Vodka (53 page)

The men came for them when they were down by the river. There were two of them, and as they approached, Alice watched with the curious detachment of the slightly drunk. They looked entirely normal, shapeless under heavy dark coats and fur hats, but there was something about the purpose and direction of their gait that pulsed warnings through the vodka fences in her head. As they came past, one knelt down to tie his shoelace while the other kept walking, and Alice was already shouting a warning to Lewis—she knew the impossibility of tying a shoelace when wearing thick gloves—when the first goon grabbed her from behind. He circled one arm around her neck and the other around her waist, pinning her fast. His companion, rising fast from the sidewalk, hit Lewis square in the face and knocked him to the ground before turning toward Alice.

A few cars puttering up and down the embankment, a family on the other side of the highway, a woman walking down toward the bridge—all as remote and unreachable as Mars.

A glint in the sunshine, a knife blooming in a gloved hand.

Alice felt less panicked than curious. For once, she was at the perfect state of intoxication: too drunk to be scared or feel much pain, not drunk enough for her coordination and reactions to have totally deserted her. She jerked her head sharply backward and heard rather than felt the crack against the teeth of the man who was holding her. It was surprise as much as anything that
made him loosen his grip, but surprise was all Alice needed. She felt for his balls through the thick fabric of his trousers and squeezed as hard as she could. When he took an instinctive pace backward, she kicked flat-footed against his knee and heard him howl in pain above the crack of bone.

The knife man slashed at Alice. She saw the blade disappear inside her coat, but didn’t feel it go any farther. She was moving, and he needed a clear shot to get through so many layers—she’d have been dead had it been summer. He pulled the knife out and raised it past his ear, intending an overhand shot. She grabbed at his wrist and brought her knee up into his groin, hard as she could, and with the fingers of her other hand she jabbed at his face, balls and eyes, balls and eyes, and now cars were slowing and people were looking, and he dropped the knife and ran.

Alice went after him, anger making her yell she didn’t know what. When she passed a courting couple, their looks of astonishment made her realize what she must have looked like; a lunatic woman, loose on the city streets. At the same moment, she knew she wouldn’t catch him, and she stopped as the adrenaline subsided.

Lewis was coming toward her. She was surprised at how distant he was, and therefore how far she must have run. His face was streaming blood, and he was shouting something at her. “Too dangerous,” he bawled. “You see? You see now?”

The danger he’d meant was Moscow’s, but it was also in Alice; a woman crazed with anger, who would have killed the man she’d been chasing if she’d reached him. The darkness in her was the darkness in the city, that was why Lewis hated this place so. She reached for
him when he arrived. “What’s doing?” she panted. “Are you OK?”

“Fine, fine.” He brushed her hand away. “Nothing broken.”

Alice saw the other man, the one she’d kicked, being bundled into a car. She was too far away to read the license plate—not that it would have made any difference. The car was bound to be stolen, unregistered, or both. She turned back to Lewis.

“Thanks for asking how
I
am,” she said bitterly.

Monday, February 17, 1992

T
hree adolescent beggars came toward Irk, swaying with the movement of the metro carriage as the train whistled through the tunnels. Street children had never been around under communism—correction, they’d never been
visible
under communism. Now they rode the carriages like pint-sized hobos, dodging the transportation police and begging money from defiantly indifferent passengers. Street kids aroused as much fear as sympathy in adults. Homeless children were outsiders, the neglected ones. Most of them, Irk knew, had two options—begging or crime. When Irk opened his copy of
Argumenty y Fakty
, he saw Arkin reported as saying that “the number of homeless children and their criminalization has
reached threatening proportions. Urgent measures are required.”

That last statement made Irk wince. Urgent measures meant one of two things, piss and wind or mindless brutality, neither of which would help the children. And this in a society that so prizes childhood. Irk thought of Lev’s orphanage, one of the few places to be tackling the problem constructively—and look what was happening there.

The woman on the next seat nudged him. “What can we do?” she asked. “What good can we do?” She waved the children away. Irk gave the nearest one a dollar and shook his head at the others. What good indeed? People felt they couldn’t make any difference on social issues—they’d hardly been encouraged to do so before—and were reluctant to get involved in other people’s problems. Keeping your own head above water was hard enough.

Alice had dressed down: no makeup, hair unbrushed and the most unflattering clothes she could find. She was punishing herself for being lovely, not knowing that this proud hostility to herself made her more attractive to Lev than ever.

Lev, unhurried as ever, took her by the elbow and guided her into his office. He must have checked his paperwork, he must have realized what she’d taken and what she’d seen. She wondered whether he would try to bribe or bludgeon or blackmail her into forgetting about it.

“I’m so glad to see you, Alice. We’re developing a new vodka and it’s a bit of a departure. I’d like you to taste it and tell me what you think.”

“Lev, we don’t have time for this. There are things…”

He slapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth in rebuke, as though she’d committed some dreadful rudeness. “Just when I let myself forget you’re an American, you can’t help but remind me again. Always in a rush, never time for the simple things in life. You
will
sit, Alice, and you
will
taste this with me.”

She sat on the edge of a chair, a sulky schoolgirl, while he poured her a glass. “This is pear-drop vodka. The process is very simple, really; we spread a handful of pear-drop candies across a sieve, place the sieve in the vat and let the alcohol pass over it. Esters impurities are sweet and fruity—we’ve kept a small amount in, to complement the pear drops. Some distillers prefer maceration, but I’ve always believed in circulation: six times a day for a week, and then the vodka’s pumped into barrels to let the flavors fuse and settle for a couple of months. Of course, you get evaporation and a corresponding loss of strength—about ten percent, which we adjust prior to bottling.” He handed her the glass. “What do you think?”

