Vodka (44 page)

They went through the same rigmarole as before with the blindfold, except this time the Chechens also searched him for tracking devices. Their paranoia was clearly on the rise. The trip lasted longer than before, and Irk knew even before the vehicle stopped that they were somewhere in the countryside; the sounds and smells of Moscow’s streets had long since evaporated, and the ride had been sufficiently bumpy to smack his head twice against the roof.

When they bundled him out of the jeep, they were rougher than before. Irk removed the blindfold and squinted against the snow glare. They were in a field, bounded on two sides by lines of poplars and on the other two by dirt tracks. It could have been anywhere.

“Where’s Karkadann?” he said.

There were four men, all with their guns trained on him. None of them answered. He nodded toward the weapons. “Where the hell do you think I’m going to run to?”

They waited ten minutes in silence before another jeep appeared, listing drunkenly over the dirt track, and disgorged Zhorzh. He rummaged in his pocket as he approached Irk and brought out a wad of dollars, from which he peeled off a large chunk—the size, Irk thought, was as much a reflection of a gloved hand’s lack of dexterity as it was of Zhorzh’s generosity. Zhorzh placed the money carefully in the breast pocket of Irk’s overcoat. With equal care, Irk took it out again and handed it back. Zhorzh scowled.

“You shouldn’t insult us by refusing our generosity,” said the gunman standing nearest Irk.

“And
you
shouldn’t insult
me
by assuming my dishonesty.”

“Leave this case alone.”

“I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. The prime minister himself has appointed me.”

Zhorzh pursed his lips, thought for a second, and nodded at the gunmen. The one who’d spoken kicked suddenly at the back of Irk’s knees, toppling him forward onto the ground. When he tried to push himself upright, snow clinging to his cheek, he felt a metallic ring pressed against the back of his head: the end of a pistol barrel, very, very cold.

Irk held his breath and waited, waited, as though seeing how long he could stay underwater. He’d never been one of those thrill seekers for whom life was incomplete without facing death. It seemed unfair that death should come looking for him when so many others went looking for it. Unfair, that was all. Unfair, such a prosaic word. If there was a great epiphany to be had at the last, Irk was surely missing it, and he felt disappointed at the mundanity of his thoughts. He didn’t even feel particularly afraid. If you didn’t have much of a life, how could you fear its loss?

Long beats of silence, ragged breathing that was his own, footsteps that clearly weren’t.

Irk heard engines revving and the crunch of snow under tires. It was only then that he realized there was no longer a gun pressed against his head, but he kept still until silence had floated back over him like a blanket. When he looked up, the Chechens were gone.

It took Irk an hour to find the main road. A ten-dollar bill clamped between shaking fingers ensured that a car
stopped for him within the minute, and was good for a ride all the way to Petrovka.

Denisov offered him round-the-clock protection, which Irk turned down. A couple of prognathous youths in a clapped-out squad car wouldn’t be able to save him from anything more dangerous than the common cold. Lev, too, offered him round-the-clock protection, and again Irk turned it down, not because he doubted its effectiveness but because he knew it would spell the end of his own neutrality.

Svetlana fussed over him and told him he had to be careful, there was a shortage of good men in Moscow as it was.

“When your time comes, your time comes,” he told her, and wondered if he really believed it.

Wednesday, February 5, 1992

T
he rate of provisional voucher take-up—the vouchers themselves weren’t to be released until a week before the auction, ostensibly for security reasons but in reality because they were being printed on presses that were old and temperamental—had soared since Arkin’s advertisements were aired. Western audiences would never have fallen for the idea that a voucher could transform lives, but for Russians it was seductive. People who no longer believed in politics or
nationhood were ready to trust a commercial that promised to make them rich overnight. So frenzied was their quest to enter this looking-glass world that they forgot to ask themselves the most crucial question of all: would there be milk there? And if there was, would it be good for them to drink?

Sabirzhan came in carrying an armload of files, which he put on Alice’s desk with an exaggerated flourish and a theatrical wipe of his brow. She smiled her thanks and started on the nearest file even before he had left the room. They were behind schedule, there was far too much for Harry to cover by himself, and Alice had proved during her time on Wall Street that she could read a company’s finances as well as anybody.

The files were routine stuff, boring but essential: real estate contracts with the Moscow city government, agreements with suppliers, budgets for research and development. Alice soon got into a rhythm of speed-reading, deliberately slowing her breathing so as to keep herself from going too fast and missing something. It took her all morning and most of the afternoon. Toward the end, her eyes were beginning to blur from looking at too many faded and badly copied documents. By the time she got to the last file, she was ready to call it a day; but she’d made it this far, she thought, and another half hour of concentration wouldn’t hurt her.

