Vodka

by Boris Starling

  One of the uniforms heading out of Petrovka puffed a cheek with his tongue as the tart passed him. “Darling, you want to take a wafer?” he said.

  She didn’t even break stride. “Not if your cock’s as empty as your head.”

  Irk chuckled, and changed his mind about talking to her. If a tart wants to help, she can be a policeman’s best friend. Working girls are streetwise. They look and listen; that’s how they stay alive.

  The officer who’d propositioned her called out to Irk, “Hey, boss, don’t listen to Aldona. She’s a drumstick.”

  “If I have got the clap,” she shouted back, flipping the finger, “it must have been from you.”

  Irk noticed how thick Aldona’s makeup was. Thick enough to cover bruises, let alone spots.

  “You the one in charge of poor Nelli’s case?”

  Irk’s pulse quickened. “You knew her?”

  “She used to hang around with us sometimes.”

  “Did she work for the same pimp?”

  “She didn’t hang out with us professionally,” Aldona said, indignant. “What do you take me for?” Irk raised a hand in apology. “As if there’s not enough competition already,” she added. Her mouth twisted, a smile in umber. “No. Nelli kept our company because it was better than anything else she had.”

  “You know where she lived?”

  Aldona nodded. “Come with me, I’ll show you.”

  The moment Irk stepped inside the internat on Akademika Koroleva, he stopped wondering why Nelli had chosen to spend time with Aldona and the other working girls.

  The internat is a mixture of orphanage and asylum. On a scale of abomination, it comes in somewhere between the army barracks and the prison cell. Russians moan about their existence, Irk thought, but those who go through life without ever seeing the inside of internat, barracks or prison—and there are many—should count themselves lucky and shut up.

  He walked the corridors as though treading nightmares. Two girls, naked from the waist down, scuttled shrieking past him. Irk saw a boy sitting chained to a wall, his knees drawn up so high that they seemed to have fused with his head. Open doors gave onto infernal vistas: children sprawled across filthy sheets, matchstick limbs splayed at impossible angles. Under shaven skulls, vacant eyes stared at him through clouds of flies. The rooms were dim, the beds pushed close together. At night, abuse would spread like a forest fire. The air was stacked with a pyramid of odors: breath, sweat, piss and shit; abandon, neglect and decay.

  Nelli would have been one of the smaller children at the internat, prey, not predator. The evidence of sexual abuse Sidorouk had found didn’t signal a change in signature or modus operandi as they had assumed. It was irrelevant, Irk thought, and almost choked on the guilt he felt at dismissing such trauma so lightly.

  On a veranda, squatting children moaned and rocked in their own private perditions, heedless of the cold. Irk turned away when one of them waved at him and tried to say “papa.” It would be so easy to persuade any of these children to go with him.

  Aldona chatted in a low voice to a couple of staff members. When Irk looked surprised at this, she regarded him with no small measure of disdain. “The working girls help out here when we can,” she said. “We outcasts must stick together, Investigator.”

  She led him into a kitchen with a table that was too large and a stove that was too small. A pot of dumplings bubbled away. Irk lifted the lid and rested his nostrils in the steam for a moment; it was the first thing he’d smelled in this place that hadn’t made him want either to weep or vomit.

  Dimenkova, Aldona said, that was Nelli’s surname. “That was how she was registered, anyway. Like most kids here, she just blew in. They turn up and are taken in, and there’s never enough room. It’s like pissing against a hurricane.”

  “This place is funded by the state, isn’t it?”

  “Theoretically. If those pompous bastards have sent any money, do let me know.”

  Russia is no place to be a child without parents, Irk knew. The lucky few are sent to decent orphanages—decent in this instance meaning well-funded, and well-funded meaning privately financed, either by foreign organizations or local philanthropists such as Lev, and who cares where the money comes from? The rest are divided between the streets and the internats, their chance of a decent life gone either way. Everybody says that their plight’s a disgrace. Everybody was saying the same thing twenty years ago; everybody will still be saying it in twenty years’ time.

