By midday, the waiting masses had begun to thin. About a third of the patrons had wandered off in an all too familiar legacy of dashed hopes. Some still clutched their vouchers, others had torn them up and thrown them in Alice’s face. A proportion of the reporters had left too, convinced that the story had come and gone. Those who remained, in both camps, seemed to be there largely because they had nothing else to do.
At lunchtime, Alice drank vodka, three glasses more or less straight off, and started laughing—what else could she do? It was so bad that it was funny. Borzov and Arkin must have gotten wind of the fiasco; they hadn’t been around, or even contacted her.
She called Lev’s numbers every thirty minutes, on the hour and at half past, and received no answer. She’d left raging messages at each number; she didn’t have the energy for any more.
At six o’clock, the scheduled end of the auction, she, Bob and Harry reluctantly abandoned the exhibition hall and set off for the Ukrainia, where Alice fully intended to drink the bar dry.
At a quarter past six, as they were crossing Kalininsky Bridge, Lev phoned.
Lev’s sitting room was vast, but Alice crossed it without seeming to touch the ground. She flew at him, talons outstretched. She wanted to rip Lev’s skin from his bones and tear his eyes out. Until that moment, she’d never fully understood the old adage about there being a thin line between love and hate, but she got it now, she’d flipped the coin. He grabbed her wrists and pushed her against the wall so that she couldn’t get enough leverage to kick him.
“How could you?” she shouted. “How could you?”
“What choice did I have?” he said simply. He held her close, both to restrain and comfort her. He was so much bigger than her that she had no real hope of hurting him.
“Let me go,” she said.
He did so. “At least let me explain,” he said.
“I’d like to see you try.”
He told her what had happened, as quickly and simply as he could. There were copies of the staff list for the auction at Red October, of course. Last night, he’d sent two 21st Century men to every staffer’s address—that was 300 Mafiosi, give or take. Each worker had been at home; anyone helping out at the auction would by definition not be earning enough money to go out on a Sunday night. Lev’s men had given every helper one hundred dollars to stay at home the next day and ignore all phone calls. The money was the carrot; the stick came with the implicit threat of Mafia retribution if these instructions were not obeyed. Five people—a teller, a controller, a counter, a chief counter and a supervisor—had been given half as much money again and told to be at Tsvetnoy Bulvar metro station by seven-thirty the next morning. From there, they’d been taken to the 21st Century’s underground vodka warehouse beneath the Garden Ring, near the junction with Prospekt Mira, now cleaned of the bloodstains from the massacre of the Chechens.
This was where the auction had taken place. The warehouse had been open all day, in accordance with auction regulations, but since no one knew how to get there—or even what was going on—it was unsurprising that there’d been only one bidder. This bidder had of course followed the procedure scrupulously, specifying that he was placing a type one, passive, bid. In doing so he had agreed to accept the final price reached, but had in return been guaranteed at least one share. At the end of the day’s proceedings, with the total number of bids still standing at one, Lev had been presented with twenty-nine percent of the shares in Red October for the grand total of ten thousand rubles—which, at prevailing exchange rates, was substantially less than one American cent.
Alice had sold a similar stake in a Polish soft-drinks factory to Pepsi for fifty million dollars.
“Why?” she spat. “Why?”
“For you.”
“For me? You’ve ruined everything. How was that for me?”
“Karkadann would have killed you.”
“You arranged this with him?”
Lev told her about their conversation, and how the Chechens had let her escape.
“You should have let me die,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m being perfectly serious.”
“You value this auction over your life?”
“This auction is my life.”
“You’re drunk, you don’t mean that.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“You are. I can smell it from here. I’m sorry about what’s happened, I really am, but what else could I do? I live in my own system of coordinates, that’s the pure truth. The new Russia is too fragile for Western morals and manners. It needs hard-hearted pragmatists, men like me, willing to dirty their hands and stain their souls, just to survive. My choice was a matter of life or death. I made the decision that your life was worth more than our auction. I’d make it again.”
“You could have told me.”
“And risk you go running to Arkin? No.”
She was calming down, her thoughts were clearer. “When exactly did you arrange this?”
He looked her straight in the eye. “Friday.”
“Three days ago.”
“Yes.”
“So all that time, when you were looking after me, you knew what you were going to do?” Her anger was rising again. It hadn’t cooled very far, and it was coming back to the boil very fast. “When you were bathing me, and watching me sleep, and looking over me, you knew?”
“Of course.”
“You fuck.” It was a noun, not a verb. “I hope I never see you again.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“I think I’m being entirely reasonable.”
“Coming in here half-cut and trying to scratch my eyes out is reasonable? You don’t want to see me again, then fine.”
“Fine? That’s all you can say? Fine? For that, I should go to the Kremlin and tell them what you and Karkadann cooked up.” He blanched; this was his weakness, and she could see that, the state she was in, he really thought that she might just do as she threatened.
“You do that, and I’ll … I’ll…”
“You’ll do what? Kill me?”
“Don’t push it.”
