Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “They said they’d be back, didn’t they?” Galina berated herself. “And I ignored them, I thought they wouldn’t dare, and look what they did … Mama, they were your pride and joy, I’m so sorry.”

  Svetlana turned to her daughter-in-law. “It’s not your fault, my sweet.”

  “She’s right, Galya. You mustn’t blame yourself,” Irk said. He moved as though to hug her, but the gesture felt awkward and he turned it into a stretch of his arms. Galina sank to her haunches and hugged Rodion, kissing his forehead; Svetlana rested her head against Irk’s shoulder.

  “Let’s clean this place up, anyway, and give them a proper burial,” Rodion said.

  “What about the police?” Galina said. “This is a crime scene, isn’t it?”

  Rodion belched a snort of derisive laughter. “You think the police would be bothered by something like this? They wouldn’t give this the time of day, would they, Juku?”

  Irk shook his head and flushed; he felt the failings of the force as his own. “I’m afraid Rodya’s right. Let’s clean this place up, and I’ll find someone to fix the door.”

  The men shooed Svetlana and Galina out of the living room and set about clearing the cats away. The first corpse flopped over Irk’s hands as he lifted it from the floor into a plastic bucket; he took to grasping the others by the back of the neck, as if he were scragging them. Feline cadavers were no more appealing than human ones, and Irk tried not to look at them. The dull squelch as he dropped each one into the bucket was sufficient test for his squeamishness.

  Rodion skidded on his stumps from blood lake to blood lake, soaking up the gore with cloths that he wrung dripping into the bucket before scrubbing angrily at the remaining stains. He worked with such a frenzy that Irk felt it best to keep silent; not that he felt much like chatting.

  Even though none of them were hungry, Svetlana cooked dinner and pressed it on them. She bustled from table to kitchen counter and back again with salted salmon, telling them as she did so how it was best cooked: remove the small bones from the fillet, sprinkle with coarse salt, let it stay at room temperature for three days and then serve.

  Galina and Rodion were silent; Irk’s appreciative noises at the food were drowned by Svetlana’s incessant chattering. “I reuse everything rather than discard it,” she said. “Stale bread goes to the guy along the corridor who keeps chickens at his dacha, milk that’s gone bad is boiled and used for cooking, old jars are kept to store food.” She even filed papers in colanders and sieves rather than drawers or folders, she said. Irk didn’t try to shut her up or encourage the others to talk. He’d seen the shock that followed trauma many times. Everyone handled tragedy in their own way, and there was nothing he could do except be there for them when they needed him.

  26

  Friday, January 17, 1992

  Alice was up to her eyeballs with work, Lewis was pulling long night shifts at the Sklifosovsky; breakfast was about the only time they managed to see each other. She’d gotten up an hour earlier than usual that morning and demanded that he not go to bed just yet—there was a fantastic apartment for rent in Patriarch’s Ponds, one of central Moscow’s more upmarket districts, and if they didn’t move fast, it would be gone.

  “What do we need with an apartment?” he said.

  “You like living in a hotel?”

  “It’s comfortable, it’s clean, everything’s done for us. Yes, I like it.”

  “It’s not ours. I want somewhere that’s ours.”

  “We’ve got somewhere that’s ours.”

  “Back in Boston. Not here.” She kissed his cheek. “Think about it—our own kitchen. You can make cush-cush till you explode.” Cush-cush—browned cornmeal served hot with sugar and milk for breakfast—was another of those New Orleans dishes Lewis pined for when away from home. “At least come and look at it with me.”

  “All right, all right.” There came a point in every argument when Lewis took the path of least resistance and backed down; anything for a quiet life.

  The apartment was in a large, pale blue building on the east side of the square where the Patriarch’s pond, now singular, was located. There was little point in paying the premium for south-facing residences when half the year was winter. The realtor looked barely old enough to have started shaving; his suit was sharp and his shoes even sharper.

  “Western remont,” he said. “All appliances and furniture; Western materials, Western labor.” Western remont was the best you could get in Russia. The next level down was “semiwestern”—Western materials with Russian workmanship—which was fine if you were prepared to risk the hugely expensive Smeg gas stove squirting water everywhere because it had been connected to the wrong mains. Below that was simply “Russian”: poor build quality and shoddy workmanship with gaudy aesthetics to boot.

