Vodka

by Boris Starling

  The troops raced down empty passageways, careful to cover each other at every corner and again before every doorway. Again, they found no one. There wasn’t even any defensive fire for them to return. The first seven floors were all empty. There were people above that, but they were all dead, lacerated by flying glass or simply mangled by shells—the unlucky ones who’d taken the brunt of the bombardment. This was becoming decidedly strange. There had been more than a thousand people inside the White House, most of them armed, and they’d surely not go down without a fight; but they were nowhere to be seen.

  It took the Spetsnaz and their less elite colleagues forty minutes to search the building from top to bottom and report, with ill-disguised incredulity, that the defenders had simply vanished.

  At that very moment, when the army commanders on the Kalininsky Bridge were spluttering with incoherent rage at their troops’ reports, Lev was emerging from a manhole on Gasheka Street, north of the zoo. Once he’d realized there was time for all the defenders to get out safely, he’d needed little persuading to follow Irk’s plan. He had known the troops would keep up the bombardment until nightfall; there was no military reason to send the infantry in during daylight, and only an eventuality such as killing hostages or some other political imperative would have seen them make the assault before last light.

  Irk had led the defenders out through the sewage tunnel. The entire process had taken two hours, each man going through a couple of paces ahead of the next, moving fast but never rushing. All Irk had needed to do was get them clear of the military cordon around the White House; from there they could find their own way to the surface and continue the journey above-ground, using the gathering darkness to dodge the army patrols where necessary. None of them had protective suits, of course, and they’d probably all fall ill in a day or two. For a safe escape, Irk reckoned, it was cheap at the price.

  Borzov was furious. He ordered every law enforcement officer in Moscow to look for the escaped deputies—particularly Lev—and said that any policeman who returned empty-handed would be fired. Then he moved to consolidate his position by placing himself in charge of the National Security Council and introducing a whole raft of new measures against crime.

  Police could conduct spot checks at will, detain suspects without charge for up to a month, search offices and dwellings without a court order, and examine the financial affairs of anyone suspected of involvement in organized crime. Residence permits were to be reintroduced in every city of more than a million people. Judges would be given improved protection. The tax police would be run by a special high-level enforcement body called the Temporary Extraordinary Commission, or VChK—a name deliberately designed to strike fear into tax cheats; the VChK was what the KGB had initially been called.

  “I am power,” Borzov proclaimed. “I’m not going to be pushed to one side. My task is to get everybody in hand and tell them all who’s the boss. If they don’t like it, they can send in their resignations.”

  The police—a round dozen of Yerofeyev’s men, armed to the teeth—came to Patriarch’s Ponds. “Have you seen Lev?” they asked.

  “As if I’d have that dirty fucker here,” she yelled. “As if! You can fuck off, the lot of you.” They paid her no mind, sweeping her aside and turning the place upside down. “He’s seven foot tall,” Alice shrieked. “There’s nowhere here big enough to hide him.”

  “It’s nothing personal,” Yerofeyev said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it’s personal.”

  “On the contrary. We’re looking everywhere: at Red October, in the Kotelniki penthouse, at Testarossa’s dacha, in every upmarket hotel and restaurant in the city.” He didn’t add the obvious rider: so far they’d come up with lint.

  “What will you do to him if you find him?”

  “When we find him.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Arrest him, of course.”

  “Not kill him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You were prepared to kill him a few hours ago—him and everybody else in the White House.”

  The police left mud on the carpets, dirty handprints on the walls, and ice between Alice and a gloweringly resentful Lewis. Having his apartment trashed and his privacy violated because of someone his wife loved was adding insult to injury.

  83

  Saturday, March 14, 1992

  The Russian Orthodox Church buries its dead on Saturday. Thousands turned out to remember those lost the previous day, and to protest at Borzov’s heavy-handedness, both in the way he’d handled the siege and the measures he’d announced after its resolution. In front of a still-smoldering White House the sidewalk was dotted with impromptu shrines of flowers, icons, fruits, bread, chocolate and cigarettes. The mourners came in dignity and silence, but their disapproval was clear. There was no euphoria now that the standoff was over; just shame, embarrassment and self-loathing. “How could we Russians do such things to each other?” they asked.

