Vodka (23 page)

“Pretty girl.” It was the taller of the Chechens who spoke to Galina. “You should think about doing some work for us.” He used
ty
, the form of address usually reserved for intimates—unless the intention is to patronize or insult, as it was here.

Irk and Svetlana reached Rodion and Galina, and stopped. Passersby swirled around the contretemps, shying involuntarily as they clocked the presence of the Chechens before pretending that they simply weren’t there. Chechens engender fear wherever they go, and they know it; it’s their bubbleskin, their force field. But Galina seemed not in the least afraid. She tossed her head as if in revulsion at a bad smell.

“I know my friends, and I’m sure I don’t know you, so if you want an answer, it’s
vy
not
ty.”

“It won’t be much,” the Chechen said. “Passing on some of the information that comes across your desk, that’s all.”

“Leave us alone, will you?” Rodion said.

Both Chechens looked down at Rodion as though he were an impertinent child. The derision in their stares
flushed Irk with anger—worse, he thought, with shame and a vicarious pity.

“Did the cripple say something?” the smaller Chechen said.

“I didn’t hear,” replied his colleague.

“I’m a war veteran, not a cripple,” Rodion snapped. “And I can still remember how to fight, so why don’t you just let us past before this gets ugly?”

“You want to see ugly, my friend, look in a mirror.”

“I’m an investigator with the prosecutor’s office,” said Irk, stepping between them, badge in hand. “I suggest that you get going, unless you want a trip to Petrovka.”

The Chechens glanced at each other. They were small fry, Irk saw; their boss wouldn’t have sent anybody valuable to intimidate a secretary on a Moscow street. “Go on,” Irk said. “Fuck off out of here.”

“Think about it,” the smaller Chechen said to Galina. “We’ll contact you again.” They melted into the crowd and were gone.

“My boys!” Svetlana clapped her hands and hugged Irk and Rodion close to her. “My brave soldiers, protecting their women!”

Galina’s emerald eyes were shot through with rage. “How
dare
they?” she said. “On the street, in full view of everyone, with all of you here? Who the hell do they think they
are?
”

Rodion was silent. The Chechens’ jibes had stung him, and he bristled with all the hostility Irk had seen last night. Irk realized now that Rodion’s belligerence had not been aimed at him, the interloper, but at the world in general.

As for Irk’s own part in the incident, well, it had all happened so quickly, but he couldn’t help thinking
that he, an officer of the law, should have spoken up a lot sooner.

They took the metro in from Elektrozavodskaya. Irk watched subtly and not without admiration as Rodion negotiated stairs, escalators and crowded carriages; not a ramp in sight to make his progress easier.

“Wouldn’t prosthetic limbs be easier?” Irk said.

“Forget it. They’re produced like every other Soviet product—to fulfill a quota, not to meet the needs of those who use them. All the ones I tried left me with dreadful sores or lesions.”

Galina was going all the way to the distillery. Svetlana and Rodion changed trains at Kurskaya to take the Circle Line up to Prospekt Mira. Irk decided to stay with Galina. “I’ve got plenty of reasons to see Lev,” he said. “Your name won’t come into this.”

She looked hard at him. Penned in by commuters on all sides and by the fur hat on her head, she seemed to Irk extraordinarily alluring, a spirit of the steppe jammed into a cage that could hardly hold her.

Red October was in turmoil when they arrived. Normally, the workers ambled, walked or bustled around the distillery, depending how near the end of the month it was and how far behind their schedules they were. Today, however, a crowd several hundred strong had gathered beyond the filtration columns. They were shouting and gesturing at Sabirzhan, who was standing on a staircase and making calming motions with his hands.

“I tell you, the situation is in hand.” Sabirzhan was having to shout to make himself heard over the hubbub.
“I am personally investigating these regrettable incidents, and the perpetrator will be brought to justice in the near future.”

Once a KGB agent, Irk thought, always a KGB agent.

“What if there’s another one, Tengiz Lavrentiyich?” someone shouted. “And one after that?”

“These are difficult times, I know. But”—Sabirzhan puffed as he searched for the right words—“your patience is a great help.”