“Or maybe I’ll go to Sabirzhan instead. He’d love to hear it, wouldn’t he? I know how much he hates you. He could put you on his slab and go to work on you.”
“Alice, don’t.”
“Perhaps I’d let him fuck me too. You could watch.”
“Enough! You need help.”
“What for?”
“Listen to yourself. That’s not you talking, all that sick shit, no matter how hurt you are. It’s the vodka, frying your brain, making you volatile.”
“Volatile? After what you’ve done, volatile is the very least I have a right to be.”
“There you go again. Always finding excuses, always turning it away from yourself. This isn’t about me, can’t you see that? This is what you’re doing to yourself. You don’t want to see me again? Fine. Then take the time you’d have spent with me and use it to do something about your alcoholism.”
“I’m not an alcoholic!”
“You’re going to fuck everything up, Alice. And if you carry on like this, you can do it alone as far as I’m concerned.”
“That’s exactly what I’ll do, then. Fuck off. Just fuck off.”
Drunk and half blinded by tears, Alice checked into the Budapest Hotel. It was the only hotel she could think of that didn’t give her a view of either the Kremlin, the exhibition hall, the distillery, the Kotelniki or Patriarch’s Ponds. The only one, in other words, that cut her off from her life.
She ordered a bottle of vodka and turned the television on. Flicking through the channels, she saw that every news program was carrying footage of the auction fiasco. She surfed all the way through and all the way back before choosing Channel One, the government channel. As this had been a government initiative, its coverage should be the most sympathetic.
There she was, telling everyone what a fuck-up it had been. Interviews
with disappointed patrons, a reporter speculating about what had happened and then a cut to Borzov, speaking from his office, playing the great statesman once more.
“What happened today was a farce, and for that Anatoly Nikolayevich apologizes. In this instance, he has placed too much trust in the West, and in particular the blandishments of Mrs. Liddell.” Alice spilled some vodka as she started forward. Borzov distancing himself was one thing, but explicitly blaming Alice on national television was quite another. “The president was not the first man to be blinded by the promises of a beautiful woman, and he shan’t be the last. Anatoly Nikolayevich admits freely: the devil confused him.” Beneath the obscenities she was screaming at the screen, Alice caught the tone of Borzov’s voice: there was more still to come. “Citizens of Russia, rest assured that your government has, as always, taken the most decisive steps available. Your president has dismissed Mrs. Liddell from her post with immediate effect, and she will play no further part in the great reform effort, an enterprise to which she has contributed nothing but harm.”
She’d always tried to defend Borzov. Now, when he’d been too cowardly, callous, discourteous and quintessentially Soviet to tell her in person that she was sacked, she finally saw what his critics meant. Russia hadn’t elected as their first democratic president a man of great moral authority, as the Czechs had done with Václav Havel, and as the South Africans would surely do with Nelson Mandela. Russia had chosen a provincial Communist Party first secretary. That was what they’d wanted, and that was what they’d gotten. Borzov was seventy this month, too old to do any more than partially reeducate himself. Sure, he’d learned much, but like everyone he had his limit, and when he came up against it he did the natural thing—fell back on his old communist thinking. That was the way he ruled. That was the way he’d treated Alice.
She poured herself another hundred grams and drank. The vodka slid down her throat, warm and seductively soothing. Her lover and her boss had both betrayed her; the bottle would never do so.
Alice’s mind was clearing. It was almost a physical sensation, a scouring inside her skull. She’d pitied the millions of Russians who’d realized that everything they’d believed in and lived for was wrong. Well, what was she going through, if not exactly the same thing? Now, her job gone and her credo in tatters, she finally had the moment of revelation that comes to everyone who stays in Russia long enough, the moment when white middle-class Westerners finally understand what the rest of humanity has always known: that there are places in this world where the safety net they’ve spent so much of their lives erecting can suddenly be whipped away, where the right accent, education, health insurance and a foreign passport—all the familiar talismans that keep the bearer safe from harm—no longer apply, and where their well-being depends on the condescension of others. The Russians brought down Napoleon and Hitler; they can bring down anyone.
Alice drank more and more. The real healing effects of vodka, the Russians say, begin only after the second bottle. Vodka in excess, brain in recess. It wasn’t just that she wanted to blot out her self-pity and sense of failure, she was also looking to suffer.
She drank glass after glass of vodka, no water or orange juice between them, her aim twofold: to wake up tomorrow morning with the most agonizing hangover, and to reach oblivion as quickly as possible tonight.
“Comfortably Numb” was playing in her head, and after a while Alice found out that Pink Floyd was right: there was no pain, and she was receding.
72
Tuesday, March 3, 1992
Moscow, center stage in an endless drama, a great city for the shameless.
In public, Borzov denounced Lev for wrecking the reform effort. In private, he stripped the Sports Academy of its tax-free status with a haste that reeked of spite.
Arkin was told that Lev had not in fact broken any law. The privatization charter had given the company’s director final say over where the auction was held, and not a single one of the lawyers who’d crawled over the document had seen fit to question it. The prime minister raged at anyone within earshot for more than an hour after he learned this.
