Vodka (24 page)

“Do you mean what I think you mean?” he asked eventually.

“It’s just a few questions.”

“You have absolutely no idea, do you?”

“No, Tengiz,” Irk said.
“You
have absolutely no idea.”

“Lev will have your balls for cuff links when he finds out.”

Irk shrugged, and Sabirzhan knew: Lev was letting this happen.

No one has faith in the Russian justice system, least of all someone who knows its workings from the inside. Sabirzhan should have shouted and screamed. That was what Irk would have expected an innocent man to do. That was what he would have expected a
Russian
to do. Sabirzhan’s anger, ice-cold rather than red-hot, was dangerously alien.

A squad car came to pick them up. Irk sat in the back with Sabirzhan and started counting the pimples on the back of the driver’s neck. He gave up when he reached fifty.

“I’ve heard of you,” Sabirzhan said. “Irk the incorruptible. Just my luck. Ninety-nine percent of cops are on the take…”

“I’m an
investigator
, not a policeman,” said Irk.

“… and I get the one who isn’t.”

Irk bit down on his anger. In return for risking their lives the police were paid a pittance. Nowadays they didn’t even qualify for special housing, even though many officers were from beyond the city limits and desperate to get their hands on a Moscow residence permit. So was it any wonder ninety-nine percent were on the take? Only those with no alternative would take on such a thankless job with such low prestige, and the low quality of recruits in turn perpetuated the poor reputation of the force. Even the name by which they were known belied a reluctance to take the job seriously: in the Soviet Union the police had been the
militsia
, as if they were just a group of civilians working together. Only bourgeois societies had police, because only bourgeois societies had crime.

Irk could afford to be principled—he was a senior investigator in the prosecutor’s service, paid just about enough to live comfortably—and having integrity was healthy for his conscience. Maybe it was the Estonian in him, he conceded, the civilized half-Westerner feeling morally superior to the primal Russian; but, if so, if he walked the straight and narrow purely to feel pleased with himself, did that vanity negate all the good?

An hour in Sabirzhan’s company had left Irk feeling clammy. He put him in a cell and went back to his office, where he found a message from Sidorouk. The pathologist had asked around, and found nothing. Irk wondered how hard Sidorouk had really tried.

There was a large map of Moscow on the wall opposite the window. Irk looked at it, and saw something he’d never noticed before. As the river meandered through the city, it seemed to trace the profile of Mother Russia herself, the great lady in repose. The locks of her hair flowed from the statue of Yuri Gagarin up to the site proposed for a monument to Peter the Great; the crown of her head abutted the Kremlin; her nose swelled beneath the Novospasskiy; her mouth pressed up against the Simonov; her bosom stretched beyond Andropovka Prospekt and down to Kolomenskoe; while her legs reached languidly out toward the east.

Irk wondered when Mother Russia would next cough up one of her children.

Tuesday, January 14, 1992

T
he meeting was scheduled to start at ten. Alice had hammered down the arrow on that, confirming it with Galina on three separate occasions. As it was, Alice arrived to find that Lev had been delayed.

“Annoying, huh?” Galina said.

“Not all men are annoying,” Alice replied. “Some are dead.”

Lev called her into his office just after eleven. She was alone, which not only surprised him but, he was loath to note, pleased him too. He made her wait for another hour while he went through his correspondence line by line. She’d known that he made every major decision at Red October; she hadn’t expected him to make every minor one too. He refused to let even the most trivial of letters, payments, invoices or contracts be issued without both his signature and the imprint of the company stamp, of which—surprise, surprise—he possessed the only model.

Alice didn’t let it get to her. She stood by the external window and looked across the river toward the eruption of onion domes that marked St. Basil’s, Russia’s most famous symbol. Ivan the Terrible had built the cathedral with money taken from Kazan in 1552, and St. Basil’s eight domes symbolize the eight assaults Ivan’s troops had been forced to make before Kazan had finally yielded. Even by Russian standards, Ivan’s troops had been bloodthirsty, and yet from the carnage of their conquest had come this impossibly exquisite building, its cupolas rich in texture and shade. It was no wonder that, when the cathedral was complete, Ivan had blinded the architect to prevent him from building anything so beautiful ever again.

“Where’s Sabirzhan?” she asked when he finally turned his attention to her.

“Sorting out some figures.”

“That’s more important than meeting with the privatizers?”

“I don’t see your colleagues here either, Mrs. Liddell.”

She smiled: touché. “Harry and Bob are up to their eyes in background work. Besides, it’s not as if any of them got the chance to say much last time.”

He took it as it was meant, a peace offering, and shook her hand. “We start from a clean slate today, yes?” he said. “Let bygones be bygones.”

“Well, if we argue again, you might find that I bite.”

He laughed. “I’ll take your word for it. Let’s get things off on the right foot, then.”

