Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Uvarov was here because this was a political case. She had more power than him, she was higher up the food chain. Everyone kept telling her how weak the state was. True, it was weak when it came to taking on powerful organized interests, but, as if in compensation, when it came to the private citizen, it could be too strong.

  If Alice was powerful enough to get Uvarov here, she thought, surely she was powerful enough to get him out, even now. She turned to Petrenko.

  “Your honor, there’s been an error. This isn’t the policeman who stopped me.”

  Petrenko furrowed his brows. “What are you talking about?”

  “I was mistaken. Grigori is an innocent man, that’s clear.” Alice looked from Petrenko to Uvarov and back again. It was hard to tell who was more shocked; easy to see who was angrier.

  “Come to the altar,” Petrenko hissed.

  “The altar?”

  “My bench. Now.”

  Alice stepped down from the witness box and walked over to the judge’s bench. Petrenko leaned forward, she stretched upward; they could have been lovers at a window.

  “Why are you doing this?” Petrenko whispered.

  “I told you.”

  “The man is guilty. I’m not going to let him off.”

  “I’m the only witness, it’s my word against his. What can you do?”

  “Charge you with wasting police time.”

  “The police do a perfectly good job of wasting their time without my help.”

  “I can’t let him off, Mrs. Liddell.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “The judiciary has … standards.”

  “Standards?”

  Petrenko lowered his voice still further. “Quotas.”

  “I see.” Alice nodded; she understood. “And if you fill your quotas…”

  Subtly, so no one could see, Petrenko rubbed his thumb against his middle finger. “We get paid. Payment you’d be depriving me of.”

  Alice sighed. “How much?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “That’s absurd.” No, she thought, what was absurd was that she was haggling for Uvarov’s freedom. “Grisha only asked me for one hundred; I’ll give you that, to drop the case.”

  “Fine.” It was more than Petrenko had expected, she saw, but it was too late to beat him down now. He sat back in his chair and rapped his gavel.

  “The case against Uvarov, Grigori Eduardovich, is dismissed, with my personal recommendation that he be reinstated to his position in the GAI without further ado. The court will now break for lunch.” He leaned forward to Alice again. “That privatization thing seems like a great idea, you know, even after what happened the other day. I don’t suppose you’ve any spare vouchers lying around, have you?”

  76

  Saturday, March 7, 1992

  Alice was killing time. She needed food, so she stopped by a gastronom, a large, box-shaped building with a battered metal door, a mud-covered floor and walls in need of painting and washing. There were few things as time-consuming as shopping in a gastronom. First, Alice went around the store’s seven counters noting the prices of the things she wanted; next, she waited in line at a cashier’s window to buy receipts for each item; and finally she returned to the seven counters, lining up at each one in turn. When she reached the front of the line, the shop assistant tore the receipt down the middle before handing over the food; Alice remembered her schoolteachers doing this on substandard pieces of work.

  The whole process would have taken five minutes in an American supermarket; here, it took almost an hour. Alice was glad; she had nothing else to do. She wasn’t living; she was existing.

  Zhorzh came to the Kotelniki. He was unaccompanied, unarmed and seemingly unafraid for his personal safety, which made him either very brave or very foolhardy. Lev allowed himself a small smile less of triumph than of vindication before having the Chechen brought in to see him.

  “I’ve come to seek accommodation,” Zhorzh said. Karkadann was gone, Zhorzh was now head of the Chechen gangs; he’d found his voice at last.

  “Why should I make a deal?” Lev asked.

  “Because it’ll save you a certain amount of trouble, and a fair few deaths too. We wouldn’t go down without a fight. Why would you want to risk more damage to yourselves, when this way you can so easily avoid it? I’m the boss now. You’ll find me more reasonable than my predecessor. What you did to Karkadann was entirely right. You can’t deal with men like that, you can only get rid of them.”

