Vodka (49 page)

They found half a table, next to a couple of builders who winked at them as they sat down. Galina lifted one leg above the table and pinched at the suede of her trousers. “You like?”

“Very much.”

“Good, because they cost me a fortune. Much more than I can afford, but I saw these in the shop, they were just so
beautiful
, and …”

Alice understood, all too well. That’s the way things are in Russia; spending money on luxuries rather than necessities is part of what keeps people human. Russians are the biggest dreamers in the world, and the maddest consumers, even though—or especially because—they can’t afford to be. This month’s edition of Russian
Vogue
carried a letter from a pediatrician in Omsk; with two children to support, she didn’t have the money for a single item featured in the magazine—in fact, she had to save up even to buy
Vogue
—but for the four hours she spent reading it cover to cover, every word, masthead and disclaimers included, she was in heaven.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Galina said. “I brought those people in, I told you they’d be good, and I just didn’t think they’d … I mean, this is a new thing, right, and no one knows what to expect?” She looked so mortified that Alice wanted to reach over and hug her, but that would have undermined the reason she’d brought Galina there. “I talked to a few people afterward, my friends, and told them to spread the word that everyone needs to buck up their ideas. What you said really shook them, I think. It won’t happen again.”

Alice nodded twice, curtly. “It had better not.”

The food arrived, plonked unceremoniously in front of them by a girl with green hair.

“I’ve been invited to speak at a conference in London about the risks of doing business in Russia,” Alice said. “I should tell the
Guinness Book of Records.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It could be the longest speech in history.”

“Oh.” Galina giggled, slightly sheepishly. “Who’s the invite from?”

“A political risk organization, I spoke at an event of theirs last year. They’re offering me expenses, accommodation, thousands of dollars
and
the chance to bring a colleague. Want to come?”

Galina’s eyes widened cartoon-style. “Are you serious?”

“Of course. We’ll spend a day at the conference, another shopping, and a third going to your two favorite places in London.” Galina looked blank; she’d never been to London, so how could she have a favorite place there? “Abbey Road,” said Alice teasingly.

“Where I can walk across the zebra crossing barefoot!”

“And 221b Baker Street…”

Galina clapped her hands in delight. Sherlock Holmes and the Beatles—she’d cry tears of joy all the way back to Heathrow. “That sounds fantastic!” She made a moue. “If Lev lets me go.”

“Why wouldn’t he? It’d be with me.”

The builders were leaving. Alice and Galina pushed their chairs back to let the men past, and realized too late that they should have gotten up. Alice got a faceful of paint-splattered crotch, Galina one of dusty ass. They were laughing before the men had even left the room.

The unloveliness of what she was doing circled in Alice’s guts as though searching for the best place to strike. It was not too late for her to pull out, she could still leave this at what it was, part of her genuine warmth and friendship for Galina. But this is Russia, she reminded herself; here, friendships are
based
on who can do what for who.

“It’d be with me,” Alice repeated.

“I guess so,” Galina said, her uncertainty like blood in the water.

“You’d love London, you really would. Outside of Boston—and here, of course—it’s my favorite city. Who knows—one day you could even go and work there. Or in America.”

“Without Rodya? Or Sveta? No, Alice, no.”

“They could come too.”

“They’ll never leave here.”

“You want a child, Galya?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“And when you have one, you think Lev’ll keep your job open for you?”

“Of course he will.”

“You’re sure?”

“He’s a loyal man.”

Alice let her silence speak, and now Galina was confused. She knew about Alice and Lev, of course, but she also knew what Alice was driving at. In many Russian companies, taking maternity leave is equivalent to writing yourself out of a job. By the time you want to come back, the position’s no longer available. Mothers are seen as unreliable employees: children are frequently sick, and people taking time off at short notice play havoc with work rosters. Several of Galina’s friends had already had abortions rather than risk losing their jobs.

“Of course he will,” Galina repeated, though with less certitude. “He’s never foisted ‘without complexes’ on me, has he?”

“Without complexes” occurs frequently in job advertisements: applicants who aren’t prepared to sleep with the boss need not apply.

“Galya, the West isn’t perfect, but in terms of attitudes toward women it’s light-years ahead.”

“It’s easy for you. For Russians, bad things are there to be endured. We don’t have the sense of power that you do. You Americans believe you can change the world.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing, and”—Alice took a deep breath—“one of the reasons I need you to help me.”

“Help you? How?”

This was Alice’s last chance to turn back, and she stepped smoothly over the edge.

She outlined what she’d found at Red October. Galina looked surprised when she heard about the dead souls; she was impassive when Alice told her about the vouchers; she gasped at the extent of the Suyumbika
scam. She’d known some of what Lev was up to, Alice realized, but not all—probably a mixture of Lev keeping her out of the loop and her own willful blindness.

“We have to do this auction quickly, but we also have to do it properly,” Alice said. “I need to know—and it’s an awful thing to ask, we both have a stake in this place and in the man who runs it—but I need to know if there’s anything else going on. If there is, I have to catch it
now.”

In the café, the chatter of the lunchtime crowd continued, banging plates overlaying chiming cutlery.

Alice had already wrestled with her conscience and won. Now it was Galina’s turn to step onto the mat. Her loyalty to Lev, her ambitions, her nascent friendship with Alice, her desire for Russia to be a better place, guilt over what had happened with the auction staff yesterday, the promise of a trip to London and perhaps more—call it.

“I can’t believe you’re asking this of me,” Galina said. When Alice was silent, Galina asked: “It really matters?” Then Alice knew she had her.

“I’ll never tell where it came from.”

