Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “We’ve got enough for a couple of soccer teams, and none of them are saying a damn thing.” Denisov hawked deep in his throat and spat into the trash can. “I don’t tell him how to run the country, so what gives him the right to tell me how to do my job?” Because he’s the prime minister, Irk thought, but didn’t say it. “Oh, I forgot—you’re his new favorite, aren’t you?”

  Irk understood Denisov’s anger perfectly well. Arkin had demanded that the police not only do something, but be seen to be doing it. So the order had gone out: round up low-level Chechen gangsters. The exercise was excruciatingly pointless. Any Chechen Mafioso insufficiently well protected to escape the trawl was by definition too junior to have any useful information about Karkadann’s whereabouts. So nothing had been achieved, and everybody was pissed off: a bunch of Chechens in leather jackets who had better things to do with their time; Denisov, who’d lost face by being forced to authorize the farce; Yerofeyev, who’d now have to explain this whole farrago to those higher up the Chechen food chain who paid his bribes; and Irk, who seemed to be collecting enemies as though they were baseball cards.

  46

  Thursday, February 6, 1992

  Alice read until the wee hours, undisturbed because Lewis was on night shift. By the time she’d finished, she’d confirmed her worst fears, and then some. Red October was selling vodka at artificially low prices to a shell company, Suyumbika, which was then exporting the vodka at much higher (and tax-free) international prices, and pocketing the difference. In the past year alone, Suyumbika had cleared more than twelve million dollars. The file included hundreds of bills of lading, detailing each shipment’s nature, size, source and destination.

  There was hardly a country in the developed world to which Suyumbika hadn’t made a sale—nor, it seemed, a country in the former Soviet Union. The fourteen republics that along with Russia had made up the USSR were now foreign countries, and vodka sold to them was therefore export rather than domestic trade. Alice found bills of lading to Yerevan, Tashkent, Riga, Tallinn, Tbilisi, Kiev and Minsk. Clearly, the union’s disintegration was proving lucrative for Suyumbika.

  In contrast, the official figures for Red October over the same period listed less than four million dollars’ worth of exports. The profits from these sales went into the distillery accounts and were therefore included in the privatization assessment, whereas the profits from Suyumbika presumably went straight to the pockets of Lev and whoever else was in on the scam. To Alice, they were technically untouchable.

  This was the way things worked here, wasn’t it? That was the easy way out. Alice could make excuses for Lev all she wanted. This was the man with whom she was sleeping, this the man for whom her feelings were already dangerously strong and deep; this was the man who was ripping off his own company.

  Sabirzhan was waiting for her when she arrived at Red October.

  “I was just wondering whether you’d finished with the files I gave you,” he said.

  “Oh, sure.” She gestured toward the pile on her desk. “Be my guest.”

  Sabirzhan picked them up, flicking through the covers like a croupier. “There’s one missing.”

  “There is?”

  “The one marked ‘Suyumbika.’”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “You haven’t read that file?”

  “No. Not that I can think of.” She laughed. “Read them all in one sitting, it’s hard to tell which is which.” She looked down at the ground. “Oh, there it is.” Crouching quickly down, the desk shielding her from Sabirzhan’s line of vision, Alice let the Suyumbika file slide from her bag into her hand. Surfacing, she gave it back to Sabirzhan. “Must have fallen on the floor.”

  “Must have.” She couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic.

  “Shouldn’t I read it?” she asked, feeling mischievous.

  “There’s no point. It’s just a duplicate of this one.” He tapped the uppermost file and left.

  You can lie as smoothly as I can, Alice thought. Of course he could: he was KGB.

  “Have you come across something called Suyumbika, Harry?” Alice asked.

  “Suyumbika? What’s that?”

  “Just a name I thought I recognized.”

  He shook his head. “Not that I remember. Too much vodka, making you imagine things.”

  “Probably.” Alice wasn’t ready to share her discoveries with Harry and Bob. She should have, she knew, but she felt that this was between her and Lev. She hadn’t told her colleagues that she’d known about the child murders before Pravda had made the story public; as far as they were concerned, they knew everything she did, and vice versa. They were a team, right?

  “The books don’t balance,” he said. “Not even close. As far as I can make out, we’re dealing with debts of hundreds of millions of rubles here, even at the old values.”

  He showed her the workings: the amount owed to suppliers was well into nine figures, the amounts owed to banks and the state were eight each. It wasn’t surprising. Enterprises ran up such huge debts because they could. The creditors with the capability to enforce payment—government agencies—didn’t do so because the administration was afraid the resulting bankruptcies and plant closures would provoke social instability. As for the banks and suppliers—well, if they didn’t have the muscle to enforce payment, who cared what they thought?

  “It’s taken me ten days, I’ve worn out four ink pens, and to be honest, I could go around and around till the end of time without knowing whether I was any closer to the truth,” Harry said. “It’s like standing in a jungle and looking into the trees. There’s something in there, and though the camouflage means you can’t tell whether it’s a tiger or a snake, you know it’s not nice. If this was a potential M&A in the States, I wouldn’t touch it with rubber gloves and a barge pole.”