  They hammered out the details with remarkable swiftness. The Slav alliance would pay the Chechens twenty-five million dollars for all their existing interests in Moscow. It was a fraction of what the Chechen portfolio was worth, but equally Lev could have taken the whole lot for nothing had he chosen to continue the fight. The money was his way of expressing appreciation for Zhorzh’s sensibleness in coming to the table, and Zhorzh understood it as such. There was more than enough for him to take back to Grozny and invest there.

  “You’ve got a week to leave Moscow,” Lev said, “or the deal’s off.”

  77

  Sunday, March 8, 1992

  Karkadann’s death still gnawed at Irk. He wanted to be alone; away from Moscow, away from other people, and away, if he could have managed it, from himself.

  The sewer streams were much deeper than usual. It was a few moments before he realized that this was peak time, when flows ran at three times the average and six times the night levels. Moreover, it had started to rain up above, which meant still faster streams as the surface water scuttled down the drains, burbling around Irk’s knees as it hunted the outflows that would take it into the deeper foul sewers.

  Irk could no longer see his breath, so he knew it was warmer down there than up above. But the chill seemed to have entered him from within, because he felt cold no matter how far he walked, and like a pilgrim he walked for hours. He came across a deserted laboratory whose floor was strewn with crystals; something about the skewed positioning of an ancient Bakelite telephone and the haphazard piles of primitive respiration masks suggested that the room had been abandoned in a hurry, though whether it had been emptied five minutes or five decades ago, he couldn’t tell. Later, in the distance, he heard echoes of Gregorian singing. Approaching cautiously, he saw a group dressed in monks’ robes carrying torches around a stone altar. Suddenly he slipped on a patch of slime and fell heavily against the side of the tunnel. By the time he’d picked himself up, the worshipers had vanished.

  Irk broke ground in Red Square, where endless currents of people seemed to materialize from the gloaming, swarming toward and around him. He felt as though he were still at the bottom of the sea, cut off from the surface, never to return. The square was crisscrossed with sons and mothers, husbands and wives—it was International Women’s Day. In Soviet times, they’d shown televised vacuum cleaner races; now all the women were carrying flowers. The most impressive bouquets belonged to the wives or girlfriends of traffic cops, who’d spent the previous days in an orgy of imagined traffic violations in order to clock up the necessary fifty dollars for the best bunches on the block. Irk himself bought flowers for Sveta and Galya, who’d invited him over for dinner that night. Thirty bucks for two sorry-looking sprays—he had a good mind to bring the flower seller in for extortion.

  International Women’s Day is the one time of the year when men are supposed to take on all the wives’ chores. It rarely works that way. If there are children, they demand that the mother cooks them a proper breakfast; if not, the wife is so alarmed by the crashing and strange smells from the kitchen that she gets up to forestall a catastrophe. Many men deliberately make a hash of everything in order to be exempted from such duties until the same time next year—not for nothing do Russian women refer to their men as “the other child.”

  Irk was aware of all this, but with the sterile knowledge of someone who’s heard about it secondhand and never experienced it for himself. Perhaps that was a good thing, he thought.


  78

  Monday, March 9, 1992

  Borzov knew that he’d need all his political savvy if he was to make it through the week unscathed. The Sixth Congress of People’s Deputies, a five-day extraordinary session of parliament, was about to begin. Everything bad—rising prices, thousands more dropping below the poverty line—was being laid at Borzov’s door. Everything good—the end of the child killings, peace between Slav and Chechen gangs, even the failure of a widely unpopular privatization auction—was being credited to Lev.

  Even if he’d felt like looking upbeat, it was impossible to maintain such an expression when squinting into howling winds and squalls of snow. It was one of those mornings when winter seemed determined to resume its sway with a last desperate onslaught. Halfway to a hurricane, devoid of either warmth or sunshine, the conditions seemed to reflect the reception Borzov was likely to get. Seven months before, he’d stood in front of the White House and hailed it as a bastion of freedom and democracy; now that same building was crammed with his most implacable foes.