  Some of the demonstrators carried banners with Lev’s picture and the slogan Fucked by the Party, Fucked by the Army. Many of the deputies had been arrested or given themselves up, but Lev had gone to ground, and the image was all that anyone had of him. That, and a message he’d sent: “I ask forgiveness from the fallen men’s families and friends; forgiveness that I was unable to protect them from the tragedy that befell them. As they rest in peace, I bow low before their will, their civic courage and the power of their spirit.”

  It wasn’t the slightest bit strange that a gangster should be a popular hero. When Russians looked at gangsters, they saw the bold, the reckless, the forceful; they saw men who bent circumstances rather than let circumstances bend them. They idolized them even while they resented their success and methods.

  It was enough to make Irk wish Karkadann was still alive. Four people in a filthy tenement apartment had been holding a drinking session, knocking back whatever they could get their hands on: vodka, eau de cologne, brake fluid, windshield cleaner. The participants were a married couple, Valdemar and Astra Khrynin, and two brothers, Grigori and Pyotr Stonkus.

  In one of Petrovka’s shabbier interview rooms, Valdemar was doing all the talking. This was unsurprising, as he was the only one capable of coherent speech. Astra had attacked the arresting officers and was now restricting her testimony to a string of highly creative expletives; Pyotr Stonkus was under sedation; and Grigori Stonkus was in at least eight separate pieces.

  According to Valdemar, the drinking session had proceeded apace until the brothers Stonkus passed out. “Drank themselves into their own asses,” Valdemar said. “Astra and I, we kept going.” After a few hours, possibly with a break for sex (he couldn’t remember), the happy couple had become ravenous. “My innards were playing a march, I tell you. And what was there to eat in the house? Fuck all.”

  What else would one do in such a situation? They’d sized up the unconscious brothers, decided that Grigori was the fleshier (a marginal decision, Valdemar conceded), and set about him with an ax. Grigori’s flesh had gone into the cooking pots, everything else into the heating furnace the entire apartment building shared. By the time the meat was ready, Pyotr had come around. Where was Grisha? Gone home, they’d said. All the more for them, he’d said; he was as hungry as a horse. What were they cooking, anyway?

  They’d told him it was dog.

  Alerted by the stink from the furnace, the neighbors had called the police. The police had arrived, worked out that the Khrynins’ haute cuisine was from a more elevated life form than the canine, displayed quite astonishing insensitivity in sharing this information with Pyotr, and then called homicide. “Why waste so much meat?” Valdemar asked. “It was very fresh.”

  Irk was still trying to think of a reply when the door opened and the duty sergeant beckoned him outside. “Can’t it wait?” Irk said.

  “Afraid not.”

  Irk sighed, got up and followed the duty sergeant out into the corridor. “What is it?”

&n
bsp; The sergeant swallowed, his Adam’s apple like a ball cock. “Another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Another child. In the sewers. A girl. Dead.”

  It had started again. It couldn’t have started again. The corpse would be an old one, killed before Karkadann’s death and found only now. The corpse would be a new one; there was a copycat on the loose. Logic and emotion battered each other for primacy. As had happened too often recently for his liking, Irk found that emotion was winning.

  Endless corridors, ceilings dripping, the uneven light of torches. Suddenly there were sea monsters flapping at Irk’s face: tentacles curling out to sucker him, fins that could slice a limb clean off, serrated teeth sharp as a saw’s blade, unblinking eyes boring into him. The shock made him want to scream, but as he looked closer at the monsters he saw that they were squids and sharks suspended motionless in formalin, and there were thick sheets of glass between him and them. A sign informed him that he was in the Academy of Oceanology warehouse. In all his years down here, he’d never even heard of it, but then again there were thousands of miles of sewer tunnels; Irk was amazed that anyone found anything here, ever.