  The apartment had everything they needed: two bedrooms, each with a connecting bathroom; a kitchen, a living room, a dining room and a small annex that could be used as a study.

  “A lot of people are interested in this place,” said the Realtor. “It’ll be gone by the weekend, that’s for sure.”

  Alice went to the window and looked out across the square. This was where Satan had first materialized in The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s classic tale of how the devil had caused havoc in the capital. Alice fancied that, if she looked hard enough, she could see Bulgakov’s ghost floating like marsh gas over the pond where the Patriarch used to keep his fish.

  Lewis came over to join her. “It’s OK,” he said. “Nothing special.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “If you’re really determined to leave the Metropol, at least look at other properties first.”

  And stall, that was his thinking, she saw it as clearly as if he’d told her straight out. Alice loved this apartment because it was a home, something permanent. Lewis was happy to stay at the Metropol indefinitely, because hotels are transient, no matter how comfortable or how long the stay. An apartment excited Alice for the same reason it dismayed Lewis; she was beginning to belong.

  “Lewis, this is fine. If I have to spend another week cooped up in that place, I’m going to go nuts.” She turned to the Realtor. “We’ll take it.”

  Lewis put his hand on her arm. “That’s not what we—”

  “I knew you’d understand, Lewis. God love ya.”

  Timofei had just opened up his kiosk at Novokuznetskaya when the Chechens came back; Zhorzh in the lead, his bodyguards fanning out around. Zhorzh raised his eyebrows questioningly at Timofei: Have you decided whether or not to switch allegiance? Unnerved as before by Zhorzh’s silence, Timofei’s hesitation was answer enough.

  Zhorzh leaned inside the kiosk, took two vodka bottles from the shelf nearest Timofei, snapped the tops off, and produced from his pocket two pieces of cloth. Timofei recognized them as the triangles Zhorzh had cut from his shirt the first time the Chechens had come, and he knew with sudden and complete horror what was going to happen. The fear seemed to be nailing his feet to the spot.

  Zhorzh splashed some vodka onto the rags, shoved them into the bottles’ necks, pulled a lighter from his pocket, set the rags alight and placed the makeshift Molotov cocktails back in the kiosk, nestling them as deeply among the other bottles as possible. Timofei, the power of movement at last restored, tried to push past him, but two of Zhorzh’s bodyguards were pressing strong hands against his chest. They shoved him back into the kiosk and shut the door on him, locking it from the outside with the keys still hanging there; Timofei hadn’t even had time to remove them.

  The flames rippled, licked and caught at the neighboring bottles, hesitantly at first and then boldly. The bottles were shattering now, little tinkling explosions until the whole kiosk was on fire, a flaming pillar on a Moscow sidewalk. Timofei kicked twice against the glass before going down, and the humane would have hoped that the smoke got him before the flames did.

  Irk smelled of smoke and anger; smoke from the burning kiosk, anger because Timofei had been ins
ide. He knew the Chechens were responsible, but the issue for Irk was whether the attack was tied in with what had been going on at Prospekt Mira.

  He’d barely had time to consider his next move, when a squad car pulled up and disgorged Yerofeyev’s smugly corpulent form. Yerofeyev seemed more bloated every time Irk saw him, as though he sat on a bicycle pump when he went home.

  “There’s nothing here for you, Juku.” Yerofeyev could have given a bull mastiff a lesson in territoriality. “You can go back to Petrovka.”

  Irk quickly explained his interest in the incident, racing to duck under the edge of Yerofeyev’s notoriously short attention span. Yerofeyev clicked his tongue dismissively “This isn’t the only kiosk to have been torched today, Juku. We’ve had reports coming in from all around Moscow: four on Novy Arbat, two on Pokrovka, another three on Valovaya.” Yerofeyev recited the names as though the burning kiosks were tourist landmarks. “So it’s an organized crime case. On you go.” He swatted a pudgy hand in the air before running it through hair slick with lotion. “Leave it to the big boys.”

