Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “Excellent.” She savored the burn, extra strong with the infusion.

  “Flawless—flawless.”

  “I’m tempted to have another sample, just to make sure.”

  “That would be greedy. I never need to make sure. I know first time when I’ve got it right.”

  He gestured, and Alice understood. The last sentence, perhaps the entire demonstration, hadn’t just been about vodka, but about the two of them. Lev took a deep breath.

  “Yesterday, I owed you an explanation,” he said. “Today, I owe you an apology. I’ve behaved badly these past days, since … since what happened last Friday, and I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have, but it’s just that”—she waited him out, giving him nothing—“this is difficult for me, because of the situation, the factory, and also because … because I’m used to Russian women, and you’re different, you’re like them in many ways but you’re not in many others, and so if I’m behaving like a teenager, then that’s why.”

  The blurted confession sounded strange coming from a man so mountainous, and it melted the hardness Alice had set in herself as surely as if it had been a blowtorch.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you too, about what happened the other day, and … it was lovely, it really was, but you see, I’m married, I love my husband, and anyway; you must have the pick of all the women you want, all younger and prettier than me.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said simply. It wasn’t an empty compliment, she knew that. “It’s you I want, Alice,” he said, “you I need.”

  With one hot hand she held his, while with the other she pushed him away. “Don’t say such things,” she pleaded. “We’re supposed to be negotiating an auction, we can’t … whatever you want, I’m not the one who can give it to you.”

  Those were her words, but her eyes said something very different.

  “Is that what you really think?” he asked, and he knew the answer as well as she.

  “No.” Her voice was so soft as to be almost inaudible. “Of course not.” She got up from her chair and came around the desk, never letting go of his hand.

  “Is it true you had to fuck Arkin to get this job?” he asked through a laugh.

  “No.” She paused. “I blew him.”

  Alice hitched her skirt up and sat lightly on Lev’s thighs. “Kiss me.” There was nothing flip in her voice anymore; she was deadly serious.

  Lev cradled her face with his hands, making Alice feel small and adored and alluring, all at the same time. He took her lower lip between his and chewed gently on it, as though to eat her up one tiny, exquisite portion at a time. When he used his teeth, the impression was so soft and tender that Alice hardly felt it, but she knew instantly what it was and what it meant: a drop bite, his incisors leaving the tiniest of marks inside her mouth, a secret sign.

  Alice and Galina walked past kiosks selling delicacies: smoked sausage, salami, even oysters. Business was good. Since all food was expensive, consumers had decided that they might as well buy the upmarket stuff before it disappeared. Everyone was tired of staples like canned sprats in tomato sauce—nicknamed “unmarked graves” because they were such abominable blobs of bones and boiled eyes. The horror of empty shelves and lines was too recent and shallow to be confined to memory; people wanted the capitalist plenty they’d heard so much about, even if they couldn’t really afford it.

  They went to a bar on Tverskaya. The front of the bar top, where customers could rest their elbows, was stainless steel; the rest was solid ice, a channel lined with freezing coils which Firsov, the barman, called his hockey rink. Originally, the entire bar had been done in ice, but so many people had ripped their skin off when getting up that the design had been rethought. Firsov handed Alice a bowl brimming with pungent stalks of pickled wild garlic—an excellent accompaniment to vodka for those strong enough. Alice took one and chewed happily on it. Galina asked for coffee.

  “I’ve only got the fake stuff,” said Firsov. His eyes were shaped like teardrops. “That’s how you can tell a real bar, you know: real bars can only afford ersatz coffee. The only places with real coffee are the fake bars, tourist traps.” He shrugged; such contradiction was commonplace.

  Tonight, Alice felt, she’d earned her vodka, and there was nothing quite like the first proper vodka of the day—tasting sessions like this afternoon’s didn’t count, not really. The first proper vodka was a ritual, and Alice approached it with due reverence. She opened the bottle with a quick, sharp turn of the wrist, then splashed the liquid into the glass, watching it rise high around the sides before settling to a level surface. She savored the smell as the glass came up and the burn as the vodka went down.

  It was passion, it was sensual pleasure, it was a paramour. It deadened the conflicting feelings inside her: a longing for intimacy but a terror of it, a wish to merge with others without being consumed. She was a gregarious introvert, she decided, that was her problem. She didn’t like being alone, but equally she was very shy. At work, she could hide behind her professional persona: the proven privatizer, the market messiah. No matter how many questions she was asked, she had all the answers and one more.

  It had been Galina who’d suggested the drink, and Alice recognized her courage in doing so. Galina was a secretary; to her, it must have seemed as though Alice had come from another galaxy, and Alice wasn’t so self-absorbed that she couldn’t see how intimidating she was capable of being. Galina had said that she wanted to improve her English, which had been culled almost exclusively from Sherlock Holmes stories and Beatles songs. “Your English is fine,” Alice said, but she herself kept lapsing into Russian to prevent the conversation from stagnating while Galina stumbled over her words.

