Vodka

by Boris Starling

  The first Land Cruiser darted hard to the right and smacked the limousine broadside. The next two took out the Range Rover, bumping it to and fro, never allowing it a path back to its calf, and finally sending it skidding across the carriageway and into the barriers. The fourth moved up behind the limousine. Double up, separate and destroy; Admiral Nelson would have been proud.

  All four orcas moved in on the calf.

  Boxed in on every side, the limousine could do nothing but glide to a halt. Men out on the road, guns leveled, urgent guttural cries that mean the same in every tongue in the world. The chauffeur turned to Alice. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “We’ll get you out of this.”

  “If you think that, my friend, you must have drunk more than me.”

  The Chechens were motioning for Alice to come out or they’d shoot the lock and then her too. She’d no idea what they had in mind, but as long as it involved her being alive, it was better than sitting in the back of the limousine and waiting for a bullet through the temple.

  She opened the door herself and stepped out. Her grace under pressure took the Chechens by surprise; a beat passed before the first man moved forward to grab her. It was strange, but she felt little fear, only curiosity. That was what a couple of vodkas first thing did for you.

  Alice was thrown into the back of one of the Land Cruisers. As the vehicle pitched and yawed, she was blindfolded and trussed by Chechens reeking of gasoline and cigarettes. She tried to remember which way they turned and how long they’d been driving, but soon gave up. There was nothing she could do now. She knew that at some level she must be in shock, and that the enormity of what had happened would eventually register, but for now she surrendered herself to bemused acceptance.

  Hard on the brakes, a wide turn and hard on the brakes again. Doors open, men moving. Alice was dragged into the open and then back inside again, the cold a brief, burning brush against her skin. They hurried her through dank passages so fast that her feet touched the ground only intermittently, skating as a heron does when it lands on water. Into a room, down onto a chair. Even through the rag across her eyes, she could tell there was more light than before. She hoped for sunshine, but when they took off the blindfold, she saw that the glare was from a video camera held by a man with a white streak in his hair.

  Still Alice felt a curious detachment. It was as if her brain was a building split into several separate apartments; each apartment with its own inhabitants, each inhabitant doing different things.

  A man came in. His face was all angles and lines. Alice saw the way everyone else deferred to this man, and she knew who it was. Karkadann, her lover’s archenemy. And now he had what Lev prized most.

  Karkadann didn’t greet Alice, or even look in her direction, but the intensity of his hauntedness singed her. She thought of Repin’s famous painting of Ivan the Terrible, wide-eyed in desperate remorse as he cradles the son he’s just killed; the painting Repin himself said was inspired by the search for an exit from the unbearable tragism in history.

  Karkadann motioned Zhorzh to focus on Alice, before personally checking the viewfinder to ensure he was happy with the shot. Then he stepped away and began to speak.

  “This is a communiqué for Anatoly Nikolayevich Borzov, president of the Russian Federation. We have in our possession the American woman Alice Liddell, and we will release her on two conditions: that the privatization auction scheduled for Monday is canceled, and that all the holdings of the Red October distillery are transferred to the communal group that represents Chechen interests in Moscow and of which I am head. You have until midday tomorrow to accede to these demands, or Mrs. Liddell will be killed.”

  That afternoon Borzov summoned the players to his office: Arkin, Lev and the American ambassador, Walter Knight. Vodka for everyone, even Knight—two years in Moscow had eroded his resistance to drinking at all hours. He’d been here both for the August coup and the killings in Vilnius and Riga, but this was the first crisis to feature an American citizen center stage, and his face was held rigid with tension.

  “Our position is very simple,” Borzov said. “Karkadann’s demands are outrageous and nonnegotiable. This is an act of terrorism. We cannot and will not accede to it.”

  “That’s your public position?” Knight asked.

  “As opposed to what?”

  “As opposed to your private position.” Borzov made a moue: go on. “Publicly, the US government and its major Western counterparts are in full agreement. But we must also consider the impact this will have on foreign investment in your country. If Mrs. Liddell does not…” He swallowed, picking his words carefully. “If the worst occurs, the murder of an IMF adviser will hardly send out promising signals to institutions who are hoping to do business here.”

  “That’s not our most pressing dilemma right now,” Arkin said.

  “It’s one you should be keeping in mind, though. I need hardly tell you what Mrs. Liddell’s, er, husband”—he stared straight ahead, determined not to catch Lev’s eye—“and friends think of all this.” Knight had just come from the apartment at Patriarch’s Ponds, where Lewis had said little. “They want her out safely, whatever it takes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they took the first flight back home after that.”

  “What else do you expect them to think? We can’t take their feelings into account. Anyway, it won’t come to that. We’re already investigating other methods of resolving the situation.”

  “More hostages get killed in shoot-outs than at any other time,” Knight said.

  “But we’d be negligent not to plan for armed intervention. And in the meantime, we’ll keep Karkadann talking, get him to extend the deadline while we negotiate. Don’t forget, his hostage is his only bargaining chip. If he kills her, he’s got nothing left.”