  The girl’s body was lying near an interceptor chamber designed to catch oil, grease and chemicals before they did too much damage to the sewers. The worker who’d found her stood uncertainly nearby, shifting his weight as though he wanted to be elsewhere. His face, pouched in dim light and shy beneath a peaked cap, was almost invisible.

  “When did you find her?” Irk asked.

  “Couple of hours ago.”

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “Stopping the pipes from collapsing. You name it, we’re doing it: repointing mortar joints, replacing defective brickwork, pressure grouting, installing a plastic lining. You see, the pipes in this part of the system are made of fireclay—”

  “I couldn’t care less what the pipes—”

  “—which absorbs water more readily than stoneware, and so isn’t as strong. Fireclay needs glazing with salt, but you can’t find salt for love or money now; a bit ironic, eh, for all those poor bastards sent to the mines?”

  Elbowing the crime-scene photographer out of the way, Irk squatted on his haunches, careful to keep the seat of his trousers from dragging in the shallow stream of detritus. He shone his torch on the corpse, and the last vestiges of his hope fled with the light. The girl had only just begun to decompose. He reckoned she’d been killed twenty-four hours ago, forty-eight at the most. Karkadann had been dead ten days; he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with this one, who looked just like her predecessors, the hammer and sickle scored into a chest white with blood loss.

  There was more: two bloodstained rings on the girl’s stomach, both perfect circles, about five inches in diameter. They looked as though they’d been caused by the impression of a cylindrical container, in the same way a coffee cup marks a desk.

  Blood. Containers. Blood.

  All the bodies had been partially exsanguinated, though that wasn’t unusual for murder victims; even the smallest wound could leak a surprising amount of blood. But what if the exsanguination was deliberate? Blood was a valuable commodity in Moscow, Irk thought, and black-market prices were high, especially for uncontaminated plasma.

  The photographer bumped against Irk, almost toppling him over. “Oi!” Irk said. “Watch it.”

  The man didn’t answer; he was too busy snapping away. Irk thought that the photographer at his own wedding had taken fewer pictures than this.

  “You need to put a ruler in there,” he told the snapper. “There’ll be no scale otherwise.”

  “Don’t have one.” The accent was a Minsk one—trust a Belarussian to be difficult.

  “Then use your foot.”

  “I know how to do my job, OK?”

  It’s standard crime-scene procedure: every shot is taken twice, once with a scale to show the size of the object, once without in case the scale itself blocks a piece of evidence.

  “What’s your name?” Irk asked.

  “Sluchek.”

  “Well, Sluchek, found any extraneous items?”

  “Hundreds.” The camera shifted slightly against Sluchek’s face as he spoke.

  “Remember to light all footprints from the side.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “The detail doesn’t show up unless you do.”

  “I said, there aren’t any.”

  “There must be. You think he levitates?”

  Sluchek ignored Irk and kept on clicking. His photographic technique was as therapeutic as his character was abrasive; a gentle flex in his index finger as the lens blinked, the graceful crook of his thumb as the film wound on. Flex, click, crook. Flex, click, crook.

  The tumblers fell in Irk’s mind with the same mechanical simplicity. In long minutes of virtually continuous picture-taking, Sluchek hadn’t stopped once to change the film.

  Irk took two quick strides and tore the camera from Sluchek’s face. The exposure meter boasted a big fat zero. Irk felt down the side for the release lever and sprung the camera open. The magazine gawped empty at him.

  Irk shook the camera angrily. “You could roll a ball through it.”

  Sluchek shrugged. Irk prodded him in the chest, following as the man backed away, a slow dance around a child’s corpse. “You sold the films on the black market, eh? And in a few hours’ time, you’d have told me that someone had mixed the wrong chemicals in the darkroom and ruined the exposures. No wonder you fuckers want to be part of Russia again. You must fit right in here.” He slammed the camera into Sluchek’s hand. Its back lolled open, a dog’s tongue.

