Vodka

by Boris Starling

  The warders at the Lefortovo came to get Lev a good few hours earlier than he’d expected. He knew better than to ask them why he was being released so soon; they wouldn’t tell him if they knew, and if they didn’t know then they couldn’t tell him. A gaggle of reporters was waiting at the main entrance, so they took him out through a back door that led into a courtyard where a limousine was waiting. The rear seat was all his, but two Spetsnaz sat opposite with their submachine guns trained on him. When they pulled out of the courtyard, two more cars joined them.

  The roads were deserted. Virtually the only vehicles on the streets were police cars slewed across intersections with the policemen leaning against them and slapping luminous traffic-control batons against their thighs as they tried to keep warm. The car Lev was in had special presidential markings; not a single policeman moved to challenge them.

  They more or less followed the course of the Yauza River as it headed back into the city. Lev looked around him with the wide eyes of a yokel arrived from the provinces for the first time. After today, he’d never see Moscow again.

  The car glided across the Garden Ring and on to Nikoloyamskaya.

  “Hey! We should have turned left there—” Lev pointed out the window. “Domodedovo’s that way.” The Spetsnaz remained silent. “What’s going on? Where are we going? What the fuck’s going on?”

  Something was very wrong. There was no reason for them to be heading back toward the city center, let alone for no one to be telling him what was happening. Lev thought of flinging open the door and jumping for it, but the car was going too fast, he’d be dead the moment he hit the pavement; and besides, there were no interior handles on the rear doors. He was trapped there until they chose to let him out.

  Lev may not have been told where they were going, but he knew the moment they got there. His destination was a vast concrete labyrinth, one of Moscow’s most recognizable buildings—and certainly its most feared. They were at the Lubyanka.

  He was numb beyond reaction. He’d done everything he’d been asked to. The charade in the Kremlin was supposed to have been the end of it all. There was nothing left in him anymore; he didn’t have the energy to respond.

  The tunnel that led down to the Lubyanka’s underground parking swallowed the car. Lev tried not to gag. He hated the smell of parking lots, too many exhaust fumes in too small an area.

  They were waiting for him in a corner; a dozen or so Spetsnaz, and in the middle Sabirzhan, trembling with the suppressed thrill of a teenage boy about to lose his virginity.

  When they opened the door, Lev stepped from the car with as much dignity as he could muster. He wasn’t going to let Sabirzhan’s thugs drag him out like terriers down a rabbit warren.

  The Lubyanka’s corridors were cream and green, the colors of institutions. On the first basement floor, the paint was scratched and chipped, and the farther down one went below the ground, the more the walls were stained with patches of rusty brown, the color of dried blood.

  No one was telling Alice anything; her guards were as silent as ever. Lev’s words spun in her head. “The fucker’s lucky they’re only giving me blanks, let’s put it that way.”

  The bullets must have been real. She’d no idea how he had got hold of them, but then again Lev had contacts everywhere. He’d spent decades running criminal empires from behind the wire—a couple of bullets in the center of Moscow would surely be child’s play.

  What Alice couldn’t see was why he’d done it. Even if Lev had really wanted to kill Borzov—and she was sure what he’d said was hyperbole rather than serious intent—he must have known it’d solve nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it had instantly destroyed their escape and all their plans for the future. What about Baikal, and jumping in the snow after making love in the banya? What about their own vegetable garden and long, lazy days in the summer heat? What about her? How could he have done this to her?

  Alice had questions for everything and answers for nothing.

  It was too much for her to take in at once. If the guards had been talking to her, she’d have asked them for a vodka, no question. Just one glass, to take the edge off it all. Just to be normal again.

  98

  Sunday, March 29, 1992

  Sabirzhan’s face filled the darkness around Lev. Dripping Poison, they called him, and it suited him well. There were no inherent contradictions in Sabirzhan’s character, Lev thought, and he had only one side to him—evil—which was rather un-Russian. Well, Sabirzhan was a Georgian really, so perhaps it was unfair to apply Russian criteria.

