Vodka (54 page)

Alice thought about this. They’d have questions, but once Lev was gone, she felt she could handle them. “Sure.”

“Perhaps you’ll walk with me through the factory.”

“If you like.”

“I like.”

They took the elevator down to the distillery floor without speaking. Curiously, it wasn’t an awkward silence, more the quiet of old friends who have come to the end of a long road mutually traveled. Alice was surprised by Lev’s lack of animosity. He must be in shock, she thought. Logically, he may have taken on board the news that his time here was at an end; emotionally, she knew, it would take much longer to register. It would be the close of an era for the workers too, she realized. For the younger ones, Lev was the only boss they’d ever had. After five years, even some of the older ones would be hard pressed to remember what had come before him.

As they started out across the vast caverns of the distillery, she fell half a pace behind him. This was his moment, and she understood that she should allow him the dignity of taking it alone. She looked up and around her: at the gangways spanning the ceiling, the pallets stacked against the walls, all the places where she’d run and hidden from him, his cronies, her feelings.

Lev paused by German Kullam, leaned into him and whispered something in his ear. German was looking straight at Alice, and she saw the emotions flit like bats across his face: surprise, realization, determination. He nodded once, decisive.

“What did you say to him?” Alice asked Lev.

Lev didn’t answer. German was already walking away, to the person at the next station; another whisper, another nod, then they both moved down the line and passed the message on again, and so it spread.

The whispers came to Alice as though borne on the west wind.
Zabastovka
, the workers were saying,
zabastovka.

Strike.

If Alice had been impressed at how quickly Lev had started up the machinery on Saturday morning, she was no less awed by the speed with which his employees were shutting the place down now. Conveyor belts creaked and juddered to a halt; bewildered bottles wobbled drunkenly as their endless passage was suddenly suspended, the gurgling and hissing from the stills subsided as though they were falling asleep. Alice heard only footsteps and lowered voices, tones of bereavement. Watching in amazement and not a little awe as Lev led the way through the main door—hadn’t the poster under Resurrection Gate depicted her as the Pied Piper?—she stifled an urge to applaud.

Even Arkin couldn’t find an entire workforce at such short notice. Alice suggested they bring in a skeleton staff from one of the more westernized Eastern Bloc countries, such as Estonia or Poland. Arkin said this would be useless. Lev’s workers were valuable not because they were acquainted with the latest in distillery technology, but because they alone could operate the obsolete equipment that Red October had yet to replace. “The auction’s two weeks away,” Arkin said. “We’ve no choice. We have to bring him back.”

“With all that shit.”

“That auction
has
to go ahead. I don’t care what you’ve found, we can’t do it without Lev. We tried, we failed, we’ve been outmaneuvered—accept it. Rather that than this whole thing goes to shit.”

“I—”

“You’ve brought this on yourself. Listen to me, Alice. Everything rests on this auction. If you mess this up, no international organization will give you a job till the next millennium. Go to him, get what concessions you can, but get him back. At any price.”

“You come with me.”

“No. You’ve been working with him, you’ll persuade him better. Use your charm.”

It was not that Arkin suspected their affair, merely that he was distancing himself, just as Borzov had by leaving Moscow. Arkin would blame Alice for anything that went wrong, saying he’d been mistaken to trust a perfidious foreigner. And it was precisely
because
she was a foreigner, because her life and career weren’t here, that she was expendable. If it still went off OK, Arkin would claim the credit; if it didn’t, dissociation was the only hope he would have of persuading parliament not to throw out the reformist administration. The reformers had no power base worth the name; they were a straggling handful trying to climb Everest, and their only clothes were tiny shreds of legislation liable to be ripped away at any moment.

Alice understood Arkin’s logic, understood too that it was nothing personal against her. Personal and professional might be intertwined with Lev, but not with Arkin.

Lev seemed both pleased and unsurprised when she came to his penthouse, and Alice thought she knew why. In uncovering Lev’s trickery and maneuvering for his dismissal, Alice had shown power, steadfastness and ruthlessness; she’d used her alliances with powerful
men; and she’d shown herself willing to adapt to local conditions. All of these were qualities Lev admired. Yes, they were lovers, but they were also adversaries.

“You want me to come back,” Lev said. “You wouldn’t have come here otherwise.” Alice shrugged. “I can do this anytime I like, you know. Bring my workers out on strike, I mean. I can make them run, jump, roll over, sit up and beg.”

“I know.” She’d realized that Lev had bought his employees heart, soul and conscience.

“So what are you offering?”

“It’s not good for anybody, this way.”

“What are you offering?”

“You have to wind down Krestyakh and restore Red October’s assets. We can’t run an auction with nothing, that’s plain stupid.”

“And in return?”

“Everything else. You can keep everything else the way it is.” It was not a moral judgment, but a practical one. Alice thought how far her original ideals had been eroded. It had been a gradual diminution, a whittling away so subtle she’d hardly noticed it happening, because there’d been a good reason behind every compromise she’d made. “You can’t keep running Red October this way forever. In time, being majority shareholder in a well-run private company will earn you more money than you do now. Agree to that, and the dismissal order’s rescinded.”

He smiled at her. “Persuade me.”

“We need you, but you love that factory. Fair’s fair.”

“No.
Really
persuade me.”

She understood what he was driving at. “No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not appropriate.”

“Not
appropriate?”
He chuckled, and she felt herself swaying. He was quicksand, he was a whirlpool. “Not appropriate is hiding out in factories all night. Not appropriate is accusing your lover of trying to kill you. Come.” He reached out a hand, a force field that dragged her closer. “You’re very persuasive when you put your mind to it. And I need a lot of persuading.”

She nuzzled his neck. “This much?”