  Moscow seemed to be crawling with policemen as Irk drove back to Petrovka. They reminded him of the Soviets in Tallinn under communism; an alien, occupying force, equally resented and feared by the local populace. No wonder the whole city drank. Every time Irk turned a corner, he saw someone with a bottle to their mouth, a population of suckling babies. Before work and after work, at construction sites and on shop floors, in apartments and office buildings; liquid energy was everywhere, everywhere.

  Irk parked between a Cadillac and a BMW—there were always a few foreign cars in the parking lot at Petrovka, on loan to the cops who offered their protection to Western auto dealerships. In his office, breathing hard from the walk upstairs, he ran a finger over his small Estonian desk flag. It was striped horizontally blue, black and white, to represent the sea, the land and the sky. He found the combination of colors soothing, which was more than could be said for the thoughts that chased around his brain.

  The phone trilled. For Irk, its very ring carried the threat of bad news. “Prosecutor’s office.”

  “It’s Rodya. Another one’s gone missing.”

  “From the orphanage?”

  “Yes.”

  “One of Sabirzhan’s?”

  “She wasn’t in the photo album. Her name’s Emma Kurvyakova.”

  “How long’s she been missing?”

  “She wasn’t at roll call yesterday morning, or today.”

  “And you only tell me now?”

  “I told you, Juku: they come and go. The other night, when I told the kids about Raisa, I said that we’d be checking every day, and we’d start looking for them after twenty-four hours.”

  “Why not sooner?”

  “Because then we’d spend every day trawling the streets, that’s why.”

  “OK, OK.” Irk didn’t want to waste energy arguing. “Have you…?”

  “Yes, we’ve looked in the river, we’re not stupid. No sign. There’s more, Juku. I saw some Chechens hanging around here earlier.”

  “Where?”

  “Just outside the main gates. Three guys, watching the place from across the road.”

  “Would you recognize them again?”

  “I was a long way away.” The underlying implication was clear: blacks all look the same. “You have to help us, Juku. You can imagine what this is doing to the orphanage. Some of the kids are terrified, crying and jumpy. Mama’s beside herself, of course. Help us for her sake, eh? She trusts you, Juku; don’t let her down.”

  It never rains but it pours, isn’t that how the saying goes? Irk’s life felt like a monsoon.

  He went down to Kolomenskoe, thinking little and caring less about what Yerofeyev would say if he found out. Traffic was surprisingly light, and the trip took less than half an hour; too short, perversely. He was putting his head in the lion’s mouth, and he’d expected more time in which to prepare himself.

  Irk needn’t have worried. Karkadann’s house was like the Marie Celeste: a deserted, ghostly place, its emptiness mocking its splendor. The gates were tight shut and the perimeter fence unbroken, but there wasn’t a soul in sight; no guards, no chauffeurs chatting by Mercedes limousines, no swarthy gangsters cutting deals. The lawns were buried under swathes of virgin snow, and the windows were dark behind their cardboard fillings. When Irk walked around the side, he saw Karkadann’s bear lying on the floor of its cage, though he couldn’t tell whether it was asleep or dead.

  What use did a man have for all this luxury, when he’d killed his own wife and son?

  Irk hurried back to his car and spun it through a three-point turn with a haste that surprised him. The sense of loss and decay pursued him all the way back to the Belgrade Hotel.

  There was the usual mix of types milling around outside the Belgrade—businessmen, gangsters, ordinary citizens—but they were divided sharply into two groups: those with the ability to open sesame, and those without. Russia was two societies divided by currency. Ruble Russia squatted in the ruins of the Soviet Union, immense, impoverished and angry. Above it was another world, elite, sleek and smart: Ru$$ia—dollar Russia, peopled by those with access to hard currency. Security guards kept the two sides apart; and, as at all the best parties, those not invited far outnumbered those who were. Hotels were like embassies now, accessible only to the rich and the alien; the doormen were there not to usher the elite in but to keep ordinary Russians out. The only natives to gain admittance were the most threatening ones, the kind who were accustomed to breezing straight through security.

