Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “What’s he offering?”

  “An amnesty for what happened in parliament.”

  “And in return?”

  “You agree not to run for deputy again. To stay out of politics altogether, in fact. And you give up all your interests in Red October.”

  Lev thought for long moments. “The first is acceptable. The second’s definitely not.”

  “It’s Red October that’s caused all this trouble, as far as he’s concerned. That’s why he put Sabirzhan in charge.”

  “Don’t talk to me about that scum. What else? From Borzov, I mean.”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You can keep everything else. If you ask me, it’s a hell of a deal. The old man’s going soft.”

  “The old man is worrying about his popularity ratings.”

  Lev considered the offer for an hour. The longer he thought, the more he realized Testarossa was right: it was a hell of a deal. Borzov was old, his health was failing, he wasn’t up to the job. In a couple of years tops he’d be out of office, and then all bets would be off.

  President and vor were photographed together in the Kremlin at lunchtime, all smiles and handshakes. It was a new dawn in Russian politics, Borzov said: reconciliation between enemies. Russia was not yet so blessed with people capable of reconstructing the nation that it could afford to throw them in jail, he added. The flash of sincerity in his eyes might almost have convinced Lev that he meant it.

  Petrovka was stuffy, smoky and overheated. Irk went for a walk to clear his head.

  The snow was falling heavily again. When he looked behind him, he saw that the snow was already covering his footprints, erasing any trace of his progress. Story of my life, Irk thought, story of my—

  And then he was running, footprints be damned, skidding like a penguin through the Petrovka gates, taking the steps two at a time past his astonished colleagues.

  What had that asshole photographer from Minsk said the other day in the sewer? That there weren’t any footprints. “There must be,” Irk had replied. “You think he levitates?”

  There must be, but there weren’t, and none around the latest body either—at least none that hadn’t been caused by heavy-footed cops tramping over evidence as though they were getting paid per item destroyed. Irk was annoyed—no, he was disgusted—that he hadn’t registered the significance of this earlier. It was the kind of thing that only a chance observation would have uncovered. He could have stared at the case files for weeks on end without it coming to light. Reality lies in what’s left out of the picture.

  Irk took the photographs of Nelli’s body and went over them with a magnifying glass till his eyes ached. If something was going to show up, it would be here, on dry land by the VDNKh sculpture, where the endless running of the sewers hadn’t washed away evidence.

  There—tracks on the ground, faint and slightly knurled. Wheels, perhaps, with narrow tires. A bicycle? Irk looked closer. The lines were parallel, as far as he could make out. If it was a bicycle, then the tracks would have to have come from two separate machines—unlikely—or the same machine repeating the same route. But no, the lines were symmetrical, perfectly so. Two wheels, separated by an axle. Not a bicycle. Too small to be a car, of course. A baby carriage?

  No, all the victims had been too old for carriages.

  What else had wheels?

  A wheelchair, for a start.

  That was stupid. None of the victims were disabled, and the vampire clearly couldn’t be.

  Why not?

  The children were small and weak, they were no match for an adult, even a disabled one.

  How would you get a wheelchair into the sewers?

  You wouldn’t, not without extreme difficulty.

  Irk examined the photographs again, looking at each tire mark in turn. The treads seemed even across their width. Wheelchair tires would leave thicker marks on their outer edges than on their inner ones, since they were angled slightly toward the rider.

  If not a wheelchair, then what?

  Irk thought of Rodion and his trolley, and he knew. There were hundreds of those poor bastards on what were little more than tea trays. They haunted the metros and street corners, playing war ballads or simply holding out upturned hands beneath lowered heads.

  How would he go about interviewing them all? Was there a list of Afghan veterans?

  Irk’s mind shied from the connection. A disabled veteran on a trolley; a man who knew at least the first three victims; a man whom Irk had seen win children’s trust in a heartbeat; a man who’d offered to help with the investigation; a man who called himself Irk’s friend.

