Vodka (19 page)

“To unity, Father!”

Friday, January 10, 1992

W
hat Timofei had said wasn’t enough to get Irk off the case, not nearly. He went to see German Kullam, a visit he knew should have been his primary
concern right from the outset. The man of the family is always the prime suspect in Russian homicide cases. This is a matter not of cynicism but of fact.

The Kullams lived next to a convent founded by a grand duchess who had been thrown down a mine shaft by the Bolsheviks. The relics of the revolution were everywhere, Irk thought, watching impotently as Alla sobbed into her husband’s shoulder. German cradled his wife awkwardly and half shrugged, half smiled over her head at Irk. He seemed embarrassed at his wife’s display of grief.

Alla eventually disentangled herself from German and looked at Irk through wide, red-rimmed eyes. “Would you like some soup?” she asked. “I made it myself.”

He nodded numbly, more to avoid causing offense than because he was hungry, and avoided German’s gaze as Alla busied herself in the kitchen. She came back with a bowl on a tray depicting the battle of Borodino. It was cold summer soup: beets, cucumber, sour cream and
egg
, the yolk floating in a sea of lilac. A soup for lazy days in the woods with friends and vodka; not a soup for the man who came to your house after your child was dead.

Irk made all the right noises about how sorry he was, this was a real tragedy, but he had to ask some questions and he hoped they understood. Yes, Investigator, yes, of course, anything he needed. So he asked and Alla answered: what they did for a living, when they’d last seen Vladimir and in what circumstances, when they’d first become worried about his safety. He didn’t ask them why they hadn’t gone to the police sooner; they all knew the answer to that one.

They’d gone over the same ground with Sabirzhan
yesterday, Alla said. Irk was annoyed and surprised in equal measure; annoyed that Sabirzhan seemed to be everywhere before him, surprised that the KGB man should have bothered questioning the Kullams when his own suspicions so clearly lay elsewhere. Perhaps he was covering his bases.

Alla was both bright and pretty enough not to be cleaning offices. Maybe she’d been offered other jobs, secretarial posts, in return for sleeping with the boss, and she’d refused. Good for her, Irk thought. German was easier to read: life savings going in the transition to capitalism, vodka, a job that paid little, vodka, emasculated because his wife was forced to work to make ends meet, vodka, insulted because his son was offering him money, vodka, going stir crazy on these long winter nights, vodka, arguments with a willful son who was not quite a teenager, vodka …

German Kullam had the look of a drinker. His nose was an archipelago of broken blood vessels, his eyes swiveled in viscous pools. Irk was unsurprised. Most murderers were drunks first and killers second, more so now than ever before. Many had assumed, at least implicitly, that people would drink less following the demise of the Soviet Union. A democratic society would surely provide more means of escapism than alcohol, and all of them constructive—books, a free press, foreign travel, consumer goods. Fine, when you could afford such things, but for now there was still only one escape when times were hard: half a liter of temporary paradise. There was talk of a magic water source in the Vologda region that could cure drunkenness. The source was at a disused well that had not been blocked properly; wives were taking their husbands there by the
trailerload. If they could somehow arrange a shuttle to and from Moscow, Irk thought, he could put his feet up for good.

“If you’d prefer,” Irk said to German, “we could do this down at Petrovka.”

“Whatever for?”

It was the first time Irk had heard him speak, he realized. German’s voice was high and reedy; no wonder he’d let his wife do the talking. Irk wanted to shake him and say, Come on, you know how it is, you know the score, this is the way things are done around here, and we have to play along whether we like it or not.

German looked as though he would burst into tears at any moment. Irk could forgive him that, whether he was innocent or guilty. For obvious reasons if innocent, and if guilty because the Russian prison system could have given Satan nightmares.

Irk filled in German’s details on a badly photocopied arrest form. He could recite the categories in his sleep: family name, given name, patronymic, address, date of birth, place of birth, age, sex, nationality, profession, marital status. Irk was on autopilot to the point where he was halfway into his first question about the night Vladimir had disappeared before he realized what German had said.

“Divorced?” German nodded. “Alla’s your second wife?” Irk glanced at the date of birth again: April 12, 1961, the day Gagarin had become a starman. That made German thirty. If Vladimir was born twelve years ago; German must have married young and divorced early.

German shook his head. “My first. Only Alla.”

Irk shouldn’t have been surprised. Unable to afford to move, couples often had no choice but to live together long after their divorce, sometimes continuing to share the same room and even the same bed. If either German or Alla resented their circumstances, they hadn’t shown it, at least not in front of Irk.

“You get used to it, Investigator,” German said. “Just make do with what you’ve got. I don’t give anyone any problems. You want to see troublemakers, go and talk to the three alkies who steal food from the kitchen and invite bums up there for all-night vodka parties. When that happens, the rest of us can’t sleep.”

The government was talking about building cheap one-bedroom apartments to replace these beehives of communal living, but with more than a quarter of a million families to be rehoused, the program would take years to complete.

“The walls are so thin that you can hear what people are saying even when they’re talking quietly,” German continued. “It’s so depressing. No one can do anything without everyone else discussing it. We’re meant to live as a big family, but it doesn’t work like that, even when we try. Last Christmas we tried to put aside our differences and pulled pieces of furniture into the corridor to make a long banquet table, but the ceiling was leaking too badly. We all ended up sitting in our rooms and sulking.”

