Vodka

by Boris Starling

  She didn’t need to add the rider: if she found out who’d killed Borzov, she might have an idea of what had happened to Lev.

  Lewis phoned down to the security department and asked to see the tapes for last night.

  “Why do you want them?” the supervisor asked.

  “To ensure that all proper procedures were followed when the president was brought here. There’ll be an inquiry—it’s in all our interests that we can say we did everything by the book.”

  The supervisor promised to bring the tapes right up. When Lewis hung up, Alice was smiling at him. “Who’d have guessed it?” she said. “Three months here, and at last a bit of Soviet ass-covering rubs off on you.”

  Lev knew that his strength of mind would destroy his body, but what could a man do if not be true to himself? He would never break, never lie down, never bend over, not for anybody. Body and soul are two complementary vessels; after crushing and destroying a man’s physical defenses, an invading party nearly always succeeds in sending its mobile detachments into the breach in time to triumph over a man’s soul, and to force him into unconditional capitulation.

  Not with Lev. Perhaps he’d have been more inclined toward surrender, or at least less firmly set against it, had it been someone other than Sabirzhan inflicting the pain. But however much it hurts to lose, it always hurts twice as much when that loss is against a best friend or a worst enemy. So, just as Sabirzhan was determined that Lev would crumble and plead with him for a mercy that would never come, so Lev was one precious iota more resolved that he would not.

  The black-and-white footage unspooled before the Liddells. Here were the motorcycles, flashing lights diffusing like halos in the low-resolution pictures; here came the limousine, men spilling from its doors even before it had stopped. All four doors were flung open, the driver was out, the front passenger was out, both of them anonymous protection officers. Borzov was being carried onto the stretcher. And there, emerging from the far door, was Arkin.

  There had been no one else inside. The leather bench seat was clearly visible, and clearly empty. There was only one person who’d ridden all the way with the president, and that was Arkin.

  The pain came in swells, and when it got really bad Lev simply went away. He thought of Alice and their love together, and he was sure he could endure anything in the knowledge that she’d always remember and cherish him. What man craves most in life is the sense that someone somewhere treasures him; if that idea holds fast, anything can be borne. He’d sacrificed everything he had for her, and it didn’t occur to him for a moment that he’d been wrong to do so. Beside Alice, nothing had any value.

  Sabirzhan had told Lev enough for him to know that Borzov was dead, but Alice wouldn’t believe he’d done it. She would work out the truth, and she would also be beside herself with worry, because she still wouldn’t have found him, and the fear and anxiety would be overwhelming.

  The American embassy is one of the vilest buildings in Moscow, an eyesore in custard and bile on the edge of the six-line Novinsky Highway near the White House. It’s so revolting that the rooftop Old Glory had this day curled itself around its flagpole in apparent protest at being associated with this architectural monstrosity. The embassy staff joke that if the garish color scheme isn’t enough to make them feel nauseous, then the microwaves from all the nearby listening posts are. The smart new building down by the river that had been intended as the new embassy has stood empty since the Americans had found the Russian builders planting enough bugs during its construction to keep a small town powered for around a year. So the Americans are still in the carbuncle on Novinsky, and it was there that Lewis went.

  Just as he’d rescued Alice from the pit of alcoholism, so Lev now hallucinated that Alice had come to liberate him. She battled in the doorway with the bannik, and the bannik had Sabirzhan’s face. He was a crazed devil, vengeance itself, Lev’s punishment for that exquisite time outside time in the banya.

  Alice didn’t sit in the chair Arkin indicated, she didn’t take the vodka he offered, and she didn’t listen to his platitudes about what a shock this whole thing had been. She told him quickly and clearly what she’d done and what she knew. The confidence drained from Arkin as Alice watched. Then she watched as it refilled as if from a cistern. She knew what had happened, but he still held the key to what she wanted.

  “You see those books there?” He gestured to a couple of volumes on his desk. “I keep them at hand because they’re the most invaluable guides to Russian politics.”

