Vodka

by Boris Starling

The woman on the next seat nudged him. “What can we do?” she asked. “What good can we do?” She waved the children away. Irk gave the nearest one a dollar and shook his head at the others. What good indeed? People felt they couldn’t make any difference on social issues—they’d hardly been encouraged to do so before—and were reluctant to get involved in other people’s problems. Keeping your own head above water was hard enough.

  Alice had dressed down: no makeup, hair unbrushed and the most unflattering clothes she could find. She was punishing herself for being lovely, not knowing that this proud hostility to herself made her more attractive to Lev than ever.

  Lev, unhurried as ever, took her by the elbow and guided her into his office. He must have checked his paperwork, he must have realized what she’d taken and what she’d seen. She wondered whether he would try to bribe or bludgeon or blackmail her into forgetting about it.

  “I’m so glad to see you, Alice. We’re developing a new vodka and it’s a bit of a departure. I’d like you to taste it and tell me what you think.”

  “Lev, we don’t have time for this. There are things…”

  He slapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth in rebuke, as though she’d committed some dreadful rudeness. “Just when I let myself forget you’re an American, you can’t help but remind me again. Always in a rush, never time for the simple things in life. You will sit, Alice, and you will taste this with me.”

  She sat on the edge of a chair, a sulky schoolgirl, while he poured her a glass. “This is pear-drop vodka. The process is very simple, really; we spread a handful of pear-drop candies across a sieve, place the sieve in the vat and let the alcohol pass over it. Esters impurities are sweet and fruity—we’ve kept a small amount in, to complement the pear drops. Some distillers prefer maceration, but I’ve always believed in circulation: six times a day for a week, and then the vodka’s pumped into barrels to let the flavors fuse and settle for a couple of months. Of course, you get evaporation and a corresponding loss of strength—about ten percent, which we adjust prior to bottling.” He handed her the glass. “What do you think?”

  Any aroma of pear drops was submerged under a slightly meaty smell, not unlike stock cubes. Alice knew this was due to the unspent yeasts burned during the distillation. She was getting better. Lev, on the other hand, seemed to be losing his touch. Perhaps it was a sign of change.

  She put the glass down and took a deep breath. “All right. Enough. Did you try to have me killed yesterday?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Two men, by the river. Whatever you think of what I did here on Friday—”

  “Alice, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” His face was closed. He regarded her calmly, happy to prolong the standoff. “You were attacked?” he asked at length.

  “Two men, a deliberate hit. They didn’t want money, they wanted to kill me. Yours?”

  “You believe that of me, you can leave here now and never come back.”

  She imagined, hoped, saw that it was the truth. “I’m sorry.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “Lewis was hit in the face. He’s fine. I—I fought them off.”

  “I’d expect nothing less. I’m glad they didn’t succeed.”

  “I suppose if they had been yours, they wouldn’t have failed.”

  He checked her face to see if she was being serious. “I should sincerely hope not.”

  “I want you to read this—” Quickly, before the conversation ran away from her, she handed Lev a copy of what she’d given Arkin: her report, together with the appendices.

  Lev read it through, his expression relentlessly placid even when he reached the photocopies of his own stolen papers. Alice waited for—what? Eruptive accusations of theft, indignant protestations of mistaken conclusions, savage denunciations of personal betrayal, but she got none, and it was the last that hurt her, because she had betrayed him, and she wanted him at least to recognize that. She wasn’t sure which would be worse: if he really didn’t see the extent of her treachery, or if he was simply determined not to give her the satisfaction of a reaction.

  When Lev finished, he bounced the papers on their ends to straighten them and turned to Alice with a smile. “It’s a shame the Cold War’s over. The CIA could have done with your sort.”

  Like Arkin, he’d made no comment about her methods. Had this been America, every politician would have distanced themselves and every lawyer would have been daubing her in coats of inadmissible evidence and trespass. The Russians couldn’t have given two shits. What she’d found was important; how she’d found it was irrelevant.

  She handed him an envelope embossed with the prime ministerial seal. Lev opened it with the teasing deliberation of an Oscar-night presenter. Inside was Arkin’s order dismissing him from his post at Red October; dated yesterday, delivered to her house this morning. He read it with the same beatific equanimity as earlier.

  “I must confess,” he said, “I don’t see exactly what I’m supposed to have done wrong.”

  “Are you being serious?”

  “Perfectly.”

  God, she thought, there was so much she still had to learn about him. “You’re stealing from the company—no, you’re stealing the company. Without me, there’d have been nothing left of Red October by the time we got to auction day. The whole thing would have been a farce.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “What’s nothing divided by forty-five thousand shares? Nothing, that’s what.”

  “I’m not stealing the company.”

  “What are you doing, then?”

  “Preserving it.”

  “Preserving it? Tell me how, exactly.”

  “This auction—who knows what’ll happen?”

  “It’ll all be properly run.”

  “Afterward, I mean. You start letting outsiders in, you open up a whole can of worms. But with everything that matters tucked away in Nicosia, under my control, I know it’s safe.”

  “And?”

