Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “Fedosia, after tomorrow you can do what you like.”

  “Tomorrow will be too late; I need to go today. I can offer my sister to you as a replacement.”

  “Without any training? Don’t be absurd.”

  “She’s very good, I promise.”

  “What’s so urgent?”

  “There’s a job in Kazakstan that’s just come up.”

  “Kazakstan? What the hell could you want in Kazakstan?”

  “Satellite launching.” Fedosia smiled shyly. “My background’s in aeronautical engineering.”

  Alice almost laughed. Fedosia was a rocket scientist, quite literally, but here she was helping out at the auction, a job Alice had thought any young Muscovite would have regarded as the pinnacle of their fledgling career. Alice wondered how many of the hundred and fifty volunteers were doing this simply because they were down on their luck. The Russians call it dequalification, when you’re forced to take jobs way below your station. In Moscow, it’s commonplace. She could afford to lose one person, Alice thought. “All right,” she said. “Go. Go to Kazakstan. Good luck.”

  There were a couple of protesters already in place, reserving their spots like shoppers in the winter sales. They waved a banner at Alice as she went past—Yankee, go home!—but she hardly noticed, because she could see trouble up ahead. Harry was arguing with a security guard. Alice quickened her step.

  “What’s the problem?” Alice asked, stepping between them.

  “This guy won’t let me through,” Harry said. “I can’t understand what he’s saying, but he’s giving me the shits.” He looked past Alice’s shoulder and said to the guard, in English: “Listen, buddy, this lady’s in charge here, I’m with her, and so I go where I like. Capisce?”

  He pushed through the doorway and immediately seemed to drop, as though he’d just fallen down a small step. The guard made a face: I told you so.

  “What’s happened?” Alice said.

  Harry pulled first one foot and then the other clear of the sludge. They came out with extravagant three-syllable sucking sounds, like oxen tramping through mud. His trouser ankles and shoes were covered in mud, wet cement and paint. He had walked onto a building site, which the security guard had been trying to direct him away from.

  Alice was heading through another door, the one that led to the main body of the exhibition hall. Studiously looking anywhere but at the security guard, Harry squelched after her. “I thought the guy was just being a typical Russian jerk, trying to tell me what to do,” he said.

  “No, Harry.” Alice was torn between being angry and trying not to laugh. “You were being a typical American asshole, not believing what he told you simply because he was Russian.”

  Harry was getting fatter by the week. Alice could see it in the way his jowls lapped at his collar, in the stretch of his shirt over his belt. She’d have thought that all that sex he was boasting about would be keeping him thin. His tan—no one had a tan in a Moscow winter—was suffused with orange, and seemed accentuated at the points on his temples where skin met hair. Definitely a tanning parlor job, thought Alice. Harry looked one notch up from a sex tourist in Thailand. She wondered how much he knew about her ordeal, about the video. Was the look on his face sympathetic or salacious? Either way, she didn’t want to know. If she was going to get through today, and tomorrow, and the rest of her life, she was going to have to close the door on the whole sorry episode.

  “How are you?” he asked. “After all the … I mean…”

  “Do me a favor, Harry. You don’t ask, and I won’t tell.”

  Bob was waiting for them by the main desk. “How are you, Alice?”

  “Ask Harry.”

  “Have you seen Lewis? He’s been worried sick about you.”

  “We’ve got an auction to run here.”

  The auction was to take place in Pavilion II, Hall 3: thirty-two-thousand square feet that was currently filled with tricolors, posters, tables and people. Alice ignored the hush that fell over the room when she entered. She stepped up to the podium, steadied herself against the lectern provided and began bombarding the staff with questions, to make sure they were on their toes.

  Where did the applications go? To the sorters, who’d rank them according to the type of bid and then file them.

  What about the tally forms? To the chief counters, for final checking before being sent to computer operators in the processing unit.

  She was a passerby without a voucher; how did they deal with that?

  She filled out specimen forms but left them deliberately incomplete to see whether the tellers noticed; she left out an address, an identity number, perhaps the number of vouchers bid or whether the bid was passive or active, even the applicant’s name.

  How many lines would there be outside? Two: one for individuals, the other for corporate entities, and on no account should the two be confused.

  What identity did bidders need? Individuals required passports; corporate entities needed their charter, notarized copies of statutory documents, declarations of any state-owned interest in them, and of course the representative’s authorization to sign.

  She shouted and screamed to check that security was alert.

  Eighteen hours to go, and the staff was still getting things wrong. “If you’re not sure,” Alice yelled, “then do something very un-Russian: ask!”

  The rehearsal lasted until the evening. Alice felt as though she were studying for exams, and the point was approaching when she simply had to stop worrying and trust that everything would work out, if not perfectly, then more or less all right. She was going to cut a ribbon and open the auction at nine o’clock sharp the next morning—Borzov and Arkin, still evidently hedging their bets, had both found pressing reasons why they couldn’t do the honors—and after that, she didn’t know whether to expect ten people or ten thousand.

