Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Always assuming, of course, that Harry had been given the genuine books in the first place.

  Practically every Russian company keeps two sets of books: the official ones, which are sent to the authorities and on which taxes are paid (or, more usually, aren’t); and the unofficial ones, which record the unreported cash transactions as well. The Russians call it “accounting out of the safe.” A businessman chooses how much of his activity to conduct aboveground and how much below, and what the ratios of cash and barter will be in the latter.

  For an accountant, the distortion of figures is a nightmare. What looked bad on paper could look much better with all the information at hand. It could also look much, much worse.

  “You know accountants,” he said. “If we can’t count it, it don’t exist.”

  “Green-light everything, unless it’s totally and irrevocably ludicrous.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Alice.”

  “That’s also how it is,” she said, teaching him lessons she was still learning herself. “You got the payroll there?”

  Harry extracted a file from the middle of one of the document stacks, steadying the top of the pile with one hand while he pulled the file out with the other. “Here you go. Watch out for the gum band holding it together; it’s frayed.”

  “Gum band?” she teased, picking at the rubber band he’d indicated. “It’s called a ’lastic.”

  “Not in Pittsburgh, it’s not.”

  “And we’re nearer Boston now.” She nodded down toward the distillery floor. “I’m off to the jungle. Look after Vladimir for me.”

  “Vladimir?”

  Alice nodded toward a bust of Lenin that had been turned to face the wall. “Vladimir.”

  The distillery floor was busier than Alice had witnessed before, though it was only when she saw a large digital clock with the time and date displayed in fading red LEDs that she realized why. It was nearly month’s end, and Russian industry divided each month into three ten-day work periods—decades, they called them. The first decade was spyachka, sleepy time, when the previous month’s quota had been met and the pressure was off; then came goryachka, the hot time; and finally likho-radka, fever: a headlong rush to complete by any means necessary.

  Alice went to the bottling department first, because it was the nearest. The payroll listed more than two hundred employees in this section. By the law of averages, even Russian averages, at least one of that two hundred would surely be cooperative. Alice stood for a moment, watching the bottles tottering down the conveyor belts like an army of penguins, and then marched up to a woman in a white coat. She had rounded cheeks and her nose was pointed: a snowman’s face; a snowman’s body too, square and thick. A kerchief covered her graying hair, and her stumpy legs were sheathed in rubber boots. “What’s your name?” Alice asked.

  The woman regarded her with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. “What’s yours?”

  “You were paid on Friday, right?”

  The woman looked around and up—for Lev, Alice realized, as though he were Big Brother, omniscient and ubiquitous. “Right,” the woman said at length, as though expelling a stone.

  “The money you got—did you keep it all?”

  “All that I was entitled to.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means what it means.”

  “That’s not very helpful.”

  The woman gestured to the nearest wall, where a metal rack held squares of printed cardboard—time cards. “I clock in, do my work, go home. It’s not my job to be helpful.”

  The rack was ten rows across and seven down, with two compartments blank: sixty-eight time cards. Alice turned back to the woman. “Those time cards…”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re just for those people here today, right?”

  “You work in this department, your card’s there.”

  “Even if you’re not in today?”

  “You think people take their cards home and frame them?”

  “OK. Thank you.”

  Alice turned back to the payroll and counted again. The list of bottling department employees ran to six and a half pages; at thirty-three lines a page, that made more than two hundred, she’d been right the first time. She looked at the title page: the document was dated this month, it was current.

  The far side of two hundred bottlers on the payroll, but only sixty-eight of them had time cards. What had happened to the other two thirds?

