Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Karkadann’s grandfather had left the train at a stop to get some snowmelt to drink, and a Russian soldier shot him dead on the spot. Now the Chechen warlord sat in an anonymous room in an anonymous part of town and seethed.

  There was no one at Petrovka—every available policeman was down at Red Square. So Irk found himself alone, with time and space to think—though he’d have been better off with neither. What had happened in Smolensky Square would have cost him his job were it not for Arkin’s continuing interest in the case. Yerofeyev was complaining to everyone in sight about the loss of so many men, as well he might. And still Irk waited in dread anticipation of another adolescent corpse.

  With the auction getting closer, the Chechens should be upping the body count rather than throttling back. The delay seemed incomprehensible, and that worried Irk. He never liked what he couldn’t understand.

  “What’s the point, Kolya?” Borzov stared gloomily into the dregs of his vodka glass. “What does the president rule, eh?” He gestured around the room. “Not Russia, not even Moscow, just this little fortress.”

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich, now’s not the time for negative thoughts. Those idiots churning up Red Square aren’t representative of the people.”

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich has never been the deputy, you know, always the boss. Not some apparatchik—the boss. In a thousand years, Anatoly Nikolayevich is the first politician to make it to the top because the people love him. That has to be worth something, surely?”

  “It’s worth everything, Anatoly Nikolayevich.”

  Borzov filled and drank, each drop dragging him further into the morass of depression. “Perhaps we’re ahead of our time, Kolya. We can see what others can’t. You play chess, Kolya?”

  “Of course.”

  “In chess, you never play to the end. If you’re going to lose, you resign, you don’t go through the motions of a futile endgame and let your opponent humiliate you.”

  Borzov raised himself from his chair and went to look out the window once more. “They used to love the president, Kolya. You remember? And now they expect miracles from him. They expect him to heal the sick, punish the corrupt, feed the poor. What else do they want? A human sacrifice? For Anatoly Nikolayevich to appear on the mausoleum and shoot himself?”

  Arkin was at his side. “Anatoly Nikolayevich, if you give in now, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  64

  Monday, February 24, 1992

  It was just after ten in the morning when four Chechens walked into the Sberbank branch on Ostozhenka. They ducked under a vast banner advertising the privatization and bypassed the Monday-morning lines, the manager himself ushering them quickly into his office—for who knew what Chechens would do if kept waiting? Producing warrant cards identifying them as representatives of the Ministry of Finance in Grozny, they informed the manager that they had come to pick up the privatization vouchers that were due to be distributed today.

  “Vouchers for where?” the manager asked. “Grozny?”

  “The entire Chechen Republic.”

  The manager raised an eyebrow. “That’s more than a million vouchers.”

  They gestured to a fleet of vehicles outside. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

  “There are no more elastic bands to wrap them with; is that a problem?” the manager asked. “The girls are using cut-up strips of condoms instead; they say it’s no great loss, their husbands refuse to wear them anyway.” He took a sheet of paper from a drawer. “I’ll need you to sign the authorization order. It allows you to take the vouchers away, and transfers responsibility for their safekeeping from us to you.”

  “No problem,” they said, each man signing with an illegible flourish.

  Another consignment of vouchers arrived at Red October, though this one numbered thousands rather than millions: one for each distillery worker, real or mythical. Lev took the packages into his office and locked them in the safe.

  The intercom buzzed. He crossed over to the desk and flicked it on. “Yes?”

  “Tengiz calling for you,” Galina said.

  “Tell him to go to hell.”

  “He’d really like to—”

  “You heard me, Galya.”

  Galina clicked off the intercom and took Sabirzhan off hold. “He won’t talk to you, Tengiz.”

  “Galya, I need to see him.”

  “Why?”

  “This thing’s gone far enough. Someone has to make the first move toward reconciliation, but since he won’t let me in the distillery, what can I do?”

  She sat up straighter. “You’re all out of favors with me.”