  Summer is the reformers’ season; winter is the time for ruthless hardliners. On days when ice sits inches thick and light starts fading at lunchtime, the gloomy Cassandras have things all their own way: no scenario of chaos, degeneration and collapse seems too pessimistic to believe.

  Over a thousand deputies from all corners of the federation had arrived for the congress. Many of the provincial representatives regarded these biannual assemblies as the highlight of their year: all expenses paid, free tickets to the Bolshoi, and a chance to spend some small part of the public revenue on luxury goods for the wife and—by way of balance for their spousal consideration—the finest girls Moscow had to offer. The deputies’ new suits and shiny shoes betrayed their excitement. They stood in clusters, talking, laughing and shouting across the room at each other like children waiting for the teacher to call them to order.

  Lev’s was one of several vory among the deputies. For the most part, the vory got themselves elected not to debate the future of the nation, but because the position of deputy afforded the holder immunity from prosecution. Police investigators moaned that they could find more crime kingpins in the parliamentary chamber than in the cells at Butyurka.

  At nine o’clock sharp, Arkin stepped confidently up to the rostrum. The harsh light picked out the features that cartoonists exaggerated and emphasized when they lampooned him: the full lips, the heavy-lidded eyes, the upturned nose, and most of all the unruly mop of black hair. He looked with barely concealed distaste at the representatives, knowing they’d give him a hard time, no matter what he said. He cleared his throat and began:

  “In the most trying of circumstances, I’m delighted to say that the reform program is still on course. If we’re allowed to continue, I’m confident that inflation will start to decrease in the third quarter of the year. The austerity measures have been hard for everyone—”

  The deputies howled him down. Arkin first tried to wait them out and then to outshout them, but neither tactic worked. He glanced at Borzov for support and saw only resigned dread, as if all the president’s worst fears were being realized.

  A forest of pink order papers shot up and one by one the deputies rose to lambast the government and harangue Arkin. Through it all, Arkin stuck to his guns, rebuking those who would stand in the way of progress.

  Lunch was called at one o’clock precisely, and for ninety minutes the deputies’ feeding frenzy became literal rather than metaphorical. Jeering the government was hungry work, and they piled into the cafeteria in search of mushroom juliennes, meat-stuffed pancakes, plum cakes and cream puffs. All these goodies, but no one there to apportion them because the cafeteria assistants were on their lunch break. So the deputies grabbed and scoffed and scooped and snaffled, trying to get their hands on the delicacies before they ran out.

  After lunch Lev was first up, to wild applause. Many in the chamber saw him as a heroic standard-bearer, with the gnarled credibility of time in the gulag.

  “I don’t mourn the old system,” Lev said. “We were treated like dogs, our only existence that of shadows, our only right that to die. In the gulags I served time with historians, mathematicians, astronomers, literary critics, geographers, experts on world painting, linguists with a knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Celtic dialects. I knew a man who was ten minutes late for work, twice—and for this he was sentenced to five years in Vorkuta. And how did these people spend their days? As manual laborers, or as trusties in clerical jobs, or in the culture and education sections, or simply wasting away, unable to find any practical application for their vast knowledge—knowledge that would often have been of value not only to Russia but to the whole world.

  “That’s why I supported our president and prime minister in their efforts to help us build a new Russia. I thought, well, it won’t be perfect, and it may very well be unworkable, but it’ll surely be better than what came before. I believed they were good men trying to do good things. No more.”

  They’d been prepared to let Alice die; he’d never, never forgive them for that.

  He looked at Arkin. “Kolya, you’ve forgotten your history. You would do well to remember what happened to the False Dmitri, the sixteenth-century czar who idolized all things Western—his subjects murdered him and fired his remains from a cannon in Red Square, as a reminder that Russia shouldn’t go too far to the west. You know what else you are, Kolya? You’re a saltdick. You’ve got one foot in Russia and the other in America, so your cock must be hanging down into the Bering Sea.”

