Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “And by the time we get permission to use either of those, Karkadann will be long gone. He’s always on the move, you know that.” Yerofeyev shrugged, not his problem, and Irk saw the reason for the apathy. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he snapped. “You’ve no reason to want Karkadann caught, not with the bribes he’s paying you.”

  “You know what you should do, Juku? Call Lev and get him to send his men over.”

  “And take sides in a Mafia war? Never.”

  “They’ll do a better job than anyone we’ve got here.”

  “I need your men, and I need them now.”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll go to Arkin and tell him how cooperative you’ve been.”

  Four vans, six men in each, and two cars, four men apiece, all racing with blues and twos around the Garden Ring.

  “I want roadblocks at each corner,” Irk barked into his radio. “No traffic, in or out—is that understood?”

  None of the men in the back of the van looked at him. There were half as many flak jackets as were needed; they’d had to draw lots for them. The ones who’d gotten jackets looked just as nervous as the ones who hadn’t. “These vests might as well be made of newspaper, and Pravda at that, for all the truth about them being bulletproof,” said one of Yerofeyev’s men. “Ha! They couldn’t stop a paper plane.”

  Why was Karkadann at the Belgrade? That was the last place he should have gone, and therefore, Irk thought with excitement and a dollop of grudging admiration, the most sensible place to have gone. One chance, one chance. Irk was momentarily surprised at how visceral his animosity toward Karkadann was, then he remembered that pretending to execute someone tended to breed enmity.

  Smolensky Square loomed ahead, the Belgrade skulking in the shadow of one of Stalin’s vampiric skyscrapers. Irk saw a half-assembled roadblock. “Clean shots,” he said. “Watch your background; watch your background.” Force markers, kicking in like adrenaline.

  The police vans and cars slewing to a halt outside the wedding-cake ministry building; men piling from their vehicles; passersby screaming and scattering. “Police—move,” Irk shouted at the herd. “Stay down, stay still.” Juku Irk, chess player reprieved from death, now in the mix and loving it as vengeful bile rose within him. Walking along the sidewalk, running, walking again. A bus and a truck stopped in the square, perfect cover as he tried to see what was going on.

  A furious volley; Chechens in the road, tipped off by the roadblocks and waiting for the police; stars of flame bursting from the ends of their machine guns, spent cartridges chattering in spurts to the ground. Dull slaps of falling men, dead before they landed: a Chechen, two cops. Weapons letting rip in concrete canyons; penetrations and ricochets, reverberation coming in patterns. Vehicles sinking and listing as bullets tore the air from their tires. More men down, sprawling across each other like drunkards. Glass shattering on advertising billboards of models in silhouette. A Western, a war film, come to Moscow’s streets.

  And there he was, right there, as though Irk had simply willed him into being: Karkadann himself, fascistic steel-and-glass towers behind him, this powerhouse of rampant self-interest with his legs apart for stability and hands spitting fire, a brace of guns spraying carnage as Zhorzh ran for cover behind one of the Chechens’ jeeps. Irk saw in Karkadann the lust for havoc, the fever of blood madness to kill everything he could find. If his guns ran dry, he’d fight the cops with knives and iron girders. If those ran out, he’d fight with his bare hands. If he died, he’d take a score of men with him. But he wouldn’t die, he was untouchable, as though he carried a force field around him. Behind Irk, a petrified policeman jabbered, barely coherent, of demons and dark forces. This is our battlefield, Karkadann had said, This is where we’ll win.

  It was Zhorzh’s turn to give covering fire, even though he could hardly see through the blood running into his eyes. Only now did Karkadann move, speeding across the ground with his limp, even though he seemed only to be ambling. He crouched down and wiped the blood from Zhorzh’s forehead. Three Chechens bundled them into the jeep and off they went toward the river, the only route the police hadn’t yet managed to block.

  Irk sagged against the nearest wall in deflated frustration. Yerofeyev’s eyes were storm-whipped breakers of accusation, and Irk couldn’t bring himself to meet them.

