Vodka (40 page)

The parking went down five levels. At the deepest, covering the entire expanse of one wall, was a corrugated iron door that could be rolled back to allow
deliveries to the subterranean vodka depository beyond. It was by this door that the Chechens congregated. Two of them attached plastic explosives to nine points on the door—the four corners, the midpoints of each side and slap in the middle, making three neat rows of three. The men worked fast to keep the others from freezing; several minutes standing around in that kind of cold felt an eternity, and men flexed their toes and fingers to keep the circulation going.

When the explosives were set and primed, the Chechens retreated to the other side of the parking area and ducked behind parked vehicles as the fuses were detonated. The shock waves bounced around the walls, and the noise could have woken the dead, but this was Moscow—no one in their right mind would investigate an explosion in the middle of the night. There was smoke and tangled metal, a rich smell of burning, and the Chechens were through what had a few seconds before been a door. They fanned out in a line, squinting through the smoke for the slightest movement, but when the air cleared they saw nothing but crates of vodka stacked floor to ceiling: the booty they’d come for in the first place.

They brought three vans right up to the entrance and arranged themselves into teams: two in each van to stack, three to carry the crates to them. The containers were heavy, and the men were soon sweating despite the cold. Four Chechens stood guard outside; the others slung their carbines across their backs or put them down on the floor to make the crate carrying easier.

The vans were half full when Lev’s men emerged from behind what was left of the screen of vodka crates. They came silently and in a rush. They didn’t call for
surrender or line the intruders up against the wall before tying them up; they simply shot them where they stood. Nothing clinical, no double taps to the head and simple takedowns. This was carnage, machine-gun rounds like stitching, the Chechens torn apart by hollowed-out bullets tipped with wax and filled with mercury explosive. Holes the size of dinner plates blossomed in chests; arms spun from bodies as if sliced off. Men seemed to burst under the weight of blood, scalps were rolled back from skulls, chunks flew from faces as though torn by the teeth of wild dogs. The screams stopped long before the gunshots.

When it was all over, Butuzov stepped out into an eerie ringing silence and began to stalk the aisles of the dead, checking that no one was left breathing. Lev had given him charge of this operation, as revenge for what Karkadann had done to Ozers in the florist’s. Butuzov had been waiting here for a week now, night after night, rubbing his own bullets in garlic to promote gangrene in the wounds of anybody not immediately killed, but the precaution now seemed unnecessary—there wasn’t so much as a twitch. Where two men lay tangled with each other, he kicked them apart to make sure neither was playing dead. He wasn’t worried that any survivors would go to the police. The police would do what they always did: nothing. Besides, Karkadann’s men prided themselves on their code of silence, they wouldn’t tell. Butuzov was simply following Lev’s orders: no survivors.

Friday, January 31, 1992

T
he underground repository yawned mockingly behind the fluttering tape. It had been cordoned off by the 21st Century rather than the police. Irk was the first law enforcement officer on the scene, and then only because the Petrovka switchboard operator had mistakenly put the call through to him rather than Yerofeyev. He remembered how Yerofeyev had behaved at the kiosk on Novokuznetskaya, and wondered how long he had before Yerofeyev arrived here and started throwing his weight around again.

Irk’s most immediate problem, however, was a thick-necked man in a black bomber jacket standing four square in front of him and saying: “You can’t come in here.” A Mafioso telling a cop to stay out of a crime scene—only in Moscow.

Irk reached in his pocket and flipped his badge open. “Juku Irk,” he said. “Chief investigator, prosecutor’s office.”

The bullneck peered at the badge. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Keres?”

“Every day,” said Irk.

The man shrugged and stepped aside. “It’s not pretty in there.”

“It never is.”

Warehouse, slaughterhouse; Irk saw slicks of blood on the floor and bodies piled against a wall like discarded mannequins. He shuddered, partly from cold, more from squeamishness.

Sabirzhan was bending over one of the corpses, his salmon face clammy with sweat. Irk wondered whether seeing so much death up close was arousing him.

“There’s nothing here for you, Investigator,” Sabirzhan said without looking up. Irk felt momentarily wounded, as though the time they’d spent in Petrovka together meant nothing. Then he remembered trailing Sabirzhan around Moscow the previous weekend, and felt that Sabirzhan had a right to his hostility, even if he didn’t know it.

“How much vodka’s kept in here?” Irk asked.

Sabirzhan straightened, adjusted his pince-nez and decided to answer. “A wagon and a side cart.” A large amount.

“How much, exactly?”

They looked like an odd couple: Sabirzhan with yellow eyes behind his pince-nez, Irk’s softened features neatly clustered together, too cerebral and gentle for all this. Sabirzhan relented, as though humoring an old friend. “If we hadn’t stopped them, they’d have gotten away with more than a million bottles.”

Irk’s left eyebrow was naturally arched; he raised his right to join it. Muscovites drink a million bottles of vodka every day. It’s a hell of a number, whichever way you look at it.

“And there’s, what, twenty men dead in here?”

“Twenty
trespassers
—that makes it their own fault. You’re not the one being fucked, Juku, so don’t make the motions.”

Irk knew Sabirzhan was right, up to a point. The Mafia’s quarrels were with each other rather than with the man in the street. So long as they didn’t affect members of the public, why not let them batter each other to
death? In any case, the argument was academic. Once the Pooh-Bah that was Yerofeyev got hold of this case, he’d administer a coat of whitewash sufficiently comprehensive and swift to make any builder proud.

Irk walked gloomily around the warehouse, more to show that he wasn’t going to be pushed around than in any real hope of uncovering anything useful. Chechen cadavers lay tangled together in contortions that wouldn’t have been out of place at an orgy. If there was ever any dignity in death, Irk thought, it hadn’t found its way here.