  “And I can keep running the place as before, and none of my workers lose their jobs.” He gestured at her report. “Sure, it’s all true. But I’m only stealing from a government that’ll otherwise steal from me.”

  “You’re stealing from your workers—the same workers whose jobs you harp on about.”

  “Stealing from them? You’ve seen me with them, Alice. They respect me, no? They wouldn’t respect me if I was ripping them off.”

  “They don’t know you’re ripping them off.”

  “They get their cut.” Her surprise amused him. “You thought they didn’t?”

  “All of them?”

  “Indirectly, yes.”

  “Your cronies, mostly.”

  “I distribute revenue among the workforce according to need as well as seniority. A married man with six children gets more than a single woman, that’s only fair.”

  “But you get the most. You and your friends.”

  “Of course. The closer you are to product control, the more you take. That’s obvious.”

  “It doesn’t make you Robin Hood.”

  “Nor does it make me a shop-floor Ceaucescu. Tell me again: how am I stealing from them?”

  “By forcing them to sell you their vouchers.”

  It had been so long since Lev had flipped, from affability to incandescence in an eye’s blink, that he caught Alice quite off guard. “That? That? I’m doing them a favor. They get something useful—cash. I get a piece of paper that—like all the others the government issues—is worthless. Vouchers are worthless, rubles are worthless, and this”—he brandished Arkin’s order at her—“is worthless.”

  “The order is served pending a criminal investigation.”

  “You can’t prosecute me. I’m a deputy. I’ve got immunity.”

  “Not from an executive order.” Lev shrugged. Alice continued: “There’s two ways we can do this. You can leave now, or I call Arkin and he sends in the heavies and the television cameras, and all Moscow will
see you being escorted from the building like a criminal.”

  Perhaps for the first time, Alice understood that either Lev would go or she would; they could not both stay. Only with him gone could she regain control of the auction and her life. She didn’t ask what this meant for the two of them. This was the course she’d chosen, and she couldn’t bear to consider the alternatives.

  Lev nodded slowly. An oil slick of a smile spread across his face. He held up his hands. “Very well, Alice.” His voice was as calm as it had, a minute before, been furious. “You win. You’ll let me explain things to my workers before I leave?”

  “Another time.”

  “At least permit me to say good-bye to them as I go.”

  Alice thought about this. They’d have questions, but once Lev was gone, she felt she could handle them. “Sure.”

  “Perhaps you’ll walk with me through the factory.”

  “If you like.”

  “I like.”

  They took the elevator down to the distillery floor without speaking. Curiously, it wasn’t an awkward silence, more the quiet of old friends who have come to the end of a long road mutually traveled. Alice was surprised by Lev’s lack of animosity. He must be in shock, she thought. Logically, he may have taken on board the news that his time here was at an end; emotionally, she knew, it would take much longer to register. It would be the close of an era for the workers too, she realized. For the younger ones, Lev was the only boss they’d ever had. After five years, even some of the older ones would be hard pressed to remember what had come before him.

  As they started out across the vast caverns of the distillery, she fell half a pace behind him. This was his moment, and she understood that she should allow him the dignity of taking it alone. She looked up and around her: at the gangways spanning the ceiling, the pallets stacked against the walls, all the places where she’d run and hidden from him, his cronies, her feelings.

  Lev paused by German Kullam, leaned into him and whispered something in his ear. German was looking straight at Alice, and she saw the emotions flit like bats across his face: surprise, realization, determination. He nodded once, decisive.

  “What did you say to him?” Alice asked Lev.

  Lev didn’t answer. German was already walking away, to the person at the next station; another whisper, another nod, then they both moved down the line and passed the message on again, and so it spread.

  The whispers came to Alice as though borne on the west wind. Zabastovka, the workers were saying, zabastovka.

  Strike.

  If Alice had been impressed at how quickly Lev had started up the machinery on Saturday morning, she was no less awed by the speed with which his employees were shutting the place down now. Conveyor belts creaked and juddered to a halt; bewildered bottles wobbled drunkenly as their endless passage was suddenly suspended, the gurgling and hissing from the stills subsided as though they were falling asleep. Alice heard only footsteps and lowered voices, tones of bereavement. Watching in amazement and not a little awe as Lev led the way through the main door—hadn’t the poster under Resurrection Gate depicted her as the Pied Piper?—she stifled an urge to applaud.

  Even Arkin couldn’t find an entire workforce at such short notice. Alice suggested they bring in a skeleton staff from one of the more westernized Eastern Bloc countries, such as Estonia or Poland. Arkin said this would be useless. Lev’s workers were valuable not because they were acquainted with the latest in distillery technology, but because they alone could operate the obsolete equipment that Red October had yet to replace. “The auction’s two weeks away,” Arkin said. “We’ve no choice. We have to bring him back.”

  “With all that shit.”

  “That auction has to go ahead. I don’t care what you’ve found, we can’t do it without Lev. We tried, we failed, we’ve been outmaneuvered—accept it. Rather that than this whole thing goes to shit.”

  “I—”

  “You’ve brought this on yourself. Listen to me, Alice. Everything rests on this auction. If you mess this up, no international organization will give you a job till the next millennium. Go to him, get what concessions you can, but get him back. At any price.”