His lover gone and the government on his back, Lev stayed in his penthouse and brooded like a dormant volcano.
Alice crept back to Patriarch’s Ponds. She knew where everything was, she was comfortable there, and for the moment that was enough. She’d had enough excitement; what she wanted now was for Lewis to hold her, cradle her, make everything all right again. “I was wrong,” she said. “I was wrong, I was seduced, I wanted to be something I’m not, and I’m so, so sorry.”
“Do you have any idea how much damage you’ve caused?”
She nodded. “Some.”
“And you really expect me just to take you back?” He was holding out for his own pride, she saw. They both knew he’d take her back at the drop of a hat.
“I expect nothing from you. But I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart; you’re my husband.”
“And you don’t love me.”
“Lewis, we can still work it out.”
“Not here we can’t. We have to leave Moscow.”
Moscow, her Moscow, the place Alice loved, the place that would swallow her absence without a ripple. So few people, particularly postcard-brained Westerners, appreciate Moscow’s moody and elusive beauty. Uncovering it is like opening an endless series of matroshka dolls: no one ever gets all the way to the end.
But that was what Alice was seeking, the answer, the truth, and by that she meant not simply the everyday pravda truth but the immortal istina, the inner light of truth. Istina is one of the few words in Russian that can’t be rhymed. It has no verbal mate and no verbal associations; it stands alone and aloof. If istina existed, surely Alice would find it here.
73
Wednesday, March 4, 1992
Lev was working out. Wearing only a pair of shorts, he moved across the room with a powerful swagger, his massive arms keeping rhythm with the steady pump of his great thighs and his head swaying, gently but arrogantly, with each stride. Beneath his bare collarbones ran a slogan: “He who has not been deprived of freedom does not know its value.” He radiated absolute peace and self-assurance. His face was composed in the benign, even saintly expression of an old-fashioned king certain of his divine right to reign. The scene might have benefited from some music, the “Hallelujah Chorus” perhaps, but it wasn’t really necessary.
He’d had the floor strengthened in one of the rooms in his penthouse so he could use it as a weight-lifting area. Unzipping a bag, he took out a white leather girdle and a package of talcum powder. He strapped the girdle beneath his belly, to diminish the immense strain on his stomach muscles when he hoisted the weights, and dusted his palms with talcum powder, slapping his hands together to get rid of the excess.
Then he went over to the weights themselves, great discs of iron stacked along one wall. He studied them for a moment, picked up two fifty-five pound discs as easily as if they were dinner plates, fit one to each end of the bar and lifted it three times with leisurely ease.
Lev added two more discs to the bar: ninety kilos in total. He spat into his palms, bent and gripped the bar. Gasping and grunting, he yanked it to shoulder level, paused, then raised it above his head, where he held it for a moment before letting it fall to the mats with an explosive crash. The savage clang of the falling weight was as unnerving as a grenade blast.
He rested for a moment, leaning silently on a padded gymnastic horse. He seemed to be concentrating very hard, as though slipping into some kind of trance necessary to perform superhuman feats. His chest and belly expanded with each inhalation, stretching the letters that spelled out the message that Church is the house of God, prison the home of the thief.
Some men find their escape in vodka; Lev’s came when his vast muscles strained against vaster weights. This was where he found his grace, this was where he was exceptional. Three times they’d asked him to go to the Olympics: in Munich, in Montreal and then in Moscow. Th
ey’d come to the gulag and said he’d get temporary release for the duration of the Games. Three times they’d asked; three times he’d told them to get stuffed. What else could he have done? There was no way he could have worn the system’s colors.
More discs on the bar. It was now up to something north of 150 kilos. This time, when he hoisted the bar above his head, he seemed about to burst; his belly strained against the leather girdle, the slabs of muscle in his biceps twisted and distorted the tattooed swastikas that signified the tough guy. Then Lev dropped the weight with the same hideous crash as before, squatted down, lifted it again, let it fall again. His chest was slick with perspiration. The sweat shone on the monasteries, cathedrals, castles and fortresses that crawled across his skin, the number of their spires and towers representing the number of years he’d been imprisoned.
The bar was up to 180 kilos now. With a bellow, Lev hoisted the weight to his shoulders, hesitated, gasped, and shouted with effort and exultation as he shoved it above his head. When the weight smashed to the mats this time, he threw out his chest, raised one arm and roared what sounded like a challenge to the heavens: “Victory or death!”
Lev and Karkadann had agreed to meet in the same banya as before. As before, Lev was there first; as before, he waited long minutes in the steam until Karkadann arrived. This time, however, he did not chide the Chechen for his tardiness.
“You’re a man of your word,” Lev said. “You let Alice go, and I thank you for that.”
“What did you think I’d do? We’re not animals, you know.”
The silver chair? Force-feeding vodka? Lev choked back his bile. “And the children?”
“Have any more been killed?” Lev shrugged to concede the point. “There you are, then. Are you a man of your word?”
“I did what I said I’d do.”
“And now? Red October’s mine, yes? You’ve brought the paperwork?”
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