  When Lev thought more, he realized he was wrong. Sabirzhan was no more or less unilateral than the next man. He was boorish, disgusting and without kindness, but he was also intelligent and astute. Who would have guessed his darker undercurrents on first acquaintance? It was a good thing when a man differed from his image; it showed he wasn’t a type.

  Sabirzhan’s breath was coming in short, tongue-lolling pants, anticipation at the pleasure to come. He wasn’t racing a deadline, as he’d been with Sharmukhamedov. He would have as long as he needed, and this time the end would come when he chose. He thought of the way Lev had thrown him to the wolves at Petrovka; it felt good to win now.

  He pressed a ring of cold metal against Lev’s right ankle, moving it as a dog would sniff as he sought the best spot: on the anklebone itself, or against the webbing of skin that wrapped around the Achilles tendon? The gun barrel slipped, adjusted, settled.

  Lev heard the shot and smelled the gunpowder burn. It seemed a long, long time before he felt his joint explode.

  Alice gave up the search for sleep at dawn, and turned on the television, more for comfort than anything else. The assassination—though she was forcing herself still to think of it as a pantomime, as it had been intended—was being aired continuously. If she missed it on one channel, she didn’t have to wait long until another channel ran it. She watched the footage over and over again. On the fourth or fifth showing, by which time she could have closed her eyes and replayed the scene stride for stride in her head, she saw something that jagged at her.

  There was a video recorder in the apartment, and piles of recorded films—pirated copies of Western movies, mostly. Alice inserted a tape in the machine, found the playback channel, and began searching through the stations using the video’s controls. The next time the shooting was shown, she recorded it; then she replayed it, watching carefully.

  The speech, the walk, and then the gun bucking and cracking and blooming fire in Lev’s hand. And there was Borzov…

  … And there was Borzov doing nothing. That was what had caught Alice’s eye. Lev was no more than a man’s height away from Borzov when he fired, and he was aiming dead center, yet the shots didn’t push Borzov backward. Borzov kept standing for a full second, perhaps even more, before finally staggering back, as though he’d only just remembered what he was supposed to do. He’d been blind drunk; he should have gone down like a ninepin.

  Alice backed the tape up and watched again. This time, she saw that none of Lev’s shots even tore the material of Borzov’s tuxedo.

  Rewind. Play.

  The carpet was a deep cream; any blood would surely have shown up on it. There was none visible. Alice watched all the way through. Not a drop.

  Lev had clearly used blanks as instructed. Borzov was clearly dead. One of those statements couldn’t be true; not even in Russia.

  Lev’s right ankle was in pieces, but Sabirzhan had yet to give him a matching pair. He was not going to do one immediately after the other. He wanted to prolong Lev’s agony, and make the gap between bullets linger as long and excruciating as the shots themselves, give the pain time not merely to kick in but to gurgle and flow around Lev’s body, oozing into the smallest parts and carving agony in the crevices.

  “I’m going to pull your eye over your ass,” Sabirzhan said. “I’m going to punish you more severely than you could ever have imagined. I’m going to tear off your balls.”

&nb
sp; Alice called the Kremlin guards into the television room. They came reluctantly, acceding only when she told them that the whole episode had been a lie. Every Russian is used to having the wool pulled over their eyes; many secretly revel in it. She played the video back to them, explaining what she’d seen, and asking them to tell her if she’d misunderstood anything.

  None of them said a word. Alice was right; Lev had been using blanks.

  “Then take me to the Sklifosovsky,” she said. “My husband”—they looked surprised—“ex-husband”—even though he wasn’t, not officially—“whatever, he’s a surgeon there; he’ll tell us what’s going on.”

  They argued with each other. They hadn’t been given any orders to move, they should try and find out what was going on first.

  “Your president is dead,” she shouted. “Your president is dead. You’re the Kremlin guards, the elite, so show some fucking initiative.”

