Vodka (43 page)

“He’s been under the weather, so he’s recuperating at Sochi.” Sochi is on the Black Sea; Borzov couldn’t use the traditional presidential dacha at Foros in the Crimea, where Gorbachev had been detained the previous August, as the Crimea was now Ukrainian territory. “But he has sent us a message of support, and is fully behind the great progress we’re making.”

Translation, Alice thought, pleased with her perceptiveness and irritated that she hadn’t seen it before: the president is distancing himself. If it all went to shit, Borzov would step away as smartly as a matador dodges a charging bull.

Arkin clapped his hands together. “No more questions. I want to show you our television commercials.”

Half slumped in her chair, Alice sat up fast. This was the first she’d heard of television commercials. She tried to catch Arkin’s eye, but he was too busy supervising the technicians setting everything up. When the lights went down, Lyonya Golubkov appeared on the back wall of the conference room.

Lyonya was the archetypal Soviet buffoon, the modern-day version of Ivan the Fool. The idiot-savant hero of countless Russian fairy tales, Ivan the Fool’s default mode is to sit on the stove and do nothing, occasionally rousing himself to catch a magic fish that will grant him three wishes, find a magic horse that will bring him riches and love and fame or catch the firebird who’s been stealing golden apples from the czar’s garden and claim the imperial reward—half the kingdom in the czar’s lifetime, the other half after his death.

The advertisements were divided into two sections:
before and after. In the first, Lyonya, wearing a thick canvas jacket and shabby hat with earflaps piled on top, was a backhoe driver—though he could just as easily have been a plumber, a loader or any kind of unskilled laborer. He was carrying his very last rubles to pay the administration fee for his voucher. “I’ll buy my wife some boots!” he said, grinning at the camera. “Well done, Lyonya,” said the narrator. In the Sberbank branch, Lyonya met other characters in the same boat as himself: Marina Sergeyevna, a single woman who didn’t trust anybody but had faith in the vouchers; a couple of dirt-poor newlywed students; and a pensioner whose glasses were held together with string. All of them had clearly been passed over or ruined by economic reforms—but, the message ran, these very reforms would now give them their lucky break. All they had to do was go to the nearest branch of Sberbank and pick up their voucher.

The contrast between before and after was as subtle as a sledgehammer. Lyonya and his wife were now seen in a newly furnished apartment: ski boots in the hall, expensive fur coats hanging in the closet, a shiny new Mercedes outside. Marina Sergeyevna had abandoned her threadbare clothes and was admiring herself in the mirror of a luxurious boudoir. The students had also moved into a new apartment, all their own, no in-laws or friends or strangers hunkering down with them. And the pensioner was packing fruit and toys to send to his grandchildren in Barnaul.

The screen went blank as the tape ran to the end. The lights came on.

Alice’s hangover suddenly reared again, and her mouth began to fill with saliva, a frothing, choking
sensation that only ever heralded one thing. She pushed her chair back and walked quickly but unhurriedly from the room. It was only when she was in the corridor that she started sprinting. The gents’ toilets were nearer, and it was those that she made for—any port in a storm. She threw open the door and slid the last few feet into the cubicle like a batter stealing bases.

She was still singing psychedelic praises to the depths of the china bowl when Arkin came in.

“Are you OK?” He looked concerned.

“Fine.”

“You looked ill. I thought I’d better check on you.”

“Something I ate, probably.” She spoke through panting breaths. “I had herring and salmon last night, perhaps one of them was spoiled.”

“You can’t waver, Alice.”

“I’m not wavering.”

“You’re strong—that’s why we picked you. Nothing great is ever achieved without sacrifice.”

“I said, I’m not wavering.”

Arkin made a moue of acceptance. “What do you think of the commercials? Pretty good, eh?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I hate them.”

“I know the production values aren’t great, but it wasn’t bad for a rush job, was it?”

Alice felt that she took eons to find her voice. “Those are blatant lies, Kolya. Wishful thinking, at the very least. You can’t put that kind of stuff on the air. It’s not going to happen like that, and you know it.”

“Well, either we sell them that, or we watch the whole thing fall down around our ears.”

“I won’t be a party to this.”

“You
are
a party to this. You’re here to privatize the distillery. The more people who pick up and use their vouchers, the better for you.”

“I don’t want you to submit those commercials.”

“Too late. They’re going out tonight.”

“Tonight? Then you must pull them from the schedules.”

“It’s too late. I can’t do that.”

“You’re the prime minister, you can do whatever you want. Pull them.”

“No.”

Alice saw that there was no doubt in Arkin’s mind that he was in the right. He reminded her of a line from Dostoyevsky: if you gave him a map of the stars overnight, he’d return it the next morning covered with corrections.

Arkin turned on his heel and stalked from the room. Alice went over to the basins and splashed her face. It couldn’t have been the amount she’d drunk, that was for sure; she’d drunk much more than that before without any ill effects. All those television lights had made her hot, the protesters had made her nervous … Stress and seafood, that’s all. And she’d gotten up and gone to work and done her job regardless. She wasn’t collapsed in a gutter or in bed bemoaning her life. She’d done fine.

Tuesday, February 4, 1992

A
lice’s office phone trilled: the double ring that indicated an external line, so it wouldn’t be Lev. She felt a gnawing sense of disappointment as she picked up.

“It’s me,” said Lewis. “Just to let you know I’ll be home late.”

“Trouble at the top?”

“A whole Schwegmann’s bag full. More people to sack.” His tone was neutral; Alice couldn’t tell whether this was a prospect that excited or appalled him, or neither.

“Poor bastards,” she said.

“Most of them, yes. Apart from one guy who’s been stealing blood from the hospital stores.”

