Vodka (5 page)

When the embassy man escorted Alice and Lewis into the taxi and climbed into the front seat, he gave the other two a small involuntary smirk of triumph, and it was all they could do not to lean in through the window and ask the rich Westerners for a little baksheesh, a goodwill gesture in these times of glorious international cooperation.

Alice was surprised that the embassy man—Quarrie, he said his name was; Raymond Quarrie, from Trenton, New Jersey—had come personally. As an International Monetary Fund adviser she was technically employed by the UN rather than the US. But America was the only superpower left now, which meant
that Washington called the shots when it came to international aid. US, UN—what was a consonant between friends? Even friends who’d spent the best part of half a century eyeballing each other across Checkpoint Charlie and the Straits of Florida.

Quarrie swiveled in his seat to face them. His face was pale and blotchy; he’d not be shy of a vodka or two, Alice reckoned. “Don’t worry about your luggage,” he said. “It’ll be sent directly to your hotel. You’re staying at the Metropol, yes?” The Metropol had reopened earlier in the month, refurbished by Scandinavian companies. For the average Muscovite, a room there cost five years’ wages. The ruble was trading at ninety-six to the dollar; clerks and technicians earned four hundred rubles per month, pensions were half that.

“Until we find somewhere more permanent,” said Alice. “Or the IMF runs out of money, whichever is the sooner.”

Quarrie laughed much louder and much longer than the joke was worth.

Armed guards stamping their feet to keep warm slid from view as the taxi eased out of the airport. Quarrie peered through the rear windshield and then sneaked a surreptitious look at Alice when he thought she wasn’t looking. She hardly noticed, it happened so often, even with her auburn hair cropped short enough to bristle up the back of her neck. She loved it; from one angle it made her look bold, and from another vulnerable. Lewis hated it. He called the cut a duck’s ass and said it made her look like a dyke.

“It’s quite a ride into town, so please take your coats off if you want to,” Quarrie said, playing the old Moscow stager. “Are you warm enough?”

“Fine,” said Alice. The heat was on full blast.

“You’ll be used to the weather, anyway. Moscow winters aren’t much worse than Boston ones.” He smiled. “Your accent gives you away.”

“My husband’s from New Orleans,” she said, realizing that Lewis hadn’t exchanged a single word with Quarrie.

“New Orleans?” Quarrie laughed. “You guys don’t even have winter there, right?”

They passed the antitank hedgehogs that marked the place where the Red Army had halted the Wehrmacht’s advance half a century before. Alice stared rapt as Moscow flashed changes at the window, rolling out for her delectation every cliché about Soviet cities, and then some: massive buildings of uniform gray with crumbling facades, roads with potholes large enough to be bomb craters. There were pockets of beauty—a Byzantine church here, a prerevolutionary house there—but they only served to accentuate the gloom.

The taxi swayed left and right as the driver glided between the hollows.

The ugliness and dereliction didn’t bother Alice. For her, the first glimpse of a new country was always exciting, vista on a world pregnant with promises of adventure and challenge. She glanced across at Lewis, knowing that he didn’t share her animation. Lewis was still ambivalent about coming to Moscow. He was looking at exactly the same city as Alice, but she knew that for him it spelled discomfort and difficulty, an experience to be endured rather than enjoyed. After two years living on different continents—the IMF job had started out as a temporary assignment in Warsaw, which then led to another in Budapest and then another and
another—Lewis, having failed to talk her out of accepting the Moscow posting, had decided to join her. As soon as her work was done there, they would head back to Boston to settle down and have kids while he was still young enough not to be taken for their grandfather.

Alice reached for Lewis’s cheek and ran her hand down it, past the silvering hairs at his temples. He gave her a weak grin.

Quarrie leaned toward Lewis. “You’re taking up a post at the Sklifosovsky, I understand.” Lewis nodded, a blip in Quarrie’s monologue. “Finest emergency department in Moscow; they say it’s far better than the Kremlinovka, or whatever they call it now—the Central Clinical Hospital, something like that. Even an old Russia hand like me finds it hard to keep up with all the name changes. No more Leningrad, no more Sverdlovsk; streets and metro stations switch from one day to the next. In Moscow, only the weather’s still the same.”