  Alice read the spines. Alice in the Land of Miracles. Alice in the World Behind the Mirror.

  “Where’s Lev?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t the reforms that were the problem,” Arkin said. “The problem was Borzov’s readiness to water them down whenever he felt his power threatened. The first night of the parliamentary plenum, when the deputies voted to remove me, he would happily have cast me out—until every capital from Washington to Warsaw reminded him of his obligation to reform. Would you have let that pass if you were me?”

  “Where’s Lev?”

  “That’s why he clung to power so doggedly, of course; for what does a man have left after he’s been the most powerful figure in the nation? Russia’s merciless to those on the downslope. Gorbachev and Khrushchev were the only two Soviet leaders to have left office alive, you know. Gorbachev’s now the most hated man in the country; Khrushchev was banished to internal exile and had his death reported in a single paragraph in Pravda.”

  “Where’s Lev?”

  “Lord Acton said that power corrupts. I’ve always thought that slightly inaccurate. Power addicts. Borzov had surrounded himself with yes-men—myself apart—and excluded all potential threats. If left unchecked, he’d have ended up turning us into a giant North Korea: no outside investment, no prospects, nothing working, none of the things a modern country needs.”

  “Where’s Lev?”

  “As a young, idealistic reformer, I dreamed for years of marching into Gosplan and tearing it apart. When he told me to do just that a few months ago, I was terrified, absolutely terrified. Now I realize I wasn’t scared enough. I underestimated the determination of many to keep Russia bound in permanent tutelage. If we’re not careful, we’ll be dragged back to the bloody Bolshevik swamp, where so many seem to think that everything was fine. There was sausage, and someone was thrown in jail. Everyone worked so hard, and people were shot for being late for work. Everyone lived so well, and millions were in the gulag. I won’t allow Russia to be turned back into an enormous concentration camp. I will not.”

  “Where’s Lev?”

  “What did Lenin say? A revolution is only worth something when it knows how to defend itself. Revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. The Russian people are a great race. A great race deserves a great leader, and I tell you this, without either bombast or false modesty, I have no doubt whatsoever that I’m up to the job. A great man can be cruel or harsh, even wrong sometimes; but he’s strong enough to do what’s necessary. I am that man. I am the future for Russia. I believe that as sincerely as I believe that the sun rises in the east.”

  “Where’s Lev?”

  Finally, Arkin seemed to hear her. “Lev? I needed to eliminate him, of course.”

  “Eliminate?”

  “He was the only one who could have known the truth. I didn’t think you would work it out.”

  “What do you mean, eliminate?”

  “I gave him to Sabirzhan.” He saw her face. “Oh, don’t worry. Sabirzhan will be taking his time with him; he won’t have killed him yet. You know how much he hates him.”

  “Get him out of there.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll tell the world what you’ve done.”

  “That would be hard if I make sure you never leave.”

  “You’re being serious?”

  “Perfectly.”

  His dark eyes show
ed her nothing, and she knew he was telling the truth. He’d killed Borzov, he’d abandoned Lev to his fate, he’d been prepared to let Alice die with the Chechens, he’d … “Those men who attacked me down by the river last month,” she said. “They didn’t want my money. They weren’t muggers. You sent them to kill me, didn’t you?”

  “Everything’s deniable, Alice.”

  “Not this. If not me, then my husband will tell. He’s in the American embassy.”

  “Your government thinks I’m the best thing in this country.”

  “Not to the point of murder they don’t.”

  Arkin was very still as he thought. Alice looked at him, as handsome as he was cruel.

  “Three of you know that Lev didn’t kill Borzov: you, your lover and your husband.” Arkin had spelled out the triangle with deliberate cruelty. “You and your husband also know who did. I need your silence, both of you; or I’ll have you locked up and let Lev die.”

  “Lewis will tell the world what’s happened if I don’t come back safely.”