  She had no strength left. If she hadn’t had the lectern to cling to for support, she would have slumped into an exhausted heap. There was nothing she could do now but hope and pray—oh, and quell her nerves with the best part of a half-liter.

  Lev was out on Mafia business and didn’t get back till late.

  “How was it?” he asked.

  “Pretty average.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly, I’m shitting myself.”

  “It’ll be all right,” he said, kissing the crown of her head. “It’ll be all right.”

  “You’re more confident than I am.”

  He flicked through the channels on the TV and picked absently at some pickled herrings.

  “You seem distracted,” she said.

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me what you’re not telling me.”

  He smiled playfully. “There are many things I don’t tell you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like many things. I don’t even know half of them myself. You’re American, Alice; I’m Russian. You’ve one soul, I’ve two—a public one and a private one.”

  “You think that’s exclusive to Russians? You should spend some time on Wall Street. On the trading floors, no one dares show sympathy, weakness, vulnerability, the slightest need for human kindness.” Every day there had brought a test of one kind or another. She recalled how colleagues had left hard-core pornography on her desk to see how she’d react, and been chastened when she’d glanced at the pictures and told the nearest guy that his sister was looking well.

  Lev’s expression showed that he didn’t think much of the comparison. He leaned over and sang softly in Alice’s ear:

  “What’s your shell made out of, Mr. Tortoise?

  I said, and looked him in the eye.

  Just from the lessons fear has taught us,

  Were the words of his reply.

  In Russia’s land we find our way through circles of deceit.

  The smiling mask cannot conceal your neighbor’s cloven feet.”

>   The crevasses of his face were deep; scars and pits marking a latent thuggish belligerence born of necessity and laid down over the years, layer after layer, carapace against a hostile world. Whatever Lev chose to show her would be merely what he wanted to, the tip of the iceberg. From time to time the iceberg would rotate, bringing different parts to the surface, but it was too big for each part to receive its time in the sun. There’d always be concealed depths, areas forever clandestine.

  71

  Monday, March 2, 1992

  Alice had hoped for good weather—sunshine would surely bring more people out—but she was disappointed from the moment she opened the curtains. It was one of those mornings when even starting the day requires an unusual, almost heroic effort. A mist of fine, drizzling rain enveloped the whole city, swallowing up every ray of light, every gleam of color, and transforming everything into one smoky, leaden, indistinguishable mass. It was daylight, and yet it seemed as though it were still night.

  On days like these, Moscow seemed not a city on the rise but one mired in the depths of communist uniformity. People walked with their heads down, hurrying away from their past rather than toward their future. Although Alice was used to vast areas being little more than construction sites, it suddenly seemed that the builders were merely papering over cracks rather than laying proper foundations. When she looked across the skyline, she could hardly see a single crane. She couldn’t believe that there was a capital city in the world, certainly in Europe and certainly of a large country, where less was actually being built.

  She had arranged to meet Harry and Bob for breakfast in the Ukrainia Hotel, across the river from the exhibition hall. The lobby was packed and noisy when she arrived, with policemen shouting at gangsters, gangsters shouting at hotel staff, hotel staff shouting at policemen. Just about the only people who weren’t shouting were Harry, who looked as if he was about to throw up, and four shell-suited men lying on the floor, dead. Alice hurried over to Harry.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

  He looked at her vaguely before collecting himself and giving her a nonchalant, this-kind-of-thing-happens-to-me-every-day smile. “Shoot-out. I got here just as it was starting.” Now that he had an audience, he was warming quickly to his story. “Someone shouted, another guy pushed someone else, a fourth guy pulled out his gun and fired—and then everyone was diving for cover. It was like the Alamo. Wouldn’t want to be the cleaners who have to redd this place up.”

  It was just past seven in the morning. The men, no doubt low-ranking Mafiosi, had almost certainly been drinking all night. Alice looked at the nearest corpse, slumped against the wall like a drunk. His face was fat and doughy, reeking of piggish stupidity even in death. Moscow was crawling with men like this, too brainless by half for any responsible authority to allow them within reach of a bottle of vodka, let alone a submachine gun.

  Alice saw a knoll of humid ectoplasm sliding slowly down the wall behind the man’s head, and felt a twinge of bashful guilt; she hadn’t meant that he was literally brainless.

  “You wanna go somewhere else for breakfast?” she asked.

  “No, no. I’m fine.” Harry glanced again at the wet flecks of gray. “I might go easy on the scrambled eggs, though.”

  Bob was coming through the main door. Alice hurried over, intercepted him before he saw too much of the carnage, and steered him firmly toward the dining room. The maître d’ wished them good morning and ushered them to a table. There was nothing in his manner to suggest that anything out of the ordinary had happened—he had the Russian ability to absorb the uncommon.

  Harry went around the buffet tables as though he were participating in one of those supermarket sweep competitions where contestants are given a minute to cram a cart with as many items as they could. If it was on display, it went on his tray: buckwheat porridge; egg fritters with cottage cheese; fried eggs; and of course a mountain of blinis. No wonder he was putting on weight.

