Vodka

by Boris Starling

  His eyes were gray. Skin scooped under his cheekbones and ridged around his mouth. He had no answers, no questions, only a statement.

  “I love you,” he said.

  It was the response Alice’s soul desired and her reason dreaded.

  “Where’ve you been?” Lewis asked. His voice was distant; he was in the bedroom.

  “Working late.” With my lover.

  The apartment was stuffy and hot. Alice turned on the humidifier and opened the window. She went through into the bedroom, and as usual the guilt came flooding back the moment she saw Lewis’s beautiful, trusting, bland face. But now his features were not those she remembered, he looked somehow different. Alice looked again, and realized that it was she, not he, who’d changed. She noticed things about him that she’d previously taken for granted. The lobes of his ears kinked sharply upward just before they fused with his jaw—how had she missed that? Look how lightly the puffs of skin beneath his eyebrows rested on his eyelids. Lewis was one of the central staples of her accepted life, but now everything seemed fractionally off center: a twin who wasn’t quite identical, a room that had been searched and left infinitesimally out of kilter, a voice heard on tape rather than from inside the owner’s head.

  This was their home, their life, hers and Lewis’s, where everything had its own poetry, sincerity and warmth. Alice wanted very much for it to be safe and whole again.

  48

  Saturday, February 8, 1992

  “I want out,” Alice said.

  Arkin was nothing if not a professional politician. He showed no surprise, still less alarm. He merely cocked his head and said “I’m sorry?” as if they were talking on a bad phone line.

  “I want out,” she repeated. “The privatization program—I’ve had enough.”

  Arkin’s look said it all; this was the woman who’d sat on a podium with him earlier in the week and swelled with pride when they told the world’s media how the program was going ahead come what may, and the naysayers be damned. She’d given him her word that she wasn’t wavering—and here she was, swaying like a larch in a hurricane. “May I ask why?”

  “Because the process has moved too far from what we started with.” Because I’m falling in love with Lev. “Because two Mafia gangs are fighting over the distillery.” Because I’m falling in love with Lev. “Because children are being killed there.” Because I’m falling in love with Lev. “Because we haven’t enough time to do this properly.” Because I’m falling in love with Lev.

  Sitting at his desk, his mouth pursed, Arkin considered what Alice had said for several moments before replying. “Alice, the Red October auction takes place in three weeks. Even if you were to leave now, your achievement would be considered heroic. But if you leave now, who could possibly take over? No one, that’s who. You’re invaluable, and you know it as well as I do.”

  The dim light pouched his eyes in shadow. “I hear what you’re saying, and I understand your reservations, but I ask you to reconsider. This isn’t just about you, or me. What we’re doing is for the Russian people, so they can live in a normal country, not one run on lies and sophistry. We used to laugh at the six paradoxes of socialism. You know what they were?”

  Alice shook her head. Arkin began recite: “There’s no unemployment, but nobody works; nobody works, but productivity increases; productivity increases, but the shops are empty; the shops are empty, but fridges are full; fridges are full, but nobody’s satisfied; nobody’s satisfied, but everyone votes unanimously. You want Russia to go back to that? Would you live with yourself if you walked away now?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  She couldn’t tell him. He had demolished every objection she’d put up, of course he had, because what she’d told him wasn’t the truth, and she couldn’t tell him the truth, so she couldn’t in all conscience step down. Arkin had her over a barrel.

  “I’ll stay,” Alice said. “I’ll stay until it’s over.”

  49

  Sunday, February 9, 1992

  Lev was asleep when the phone in his bedroom rang. He knew before answering that it must be important; very few people had his private number, and none of them were without influence. When he picked up, his first reaction was surprise that the voice was Karkadann’s. His second, more pressing, was alarm that the voice was Karkadann’s.

  “The reservoirs. Potassium cyanide,” Karkadann said, and rang off.

