Vodka (36 page)

Alice was angry, not merely at the delay but at Lev. He hadn’t been at Red October when she’d gone to pick up the Mercedes. Not that she’d have known what to say to him in the cold, sober light of a winter morning, but she’d have liked to have had the option of making a tongue-tied, quasi-teenage fool of herself, that was all. Either way, she was in no mood to sit in traffic for hours.

The jam was even worse than a Boston rubberneck, when drivers slowed to a crawl to check out an accident on the other side of the road. Alice pulled out of the line, turned hard left and headed through a no-entry sign onto a side street. The road was empty and she’d almost made it to the other end, when a traffic policeman stepped smartly out from between two parked cars and twirled his baton at her like a drum majorette. “Stop!”

Her first reaction was to pretend she hadn’t seen him, but if her vision was that bad, then she shouldn’t have been anywhere near the wheel of a car in the first place. Besides, the cop would simply radio through to the next guy down the line, who’d give her twice as much hell. She pulled over, and the policeman smirked when he saw her yellow license plates; foreigners are easy shakedowns because they can usually spare more money than time. Harry counted on being stopped about once every two weeks, Bob once a week—it was a black thing, he averred. At least her plates were clean, Alice thought. The slightest splash of mud sends dollar signs whirring behind policemen’s eyes.

Alice pulled the vehicle documents from the sun visor and her personal ones from her purse, checking instinctively that she had them all: the
tekhpasport
, which gave her name and vehicle registration number; the
tekhosmotr
, which confirmed that the car was road-worthy (making it the nation’s biggest-selling work of fiction); her international driver’s license, open at the Cyrillic page; and her Russian visa and work permit. The cops always ask to see them all, and if any are absent or expired, then it’s the long walk home and a
car abandoned to the tender mercies of Muscovites. “Without documents,” the Russians like to say, “you’re shit.”

She got out of the Mercedes and walked over to the policeman. Sometimes it’s better to play the dumb foreigner and hope they get bored of trying to elicit a bribe from you, but usually it’s easier just to pay whatever they ask and go on your way. You can stand and fight, but then they confiscate your license and you have to pay the fine anyway to get it back. It simply isn’t worth the hassle—which is almost certainly why the system evolved that way to start with.

The policeman’s nose was curved like a cucumber and large enough to cleave his face in two. His features were too adjusted to meanness to be anything but ignoble. Alice looked at the name badge on his lapel: Uvarov, Grigori Eduardovich.

“This is a one-way street,” Uvarov said.

“And how many ways did you see me going?”

The joke did not register. He squatted down by the bumper. “Your headlights are faulty.”

“My headlights are fine.”

“Driver’s license.” Uvarov put out his hand and she gave him her license. His eyes traveled slowly down the page. “What is your nationality?”

“I’m a drunkard.”

“What?”

“It’s from
Casablanca.
Major Strasser asks Rick Blaine…”

“Ah,
Casablanca, Casablanca.”
He switched to bad English, more amused now. “‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’”

“Exactly.”

“A hundred bucks.” He was speaking Russian again; playtime was over.

“Shall we go and sit in your car?” It’s illegal for policemen to accept money in public. He shrugged; there was no one around to see them, why not do it here? Alice handed over five twenties; Uvarov licked his finger and counted them.

“You want some caviar?” he asked. “I have some in the car. Good price.”

“No, thank you.”

“Very good price. Very good caviar—Caspian. Not the shit from the Far East.”

Alice shook her head. Uvarov shrugged again. “Very well. A hundred dollars, for violation of traffic direction and faulty headlamps.”

“I told you, my lights are fine.”

He whirled sharply and drove his baton into the offside lamp. Serrated splinters of glass plopped onto his shoe. “You don’t buy my caviar, your headlights are definitely faulty.” He handed her a card. “This is my brother’s number. He runs a repair garage on Dolgoru-kovskaya. He’ll fix it cheaply for you. Don’t take it to those crooks at the big places, they’ll rip you off.”

Alice took the card and turned it over. On the back, she wrote down Uvarov’s name and badge number. “Grisha”—she used the diminutive deliberately and patronizingly—“I work for the IMF, and I report directly to Nikolai Valentinovich Arkin. I’m going to mention this little incident to him, and I imagine the only way I’ll ever see you again is if I happen to find myself looking for a parking space in Tomsk.”

Uvarov looked horrified. Alice walked back to the car and got in.

“My brother will do it for free,” he said. He’d gone white. Alice backed the car up a touch, mimicked his shrug—little more than a twitch of the shoulders—and pulled out from the curb in an arc wide enough to avoid both Uvarov and the puddle of glass for which he was responsible.

Alice knew that the police didn’t get paid a salary worth the name and depended on petty extortion for a living. She didn’t begrudge Uvarov the cash—she
had
been breaking the highway regulations, after all—but smashing the headlight when she wouldn’t buy his caviar had overstepped the mark. That was why Alice had taken his name. And she
was
going to tell Arkin, of course she was. She’d been in Russia long enough to know you should never make a threat you’re not prepared to carry out. More important, you should never up the ante unless you were sure who you were dealing with. It was Uvarov’s fault if he’d forgotten
that.

Sunday, January 26, 1992

S
abirzhan was on the move just after breakfast. For Irk, who’d pulled up across the road barely ten minutes before, it seemed like serendipity. He put his car in gear and followed Sabirzhan through the light Sunday traffic, taking care to keep at least one vehicle between
them; Sabirzhan was KGB, trained in countersurveillance techniques, and it wouldn’t do for him to recognize Irk in his rearview mirror. Irk had no idea where Sabirzhan was going or even whether this would yield anything useful, but he felt he was doing something positive, and that was the main thing.