  They argued some more. Why didn’t some of them stay and some go? That last suggestion met with general agreement.

  “Come,” they said to her. “To the Sklifosovsky.” Time loses all meaning in a room without windows. Lev couldn’t tell whether minutes, hours or days had passed when Sabirzhan next entered. This time, Sabirzhan didn’t show Lev the gun, nor did he need to look for the best place to rest the barrel. He simply placed it against Lev’s left ankle and fired.

  It seemed that half of Moscow’s police were at the Sklifosovsky, and they weren’t letting anyone in. Alice sat in the car while the Kremlin guards shouted, argued, gesticulated and waved guns around. This was debate Russian-style, and she sank lower in her seat, hoping that making herself as invisible as possible would help if shooting started. The police wanted to see authorization papers; the presidential guard said they had a perfect right to be there. The situation was sufficiently heated to be beyond resolution through bribery, which was saying something.

  One of the presidential guard eventually ended the standoff in a typically Russian way, by upping the ante. He grabbed the nearest policeman and held a gun to his head. Before any of the other policemen could react, everyone found himself covered by a gun. If it was going to come down to shooting, they all knew which side would end up on top. The Kremlin guard were among the cream of the Russian army, such as it was; the police would hardly have counted as the cream in a collective dairy. The two policemen nearest the hospital gates could hardly open them fast enough. The presidential guards jumped back inside the car and drove through with a few well-considered oaths by way of farewell.

  “I want to see Lewis Liddell,” Alice said when they reached the main desk.

  “Everyone’s very busy right now,” the receptionist said.

  “Nurse!” someone cried from down a corridor.

  “Lewis is my husband,” Alice said, “and I need to see him, now.”

  The receptionist looked beyond Alice to her escort, thought better of whatever she’d been about to say next, and swung in her chair to point down the corridor behind her. “Follow the signs first to pathology and then to neurosurgery,” she said. “When you get to the large picture of Khrushchev—you can’t miss it, it’s hideous, makes him look like a boiled egg—turn left, then first right. His office is the second door on your right.”

  Alice had never been there before. She’d never once visited Lewis at work, and the realization pricked her with guilt. They hurried down long corridors and found his office after asking twice where it was. He was deep in conversation with two of his colleagues, and looked up sharply when they entered. He hadn’t been home all night, that was clear; hadn’t shaved or slept either, by the look of him.

  “Alice! What are you doing here? Who are these people with you?”

  “I need to talk to you,” she said. “Urgently.”

  He turned to his colleagues. “Could you excuse us for a moment, please?”

  They got up and left, casting anxious glances at the presidential guard as they went. Alice turned to her escort. “You guys can wait outside too.”

  “We’ll stay,” one of them replied.

  “This man is my husband, and I’d like to talk to him in private.” That did the trick; whatever they wanted to know about Borzov, they wouldn’t impinge if they thought there was something personal to discuss. “But stay right outside the door, OK?” she added. “Don’t let anyone in.”

  She was gabbling at Lewis almost before the escort had closed the door behind them. “I don’t know what’s happened, Lewis, but Lev didn’t kill Borzov, you have to know that—”

  “Alice—”

  “—whatever you think of him, it was all a setup, that was the whole point, and …” And what? That after tonight, if all had gone well, Lewis would never have seen her again?

  “Alice! Will you let me speak?”

  She was breathing hard enough to be swallowing air. “OK,” she gulped. “Sorry.”

  “I know Lev didn’t kill Borzov.”

  “How do you know?”

  Lewis picked up a manila folder from his desk, opened it, and pulled out a series of photographs. Alice caught glimpses as he flicked through them: Borzov’s body on the slab, even less dignified in death than he’d been in drunken life. Lewis found the photograph he’d been looking for and handed it over. It was Borzov’s dress shirt, drenched in blood.

  Alice shrugged. “I don’t understand.”