“More.”

She kissed gently around the edge of his mouth. “This much?”

He shook his head with a look of mock disappointment, and she laughed as she unbuttoned his shirt and felt inside. “This much?”

“Ah. Finally, I’m beginning to see the merits of your proposal.”

She worked at his belt. “This much?”

“Now, Alice, those are some
excellent
points you’re making!” The rumbling of his laughter gladdened her heart.

Tuesday, February 18, 1992

U
nder communism, people had complained about the authorities; now they complained
to
the authorities. Every man and his dog seemed to be calling Petrovka for a good old moan. It was Irk’s misfortune to get saddled with a particularly vehement busybody.

“Why aren’t you doing something about the niggers, that’s what I want to know?” she shouted. “There are
hundreds
of them near me, riding around in their gaudy cars and causing heaven knows what kind of trouble.”

“It’s a free country, madam.”

“More’s the shame. Day and night they’re here, putting good people in fear of their lives. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is. I won’t be letting my kids out of my sight, that’s for sure—not now that
he’s
down here.”

“He?”

“The gangster. The one who’s on TV, ranting and raving. You know.”

Irk’s office was as overheated as every other room in Moscow, but now he shivered. “Where exactly do you live, madam?”

“Shubinsky Avenue.”

“Where’s that?”

“Off Smolensky Square, just around the back of the Belgrade Hotel. That’s where they are.”

Of course they were—that was their headquarters. “Let me get this straight,” Irk said, hardly daring to believe it. “Karkadann’s there?”

“Karkadann, yes, that’s him.”

“You saw him yourself?”

“With my own eyes, and there’s nothing wrong with them. There I was in my kitchen, and from there I can see into the back courtyards of the Belgrade. I was looking out, minding my own business”—sure you were, Irk thought—“and there he was, getting out of one of those jeep-type things, a whole bunch of coons around him like he’s the czar or something.”

Irk was already halfway down the corridor.

Homicide didn’t have enough men to spare. Organized crime did.

“An anonymous tip-off?” Yerofeyev said. “You must be mad.”

“Let’s say I’m not. She sounded genuine enough.”

“Then this is a job for the OMON, even the Spetsnaz.” OMON was the interior ministry’s riot police; Spetsnaz were army special forces.

“And by the time we get permission to use either of those, Karkadann will be long gone. He’s always on the move, you know that.” Yerofeyev shrugged, not his problem, and Irk saw the reason for the apathy. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he snapped. “You’ve no reason to
want
Karkadann caught, not with the bribes he’s paying you.”

“You know what you should do, Juku? Call Lev and get
him
to send
his
men over.”

“And take sides in a Mafia war? Never.”

“They’ll do a better job than anyone we’ve got here.”

“I need
your
men, and I need them now.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll go to Arkin and tell him how cooperative you’ve been.”

Four vans, six men in each, and two cars, four men apiece, all racing with blues and twos around the Garden Ring.

“I want roadblocks at each corner,” Irk barked into his radio. “No traffic, in or out—is that understood?”

None of the men in the back of the van looked at him. There were half as many flak jackets as were needed; they’d had to draw lots for them. The ones who’d gotten jackets looked just as nervous as the ones who hadn’t. “These vests might as well be made of newspaper, and
Pravda
at that, for all the truth about them being bulletproof,” said one of Yerofeyev’s men. “Ha! They couldn’t stop a paper plane.”

Why was Karkadann at the Belgrade? That was the last place he should have gone, and therefore, Irk thought with excitement and a dollop of grudging admiration, the most sensible place to have gone. One chance, one chance. Irk was momentarily surprised at how visceral his animosity toward Karkadann was, then he remembered that pretending to execute someone tended to breed enmity.

Smolensky Square loomed ahead, the Belgrade skulking in the shadow of one of Stalin’s vampiric skyscrapers. Irk saw a half-assembled roadblock. “Clean shots,” he said. “Watch your background; watch your background.” Force markers, kicking in like adrenaline.

The police vans and cars slewing to a halt outside the wedding-cake ministry building; men piling from their vehicles; passersby screaming and scattering. “Police—
move,”
Irk shouted at the herd. “Stay down,
stay still.” Juku Irk, chess player reprieved from death, now in the mix and loving it as vengeful bile rose within him. Walking along the sidewalk, running, walking again. A bus and a truck stopped in the square, perfect cover as he tried to see what was going on.

A furious volley; Chechens in the road, tipped off by the roadblocks and waiting for the police; stars of flame bursting from the ends of their machine guns, spent cartridges chattering in spurts to the ground. Dull slaps of falling men, dead before they landed: a Chechen, two cops. Weapons letting rip in concrete canyons; penetrations and ricochets, reverberation coming in patterns. Vehicles sinking and listing as bullets tore the air from their tires. More men down, sprawling across each other like drunkards. Glass shattering on advertising billboards of models in silhouette. A Western, a war film, come to Moscow’s streets.

And there he was, right there, as though Irk had simply willed him into being: Karkadann himself, fascistic steel-and-glass towers behind him, this powerhouse of rampant self-interest with his legs apart for stability and hands spitting fire, a brace of guns spraying carnage as Zhorzh ran for cover behind one of the Chechens’ jeeps. Irk saw in Karkadann the lust for havoc, the fever of blood madness to kill everything he could find. If his guns ran dry, he’d fight the cops with knives and iron girders. If those ran out, he’d fight with his bare hands. If he died, he’d take a score of men with him. But he wouldn’t die, he was untouchable, as though he carried a force field around him. Behind Irk, a petrified policeman jabbered, barely coherent, of demons and dark forces.
This is our battlefield
, Karkadann had said,
This is where we’ll win.