. There’s not enough time.”

  “Oh, you’re indispensable now? Alice, come on. This is the Wild East, this is the Mafia.”

  His tone was so condescending that Alice had a sudden urge to tell him everything about Lev, just to spite him. Lewis had no idea how deeply she was in with the Mafia, and they with her. Not for the first time, she thought how hard it was to take him seriously when he was angry. Where passion suited Lev, it sat uneasily on Lewis, like someone else’s clothes. Every battle Lev had fought was etched on his face; Lewis was unlined, untouched, a sculpture in smoothed marble.

  But it wasn’t Lev about whom Lewis was worried, it was Moscow. Already, Alice loved Moscow with the infatuation of a new romance. She knew it wouldn’t always be this way, and that her love would eventually be that for a difficult child or a temperamental lover: deep and resilient, but shot through with lines of hatred, resentment and anger, layers in rock.

  Love it she did, however. Moscow set her senses jangling, it put her on full throttle every day. It was a city charged with history, even more than Berlin or Paris, and Alice could feel the overlaying of present with past wherever she went. There it was, lurking at the street corner; there again, oozing around her feet as she hurried along the sidewalks. The perpetual fight for life, the combat, the uncertainty, the excitement, the sheer unreality—Moscow energized her. She’d heard that Russia changed people. You went in as one person and came out as another. Tension stalked you with a shadow’s impassive remorselessness. You woke with it, worked with it, ate with it, loved with it, slept with it. Some people couldn’t take it and fled. Some grinned and bore it for as long as they had to. Some took refuge in eccentricity, some went insane. And some, like Alice, embraced the Russian bear and danced with it.

  “Let’s go home,” Lewis repeated. “We can always come back in a few years’ time, once this place has sorted itself out. If we still want to.”

  If we’re still together, she thought.

  43

  Monday, February 3, 1992

  February is always a gruesome month in Moscow. The early charms of winter snow have worn off, the consolation of the New Year holiday is long past, and there are still months of grimy slush to slog through before spring brings relief. Slimy sleet inside boots and gray wind in souls, darkness when work starts and darkness again when it finishes, the sun barely making it through the combination of noonday dimness, hangovers and the unknowable fear of the future.

  It was the coldest day of the year, twenty-five below and falling. The cold was a presence, an organism; in the few steps between the front door of her apartment building and Arkin’s limousine, Alice wondered briefly whether hell was freezing rather than roasting. Her earrings seemed to be burning into her flesh. She unfastened the flaps of her fur hat and pulled them down over her ears. Inside the car, Arkin greeted her with a bottle of vodka. “Rub this on your fac
e,” he said. “It’ll help.”

  En route, Arkin pointed out the sights as though he personally had built the Kremlin, cobbled Red Square and erected the dome on St. Basil’s. “This is the greatest city in the world. The third Rome,” he said, holding up three fingers on one hand and four on the other. “Built on seven hills, just like Rome was.”

  They bumped off the road and onto the pedestrianized section of Manezh Square. To their left, the Moscow Hotel was a monument to strained pomposity. “See the towers on either side of the central building?” Arkin said. “They’re different from each other. Schusev, the architect, prepared two treatments for the facade, illustrating both on one drawing. He gave the sketch to Stalin, who approved and signed it as shown, not realizing that Schusev wanted him to choose between the two. Schusev was too scared to point it out. So that was how the hotel was built: two wings, two designs.”

  Ahead of them the police were trying to clear demonstrators out from under Resurrection Gate so that the prime ministerial limousine could pass into Red Square. Alice saw that some of the placards targeted her personally: one portrayed her as a vampire, sucking the blood from the Russian economy; another as the devil in a dress; a third showed her as the Pied Piper, playing merrily while Borzov and Arkin led the line following her toward a river marked “Doom”; in a fourth, she was a female Rasputin, bewitching and befuddling hapless politicians. She was foreign, and therefore cavalier with Russian money and sensitivities alike; her looks brought jealousy on the coattails of admiration. An easier target would have been hard to find.

  Alice found herself shaking. This was the first time public opprobrium had been turned against her personally, and she felt violated by the depth of hatred. It was all right for Borzov and Arkin, they were used to it, in fact they courted it. For the people’s elected representatives, it went with the territory. But she was nothing more than a paid official, why should she have to put up with it?

  Her shaking, she conceded, might also have something to do with the amount she’d drunk last night. Well, that was Lewis’s fault for pissing her off so much. When she’d finally crawled out of bed and gone to open the curtains, she’d had to brace herself against their weight; good Russian curtains are always heavy, to keep out drafts in winter and daylight in summer.

  “Murderers!” someone shouted. “Stinking murderers, the blood of innocent children!” Another demonstrator half broke through the police line. He brandished a sheaf of rubles at the limousine, and yelled: “You know what I’m using these for? Papering my walls, and wiping my ass. That’s all they’re good for!” The last words trailed away as the police finally managed to wrestle him to the ground.

  Alice knew he had a point. Inflation becomes hyper when it rises fifty percent month after month; the rate was past that now, and getting worse every day. Hyperinflation is self-feeding, increasing exponentially rather than linearly. If Russia were a Western company, Alice thought, the receivers would have been called in, the assets sold off, and the employees made redundant. Of course, it was insane to consider privatization in such conditions. Of course, this was Russia, and they would continue.

  The press was out in force for the official announcement of both the Red October auction, to be held in exactly four weeks’ time, and the voucher system under which all privatization would take place. Every one of Russia’s 150 million citizens was entitled to a free voucher, nominal value ten thousand rubles, which they could either invest directly in a privatized enterprise, put in a voucher investment fund or sell for cash.