Informing was in the Russian mind-set, Alice thought, even for those who kicked against it.

Galina fished inside her handbag for a pen and wrote two numbers on a napkin. “Ring this number,” she said, pushing the napkin across the table to Alice and pointing to the first set of digits. Alice saw that it was prefixed with an international code, though she couldn’t recognize which one. “Ask them for transfer details on this account.” That was the second number. “The password is ‘Lefortovo,’” she said, pushing her chair backward, up and gone, her beef as cold and congealing as their friendship.

Sidorouk was cradling a dripping heart with the reverence of an Aztec priest.

“Juku!” The pathologist was his usual jauntily lugubrious self. “How nice to see you.” He put the heart into a stainless-steel tray and came across the room with his outstretched hand trailing blood. Irk recoiled with an urgency not far short of panic.

“Sorry!” Seeing the bloody hands that had so disturbed Irk, Sidorouk chuckled to himself, turned tail and headed for the washbasin. “My mistake. I used to work in an abattoir, you know. When winter came and it got really raw, twenty or thirty below, there was only one way to keep warm: by plunging my arms into the guts of a freshly slaughtered animal, right up to the shoulders.”

The disembodied heart glowed like a pulsar in its tray. “How’s life, Syoma?” Irk asked.

“They give you one ruble and charge you two.” Sidorouk scrubbed his hands vigorously. “Things are pretty normal. People break in every week and steal whatever they can find.” He finished washing his hands and reached for a towel.

“You’ve missed some bits.” Irk pointed to reddish patches on Sidorouk’s fingertips.

“Oh? That’s not blood.” Sidorouk laughed. “I take the same lightbulb from home to work and back again, every day—it’d get stolen otherwise. The marks are where I burn myself when I take it out of its socket. Now. You’ve come about the girl, I imagine?”

“Of course.”

“She’s over here.” He led Irk across the room to the slab by the far wall, talking as he did so. “She’s been sexually abused. That’s a first in this case, isn’t it?”

“The killer raped her?”

“Not necessarily the killer. The wounds around and inside her orifices are older than the ones on her neck and chest—the ones that killed her, in fact.”

“How much older?”

“Enough to have halfway healed.”

“So even if the killer held her for several days…”

“They’d still have appeared fresher than they did. I’d say they were inflicted sometime in the past few weeks.”

Irk recalled Nelli’s friends—the “asphalt flowers,” Rodion had called them—huddled under the skirts of the farm-girl statue. What was it that boy had said in response to his question about the Chechens?
Doesn’t matter who runs things, as long as someone’s fucking the little people.

Alice went home; she couldn’t risk being overheard or tapped within the distillery. A call to international inquiries—a service that hadn’t existed in the USSR—revealed that the country code was for Nicosia, and Alice knew instantly what she was dealing with. In business terms, Nicosia is up there with Vaduz and Grand Cayman as a place where questions asked about money’s origins decrease in direct proportion to the amount involved.

She called the number, and her nerves jangled with the purity of anxiety that comes from knowing there’s only one chance of getting it right.

A man’s voice answered. “Bank Kormakitis-Plakoti.” He spoke in English, heavily accented: a local.

“Good afternoon,” Alice said. “I’m looking to check transfer details on this account.” She gave the number.

“You have the password?”

“Lefortovo.”

“Is that you, Galya? You sound different.”

“Bit of a cold,” Alice said, thankful that Galina’s English was good enough for conversation and therefore impersonation.

“I’m not surprised, with the weather you have there. What do you need?”

“Incomings and outgoings.”

He didn’t ask why she wanted them; these kind of bankers never do. “For how long?”

“Past six months?”

“No problem. I’ll fax them over.”

“To work? No. The machine’s broken. Use this one instead.” Alice gave her home number and set the fax to receive.

“I’ll send them over right away. Anything else?”

“No, that’s all.”

“Give Lev my regards.”

“Will do.”

She was shaking when she put down the phone, nervous reaction mixed with visceral triumph. Alice was developing quite a taste for detective work, also for the subterfuge and deceit that came with it. A well-crafted lie actually gave her pleasure: she admired the craftsmanship and elegant simplicity with which all the parts of a lie fitted together. There was a time she had hated lying, and falsehood had been alien to her nature, but now it was becoming so simple and natural, it was as if some unseen power was helping her, clothing her in an impenetrable armor of lies. At the same time she knew it wasn’t an impenetrable armor but a house of cards, and it would mount up and mount up—having started with little ones,
she would build bigger and bigger ones on top—until one day the whole lot would come crashing down.

She waited and waited, anxiety gnawing at her. Had something gone wrong? Had she been discovered? Had she made the man in Nicosia suspicious?

Time crawled. She had a couple of vodkas, to quell her nerves and keep her hands occupied.

It was forty-five minutes before the fax came through, a delay which, with the logicality of relief, Alice attributed to the precarious state of Moscow telecommunications rather than anything more sinister. There were seven sheets, and each one contained details of three or four transactions. They were spread, as far as Alice could see, fairly evenly throughout the period. The smallest was just below $3,000, the largest more than $750,000. Altogether, Lev had transferred more than $5,000,000 into the bank over the past six months.

Five million? It sounded like a lot, but that was surely peanuts to a gang boss. The money could have come from anywhere, any of Lev’s myriad interests. But if it had nothing to do with Red October, why would Galina have told her? More to the point, how would Galina have known? She was responsible only for handling Lev’s affairs at the distillery; there’d be others who took charge elsewhere, Alice thought, but only Lev himself would know the whole picture—a legacy of life in the gulag, where you trusted only yourself and compartmentalized your life.