“To sell on the black market?”

“Presumably. He’s the first to go, and good riddance to him.”

There was a knock on the door.
“Kto?”
Alice said. “Who is it?”

“Kto, kto, ded Pikhto.”
It was a nonsense rhyme: “Grandpa Pikhto, that’s who.” Lev came in, doffing an imaginary hat as he blocked the doorway. His thick hair was swept back from his forehead and tucked behind his ears; tendrils curled up on themselves at the base of his neck. Alice held up a finger: one minute.

“Good riddance to him indeed,” she said into the receiver, her voice unhurried. “Take your time, I might be late too.”

Lewis hung up. Other men tell their wives they love them at the end of phone calls, and sometimes it irked Alice that Lewis was not like that. Today, however, she was relieved—he’d spared her the embarrassment of reciprocation in front of Lev.

They drank Sibirskaya, distilled from winter wheat and repeatedly filtered through birch-tree charcoal. The wafts of aniseed on the nose were repeated on the palate, this time with liquorice tones attached; a delicate and light aroma giving way to a large, fragrant taste, quite sweet and almost creamily smooth until the extra alcohol began to bite through a long finish.

“I saw you on television yesterday,” he said.

“And?”

“You looked prettier than Arkin.”

She laughed. “I didn’t feel it.”

“It’s a lousy idea, the vouchers.”

“It worked in Eastern Europe—I know, I know, Russia’s different. Why is it a bad idea? People can do with them what they want.”

“They should be made to invest them in the enterprises where they work.”

“I’m sure most of them will. But if they don’t, you can’t stop them.” Lev was silent; Alice detected the lightest brushstroke of amusement on his face. “Not even here,” she said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“What are you going to do? Force them to sell you their vouchers?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t.”

“I can, and I am. I’ve had their contracts amended to that effect.”

“That’s illegal.”

“Not at all. I’ll pay them face value, so they’ll all make money from the deal. There are special provisions for the workers as it is. I’m just making sure all the vouchers go to the right place. What kind of signal would it send out if Red October’s employees didn’t want to invest in their own company?”

“Every worker?”

“Every worker.”

Something jogged in her brain. “Every person on the payroll?”

“That’s what I said.”

Feeling vaguely nauseous, Alice made her way down to the distillery floor. She didn’t like what Lev was doing, didn’t like it at all, not least because she couldn’t square it with the man she so desired. Until she was sure of what was going on, however, she would not confront him.

The first person she saw was German Kullam, staring into space. It was the start of the month, with production targets again weeks rather than days or even hours away, and the sense of urgency was all but invisible.

“What are you going to do with your privatization voucher?” she asked. He looked first at her and then up toward Lev’s office high above the distillery floor; the same motion as the woman in the bottling department, she remembered. “And you’re happy about that?” she said.

“Lev knows best.”

“German, this is a factory, not a damn cult. Are you happy about selling him your voucher?”

“You want to know what makes me
un
happy? Being invaded by Westerners on hardship packages. You get luxury flats, the best tickets for ballet and the theater, restaurant allowances, six-figure dollar salaries—and on top of all that,
allowances
for ‘deprivation.’ That’s not hardship, you shits on sticks. Come and live where I live, come and work where I work, come and earn what I earn—then you’ll see what fucking hardship is.” He tapped his chest, a warrior feeling for his medals. “We’re the people without tears. Straighter than you, more proud. You see me—how old do you think I am?”

His face was scored with lines, anxiety and vodka in equal quantities; his hands bore the creases of a million experiences. “Forty-five?”

German snorted in derision. “Thirty-one. What about her?” He pointed at a woman working at a technician’s bench.

“Fifty-two,” Alice said.

“Forty,” German said, his voice not without triumph, as if he’d just confirmed a great truth about pampered Westerners.

“You don’t seem very busy,” she said.

“Waiting for supplies.”

“Isn’t there someone else you could be helping?”

German looked blankly at her. It was not that he didn’t like the question, Alice saw; rather that he didn’t understand it. A Russian worker felt responsible only for his allocated task. If one worker had finished and another still had much to do, the first would never help the second, no matter how easy the work, and the second would never ask for help. Under Soviet law, every citizen of able mind and body had been obliged to hold a job or face prosecution. This meant that enough work had to be
found for everyone, which in turn meant that each worker did his own and only his own specific share. “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” the people had lamented under a system that gave little reward for hard work and didn’t punish sloth. Suddenly they were expected to behave as though they were salesmen working on commission; it simply wasn’t going to happen.

Alice went back upstairs to find Harry suggesting performance initiatives and bonuses.

“You understand nothing, do you?” Lev snapped.
“Nothing.
What you’re suggesting would destroy this place. The moment you start paying people differently, you create envy, dislike, factionalism. This place runs on equality, Mr. Exley, equal pay across a group. There’s no room for individual ambition.”

Harry tried again. “In that case, you need to raise prices. Sell your vodkas at greater margins.”

“Who’s going to buy them then, eh? How many ordinary Ivans have you seen ambling down the street counting their millions? Our prices are high as they are, to distinguish us from the third-rate poison that inferior distilleries and private piss-artists put out. If we go any higher, people will either switch to our competitors or they’ll start making their own. Either way, we’ll go from some margin to no margin. There’s an old conundrum that goes like this: ‘If they raised the price of vodka to the price of a suit, which would you buy?’ ‘Why, vodka, of course. What would I need with such an expensive suit?’”

Irk had been trying for three days to get an audience at the Belgrade Hotel; the phone call came through now, giving him half an hour to get there or miss his chance.
Jump, the Chechen Mafia said. How high? asked the senior investigator.