Vodka

by Boris Starling

  82

  Friday, March 13, 1992

  Channel One had pulled all scheduled programs and was showing Swan Lake—a bad omen if ever there was one; Tchaikovsky is the nation’s harbinger of wars and coups d’état. At seven o’clock, Swan Lake went off and Borzov came on to declare a state of emergency in Moscow, now divided into seven military districts: Borovistsky, Stretensky, Tverskoy, Vorobyory, Tryokhgorya, Taganka and Lefortovo.

  The army had taken over the functions of the police, and Moscow was filling with troops by the hour. The first T-72 tanks were seen on the outskirts at dawn, and the pale sun was burning up the east by the time they came down Kutuzovsky Prospekt, slowly so as not to lose control on the slippery concrete, and pulled up on the Kalininsky Bridge opposite the White House. This was the same route the coup plotters had taken the previous year; the same route, indeed, along which Napoleon had entered Moscow in 1812.

  The troops, most of them no more than boys with eyes streaming in the wind, came from all over: the Fourth Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division in Narofominsk, the 27th Motorized Infantry Division in Moscow, the 106th Guards Airborne at Tulskaya, and the Second Guards Tamanskaya Motorized Infantry Division in Golitsyno, widely seen as the toughest of them all. Their commanders had orders to fire if necessary.

  The army had taken control of all the main bridges and arterial routes into Moscow, leaving snaking white tracks on the road as they patrolled the city. They assumed their positions around the White House, from where the police had been chased the previous evening. The building has nineteen stories, and the tank barrels nodded slowly as they took sightings, as if wondering idly where to aim first. The message to the parliamentary guard who still circled the building was clear: the posturing would soon be over, it was time for action.

  Midday, the deadline for the deputies’ surrender, came and went. Borzov’s resolve ebbed and flowed like the tide. He’d thrown down the ultimatum without a second thought. Now it had passed, he was suddenly more circumspect. There was so much that could go wrong, and he hadn’t yet had the familiar flash of resolution that accompanied all his greatest decisions. Should he give the parliamentarians another ultimatum? Should he order still more troops into the area, to turn up the pressure? Or should he just go in with what he had, and perhaps catch them off guard by striking fast? The latter made his stomach jump; he was not naturally trigger-happy, and he knew that, irrespective of political persuasion, every Russian would thank him if he resolved the standoff without resorting to violence.

  He needed to clear his head, so he went to the Kremlin banya, by repute the most luxurious steam bath in all Russia, with benches upholstered in leather and thick pillows strewn across the floor. The heater was as wide as a truck and reached ten feet to the ceiling; inside glowed a massive heap of round rocks, cannonballs in miniature. Borzov threw some vodka on the heated rocks, inhaled the vapors lovingly, and poured himself a hundred grams.

  “Herald!” Borzov threw open the door. “Herald!” A herald was someone sent to buy liquor for his friends. One of the presidential guard came running. Borzov, his vodka face as round as a turnip, squinted at him and then began to shout again, even though the two men were no more than a meter apart. “Go fetch me another bottle, on the double. Go!”

  Home alone, Irk watched the pictures from the White House with a sense of numb dislocation. It was happening again, he thought. Was this the way it would always be with Russians, their pretensions to civilized behavior torn away every time an argument became intractable?

  Denisov had ordered the police to support Borzov, and officially Irk was still bound by that. Not that he’d needed to be told, of course. If he, a progressive Estonian, wouldn’t back the forces of reform, then surely no one would. But if there was to be an assault—and with all the troops involved, there would be, maybe not today but certainly tonight, under cover of darkness—it would, Irk thought, simply expose Borzov as being no different from all his predecessors. If he was prepared to spill blood in pursuit of untrammeled power, if he was prepared to bomb his own people, he’d be no better than what he’d beheld.

  Irk felt his way through thickets of unfamiliar feelings. Sure, Lev did bad things, but didn’t everyone? He also did many good things. He stood by his own, he stuck rigidly to his code of honor, and he was a genuine philanthropist—look at the children’s home, for instance. It was no hardship to respect and admire him. Technically, Lev was a criminal. So? The whole nation was becoming criminalized, just to survive. And at least Lev and his lot were competent, unlike Denisov and the half-wits at Petrovka. There was nothing Russia needed more than competence.

  Irk had been unable to stop Karkadann, but perhaps he could make a difference now. There were few people more dangerous, he thought as he went to find his chemical protection suit, than idealists who’ve lost their heroes.

  Outside the main entrance to the White House, Sveta scowled at the troops through her makeup and emptied onto the hood of the nearest tank the food from her shopping bag. She began feeding and scolding the soldiers simultaneously, as only an old woman can. “Who’ve you come to shoot at? Your mothers? Is that what we’ve brought you up for? Here, you—take this sausage. You look like you haven’t eaten in months.”

  A colonel stepped forward to usher Sveta away, and she rounded on him. “You stay out of this, fatface,” she snapped.

  “Go home, Grandma,” he said. “Your place is in the kitchen, making borscht. Leave the politics to the men.”