  One of the older boys walked past the kitchen door, swigging from a bottle of vodka. Irk watched as he bent down to another child, a smaller one, asleep on the floor. “Come on, sleepy grouse. Let’s go.”

  Sleepy Grouse opened one eye, saw the bottle of vodka and shook his head. Aldona leaned forward to follow Irk’s gaze. “The younger ones don’t drink,” she said. “They think it stunts their growth. They want to be as big as they can.”

  Timofei had said the same thing about Vladimir Kullam. Good God, Irk thought; only the fear of not being able to look after themselves is keeping our children from the bottle. It wasn’t much of an outlook for the future.

  “When did you last see Nelli?” he asked.

  “Last weekend.”

  “Is there anyone here who could have killed her?”

  Aldona gave a short, barking laugh. “Is there anyone here who couldn’t have?”

  It was Valentine’s night, and the only way Alice could deal with it was to be alone. Lewis had asked her what she was doing; she’d told him she was working late. Lev, apologetic for not making time yesterday, had also asked her what she was doing; she’d told him she couldn’t make it. Both answers were true. Both concealed more than they revealed.

  Logic said that Alice couldn’t just go sneaking around the distillery after hours. What if she got caught? What would Lev say? What would he do? Would he harm her? She was his lover, sure, but she’d also be a spy, and he was a gang lord. The privatization process was compromised enough as it was—what would the press say if they found out? Didn’t Watergate start with an unauthorized break-in?

  Logic also said that Alice should get Arkin to send in the cavalry and impound all Lev’s files. But would he do so? She wasn’t sure. With every extra person she involved, the chance of a snarl-up increased exponentially. Presenting this as a fait accompli was the only way to do it.

  The distillery was closed for cleaning over the weekend. It would be empty tonight.

  Red October at night, lights off and workers gone, seemed even more cavernous and intimidating than it did during the day. From where Alice stood at the window of Lev’s office, the vast machines seemed to rise from the factory floor like darkened sentinels. Alice turned her back on them and set to work.

  The office she’d been allocated had a storage annex, and it was there that she had concealed herself until everyone had left for the weekend. She’d brought along a credit card to slip the lock of Lev’s office if need be, but it was open; he clearly thought his own staff too respectful and the Westerners too scrupulous to sneak in behind his back. Odd, for one so paranoid, she thought; but even the most fearful sometimes grow complacent about their weakest points.

  Alice went through desk drawers and filing cabinets one by one, grateful that Lev didn’t use a computer. Alone and furtive, she kept the main lights off and shielded the beam of her flashlight with her hand; Red October was patrolled by the 21st Century’s security guards, and they wouldn’t be slow to come and investigate anything suspicious. If they found her, would any of them know that she was sleeping with their boss? Shit, this was more dangerous than letting a hungry weasel loose in a nudist colony hot-tub.

  There was a bottle of Stolichnaya in the freezer. Alice took it out and filled a glass, watching the vodka as it separated and slid like oil over ice cubes: frigid lava.

  Personal considerations intertwined with professional ones, guilt crawled over justice; she couldn’t even see where to make the cut to separate them. Images of what s
he and Lev had done in this office, over this desk, against this window. She shut them all out and bent herself once more to the task.

  Alice spent hours going through Lev’s papers, looking for documents corroborating the bank transfer details. The trail was often patchy, incomplete or confusing—Lev didn’t keep his records in any discernible order, either through accident or design—and it was well into the wee hours before Alice had worked out for sure what he was doing. The realization came to her gradually: a hint here, an inference there, allowing her to believe and disbelieve before gradually reconciling herself to the idea. It was better that it crept up on her rather than reveal itself all at once, because it was bigger than she’d ever expected. When she saw the whole picture, she was breathless at—and, despite herself, admiring of—his audacity.

  Lev was systematically stripping Red October of its assets.