  None of the Khruminsches were home. Feeling like the most deceitful man alive, Irk used his skeleton key to open the door of their apartment. It was mid-afternoon, so he had a good couple of hours before any of them were likely to return home, but still he found himself holding his breath and creeping lightly on his feet.

  What was he looking for? He didn’t exactly know; a clue, a lead, something to clear Rodion’s name or drag him deeper into the mire. Irk opened every drawer, ran his hands over every item of clothing, flicked through the pages of every book—and finally, in the margins of a memorandum about staffing at Prospekt Mira, Irk found something: Studenetsky, Wed. 12th, 6:30. A name, a date, a time—an appointment. Rodya’s handwriting, Irk knew that much.

  He checked back through his own diary. Wednesday had fallen on the twelfth last month, February; the next previous occasion had been back in June, and the memo was dated January this year, which ruled that out.

  Not that any of this helped Irk much. Who or what was Studenetsky? Speculation was pointless; it could be anybody. Irk didn’t even know whether the name was important, or if Rodya had kept the appointment. A telephone number would be priceless. A telephone number was exactly what Irk didn’t have. Unless …

  He recalled Sveta, chattering away after the Chechens had killed the cats—good God, Irk thought suddenly, bloodlust was bloodlust, animal or human. What if it was Rodya rather than the Chechens who’d sliced up the Archangel blues?—anyway, Sveta chattering away about how nothing ever went to waste, and how she used colanders and sieves to file her papers.

  He went into the kitchen.

  The phone bills were in the third colander he tried, beneath a frying pan full of old newspaper crosswords, all blank, and above a skillet smeared with the pages of a letter. Phone bills had been itemized since the start of the year—it was one of Arkin’s proudest boasts, that a modern city must have a decent telecommunications system. That wrong numbers were still ten a penny was of no concern to Irk now, so long as he found a Studenetsky at one of these numbers, he’d be happy.

  He worked backward, careful to check before each new number that he hadn’t dialed it before. Three “you’ve got the wrong number”s, two failures to answer and one torrent of abuse later, he struck gold.

  Studenetsky was a consultant at the Serbsky Psychiatric Institute.

  Irk sat at Elektrozavodskaya metro station and moved his gaze slowly through a half circle. He started with the curved ceiling where cupolas cradled electric lamps, passed through the rows of pylons crawling with marble reliefs, and finished at the black-and-gray paving slabs framed in pink-and-yellow Crimean marble. What counted more: his friendship with Rodya, or his job? He could no longer have both.

  The Serbsky was a yellowing pile on Kropotkinskaya, halfway down the loop in the river by the Luzhniki Stadium. Yevgeni Studenetsky’s white hair was brushed savagely back from his forehead. He looked more like a retired Red Army colonel than a psychiatrist, Irk thought, but then again, what did he know? People kept telling him that he looked more like a chess grandmaster than a homicide investigator.

  “I’m not sure I like this whole affair,” Studenetsky said. “The nature of the relationship I have with Rodion Khruminsch must surely remain between me and him? There is such a thing as patient confidentiality, Investigator—or are the thought police
still with us?”

  Such a gambit was usually a prelude to a bribe, but Studenetsky’s voice didn’t carry the knowing cynicism that Irk would have expected, and Irk saw in his face none of the almost imperceptible movements that represent the habitual financial come-ons of a Russian reluctant to part with information. Studenetsky wasn’t holding out for money; he really was concerned about Rodion’s right to privacy. The incorruptible man, Irk thought, was good at spotting the few who were like him; it was a secret society, almost.

  “It’s like this, Yevgeni Pavelevich,” he said. “Rodya’s a friend of mine, and I’d give anything not to be investigating him, but that’s the way things go. I wouldn’t have come here unless I thought it absolutely necessary. This is a serial killer we’re talking about.”

  “I know that.”