“What kind of person are you looking for?” It was German Kullam speaking, up on tiptoe and looking twice the size of the wreck Irk remembered from Petrovka. “Someone like you yourself, perhaps, Tengiz Lavrentiyich?”

Sabirzhan recoiled as if he’d been pushed. Irk understood that the gasp that ran through the crowd was not one of disbelief at German’s accusation, but of recognition that he’d dared say the unthinkable. Emboldened by their approval, German hurried on. “A man who enjoys torturing and killing—doesn’t that sound like you? How do we
know
it wasn’t you, eh? You should be on trial anyway, Tengiz Lavrentiyich, you and your friends at the Lubyanka.”

A mass reckoning for the KGB was something many people—Irk included—favored, but Irk knew it would never happen, if only on the grounds of practicality. Millions of people would be involved. Perhaps this was Red October’s substitute.

“That’s enough!” Sabirzhan was hopping around in agitation. “Back to your workstations, all of you!”

“We want an answer, Tengiz Lavrentiyich!” The crowd scented blood; they followed where German had
dared to tread. “Come on, defend yourself against these accusations!”

“That
is
enough.” Lev’s voice rumbled like cannon fire. As he descended the staircase, the sheer force of his presence impelled Sabirzhan to step aside. “The murders of Vladimir Kullam and Raisa Rustanova have struck a blow at the heart of the Red October family. I share your anger, German, and I feel the loss of those two children as keenly as if they were my own son and daughter. I give you my word that I will hunt down their murderer as if I were their father. I will move heaven and earth to find him, no matter where he is hiding, and I will make him pay. I know how difficult this is, especially for those of you whose children attend the school, but I ask you to put your faith in me. I have just this minute returned from Prospekt Mira, and the children are well guarded. Whatever fiend is committing these crimes, the discord I see here will only serve his purpose better. If you want to talk to me in private, my door is always open; otherwise I ask you respectfully to get on with your work. Thank you.”

The crowd began to drift away. Sabirzhan sneered at their retreating heads. His salmon face was clammy with sweat, and he was breathing hard. “You see that?” he said. “The sooner you have me back on the case, the better.”

Lev turned to him. “A word of advice for the next time you’re tempted to act the peacemaker, Tengiz: don’t.”

Irk sat in the canteen with German Kullam; a cup of strong tea each, and a severe dose of nerves for German. The canteen was three-quarters empty, but
those who were there were only feigning nonchalance. Word had gotten around that Irk was an investigator. German looked about him as though working out which way to bolt.

“This isn’t very comfortable for me,” he said.

“I can see that, German.”

“Couldn’t we do this somewhere more private?”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Sabirzhan?”

“What about him?”

“You tell me.”

“How do you know there’s anything to tell?”

“That’s not what I asked. Vladimir was one of Sabirzhan’s favorites, wasn’t he?”

“You’re not going to get me on this, Investigator.”

“Wasn’t he?”

German cast more panicked glances toward the four corners of the room. “Vova didn’t ask to be. We didn’t ask for him to be. Sabirzhan just … he just
decided.
He took a liking to Vova, and that was that. It’s not like we could have stopped it.”

“Are you afraid of Sabirzhan?” Irk smiled; softer, flatter. “It didn’t seem so back there.”

“No, I’m not afraid of him. Not … not when there’s lots of people around, or even when it’s just me and him, face-to-face, sometimes. But if I’d
told you …
” German looked down at his tea. “What would have happened then? You’d have ignored me, or told me not to try and pin the blame on other people. He’s one of yours, Investigator.”

“He’s
not
one of mine. He’s KGB. I’m from the prosecutor’s office.”

“Different names, same thing. Doesn’t matter what you call yourselves, it all ends up the same.”

“If you’d told me, I’d have questioned him—which is exactly what I’m going to do now.”

“OK, Investigator, so you question him—then what? He’s got friends in high places, hasn’t he? He’ll know I talked to you—there’s probably someone reporting back to him right now—and then he’ll really make my life a misery.”

“You signed a confession rather than land him in the shit? I can’t believe this.”

“Then you can’t understand how things work around here. Nothing personal, Investigator, but I wish I’d never met you.”