Irk tracked Sabirzhan’s silver BMW as far as Khlebny Avenue, where Sabirzhan entered an apartment building just down the road from the Egyptian embassy. Irk half got out of the car and then thought better of it. There would be at least fifty apartments in that building, and there was no way he could find out which one Sabirzhan was visiting without risking exposure. So he sat and waited, a hunter in repose. The shops nearby had plastered their doors with dollar-only signs. Gorbachev should have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, Irk thought: he’d turned the ruble to shit.

Sabirzhan came out forty minutes later. Irk looked for a jaunty step or the jerkiness of anger, and saw neither. Sabirzhan gave nothing away, even when he thought he was alone. He got back into his car and the trail began again: out west to Kudrinskaya Square, north around the Garden Ring, left onto Krasina and then left again toward the zoo. Another apartment building, another visit; another wait in the car for Irk with nothing to do except note the address and speculate whom Sabirzhan might be visiting. Family members, whores, friends—Irk couldn’t tell.

Friends?
Did a man like Sabirzhan have
friends?

Irk thought about ringing Petrovka for more people to help tail Sabirzhan, in case Irk was spotted, or someone to find out who lived in the apartment buildings. He
felt in his pockets for two-kopeck pieces and found none. With inflation what it was, public phones were the only thing kopecks were used for now. Enterprising old women sold stacks of them outside the central post office; ten two-kopeck coins for thirty rubles, 150 times their face value!

Even if he’d had the change, there was little point making the call. Petrovka barely had the manpower to investigate a loaf of bread. Irk knew of detectives who were reduced to tailing suspects by bus, using phone booths rather than radios, and even charging foreign journalists to accompany them on patrol. Under current reequipment schedules, it would take the police twenty-five years to get equipment parity with any half-decent gangster. Twenty-five years! Twenty-five years from now would mark the centenary of the revolution.

The problem, Irk thought, was fundamental: Russians didn’t understand crime. Lambasting criminals as “socially dangerous,” the Soviets had equated crime with politics. As socialism was perfected, the theory went, so the social base for crime—and therefore crime itself, of course—would gradually disappear. Consequently they had seen no point in spending money on modernizing the police, training prosecutors or improving the courts. It was wholesale institutional blindness, and it was men like Irk who were suffering. How could he do his job when all he could find was a small piece here, another piece there? It was like trying to do a jigsaw by touch alone.

Irk was so lost in thought bordering on self-pity that he almost missed Sabirzhan when he came out of the apartment building on Zoologicheskaya. Gears ground
and tires squealed as he strove to keep his quarry in sight. The chase, such as it was, went on all morning and through lunch, a slowly unwinding procession of street names and building numbers: Petrovsky, Zvonarsky, Kolokolnikov, Ipatevsky. It was at the seventh destination, just as Irk was about to give this up as a waste of time—though what else would he have done with the day?—that he had some modicum of success. Sabirzhan drove down Bolshaya Ordynka, past the Convent of Martha and Mary, and was just pulling in to the curb, when Irk recalled that he had been here before. This was where German Kullam lived.

Sabirzhan got out of his car and went up the steps to the Kullams’ building. Irk slowed just enough to be sure that he’d gotten the right place, and then turned tail and headed for home.

The guy who ran the bookstall on Irk’s street was packing up when Irk arrived.

“All over for another day, Nikulsha?” Irk asked.

“All over, full stop. I’m closing.”

“Closing? Russians love to read.”

“Books are expensive, Investigator, and food even more so. Can you eat a book?”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll survive.”

Irk wished him good luck and went inside his apartment house, happy as ever to be home. He always felt uplifted the moment he walked through the front door. Perhaps he was becoming more Russian than he liked to concede; a Russian’s apartment is more than a physical living space, it’s a sanctuary from life outside, even when it’s as nondescript as Irk’s. He had few items that were
new, and even fewer that were valuable. His sofa doubled as a bed, his phone was the old rotary-dial model and his books were old and tattered. According to tradition, a host is bound to hand over any item that a visitor praises, though there was little enough danger of that happening here. Irk’s possessions were junk, and he never had anyone around.

The police file on Sabirzhan was in the drawer of Irk’s desk. It should have been at Petrovka, of course, but it was safer there. If Sabirzhan had enough connections to get himself released from questioning early, he had enough connections to make files disappear.

Irk flicked through the file—his own reports, photographs of Sabirzhan’s apartment and office, sundry correspondence—until he found the list of informers he’d copied from Sabirzhan’s records. He ran his finger down the address column—it was in alphabetical order, of course; neither Sabirzhan nor Irk would have stood for anything else—and the street names popped up for him like targets on a shooting range:

Not relatives, whores or friends. Sabirzhan had been visiting his informers. Irk felt the spearing thrill of connection, and hot on its heels the gentle anticlimax
of deflation. Sabirzhan had been visiting his informers; so what? In some ways, it would have been strange if he hadn’t been. Did it make any difference to Irk’s hunt for whoever had killed those three kids? Not that he could see. Perhaps Lev would like to know what Irk had worked out. But if Lev was worried about it, Irk thought, he could tail Sabirzhan himself.

Irk made chicken soup with boat-shaped pastries and turned on the television, flicking through the channels in an attempt to find something that wasn’t a commercial. Soviet television had shown reports of beggars scavenging for food in New York trash cans or miners in Yorkshire battling with the police; modern Russian stations carried advertisements for cash machines and dishwashers. Few viewers had fully believed the news reports; everyone wanted the commercials to be true.