Vodka

by Boris Starling

  She was still singing psychedelic praises to the depths of the china bowl when Arkin came in.

  “Are you OK?” He looked concerned.

  “Fine.”

  “You looked ill. I thought I’d better check on you.”

  “Something I ate, probably.” She spoke through panting breaths. “I had herring and salmon last night, perhaps one of them was spoiled.”

  “You can’t waver, Alice.”

  “I’m not wavering.”

  “You’re strong—that’s why we picked you. Nothing great is ever achieved without sacrifice.”

  “I said, I’m not wavering.”

  Arkin made a moue of acceptance. “What do you think of the commercials? Pretty good, eh?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “I hate them.”

  “I know the production values aren’t great, but it wasn’t bad for a rush job, was it?”

  Alice felt that she took eons to find her voice. “Those are blatant lies, Kolya. Wishful thinking, at the very least. You can’t put that kind of stuff on the air. It’s not going to happen like that, and you know it.”

  “Well, either we sell them that, or we watch the whole thing fall down around our ears.”

  “I won’t be a party to this.”

  “You are a party to this. You’re here to privatize the distillery. The more people who pick up and use their vouchers, the better for you.”

  “I don’t want you to submit those commercials.”

  “Too late. They’re going out tonight.”

  “Tonight? Then you must pull them from the schedules.”

  “It’s too late. I can’t do that.”

  “You’re the prime minister, you can do whatever you want. Pull them.”

  “No.”

  Alice saw that there was no doubt in Arkin’s mind that he was in the right. He reminded her of a line from Dostoyevsky: if you gave him a map of the stars overnight, he’d return it the next morning covered with corrections.

  Arkin turned on his heel and stalked from the room. Alice went over to the basins and splashed her face. It couldn’t have been the amount she’d drunk, that was for sure; she’d drunk much more than that before without any ill effects. All those television lights had made her hot, the protesters had made her nervous … Stress and seafood, that’s all. And she’d gotten up and gone to work and done her job regardless. She wasn’t collapsed in a gutter or in bed bemoaning her life. She’d done fine.

  44

  Tuesday, February 4, 1992

  Alice’s office phone trilled: the double ring that indicated an external line, so it wouldn’t be Lev. She felt a gnawing sense of disappointment as she picked up.

  “It’s me,” said Lewis. “Just to let you know I’ll be home late.”

  “Trouble at the top?”

  “A whole Schwegmann’s bag full. More people to sack.” His tone was neutral; Alice couldn’t tell whether this was a prospect that excited or appalled him, or neither.

  “Poor bastards,” she said.

  “Most of them, yes. Apart from one guy who’s been stealing blood from the hospital stores.”

  “To sell on the black market?”

  “Presumably. He’s the first to go, and good riddance to him.”

  There was a knock on the door. “Kto?” Alice said. “Who is it?”

  “Kto, kto, ded Pikhto.” It was a nonsense rhyme: “Grandpa Pikhto, that’s who.” Lev came in, doffing an imaginary hat as he blocked the doorway. His thick hair was swept back from his forehead and tucked behind his ears; tendrils curled up on themselves at the base of his neck. Alice held up a finger: one minute.

  “Good riddance to him indeed,” she said into the receiver, her voice unhurried. “Take your time, I might be late too.”

  Lewis hung up. Other men tell their wives they love them at the end of phone calls, and sometimes it irked Alice that Lewis was not like that. Today, however, she was relieved—he’d spared her the embarrassment of reciprocation in front of Lev.

  They drank Sibirskaya, distilled from winter wheat and repeatedly filtered through birch-tree charcoal. The wafts of aniseed on the nose were repeated on the palate, this time with liquorice tones attached; a delicate and light aroma giving way to a large, fragrant taste, quite sweet and almost creamily smooth until the extra alcohol began to bite through a long finish.

  “I saw you on television yesterday,” he said.

  “And?”

  “You looked prettier than Arkin.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t feel it.”

  “It’s a lousy idea, the vouchers.”

  “It worked in Eastern Europe—I know, I know, Russia’s different. Why is it a bad idea? People can do with them what they want.”

  “They should be made to invest them in the enterprises where they work.”

  “I’m sure most of them will. But if they don’t, you can’t stop them.” Lev was silent; Alice detected the lightest brushstroke of amusement on his face. “Not even here,” she said.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “What are you going to do? Force them to sell you their vouchers?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I can, and I am. I’ve had their contracts amended to that effect.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “Not at all. I’ll pay them face value, so they’ll all make money from the deal. There are special provisions for the workers as it is. I’m just making sure all the vouchers go to the right place. What kind of signal would it send out if Red October’s employees didn’t want to invest in their own company?”

  “Every worker?”

  “Every worker.”

  Something jogged in her brain. “Every person on the payroll?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Feeling vaguely nauseous, Alice made her way down to the distillery floor. She didn’t like what Lev was doing, didn’t like it at all, not least because she couldn’t square it with the man she so desired. Until she was sure of what was going on, however, she would not confront him.