  “If Rodya is innocent, nothing you tell me will make it beyond these walls, I promise you that. I won’t even tell him I’ve been here. If he’s guilty, his state of mind—whether he’s insane or not—will be crucial in determining whether he’s fit to stand trial. Either way, I’d rather do this in a civilized manner, gentleman to gentleman, than have to bring down a bunch of uniforms and impound your files.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m appealing to your good sense. My need for information is greater than Rodya’s need for privacy; I’m trying to make you see that.”

  Studenetsky steepled his hands, and Irk knew he had him.

  “What did Rodya come and see you about?” Irk asked.

  Studenetsky gave a small laugh. “Where do you want me to start?”

  “The basics.”

  “All right. Rodya suffers from a blood delusion.” Good God, Irk thought, there goes the first nail in the lid of his coffin. Soviet courts had sentenced people to death on half this evidence. “It’s been getting progressively worse, especially since Rodya came off his pills in mid-January.”

  “Pills?”

  Studenetsky ticked them off on his fingers: “Desi-pramine, phenothiazines, benzodiazepines, lithium, Xanax, doxepin hydrochloride, thorazine. Half a pharmacy, and most of them past their expiration date, dumped on us by the United States or coming from our own antiquated pharmaceutical plants before they were deemed environmental hazards and shut down. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. Rodya was down to only a few by the time he came off. Well, ‘came off’ is perhaps a misleading phrase. He didn’t want to stop taking them—I didn’t want him to stop taking them—but they simply cost too much. The clinic could no longer afford them, Rodya couldn’t either, and the stuff on the black market is too expensive and cut with all kinds of rubbish—that stuff causes more harm than it cures. Say what you like about the old system, Detective, but it kept Rodya in pills and his problems in check.”

  “And it never occurred to you to get in touch with Petrovka these past few days?”

  “You know my position on that, Investigator, we’ve been over it.”

  Irk could have pushed the point, but decided he’d do better to get as much as he could out of Studenetsky now. “Tell me about the blood delusion.”

  “Well, it stems from Afghanistan. More specifically, from when he had his legs blown off. The medics had run out of morphine, so they injected him with vodka instead. And from that moment onward, he’s feared that his blood—of which he now has less than other people, of course—is turning into vodka.” Studenetsky saw the skepticism on Irk’s face. “Believe me, Investigator, Rodion’s mania is no joke. This obsession with his blood is so intense that we can’t inject him with anything—he’s too scared of needles. I once found him watching a televised angiogram and the sight of blood pumping through the veins had him utterly transfixed. I stood next to him for ten minutes before he even noticed me. It was as if he were in a trance.”

  Studenetsky left the room and came back five minutes later, clutching a videocassette.

  “We tape sessions sometimes,” he explained.

  “With the patients’ knowledge?”

  Studenetsky made a face. “The clinic’s policy is that the patients by definition are incapable of determining their own best interests.”

  Irk thought fleetingly of Studenetsky’s jibe about the thought police. Studenetsky inserted the cassette into an old VCR machine and fiddled with the controls on both recorder and television until a picture appeared. Rodion’s face filled the screen, filmed in full zoom on a static camera, and Irk actually recoiled in his chair at the sight, it was so sudden and unexpected—so real.

  “I try to hold it in,” Rodion was saying, “but sometimes it’s too hard. Dark thoughts, bad thoughts keep on and on, battering against the inside of my skull. It’s chilly outside right now, but I don’t feel too cold, and that sets me worrying, because it means that there’s too much vodka in my blood again. My blood’s turning to vodka, that’s why it’s not freezing, because vodka only freezes at very low temperatures. If I don’t get some more blood soon, then that’ll be it for me.”

  “When was this filmed?” Irk asked.

  Studenetsky looked down. “February twelfth.”

  “And this didn’t alert you that something might be wrong?”

  “He often said stuff like that. You say you know Rodya, Investigator. Then you’ll know how he can be …” Studenetsky searched for the right words: “So insistent, so … over the top.” That was true enough, Irk thought. “He came in here once claiming that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. So when dealing with his delusion one must be careful to factor in his tendency to exaggerate.”