  “We’ve been doing that since the time of Catherine the Great. A fat lot of good it’s done us.”

  The colonel, knowing when he was beaten, stepped back.

  His temporal efforts at negotiation having failed, Patriarch Alexei turned to peacemaking on an altogether higher plane. Trailed by priests whose black robes gave them the appearance of carrion crows, he went to the Yelokhovsky Cathedral and paraded the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God. An image of the Virgin and the infant Christ, it is the capital’s holiest icon. Many believe that it saved Moscow from Tamerlane. Now, clutching the precious figure tightly to him, Alexei prayed that Russia be preserved from catastrophe yet again.

  It took Irk more than an hour to make the journey. He had to travel underground the whole way to be sure of avoiding the troops, who seemed to be on every street corner and at the entrance to every metro station. He was a senior investigator, of course, so it would have been damnably bad luck had they done more than check his ID and wave him on. But bad luck seemed to be Irk’s specialty, and he decided not to take the risk.

  The sewer flow seemed lower than before, as though Moscow itself was constipated while it waited to see who would triumph. Irk waded through cascades straight and spiraled, his progress measured by the baffles that appeared at intervals in the pipes. Hurrying through areas where the cast-iron pipes were badly corroded, he kicked up a splash around fish without either fins or eyes. And all this time, he saw no one. Only a cave-painting rainbow mural with red guitars dancing with musical notes betrayed that there was life down there.

  He thought of Moscow’s wobbly foundations: alluvial soils, the substrate pliable and sandy. On top of that, the water table’s too high. There are underground lakes fed entirely by leaking plumbing and atrocious drainage. The bridge near Belorussky Station could tumble down at any minute, and it wasn’t the only one. Every day, the city lurched closer to collapse. Well, Irk thought, he didn’t need to be a speleologist to know that.

  Perhaps he should give up being an investigator and run tours of the sewers: short ones, long ones, shallow ones, deep ones. How long would people want to stay down here? Less than an hour wouldn’t really be worth his while. How about a whole night? He’d get them to pay twice: once at the start, and once to show them the right way out instead of abandoning them down here. He could do exhibitions too, in the city administration building or the Ostrovsky Museum. A cabaret under Red Square, or a safety-training center for new initiates. He could go to the International Spel
eological Society in Alabama, get a new Land Rover, new suits, helmets from France—they were five hundred dollars each, but they were the best.

  This was no hobby; it was a state of the soul. These places where he went were full of darkness and disease, collected there like a sponge. When he heard the water babbling in the sewers, it was as though he was listening to Moscow’s ancestors. He heard their whispers bubbling up, and he was closer to them. People thought they were independent of these forces, but they weren’t. They all depended on the underground. Like it or not, what had come before them, determined them.

  It took Irk three wrong turns before he found what he was looking for: a door that led to the White House. He’d discovered it the previous year by chance, while looking for a way up to the Devyati Muchenikov church. The door was locked, naturally. Irk felt in his pocket for the skeleton key issued to all senior investigators and eased it gently into the lock. He felt the tremor as the tumblers clicked into place, and then he twisted the key counterclockwise, hoping that the door hadn’t rusted solid. The lock gave way. Irk gripped the door and pulled; it unpeeled itself reluctantly from the frame and gaped open before him.

  The tunnel sloped upward and was narrow, but higher than he’d expected. He had to do no more than duck his head and bend his knees slightly to walk through it, balancing on the balls of his feet to stop himself slipping backward down the gradient. Navigating by the beam of his headlight, he went about twenty paces, turned right and then left again in a dogleg, went another twenty paces or so, and found himself at another door. This one gave way more easily; surprisingly so, he thought, realizing that it hadn’t even been locked. He stepped through it and found himself in a basement as dark, cold and damp as the access pipe had been, but this was unmistakably terra firma. He was back once more from the reverse world.

  Irk was just wondering whether or not to take off his chemical protection suit, when there was a sudden flood of white light, and with it shouts and the sounds of safety catches being clicked—at least the catches had been on in the first place, he thought absurdly as he tried simultaneously to cover his eyes and put his hands above his head. “Down!” rough voices yelled. “Down!”

  Irk sank to his knees and then—less voluntarily, when someone kicked him hard in the back—to his stomach. He waited to be frisked, but none of them seemed particularly keen, perhaps, he realized belatedly, because his clothes were smeared with some of Moscow’s choicest effluent.

  “Who are you?” they barked. “What do you want?”

  “My name is Juku Irk,” he said, thinking that he sounded unbearably pompous. “I’m a …” He was going to say “senior investigator with the prosecutor’s service,” but Denisov’s public commitment to Borzov made him reconsider. “I’ve come to help Lev.”

  “He knows you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Irk. Juku Irk. But tell him I’ve come in a personal capacity. Be sure to tell him that.”

  He felt like Rudolf Hess, sneaking off to England without telling Hitler. Footsteps turned and faded, someone going to tell Lev what they’d found. When Irk raised his head to look around, a foot on the back of his skull dissuaded him. They were clearly taking no chances.

  If Lev didn’t want to see him, Irk thought, he’d be as dead as Lenin.