  Nothing made Alice feel more like a Muscovite than riding the metro, and Revolution Square was one of her favorite stations. The bronze figures crouched under the arches gave her a comfortable feeling of companionship; there were sailors, soldiers, farmers and airmen, all with their weapons ready to protect the Motherland, to protect Moscow, to protect Alice. The escalator hauled her and Galina up through heroic mosaics of Soviet endeavor. A man in a full gas mask passed them on the opposite stairway, heading for the city’s bowels. Alice wondered whether he wore the mask because he was hideously disfigured, or because he knew something she didn’t; was he a lunatic, or the last sane person in the asylum?

  Outside the station, cars were parked all across the road, directly under signs proclaiming NO PARKING ZONE. Galina gestured to the signs. “No one pays any attention, as usual. But they should.”

  “What, to parking restrictions?”

  “No. To the zone. The zone used to mean the gulags and the prisons, but these days we’re all living under the zone’s laws, we’re all frightened. Look what’s happened at Prospekt Mira. Look what happened today in Smolensky Square—twenty-two dead, they said, twice as many injured. Read the papers, watch the TV: bombings, murders, Mafia score-settlings…”

  Not Lev, Alice wanted to say. She felt an obscure urge to defend him even when he wasn’t the topic of conversation; she wanted to mention him whenever she could.

  “… robberies, assaults, maniacs on the loose. The rich kill each other with bodyguards and automatic weapons, the poor use vodka and kitchen knives, but they end up just the same, and the likes of me get caught in the middle.” Galina reached into her handbag and pulled out a can of Mace. “Every girl I know carries one of these. Some have electrical stunners too. There’s a weirdo around every corner, Alice. Did I tell you what happened the other night? I found a man outside our building dressed in high heels—nothing else.”

  “Shit,” Alice said. “I wish I had time for a social life.”

  They laughed as much as the small joke and their tentative rapprochement was worth.

  For most Russians, the name “Lubyanka” resounds like a gunshot at the end of a darkened corridor—the traditional method of killing prisoners in the KGB’s notorious stronghold. Lubyanka, where every brick marked a grave. But for a lucky few, Lubyanka was Moscow’s newest and trendiest nightclub. Alice had been sent an invitation for herself plus guest. Lewis, predictably, hadn’t been keen to come—nightclubs were his idea of hell—so she’d asked Galina, hoping to make up with her.

  They were whisked through an unmarked doorway and down a dark, shabby corridor dotted with piles of construction debris—subterfuge to deter undesirables who might be attracted to a new nightclub. Moreover, it’s very Russian to hide one’s light under a bushel, to ensure first impressions are wrong. In Russia, what you see is almost never what you get.

  The corridor gave onto a hallway smelling of mold. It widened abruptly to a vast atrium wiped with neon and shaking with an impossibly loud bass-line. They’d come in at the mezzanine level, a gallery that ran around the walls high above the dance floor. A vast head hung from the ceiling, its lifeless bronze eyes staring straight at Alice. It took several moments before she realized that she was looking at Feliks Dzerzhinsky—Iron Feliks, who’d founded the KGB—and that the noose that held it up was the same one that had pulled the statue from its plinth opposite the real Lubyanka following the August coup.

  Alice shouted in Galina’s ear. “It’s a nuclear bunker. The defense ministry still owns it; the managers had to agree that they’d vacate the place within six hours if war’s ever declared.”

  Galina shr
ugged. “The defense ministry’s got to make money like everyone else, I guess.”

  The walls had been designed to mimic the Lubyanka’s exterior: gunmetal cladding atop a smooth base of black stone; dour and sour shades reeking of military uniforms. It was a color scheme, Alice thought, that hardly lent itself to jovial activity, but people seemed to be having a good time wherever she looked. Naked swimmers glided in a huge tank along one wall, pounding techno beats bounced off the glass ceilings and through the velvet-covered steel-tube furniture, while graying men with bulges in their jackets huffed and puffed with miniskirted girls young enough to be their daughters. Location apart, it was a typical Russian nightclub: the music secondary to the idea, performance art and fashion wrapped in self-conscious mockery, and all somehow incomplete, the sum less than its parts.