  37

  Tuesday, January 28, 1992

  Alice had discovered the same pattern all the way across the distillery. For every employee she’d physically found—and even then Red October was overstaffed, Alice had reminded herself, like all inefficient Soviet industries—there’d been another, perhaps two, who appeared on the payroll. Of the 25 filtration column washers listed, she’d unearthed only 12; of the 399 recorded as working on the storage vats, just 187. By the time she’d reached the fourth department, the question was not whether the official and actual tallies would be different but by how much. She didn’t tell anyone what she’d found, because she didn’t want news getting back to Lev. Instead, she asked every department head for the names and numbers of those employees under their supervision, and told each one that everything was just as she’d expected.

  Alice left the site at Prospekt Mira until last, not merely because it was off the main premises, but also because of the murders; she needed time to steel herself before going. She felt an irrational resentment toward Lev for not telling her earlier. They were lovers now, why should they have secrets from each other? Then she thought of Lewis, and the gulag.

  It was late in the afternoon when she arrived. Two of Lev’s men were at the main gate. They checked her credentials and let her through, pointing her toward the entrance of the school. Classes had resumed last week after the Orthodox Christmas holiday, and Alice walked through corridors that streamed with children in somber uniforms and high spirits. She was surprised, and a little disturbed, to see that no one, pupils or teachers, gave her a second glance, even with everything that had been going on there. Whatever the bogeyman looked like, it clearly wasn’t Alice.

  Svetlana’s door, unlike Lev’s, was not always open. Alice knocked, waited a moment, and entered. Svetlana was talking to a man whom Alice recognized instantly as the one who’d come to the distillery on Friday; the one, indeed, who’d inadvertently apprised her of the child killings in the first place.

  Svetlana broke off her conversation and came quickly across the room. “Mrs. Liddell!” She clasped Alice’s forearm with both hands. “We met at the party last week, you remember?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But you haven’t been taking my advice, have you? You should eat more. Look at your face: skin and bones. Well, you Westerners don’t know best, not in this case. Come, Sveta will feed you. I’ve some speckled hen in the kitchen. Have you ever had speckled hen? Chicken strips, cucumber slices, minced prunes, mayonnaise, walnuts, eggs—sound good? Juku, you will have some too. Have you two met? No? How rude of me not to introduce you earlier. Mrs. Liddell, this is Juku Irk, the finest investigator in the Moscow prosecutor service and a close friend of mine. Juku, this is Alice Liddell, who’s come to privatize the factory and tell us how we should be living. I’ll go get the speckled hen—won’t be a minute.”

  Svetlana bustled from the room. Irk gestured that Alice should sit down.

  “Investigator,” Alice said. “Of course. What else?”

  What else, indeed? Irk had thought of nothing else for days. A psychiatrist would doubtless have told him that he was suffering attack psychosis: he awaited the next murder with such keen anticipation and imagination that it seemed almost as though he was either experiencing such an attack for real or trying to conjure it into existence through sheer force of will. Either would have done, as the only thing unacceptable was silence. He needed either to find the murderer or new murders with fresh clues, and since there was no sign of t
he former, it had to be the latter. The enemies Irk knew—politicians, bureaucrats, Mafiosi—were finite in their power to threaten, frighten or dismay, no matter how potent their influence. Not so the enemy he was unsure about.

  “I know you must have a great interest in this case,” Irk said, sounding as pompous as he usually did when he wasn’t sure how to go about things. “I assure you I’m doing all I can to solve it. I want to see reforms go ahead too, you know.”

  “That’s why you’re making such efforts?”

  “No. I’m making such efforts because I don’t want to see any more dead children.”

  “Who do you think is responsible?”

  “I’m keeping an open—”

  “For God’s sake, Investigator, if this gets out, it could jeopardize the entire process. I don’t want the party line—I want you to tell me what you honestly think. Is it the Chechens?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want it to be the Chechens?”

  “I want to find the truth,” he said simply and without flourish, and Alice realized with a flash of shame that she’d underestimated him. She’d been prejudiced enough to take him for homo sovieticus, mendacious and venal, concerned only with his career, his reputation and his bank balance, in no particular order. There was much more to him, she saw now. He was like her, a seeker, a searcher, one of those unquiet souls who keep digging even when they know they shouldn’t, because when you dig you can’t stop halfway down, you have to go on and on till you get to the end, and you can’t ever hide what you’ve uncovered—not from yourself, at any rate.