Twenty-five people in one house, with one kitchen and one bathroom between them. The Bolshevik planners had seen this as an innovation that would forge bonds between residents, an exciting experiment in
socialist living. Innovation, experiment—words for scientists, Irk thought, not for human beings.

Sabirzhan was in Irk’s office again.

“Perhaps I should give you all my work and go home for the day,” Irk said.

“Are you making progress with German Kullam?”

“Didn’t you hear what Denis Denisovich said?”

Sabirzhan held up his hands. “We got off on the wrong foot, you and I, and for that I apologize. The truth is this: I think German Kullam is guilty.”

“He doesn’t look like a Chechen to me. Nor some kind of political kingmaker.”

“I know, I know. But I spoke to him yesterday…”

“They told me.”

“… and he wasn’t convincing, let’s put it that way. So I got to thinking; what if it is as simple as that? Take out the Chechens and the politics. Take out our national desire to complicate everything. What if German
did kill
his son, and all the rest is coincidence?”

Irk considered this for a moment. “A domestic incident, could have happened anywhere … Less embarrassing for Red October, that’s for sure.”

Sabirzhan smiled and clapped his hands. “I knew you’d see, Juku.”

“What about Lev?”

“I thought it would be better presented to him as a fait accompli.”

“He doesn’t know you’re here?”

“He has enough things to worry about.”

“I’m not going to stitch German up, I want you to know that. If we charge him, it will be because he’s guilty, not because you want him to be guilty.”

Sabirzhan looked offended. “Investigator, please. We’re not in the dark ages now.”

Irk asked German about Vladimir until he ran out of questions. What happened the night he had disappeared, who his friends were, who his teachers were, where his stamping grounds were—everything he could think of. Some of the questions he’d already asked back at the apartment, others he repeated three or four times here.

German’s diatribe on communal living was, in retrospect, proving something of a soliloquy. His answers had the consistency and creativity of a metronome: yes, no, don’t know. At one point Irk even asked if Vladimir had really been his son, more to shock German into a reaction than anything else. German had said yes without surprise or offense, the same way he’d say yes to someone who asked him whether he’d like bread with his soup.

“Why don’t you just drop it all on the table?” Irk said. He needed to sound angrier, more exasperated. If he couldn’t convince himself, there was no way German would fall for it. “Go through your memory like your mother searched your head for lice. You’ll feel a lot better. Come on, German. You’re like a virgin after seven abortions. All this posing the innocent doesn’t wash with me. I know details can get hazy in the emotion of the moment. I’ll remind you of what happened, and you let me know when you remember, yes? After all, I’m only telling you things you already know.”

Sabirzhan and Denisov were chatting away like old friends when Irk walked in. Yesterday’s animosity was gone. It was amazing, Irk thought sardonically, what communality of purpose could do for human relations. He sat down without looking at either of them.

“He didn’t do it,” Irk said. “German Kullam didn’t kill his son.”

“Just because he didn’t confess?” Denisov snorted. “Of course he did it. You only have to look at him to know that.”

Sabirzhan was nodding slowly, as though Irk would soon see the truth so evident to other, wiser men. They’re in this together, Irk realized. Before Sabirzhan had visited Irk, he must have been to see Denisov and impressed on him their mutual interest in convicting German. This was how it was in Russia; for Irk, truth and justice were too often mutually exclusive commodities.

“He didn’t do it.” Irk realized he was beginning to sound like German himself: didn’t do it, didn’t do it. “The boy was dead when he went in the water. German doesn’t live too far from the river, but he hasn’t got a car.”

“So?”

“So how could he get Vladimir’s body down to the Moscow without anyone seeing?”

“Maybe they went for a walk on the bank and he bopped him on the head there. We hold Kullam until he stops playing silly buggers. I want him here, isolated and shitting himself.” Denisov peered at him. “You didn’t offer him a lawyer, did you?”

“No. But he’s entitled to one.”

“What, because the devil’s spawn said so? Don’t make me laugh.” The previous year Gorbachev had extended a defendant’s right to a lawyer to the moment
he was arrested rather than from the moment he was charged. Denisov had flatly refused to recognize this; as far as he was concerned, anything that had come from Gorbachev was an edict of Beelzebub, and should therefore be disobeyed as a moral imperative. Denisov ran the prosecutor’s office on strictly Soviet lines: suspects could be held without charge for three days, and for another week after that if the prosecutor believed they had enough evidence to prepare a case. When these ten days were up, they had either to charge the suspect or release him.

“That’s what the law says.”

“The law doesn’t know what it says from one day to the next.”

“Besides, it’s not as if these draconian conditions help. Our clear-up rate is still woeful, Denis Denisovich, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Just imagine how much worse it would be without them.”

Denisov took over the questioning himself. He drew the line at inviting Sabirzhan to help.

“We’ve spoken to your wife, German. She says you’ve been drinking more and more lately, and when you get drunk you get angry, and when you get angry you take it out on her too. But I suppose you think that’s the lot of a Moscow wife—cook up, shut up, get beaten up. Don’t you?”