  He’d established a new company called Krestyakh, also registered in Nicosia, to which he was transferring the distillery’s buildings and equipment. The dates on the correspondence tallied with those of the bank transfers, and revealed a finely judged pace: not quick enough to arouse suspicion, not slow enough to risk being caught short before privatization. At this rate, auction day would dawn with Red October—the guinea-pig for the entire reform program, the company on which the future of Russia rested—little more than an empty shell.

  Under communism, state factory directors who stole from the state were shot. Now, with the economy on its knees, those ruthless enough could obtain previously unimaginable wealth almost overnight. Russia, vast and laden with resources, was like a crashed bullion van, its contents scattered on the ground, and bystanders pushing each other away as they tried to grab the biggest bundle of cash—while the guards were trapped inside, crying uselessly for help.

  Her eyes ached from straining to read by the flashlight—she’d already had to replace one set of batteries—and in her excitement and fear she’d forgotten to eat the food she’d brought. She brought it out now: cheese, ham, salty biscuits and some stale bread.

  No matter, she thought, there was a simple cure: bread soaked with vodka. She was in a distillery, after all, there was enough vodka here to last her a year … perhaps a month … well, a week … till dawn, at any rate.

  55

  Saturday, February 15, 1992

  Dawn was when they started coming in, and they didn’t look like cleaners. Lev and Sabirzhan were among the first to arrive. Sabirzhan wasn’t the kind of person to bother himself with mundanities such as cleaning, and even Lev’s insistence on controlling everything that went on in the distillery surely didn’t extend this far. From beside the window in Lev’s office, tucked out of sight, Alice tried to slow the churning in her chest. Her sense of guilt was no longer only about Lewis. Now it encompassed Lev too, as though the night she’d just spent was some sort of illicit affair behind his back, cheating on the man with whom she was cheating on her husband.

  She watched Lev and Sabirzhan start up the production line, casual as could be. She heard sounds familiar enough to have become part of her subconscious: the steady sibilance of vodka washing through the machinery, the brittle clanking of bottles wobbling down conveyor belts. Above these noises came laughter and joking. In Soviet times, Black Saturday had occurred once a month, a compulsory workday. But there was nothing remotely downbeat about those there today. What could this be other than a parallel production line, with neither output nor profits finding their way into the distillery ledgers, pure profit for those lucky enough to be in on it?

  They were working faster than usual, Alice saw. Why wouldn’t they, when their own money was at stake? Slow for the state, quickly for themselves. She couldn’t even muster the energy to be surprised, let alone outraged.

  No wonder Lev had initially been opposed to Red October’s privatization. It was amazing that he’d relented at all. Asset stripping, voucher requisitioning, unregistered exports, and now this. He must have been making a fortune from this distillery, let alone all his other interests. Alice wondered how wealthy he really was—rich enough, surely, to keep accounts in Switzerland or the Caribbean, as well as the company in Cyprus. Perhaps even Lev didn’t know his exact worth.

  For Russia, one black market is considered two too few. There’s the shadow economy of underground businesses, unrecorded, unreported and cash only. There’s the virtual economy of Soviet-era manufacturing, which shelters from market pressures by retreating from them and existing instead by barter, credit notes and subsidies. And there’s the offshore economy, where the serious money goes.

  Three black markets, and Lev had fingers in all of them.

  Alice’s mind must have wandered. When she next looked down over the factory floor, Lev was nowhere to be seen. She was still searching for him when she heard the fire door at the end of the corridor open. It was Lev, she was sure; she could tell by the cadence of his stride, the long delay between each footfall as his endless legs ate up the ground, and he’d catch her in his office if she didn’t move, now.

  Lev’s office gave onto the antechamber where Galya sat, and the antechamber had two doors—the main one out to the corridor along which Lev was walking, and a smaller side exit onto a gangway high above the distillery floor. Alice had little choice. She’d already filled a satchel with the most incriminating of Lev’s papers. She slung it over her shoulder, hurried out of the office and across the antechamber, fancying that she heard the main door open even as she closed the side one behind her and stepped onto the gangway.

