Vodka

by Boris Starling

  They ran past her, under her, ten seconds later, so close that she could have reached out and stroked the tops of their heads. Alice wanted to laugh at them, peek out and whistle before disappearing again; in her head, they were the Keystone Kops.

  She was on the ground floor now. All she had to do was find an exit. Careful not to make a sound, Alice looked around her. It wasn’t promising. The alcove enclosed her on three sides, and the main distillery floor lay beyond the filtration columns. She tried to remember the layout of the place. The main entrance was nearest, but she couldn’t go out through there. With the threat of Chechen attack constant, it would be too heavily guarded, even on a weekend. What about a side exit? None she could think of, not within reach.

  Her fear had been subsumed while she was on the move. Now, with nothing to occupy her body, her mind began to twist again in quick turns of dread. Being alone was the worst of it. No one to look out for, sure, but no one to look after her either. She suddenly wanted someone else here, it didn’t matter who—Lewis, Bob, even Harry.

  Harry.

  An image jumped into Alice’s mind: Harry on his first day here, blundering into the women’s toilet by mistake. The toilets were down a corridor that ran off the entrance hallway, and they’d have a window, even a small one for ventilation.

  She squirmed very slowly across the top of the crates and looked out. The corridor was not far, perhaps double the distance between alcove and filtration columns. There were three men at the reception console, but if she kept close to the wall, she’d be out of their line of sight. It was worth the risk; she couldn’t lie there all day, they’d find her eventually if she did.

  Alice gripped the edge of the pallet and levered her body over the side, taking the strain in her arms. It was twelve, thirteen feet to the floor; at full stretch, she didn’t have far to drop. A few surplus bottles had been lined up on the ground. Alice took two, for self-defense—a broken bottle was as good a weapon as any at close quarters, and no one in their right mind would come too close to a desperate woman jabbing at them with a smashed glass stump. If she got away cleanly, she’d drink them in celebration.

  Movement would catch the eye of any watcher, but she had to take the chance. She walked quickly along the wall and turned sharply down the corridor. Not too hurried, not too furtive, nothing to suggest she didn’t have a perfect right to be doing what she was. She stepped into the ladies’ toilet, entered the nearest cubicle and locked it behind her. The door and lock were flimsy enough to be kicked off more or less instantly, but they were better than nothing.

  The window was hinged at the top, and opened barely wide enough to accommodate Alice. Reluctantly, she set down the two bottles of vodka—there was no room for them in the satchel, and no other way of getting them out intact. Looping the satchel’s strap around her wrist, she sent it through first, then, feeling ungainly and clumsy, squeezed after it, headfirst like a reluctant diver. The window was set too high for her to be able to reach the ground. She had to let herself fall, twisting as she did so to take the impact on her shoulder rather than her fingers, while her legs came over her head and hard onto the sidewalk beside her.

  Moments later, brushing the snow off herself and rubbing at her bruises, she sauntered into the street and flagged down the nearest car: a dirty white Moskvich, the Ford Fiesta of Russia, so ubiquitous as to be all but invisible. An icon of the Virgin Mary and a topless glamour girl vied for space on the dashboard.

  “Where to?” the driver asked, slapping the passenger window down with his hand.

  “Patriarch’s Ponds.” Sweat on her brow, heart hammering beneath her shirt. She climbed in the back, sliding a violin case along the seat to make room. “Violin, or machine gun?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Violin. One of my many talents.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a stack of business cards, fanning them out between thumb and forefinger like a magician inviting her to pick a card, any card. Alice read the descriptions: Petropavlovsk, Sergei Mikhailovich, taxi driver, violinist, photographer, taxidermist, bookbinder, insurance salesman, counselor, caterer, television postproduction.

  “I used to be a cabbie, but it cost too much. You have to bribe everyone at the depot—the depot manager, to get a decent car; the mechanic, to make it fit for service; the garage manager, if you need repairs done; the controller, for giving you a favorable shift and cooking the time clock; and the guy at the exit gate, to let you leave. Once you’ve paid all that, fares and tips aren’t enough, you need to find after-hours vodka, tours, whores.”

  He jinked left and right between two cars, and the Moskvich lurched like sloshing bathwater in protest. They passed signs on the sidewalk for pork chops, mashed potatoes, vanilla pudding—street canteens serving hot meals to the poor, the elderly, invalids, all those for whom winter bit particularly hard. Alice guessed that the food was from Operation Provide Hope, but she couldn’t see whether the meals were being sold or given away.

  She’d been into a lion’s den and come out unscathed. She felt flushed with triumph, and it was all she could do not to yell at the top of her lungs. Instead, she gestured to the array of business cards. “Do you really do all these things?”

  “Not all. But I know people who can. There are lots of us down on our luck, and nothing comes for free anymore. The other day, I broke down in the middle of nowhere, coming back from Kiev. There used to be this unspoken rule that the first driver who passed a broken-down vehicle stopped and helped. How else can you run things, when you’ve got crap cars covering vast distances on bad roads? So the first driver stopped, as usual. But even before he’d looked for the teapot sign”—a window thus marked indicates that the driver is mechanically inept; Russians take a perverse pleasure in advertising this—“he asked me: ‘D’you have money?’ I wonder what this place is coming to.” He swiveled around to look at her more closely. “You look like you need a drink.”