  “But he wouldn’t abandon you like that—though God knows you deserve it. And you won’t let it happen, because you want Lev back alive.” Arkin had played on Alice’s ambition to keep her in the privatization program; he played on her love now. He always knew her weak spots.

  Arkin picked up a phone and dialed the American embassy. “I remember phone numbers,” he explained as he waited for the connection. “Don’t know how; just do. American embassy? This is President Arkin. I believe you have a Lewis Liddell on your premises? I’d like to speak to him, please.” He and Alice waited in silence while Lewis was paged and brought to the phone. “Lewis Liddell? Nikolai Arkin. I sincerely hope you’ve yet to tell anyone what you know. You’re still waiting for the ambassador? Excellent, because your wife’s here with me. Give me your word that what you know stays with you to the grave, or she won’t see the end of today.”

  Eight bullets fired now, through ankles and kneecaps and wrists and elbows; eight joints reduced to bloody pulp. There was only one more shot: through the temple. Sabirzhan was going to kill Lev, of course he was, and Lev was stoic. He’d faced death so many times already that it no longer seemed like such a big deal. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, of course he did, but he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Death had come for him many times already, and many times it had turned away at the last moment in search of someone else. If it came this time and didn’t turn away, he would accept it. Fate can be benign or malign, but it can’t be changed or evaded.

  Like all Russians, Lev knew his literature. He thought of the passage in Crime and Punishment—and remembered that Dostoyevsky had in turn taken this part from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris—about a man who’d said, or perhaps just thought, in the hour before his death, that even if he had to live somewhere high up on a rock, on a summit so small that he could only just stand on it, with nothing around but sheer unclimbable precipices and an ocean that stretched as far as he could see in every direction, the weather always either thick fog or raging storms, never bright sunshine and warm breezes, and of course without ever seeing or hearing another human being, even if that was all that life had to offer for fifty years, or a hundred, a thousand, even for eternity, then it’d be better to live like that than to die so very soon! If only he could live, live and live some more, no matter what life was like.

  “What was that?” Sabirzhan said, seeing Lev’s lips move.

  “I don’t hate you,” said Lev, feeling curiously lightheaded. The sands of his life were almost done. He’d do what Russian men did before death: put a white shirt on his soul. They may have lived sinfully, but they died like saints.

  The Spetsnaz came for them, on Arkin’s orders. Sabirzhan heard the commotion outside and assumed it was about something else entirely. He wasn’t at all prepared when they came barreling through the door, one with the battering ram and the others throwing the stun grenades and spraying bullets. They saw a body motionless on a table, and that was Lev; a flash as Sabirzhan fired into Lev’s head before the broadside from the Spetsnaz picked him from where he was standing and flung him clean against the wall, dead even before he’d slid to the floor.

  Where else would they take Lev but the Sklifosovsky, keeping him alive en route with cardiac massage and injections of adrenaline? It was like Borzov, Lev’s supposed victim, all over again, and once more Lewis, back from the embassy with the ambassador left unseen and wondering what the visit had been all about, was the surgeon in charge.

  This time, however, it was his wife’s lover whom he was trying to save.

  Lev had lost a lot of blood, and that in itself was a problem, but the only reason he wasn’t dead already was because Sabirzhan, startled by the Spetsnaz, hadn’t gotten the final head shot quite right. It had entered Lev’s skull through the mastoid bone, an inch behind his ear, and had traveled onward to sever the branches of the superior cerebral artery and pass into the brain, scattering fragments of lead and bone. Successfully removing them all would be a feat in itself. Keeping Lev alive would be a whole new level of achievement.

  Lewis was honest about Lev’s chances, and equally honest about his willingness to do everything he could to save him. Lewis was the best surgeon here; there was no question of him leaving.

  Arkin walked around the Kremlin.