  Alice leaned toward the man escorting them through the crowds and bawled in his ear: “It’s very loud!”

  “What do you mean? This is a quiet night.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure it is. No one’s been shot yet.” His tie was patterned with bullet holes and blood. Alice had to look closer to see that they were part of the design.

  He took them to a private room behind a mirrored wall on the main level. A vast buffet stretched the width of one wall. Sofas and armchairs lined the periphery, a dining table stood like an island in the middle, straining under platters of mushrooms baked in sour cream, and salted fish; smoked salmon and pickled cucumbers; herrings and meatballs; cold meats and cold fish; chilled soups with chopped pickles; and of course caviar, the black zirnistaya from the Caspian sturgeon and the red keotvaya from the roe of Siberian river salmon.

  Sabirzhan was sitting at the table, smiling at them. Alice thought it must be a coincidence, and not an especially welcome one at that. She turned to Galina in surprise, but in return saw only shamed complicity.

  “Well done, Galya,” Sabirzhan said. “Sit, both of you. Please.”

  Alice slumped rather than lowered herself into the nearest chair, dropping as fast as her mood. She was annoyed at Galina, but held herself to blame; in Russia, everything comes around. Sabirzhan rubbed at her bare arm, his fingers tracing a snail’s humid path that made her shudder. When he smiled at her, his lips looked like engorged maggots. She wanted to spit in his face.

  “You like this place?” he asked.

  Through the window, Alice could see a mock show trial being carried out onstage. “No.”

  “Shame. It’ll do very well.”

  Alice looked at Galina. “What’s all this about?”

  Sabirzhan poured them each a vodka. Galina waited until Alice had finished her glass and called for a refill before she spoke. “You told me things would change,” she said.

  “I … what?”

  “You told me things needed to change—in the factory, in Russia. I did something very bad, because I believed in what you said. And what happened? Nothing.”

  “The staff walked out. We can’t get a new workforce.”

  “It’s just the same as it was before. So what did I do it for? Why did you lie to me, Alice?”

  “I …”

  “It’s not your fault? That’s not good enough. So, why?”

  There was no answer.

  “Thank you, Galya.” Sabirzhan flicked a smile at her. “I’ll take it from here.”

  Alice watched as Galina left the private room and picked her way through the dancing couples. Alice had set this process in motion by encouraging Galina to betray Lev, so how could she complain now? She had known that the price of using Galya might be their friendship. The prospect jarred her, because Galina was the only Russian she felt halfway close to—Lev apart, of course. Yet Alice had never expected it to come to this.

  It had pained her to see Galina’s admiration for her slowly dissipating since the moment she had told her about Lev. What business was it of Galina’s? Lev belonged to Alice and Alice alone. What they had together, the depth and intimacy of it, was the one part of her life that was truly secret. If she told Galina how she felt—even assuming she could find the words to describe it—wouldn’t she be diluting its very preciousness? Besides, it sounded like such a cliché. Every woman in love thinks her man is unique.

  Sabirzhan was speaking. Alice wasn’t really listening, until she heard him ask the waiter for another bottle of vodka—and an intravenous drip for the American lush.

  “That’s it,” she said. “How many times do I have to flush before you go away?”

  She got up to leave. He grabbed her arm, and she sat again rather than let his slimy palm rest on her skin a minute longer than necessary.

  “Stop the process,” he told her. “Stop the auction, get it called off.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or all of Russia will know you’re screwing Lev.”

  “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Your friend told me.” Sabirzhan nodded toward the door through which Galina had left. “Seems you’ve disillusioned her somewhat.”

  “Why the fuck did she come to you?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Then why did she tell you?”

  “I speak to the Kormakitis-Plakoti Bank every week. They told me yesterday that Galya had requested printouts of all transfer details. I asked her why she needed them. She didn’t have a good enough answer.” He grimaced. “She soon found one. There’s never treachery without cooperation, you know. I threatened to tell Lev. She’d have done anything after that.”