He sat her down and gave her two vodkas to taste. Russkaya had been filtered through birch-tree charcoal and quartz sand, and tasted of cinnamon. Alice preferred the Altai Siberian. It was sweet, rich and oily, smoothed with glycerine and lingering long on her palate, without a background burn worth mentioning.

Her skin was Elizabethan pale, almost translucent; he could see the veins beneath the surface, the blood pulsing through them, as though there was nothing to mar her beauty within or without.

He showed her how not to get drunk. “Smell the vodka first, take a sip and hold it in your mouth for a couple of moments. Then you swallow, and right after that you eat something. After every toast, a chaser; it’s the beauty without which the beast is incomplete. Getting drunk is all well and good, but it’s not the entirety of what vodka’s about. If you equate vodka purely with inebriation, it’s like saying love’s the same as venereal disease.”

Alice was unaccountably happy that Charming Lev had turned up, as opposed to Angry Lev. It wasn’t just that she wanted things to run smoothly. Accustomed to dealing with adversaries she could manipulate, she had been
caught off guard by Lev. She had allowed him to goad her into losing control. If this privatization were to happen in nine weeks, she needed to maintain control. And since browbeating clearly wasn’t going to work, charm seemed her best ploy.

For insurance, she’d brought a pin with her, which she held in her left hand. If she felt herself getting angry, she would jab it into her palm as a reminder to calm down. Not that she needed it to start with. Gently, gradually, as though she were massaging a lover, Alice worked on convincing Lev that privatization was in his best interests.

As the subject of the inaugural auction, she said, Red October would secure better terms than those enterprises that came into the process later. Lev’s foresight would also free him from the influence of apparatchiks, and give him access to Western capital, which in turn would help attract a strategic foreign investor. Society was changing, she reiterated; better to move with it and help shape it than stand, Canute-like, on the shore and be swept away.

“I despise the rationality and harshness of the new market economy,” he said.

“Why? Russia’s a harsh country.”

“Yes, but it’s not rational.”

They went at it all morning, Alice and Lev, Beauty and the Beast; Alice’s prettiness as Russian as her attitudes were alien, Lev a towering presence that she found unnervingly unreadable. He’d spent decades in the gulag, and now he was one of the most powerful men in Russia. She’d never felt so aware of and intrigued by someone. How long would she have to spend with
him, she wondered, before she could fathom what made him tick?

“What I propose is that Red October has minority insider ownership,” Alice said. When Lev tried to interrupt, she held up her hand, determined to assert herself. “Hear me out, please. Twenty-five percent of shares go free to employees and managers. Another ten percent will be sold at discount. Then there’s a final five percent that top managers can buy if they want. The remaining three fifths are sold to the public at auction.”

“That’s totally unacceptable. It doesn’t give the workers enough rights—not even close.”

“What you mean,” said Alice, getting angry despite herself, “is that it doesn’t ensure that you retain control of this place.” She jabbed the pin into her palm and imagined the ire draining out around it, as though her rage were a boil that could be lanced.

Lev shot Alice a look that took her a second to read. It was not that she was wrong in her assessment of his reasoning; rather, he was disappointed in her vulgarity at enunciating a truth that was tacitly and best left unspoken. She felt gauche, teenage.

“I’ll make you a counteroffer,” he said. “Insider control—management and workers combined—is set at seventy-five percent. The remaining twenty-five percent is offered for sale to the public, with a cap on how much any one individual or institution can own. Oh—and no foreign involvement.” He tried to make it sound like an afterthought, but Alice knew better.

“What?”
He hadn’t demurred when she’d talked about Western capital earlier. To Alice, it was a no-brainer; American and European firms would bring expertise, cash, technology and access to world supply
chains, and would make bidding more open and pricing more important.

“You heard me perfectly well, Mrs. Liddell. Bidding must be restricted to Russians only.”

“Why? Foreigners are already involved in the process.”

“As advisers, yes; not as participants. In Poland, you planned national investment funds to manage and have equities in privatized enterprises, didn’t you? And who was to manage these funds? Foreign firms. Foreign firms who’d gain control of Polish assets, who’d strip such assets for short-term profits, who’d sell off Polish firms at bargain-basement prices or shut them down altogether. You must be a fool if you think I’m going to allow you to repeat that here.”

It was ironic, Alice thought; it had been that very privatization program in Poland that had first introduced her to this kind of xenophobic paranoia. British Sugar and Peat Marwick had been accused of trying to destroy local rivals. The Polish accountants and lawyers who had helped Alice had been denounced as traitors; some had even received death threats.

“That’s a total lie,” said Alice. “No one intends to take your country over or wreck your economy. Quite the opposite—Western business could be a great help to you, if you’d only let it.”

“If I wanted help, Mrs. Liddell, don’t you think I’d have asked for it?”