  The reservoirs in question were the ones Red October maintained up near the Mytishchi Springs, whose soft, calcium-free water the Kazan distillery had stopped taking the previous month. It took Lev minutes to assemble a twelve-vehicle convoy, five men to a car. At that time on a Sunday morning, traffic was light, though it would have made little difference had it been rush hour on a Friday: the convoy jumped red lights, ignored one-way signs and tripled the speed limit on occasion, and not a traffic cop in Moscow would have dared stop them.

  The Mytishchi reservoirs were protected by two concentric rings of razor wire and permanent patrols of armed men in uniform and dogs. Lev himself strode up to the security officer in charge: V. Golovin, according to the laminated nameplate on his chest. In his hurry to stand at attention, Golovin practically snapped himself in half.

  “Have you had any break-ins?”

  “No.”

  “No alarms, strange incidents?”

  “None.”

  “No Chechens in the area?”

  “They’re the first thing we look for.”

  “All your men accounted for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go and check the perimeter fence, every inch. Draw off samples of water from each reservoir and have them sent to Petrovka for analysis; the scientists there do it, for a fee.”

  The phone was ringing in the guard hut at the main entrance to the reservoir complex. Golovin gestured diffidently in its direction. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  Golovin hurried into the shed and snatched up the receiver. Lev saw Golovin’s body stiffen, his face urgent as he snapped words soundless behind the heavy bulletproof glass. In an instant, Lev was in the hut, taking the phone from Golovin and filling the tiny space with his anger. It was Sabirzhan calling: a 21st Century convoy bringing grain from Krasnodar had been attacked on the Garden Ring, and it was carnage.

  Blue and red emergency lights rotated lazily in the pale light of a winter morning. The ambush had taken place at Serpukhovskaya Square, where the main road from the south meets the Garden Ring. It was a logical enough place to have mounted an ambush: any traffic coming from Krasnodar to Moscow would have had to pass through there.

  There must have been thirty vehicles at the scene: ambulances and police, with civilian cars being filtered around them. There were no trucks; the Chechens must have stolen the lot. Lev strode angrily through the police cordon. A young officer moved to stop him, but then thought better of it and backed away.

  Bodies littered the ground. Lev recognized the drivers and their guards, sprawled and stretched across the road in pools of darkening blood. It looked like a mock-up, the kind of tableau used to teach rescue workers about safety procedures. Young men, Lev thought, young men who in other times would have had twice as much life ahead of them as had already passed, but who as Mafiosi could expect three decades if they were lucky. Their bravery in facing death was no more than he would have expected. Those who joined the warrior elite traded rich rewards for a life of tension and an inevitably violent end. They had been happy to live fast and die young. Russians are all too used to death; when twenty million died defending the Motherland against the Nazis, Stalin simply sent in twenty million more.

  The warning about poisoning the reservoirs had been a decoy. Karkadann had made Lev concentrate on a threat that didn’t exist, and in doing so had left the door open for the Chechens to hit the Slav alliance elsewhere.

  Lev’s men had been primed for the attack on the repository the previous week, but this one seemed to
have caught them unawares. Though every man in the convoy had been armed, Lev could see no dead Chechens. How was that possible in a mass gunfight?

  Two paramedics were loading a man onto a stretcher by the curb. By the care with which they handled the patient, Lev knew he was still alive—they’d have slung corpses in like sacks of garbage. When he got closer, he saw that it was Butuzov, his gray face beaded with sweat and blood.

  “What the fuck happened?” Lev said.

  “Police.”

  “Police?”

  Butuzov shook his head, and winced at the movement. “Not real ones. Blacks. Dressed as police.” It wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded; the police took recruits where they could find them, even from those whom they most routinely victimized. “Appeared from nowhere, pulled us over, ordered us out, disarmed the guards.”

  “Then what?”

  “Shot us.”

  “Everyone else is dead?”

  “I think so. Someone fell on top of me, that’s why I’m still here.”

  “And the trucks?”

  “Took them.”