The file was labeled “Suyumbika,” and Alice saw instantly that the contents were dynamite.

There was no way Sabirzhan could have meant for her to see this, she thought. Yes, Red October was obliged to give her full cooperation and disclosure, but Alice was
becoming more realistic about how much work they had to do and how little time they had in which to do it. There must have been an entirely plausible alternative file that Sabirzhan should have given to her instead, and she’d never have known the difference.

It was clear what Alice should do: take all the files back to Sabirzhan, thank him for them and hand them over. The auction was less than a month away, why rock the boat now?

Why indeed? Because that was the kind of person she was: a prober, an inquirer, restless and ambitious, and you could no more show a file like Suyumbika to her and expect her not to act on it than you could dangle a bottle of vodka in front of an alcoholic and expect them not to drink it.

In the toilets, Alice saw that she wasn’t the only person removing items surreptitiously from the premises. Two women were decanting vodka into hot-water bottles which they then strapped to their chests. They didn’t miss a beat when they saw Alice, which annoyed her.

“What are your names?” she said. “I’m going to report you.”

“For what?” said one. “If everything belongs to everybody, nothing belongs to anybody.”

“That’s not the case anymore, and you know it.”

“That’s always the case. We take what we can get:
that
hasn’t changed.”

“Report us all you want,” said the other. “The guards won’t care. Everyone knows the limits.”

Wasn’t that the truth? Alice thought. Theft was fine, so long as it was at an acceptable level.

Outside the Pushkinskaya metro station, Alice had to fight her way through a line that seemed to stretch halfway around the block. She followed it all the way to its source at a post office. Post offices had insufficient funds to pay pensions, so the staff waited until someone came in to mail something and then paid the next person in line with the money just received. If you went away and came back the next day, you’d find that your pension was worth much less than it had been the day before, so no one dared leave, and the lines got longer and longer.

A police car shot past, leaching blue neon into the smoggy darkness. Alice caught a glimpse of two Chechens in the backseat, each cuffed to a door handle, each staring out the window with the sullen disillusion of aliens wondering what kind of world they’d landed on.

“We’ve got enough for a couple of soccer teams, and none of them are saying a damn thing.” Denisov hawked deep in his throat and spat into the trash can. “I don’t tell him how to run the country, so what gives him the right to tell me how to do my job?” Because he’s the prime minister, Irk thought, but didn’t say it. “Oh, I forgot—you’re his new favorite, aren’t you?”

Irk understood Denisov’s anger perfectly well. Arkin had demanded that the police not only do something, but be
seen
to be doing it. So the order had gone out: round up low-level Chechen gangsters. The exercise was excruciatingly pointless. Any Chechen Mafioso insufficiently well protected to escape the trawl was by definition too junior to have any useful information about Karkadann’s whereabouts. So nothing had been achieved, and everybody was pissed off: a bunch of
Chechens in leather jackets who had better things to do with their time; Denisov, who’d lost face by being forced to authorize the farce; Yerofeyev, who’d now have to explain this whole farrago to those higher up the Chechen food chain who paid his bribes; and Irk, who seemed to be collecting enemies as though they were baseball cards.

Thursday, February 6, 1992

A
lice read until the wee hours, undisturbed because Lewis was on night shift. By the time she’d finished, she’d confirmed her worst fears, and then some. Red October was selling vodka at artificially low prices to a shell company, Suyumbika, which was then exporting the vodka at much higher (and tax-free) international prices, and pocketing the difference. In the past year alone, Suyumbika had cleared more than twelve million dollars. The file included hundreds of bills of lading, detailing each shipment’s nature, size, source and destination.

There was hardly a country in the developed world to which Suyumbika hadn’t made a sale—nor, it seemed, a country in the former Soviet Union. The fourteen republics that along with Russia had made up the USSR were now foreign countries, and vodka sold to them was therefore export rather than domestic trade. Alice found
bills of lading to Yerevan, Tashkent, Riga, Tallinn, Tbilisi, Kiev and Minsk. Clearly, the union’s disintegration was proving lucrative for Suyumbika.

In contrast, the official figures for Red October over the same period listed less than four million dollars’ worth of exports. The profits from these sales went into the distillery accounts and were therefore included in the privatization assessment, whereas the profits from Suyumbika presumably went straight to the pockets of Lev and whoever else was in on the scam. To Alice, they were technically untouchable.

This was the way things worked here, wasn’t it? That was the easy way out. Alice could make excuses for Lev all she wanted. This was the man with whom she was sleeping, this the man for whom her feelings were already dangerously strong and deep; this was the man who was ripping off his own company.

Sabirzhan was waiting for her when she arrived at Red October.

“I was just wondering whether you’d finished with the files I gave you,” he said.