  The first person she saw was German Kullam, staring into space. It was the start of the month, with production targets again weeks rather than days or even hours away, and the sense of urgency was all but invisible.

  “What are you going to do with your privatization voucher?” she asked. He looked first at her and then up toward Lev’s office high above the distillery floor; the same motion as the woman in the bottling department, she remembered. “And you’re happy about that?” she said.

  “Lev knows best.”

  “German, this is a factory, not a damn cult. Are you happy about selling him your voucher?”

  “You want to know what makes me unhappy? Being invaded by Westerners on hardship packages. You get luxury flats, the best tickets for ballet and the theater, restaurant allowances, six-figure dollar salaries—and on top of all that, allowances for ‘deprivation.’ That’s not hardship, you shits on sticks. Come and live where I live, come and work where I work, come and earn what I earn—then you’ll see what fucking hardship is.” He tapped his chest, a warrior feeling for his medals. “We’re the people without tears. Straighter than you, more proud. You see me—how old do you think I am?”

  His face was scored with lines, anxiety and vodka in equal quantities; his hands bore the creases of a million experiences. “Forty-five?”

  German snorted in derision. “Thirty-one. What about her?” He pointed at a woman working at a technician’s bench.

  “Fifty-two,” Alice said.

  “Forty,” German said, his voice not without triumph, as if he’d just confirmed a great truth about pampered Westerners.

  “You don’t seem very busy,” she said.

  “Waiting for supplies.”

  “Isn’t there someone else you could be helping?”

  German looked blankly at her. It was not that he didn’t like the question, Alice saw; rather that he did
n’t understand it. A Russian worker felt responsible only for his allocated task. If one worker had finished and another still had much to do, the first would never help the second, no matter how easy the work, and the second would never ask for help. Under Soviet law, every citizen of able mind and body had been obliged to hold a job or face prosecution. This meant that enough work had to be found for everyone, which in turn meant that each worker did his own and only his own specific share. “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” the people had lamented under a system that gave little reward for hard work and didn’t punish sloth. Suddenly they were expected to behave as though they were salesmen working on commission; it simply wasn’t going to happen.

  Alice went back upstairs to find Harry suggesting performance initiatives and bonuses.

  “You understand nothing, do you?” Lev snapped. “Nothing. What you’re suggesting would destroy this place. The moment you start paying people differently, you create envy, dislike, factionalism. This place runs on equality, Mr. Exley, equal pay across a group. There’s no room for individual ambition.”

  Harry tried again. “In that case, you need to raise prices. Sell your vodkas at greater margins.”

  “Who’s going to buy them then, eh? How many ordinary Ivans have you seen ambling down the street counting their millions? Our prices are high as they are, to distinguish us from the third-rate poison that inferior distilleries and private piss-artists put out. If we go any higher, people will either switch to our competitors or they’ll start making their own. Either way, we’ll go from some margin to no margin. There’s an old conundrum that goes like this: ‘If they raised the price of vodka to the price of a suit, which would you buy?’ ‘Why, vodka, of course. What would I need with such an expensive suit?’”

  Irk had been trying for three days to get an audience at the Belgrade Hotel; the phone call came through now, giving him half an hour to get there or miss his chance. Jump, the Chechen Mafia said. How high? asked the senior investigator.

  They went through the same rigmarole as before with the blindfold, except this time the Chechens also searched him for tracking devices. Their paranoia was clearly on the rise. The trip lasted longer than before, and Irk knew even before the vehicle stopped that they were somewhere in the countryside; the sounds and smells of Moscow’s streets had long since evaporated, and the ride had been sufficiently bumpy to smack his head twice against the roof.

  When they bundled him out of the jeep, they were rougher than before. Irk removed the blindfold and squinted against the snow glare. They were in a field, bounded on two sides by lines of poplars and on the other two by dirt tracks. It could have been anywhere.

  “Where’s Karkadann?” he said.

  There were four men, all with their guns trained on him. None of them answered. He nodded toward the weapons. “Where the hell do you think I’m going to run to?”

  They waited ten minutes in silence before another jeep appeared, listing drunkenly over the dirt track, and disgorged Zhorzh. He rummaged in his pocket as he approached Irk and brought out a wad of dollars, from which he peeled off a large chunk—the size, Irk thought, was as much a reflection of a gloved hand’s lack of dexterity as it was of Zhorzh’s generosity. Zhorzh placed the money carefully in the breast pocket of Irk’s overcoat. With equal care, Irk took it out again and handed it back. Zhorzh scowled.

  “You shouldn’t insult us by refusing our generosity,” said the gunman standing nearest Irk.

  “And you shouldn’t insult me by assuming my dishonesty.”

  “Leave this case alone.”

  “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. The prime minister himself has appointed me.”

  Zhorzh pursed his lips, thought for a second, and nodded at the gunmen. The one who’d spoken kicked suddenly at the back of Irk’s knees, toppling him forward onto the ground. When he tried to push himself upright, snow clinging to his cheek, he felt a metallic ring pressed against the back of his head: the end of a pistol barrel, very, very cold.