  A bubbling eruption of blood spurted from Butuzov’s mouth, and the paramedics were on him in a flash. Lev turned away. He’d seen enough men die to know that Butuzov wouldn’t make it. He remembered how Butuzov had installed the bug in Karkadann’s office and helped snatch Sharmukhamedov from Sheremetyevo; remembered too how Karkadann had sent Butuzov back to Lev with the Chechen bandit oath ringing in his ears. Butuzov had been there almost from the inception of this conflict—it didn’t seem right that he wouldn’t live to see its end.

  Lev looked back to the stretcher. Lying on his back, his blood wetting skin he could no longer feel, Butuzov stared sightlessly at the sky.

  50

  Monday, February 10, 1992

  It was still dark, but the area around the Vera Mukhina sculpture was lit up like a television studio. Irk saw discarded McDonald’s wrappers, three half-liter bottles of vodka—empty, naturally—and a young girl, whitened first by blood loss and then by the merciless glare of the arc lights.

  The girl was lying on her back. Irk stepped forward and looked into her eyes. Once again, there was no reflection of the murderer; all he saw was himself, embittered, angry, bewildered and so very, very tired. Every option he took turned out to be useless against an enemy who was both ubiquitous and invisible. Damn Arkin, he thought, damn Arkin for putting him back on the case.

  Vera Mukhina’s stainless-steel rendition of the worker and farm girl is one of the most famous sculptures in all Russia. The worker clasps a hammer and the farm girl a sickle; they hold their hands high in solidarity as they stride boldly toward the glorious Soviet future, his apron and her skirt rippling out behind them in horizontal pleats. Stalin used to come at night and stare at the sculpture for hours. It was rumored that Trotsky’s profile could be seen in the drapery’s folds.

  The policemen on the scene hopped from foot to foot, wafting vodka with every exhalation. If the bottles by the sculpture hadn’t been empty before, it was no mystery that they were now.

  Irk looked away from the girl toward the VDNKh, the Exhibition of Economic Achievements Park. Marx himself would have been proud of the pavilions’ names: Atomic Energy, Coal Industry, Biology, Education, Physics, Trade Unions, Electrotechnology, Agriculture and Grain. But their grandiose architecture now mocked the denuded halls where imported cars and televisions had ousted local products, and where merchants touted their wares as if they were in the souk.

  Death of a child, death of a nation. Irk wondered whether he could still tell the difference.

  Unsure whether to be reassured or disturbed that he still had an appetite, Irk stopped at the Petrovka canteen. His hunger lasted for as long as it took him to search without joy for solids in the watery goulash. Where the girl’s corpse had failed, Petrovka cuisine had succeeded. His hunger evaporated.

  He went up to see Denisov, who was so engrossed in the television that it was several moments before he noticed Irk. US Air Force carriers were arriving at Domodevo Airport with the first aid consignments of Operation Provide Hope. Transport aircraft landed with wobbling wings before disgorging the contents of their fat bellies onto the grimy snow. The pallets were unloaded by immaculately uniformed USAF officers, square of jaw and straight of back. Next to them, the assisting Russian conscripts looked like toy soldiers, pale-faced and shivering as they passed bottles of vodka around to ward off the cold.

  “What are they delivering?” Irk asked.

  “Food. Prepackaged army meals left over from the Gulf War, which they’re getting rid of because they’re nearing their sell-by date. If we don’t take them, they’ll throw them away. It’s an insult. Leftovers are what you give animals, not human beings.” Denisov hawked again, but this time didn’t follow through; his phlegm was clearly not rising as fast as his bile. “We’re a great people, Juku. We’ll settle things ourselves, with our state and our government. There’s a world of difference between help and handouts. The West gives us this today—who knows what they’ll ask in return tomorrow? This is free cheese in the mousetrap. For all I know, the meat there’s been poisoned. I wouldn’t feed it to my dog.”

  “I didn’t know you had a dog, Denis Denisovich.”

  “I don’t.”

  Rodion was waiting for Irk down in the lobby of Petrovka, ignoring the stares of the able-bodied. “I heard it on the news,” he said. “Thought you’d like some moral support.”

  “I’d like a drink, that’s what I’d like.”

