Vodka (16 page)

L
ev had boasted that his door was always open to his workers and, just before the start of his shift and in a state of some agitation, German Kullam was the latest to prove the truth of this.

“Vladimir’s gone missing,” he blurted out.

Lev poured German a hundred grams, sat him down and made him recount what had happened.

German and Vladimir had argued on Sunday afternoon about Vladimir’s working at the kiosk, something German had repeatedly told him not to do. (German omitted to mention Sabirzhan’s presence; it would have raised all sorts of questions he’d rather Lev didn’t ask.) Vladimir had stormed out. That was the last his parents had seen of him.

“Your son disappears on Sunday afternoon and you wait till
now
to tell me?”

“We thought he was being a hothead.” German listened to himself and realized that he’d smeared the truth somewhat. “
I
thought he was being a hothead. Alla was worried right from the start. But this happens all the time: we fight, he leaves and doesn’t come back for a night. Sometimes even two.”

“And where does he go?”

“To friends.”

“These friends—did you call to see if Vladimir was with them?”

“With what phone calls cost nowadays?” The price of local calls had been almost negligible under communism, but telecommunications were no more exempt from rampant inflation than anything else. “Besides, it was up to him, wasn’t it? To call, to come back, I mean.
He
was in the wrong, not me. He should obey his father.”

“He’s your
son
, German.”

German looked at his hands. “I went down to the kiosk. They haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“Have you been to the police?”

“What’s the point? Those guys couldn’t find their own assholes with a mirror.”

“Too true. OK, German. You tell me everywhere you can think of where Vladimir might be, every place
you’ve ever known him to go, and I’ll have my men check them out for you.”

Endless pairs of men, wrestlers and weight lifters in dark overcoats who clutched smudgy photocopies of Vladimir’s photograph, fanned out across the city like blips on a radar sweep. They went to every one of Moscow’s eight mainline train stations, ticking them off as though they were destinations on a journey—Belarus, Riga, Kiev, Yaroslav, Leningrad, Kazan, Kursk, Pavelets—striding through air heavy with fried food and urine, ignoring the beggars who swarmed out of the pistachio gloom and tugged at the brightly colored plastic bags that families were carting home across the federation’s expanse. The searchers stood at ticket barriers in metro stations and thrust Vladimir’s picture in the faces of commuters and station workers. They went to Red Square and questioned the hustlers who tried to sell tourists fur hats for ten times their value. They went to the vast GUM department store and prowled beneath advertisements for the Canary Islands promising eleven months’ sunshine a year. They went to the Bolshoi theater, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Lenin and Dynamo stadia, and to Gorky Park, where families skated and wrapped their faces in sticky pink cotton candy.

In every place the same result: no sign of Vladimir, no sign at all.

Thursday, January 9, 1992

I
t was just past eight in the morning. A British embassy staffer was walking along Sofiyskaya, the road that ran along the north side of the drainage island, directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The wind tore her copy
of Izvestiya
from her hands and sent it whirling toward the river; when she looked over the parapet to see whether the paper was retrievable, she saw a dark shape below the ice, hidden briefly and then visible again as the sheets of newsprint skittered across the top of it.

Juku Irk, once of the Estonian capital Tallinn and now senior investigator with the Moscow prosecutor’s office, wanted to go home and start the day again. Russia really is the home of winter, he thought bitterly; the sun hauls itself wearily over the horizon after breakfast and is back in bed by teatime. The ground was gray with ice, the snow gray with dirt, the buildings gray with exposure; it was as though the bleak winter had robbed the world of its color. Beneath Irk’s feet, the mud was as hard as concrete, and the puddles might have been made of marble.

He’d had to show his card to gain access to the site. He didn’t look like an investigator. An academic, yes. His features were small and clustered together beneath a slick of back-brushed gray hair; they made a face too soft and genteel for his job.

The police had set up some sort of small crane to lift the corpse out. The job needed two policemen, three at most; there were at least a dozen, arguing, shouting, smoking and getting in each other’s way. Irk knew that scolding them would just make things worse; there was little love lost between police and prosecutors. Police caught criminals, answered to the interior minister, were uneducated and badly paid; prosecutors questioned criminals, answered to the prosecutor general, usually had degrees and were better paid, though in Moscow salary and income tend to be different beasts altogether.

They were right by the spot where Red October’s effluent pipes spewed into the river waste that was warm enough to keep the immediate vicinity from freezing over too heavily. Moscow city ordinances explicitly prohibited such discharge; Moscow city industries explicitly ignored such ordinances.

Shit day, shit job. Irk had traveled here by metro, for heaven’s sake—all the squad cars were on calls or had broken down. It wasn’t the inconvenience that bothered him, still less the implied loss of status, but the fact that on foot he couldn’t help but see things he could ignore from a car. Homeless children jostled for space on metro air vents as they tried to keep warm. Lines formed outside state shops hours before opening, to get the lower prices at the start of the day.

Irk heard a low groaning, whether mechanical or human he couldn’t tell, and the child came free from the water at last, a grappling hook in the back of his coat and his extremities streaming water as they hung limp and pathetic as though reaching for the sanctuary of his icy tomb.

Sabirzhan stood in the mortuary with his hands clasped behind his back and waited, perfectly still, for the attendant to bring out the body. Identification was often the worst part of any death; it was the final extinction of hope, and on such occasions there was nothing Irk could do other than hover impotently while someone nodded numbly and confirmed with quivering lips and red-rimmed eyes that yes, this was their loved one and yes, they were dead.