  “Just tell me … is he going anywhere I could catch him?”

  “Well …” She sucked air through her teeth. “You didn’t hear this from me, but I’ve just made reservations for him at the Vek. Tomorrow night, eight o’clock. You could, I don’t know, go there for dinner with a couple of people, accidentally on purpose, and act like it’s a big surprise to see him.”

  “I’ll do that. Not a word, eh? You’re a star. Thanks, Galya.”

  “You can leave me alone now.”

  Sabirzhan walked across Red Square, where an army of municipal workers were still clearing up yesterday’s debris. The display windows in the GUM department store gaped jagged where they’d been broken. Nearby, a man in a laborer’s jacket was scrubbing at a stain easily recognizable as blood, even against the dark red of the cobbles.

  The riot had jolted the government, but no more. Borzov was still in power; Arkin had lambasted the rioters as hooligans and reactionaries trying to derail the forces of progress; the West was still supporting the privatization program; and Lev was still in the distillery. Nothing had changed. The auction was in a week, that was all the time he had left.

  Sabirzhan had one option remaining. It was a course of action he’d considered in the past but always rejected, save as a last resort. He got in his car and headed west—to Smolensky Square, where the Chechens were.

  65

  Tuesday, February 25, 1992

  Same Sberbank branch and same manager as the previous day; four different Chechens, this time in the uniforms of the Grozny police. “There have been some irregularities in the voucher pick-up schedule,” one of them said. “You still have the authorization order?”

  “Of course.”

  “Give it to me. We’re taking it in for forensic testing.”

  The bank manager opened his drawer. “No,” the Chechen said. “Don’t touch it—we must do this properly.” He opened a small bag and brought out a pair of rubber gloves, some tweezers and a clear plastic envelope. On went the gloves, the tweezers gripped at the paper, the authorization order was dropped in the envelope.

  “Shouldn’t we report this?” the bank manager said, goggle-eyed at his bit part in such a drama. “To Petrovka—to the Kremlin, even?”

  “Who do you think asked us to come here in the first place? Just let us handle it; there’s a good fellow.”

  The Chechens were back at the Belgrade Hotel inside the hour. They had a million vouchers and the authorization order. Sberbank had absolutely no record that they’d ever been there. When Karkadann heard the news, he corrugated his face into something that began as a grimace and ended as a smile—the first anyone had seen from him in a long time.

  Officially, vouchers could be sold for cash, invested in an enterprise of the holder’s choice, or put in a voucher investment fund. Unofficially, and entirely predictably, a fourth market had sprung up overnight: vouchers could be traded for vodka, usually at the rate of one for three bottles. All over Moscow, kiosk owners put up signs saying: “Vouchers bought here.” In the old central post office, now the city’s raw materials and commodities exchange, a bust of Lenin watched inscrutably as dealers added vouchers to the list of goods bought and sold. On the sidewalk outside, Arkin could be found urging an old man not to sell his voucher, but rather to invest it wisely. “Nikolai Valentinovich,” the old man replied, “I’d sell it to you right now
if I thought you were fool enough to buy it.”

  The maître d’ at the Vek greeted Lev like a long-lost friend. It was the first time Lev had been there since New Year’s Eve. Both Lev and Alice had dressed up for the occasion. Places like this thrived on exclusivity and patrons were expected to make the effort.

  Even after everything that had happened over the previous few days, none of the other diners whispered or pointed fingers at Lev and Alice. She half wanted someone to, just so she could give them a piece of her mind; her period wasn’t far off, and a good rant would leach away some of her tension.

  A table was presented, chairs pulled out, vodka and menus brought. The bodyguards sat at adjacent tables, close enough to see, too far away to hear. Lev chose an apple-filled goose, Alice a perch fish packed with mince and with olives for eyes. A jazz band played as softly and unceasingly as a river beneath the conversation. Outside, the dim sodium glow of the streetlights cast a suitably downbeat tinge on the perpetual stream of drones who trudged past. Home to work, work to home, nothing in between but survival.