  The deputies stamped their feet in approval. Lev held his arm up to milk the applause, before cutting it horizontally through the air: enough, he wanted to get on. Dwarfing the lectern, he turned to face Borzov. “As for you, Anatoly Nikolayevich, we invested so much hope in you, so much hope. In electing you, Russia saw not only a politician ready to demolish the state structure, but an individual who was trying to leave behind his old habits and prejudices in favor of democratic values. You were first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional Party committee, first secretary of the Moscow city Party committee, a candidate member of the Politburo, a member of the central committee of the CPSU—and then, at the age of sixty-five, oplya! You decided you were a democrat, and the whole world believed you. If you stick a wine label onto a bottle of vodka, it doesn’t affect the contents. The only way to bring about real change is to pour the vodka out and pour the wine in. If democracy is to exist in Russia, Anatoly Nikolayevich, it will exist not because of you but in spite of you.”

  It was a bravura performance, and the deputies were enthralled. Lev now turned to address them.

  “I believe neither Anatoly Nikolayevich nor Nikolai Valentinovich is fit to hold his position. If I had my wish, they’d both be out on their ears. But the people have suffered enough uncertainty. They’d not thank us for plunging them into yet more by unseating their president. A prime minister, however, is a different matter. He can be replaced in this chamber, today, here and now. One vote is all that’s needed. I propose that we take a vote of no confidence in Nikolai Valentinovich.”

  There’d been no preamble, no buildup, no rising percussion tide to herald this move, but Arkin felt the shock ripple through him almost before Lev had said the words. Borzov, his clay pipe dangling in limp surprise from the corner of his mouth, shot panicked glances between Arkin and Lev.

  The chamber erupted. There were cheers from some quarters, but consternation and bewilderment in others.

  Arkin knew how vulnerable he was. For all those who regarded him as Russia’s great white hope, there were many more who hated everything he stood for. Knowing that parliament was a massive political spectacle, a great circus where only the most dramatic and breathtaking twists and turns can carry the day, he faced Lev.

  “If such a vote is even taken,” Arkin said, “no matter what the result, I’ll walk out of this building and out of the government. Only a market economy can generate the wealth and dynamism that will renew Rus
sia; only a market economy will enable this country to be a major world power. Vote me out today, and you’ll harm Russia far more than you’ll harm me.”

  Arkin had just about managed to have himself heard over the hubbub that had followed Lev’s proposal; now the noise in the auditorium was climbing somewhere toward that of a liftoff at the Baikonur cosmodrome. Borzov, as haughty as a popular tribune, glowered in the corner at this affront to his authority. As a rule, he kept himself aloof from such battles rather than risk destroying his popular mystique. But he knew this was no time to be timid. Whoever is shouting the loudest, gesticulating the most wildly, snarling the most ferociously, will win the day. The only way to subdue Lev’s fire was to counterattack. He clambered to his feet.

  “To sack a prime minister because you feel like it is mockery, not democracy. The chief will not be dictated to by a bunch of savages demanding human sacrifices.”

  The deputies were shouting at Borzov, and they weren’t going to let up. He was right; they were savages, and the sacrifice they wanted was Arkin. No, said Borzov; they could control the appointment of certain ministers, the junior ones, but he wouldn’t give them the prime minister. They howled and raged still more. He tried barter: offering to concede control of key portfolios, such as the security and finance ministries. A man on the run, doling out compromises and effectively dismissing his own officials to buy time. He was panicked, and they knew it.

  At ten to six, the deputies voted to sack Arkin by a majority of 254.

  79

  Tuesday, March 10, 1992

  When Borzov got up to speak on the second morning of the plenum, packs of deputies tried to howl him down. It was Lev who stayed them: he wanted to savor the president’s humiliation. As the deputies quieted, Borzov nodded his thanks to Lev.