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said. “I got you all wrong. I thought you were … well, you know …”

  Irk nodded; he knew, all too well. “Did you come here to see me?”

  “No. I’m checking personnel details. Boring admin stuff.”

  “But someone’s got to do it, right?”

  She laughed. “Right. Just like someone’s got to deal with all the dead people in Moscow.”

  “Just wait till spring, when all the snow flowers bloom.”

  “‘Snow flowers’?”

  “The bodies we find when the snow melts. It’s one of our busiest times.” Irk looked wistful. “Lucrative too, if you’re ruthless enough.”

  “There’s always someone who makes money out of death.”

  “You can say that again. I’ve investigated cases of ambulancemen coming to people’s houses and saying that this or that relative has been involved in an accident, just so they can get into the family’s home and steal their things while everyone’s crying and carrying on with grief. Or ambulancemen tipping off body snatchers: fifty bucks, corpse removed the same day. Actually that’s not such a bad bargain, when it can take the state a week to arrive, if they make it at all.”

  Irk’s tone was curious, Alice thought. It was as though he were trying to impress, or depress, her with the city’s squalor. He went on: “I’ve had to examine bodies that have been thrown out of windows. You get to them by following the footprints of those who’ve already been there to strip the corpse of anything valuable. The other day, Pravda had to sack the guy who compiles the death notices because he wouldn’t guarantee a space in the paper unless the relatives gave him a bribe. People are starving and freezing to death every day; he was making a small fortune.”

  Something stirred in Alice’s brain. Horror, yes, the inklings of black humor too, but also a connection. “Pravda publishes death notices?” she asked.

  “Every day. You die in Moscow and someone remembers you, in goes your name.”

  38

  Wednesday, January 29, 1992

  The entire front page of Pravda was taken up by the headline: PLEASE DON’T BUY THIS NEWSPAPER. An article inside explained that Pravda had calculated its prices for 1992 the previous autumn, when newsprint had cost four thousand rubles per ton. Newsprint now cost twenty thousand and rising, but if the cover price increased, then no one would be able to afford it. So Pravda was losing money on every copy produced, and the more readers it had, the more it lost. Alice thought the whole thing must be a practical joke or a deliberate lie—pravda is Russian for truth, but the old joke was that there was no truth in Pravda—yet the staff in the Pravda office seemed serious enough. A newspaper that didn’t want people to buy it. Only in Moscow.

  The newspaper archivist, a pale young man who looked as though he hadn’t seen the sun since Brezhnev’s death and possibly before, couldn’t have looked less interested in Alice’s request had he tried. Back copies of the newspaper were kept over there, he said, jerking his head vaguely toward the far wall. Alice should look in the large dark red files, each containing exactly a month’s worth of issues. She didn’t even have time to reply before the archivist turned away from her and continued sorting through a mountain of index cards. He’d probably calculated his rate of progress, Alice thought, to finish the sorting at exactly the moment his work day ended.

  He was also just about the only Russian man she’d met who’d shown absolutely no recognition of her beauty. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted.

  Alice went over to the files, pulled out the ones for the previous November and December, and set them down on the nearest spare desk. There were fifteen or twenty death notices a day, more on Thursdays and Fridays, when the Monday deaths had been incorporated—half of all Russian men die on a Monday, usually after a weekend of solid vodka drinking.

  There were two versions of the Red October payroll: one organized by department, the other alphabetical. Using the latter, Alice started to work backward through Pravda, cross-referencing two lists. It was a job best done on a computer, and she feared that the mind-numbing tedium of checking down reams of names would cause her to lose concentration and miss something, but she struck gold almost immediately: Salnikov, Roman R., died November 12 in Basmanny, now listed as working in the accounts department of Red October. A few days earlier, there was another one: Breus, Mikifor G., died November 3 in Meshchanosky, now listed as a forklift operator.