  Was it obscene, Alice thought, that they could come to a place like this and spend two hundred dollars a head? Of course. But then, many Muscovites were so poor that a trip to McDonald’s seemed grotesquely extravagant.

  They were halfway through their entrées when the attack came.

  Three cars, BMWs by the look of them, passing at high speed, Chechens leaning out the windows while their guns spat flames at the Vek’s window. “Down!” Lev yelled. “Everybody down!” and they were plunging for the floor even as he shouted. In the half-second separating chair from carpet, Lev saw everything with remarkable clarity: passersby scattering and falling in terror onto the sidewalk outside; his own bodyguards waving their weapons around in frustrated impotence, unable to fire because the cars had gone and there were too many civilians in the way; Alice’s face pressed against the ground, eyes scrunched shut in fear.

  No, Lev thought, there’s something wrong. He clambered upright with ursine determination, ignoring a warning from one of his guards that he should keep down. It was what he’d heard, or rather what he hadn’t heard, like the dog that didn’t bark. He hadn’t heard all the things he’d expected to: he hadn’t heard breaking glass, or grunts and screams from people taking bullets in their guts. Lev knew these sounds as well as he knew Pushkin, and there was only one explanation for their absence: the Chechens had been using blanks.

  The others were slowly getting to their feet. They dusted themselves off and looked with bewilderment at the Vek’s windows, entirely undamaged, and at the people outside, laughing nervously as they helped each other up. “They were using blanks!” someone shouted, and they could all see that, but Lev’s mind was already one step on. Yes, they’d been using blanks—but why?

  The answer came to Lev more by osmosis than conscious thought. He knew the reason before his brain had framed it into words, and it certainly wasn’t conscious thought that had him toppling like a forest oak onto the floor again, a long way down for such a big man, dragging Alice with him as he yelled once more for everyone to get down, but they didn’t understand. Surely, the danger was over. It was the simplest of double-taps and they couldn’t see it, and his voice was lost in the twin impacts of his body against the floor and the first volley of real bullets through the window.

  There were five cars in all, spaced at ten-foot intervals, and this time they passed the Vek as though they were part of a funeral procession. Two gunmen were leaning out of each vehicle, and as they went past they laced the restaurant with methodical rounds, up and down, up and down. They made a double frieze, one at face height, the other at chest level, and from Lev’s prostrate position he could tell what was happening only by the infernal noise of shattering glass and human howls.

  The seconds stretched and stretched, and then the rearmost car accelerated away and time speeded up to normal again. Lev looked around. “Alice! Alice!”

  She was lying on her side, covered in food. “Well, this was a total waste of makeup.”

  “You’re fine,” he said, and he knew she’d heard the anguish in his voice that showed that his love was for real. He peered cautiously up and around before daring to lift first his head and then his torso. The sidewalk was strewn as much with body parts as with entire people. The gunmen had been professionals, their slow and methodical stitching movement had torn heads from bodies and limbs from trunks.

  The jazz band was still playing. They would not remember the tune afterward, and their clothing was so saturated with nervous sweat that they needed to change even their shoes, but if they had stopped before their scheduled break, they would have been in breach of their agreement with the management. The Vek could then have withheld their fee—yes, even for a massacre right in front of them.

  Inside the restaurant, people were whimpering and yelling, but it wasn’t them Lev was worried about. He was looking for anyone who was silent, because the mute cases are always the most serious. No, everyone was alive. The person shouting loudest was one of the bodyguards.

  “What happened to you?” Lev asked.

  “Took a bullet in the shoulder.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Oh, not very. I’m more worried about my jacket.” He picked at the leather so that Lev could see the bullet hole. “It was new, last week. Now it looks like it’s come from my ass.”