  Irk shook his head and turned his attention back to Rodion.

  “When I was young,” Rodion was saying, “I had such a head for vodka that my friends said I had hollow legs. Now my legs are gone, I’ve only half a body. There’s more and more vodka, less and less blood. I can feel the blood thinning into vodka. If I look at my veins through the skin they’re no longer dark with all the red blood flowing through them, but pale, like clear plastic tubes. I see all the vats and the machinery and the pipes in the distillery and I think, that’s it, that’s what my body looks like inside: a distillery. Without blood, my body’s going to disintegrate, everything will shut down: blood stops flowing, heart stops beating, kidneys and liver stop working…”

  Rodion kept talking, jumping from subject to subject; Irk watched and listened, rising to the thrill of finding his mark, falling at the way his friend had let him down.

  “It was a perfect day to be alive. A hundred peaks, dazzling white in the sun; dragonflies buzzing around like miniature Mi24 helicopter gunships; the sound of a river rushing below us; clumps of the most amazing flowers—deep pink, purple, dark blue—blossoms everywhere you looked. And the air was full of birds: yellow wagtails with rich lemon-curd heads, hoopoes with their striped crests … But beyond the drone of the flies, the flutter of the birds, the shepherds watching our passing, you could see the rocket craters, the shrapnel scars, the twisted metal carcass of a downed helicopter napalmed so the Afghans couldn’t get it, charred roof beams rising from burned buildings. That’s why we hurried through this region.

  “But hurrying meant taking chances, and chances in Afghanistan meant risks. A convoy had been down this road a couple of days before, and we didn’t think there’d been time for the Afghans to re-mine it. I was hanging on to the outside of the trawler, ready to jump down and start sweeping the moment I got the order. To keep our minds off the prospect of being attacked, we were singing:

  Here in the mountains we have only one law,

  to stab and to slash the Afghan tramps;

  and if your chest doesn’t catch a fragment of lead,

  it’ll most likely catch a medal instead.

  “We’d just gotten the words out when the vehicle suddenly jolted. I thought we’d hit a rock, and like a greenhorn I hadn’t been holding on tight enough. My arms stretched out in front of me. But then I looked down at myself from up above and saw my body tearing itself off the trawler in pursuit of my hand
s. It must have been a huge rock, I thought; the trawler was in bits.

  “Men were lying with their limbs hanging by threads, and the rocks were red and soft with intestines. I looked down and there was nothing below my waist, nothing but blood. I’ve lost my balls, I thought. Never mind my legs, I’ve lost my fucking nuts. I reached down and felt around. I found one, but not the other. Hitler only had one ball, that’s what the veterans from Stalingrad had told us. But then I found the other, caught between my legs—caught between my stumps, rather. One, two, both my plums were still there.

  “I called out to one of my buddies, the first guy I saw. ‘Hey! Filya! I’ve lost my legs.’

  “‘No, you haven’t,’ he said. ‘They’re over there.’

  “He should’ve been a comedian, Filya should. I looked where he was pointing, and saw he was right: there were my legs, with the identity tags glinting around my right ankle—except now it was somewhere near my left knee. We always wore two identity tags, one around our neck and the other around an ankle. That way, if you got blown in two, they still might be able to put your corpse together and send it home.

  “The medics pulled my shirt open. My chest was all white, except for the pink patches left by the lice sores. They had to inject me with vodka, because they were all out of morphine. They said they’d get me drunk and knock me out, all in one shot. It took four men to hold me down, I was struggling so much. They shoved a branch in my mouth for me to clench my teeth on; I’d have bitten someone’s hand clean off if they hadn’t. I remember the needle going in, feeling the vodka pump around my system and watching my blood draining onto the road—blood out and vodka in, blood out, vodka in, out, in, blood, vodka. The pain got louder and louder, until I was almost unconscious. And then all the thoughts wandering around in my head seemed bright and new and sticky to the touch like fresh paint. It was a wonderful feeling.