  Far from being tedious, the methodical task was proving therapeutic, balm for her weary soul. The names added up. Goikhmann, Piotr D., died September 28 in Donskoy, now a tasting technician. Polivoda, Stassis K., died July 19 in Sloboda Kutuzova, resurrected as a security guard. Ratsimova, Marina R., died June 1 in Zyuzino, a spectral presence in the cleaning department.

  Alice wondered what these people had been like when they were alive. Had they worked at Red October, or had Lev just picked their names from the death columns? She wondered too what their relatives would think if they knew their loved ones were being used this way. If there was money in it for them, she thought bitterly, they’d probably approve.

  She stopped counting when she reached the year 1991, by which point she had thirty-two matches, and even then she’d probably missed some. Conclusive proof, either way.

  When she walked past the archivist’s desk, she saw that his pile of index cards had hardly diminished at all. Perhaps he was working toward finishing by the end of the week rather than the day. He looked up. “Good day?” he asked, suddenly friendly.

  Alice nodded toward the cards. “Better than yours.”

  Lev was waiting for her when she arrived back at Red October. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Your men have been asking after you all day.”

  Her men. She wondered if he’d chosen the phrase deliberately. “I’d things to do. What’s it to you, anyway?”

  He took her into his office and shut the door. Despite herself, Alice remembered what had happened the last time he’d done that.

  “I’m very busy,” she said.

  He picked up a thick three-and-a-half-ounce glass and handed it to her, his fingers brushing hers. “Handwashed in spring water—no scented detergent, please, not for our purposes. You see, the glass is stemless, and fits neatly into your palm? This warms the liquid, which is good; room temperature is best for testing. Long-stemmed glasses are better for pleasure, when the vodk
a is freezing and the afterburn icy, but this isn’t pleasure. Master craftsmen must be particular about their equipment.”

  There were three small glass bottles on the sideboard. Lev removed the stopper from the first and filled Alice’s glass. “I’m making it harder for you, I confess,” he said. “The easy way to detect faults is to cut one measure of room-temperature vodka with two measures of pure, bottled spring water in a wineglass, swirl it to release the vapors, and then inhale. Most faults will then become so apparent that they virtually scream at you. But you don’t strike me as a woman who needs to start at the beginner’s level.”

  He held her gaze a beat too long for comfort, and then gestured at her to try the vodka. She dipped her nose to the rim of the glass and inhaled. The vodka was off, she could tell that without even having to taste it. She shook her head. “It smells bad.”

  “Be more specific.”

  “It smells of toffee.” She sniffed again. “A faint layering of caramel too.”

  “They both mean the same thing: diacetyl, burned sugars from incomplete fermentation. You’re right, that batch is no good. We’ll have to throw it away. Perfumes are a dead giveaway. Amyl alcohol smells of nail polish remover, DMTs of boiled cabbage or drains. Acrolein is sharp, acrid and pungent. The scent of green apples means acetal. Methyl thiazole, you can’t mistake that one, it smells like cats. What else? Oh yes, ionone; that’s heavy and sweet. All are bad news. Now, how about this?” He took another glass and filled it from the second bottle. This one she did need to taste; from the smell alone, she couldn’t tell whether anything was wrong.

  “Too heavy,” she said. “Too greasy.”

  Lev clapped his hands together. “I’ll be offering you a job at this rate. You’re exactly right. We’ve overdone the fusel oil.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a combination of butyl and iso-amyl alcohol. We use it in tiny quantities to make the vodka smoother. Not tiny enough here, clearly—not enough to be sold commercially, though I could fill a few bottles and peddle them to the bums outside without too much trouble. Last one.” Another glass, another bottle, another sample. It was vodka infused with horseradish. Alice sniffed, swilled and swallowed.