  Lev made a noise deep in his throat; more precisely, a noise was heard, and it was hard to tell whether it had been voluntary, or in what quantities it mixed assent and distress. “Anatoly Nikolayevich is right,” he said. “Doing what Karkadann demands—that’s out of the question. There’s not a single worker at Red October who would want to be run by the Chechens. How could I give in to him without betraying all of them? How could I give in to him, full stop?”

  “Exactly,” Arkin said. “It’s not like she’s your wife, is it?”

  Irk was called to the Kremlin and shown the videotape. Homicide, not kidnapping, was his specialty, but in Russia one all too often leads to the other. Besides, what was this if not a variation on the child killings? The protagonists were the same, as were their aims; they were upping the ante, that was all. One had to give the Chechens credit, Irk thought, for their persistence if nothing else.

  “How did you get this?” he asked.

  “Someone called the Kremlin switchboard and told them to look under a certain bench in Gorky Park,” Arkin said. “We sent two of the presidential bodyguard. They found the cassette taped to the bench’s underside.”

  “No way you can communicate with the kidnappers?”

  “Not yet.”

  Irk watched the video all the way through, three times. He was looking and listening for anything that might give him an idea of where the recording had been made: a view through a window to a recognizable landmark, sounds from outside. Airplanes might mean they were near a flight path, traffic a main road, machinery an industrial plant. There were no signs, at least not to the naked eye and ear, and in Moscow a man’s own senses were just about all any law enforcement official had. Sophisticated technical equipment could have isolated noises or enhanced images, but even with the Kremlin’s full support Irk might as well have asked for a night with Miss World.

  Borzov went on television, broadcasting from the presidential office with the full panoply of state power, the tricolor and double-headed eagle, arrayed behind him.

  “The president will not be blackmailed into calling off a program that is in the nation’s best interests,” he said. “How can we negotiate when we’re in the right?”
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  The Chechens had stripped Alice naked and put her in a room not much larger than the average toilet stall. Underground, she thought, to judge from the damp and the absence of windows. They’d given her no food—no hardship, given that fear had clenched her stomach tight—and locked the door on her. She had felt around the walls to make sure that none of them were still in there with her.

  Her mind was a thresher, trying to separate the wheat of hope from the chaff of doubt. In favor of survival: these were professional gangsters, so they wouldn’t be panicked into anything rash. Against survival: she knew the odds against Borzov agreeing to their demands. What’s more, her kidnappers had made no attempt to disguise themselves, and so they’d have no compunction in killing her if it suited. Best to think about that later.

  They’d taken her clothes in order to humiliate her, make her afraid and defenseless. She could live with that, though. At least while they weren’t there to cast sideways glances at her body. If they came for her, she’d try and foul herself to revolt them into stopping—if her imminent menstruation hadn’t done that already, she thought wryly.

  She felt guilt that she was putting everybody she loved through all this. She should have tried to escape at the beginning. The dignity she had shown stepping from the limousine was all very well, but look where it had gotten her. People depended on her and she’d let them all down. What about the auction? That was for the whole country, its present and future. Did anything matter more than that?

  In the darkness, the vodka wore off. The gutturals of her captors beyond the door sounded to her like wolves tearing at a carcass. Alice dug her nails into her thighs to remind herself that she was alive, and tried not to think of the veneration with which Russians regard martyrs.

  67

  Thursday, February 27, 1992

  Karkadann himself came in with Alice’s breakfast. “I need the john,” she said. “I’ve been holding it in all night.”

  He looked her up and down with carnal curiosity and shook his head. “After you’ve eaten.”

  “I can’t wait that long.”

  “You’ll have to.”

  Alice knew that antagonism would beget antagonism. So far she had done whatever they’d told her to, and had been neither too craven nor too defiant. They had every reason to hate her; she didn’t want to give them any more. But she had her pride too.

  “If you’re going to treat me like an animal,” she said, “I’ll behave like one.”

  Alice pushed herself into a squat. Karkadann stared at her, as if daring her to debase herself.

  It should have been difficult, relaxing enough to urinate naked in front of a stranger, but Alice was so desperate that she had barely resigned herself to it when the stream came. Sweet relief, warm as it splashed off the floor and against her ankles. Karkadann said nothing until she’d finished, then he put his hand on her stomach and pushed her back into the puddle she’d made.

  “Eat your breakfast,” he said, offering her a gray pancake and some stringy broth that was several consistency grades short of soup. It was the first food she’d seen since being snatched yesterday, but the sight of it made her wish he hadn’t bothered. “You got any vodka?” she asked.

  Karkadann tipped his head slightly to look at her, as if he were examining some exotic creature in the zoo. “Are you being serious?”

  “If you’re going to kill me,” she said, “I’d rather be drunk when it happens.”

  “Who says we’re going to kill you?”

  “You did, yesterday, on camera.”

  “We’ve extended the deadline.”

  “They’re negotiating?”

  “They’re stalling. None of them want to give in to me, Lev least of all.” Karkadann smirked when he saw the flutter of grief on Alice’s face. “Let me ask you something. If you get out of here alive, will you stay in Moscow?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “I love the city, that’s why.”

