Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Saliva, whorls: licking, Irk thought, licking, tasting … The connection came in a rush. The killer wasn’t taking the blood to sell on the black market; he was taking it to drink.

  If a vampire was going to strike anywhere, Sidorouk said, Russia was as good a place as any. Looming large in Russian folklore is a bogeyman named Myertovjec, a brute with a purple face whose victims are the sons of werewolves or witches, or those who’ve cursed their own father or the church. Myertovjec responds to soft and hard treatment alike: if sprinkling poppy seeds along the road from the tomb to the deceased’s house doesn’t work, a stake through the chest to nail the beast to the coffin usually does the trick.

  Vampires are supposed to command weaker wills; this at least was something to which Irk could relate. This vampire had drained Irk’s energy even as he’d dominated his thoughts. Irk’s lassitude had been debilitating. Some days, he’d climbed the stairs to his office only by grabbing the banister and pulling himself up arm over arm, as though hauling an anchor aboard a boat.

  Why children? They were smaller than adults, of course, and easier to subdue. But why their blood? For rejuvenation? Reinvention? Was the vampire—the killer, vampires don’t exist, he reminded himself—was the killer harking back to his own childhood, an idyll, real or imagined? Or perhaps he was revisiting the sins of a dreadful adolescence on these children?

  He? Why shouldn’t the killer be a woman? Sidorouk recounted the tale of the Transylvanian countess Erzsebet Bathory, who killed more than 650 young women and bathed in their blood, which she believed would keep her forever young. She’d been sentenced to life imprisonment in a windowless room, and had died there three years later.

  The killer could easily be a woman, Irk thought. What about menstruation? Women lose blood every month, would a deranged female want to replace that somehow? The victims were children; did pregnancy have anything to do with it?

  No, this was ridiculous. How would Irk know, one way or the other? He was a man, men know nothing about women, and the police force was a good generation away from being enlightened enough to employ women in anything higher than a clerical capacity.

  So, assume that the killer’s a man as opposed to a woman or a supernatural being. He would cast a shadow and have a reflection, and Irk would find him through detective work, steady and prosaic. The killer wasn’t going to be a creature who could fly, or hypnotize a beautiful woman out of bed in the middle of a thunderstorm; he wouldn’t be able to turn into mist and slither through keyholes, or command the elements, or survive on human blood alone. He wouldn’t be as strong as twenty men, nor possessed of everlasting youth. He wouldn’t be the master of bats, moths, wolves, rats, foxes and owls, and he wouldn’t climb walls like an insect.

  Irk was sure of another thing: the killer wouldn’t cease voluntarily. Only his own death or capture could contain the perverse fires within him that led him to kill. He was the ultimate consumer, unfettered by any kind of restraints apart from the need not to get caught, and he played off the weaknesses and moral contradictions that rent society from top to bottom. The vampire had chosen the darker path, and he was willing to go the distance.

  Tverskaya was lined with an army of whores, five or six deep and wearing next to nothing, the cold making their bare legs blue under electric-green miniskirts. In Pushkin Square, twelve-year-olds lined up for hamburgers at McDonald’s and sold them at a profit. The lines stretched around the block; it was the slowest fast food in the world.

  An old woman walked up and down the line, muttering to herself before grabbing Alice by the arm. “I wish my death would come sooner. I won’t beg, I won’t be pitied. You know why people pity beggars? Because, compared to beggars, they don’t seem so pathetic themselves.”

  I wish my death would come sooner. Alice repeated the words to herself as she staggered down the sidewalk. She needed a permanent touch, like a radio that dissolved into static the moment you removed your hand from the aerial. She needed to be grounded.

  I wish my death would come sooner. It would solve so many problems, and it would be so easy. All Alice would have to do was climb over the side of a bridge and step off, then down through the thinning ice, a couple of lungfuls of water, and she’d be gone.