He caught a glimpse of something, an image subliminal enough to be a memory. He blinked and looked again, knowing for sure what he’d seen and unsure whether he hoped he was wrong.
There
, beneath two dead Chechens who looked to have fallen on top of him, lay a young boy.

Irk leaned down and rolled the first Chechen away. The body was brittle hard under his fingers—rigor mortis was setting in quickly. The second Chechen seemed to be clinging to the boy. Taking a deep breath, Irk yanked the man’s arm from around the child’s torso. Irk’s stomach heaved, and he bit back the bile as his mouth filled with saliva; it wouldn’t do to be sick here, in front of half of the 21st Century. The Chechen went spinning onto his mate and the boy was left exposed, alone, bloodied and naked.

There they were: the same marks as on the other bodies. They were clearer this time, much clearer, perhaps because the victim was slightly less decomposed than the others had been, or perhaps because the killer had been more adept at inflicting them. Irk didn’t care which. He cared only that he knew now what they were.

Not a crescent, or an angled letter “T,” but both, laid across one another. Together they made the most famous Soviet symbol of them all—the hammer and sickle.

Rodion and Svetlana arrived at the repository a few minutes later; the school and orphanage were just across the street, after all. Irk met them at the edge of the scene and took them aside.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a dead body before,” he began, “but…”

“I was in Afghanistan,” Rodion said indignantly.

“I meant Sveta.”

“Never.” Svetlana shook her head and swallowed nervously.

“Then I should warn you, it’s pretty horrific in there. Think what you will of the Chechens, but there’s a boy in there who’s one of yours…” They looked more resigned than horrified, and why wouldn’t they, when this was the fourth. “Someone you knew and cared for, perhaps more than the other kids, perhaps less, but … I’m sorry I have to do this, I’m so sorry, but I need to know what his name was, and at least one of you will have known him.”

Irk clasped Svetlana’s shaking hands between his. “OK?” She nodded.

As he led them back through the slaughter, Irk was grateful that the 21st Century men stood aside and didn’t crowd them. They knew that there were those for whom death was part of life, as it were, and those for whom it wasn’t. Irk took Svetlana and Rodion up to the boy’s body and stepped away. Svetlana gasped and crossed herself. Irk thought he saw her swaying, but when he reached out to steady her, she batted his hand
away; she was fine. Rodion, closer to the corpse than either of them, shut his eyes and shook his head.

“No,” he said, and Irk thought he heard anguish in his voice.

“I need his name, Rodya.”

Rodion opened his eyes again and looked up at Irk. “I meant, no, I’ve never seen him before.”

“Me neither,” Svetlana said.

His miniature Estonian flag apart, Irk’s desk was empty. Its blank cleanliness stood like a reproachful tract of Siberia in the crowded hubbub of ancient typewriters and crime reports piled into tottering turrets. A man who’d taken five weeks’ vacation would have left his desk like this, not a man working on a case of serial murder.

Missing Persons was still checking their files to see if they had any record of a boy answering to the victim’s description. That he wasn’t one of Prospekt Mira’s had come as a shock, there was no denying that, but the more Irk thought about it, the more it made sense.

For a start, he could no longer deny that the Chechens were responsible. The child had been with the men who had attacked the repository. Sidorouk reckoned he’d been dead longer than twelve hours, which meant they must already have killed him before going to the repository. They must have intended to leave him there as a signal, a warning. The only alternative was that he’d been killed earlier by Lev’s men, there in the repository, and whichever way Irk looked at that, it made no sense.

As for the kid not being from Prospekt Mira, perhaps the Chechens had decided it would be more effective to spread the net wider. Until then, Lev had been
obliged to explain himself only to the thousands of people who worked at Red October, but if news of the latest murder was made public, he would have to answer to millions of Muscovites, all fearful that their own child would be next. It was, Irk acknowledged ruefully, smart thinking from Karkadann.

As for the hammer and sickle—well, Irk had to look no further than what Karkadann had said to him about the Chechen diaspora and the national exile to Kazakstan. The carvings were a defiant display of hatred against a regime now gone. That Lev had despised the Soviet Union just as much as the Chechens seemed to have escaped Karkadann’s notice, or perhaps not. In Irk’s experience, men’s hate is greatest when they see themselves reflected.

When he went down to the squad room, the uniforms were packing up. Irk called over to them.

“Gents, have you got a moment? I need some manpower.”

“Nothing doing, Investigator,” one of them answered. “We’re due at Mytninskiy in half an hour.” Mytninskiy was Moscow’s largest audio, video and computer market, way up in the northern suburbs. It was open daily until six. Irk checked the duty roster. The men’s shifts for today were over; they were going to the market not as policemen, but to act as muscle for one of the gangs who controlled the place. It was known as “extra-departmental guard duty,” just one more form of semi-institutionalized corruption.

“Hell, we’ve got to get some greens somehow,” said a second man. He turned to his mate. “Yarik, you got my pager?”

“What do you need pagers for?” Irk asked.

“So we know when the exchange rate rises. We pass the news on to the traders, and they put their prices up. Sorry, Investigator. Another time, and all that.”

They left the room at a jog. Irk looked at the calendar on the wall: the last day of January. Was it only a month ago it had seemed that, having gotten rid of the Communists at last, everything would fall into place? The boil had indeed been lanced, but the doctors, instead of caring for the patient, were busy going through his pockets.

The door was still swinging behind the uniforms when Denisov came in. He hadn’t been down here in so long, Irk wondered how he’d found the way without help.

Denisov had his hands behind his back, his traditional marker of bad news. “You know what I’m going to say,” he said.

“And you know what
I’m
going to say.”

“That he’ll fuck it up completely?”