  “Then you have no taste. Moscow is hideous. You should come to the Caucasus.”

  “Is that an invitation?” She felt goonish and awkward, trying to get him to like her.

  “Snow on the mountaintops, year round. Sunlight that changes color every hour. Air so pure you could drink it. Roses and pomegranates growing in the valleys, and you can’t move for vineyards. We sit around and eat meat with flat bread and herbs and spices, and we wash it all down with brandy. You turn a corner, and there’s a spring, there’s a fountain, there’s a courtyard. Ancient feuds settled with knives, horses that whisk you off into the night. It’s life.”

  He left her with a copy of Pravda. Alice wondered what they’d have done for headlines over the past week without her. This was another multipage splash. She read an interview with Lewis—”the cuckold,” as the photo caption had him—in which he said he prayed for her safe release. And on an inside page was Lev, glowering at the camera from behind his praetorian guard. Alice looked at his face until the pixels blurred.

  More hours alone. Alice tried to fill her mind and then to empty it; neither worked. In her head, around and around, Karkadann’s words: “None of them want to give in to me, Lev least of all.”

  Alice knew that Lev loved her—she’d heard it in his voice at the Vek when he’d thought she’d been hurt—but she knew also of his pride in Red October and his hatred for Karkadann. If he sacrificed everything for her, he would surely resent her for being the cause. So he wouldn’t give them up, he wouldn’t surrender to Karkadann’s demands. But if he wouldn’t—the man who loved her—then who would? What if Karkadann was right? After all, she wasn’t free yet, was she?

  Doubt was corrosive, as was boredom. She was too used to rushing around, filling every last moment with activity. The auction was five days away. Arkin had told her she was indispensable. There were still a million and one things to do. How could she help when she was stuck here?

  She tried exercising. Push-ups, sit-ups, squat thrusts, all wound down after a few minutes because she was drained of energy. She thought of Lev and began to fantasize, but even in an empty room she felt self-conscious about touching herself. There might be secret peepholes. There was no vodka.

  After what felt like a few hours, they came and took her back to the room where she’d been filmed yesterday. Karkadann and Zhorzh were there again. Zhorzh was carrying a bed of needles and nails set in wax, which he placed on the floor behind Alice.

  “This is called the silver chair,” said Karkadann. “It’s an old Red Army punishment. They used it on our people during the deportations. You have to squat over it until your thigh muscles give way. The lactic acid’s bad enough, but the pain of the nails when you fall is many times worse.”

  The humanity Alice had seen in him earlier was gone, as though erased by a passing cloud. She inhaled sharply before she could stop herself, and he saw her fear. The wax bed was flecked with blood; she was clearly not its first victim.

  “At least give me some clothes,” she said.

  “Feet flat on the floor, knees bent no more than ninety degrees.” He nodded at her to begin.

  “And if I refuse?” Alice said.

  “It won’t be worth your while to refuse.”

  “If assholes could fly,” she said, “this place would be an airport.”

  Alice closed her eyes for a moment and then assumed the position. Karkadann knelt down to check that her legs didn’t straighten a degree more than was permitted, and then stood again in apparent satisfaction. Behind its unblinking eye, the camera’s red light was on. Her suffering wasn’t just for here and now. In a few hours’ time, she would relive it for four men in the Kremlin.

  The pain started a few minutes later. Alice gritted her mind rather than her teeth against it; she didn’t want her face betraying anything to Karkadann. The strain ran across the front of her legs and down the sides, stabbing and testing, retreating from one area before reappearing suddenly and violently in another.

  Karkadann stood
with his arms folded and smiled mirthlessly. She looked at him with all the contempt she could muster. The very force of her disdain seemed to knock her slightly backward, and for a moment she thought she was going to fall, but she recovered her balance and redoubled her efforts to ignore the pain.

  “Those points are awfully sharp,” Karkadann said.

  Alice didn’t look down. She’d seen them already, and they were indeed sharp. Some were also jagged, others brown with rust or dried blood. She wondered what kind of infections lurked on those menacing tips.

  The tape spooled.

  When it came, the end was quick. Alice felt her legs going a fraction before they collapsed, and all the willpower in the world couldn’t have kept her upright a moment longer.

  The silver chair had made a hell of a mess. There were six or seven puncture wounds where Alice had landed, descending deep into the flesh. In addition there were tears and rips where she’d squirmed in agony, where she’d tried to push herself off and found that her numbed legs simply wouldn’t respond, leaving her spread-eagle in front of them as though she were the cheapest kind of whore. The skin around these wounds glistened wetly, invitingly red, and when the camera lingered on them it felt to Alice like every kind of violation.

  Another five o’clock meeting in the Kremlin; another round of vodkas; another tape, which they watched in silence, at first uncomfortable and then downright embarrassed when it came to the final shots of Alice’s backside, the close-up almost voyeuristic in its intimacy. Lev got up and walked out, his throat twitching with the effort of keeping his temper under control. It was several minutes before he returned.

  “Negotiations are continuing,” Arkin said. “So far, Karkadann hasn’t shifted his position at all.”

  “And if he hasn’t by midday tomorrow?” Lev asked.