  He told her everything; Sabirzhan, the KGB man, eternally suspicious.

  Sabirzhan, who’d found there weren’t enough of his informers at Red October prepared to help him out. They used to be scared of the KGB, now they were scared of being seen with him.

  Sabirzhan, who’d told Lev there were no hard feelings about what had happened at Petrovka, and then set about dismantling the privatization behind his back. He’d given Lev his loyalty, and what had he gotten in return? Three days in a cell with Irk trying to pin child murders on him.

  Sabirzhan, who’d given Alice the Suyumbika file accidentally on purpose.

  Sabirzhan, who’d told Pravda about the murders at Prospekt Mira and beyond.

  Sabirzhan, who’d been prepared to forsake the considerable fortune he stood to make from privatization as long as it harmed Lev.

  “How do I stop the process?” Alice asked.

  “That’s your problem. You’ve got twenty-four hours.”

  A Cossack dancer came onstage, so good that even Sabirzhan clapped in admiration. Legs kicking straight out and arms folded across his chest, the dancer’s balance was impeccable. He could pick flowers in a minefield and not miss a bloom, Alice thought, and turned it back on herself; what was her life but one long feat of equipoise, walking the thinnest of tightropes without so much as a balancing pole, let alone a safety net?

  At midnight exactly, the music stopped and the Soviet national anthem came on. The clubbers cheered and whooped, reveling in the irony. They belted out the words with the zeal of victors mocking the fallen. “Indestructible Union of free republics, joined together for all time by great Russia! All hail the one, powerful Soviet Union, created by the will of the people! Glory to the free Fatherland. The friendship of peoples is our safe stronghold, the party of Lenin, the power of the people, will lead us to the triumph of communism!”

  Sabirzhan was on his feet, singing lustily. This was still his doctrine. When the anthem was finished, he turned to Alice. “We sacrificed ourselves for the ideals of a better life under communism,” he spat. “We planned and planned, then everything was lost. We were lied to. We lived for an idea. You Americans just live for money. Now it turns out you were right all along. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  59

  Wednesday, February 19, 1992

  Alice went to look for Sabirzhan in his office, and then called him at home, both without success. She fretted all morning. Finally, at lunchtime, she went to Lev, and had to wai
t for ten minutes while he bawled out Irk on the phone.

  “Poor guy, I bet he’s catching hell from everyone today,” she said when Lev hung up.

  “And so he should be. We’d have done the job for him, and he knows it. Now Karkadann’s gone again”—he clicked his fingers—“just like that. Who knows when he’ll surface again?”

  “Are you calm enough to listen to me?” His massive shoulders dropped as he exhaled. “Yes.” She gave him an abbreviated version of what had happened last night; abbreviated in that it omitted the nightclub and Galina, leaving just her and Sabirzhan as protagonists. The whole truth would surely have cost Galina her job, perhaps Rodion and Svetlana theirs too, and Alice didn’t want that on her conscience.

  “That fucking prick,” growled Lev. “His face is just asking for a brick. How could I have been so stupid, not to have kept him on the tightest of leashes? Short men have always caused trouble in Russia. Look at Napoleon, look at Hitler. The only people who cause more trouble than short men are Georgians. Sabirzhan’s both, so was Stalin. That tells you all you need to know, my darling.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Lev steepled his fingers. “Ride it.”

  “How?”

  “When you get home tonight, you tell Lewis about us.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Not at all. What’s Sabirzhan banking on? That you’ll do anything to prevent your husband from knowing. Take that away from him, and you leave him nothing.”

  “And then he publicizes it anyway.”

  “So?”

  “So the whole process looks compromised. You know how much opposition there is to this program. It comes out about you and me—collusion at the highest level—the whole thing looks like a farce. It might be the last straw. You get enough pressure on this government, who knows what’ll happen? What if Borzov resigns? Arkin says he’s unpredictable.”

  “The auction will go through.”

  “How can you be sure?”