  Lewis pointed to a tear in the shirt, presumably where a bullet had entered; more specifically, to the area around it, almost imperceptible against the lake of red until she looked closer and saw what he was indicating. There, there and there: darker areas, black against the crimson.

  “Lewis, stop fucking around. What are they?”

  “Scorch marks,” he replied.

  “Scorch marks?”

  “From the barrel of a gun. But to leave scorch marks on someone’s clothes, you have to be firing very close. Very close. A few inches kind of close.” He swallowed. “I saw the TV footage, Alice, a few hours ago. When he fired, Lev was too far away to have left scorch marks.”

  Sabirzhan wanted Lev to beg him for mercy. Both ankles gone, Lev spat at him through the pain.

  “You’re a coward, Tengiz, you know that?”

  “I’m not listening.”

  “You know why you’ve got a patronymic? So your mother could remember who your father was, that’s why.”

  Cold metal on skin, and the hot blast of a bullet through Lev’s right kneecap.

  Lewis told Alice everything: how they’d done all they could to save Borzov, but he’d already lost too much blood, and the faster they’d pumped new plasma into him, the faster it had leaked out. Even though the limousine had gotten there as quickly as it could, the outriders clearing traffic all along the route—the motorcyclists had been adamant about that, just in case anyone had tried to blame them, they’d insisted they couldn’t have gotten Borzov there a second earlier—it was a minor miracle that he hadn’t been dead on arrival.

  After life extinct had been declared, Arkin himself had come into the operating theater and demanded they hand over Borzov’s body to him. He was president now, under the constitution, and would be for at least the next three months until elections were held. He would arrange for an autopsy and a state funeral. He had thanked them all for their efforts, and reminded them that they weren’t to breathe a word of what had happened in the hospital to anyone. The president’s assassination was the most heinous of crimes, and the mood in the country wouldn’t be helped by sensationalist tattle from surgeons who should have known better. Anyone who breached these conditions would find themselves detained long enough for their wives to have fucked every man inside the Boulevard Ring before they were out again.

  Lev’s kneecaps were bullet-shattered porridges of cartilage and tissue. From the wounds, blood and fluid oozed through the holes the slugs had ripped in the table. His pain leached into the silence.

  Alice traced back what she knew. Borzov had been unharmed when he’d gotten into the limo
usine, and more or less dead when he’d arrived at the Sklifosovsky. Therefore he must have been shot en route. The limousine had barely slowed, let alone stopped, in its headlong rush for the hospital, so Borzov must have been shot by someone already in the car with him. It couldn’t have been the driver, clearly, since he was driving; nor anyone in the front seat, since front and back compartments were sealed off from each other. It could only, therefore, have been someone who’d been in the back with Borzov.

  “Have you got security cameras here?” she asked. “At the main entrance, in particular?”

  “Of course.” Soviet paranoia had dictated as much.

  “Can you get a look at last night’s tape; for the time when the limousine arrived?”

  Sabirzhan came in with plates laden with food. “Look at all this,” he said. “You haven’t eaten since you arrived, you must be hungry, no? Ravenous, that’s what I’d be if I were in your shoes. Well, all this could be yours. Look at it, Georgian cooking. There’s beef soup, delicious and hearty, just what a man in your condition needs; here we’ve got some vegetable paste with spinach, walnuts and cabbage. It looks awful, it sounds awful, it tastes great. All this could be yours. You know what you have to do.”

  Lev gasped through the rolling waves of agony. “You were conceived on a train, weren’t you, Tengiz? All a guy had to do was to barge into your mother’s compartment with a bottle of vodka, and within seconds her panties were hanging from the curtain rod.”

  Lewis was reluctant; he’d already proved to her that Lev couldn’t have killed Borzov, what more did she want? He was a surgeon, not an activist. Why couldn’t Alice just leave things alone?

  This was the murder of a head of state, she said. It wasn’t theirs to leave alone. If he was that scared, they’d go straight from there to the embassy and demand protection.