  “Well, it’s not. Nor is it helpful to apply those standards here. What you got?”

  “I’ve calculated Red October’s statutory capital at 45,214,000 rubles. Divided by a nominal value of 1,000 rubles, this gives 45,214 shares. Ordinary shares held by management and workers make up 51 percent of the total, that’s 23,059 shares. We offer 29 percent—13,112—at auction; and the remaining 9,043, the last 20 percent, are held back by the state. That’s it.”

  Figures made it official, Alice thought; figures meant it was really going to happen. She wanted the auction to go forward, it was what she had set her heart on, the pinnacle of her career to date. Yet at the same time she wanted to uncover whatever darkness there was at the heart of this place, whatever the harm to her cause. These twin contradictory thirsts for achievement and knowledge tugged at Alice, just as she was torn between love and guilt, loyalty and betrayal, desire and ambition, friendship and lust. The time was coming when, caught in the conflicting currents, she must hold her nose and take the plunge.

  47

  Friday, February 7, 1992

  In addition to Lev’s penthouse, the Kotelniki building also housed the Illusion cinema, in Soviet times the only one in Moscow that had shown undubbed foreign films. Now a painting advertised The Silence of the Lambs; the artist had improbably but spectacularly contrived to make Anthony Hopkins resemble Ivan Lendl, and Jodie Foster Pinocchio.

  Lev had invited Alice for dinner. She was going to be strong, she told herself as she stepped into the elevator, strong and professional. She would tell him that she’d discovered his scams, that the West would see them as unacceptable, and that he’d better have a good explanation. She wouldn’t let him pour her any vodka, and she wouldn’t let him undress her.

  She ran her hand over his belly, marveling at its hardness.

  “If it wasn’t like that, I’d break my back every time I lifted weights,” he said.

  He kissed the back of her neck, just below the hairline; he kissed her on her eyelids, licking from their centers to their edges; he kissed her in her ears, blowing gently in one and nuzzling the other; he kissed her on her hands, looking up at her as his ton
gue traced lazy circles across her palms; and he kissed her where her wrists pulsed, the lightest of touches.

  He was a heart too hot to hold, a flame that burned her soul.

  In Gozo, years back, Alice had swum through the Azure Window—a cave that led from the sea into a small lagoon. As she’d scissored through the water, she’d felt bubbles rising from the depths beneath her. When she’d looked down, she’d seen nothing but ever-deepening shades of blue, extending to infinite darkness. She had known then that if she were to stop swimming and let herself sink, she would never reach the bottom—the monster breathing those bubbles would have eaten her first.

  She was experiencing a similar sensation now, held in suspension over the abyss to a strange and hazardous world.

  Lev’s right foot was covered in tattoos of cats, signifying his life as a thief. Several cats together across the top showed that he was part of a gang, while the tom’s head on his instep represented good luck and warned that the bearer was not to be messed with.

  “Tell me about him,” he said.

  “Tell you about who?”

  “Lewis.”

  Alice thought of the wedding photograph in her sitting room: the two of them laughing as they ducked a shower of confetti. Lewis was beautiful—handsome to the point of ugliness, like he’d just stepped off the pages of a glossy magazine, the kind of guy who appeared in ads. When it came to handsomeness, he was miles ahead of every Russian man she knew. But now Alice found his looks flat and antiseptic. Lev’s face was much rougher than Lewis’s; Alice felt she could lose herself in Lev’s features forever.

  She was reluctant to answer. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Why not?” Within Lev’s parameters, the question was entirely normal.

  “OK. What do you want to know?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Everything I’m not. Quiet when I’m loud, dependable when I’m all over the place, sober as a piece of glass when I’m oinking like a pig, part of the furniture when I’m the garish centerpiece.”

  “He doesn’t know about me?” She shook her head. “Does he suspect?”

  “No.” Alice had convinced herself that she could partition her life into small, separate compartments. Lev’s existence, her drinking—it was easier not to explain things to Lewis. The best way to keep the harmony was to maintain his ignorance. “It’s enough that he thinks he’s losing me to Moscow.”

  “He’s right.”

  She shrugged. “You know when I first wanted to come here? I was working up in Lake Placid at the Winter Olympics, twelve years ago. I was a student, it was a volunteer job, crap pay, endless fun. I was one of the stewards that day at the ice hockey, when we beat you…”

  “That team played under the hammer and sickle. It was not mine.”

  “… and when the buzzer sounded, I was looking not at the Americans but at the Soviets. I’d never seen a team look more upset—they were devastated.”

  “What did you expect them to be?”

  “Automatons. That was what we’d been fed, remember: that these unsmiling people would come here, win the gold medal without a flicker of emotion, and go back home to their gray cities. Only it turned out they weren’t robots, they were human beings. Ever since then I’ve wanted to come here. Last year, when I was offered the privatization job, Lewis begged me to turn it down. He didn’t want us to come here, even when the Sklifosovsky approached him. I persuaded him that this was the land of opportunity. We were stagnating at home. I wanted that buzz again, the one I’d had in Eastern Europe: that sensation of being at the cutting edge, where history’s made.”