Any aroma of pear drops was submerged under a slightly meaty smell, not unlike stock cubes. Alice knew this was due to the unspent yeasts burned during the distillation. She was getting better. Lev, on the other hand, seemed to be losing his touch. Perhaps it was a sign of change.

She put the glass down and took a deep breath. “All right.
Enough.
Did you try to have me killed yesterday?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Two men, by the river. Whatever you think of what I did here on Friday—”

“Alice, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” His face was closed. He regarded her calmly, happy to
prolong the standoff. “You were attacked?” he asked at length.

“Two men, a deliberate hit. They didn’t want money, they wanted to kill me. Yours?”

“You believe that of me, you can leave here now and never come back.”

She imagined, hoped, saw that it was the truth. “I’m sorry.”

“Were you hurt?”

“Lewis was hit in the face. He’s fine. I—I fought them off.”

“I’d expect nothing less. I’m glad they didn’t succeed.”

“I suppose if they had been yours, they wouldn’t have failed.”

He checked her face to see if she was being serious. “I should sincerely hope not.”

“I want you to read this—” Quickly, before the conversation ran away from her, she handed Lev a copy of what she’d given Arkin: her report, together with the appendices.

Lev read it through, his expression relentlessly placid even when he reached the photocopies of his own stolen papers. Alice waited for—what? Eruptive accusations of theft, indignant protestations of mistaken conclusions, savage denunciations of personal betrayal, but she got none, and it was the last that hurt her, because she
had
betrayed him, and she wanted him at least to recognize that. She wasn’t sure which would be worse: if he really didn’t see the extent of her treachery, or if he was simply determined not to give her the satisfaction of a reaction.

When Lev finished, he bounced the papers on their ends to straighten them and turned to Alice with a smile.
“It’s a shame the Cold War’s over. The CIA could have done with your sort.”

Like Arkin, he’d made no comment about her methods. Had this been America, every politician would have distanced themselves and every lawyer would have been daubing her in coats of inadmissible evidence and trespass. The Russians couldn’t have given two shits. What she’d found was important; how she’d found it was irrelevant.

She handed him an envelope embossed with the prime ministerial seal. Lev opened it with the teasing deliberation of an Oscar-night presenter. Inside was Arkin’s order dismissing him from his post at Red October; dated yesterday, delivered to her house this morning. He read it with the same beatific equanimity as earlier.

“I must confess,” he said, “I don’t see exactly what I’m supposed to have done wrong.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Perfectly.”

God, she thought, there was so much she still had to learn about him. “You’re stealing from the company—no, you’re stealing the company. Without me, there’d have been nothing left of Red October by the time we got to auction day. The whole thing would have been a farce.”

“Why’s that?”

“What’s nothing divided by forty-five thousand shares? Nothing, that’s what.”

“I’m not stealing the company.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“Preserving it.”

“Preserving
it? Tell me how, exactly.”

“This auction—who knows what’ll happen?”

“It’ll all be properly run.”

“Afterward, I mean. You start letting outsiders in, you open up a whole can of worms. But with everything that matters tucked away in Nicosia, under my control, I know it’s safe.”

“And?”

“And I can keep running the place as before, and none of my workers lose their jobs.” He gestured at her report. “Sure, it’s all true. But I’m only stealing from a government that’ll otherwise steal from me.”

“You’re stealing from your workers—the same workers whose jobs you harp on about.”

“Stealing
from them? You’ve seen me with them, Alice. They respect me, no? They wouldn’t respect me if I was ripping them off.”

“They don’t know you’re ripping them off.”

“They get their cut.” Her surprise amused him. “You thought they didn’t?”

“All of them?”

“Indirectly, yes.”

“Your cronies, mostly.”

“I distribute revenue among the workforce according to need as well as seniority. A married man with six children gets more than a single woman, that’s only fair.”

“But you get the most. You and your friends.”

“Of course. The closer you are to product control, the more you take. That’s obvious.”

“It doesn’t make you Robin Hood.”

“Nor does it make me a shop-floor Ceaucescu. Tell me again: how am I
stealing
from them?”

“By forcing them to sell you their vouchers.”

It had been so long since Lev had flipped, from affability to incandescence in an eye’s blink, that he caught Alice quite off guard. “That?
That?
I’m doing them a
favor.
They get something useful—cash. I get a piece of paper that—like all the others the government issues—is worthless. Vouchers are worthless, rubles are worthless, and this”—he brandished Arkin’s order at her—“is worthless.”

“The order is served pending a criminal investigation.”

“You can’t prosecute me. I’m a deputy. I’ve got immunity.”

“Not from an executive order.” Lev shrugged. Alice continued: “There’s two ways we can do this. You can leave now, or I call Arkin and he sends in the heavies and the television cameras, and all Moscow will see you being escorted from the building like a criminal.”

Perhaps for the first time, Alice understood that either Lev would go or she would; they could not both stay. Only with him gone could she regain control of the auction and her life. She didn’t ask what this meant for the two of them. This was the course she’d chosen, and she couldn’t bear to consider the alternatives.

Lev nodded slowly. An oil slick of a smile spread across his face. He held up his hands. “Very well, Alice.” His voice was as calm as it had, a minute before, been furious. “You win. You’ll let me explain things to my workers before I leave?”

“Another time.”

“At least permit me to say good-bye to them as I go.”