  The voucher didn’t look like much: the paper was flimsy, and the design—grandiose banners proclaiming “Russian Federation” and “Privatization” across the top and bottom respectively, between them an embroidered oval containing a stylized drawing of the White House from across the river, and a serial number in the lower right-hand corner—made it look less like a banknote than a lottery ticket. Which in a way, Alice thought, it was.

  Arkin had initially been loath to give the vouchers away—the state needed money, and even the lowest of prices was worth something when multiplied by 150 million—but Alice had quoted his own words back at him: what mattered more than anything else was getting enterprises into private hands. They needed millions of owners with a handful each, not a handful of owners with millions each. It didn’t matter who got it or whether they were ready or what they could do with it, so long as the state no longer owned it.

  Besides, price liberalization had wiped out everyone’s savings, so the only people who could lay their hands on vast amounts of cash were foreigners and Mafiosi—and even Arkin couldn’t think of a way to sell either possibility to the Russian people. In theory, cash privatization was beautiful. In practice, it would be dangerous, untenable, cataclysmic. It would allow, even encourage, a small group to buy the whole economy, which in turn would spark resentment and upheaval.

  Finally Alice’s arguments had won the day and Arkin had agreed to give the vouchers away rather than sell them. She felt extraordinarily proud of herself. Could this be the same woman who’d shouted across Wall Street trading floors, “I got ten million IBM eight-and-a-halves to go at 101, and I want those fuckers moved out of the door now!”; the woman whose first reaction to the Chernobyl disaster was to buy up as much crude oil as possible (nuclear stocks would take a hammering, less nuclear power meant an increased reliance on oil) and more potatoes than Idaho could produce in a year (fallout would contaminate vast swathes of European crops, putting a premium on clean American substitutes).

  Arkin was taking questions, and they were coming thick and fast, the first from Pravda, even though the paper’s reporters were supposed to have been banned from the room as punishment for last weekend’s exposé. “How can you justify this process when children are being murdered in its name?”

  Arkin arranged his features into an expression of suitably regretful solemnity. “We’re in a time of transition, and transition always encourages transgression. Like all right-minded citizens, I abhor what the Chechens are doing. What we have here is terrorism, groups trying to coerce us into doing what they want. Yes, these things are happening at the distillery, and yes, they’re horrendous; but far more horrendous would be to let them intimidate us into submission. Just because we’re now a democracy doesn’t mean we’ve gone soft. Those are my last words on the subject; I’ll take no more questions about that.”

  Several hands that had been up went down. A woman got to her feet and peered over her reading glasses. “Why isn’t Anatoly Nikolayevich here?”

  “He’s been under the weather, so he’s recuperating at Sochi.” Sochi is on the Black Sea; Borzov couldn’t use the traditional presidential dacha at Foros in the Crimea, where Gorbachev had been detained the previous August, as the Crimea was now Ukrainian territory. “But he has sent us a message of support, and is fully behind the great progress we’re making.”

  Translation, Alice thought, pleased with her perceptiveness and irritated that she hadn’t seen it before: the president is distancing himself. If it all went to shit, Borzov would step away as smartly as a matador dodges a charging bull.

  Arkin clapped his hands together. “No more questions. I want to show you our television commercials.”

  Half slumped in her chair, Alice sat up fast. This was the first she’d heard of television commercials. She tried to catch Arkin’s eye, but he was too busy supervising the technicians setting everything up. When the lights went down, Lyonya Golubkov appeared on the back wall of the conference room.

  Lyonya was the archetypal Soviet buffoon, the modern-day version of Ivan the Fool. The idiot-savant hero of countless Russian fairy tales, Ivan the Fool’s default mode is to sit on the stove and do nothing, occasionally rousing himself to catch a magic fish that will grant him three wishes, find a magic horse that will bring him riches and love and fame or catch the firebird who’s been stealing golden apples from the czar’s garden and claim the imperial reward—half the kingdom in the czar’s lifetime, the
other half after his death.

  The advertisements were divided into two sections: before and after. In the first, Lyonya, wearing a thick canvas jacket and shabby hat with earflaps piled on top, was a backhoe driver—though he could just as easily have been a plumber, a loader or any kind of unskilled laborer. He was carrying his very last rubles to pay the administration fee for his voucher. “I’ll buy my wife some boots!” he said, grinning at the camera. “Well done, Lyonya,” said the narrator. In the Sberbank branch, Lyonya met other characters in the same boat as himself: Marina Sergeyevna, a single woman who didn’t trust anybody but had faith in the vouchers; a couple of dirt-poor newlywed students; and a pensioner whose glasses were held together with string. All of them had clearly been passed over or ruined by economic reforms—but, the message ran, these very reforms would now give them their lucky break. All they had to do was go to the nearest branch of Sberbank and pick up their voucher.

  The contrast between before and after was as subtle as a sledgehammer. Lyonya and his wife were now seen in a newly furnished apartment: ski boots in the hall, expensive fur coats hanging in the closet, a shiny new Mercedes outside. Marina Sergeyevna had abandoned her threadbare clothes and was admiring herself in the mirror of a luxurious boudoir. The students had also moved into a new apartment, all their own, no in-laws or friends or strangers hunkering down with them. And the pensioner was packing fruit and toys to send to his grandchildren in Barnaul.

  The screen went blank as the tape ran to the end. The lights came on.

  Alice’s hangover suddenly reared again, and her mouth began to fill with saliva, a frothing, choking sensation that only ever heralded one thing. She pushed her chair back and walked quickly but unhurriedly from the room. It was only when she was in the corridor that she started sprinting. The gents’ toilets were nearer, and it was those that she made for—any port in a storm. She threw open the door and slid the last few feet into the cubicle like a batter stealing bases.