  “And so you should. Foreigners who are drawn or sent to Russia become part of our history, in all its restlessness and unpredictability, no matter how much we like to pretend they don’t.”

  “But how many of them realize it? Most of the chowderheads here see this as just another foreign post. They might find it exciting, but does it grab their soul the way it does mine?”

  “Then that’s their loss, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If a man’s a fool, he’ll stay that way for good. Being part of history is easy. Shaping it, less so—that privilege is given only to the chosen. Have you ever read Alexander Blok?” Alice shook her head; Lev quoted from memory: “‘Dear overseas guests, go to sleep. May your dreams be blissful; forget that darkness falls on the cage we struggle in.’”

  “Isn’t it my struggle too? We—I—came here with the best of intentions; to make a difference, to transform this society. The West had won the Cold War, it was up to us to show a winner’s magnanimity, be helpful in the hour of our triumph.”

  “Alice, Russians don’t like it when foreigners talk like that.”

  “But it’s true, Lev—I can’t help that. It’s just that living in Moscow has done different things to us. The more my horizons expand, the more Lewis’s seem to contract. I’m twice an outsider, an American woman in a world dominated by Russian males; but I feel more at home here than I’ve ever felt in Boston, in D.C., even in New York—and if there are two places on earth you could confuse with each other if you don’t look too hard, it’s Moscow and New York.”

  “Of course it’s true. What’s life if you live it on a flat line? No great downs, true, but no great ups either. You might as well be dead. Ups and downs are proof that you’re alive. Flatlines are what happen to patients in hospital when their bodies give out on them.”

  “Tell that to Lewis: he spends his days watching for vital signs.”

  “Why don’t you leave him?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  She took a deep breath. “All right. If I left him, I’d be admitting failure. I’ve never failed at anything in my life, and I don’t want to start now. I still want him to love this place as much as I do. He’s already talking about going back to America. If he does that, either I leave him or I leave here.”

  “And if you leave here, then you leave me.”

  “And that I can’t do.”

  Alice drained her glass and shook it at him. “Fill her up.”

  He paused a moment, looked at her and poured. “You’re tucking that away behind the tie.”

  “Taking it to my breast, and it feels good.” She drank half the hundred grams down in one.

  “When did you start drinking?” he said.

  As far as Alice could recall, Lev was the first person ever to have asked her that. Most people just accepted her drinking as a part of her, as innate and integral as her spleen.

  “As a teenager, I guess. It used to be a big thing, going out and getting drunk—you know, rites of passage, experimentation, all that. Boys thought it was really cool to know a girl who could outdrink them. Once they’d gotten over the blow to their machismo, they treated me like some kind of party piece. They loved me for that, and it made me feel popular and wanted—and sexual too, of course. It lowered my inhibitions, made me feel randier, and most teenage boys couldn’t find their own assholes with a mirror, they’re so fumbling and clumsy, so it was just easier to be drunk.” She paused, as though she’d just articulated the thought for the first time. “That’s it, I guess: it was easier to be drunk than not to be. It’s more ingrained and complex now, but that’s where it started. There was always liquor around the house, it was too easy.”

  “Your parents drank?”

  “My mother, especially.” Alice reached for her glass. It was empty, and for a moment she felt disconcerted, she couldn’t remember having finished the last measure. “She was … she was an alcoholic. I know, I know, alcoholism can be genetic and hereditary, transmission’s more often maternal than paternal—I know all that. I’m lucky to have escaped it, I reckon.”

  “Do you remember her drinking, when you were a child?”

  “Oh yeah. And I know all the psychobabble, I had all that shit rammed down me about the way children behave in those situations. Whether they try to act the hero and achieve things in schoo
l or sports or drama or whatever to get love and appreciation; or whether they go for the caretaker-cum-lost-child approach, taking responsibility for the family and looking after it by blending gently into the background and keeping the peace when they can.”

  “I’d never heard of those.”

  “You’re not American. In America, you can hardly walk out of your front door without being mugged by shrinks. It’s all bullshit. Therapy schmerapy. Let’s leave all that crap in America, where it belongs, and talk about something else, shall we?”

  Sensing the hurt behind her cavalier dismissal of the subject, Lev acquiesced, even though he would have liked to know more. On the surface, Alice was the typical brash, hard-as-nails American bitch—or so she would have everyone believe. But there were chinks in that armor-plated surface that offered tantalizing glimpses of the woman within. A woman who was anything but typical.

  Perhaps it was something common to every only child, this need to belong and yet to be alone. Alice could count on the fingers of one hand the number of friends she had; proper, true and valued friends, that was. There were many others, of course, who dropped into her life and then left again, like Bob and Harry, coming and going. Alice had tried in the past to join groups of people, but it hadn’t worked. She was too singular. Her beauty and vulnerability were those of a woman; her haircut and clothes were masculine. Without siblings, an only child puts up boundaries and cordons. Alice was born lonely and had grown up lonelier.

  There was a complete absence of guilt in Alice. It was the only thing that made her feel guilty. What she and Lev had was beyond regulation. It couldn’t be negotiated like treaties, rationed like food parcels or ignored like background noise.

  “I only wish to save myself,” she told him, “but I don’t know how.”