  You could skate across the surface when the river was frozen over, but in Moscow things moved in four dimensions, and time was taking her under and showing her the dark hearts of existence, as it did to everyone who wasn’t just passing through. Maybe she could simply throw herself in front of a train the next time she was in a metro station. Thousands had been killed in the rush to complete the first line in the thirties, what difference would one more make? The metro was brutally efficient; she’d never have to wait more than three minutes.

  No, no, it was stupid of her to think this way. However bad she felt, it would never be enough. Alice couldn’t conceive of a despair on earth that was sufficiently powerful to extinguish her frenzied, perhaps even indecent, thirst for life.

  84

  Sunday, March 15, 1992

  The cartoon in Izvestiya said it all. Three panels, from left to right: Lenin in ankle boots, because in his day Russia had only been inch-deep in shit; Stalin up to the knees in his trademark cavalry boots; and now Borzov, fishing waders flapping around his thighs as he looked thoughtfully at one of the full bodysuits worn by the sewer maintenance crews.

  Borzov was drunk and maudlin. “You know your Shakespeare, Kolya? You know your Macbeth? What does a man need in old age? Honor, love, obedience and a troop of friends. And what’s the president got? None of them, that’s what. Look outside, Kolya. Those oafs in parliament do untold damage to the nation, but when the president puts them in their place, the people turn against him. Newspapers, television, people in the streets with banners, they all say the same thing.”

  There was little Arkin could do but hear the old man out. He knew the problem perfectly well: the gap between reality and expectation had proved too much for people and president alike. Wounded by his own errors, by the implacable hatred and resistance of his enemies, and most of all by his inability to deliver miracles to this enormous, impoverished country, Borzov was proving too weak to manage the revolution and justify his people’s trust.

  The Kremlin doctors had suggested that Borzov was manic depressive. There had been depression, inactivity and despair; there had been energy, elation and activity. Nobody had thought out a plan more quickly, carried it out more slowly or abandoned it more easily.

  As if deliberately confirming Arkin’s fears, Borzov spoke again. “Anatoly Nikolayevich was too hasty in his reaction to the siege, Kolya. Perhaps we should quietly abandon some of these new policies before they become too entrenched.”

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich, that’s absurd. This is what Gorbachev did, remember? Swing from one extreme to the other, make concession after concession. He tried to please everyone and ended up satisfying no one.”

  “Things are different now.”

  “Human nature’s always the same.”

  “Why haven’t those useless fools found Lev yet?” The discussion was over.

  “He’s got a network of supporters with no love for the cops. He’ll be hard to track down.”

  “Find him, Kolya. We don’t want him running around causing trouble.”

  The papers were full of the vampire, relaying every blood-engorged detail to their readers with lip-smacking relish and speculating wildly. One organized crime gang had lost a card game to another one, and the stake was fifty children’s lives; Jews were sacrificing Christian children for their rituals; the murders were the work of a high-ranking government official who rode around in a black Volga sedan with a special license plate beginning with the letters SSO—the Russian acronym for Death to Soviet Children.

  Muscovites drank down every last detail and came back for more. The vampire, Irk thought, could be seen as a convenient form of retribution for the reformists’ zeal. Muscovites, Russians, human beings, want love, life and power, but in wa
nting these things they risk exactly the opposite: hate, death and exploitation. To understand this predicament was to understand the vampire, the true symbol of a society in decline and at war with itself.

  Seven hours at Petrovka chasing leads that went nowhere was enough for anyone. Irk went out west to the Vagankovskoye Cemetery, where vampire hunters armed with crucifixes, spades and stakes of sharpened aspen huddled around small fires and shared bottles of vodka. They were waiting for the creaking of a coffin lid or the sound of moving earth under the snow. The safest and surest way of cutting short a vampire’s immortality was to trace it to its lair. They’d already been around the entire cemetery looking for empty coffins into which they could place crucifixes, which would prevent the vampire returning and send it crumbling to dust in the first rays of dawn. Inherent in Russian belief is the concept of the earth’s purity and sanctity; the soil will not put up with dead sinners. “Trust the earth not to have you,” the cemetery vigilantes muttered to their unseen enemy. “Trust the earth not to have you.”