  “Damn straight, I do.”

  Petropavlovsk reached down into the passenger foot-well and picked up a bottle and a glass. Alice opened, poured and drank all in one movement.

  “Ay, ay,” Petropavlovsk said, wincing. “You drink like a Russian.”

  Back home, Alice was grateful to find the apartment empty. She didn’t feel up to talking to Lewis just then. She typed a report of what she’d found at Red October, ran the more incriminating papers through the fax to make copies and added them as appendices. Then she called Arkin and said she had to see him, now. She didn’t ask whether she was interrupting his weekend; Arkin would have made each day forty-eight hours long if it meant he could work harder.

  In his office, she watched him read in a silence punctuated only by the dull tapping of a vodka glass against her teeth.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked when he’d finished.

  What a question, she thought. “I’m not doing anything. If there was nothing to find, then I wouldn’t have found it.”

  “You think this is going to help the process?”

  “If this kind of stuff’s going on, the process isn’t worth it in the first place.”

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “This isn’t incompetence or random pilfering. It’s systematic fraud.”

  “You think I should fire him?”

  “Do you have a choice?”

  “What good will firing him do? You think we’re ever going to get any of the money back? He’ll have hidden it too well. More than that, Alice, we need Lev for privatization to work. Sack him, and we can kiss good-bye the whole process. Sack him, and you might as well give Karkadann the keys and invite him to help himself. You should have left this alone.”

  “And let the Russian people buy into a charade? No way.”

  “Alice, this is—”

  “—Russia, I know, but that doesn’t mean we can just brush everything under the carpet. Why do we need Lev for privatization? The vouchers are distributed, the auction date set. This thing is bigger than one man. If he ki
cks up a fuss, we can destroy him publicly. Sacking him will prove once and for all that this really is a revolution, that people are called to account when they’ve done wrong. Coming clean now won’t derail privatization. Quite the opposite—it’ll save it.”

  “That’s not how things work here.”

  “You want me to take this to the president, Kolya?”

  “Be my guest. You won’t get a word of sense out of him.”

  “Oh?”

  “He often leaves the Kremlin early, sometimes right after lunch, and makes for his dacha in Barivkha, giving orders that he’s not to be disturbed. He’s horrible to deal with when he’s like this, and it’s utterly impossible to get him to do anything. He’ll only snap out of it when there’s a crisis.”

  “What the hell’s this, then, if not a crisis?”

  “Not enough of one, that’s what. He needs a total emergency—tanks at the White House, battle stations. Then you’ll see him at his best: he swallows papers like a computer, the days are too short for him.”

  “Kolya, if you don’t fire Lev, I’ll go to the media and tell them myself.”

  There were four messages on Alice’s answering machine when she returned home, all from Lev: the first bewildered, the second angry, the third frustrated, the fourth tinged with a desperation she’d never heard from him before. Lewis was in bed, asleep after a night at the Sklifosovsky. He wouldn’t have heard the phone ring; it was in the living room and, because it was a shoddy Soviet model, it rang quietly and sometimes not at all.

  On the way into the kitchen to pour herself a vodka, Alice caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and wasn’t sure what she saw. A fearless crusader for truth and justice? Perhaps. Partly. But she wasn’t yet so far gone that she couldn’t see beneath that, down to the depths where she hated herself for cheating on a man who loved her, where she depended on a man she needed to get away from, where she was trying to make Lev hate her enough to finish their affair, to effect what she didn’t have the courage to do herself.

  56

  Sunday, February 16, 1992

  Alice went to watch Lewis play broomball at lunchtime. She needed to feel secure among her own kind, no matter how regularly she tried to disown them.

  Broomball is ice hockey light, and for Alice it was just about the perfect microcosm of expatriate life. It removes all hockey’s danger: players use brooms tied with tape or string rather than sticks, rubber-soled shoes rather than skates, and pucks of plastic rather than vulcanized rubber. Despite this, it’s still compulsory to wear helmets and face guards, even though it’s easier to get a tan in a Moscow winter than get badly hurt playing broomball.

  Lewis slid around the ice with more enthusiasm than technique. Alice laughed with him when he fell over and cheered when he scrambled the puck into the goal, but she felt as though she were watching a son rather than a husband. She was keeping things from him, so her knowledge was greater than his, as an adult’s is greater than a child’s, and his resulting state of innocence was childlike too. Knowledge breeds power and power breeds pity—and pity, Alice thought, is the one thing you should never feel for a spouse. She still wanted to talk with Lewis and be his friend, go for walks and to the theater, hug and protect him, everything that wasn’t exciting, because what excited her were the very things she kept from him. What she didn’t want, even though she could still admire his handsomeness, was to sleep with him.

  Lewis’s team was leading until the last minute, when he gave away a penalty and the opposition scored to tie the match. Over on the touchline afterward, as the players gathered their belongings, one of Lewis’s teammates, an attaché at the German embassy, rounded on him.

  “If you hadn’t conceded that penalty, we would have won the match.”

