Vodka (46 page)

“Your parents drank?”

“My mother, especially.” Alice reached for her glass. It was empty, and for a moment she felt disconcerted, she couldn’t remember having finished the last measure. “She was … she was an alcoholic. I know, I know, alcoholism can be genetic and hereditary, transmission’s
more often maternal than paternal—I know all that. I’m lucky to have escaped it, I reckon.”

“Do you remember her drinking, when you were a child?”

“Oh yeah. And I know all the psychobabble, I had all that shit rammed down me about the way children behave in those situations. Whether they try to act the hero and achieve things in school or sports or drama or whatever to get love and appreciation; or whether they go for the caretaker-cum-lost-child approach, taking responsibility for the family and looking after it by blending gently into the background and keeping the peace when they can.”

“I’d never heard of those.”

“You’re not American. In America, you can hardly walk out of your front door without being mugged by shrinks. It’s all bullshit. Therapy schmerapy. Let’s leave all that crap in America, where it belongs, and talk about something else, shall we?”

Sensing the hurt behind her cavalier dismissal of the subject, Lev acquiesced, even though he would have liked to know more. On the surface, Alice was the typical brash, hard-as-nails American bitch—or so she would have everyone believe. But there were chinks in that armor-plated surface that offered tantalizing glimpses of the woman within. A woman who was anything but typical.

Perhaps it was something common to every only child, this need to belong and yet to be alone. Alice could count on the fingers of one hand the number of friends she had; proper, true and valued friends, that was. There were many others, of course, who dropped into her life and
then left again, like Bob and Harry, coming and going. Alice had tried in the past to join groups of people, but it hadn’t worked. She was too singular. Her beauty and vulnerability were those of a woman; her haircut and clothes were masculine. Without siblings, an only child puts up boundaries and cordons. Alice was born lonely and had grown up lonelier.

There was a complete absence of guilt in Alice. It was the only thing that made her feel guilty. What she and Lev had was beyond regulation. It couldn’t be negotiated like treaties, rationed like food parcels or ignored like background noise.

“I only wish to save myself,” she told him, “but I don’t know how.”

His eyes were gray. Skin scooped under his cheekbones and ridged around his mouth. He had no answers, no questions, only a statement.

“I love you,” he said.

It was the response Alice’s soul desired and her reason dreaded.

“Where’ve you been?” Lewis asked. His voice was distant; he was in the bedroom.

“Working late.”
With my lover.

The apartment was stuffy and hot. Alice turned on the humidifier and opened the window. She went through into the bedroom, and as usual the guilt came flooding back the moment she saw Lewis’s beautiful, trusting, bland face. But now his features were not those she remembered, he looked somehow different. Alice looked again, and realized that it was she, not he, who’d changed. She noticed things about him that she’d
previously taken for granted. The lobes of his ears kinked sharply upward just before they fused with his jaw—how had she missed that? Look how lightly the puffs of skin beneath his eyebrows rested on his eyelids. Lewis was one of the central staples of her accepted life, but now everything seemed fractionally off center: a twin who wasn’t quite identical, a room that had been searched and left infinitesimally out of kilter, a voice heard on tape rather than from inside the owner’s head.

This was their home, their life, hers and Lewis’s, where everything had its own poetry, sincerity and warmth. Alice wanted very much for it to be safe and whole again.

Saturday, February 8, 1992

“I
want out,” Alice said.

Arkin was nothing if not a professional politician. He showed no surprise, still less alarm. He merely cocked his head and said “I’m sorry?” as if they were talking on a bad phone line.

“I want out,” she repeated. “The privatization program—I’ve had enough.”

Arkin’s look said it all; this was the woman who’d sat on a podium with him earlier in the week and swelled with pride when they told the world’s media how the program was going ahead come what may, and
the naysayers be damned. She’d given him her word that she wasn’t wavering—and here she was, swaying like a larch in a hurricane. “May I ask why?”

“Because the process has moved too far from what we started with.”
Because I’m falling in love with Lev.
“Because two Mafia gangs are fighting over the distillery.”
Because I’m falling in love with Lev.
“Because children are being killed there.”
Because I’m falling in love with Lev.
“Because we haven’t enough time to do this properly.”
Because I’m falling in love with Lev.

Sitting at his desk, his mouth pursed, Arkin considered what Alice had said for several moments before replying. “Alice, the Red October auction takes place in three weeks. Even if you were to leave now, your achievement would be considered heroic. But if you leave now, who could possibly take over? No one, that’s who. You’re invaluable, and you know it as well as I do.”

The dim light pouched his eyes in shadow. “I hear what you’re saying, and I understand your reservations, but I ask you to reconsider. This isn’t just about you, or me. What we’re doing is for the Russian people, so they can live in a normal country, not one run on lies and sophistry. We used to laugh at the six paradoxes of socialism. You know what they were?”

Alice shook her head. Arkin began recite: “There’s no unemployment, but nobody works; nobody works, but productivity increases; productivity increases, but the shops are empty; the shops are empty, but fridges are full; fridges are full, but nobody’s satisfied; nobody’s satisfied, but everyone votes unanimously. You want Russia to go back to that? Would you live with yourself if you walked away now?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

She couldn’t tell him. He had demolished every objection she’d put up, of course he had, because what she’d told him wasn’t the truth, and she couldn’t tell him the truth, so she couldn’t in all conscience step down. Arkin had her over a barrel.