  Across the rows of graves, Irk saw a familiar figure. Grateful for the relief, he hurried over like a swimmer striking out for land. “Rodya! What are you doing here?”

  Rodion gestured at the nearest two graves. “Mates of mine; died in Afghanistan.” There were a couple of women with him, wrapped like mummies against the cold. “These are their mothers, Ira and Lena,” Rodion said. “This is Juku—he’s an investigator with the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Rodion’s a friend of mine,” Irk said.

  “He’s a good man,” Ira said. “He always comes here, you know. Twice, three times a week. A lot of them don’t bother.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Rodion said. “The mothers are always here, Juku. You see one hurrying from the bus in the evening after work, another already sitting by the graveside crying, a third painting the railing around her son’s grave. That’s how they get to know each other, that’s how they got to know me.”

  Lena handed Irk a piece of paper, half torn along the lines where it had been folded and unfolded on umpteen occasions. “This is what the government sent me,” she said. He opened it and read: Your son perished while fulfilling his international duty in Afghanistan. “Not very comforting, is it?” Lena said.

  “Tell us what it was like, Rodya,” Ira said. “The truth, this time. You never tell us the truth, you lie to save our sensibilities.”

  “Mama, trust me. You wouldn’t want to know the truth unless you’d been there, and if you’d been there you wouldn’t have to ask for it.”

  “Why couldn’t he have come back and you died?” Lena said suddenly, and there was silence, everyone shocked and no one knowing where to look. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s OK, Mama,” Rodion said. “I understand. I’ll see you next time. Come on, Juku.”

  Irk followed him through the cemetery. “Next time?” he said.

  “There’s always a next time, because there’ll never be one for the poor sods we’ve come to remember. She’ll be there with a bottle of vodka and a thousand apologies, embracing me as if I were her own son, saying over and over how she never meant it, grief does funny things to people, and we’ll cry and hug. The mothers at least try to understand, Juku. No one else does, not really. ‘We never sent you there,’ they say. ‘We didn’t send you to Afghanistan.’”

  Back at the Khruminsches’ apartment, they settled down in front of a crime show called Six Hundred Seconds, each one counted down on a clock in the corner of the screen while the host—Alexander Nevzorov, a former movie stuntman and son of a KGB officer—narrated footage for which no detail seemed too gruesome. That was especially true tonight, when Nevzorov was dedicating every one of those six hundred seconds to the story of the Moscow vampire.

  “When the need to kill arises,” Nevzorov said, “the vampire can no more decide not to kill than a normal man can decide not to eat when he’s hungry or not to drink when he’s thirsty. The vampire can make and follow a plan to find a victim, even a subtle and convoluted plan. But until he obtains the release that killing offers, he’ll be depressed and irritable, he might suffer from headaches or insomnia. Blood will no longer satiate him, it’ll simply intensify the craving, a deadly snowball effect whereby the more he gets, the more he wants.”

  Like all the best programs, Six Hundred Seconds was from St. Petersburg. Moscow journalists couldn’t make decent television if their lives depended on it. No matter how sprawlingly enormous it becomes, Moscow will always be a village at heart, retaining peasant superstitions. No wonder the vampire came here, Irk thought, because here people would believe in it. In contrast, Peter is a foreign, prodigal son, ashamed of its country-bumpkin mother. The vampire wouldn’t have lasted a second in Peter.

  Asleep on the sofa, too tired even to have gotten undressed, Irk fretted lonely in his nightmare.

  He was walking through corridors lit in crimson, pathways to hell. There were goths and rubber fetishists, men with tapestries of tattoos and women pierced like pincushions. Eyebrows had been shaved off and redrawn in eyeliner; lips were slashed crimson and traced black.

  Irk was with a girl called Roza; her cheeks were snowy and her lips scarlet. People greeted Roza warmly, Irk more guardedly; in here, without makeup or ornaments, he was the freak. “You want to stay here,” Roza whispered, pulling him into a side room, “we have to make you look normal.” She pushed him down into a chair. “This won’t take long.” She rummaged in a wicker basket, and gave him a makeup job as basic as hers before holding up a mirror.