  Alice took a small plateful and picked at no more than half of it. She could hardly eat for worrying, and it wasn’t even about whether the auction would be a success or not. Her mind was swimming with trivialities: personnel badges, generator back-up, food and drink—tea and coffee, that was, no vodka!—and spares, spares, spares.

  “How’re you feeling?” she asked Bob.

  He swallowed nervously. “Like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

  Alice’s first thought, confused but unworried, was that she’d walked into the wrong hall. The place was empty: no tables, no chairs, no dais for the supervisors. She clicked her tongue in irritation and was turning to leave when she saw two things more or less simultaneously: the sign on the door, which told her that she was indeed in Pavilion II, Hall 3; and a couple of privatization posters left on the far wall as if to taunt her.

  Suddenly very, very cold, Alice felt as though she were falling through space.

  She was due to cut the ribbon in just under an hour’s time, and the hall to which thousands of Muscovites would hopefully be flocking—there were at least a hundred outside already, she’d seen the line on her way in—was as barren as the Siberian tundra. This place had been thrumming with activity only yesterday, when she’d conducted the dress rehearsal. Since then, sometime between about seven o’clock the previous evening, when she’d left, and now, everything had been—what? Stolen? Moved out? Burned?

  Bob was looking as though he’d seen Stalin’s ghost.

  “It’s almost eight o’clock. Where is everyone?” said Harry, and Alice was about to round on him for asking such an irrelevant question—where was everything, was surely the more pressing matter?—when she realized what he meant. The supervisors at least were supposed to have been there by now, and everyone else should be turning up in the next few minutes, but the three of them were the only people in the hall.

  “Pinch me, Harry,” Alice said, her voice wavering. “Hit me, bite me, do something to wake me up. This is all a bad dream, right?”

  He shook his head. “Not unless I’m having exactly the same one.”

  She found the security guard who’d tried to stop Harry from tramping through the building site the day before. “My hall, it’s empty,” she snapped. “Where is everything? What the hell’s going on?”

  The security guard looked surprised. “The auction’s been moved.”

  “Moved?”

  “Of course.” He nodded in Harry’s direction. “He said you were in charge.”

  “Just tell me what happened,” Alice said, spacing the words carefully as though cadence could make everything all right.

  “A lot of blokes came along last night and took everything out.”

  “Didn’t you ask them what they were doing? Where they were going?”

  “They weren’t the kind of people who appreciate questions, if you know what I mean.”

  “And you thought I had something to do with this?”

  He shrugged. “Of course. I read the papers, you know. He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?”

  Alice called the numbers she thought Lev might answer—penthouse and distillery—and several that he probably wouldn’t, such as the Vek, on the grounds that she’d been there with him and it was the longest of long shots that he might be there now.

  Wherever he was, he wasn’t answering. She left Harry and Bob at Krasnaya Presnya, along with a growing number of bewildered journalists and camera crews, and, wiping panicked tears from her face, set off to track Lev down herself.

  She’d barely turned the corner when she had to pull over and throw up into the gutter, dry-retching long after her stomach had emptied itself. It wasn’t just that this, the culmination of her work—right now, in fact, just about all she had to show for it—had disintegrated into fiasco; it was the fact that Lev was the one who’d pulled the rug from under her.

  Lev, who’d said more times than she could remember how much he loved her.

  Lev, who’d told her only last night
that everything would be all right, when he’d just come back from putting a bomb under the auction.

  Lev, who’d told her to go to breakfast with Harry and Bob because he had things to do, and that he’d see her in the exhibition hall.

  Lev, who’d lied, lied, lied.

  Alice went to Red October first, because it was closest. She ran past a couple of security guards and up the stairs, two at a time, to the executive floor. It was as empty as the Marie Celeste. When she went to the Kotelniki penthouse, there was no one there either.

  Lev was the size of a small mountain, and he’d vanished into thin air.

  There wasn’t quite as much pandemonium outside the exhibition hall as there was in Alice’s brain, but it was close. It was now half an hour since the auction had been scheduled to start, and Harry and Bob were trying to explain to journalists and would-be bidders alike what was happening. Alice slammed her car to a halt and ran up to them.

  “What? What’s going on?” she said.

  “What does it look like?” said Harry. “The place is empty, and not a single staff member has turned up.”

  Alice looked out at the agitated crowd: policemen trying not to laugh, patrons who were telling each other how they’d always known this capitalism thing was too good to be true and journalists almost visibly licking their lips at how juicy this story was.

  “Look on the bright side,” Harry added. “At least the day can’t get any worse.”

  At ten o’clock, Alice made a public statement. She’d decided that the best way to play it was simply to be honest. Muscovites are so used to being fed lies that they laugh any “we’re-having-technical-problems” euphemisms all the way to Irkutsk. She confessed everything: that her staff, facilities and equipment were nowhere to be seen, and that, barring the kind of miracle unknown in a nation officially godless until last year, the auction of the Red October distillery was not going to take place today. She was jeered and whistled at for this, and of course for being foreign, though pockets of the crowd also applauded her for her candor, which pleased her.