“I’ll stay,” Alice said. “I’ll stay until it’s over.”

Sunday, February 9, 1992

L
ev was asleep when the phone in his bedroom rang. He knew before answering that it must be important; very few people had his private number, and none of them were without influence. When he picked up, his first reaction was surprise that the voice was Karkadann’s. His second, more pressing, was alarm that the voice was Karkadann’s.

“The reservoirs. Potassium cyanide,” Karkadann said, and rang off.

The reservoirs in question were the ones Red October maintained up near the Mytishchi Springs, whose soft, calcium-free water the Kazan distillery had stopped taking the previous month. It took Lev minutes to assemble a twelve-vehicle convoy, five men to a car. At that time on a Sunday morning, traffic was light, though it would
have made little difference had it been rush hour on a Friday: the convoy jumped red lights, ignored one-way signs and tripled the speed limit on occasion, and not a traffic cop in Moscow would have dared stop them.

The Mytishchi reservoirs were protected by two concentric rings of razor wire and permanent patrols of armed men in uniform and dogs. Lev himself strode up to the security officer in charge: V. Golovin, according to the laminated nameplate on his chest. In his hurry to stand at attention, Golovin practically snapped himself in half.

“Have you had any break-ins?”

“No.”

“No alarms, strange incidents?”

“None.”

“No Chechens in the area?”

“They’re the first thing we look for.”

“All your men accounted for?”

“Yes.”

“Go and check the perimeter fence, every inch. Draw off samples of water from each reservoir and have them sent to Petrovka for analysis; the scientists there do it, for a fee.”

The phone was ringing in the guard hut at the main entrance to the reservoir complex. Golovin gestured diffidently in its direction. “May I?”

“Of course.”

Golovin hurried into the shed and snatched up the receiver. Lev saw Golovin’s body stiffen, his face urgent as he snapped words soundless behind the heavy bulletproof glass. In an instant, Lev was in the hut, taking the phone from Golovin and filling the tiny space with his anger. It was Sabirzhan calling: a 21st Century convoy
bringing grain from Krasnodar had been attacked on the Garden Ring, and it was carnage.

Blue and red emergency lights rotated lazily in the pale light of a winter morning. The ambush had taken place at Serpukhovskaya Square, where the main road from the south meets the Garden Ring. It was a logical enough place to have mounted an ambush: any traffic coming from Krasnodar to Moscow would have had to pass through there.

There must have been thirty vehicles at the scene: ambulances and police, with civilian cars being filtered around them. There were no trucks; the Chechens must have stolen the lot. Lev strode angrily through the police cordon. A young officer moved to stop him, but then thought better of it and backed away.

Bodies littered the ground. Lev recognized the drivers and their guards, sprawled and stretched across the road in pools of darkening blood. It looked like a mock-up, the kind of tableau used to teach rescue workers about safety procedures. Young men, Lev thought, young men who in other times would have had twice as much life ahead of them as had already passed, but who as Mafiosi could expect three decades if they were lucky. Their bravery in facing death was no more than he would have expected. Those who joined the warrior elite traded rich rewards for a life of tension and an inevitably violent end. They had been happy to live fast and die young. Russians are all too used to death; when twenty million died defending the Motherland against the Nazis, Stalin simply sent in twenty million more.

The warning about poisoning the reservoirs had been a decoy. Karkadann had made Lev concentrate on
a threat that didn’t exist, and in doing so had left the door open for the Chechens to hit the Slav alliance elsewhere.

Lev’s men had been primed for the attack on the repository the previous week, but this one seemed to have caught them unawares. Though every man in the convoy had been armed, Lev could see no dead Chechens. How was
that
possible in a mass gunfight?

Two paramedics were loading a man onto a stretcher by the curb. By the care with which they handled the patient, Lev knew he was still alive—they’d have slung corpses in like sacks of garbage. When he got closer, he saw that it was Butuzov, his gray face beaded with sweat and blood.

“What the fuck happened?” Lev said.

“Police.”

“Police?”

Butuzov shook his head, and winced at the movement. “Not real ones. Blacks. Dressed as police.” It wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded; the police took recruits where they could find them, even from those whom they most routinely victimized. “Appeared from nowhere, pulled us over, ordered us out, disarmed the guards.”

“Then what?”

“Shot us.”

“Everyone else is dead?”

“I think so. Someone fell on top of me, that’s why I’m still here.”

“And the trucks?”

“Took them.”

A bubbling eruption of blood spurted from Butuzov’s mouth, and the paramedics were on him in a flash. Lev
turned away. He’d seen enough men die to know that Butuzov wouldn’t make it. He remembered how Butuzov had installed the bug in Karkadann’s office and helped snatch Sharmukhamedov from Sheremetyevo; remembered too how Karkadann had sent Butuzov back to Lev with the Chechen bandit oath ringing in his ears. Butuzov had been there almost from the inception of this conflict—it didn’t seem right that he wouldn’t live to see its end.

Lev looked back to the stretcher. Lying on his back, his blood wetting skin he could no longer feel, Butuzov stared sightlessly at the sky.