  No one spoke. The silence stretched and stretched. Cities could have risen and fallen in the time it took for the footsteps to come back.

  “Get up,” said the same voice that had asked his name. “You’re wearing clothes under that orange thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then take it off.”

  Irk pushed himself to his feet and looked around. There were four of them, all unshaven, pale and twitchy. Their eyes darted around the room like mosquitoes, never settling on one place for more than a moment. He was lucky that they hadn’t shot him on sight.

  When the chemical protection suit was on the floor, they took him to see Lev.

  It was like walking through a military barracks. Every corner they turned and every staircase they climbed seemed to be guarded by two or three armed men, sometimes more; most of them affecting the sort of overly studied nonchalance that only the very nervous can attain. They were sure that an attack was coming, and that even the thousands of small arms they’d stockpiled would be no match for heavy tank and mortar fire. Their only hope was that Lev could somehow manage to change the army’s mind before the first shots were fired. Failing that, the most they could wish for was to take some of the enemy with them as they died defending the White House.

  Lev was in one of the conference rooms near the middle of the building. He was drumming his fingers on the tabletop and staring into space—gathering his energy or letting hope ebb away, it was impossible to tell.

  “What do you want?” Lev said in a voice devoid of either irritation or inquisitiveness.

  “To help you,” Irk replied.

  “How?”

  “By getting you out of here.”

  “I don’t want to get out of here.”

  “Lev, Russia needs you, and it needs you alive, to help drag it back to its feet. You dying in the rubble here is no good to anyone.”

  “No. I’ve pledged that I’ll leave here only in victory or death. These people are risking their lives for me, I can’t leave them. And what do you care about us anyway, Investigator? You’re Estonian, aren’t you?”

  What do you care? The question pricked at Irk. Why was he placing himself in the middle of the fight for a country that wasn’t even his? Russia was under his skin, he guessed, and he hadn’t even realized it until then. The more people who reminded him he wasn’t Russian, the more compelled he felt to compensate.

  “Why don’t you believe in Borzov?” Lev added.

  “I did.”

  “But…?”

  “And now I don’t. The emperor’s new clothes, I guess.”

  It existed in everyone, Irk thought, even in the most publicly infallible: those moments of weakness when the spring recoiled. Whether others saw these moments or not depended on little more than chance and timing. Irk saw the doubt in Lev’s face, and he pounced. “Listen.”

  “To what?”

  “What can you hear?”

  People moving, pipes bubbling, floorboards moaning softly, an ambient hum; the cadence of a city, in other words. “Nothing.”

  “Exactly. It’s too quiet.”

  The word leapt from person to person, wildfire through a building: “Attack is imminent. We’re observing a blackout—extinguish all lights. Those with gas masks, prepare to put them on. Those without should tie wet cloths over their noses and mouths.” In the sudden gloom, there was the stir of hundreds of people slipping on goggles, and tying scarves and handkerchiefs over their faces. After a moment, the lights were replaced with tiny red sparks that glowed and waned.

  Lev stifled a laugh. Only the Russians, when prompted by the twin imperatives of staying invisible and minimizing the effects of a gas attack, would consider cigarettes indispensable necessities rather than shortcuts to the next world.

  There were four T-80 tanks on the Kalininsky Bridge, their turrets swiveling with the synchronicity of well-drilled chorus girls and unleashing 150mm cannon fire that scorched the White House black. The first shells hit the building with dull crumps, sounds that seemed too quiet and subdued to cause all the ensuing damage. Windows shattered and wept soot, walls and floors shuddered, and water pipes snapped and flooded hallways, extinguishing some of the fires the shells had started.

  The civilian protesters outside were the first to go. They’d seen off the police, but artillery was an entirely different matter. They ran for their lives, dispersing into the surrounding streets. The soldiers let them go, they had more pressing concerns. The parliamentary guard and other paramilitaries stayed at their posts until falling debris had killed several of them and injured many more; then they retreated into the White House. Most of the shells were hitti
ng the building in its upper stories, too high to seriously threaten its structural integrity. Perhaps the tanks were competing to see who could knock the clock tower off.

  The army bombarded the White House until last light, by which time the commanders reckoned that both building and occupants were suitably softened up. As the last threads of day snapped, all television feeds were diverted away from the White House, to prevent any of Lev’s men from seeing too much of what was going on outside. The troops cleared holes in the barricades through which Spetsnaz special forces made their way to the foot of the White House itself. They placed plastic explosive against the doors, each connected to the next by lengths of detonation cord.

  The infantry assault began half an hour after sundown. One of the Spetsnaz boys lit the detonation cord, which burned down at more than three and a half miles per second. Even around a building with a diameter as large as the White House, it looked to the naked eye as though the explosions were actually rather than very nearly simultaneous. The soldiers came in hard and fast behind the explosions, throwing stun grenades into the suddenly gaping doorways and sweeping the corridors with gunfire as their barrel-mounted torches cut through the smoke. There was no one at the entrances, which was strange—they’d expected to be hurdling a few corpses fresh from the explosions. The defenders must have worked out what was coming and retreated farther inside.