  The doorman at the Belgrade saw Irk, took half a pace forward and stopped, confused. Irk fell midway between all categories, and the doorman didn’t know what to make of him. He wasn’t a Russian, clearly—he was an Estonian, dammit, and proud of it—but equally, he wasn’t a prosperous Westerner for whom passage was a divine right.

  Irk flipped his badge, and the doorman retreated with a grateful smile; confusion spared.

  The Chechens kept Irk waiting an hour while they discussed his proposal. Phone calls gave way to huddled conversations broken by suspicious glances in Irk’s direction. Irk had brought a copy of Moskovskie Novosti, and read it from cover to cover while waiting for them to make up their minds. Shootings, muggings, nails in the coffin of hope; the newspaper was like his life.

  Finally, two Chechens approached him, both bearded and both with AK-47s hanging casually from their shoulders. “Come with us,” they said.

  They took Irk down to the basement parking area and shepherded him into a Land Cruiser. He sat in the middle of the backseat; the two Chechens took up position on either side of him, unslinging their guns as they climbed in.

  “You’ll have to wear this,” one of them said, handing him a blindfold.

  They let Irk tie it himself, but the vehicle began to move only when both his guards had tugged at the material to check that he really could see nothing. Irk tried to work out where they were going—up a ramp, left, right and then immediately left again—but it was more for the mental exercise than a serious attempt at remembering the trip, and it wasn’t long before he gave up. The man to his right smelled of okra, and he could feel the barrel of the other’s gun digging into his ribs whenever they went over a bump—about five times a minute, given the state of Moscow’s roads.

  “I hope the safety catch is on,” he said airily, and received a resounding silence in reply.

  They were on the road for half an hour, and barely stopped once. Irk wondered how many red lights they’d jumped. Only when he heard the engine die did he know that they’d reached their destination. He waited for the guards to get out and shuffled along the seat, feeling for the exit with his legs. They took his arms and pulled him onto the sidewalk, not without care.

  Inside; a corridor, to judge from the darkness behind the blindfold and the echoing footsteps. Then a brighter haze, warmth and a chair beneath him as his shoulders were pushed down.

  “Take the blind
fold off,” Karkadann said.

  The room was small and damp. Wallpaper was peeling off in strips; there was a plastic table, metal chairs, a samovar. They could have been anywhere in Moscow, which Irk guessed was precisely the point. Karkadann was sitting opposite Irk, his chair turned around so he could lean his arms on the backrest. Zhorzh hovered like a vampire at Karkadann’s shoulder.

  “If Yerofeyev wants to talk to me, he can come here himself,” Karkadann said.

  “Then tell me something that lets me pass my case on to him.”

  “I’ve absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Vladimir Kullam. Raisa Rustanova.”

  Karkadann’s face was unreadable. “Never heard of them.”

  “Vladimir worked at a kiosk on Novokuznetskaya.” Irk looked at Zhorzh; Zhorzh looked steadily back. “One of those you firebombed today, in case you forgot. Vladimir attended the Red October school on Prospekt Mira. Raisa Rustanova was at the orphanage on the same site.”

  “‘Attended’? ‘Was’? You use the past tense, Investigator. These young people are dead?”

  “And now another one’s missing. You had nothing to do with this?”

  “You think I did?”

  “You want the Red October distillery.”

  “There are many ways pressure can be applied. We’re bandits, Investigator. A bandit never pays out, only collects. Businessmen owe bandits, not vice versa. No one collects from me, no one.”

  “I know what happened at the florist’s too.”

  Karkadann turned his head slightly, acknowledging Irk’s line of thought. If a man could shoot his own child in cold blood, what was to stop him killing others? Whether by accident or design, the light caught the trenches in Karkadann’s face and painted them in deep shadows. He looked suddenly haggard, spectral; a man struggling to keep his dignity as he lost his humanity.

  Irk understood. No more Valentina and no more Aslan, because Karkadann had murdered them himself; no more mansion in Kolomenskoe, because killing Ozers and the oath he’d taken had meant war on the Slavs, so he couldn’t afford to stay in the same place all the time, no matter how well defended it was. He was a guerrilla leader now, hiding out and always on the move; all he needed was military fatigues, and the look would have been complete. Karkadann had brought all this on himself, but he still thought life had screwed him. He was a shell.