  He went to the museum and stared for long minutes at a crown of eight gold-filigree triangles joined to form a cone, studded with rough-cut gems and trimmed with sable. It was the crown of Monomakh, the symbol of the Russian leader.

  He went inside the Assumption Cathedral, where, in the first winter of the Great Patriotic War, with the Nazis in Moscow’s suburbs, Stalin had flouted his regime’s atheism and secretly ordered a service to pray for the city’s deliverance.

  He paused by the giant cannon that couldn’t be fired and the giant bell that had fallen down before it could be rung, and thought that it was an amazing town in which the objects of interest were distinguished by their absurdity, or perhaps that the great bell without a tongue was a hieroglyph symbolic of this huge dumb land.

  The pistol Arkin used to shoot Borzov had been identical to the one he’d given Lev. He had fitted a silencer to suppress the noise and then shot Borzov point-blank, in the chest, with hollow-nosed bullets that would spread out inside Borzov and leave no bullet marks in the car. Borzov had looked at him in surprise, suddenly very sober, and through the pain he’d smiled. Arkin had gotten his aim slightly wrong; Borzov wouldn’t die instantaneously, but he wouldn’t last long either.

  “If you think you can do it better, Kolya, just try,” Borzov had gurgled, the hemorrhaging drowning him from within. “Take care of Russia,” he said, the lights of the Sklifosovsky reflected in his dying eyes.

  99

  Monday, March 30, 1992

  Alice had been given a private waiting room. She’d clenched her hands so tight, dug her nails so deep into her palms, that she’d drawn blood, dripping reddened globules onto the white leather sofas like rose petals on snow.

  Lewis came to see her at breakfast. “We’ve gotten rid of most of the bullet and bone fragments,” he said, “and those still left there aren’t doing any particular harm. But his vital signs are seriously impaired.”

  He walked with her into the intensive care unit, where Lev had been taken after the operation. The even rise and fall of Lev’s chest offered Alice the only reassurance that he was still alive. His head was bandaged, and his blackened eyes and white cheeks were frightening in their absence of color. Alice bent to Lev and whispered in his ear. There was no response.

  “There’s very little brainwave activity,” Lewis said. “That mechanical ventilator is the only thing keeping him alive.”

  “What are his chances of recovery?”

  “None.”

  “None?”

  “Not to any life outside this bed. We can keep him going on the ventilator indefinitely, but the brain damage is too deep.”

  The tel
evision was showing old footage of Arkin performing martial arts; sombo, to be precise, a mixture of judo and wrestling that places a premium on quick moves, a calm demeanor, and the ability to keep oneself from showing emotions or uttering a sound, no matter how intense the struggle or the pain. As Arkin fought, hard but fair, his judo teacher was being interviewed. “Nikolai Valentinovich is not a wrestler of physicality,” the teacher was saying, “but more of intellect—a smart wrestler. He always does the unexpected, because he’s versatile, very strong, so the speed of the fight is intense.”

  As if on cue, Arkin ended the fight with his favorite move, a swift attack that knocked his opponent off his feet. The beaten man picked himself up off the mat. He and Arkin bowed to each other, then clasped hands and shared an unheard joke.

  Arkin would need more than judo to save Russia, Alice thought; he’d need voodoo.

  She sat in the waiting room all day, refusing food or company. Lev was in a coma, and he’d almost certainly never come out of it. She’d nurse him, of course, if that was what he needed, she’d nurse him day and night, feed him and empty his catheter and watch over him with all the love in the world; but whatever that existence would represent for her, it would be no life for him.

  Night fell, and with it came the darkness in her soul.

  100

  Tuesday, March 31, 1992

  Alice left the waiting room and went back to the intensive care unit. Lewis was there, looking silently at Lev. Alice came up beside Lewis and rested her head against his shoulder. They stood like that for a moment, husband and wife, both looking at Lev as the ventilator opened and closed his lungs; both facing the enormity of what they’d lost.

  “Turn the ventilator off,” Alice whispered.