  They spoke about this and that—what parliament would think of the privatization plan, how Moscow compared to other cities Alice had visited, the merits of American and Russian hockey—but somewhere along the line Alice was conscious of talking too much. She was hardly taciturn at the best of times, but tonight she seemed overly chatty, too determined to cover all the natural pauses in discourse. Her cadence, her pacing, were wrong. She knew Galina had picked up on it, for Russians are accustomed to people using words as a smoke screen rather than a window.

  Galina cocked her head to one side. “What is it you’re not telling me?” she said.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “There is something, I know it.”

  “How can you know it, Galya? We barely know each other.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You’ve got a secret, I can tell.”

  Alice smiled through a sigh. “Is it that obvious?” she said, knowing that it was. It was as if an excess of vitality so filled her being that it betrayed itself against her will; now in her smile, now in the light of her eyes. Glee and guilt pressed at each other within her. She was on her fourth vodka, and she was desperate to tell someone. This was one secret she couldn’t share with her usual confidant, Lewis, and Galina was the closest thing she had to a friend in Moscow.

  The alcohol was working its way through Alice, carving out paths for itself, straightening her kinks, coaxing her tongue loose, tempting her to indiscretions she knew she should eschew. She put her finger to her lips. “Tsss! Shhh!”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Alice glanced left and right, parody of a paranoiac. “It’s Lev.”

  Galina knew instantly what she meant. Her mouth formed a perfect circle. “No!”

  “Afraid so.”

  “You’re insane.” Galina mistook the amusement on Alice’s face for offense. “Oh, I don’t mean—I mean, you’ve done so much in your life, Alice, you know so much more about the world than me, so forgive me if I’m talking out of line or missing something, but … is this a good thing for you to be doing? I mean, you wouldn’t have told me unless you wanted my opinion, would you?”

  “Why don’t you think this is a good idea?”

  “For a start, you’re married.”

  “And I’ve never done anything like this
before.”

  “That’s no excuse to start now, is it?”

  “Have you ever cheated on Rodya?”

  “He’s the only man I’ve ever slept with.”

  “Oh.” Alice thought briefly of the various lovers she’d had in college and on Wall Street: students, tutors, colleagues, clients—all received in the hope that they could help her find what she wanted. She wondered how anyone could know that they had found Mr. Right without working their way through a few Mr. Wrongs, and was startled when Galina mistook the source of her puzzlement.

  “You’re wondering how we do it, right?” By the time Alice realized what Galina was talking about, Galina was half a sentence on, taking Alice’s silence for assent. “The same way as everyone else, that’s how. Rodya didn’t lose any of those, you know. But people see he’s got no legs and think he must have lost the rest too.” The words poured out of Galina in torrents; she’d dammed them up for so long, Alice saw, taking every slight against Rodion as her own. “Everyone who sees us thinks two things, whether they say so or not.” She ticked them off on her thumb and index finger. “One, how do they do it? And two, what the hell’s she doing with him? He’s no beauty, let’s face it. Even back when we were kids, he was nothing special to look at. And you know something, Alice? I couldn’t care less. He’s got the best, kindest spirit in the world. You see him with the kids at the orphanage, and then you think of all he’s seen and done in Afghanistan, all the things that have broken so many of those guys you see begging on the streets, and you realize that his warmth and generosity are even more amazing. He’s my husband, and yet there’s something so childlike about him that he’s like my son too, so until we have a real child, I get two for the price of one!”

  “I knew all Russians were capitalists at heart,” Alice said, and they both laughed until Galina, embarrassed at the vehemence of her outburst, remembered where the conversation had been heading. “You’re married, you’re trying to privatize the distillery, and you sleep with the director?” she said. “Imagine what’ll happen if this gets out.”

  “It won’t get out.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “You’re the only person I’ve told.”

  “Then keep it that way. What about Lev?”

  “I doubt he’ll be shouting it from the rooftops.”

  Galina shook her head, unfathomably disappointed. “Why are you doing this? You’re not a Russian, Alice. You’re used to holding your destiny in your own hands. This isn’t a game. All you’re going to do is cause a whole heap of trouble for yourself. You want my advice? Get out while you can.”

  39

  Thursday, January 30, 1992

  Rodion came into the factory with Galina first thing rather than going straight to the orphanage; he wanted to see Lev personally. A ceiling fan moved lazily, and Rodion felt something flickering through his memory, something wasn’t quite there—then it came to him, of course, that the movement of the blades should be accompanied by their flat blatting sounds and the staccato roar of a helicopter’s engines.

  He hopped onto one of Lev’s chairs, refused the offered hundred grams with a shudder, and got straight to the point. “There’ve been more Chechens hanging around outside the gates,” he said.

  “The same ones as before?”

  “I’m not sure. But…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, I might be wrong, I don’t want to be responsible if…”

  “Rodya, you tell me what you think, and I’ll decide what to do about it.”

  “OK. I don’t think this lot were watching our site.”

  “You said they were hanging around outside the gates.”

  “But they weren’t facing in our direction, and they didn’t seem to care if we saw them.”

  “So?”

  “Well, this is something I remember from my army training—surveillance and positioning and all that. Perhaps their attention was somewhere else nearby.”