The driver cut across three lanes without indicating; Quarrie, unconcerned, pointed out the window. In the gathering darkness, the most radiant objects in the skyline were the ruby-red stars shining above the Kremlin towers. “Five points, for the proletariats of five continents,” he said. “Fat lot of good it did them.”

The Kremlin itself, so familiar from photographs and television footage, looked slightly out of kilter. It took Alice a few moments to realize that it was because the hammer and sickle no longer rippled from the flagpole. In its place was the Russian tricolor, striped in white, blue and red; the same colors, Alice thought, as those of America, Britain and France, the countries tasked with helping revive the stricken Russia.

“They put it on upside down last night, can you believe?” said Quarrie. “Down comes the hammer and sickle, up goes the tricolor—and the red stripe’s at the top! Stupid asses. Too much vodka, I wouldn’t doubt. Then the artificial wind machine to make the flag flutter didn’t work. They had to give it a good kick to get it going. Percussive maintenance, I think they call it. That’s the way most Russian problems get solved. To cap it all, they launched an enormous hot-air balloon in the same three colors. It rose a few feet, then crashed back to earth. Not the most auspicious start.”

“Nor much of an omen,” said Lewis, perking up for the first time since their arrival.

The Metropol was entirely to Lewis’s taste, which was to say it was sufficiently luxurious to kid him that he wasn’t in Russia. He retired to the bathroom to soak away thoughts of the great unwashed outside, while Alice plucked four Smirnoff miniatures from the minibar and drained them with systematic relish as she stood at the window, looking down at the patches of neon signs flickering uncertainly, the dancing headlights of crazy drivers, the gargantuan buildings that loomed like supertankers from the darkness, and the people, the people, scurrying fifty yards below the remote and omnipotent goddess who’d come from the promised land to spread the gospel according to the almighty dollar.

Friday, December 27, 1991

T
he limousine pulled up around the back of the president’s official residence, a neoclassical triangular building that used to serve as the senate. The driver, a thickset southerner named Ruslan with beetle brows and an ill-fitting suit, opened the door for Alice. The cold was dry and seemed almost industrial; it hurt her nostrils the moment she stepped out of the car.

“I’ll be waiting here for you when you come out,” Ruslan said.

“You’ll be keeping yourself warm while I’m gone?”

He looked at her blankly, perhaps surprised at how good her Russian was. Alice opened the passenger door and pulled a bottle of vodka from the glove compartment. Ruslan sized her up fast and smiled. “Best heating known to man,” he said.

She grinned back. “Save some for me.”

The president’s office was at the end of a long corridor carpeted in red. Alice passed through an anteroom bulging with stone-faced men in gray suits and into a small conference room, where she waited until a secretary arrived to escort her into the inner sanctum.

Anatoly Nikolayevich Borzov, president of the Russian Federation and now the Kremlin’s inhabitant, kissed Alice’s hand, took a step backward the better to admire her, nodded approvingly and steered her by the elbow toward a white leather armchair. Gorbachev had
been gone barely thirty-six hours, and already there was no trace of him. Rumor had it that Borzov had moved in even before Gorbachev had left, piling Gorbachev’s possessions in the corridor as though he were holding a fire sale. Now the office was a shrine to Russia and Borzov in equal measures.

Huge paintings dominated the walls: Lentulov’s
St. Basil’s Cathedral
, Surikov’s
The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy
, Polonev’s
Moscow Courtyard.
Along the plasterboard, smaller frames jostled for space: prints of prerevolutionary streets and czarist armies, icons of apostles, and scores of photographs, all without exception featuring Borzov himself, his drinker’s luminous face glowing under the statesman’s stiff helmet of white hair. Borzov in a bulldozer, Borzov outside McDonald’s on Pushkin Square, Borzov laughing with colleagues.

“You’ll take a hundred grams with the chief?” he said.

It was ten in the morning. “Of course.”