“What more evidence do you need?” Lev asked. He ticked off the points on his fingers. “I tell you what Karkadann said. Vladimir was working at a kiosk run by the 21st Century. A couple of those black bastards threatened my secretary this morning on her way to work—and
still you
don’t seem to take me seriously, Investigator.”

“If I could find a Chechen connection, I would. If only so I could hand this case over to Yerofeyev and be finished with it. I want to get rid of it as much as you want to get rid of Karkadann. But all that’s circumstantial at best. It’s certainly not enough for me to start poking around the Chechen gangs. All that’s going to do is piss them off and piss Yerofeyev off, and being pissed off is the only thing that makes Yerofeyev even more objectionable than he is normally.”

“Then I’ll have to deal with the Chechens myself.”

“You will anyway.” Irk saw Lev shrug slightly, conceding the truth. “The main reason I’m not convinced it’s the Chechens is that another suspect has come to light; someone much closer to home.”

Rule five of the
vory
code was that members of the Communist Party were to be despised—and never, Lev thought, had this been more true than with Sabirzhan. Oh, Sabirzhan seemed utterly innocuous at first glance, even given the ancestral suspicions of the brotherhood. His gray cardigan, pince-nez and big head reminded Lev of an owl, and his outward manner could be gently and abstractly benign—the amiable professor. Sabirzhan could speak better Russian than anybody else Lev knew, even though he was a Georgian. When he wanted to, he could wind his phrases through subsections, qualifications and subtleties, all hinting at the coldly precise brain behind.

But as Lev had gotten to know him, he realized that Sabirzhan was a man with no friends, only informers. Not for nothing had his fellow KGB agents christened him Dripping Poison.

They had an accommodation, of course. It dated back five years, to the
vory
summit at Murmansk where it had been decided that Lev could take over Red October. The 21st Century had had the distribution and transportation networks necessary to keep the distillery running; KGB involvement was the government’s price for handing over control—essential if they were to keep tabs on their investment. At the time, Lev and Sabirzhan had found use for each other. Since then, however, power had shifted Lev’s way. His empire was expanding; Sabirzhan’s influence was on the wane. The one thing they still had in common was Red October and their interest in its successful privatization. Because
Sabirzhan’s natural instinct was to reject the free market, Lev had offered him a generous stake in the auction. Lev knew that every man had his price, and that in the final analysis greed would always beat ideology. He also remembered the words of Don Corleone: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

But there was a limit. There was always a limit.

Lev thought of Sharmukhamedov strapped to the table and hung upside down by his hands. He thought of the glee with which Sabirzhan had gone about the torture. He thought of how Sabirzhan had chosen to spend New Year—the most historic New Year of their lives—inflicting pain on another man. He thought of all the times he’d gone over to Prospekt Mira and found Sabirzhan there. Lev thought of all this, and remembered something Sabirzhan had once said: Suspicions can only be proved, never disproved, because a suspicious person will not be satisfied with anything but affirmation.

Irk arrived at Sabirzhan’s office to find it empty. He resisted the temptation to sit in Sabirzhan’s chair and act as though he owned the place; instead, he stood by the window and let the gentle cadence of the distillery floor far below soothe him. There was little urgency in people’s movements, and Irk thought he understood why. The Russian worker wants a place where he can talk about fishing, his wife, the hash the government’s making of things, whatever—above all, a place where he’ll be
understood.
He wants not only his colleagues but also his boss to accept him in this way. He wants work to feel like home; he needs time on the job to chat, time off the job for special occasions. The atmosphere he seeks is one of serenity.

Sabirzhan returned a few minutes later, shaking water from his hands. “First I come to you, now you repay the compliment,” he said. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“About what?” Sabirzhan’s tone was lightly curious; Irk could detect no defensiveness.

“About Vladimir Kullam and Raisa Rustanova.”

Sabirzhan waved an expansive hand. “Anything. Anything I can do to help.”

“I’d rather do it at Petrovka.”

Sabirzhan was suddenly very quiet. His eyes simply weren’t those of a human being, Irk thought; they seemed to be made of some yellowish resin.