  Irk held his breath and waited, waited, as though seeing how long he could stay underwater. He’d never been one of those thrill seekers for whom life was incomplete without facing death. It seemed unfair that death should come looking for him when so many others went looking for it. Unfair, that was all. Unfair, such a prosaic word. If there was a great epiphany to be had at the last, Irk was surely missing it, and he felt disappointed at the mundanity of his thoughts. He didn’t even feel particularly afraid. If you didn’t have much of a life, how could you fear its loss?

  Long beats of silence, ragged breathing that was his own, footsteps that clearly weren’t.

  Irk heard engines revving and the crunch of snow under tires. It was only then that he realized there was no longer a gun pressed against his head, but he kept still until silence had floated back over him like a blanket. When he looked up, the Chechens were gone.

  It took Irk an hour to find the main road. A ten-dollar bill clamped between shaking fingers ensured that a car stopped for him within the minute, and was good for a ride all the way to Petrovka.

  Denisov offered him round-the-clock protection, which Irk turned down. A couple of prognathous youths in a clapped-out squad car wouldn’t be able to save him from anything more dangerous than the common cold. Lev, too, offered him round-the-clock protection, and again Irk turned it down, not because he doubted its effectiveness but because he knew it would spell the end of his own neutrality.

  Svetlana fussed over him and told him he had to be careful, there was a shortage of good men in Moscow as it was.

  “When your time comes, your time comes,” he told her, and wondered if he really believed it.

  45

  Wednesday, February 5, 1992

  The rate of provisional voucher take-up—the vouchers themselves weren’t to be released until a week before the auction, ostensibly for security reasons but in reality because they were being printed on presses that were old and temperamental—had soared since Arkin’s advertisements were aired. Western audiences would never have fallen for the idea that a voucher could transform lives, but for Russians it was seductive. People who no longer believed in politics or nationhood were ready to trust a commercial that promised to make them rich overnight. So frenzied was their quest to enter this looking-glass world that they forgot to ask themselves the most crucial question of all: would there be milk there? And if there was, would it be good for them to drink?

  Sabirzhan came in carrying an armload of files, which he put on Alice’s desk with an exaggerated flourish and a theatrical wipe of his brow. She smiled her thanks and started on the nearest file even before he had left the room. They were behind schedule, there was far too much for Harry to cover by himself, and Alice had proved during her time on Wall Street that she could read a company’s finances as well as anybody.

  The files were routine stuff, boring but essential: real estate contracts with the Moscow city government, agreements with suppliers, budgets for research and development. Alice soon got into a rhythm of speed-reading, deliberately slowing her breathing so as to keep herself from going too fast and missing something. It took her all morning and most of the afternoon. Toward the end, her eyes were beginning to blur from looking at too many faded and badly copied documents. By the time she got to the last file, she was ready to call it a day; but she’d made it this far, she thought, and another half hour of concentration wouldn’t hurt her.

  The file was labeled “Suyumbika,” and Alice saw instantly that the contents were dynamite.

  There was no way Sabirzhan could have meant for her to see this, she thought. Yes, Red October was obliged to give her full cooperation and disclosure, but Alice was becoming more realistic about how much work they had to do and how little time they had in which to do it. There must have been an entirely plausible alternative file that Sabirzhan should have given to her instead, and she’d never have known the difference.

  It was clear what Alice should do: take all the
files back to Sabirzhan, thank him for them and hand them over. The auction was less than a month away, why rock the boat now?

  Why indeed? Because that was the kind of person she was: a prober, an inquirer, restless and ambitious, and you could no more show a file like Suyumbika to her and expect her not to act on it than you could dangle a bottle of vodka in front of an alcoholic and expect them not to drink it.

  In the toilets, Alice saw that she wasn’t the only person removing items surreptitiously from the premises. Two women were decanting vodka into hot-water bottles which they then strapped to their chests. They didn’t miss a beat when they saw Alice, which annoyed her.

  “What are your names?” she said. “I’m going to report you.”

  “For what?” said one. “If everything belongs to everybody, nothing belongs to anybody.”

  “That’s not the case anymore, and you know it.”

  “That’s always the case. We take what we can get: that hasn’t changed.”

  “Report us all you want,” said the other. “The guards won’t care. Everyone knows the limits.”

  Wasn’t that the truth? Alice thought. Theft was fine, so long as it was at an acceptable level.

  Outside the Pushkinskaya metro station, Alice had to fight her way through a line that seemed to stretch halfway around the block. She followed it all the way to its source at a post office. Post offices had insufficient funds to pay pensions, so the staff waited until someone came in to mail something and then paid the next person in line with the money just received. If you went away and came back the next day, you’d find that your pension was worth much less than it had been the day before, so no one dared leave, and the lines got longer and longer.

  A police car shot past, leaching blue neon into the smoggy darkness. Alice caught a glimpse of two Chechens in the backseat, each cuffed to a door handle, each staring out the window with the sullen disillusion of aliens wondering what kind of world they’d landed on.