  It was horribly exposed, that was for sure. The railing was only waist high, and the latticed metal treads looked a lot less secure than Alice hoped they actually were. When she looked down, she could see all the way through the grids to the floor; a couple of seconds’ drop if she fell—or was pushed. How long would Lev be in his office? If it was only a few minutes, she should stay still, wait for him to leave and sneak out that way. Any longer, and she should find somewhere more secure to hide.

  Alice shifted the satchel against her hip and felt a hard bulge in its base. It took her a moment to remember what it was; she’d brought a camera with her in case she needed to photograph documents. Contenting herself with stealing them instead, she’d forgotten all about the camera. She had documents to back up everything else, but nothing to prove the existence of this illicit production. Pictures would be the icing on the cake, insurance even. Arkin might refuse to read documents, but even he couldn’t ignore evidence on five-by-sevens.

  The gangway was high enough to afford the perfect camera angle to capture faces—profiles, at least—rather than anonymous tops of heads. She wanted Lev in there too, but she could catch him when, if, he came back. Feeling like a private dick snapping a man with his mistress, she pulled out the camera, turned it on, adjusted the image in the viewfinder and clicked.

  The flash sparked, bright and impossible to miss even from twenty yards. It was automatic; Alice had forgotten to disable it. Even as her stomach twisted in self-reproach, the viewfinder picked out faces turning up toward her, fingers pointing, sudden angry shouts where the laughter had been. There was no need for secrecy anymore; safety was what she needed, and fast. Lev would be coming through the door behind her at any moment. The element of surprise she’d banked on had vanished. It was time simply to save her skin.

  Alice ran.

  The gangway swayed slightly under her feet, but she couldn’t be scared of more than one thing at a time, and getting caught was more than enough to be going on with. She was most of the way across when she heard the door opening behind her and Lev yelling. Alice didn’t even look around. The gangway forked in two and then in two again, branches across the roofs of vats that held more than a million liters each. If they caught her, would they throw her in one? What a way to go, she thought; she could open her mouth and literally drink herself to death. Talk about being pickled.

  She zigzagged over the tops of oceans of vodka destined to fuel heated conversations, silly arguments,
hysterical laughter, maudlin tears, pulverizing hangovers, family scandals, acrimonious split-ups, violent rapes and agonizing cirrhoses.

  Alice scampered like a fox through landscapes of stainless steel. When the vats ended, she found herself in the treetops of the filtration columns, and even as she was looking behind to check whether Lev was following—he wasn’t—her skin prickled as a column of scorching vapor spat out and dispersed beside her. She looked down, and saw Sabirzhan, far below, holding one of the high-pressure steam jets they used to clean the filtration columns. A touch closer, and it would have taken some of her skin with it, even at this distance.

  If she didn’t know before, she knew now: these guys weren’t playing around.

  The more Alice ran, however, the less frightened she became. It must have been all the vodka inside her. She appreciated the danger she was in but felt somehow detached from it, as though this were happening to someone else.

  A bolted steel ladder ran down the side of each filtration column. Alice chose the one nearest to the corner, the one most hidden from sight—if it was also the easiest to trap her on, then she’d take that chance—and clambered down it, using opposite arms and legs like a quadruped. In the wide-open spaces beyond, voices sounded loud and distorted as they chased her. At the bottom of the column—she’d come down almost fast enough to make her ears pop—Alice looked both ways, saw nothing and then listened through the echoes to find out where her pursuers were.

  Ten yards away, across an expanse of floor that looked about as inviting as a sniper’s alley, Alice saw an alcove full of wooden forklift pallets stacked with vodka crates. She tucked her body low and ran to them. The pallets stopped a yard or so short of the alcove’s ceiling, space enough for Alice to hide without being seen from above. The crates on the end pallet were piled at a slight angle, makeshift steps. She hauled herself up these and lay flat on top, pressing herself down as though by sheer force of will she could make herself invisible.