  “If you guys hadn’t invaded Russia,” Alice said, “you’d have won the war.”

  It was a perfect winter’s day, the cold matched only by the brilliance of the sun and the purity of a cloudless sky. Alice and Lewis went for a walk in a silence that he found companionable and she cagey. They passed like tourists through Resurrection Gate and into Red Square, a paved desert surely too vast to be contained in a city. Red Square looks as though it descended from the sky and simply erased an entire district. Its vacant tracts and towering walls make all those inside look insignificant. On the cobbles laid deliberately to recall the curvature of the earth, one can feel both at the world’s center and at its edge. This is no cozy, friendly courtyard; this is architecture as war.

  Alice was struck by how the Kremlin draws all Moscow toward it, like a basin into which the city drains. In fact—another of Moscow’s million absurdities—the Kremlin stands on a hill, like a huge Escher drawing in which a hill can be lower than the ground around it. The fortress is massive and impassive, and there’s nothing subtle about it. It imposes, the towers stabbing the skyline, the golden domes swelling and glittering. It intimidates, a Mecca for those who believed, a Hades for those who opposed. More than any other place in Moscow, Russia, perhaps the world, the Kremlin says simply, “I am the power,” and it itched at something atavistic in Alice.

  The men came for them when they were down by the river. There were two of them, and as they approached, Alice watched with the curious detachment of the slightly drunk. They looked entirely normal, shapeless under heavy dark coats and fur hats, but there was something about the purpose and direction of their gait that pulsed warnings through the vodka fences in her head. As they came past, one knelt down to tie his shoelace while the other kept walking, and Alice was already shouting a warning to Lewis—she knew the impossibility of tying a shoelace when wearing thick gloves—when the first goon grabbed her from behind. He circled one arm around her neck and the other around her waist, pinning her fast. His companion, rising fast from the sidewalk, hit Lewis square in the face and knocked him to the ground before turning toward Alice.

  A few cars puttering up and down the embankment, a family on the other side of the highway, a woman walking down toward the bridge—all as remote and unreachable as Mars.

  A glint in the sunshine, a knife blooming in a gloved hand.

  Alice felt less panicked than curious. For once, she was at the perfect state of intoxication: too drunk to be scared or feel much pain, not drunk enough for her coordination and reactions to have totally deserted her. She jerked her head sharply backward and heard rather than felt the crack against the teeth of the man who was holding her. It was surprise as much as anything that made him loosen his grip, but surprise was all Alice needed. She felt for his balls through the thick fabric of his trousers and squeezed as hard as she could. When he took an instinctive pace backward, she kicked flat-footed against his knee and heard him howl in pain above the crack of bone.

  The knife man slashed at Alice. She saw the blade disappear inside her coat, but didn’t feel it go any farther. She was moving, and he needed a clear shot to get through so many layers—she’d have been dead had it been summer. He pulled the knife out and raised it past his ear, intending an overhand shot. She grabbed at his wrist and brought her knee up into his groin, hard as she could, and with the fingers of her other hand she jabbed at his face, balls and eyes, balls and eyes, and now cars were slowing and people were looking, and he dropped the knife and ran.

  Alice went after him, anger making her yell she didn’t know what. When she passed a courting couple, their looks of astonishment made her realize what she must have looked like; a lunatic woman, loose on the city streets. At the same moment, she knew she wouldn’t catch him, and she stopped as the adrenaline subsided.

  Lewis was coming toward her. She was surprised at how distant he was, and therefore how far she must have run. His face was streaming blood, and he was shouting something at her. “Too dangerous,” he bawled. “You see? You see now?”

  The danger he’d meant was Moscow’s, but it was also in Alice; a woman crazed with anger, who would have killed the man she’d been chasing if she’d reached him. The darkness in her was the da
rkness in the city, that was why Lewis hated this place so. She reached for him when he arrived. “What’s doing?” she panted. “Are you OK?”

  “Fine, fine.” He brushed her hand away. “Nothing broken.”

  Alice saw the other man, the one she’d kicked, being bundled into a car. She was too far away to read the license plate—not that it would have made any difference. The car was bound to be stolen, unregistered, or both. She turned back to Lewis.

  “Thanks for asking how I am,” she said bitterly.

  57

  Monday, February 17, 1992

  Three adolescent beggars came toward Irk, swaying with the movement of the metro carriage as the train whistled through the tunnels. Street children had never been around under communism—correction, they’d never been visible under communism. Now they rode the carriages like pint-sized hobos, dodging the transportation police and begging money from defiantly indifferent passengers. Street kids aroused as much fear as sympathy in adults. Homeless children were outsiders, the neglected ones. Most of them, Irk knew, had two options—begging or crime. When Irk opened his copy of Argumenty y Fakty, he saw Arkin reported as saying that “the number of homeless children and their criminalization has reached threatening proportions. Urgent measures are required.”

  That last statement made Irk wince. Urgent measures meant one of two things, piss and wind or mindless brutality, neither of which would help the children. And this in a society that so prizes childhood. Irk thought of Lev’s orphanage, one of the few places to be tackling the problem constructively—and look what was happening there.