  Rodion laughed. “We’ll make a Russian out of you yet, Juku.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Rodya, but the longer this goes on, the happier I am to be Estonian. Yes, I’d love a drink, but I have to go back to the VDNKh.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “It’s a crime scene, Rodya.”

  “And I’m a … material witness—is that what you call it?”

  “You’ve been watching too many cop shows.”

  “I’m part of the investigation, at any rate.”

  Irk thought for a moment. Two heads were better than one and, as always, he could do with the company. “All right.”

  The worker and farm girl is one of two statues outside the VDNKh; the other is the space obelisk, a shining rocket that trails a diverging jet stream and is faced in sheets of titanium that seem to ignite even in the palest sun. On one side of the plinth, engineers and scientists strive to put a cosmonaut in his rocket; on the other, Lenin leads the masses into space while a woman offers her baby to the sun.

  As Irk and Rodion passed, a man was standing by the obelisk, endlessly declaiming to himself: “I was a cosmonaut. I knew Gagarin, I flew on Voshkod 1. I went all the way to outer space, and came all the way back. I saw the entire globe—the deserts, the seas, all the places I’d heard of but never laid eyes on. And of all the places on earth I could have landed, I had the bad luck to land right back in the Soviet Union.”

  The man saw Rodion and shuddered. Rodion stared straight ahead with the excessive determination of one who is hurt but determined not to show it. When it comes to the disabled, the Russians employ neither linguistic euphemisms nor uneasy piety. If you’re handicapped, you’re in with the lunatics, the imbeciles and the idiots—unsuitable participants in the Soviet experiment, imperfect materials in a perfect society. It’s an approach whose only merit is its complete lack of hypocrisy.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” said Irk, offering him the opportunity to leave without losing face.

  “What, you think I’m bothered by jerks like him? I’ve had years to get used to it. I’ve long since given up on expecting people to understand. How could they? Afghanistan’s the forgotten war, the buried war, the hidden-under-the-carpet war. Survivors of the Great Patriotic War—they’re proper veterans, but not the afgantsy. They got medals for being at Stalingrad, Leningrad, Berlin; we got nailed to the cross to expiate a nation’s sins. If they see me going to the window for war vetera
ns, people say, ‘Hey you, boy—you’re in the wrong line!’ Me with no legs, fuck your mother! ‘I defended the Motherland,’ they go, ‘what’s he done?’ It’s a waste of time trying to talk to them about trauma and stress disorder, they just sneer and say it never bothered them, like they’re made of sterner stuff or something. I’ve got no time for ignorant shits like that.”

  The crime scene was still cordoned off, though the sole policeman on duty seemed more interested in flirting with passing women than securing the area. He straightened when he saw Irk and tried to look officious, but it was too late. In a place where no civilian should have been allowed entry, Irk had seen a child at the base of the sculpture.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Irk said. “This is a crime scene, not a pop concert.”

  “The area’s secure, sir. It’s just me here.”

  “Then what’s that child doing?”

  “What child?”

  “That child,” Irk said, pointing to the sculpture. The policeman turned to follow his finger.

  “There’s no one there, sir.”

  And he was right, there wasn’t.

  Irk hurried over to the statue. The child was gone, but where? There was nothing but open space for a hundred yards in every direction. The kid would’ve had to be an Olympic champion to get away that fast.

  Irk shook his head and slapped at his face. He was seeing specters, hallucinating. He’d been working too hard, everyone at Petrovka told him so.

  Rodion was by Irk’s side—he moved fast for a man with no legs—and pointing upward.

  “What, Rodya—you think he flew?”

  “No. Look—” Rodion was indicating the folds of the farm girl’s skirts. After a moment Irk saw it too: the outline of an opening. “Service hatch,” Rodion said, pulling himself up onto the cornice. He began to climb the girl’s left leg. The metal was smooth, but there were plenty of handholds on the statue’s contours. Rodion clung to them with the casual assurance of an orangutan. The sinews in his forearms stood out like piano wires. He reached for the hatch’s handle and pulled it open. “Come on up,” he called down to Irk.