Irk was grateful to Sabirzhan for sparing Vladimir’s parents this ordeal. Sabirzhan was a KGB officer; dead bodies wouldn’t cause him the slightest discomfort.

There was no sheet over Vladimir’s body. Preserving the dead’s modesty is a Western affectation. Sabirzhan looked up and down the corpse without blinking.

“That’s Vladimir,” he said.

Was it Irk’s imagination, or did he see Sabirzhan lick his lips as he turned away?

There was only one place the squeamish found worse than a murder scene, Irk thought, and that was the autopsy room. A dead body was repellent enough when first found, whether curled under a forest tree with animals chewing at its face, leaking blood onto the cheap linoleum floor of a dingy apartment or hauled bleached and bloated out of the river as this one had been. It seemed twice as loathsome when laid out on the examination table. Clinical and chemical, pathology was supposed to sterilize and sanitize death; in Irk’s experience, the effect was exactly the opposite.

And there were no autopsies more disturbing than those like today’s, when the body in question was that of
a child. The examination table was large enough to take someone of Sharmukhamedov’s size, or even Lev’s; it dwarfed this small, hairless corpse.

“You understand, Syoma; this may not be mine at all,” Irk said.

“Mine,” of course, referred to operational responsibility rather than paternity. If Semyon Sidorouk, pathologist, decided that Vladimir Kullam, deceased, had drowned, then Irk would not investigate the case. Drownings were either suicides, who usually weighted their pockets with stones, or accidents—children overestimating their ability to swim, adults drinking too much vodka. There were plenty of easier ways to murder someone.

“My knowledge of Soviet procedure is still good, Juku.” Soviet procedure, more often than not, had involved deciding the result in advance and shepherding the analysis in that direction. “Though in these trying times, you understand I have to charge for such a service, may Lenin forgive me.” The dark skin of Sidorouk’s shaven head gleamed under the lights; he was a Chechen, one of the very few working in Moscow law enforcement. He stubbed out a cigarette in a knee-high ashtray embraced by lead nymphs.

“That’s not what I meant, Syoma.” Sidorouk had assumed that Irk wanted to bribe him to falsify results. “I need your honest appraisal. It’s just that”—Irk waved helplessly at the body—“would
you
want to investigate that?”

Sidorouk shrugged. Irk understood that the gesture was one of indifference rather than indecision. Sidorouk dealt with cadavers the way mechanics treat cars, midway between affection and exasperation, with a pitying
condescension aimed at those who did not understand. To Sidorouk, corpses were objects to be examined and dissected, stepping-stones on the path to truth. It made no difference to him whether they were young or old, thin or fat, beautiful or ugly; he showed no interest in the kind of person they might have been. In a pathologist, it was an excellent quality; in an investigator, thought Irk, it would have been disastrous.

Irk wondered how much of Sidorouk’s attitude stemmed from the way other people treated him. It wasn’t that they saw the Chechen first and the person second; they simply saw the Chechen, and that was enough to discourage further interest. As an Estonian, Irk was an outsider too, but he knew there was a difference between white outsiders and black outsiders.

“It’s the season for deaths, Juku.”

“It’s
always
the season for deaths.” Numbers were worse in times of upheaval, but upheaval was constant. In the thirties there had been collectivization, in the forties, war; liberalization in the fifties, retrenchment in the sixties; the seventies had brought stagnation, the eighties perestroika; and now this, freedom or anarchy, depending on whether your vodka glass was half full or half empty.

“Have you ever investigated a drowning before?” Sidorouk asked. Irk shook his head. “Right, first things first: let’s find out how long it’s been there.” Irk sighed inwardly. The moment Sidorouk had an audience, he treated every autopsy as an opportunity to lecture. Irk had long ago realized that it was easier simply to play along; trying to rush Sidorouk only doubled the journey.

“The body’s temperature matches that of the river. Bodies in water cool at about three degrees centigrade
per hour, twice as fast as they do in air. If the water’s warm, they reach the water temperature within five or six hours; if it’s cold, as it is now, twice that. So let’s say the cadaver’s been there twelve hours, minimum; that’s too long an immersion to run diagnostic tests for blood gravity or plasma chloride levels, even if I could get my damn machines to work.”

“That doesn’t help me, Syoma. Vladimir was definitely alive on Sunday afternoon, he was definitely dead on Wednesday evening—that’s three days unaccounted for, I need something more specific. What about that?” Irk gestured to the boy’s neck and chest, patched in greening bronze. “Does that tell you anything?”

“Post-aquatic putrefaction. That’s happened since it was pulled out of the river. Changes happen very fast once a corpse is exposed to the air. Nothing to do with how long it had been in the water.”

“It,” “the body,” “the cadaver”; Irk envied Sidorouk his facility with the dead, his ability to dehumanize them. Irk came to the mortuary as seldom as he could manage, and when he did he spent as little time there as possible; he didn’t chat to the assistants or poke around the freezer cabinets. Hundreds of people worked there, in the Ministry of Health’s criminal biological department, but Sidorouk was the only one whom Irk knew either by sight or name. It was a world Irk found alien and frightening. There was talk at Petrovka, the central police headquarters, that one of the mortuary assistants, dealing with the body of a catwalk model, had found her charms unblighted by death. Irk knew there was no correlation between how comfortable a detective felt in the autopsy room and his ability to solve a crime—some of the biggest idiots in homicide seemed practically to live
in the morgue—but still; this was an aspect of the job he felt he should be handling with more aplomb.