  “You like?” Irk nodded. He thought he looked like a clown.

  They went back out into the corridors, and from there into a cavernous hall where a band was playing on an elevated stage strewn with skulls and bones. Irk saw four musicians, stripped to the waist and soaked with sweat. In the pit below the stage, the crowd was loving it. When the singer yelled, Irk saw that his teeth were filed to gleaming points. In cages suspended above the stage, dancers flailed with whips and handcuffs, or writhed upside down, hanging like bats.

  The band finished their set with triumphant howls and ran off the stage. In their place came an apparition in sweeping black, a woman with unnervingly real horns sprouting from her hairline.

  “Plastic surgery,” Roza said. “That’s the Mistress, the head of the coven.”

  “She’s young to be in charge, isn’t she?”

  Roza smiled. “She’s eighty.”

  “Rubbish. She’s half that, tops.”

  The Mistress’s voice rang through the speakers. “Mortal life is short, but we are not of this world. We must liberate our souls from human flesh. We drink blood to reaffirm our membership of the religion of rulers. We are vampires, immortal masters of the earth. We drink for power, for surrender, for immortality. Those who fail are lost to the winds of time.”

  Irk saw objects being passed from person to person, metallic sheens glinting under the lights: scalpels and cups. Several were pressed into his hands; he was motioned to take one of each for himself and pass the rest on. Sleeves were rolled up, scalpels applied to skin. Three parallel incisions on the inside of the left forearm, the cups held beneath to catch the draining blood. Only Irk spoiled the symmetry.

  Full, the cups were handed around in acts of communion. Irk waved away those offered to him and shuffled closer to Roza. Participants drank greedily and fast; those who sipped too leisurely would find the blood starting to coagulate. Irk felt the bile rise in his throat.

  “I see a man who chooses only to observe,” the Mistress shouted.

  A moment dripped like blood on tiles. Irk realized that the Mistress was pointing at him.

  “You wish to be lost to the winds of time, my friend?”

  Her gaze squeezed at Irk’s stomach. Dimly, slowly, he was aware they weren’t playing games anymore—if indeed they ever had been.

  “The blood ritual can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself.” The Mistress’s voice wa
s relentless. “If you won’t become an active participant, then we’ll use you as a passive one.”

  “What does she mean?” Irk hissed.

  “If you won’t drink our blood, we’ll drink yours.”

  “No. No way.”

  “I thought you wanted to join us.”

  “Perhaps a sanctuary feed is in order,” the Mistress said.

  Roza looked away. Irk had to nudge her twice before she explained. “A sanctuary feed,” Roza said slowly, “is when the entire herd converges on one donor.”

  Everyone was looking at Irk now, their faces heavy with anticipation. He felt their anger and fear. His investigator’s badge was no use to him now; in here, he was the intruder, the outlaw.

  Irk tensed himself to run.

  “My friend is timid and reluctant,” said Roza.

  “And so his blood is tarnished,” the Mistress replied. Was Irk imagining it, or was there a note of disappointment in her voice? “Very well. We’ll find a willing volunteer for this most noble of services. Roza, would you escort your friend from the premises?”

  Irk burst from sleep like a cork pops from a champagne bottle, and sucked in deep, gulping breaths as though Moscow air was the cleanest and purest of mountain breezes.

  In his bag was a copy of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s classic tale of how the devil had created havoc in the capital. If Satan came back to Moscow now, Irk thought, he’d find his work already done.

  85

  Monday, March 16, 1992

  Testarossa called Lev early in the morning. “Borzov wants to offer you a deal,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “He’s embarrassed that they can’t find you. It’s making him look weak and stupid. Reading between the lines, he’s also worried about how small his power base is. There’s a lot of support for you out there. He’d rather have you where he can see you than always be wondering what you’re cooking up against him.”