  “You come with me.”

  “No. You’ve been working with him, you’ll persuade him better. Use your charm.”

  It was not that Arkin suspected their affair, merely that he was distancing himself, just as Borzov had by leaving Moscow. Arkin would blame Alice for anything that went wrong, saying he’d been mistaken to trust a perfidious foreigner. And it was precisely because she was a foreigner, because her life and career weren’t here, that she was expendable. If it still went off OK, Arkin would claim the credit; if it didn’t, dissociation was the only hope he would have of persuading parliament not to throw out the reformist administration. The reformers had no power base worth the name; they were a straggling handful trying to climb Everest, and their only clothes were tiny shreds of legislation liable to be ripped away at any moment.

  Alice understood Arkin’s logic, understood too that it was nothing personal against her. Personal and professional might be intertwined with Lev, but not with Arkin.

  Lev seemed both pleased and unsurprised when she came to his penthouse, and Alice thought she knew why. In uncovering Lev’s trickery and maneuvering for his dismissal, Alice had shown power, steadfastness and ruthlessness; she’d used her alliances with powerful men; and she’d shown herself willing to adapt to local conditions. All of these were qualities Lev admired. Yes, they were lovers, but they were also adversaries.

  “You want me to come back,” Lev said. “You wouldn’t have come here otherwise.” Alice shrugged. “I can do this anytime I like, you know. Bring my workers out on strike, I mean. I can make them run, jump, roll over, sit up and beg.”

  “I know.” She’d realized that Lev had bought his employees heart, soul and conscience.

  “So what are you offering?”

  “It’s not good for anybody, this way.”

  “What are you offering?”

  “You have to wind down Krestyakh and restore Red October’s assets. We can’t run an auction with nothing, that’s plain stupid.”

  “And in return?”

  “Everything else. You can keep everything else the way it is.” It was not a moral judgment, but a practical one. Alice thought how far her original ideals had been eroded. It had been a gradual diminution, a whittling away so subtle she’d hardly noticed it happening, because there’d been a good reason behind every compromise she’d made. “You can’t keep running Red October this way forever. In time, being majority shareholder in a well-run private company will earn you more money than you do now. Agree to that, and the dismissal order’s rescinded.”

  He smiled at her. “Persuade me.”

  “We need you, but you love that factory. Fair’s fair.”

  “No. Really persuade me.”

  She understood what he was driving at. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not appropriate.”

  “Not appropriate?” He chuckled, and she felt herself swaying. He was quicksand, he was a whirlpool. “Not appropriate is hiding out in factories all night. Not appropriate is accusing your lover of trying to kill you. Come.” He reached out a hand, a force field that dragged her closer. “You’re very persuasive when you put your mind to it. And I need a lot of persuading.”

  She nuzzled his neck. “This much?”

  “More.”

  She kissed gently around the edge of his mouth. “This much?”

  He shook his head with a look of mock disappointment, and she laughed as she unbuttoned his shirt and felt inside. “This much?”

  “Ah. Finally, I’m beginning to see the merits of your proposal.”

  She worked at his belt. “This much?”

  “Now, Alice, those are some excellent points you’re making!” The rumbling of his laughter gladdened her heart.

  58

  Tuesday, February 18
, 1992

  Under communism, people had complained about the authorities; now they complained to the authorities. Every man and his dog seemed to be calling Petrovka for a good old moan. It was Irk’s misfortune to get saddled with a particularly vehement busybody.

  “Why aren’t you doing something about the niggers, that’s what I want to know?” she shouted. “There are hundreds of them near me, riding around in their gaudy cars and causing heaven knows what kind of trouble.”

  “It’s a free country, madam.”

  “More’s the shame. Day and night they’re here, putting good people in fear of their lives. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is. I won’t be letting my kids out of my sight, that’s for sure—not now that he’s down here.”

  “He?”

  “The gangster. The one who’s on TV, ranting and raving. You know.”

  Irk’s office was as overheated as every other room in Moscow, but now he shivered. “Where exactly do you live, madam?”

  “Shubinsky Avenue.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Off Smolensky Square, just around the back of the Belgrade Hotel. That’s where they are.”

  Of course they were—that was their headquarters. “Let me get this straight,” Irk said, hardly daring to believe it. “Karkadann’s there?”

  “Karkadann, yes, that’s him.”

  “You saw him yourself?”

  “With my own eyes, and there’s nothing wrong with them. There I was in my kitchen, and from there I can see into the back courtyards of the Belgrade. I was looking out, minding my own business”—sure you were, Irk thought—“and there he was, getting out of one of those jeep-type things, a whole bunch of coons around him like he’s the czar or something.”

  Irk was already halfway down the corridor.

  Homicide didn’t have enough men to spare. Organized crime did.

  “An anonymous tip-off?” Yerofeyev said. “You must be mad.”

  “Let’s say I’m not. She sounded genuine enough.”

  “Then this is a job for the OMON, even the Spetsnaz.” OMON was the interior ministry’s riot police; Spetsnaz were army special forces.