Borzov filled two glasses and handed one to Alice. The vodka in his glass lurched as he sat heavily into the chair opposite her, but the preservative balance innate to the hardened drinker ensured that not a drop was spilled. “Your good health,” he said, and moved to drain the glass in one gulp before remembering whose company he was in and smoothly altering the action to a sip.

There was a knock at the door, and in came Arkin.

“Kolya!” Borzov launched himself from his chair and kissed Arkin on both cheeks. “Kolya, meet Mrs. Liddell. Mrs. Liddell, meet Nikolai Valentinovich Arkin—the son the chief never had.”

Arkin looked to be in his mid-thirties, two or three years older than Alice. He shook her hand and speared
her with his good looks; skin glowing under well-groomed black hair, as tall as Borzov but many times more handsome as he shrugged off his Italian cashmere overcoat, a Russian as the West likes to see them. Untainted by any past association with the Communists, Arkin was a perfect poster boy for the new generation. At his inauguration as prime minister the previous month, he’d taken a stiletto blade from his pocket and slashed at the air in front of him. This is to be my trademark, he’d said; this knife is the symbol of my desire to cut through red tape and get things done. “I’ve no time for the enemies of progress,” he’d proclaimed. Whether he’d mimicked the famous Soviet slogan deliberately or unconsciously was moot; that he understood the free market was evident.

“You two!” Borzov said, looking at Arkin and Alice as though he were presiding at a wedding. “So young, and already ruling the roost! There’s hardly room for an old codger like Anatoly Nikolayevich these days, is there?” He winked at Alice to let her know that he wasn’t being serious, and she understood instantly why he was such a hero to Russians; they were seduced by his bonhomie, but they also recognized the steel beneath it, and that reassured them. He’d stood on a tank outside the White House in August, he’d faced down the gray bureaucrats until the coup had disintegrated. He belonged to the Russian people, he was
theirs.
It was no wonder that Muscovites had rallied to him in those dark days the previous summer.

Borzov motioned Arkin to a chair, chided him good-naturedly for refusing a glass of vodka—“Don’t say it, Kolya; someone has to remain sober, no?”—and then went to sit behind his desk, one side of which was
covered with banks of telephones, some white and others colored but all without numbers. Under the Kremlin telephone system, each phone was connected to only one other person, which meant that the number of telephones was a direct indicator of seniority. No one had more phones than the president, of course. A modern exchange, though infinitely easier and more flexible, would have defeated the point: what matters in Russia is not just who has the power, but who’s
seen
to have that power.

“It’s very simple, Mrs. Liddell,” Borzov said. “Russia is reforming, God knows, we’re reforming. Prices are being freed next Thursday, we’re stabilizing the money supply, creating a new tax system, protecting property rights and contracts, and so on. It sounds very simple put that way, no?” He nodded toward Arkin. “Kolya understands all this much better, which is why Anatoly Nikolayevich made him prime minister, to see this whole program through. And he tells the chief that the one thing we need to do before everything else, the one thing that’s of paramount importance, is to privatize. The state owns everything, absolutely everything: diamond mines, food stores, oilfields, barber shops. Yes, Gorbachev’s reforms have ushered in some new beasts—leased enterprises, joint-stock companies, economic associations, cooperatives—but these are little more than variations on a theme. If we’re to be a proper market economy, the state must own
nothing
, yes? As little as possible, anyway. So we put out some feelers. ‘Who knows about privatizing command economies?’ we asked. We asked everyone—international organizations, other governments, embassies—and one name came up time and again. Yours.”

Alice wasn’t surprised; quite the opposite, in fact. She’d have been insulted if she hadn’t been chosen. In the mid-eighties, she’d been the first woman to work on Milken’s infamous junk-bond trading floor in Beverly Hills. Headhunted from Wall Street at decade’s end, she’d spent the last two years running privatization programs in Eastern Europe, suddenly liberated after the momentous autumn of 1989 when government after government toppled, the Berlin Wall was dismantled and the Ceaucescus were executed by their own people. If there was a single person who’d shuttled between Budapest, Prague and Warsaw more than Alice had in that time, she’d yet to meet them. But she’d always been conscious that, however important her work there had been, it was little more than a dress rehearsal for the big one—Mother Russia herself.