  “Fuck your jacket.” Lev glared through the gaping window at the destruction beyond, seeing that his cardinal rule of Mafia disputes had once more been well and truly broken: civilians had not only been involved, they’d been injured, killed. The Chechens’ indiscrimination offended Lev. When he’d been behind the wire, his quarrel had been with the Soviet system rather than its people. His circumstances and opponents may have changed, but his principles had not.

  Lev turned to the bodyguards. “Round up all the injured out there and take them to the hospital, now. Don’t wait for the ambulances, you’ll be lucky if they get here before Christmas. And don’t just drop them at those crappy municipal places, either. Take them all to the Sklifosovsky, and tell the staff there that I’ll pay.”

  The restaurant was a mess, and there were no insurance policies in Russia worth the name. As his men hurried off, Lev yelled for the Vek’s manager.

  “I’ll reimburse you for the damage,” he told him. “Every last cent—you have my word.”

  66

  Wednesday, February 26, 1992

  The penthouse and Red October were the only places Lev felt safe. He sequestered Alice in his office at the distillery and stationed four guards with her. Another eight were in the antechamber where Galina sat. Lev called Sabirzhan and asked—demanded—that he come in.

  “Only if you personally guarantee my safety,” Sabirzhan said.

  “I guarantee it.”

  There were no offers of vodka or chummy handshakes when Sabirzhan arrived; they got straight down to business. “Did you tell the Chechens where to find me?” Lev asked.

  “How would I have known where to find you?” Sabirzhan was neither outraged nor defensive, there was no flicker in his eyes as he spoke. The doubt his impassiveness induced was enough to keep Alice quiet. She wouldn’t condemn Galina without knowing for sure.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “No. I didn’t tell the Chechens.”

  This was why Lev had wanted to bring Sabirzhan in rather than just ask him on the phone: so he could see him face-to-face when he put forth the questions. But he found it as pointless as Irk had back in Petrovka. You couldn’t interrogate a man for whom interrogations were a forte; Sabirzhan knew tricks Lev hadn’t even heard of. Lev could have asked Sabirzhan the same question, over and over until sundown, and still not known one way or the other.

  It was luck of the purest kind that Sabirzhan should be leaving the distillery just as a man in a chauffeur’s cap with Old Glory on the peak was approaching the reception desk.

  “I’ve come to pick up Alice Liddell,” Sab
irzhan heard him say.

  “And you are …?” asked the receptionist.

  “I’m from the American embassy.”

  The limousine drove west toward the embassy, the Stars and Stripes fluttering proudly, provocatively, on its hood. Alice sat in the back, trying to work out what she’d say to the ambassador when he asked her about the assassination attempt and told her—not for the first time—how concerned Washington was about the way things were going. A solitary Range Rover rode shotgun, now alongside the limousine, now behind, never ahead. It was a simple run from Red October to the embassy; across the Kammeny Bridge, along Znamenka to Arbatskaya, down Novy Arbat and up Novinsky. They were making the last turn, the right from Novy Arbat to Novinsky, when the ambush came.

  Have you ever seen orcas, killer whales, on the attack? They flash black and white as flukes and fins break the surface around a gray whale and her calf. The pod of orcas works together to tire their prey and separate mother from calf. They come again and again, sustained and violent, repeatedly ramming into the calf with extraordinary force as the mother tries to get between the killers and her baby, or to swim underneath it and push it out of their way. Eventually, battered to exhaustion, the calf begins to roll in red-stained water, its pectoral fins bleeding and studded with teeth marks where the orcas have been holding it under the water to try and drown it. The mother swims slowly shoreward. Her offspring is lost.

  The Chechens came in four Land Cruisers. The first accelerated in front of the American convoy and braked sharply; the second and third tried to push in between the Range Rover and the limousine; the fourth took up position behind the battle, to block off following traffic.

  The embassy limousine swerved around the first Land Cruiser with a lurch that threw Alice to the floor. She saw a Chechen face as she went down, and was torn between apprehension and admiration. Was there nothing these guys wouldn’t try?