  “Are all Estonians patronizing bastards, or is it just you?”

  Irk swiped the air in front of Sluchek’s face. “Fuck off out of here. Let me do my job.”

  Irk arrived at the Belgrade Hotel just in time. The week Lev had given Zhorzh to leave Moscow was almost up. Another ten minutes, and Zhorzh would have been on his way to Sheremetyevo; another couple of hours, and he’d have been in the air, bound for Grozny.

  Breathlessly, Irk told Zhorzh what he’d found in the sewers. Zhorzh thought for a long time before answering—at least, it seemed to Irk like a long time, though in reality it was probably less than a minute. “It was never us,” Zhorzh said simply.

  “What?”

  “Never. We’d no idea who was doing it, or why.”

  “But you claimed responsibility.”

  “Of course. It suited our purposes.”

  Irk shook his head, more to clear the fog than in disagreement with Zhorzh. “You wanted people to think that of you?”

  “Like Karkadann told you, Investigator: we’re Chechens. They think that of us anyway.”

  “OK. Tell me this: if it wasn’t you, why did you try and scare me into surrendering the case?”

  Zhorzh ran a hand through the white streak in his hair. “Because it wasn’t us. Karkadann knew that if you dug around long enough, you’d realize all the evidence against us was circumstantial. Worse, you might find the real killer. The moment you did, all the pressure we were placing on Lev would have dissolved. It wasn’t that we feared you proving we were responsible; we feared you finding out that it wasn’t us.”

  Onward, onward; to stop, even to slow down, would have forced Irk to confront the humiliation of having gotten things so terribly wrong.

  Investigators know surgeons, it’s an occupational hazard of the job. Irk went from hospital to hospital, asking—in confidence, of course—what they knew of black-market blood. Some denied any knowledge outright; what they didn’t say couldn’t get them into trouble. Others hinted at the truth, leaving Irk to pick his way through shifting shapes of information and evasion. Yes, they’d heard it was a problem in other hospitals, but not here, heavens no, their own procedures were well tested and thorough.

  Only one surgeon was totally frank with him, and if that was because he was American and therefore used to transparency, or if i
t was because Irk, having seen a photograph of the man’s wife on his desk, had remarked that he’d had the pleasure of meeting her and that her beauty was matched only by her charm, well, so be it; a man got his breaks where he could. Lewis’s accent made some words hard for Irk to understand, but that was offset by the slowness of his cadence.

  “No offense to your country, Investigator …” he said.

  “I’m Estonian. It’s not my country.”

  “Even better. Black market? Yes, it’s a problem. I had to sack someone the other day for raiding our supplies and selling them. And of course you have to check all incoming blood too—you can’t simply accept the supplier’s word that it’s safe. I’ve had to throw out stock that’s contaminated, diseased, improperly refrigerated or otherwise substandard.”

  Children’s blood was less likely to be substandard, Irk supposed; children had less time and opportunity to pollute themselves with vodka and heroin and AIDS.

  “You deal with the suppliers directly?”

  “You know how this place works better than I do, Investigator. Even the middlemen have middlemen. I keep well away from them.”

  Of course you do, Irk thought. You’re American; your hands are cleaner than Pontius Pilate’s.

  “You saw the container marks on the body, I take it?” Sidorouk said.

  “I’ve just been to the hospitals asking about black-market blood.”

  Sidorouk paused. “I wouldn’t dream of making suggestions, Juku, but…”

  “You’re going to anyway, aren’t you?”

  Sidorouk gestured at the cadaver. “Look at her neck.” Irk did so. It was dotted with small tracts of dried blood. “Closer, down at the throat.” Whorls of dark brown, smeared on the skin. “Now the left temple, next to the wound.” A scab of desiccated saliva.