  Lev steepled his fingers. “You know what ‘somewhere else nearby’ might be, Rodya?”

  “Yes. I’ve helped out there before.”

  “Good. Thanks for telling me this. We’d be better off if everyone was as observant as you.” Lev had been tipped off about Chechen activity in the area a week ago, but Rodion would have been crushed to learn that his precious nugget of information was worthless.

  The compliment seemed to swell Rodion. “I can help guard the place, if you need more men.”

  “Men are the one thing I’m not short of, Rodya.”

  The night sky was darkened smog, hazy and moonless. Any watchers would have found it hard to make out the score of men moving silently into the underground parking beneath Prospekt Mira; they were swathed in black and kept to the shadows, far from the security lights and their weak pools of amber that illuminated the signs warning of dogs and patrols. Neither were to be seen, of course. It was too cold for anything other than a polar bear to be outside for long, and any guards would have been inside, huddling around gas fires and passing the time with vodka and cards, laughing at the man with the losing hand at the end of each round.

  The parking went down five levels. At the deepest, covering the entire expanse of one wall, was a corrugated iron door that could be rolled back to allow deliveries to the subterranean vodka depository beyond. It was by this door that the Chechens congregated. Two of them attached plastic explosives to nine points on the door—the four corners, the midpoints of each side and slap in the middle, making three neat rows of three. The men worked fast to keep the others from freezing; several minutes standing around in that kind of cold felt an eternity, and men flexed their toes and fingers to keep the circulation going.

  When the explosives were set and primed, the Chechens retreated to the other side of the parking area and ducked behind parked vehicles as the fuses were detonated. The shock waves bounced around the walls, and the noise could have woken the dead, but this was Moscow—no one in their right mind would investigate an explosion in the middle of the night. There was smoke and tangled metal, a rich smell of burning, and the Chechens were through what had a few seconds before been a door. They fanned out in a line, squinting through the smoke for the slightest movement, but when the air cleared they saw nothing but crates of vodka stacked floor to ceiling: the booty they’d come for in the first place.

  They brought three vans right up to the entrance and arranged themselves into teams: two in each van to stack, three to carry the crates to them. The containers were heavy, and the men were soon sweating despite the cold. Four Chechens stood guard outside; the others slung their carbines across their backs or put them down on the floor to make the crate carrying easier.

  The vans were half full when Lev’s men emerged from behind what was left of the screen of vodka crates. They came silently and in a rush. They didn’t call for surrender or line the intruders up against the wall before tying them up; they simply shot them where they stood. Nothing clinical, no double taps to the head and simple takedowns. This was carnage, machine-gun rounds like stitching, the Chechens torn apart by hollowed-out bullets tipped with wax and filled with mercury explosive. Holes the size of dinner plates blossomed in chests; arms spun from bodies as if sliced off. Men seemed to burst under the weight of blood, scalps were rolled back from skulls, chunks flew from faces as though torn by the teeth of wild dogs. The screams stopped long before the gunshots.

  When it was all over, Butuzov stepped out into an eerie ringing silence and began to stalk the aisles of the dead, checking that no one was left breathing. Lev had given him charge of this operation, as revenge for what Karkadann had done to Ozers in the florist’s. Butuzov had been waiting here for a week now, night after night, rubbing his own bullets in garlic to promote gangrene in the wounds of anybody not immediately killed, but the precaution now seemed unnecessary—there wasn’t so much as a twitch. Where two men lay tangled with each other, he kicked them apart to make sure neither was playing dead. He wasn’t worrie
d that any survivors would go to the police. The police would do what they always did: nothing. Besides, Karkadann’s men prided themselves on their code of silence, they wouldn’t tell. Butuzov was simply following Lev’s orders: no survivors.

  40

  Friday, January 31, 1992

  The underground repository yawned mockingly behind the fluttering tape. It had been cordoned off by the 21st Century rather than the police. Irk was the first law enforcement officer on the scene, and then only because the Petrovka switchboard operator had mistakenly put the call through to him rather than Yerofeyev. He remembered how Yerofeyev had behaved at the kiosk on Novokuznetskaya, and wondered how long he had before Yerofeyev arrived here and started throwing his weight around again.

  Irk’s most immediate problem, however, was a thick-necked man in a black bomber jacket standing four square in front of him and saying: “You can’t come in here.” A Mafioso telling a cop to stay out of a crime scene—only in Moscow.

  Irk reached in his pocket and flipped his badge open. “Juku Irk,” he said. “Chief investigator, prosecutor’s office.”

  The bullneck peered at the badge. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Keres?”

  “Every day,” said Irk.

  The man shrugged and stepped aside. “It’s not pretty in there.”

  “It never is.”

  Warehouse, slaughterhouse; Irk saw slicks of blood on the floor and bodies piled against a wall like discarded mannequins. He shuddered, partly from cold, more from squeamishness.

  Sabirzhan was bending over one of the corpses, his salmon face clammy with sweat. Irk wondered whether seeing so much death up close was arousing him.