Vodka (59 page)

Villages had been sealed off and communications cut as lend-lease Studebaker trucks drew up to transport everyone to Grozny station, where hundreds of freight trains were lined up and waiting. The Russian soldiers had been drunk. They had given the Chechens twenty-five minutes to get ready before sending them off, thousands of miles across the desert wastes. The deportees were fed once a week, nowhere to wash, nowhere to piss, nowhere to shit, typhoid in the carriages, the harshness of the Kazak winters matched only by the coldness of the Kazaks themselves, who had been told that here were cannibals come to drink their blood.

Karkadann’s grandfather had left the train at a stop to get some snowmelt to drink, and a Russian soldier shot him dead on the spot. Now the Chechen warlord sat in an anonymous room in an anonymous part of town and seethed.

There was no one at Petrovka—every available policeman was down at Red Square. So Irk found himself alone, with time and space to think—though he’d have been better off with neither. What had happened in Smolensky Square would have cost him his job were it not for Arkin’s
continuing interest in the case. Yerofeyev was complaining to everyone in sight about the loss of so many men, as well he might. And still Irk waited in dread anticipation of another adolescent corpse.

With the auction getting closer, the Chechens should be upping the body count rather than throttling back. The delay seemed incomprehensible, and that worried Irk. He never liked what he couldn’t understand.

“What’s the point, Kolya?” Borzov stared gloomily into the dregs of his vodka glass. “What does the president rule, eh?” He gestured around the room. “Not Russia, not even Moscow, just this little fortress.”

“Anatoly Nikolayevich, now’s not the time for negative thoughts. Those idiots churning up Red Square aren’t representative of the people.”

“Anatoly Nikolayevich has never been the deputy, you know, always the boss. Not some apparatchik—the boss. In a thousand years, Anatoly Nikolayevich is the first politician to make it to the top because the people love him. That has to be worth something, surely?”

“It’s worth everything, Anatoly Nikolayevich.”

Borzov filled and drank, each drop dragging him further into the morass of depression. “Perhaps we’re ahead of our time, Kolya. We can see what others can’t. You play chess, Kolya?”

“Of course.”

“In chess, you never play to the end. If you’re going to lose, you resign, you don’t go through the motions of a futile endgame and let your opponent humiliate you.”

Borzov raised himself from his chair and went to look out the window once more. “They used to love the
president, Kolya. You remember? And now they expect miracles from him. They expect him to heal the sick, punish the corrupt, feed the poor. What else do they want? A human sacrifice? For Anatoly Nikolayevich to appear on the mausoleum and shoot himself?”

Arkin was at his side. “Anatoly Nikolayevich, if you give in now, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Monday, February 24, 1992

I
t was just after ten in the morning when four Chechens walked into the Sberbank branch on Ostozhenka. They ducked under a vast banner advertising the privatization and bypassed the Monday-morning lines, the manager himself ushering them quickly into his office—for who knew what Chechens would do if kept waiting? Producing warrant cards identifying them as representatives of the Ministry of Finance in Grozny, they informed the manager that they had come to pick up the privatization vouchers that were due to be distributed today.

“Vouchers for where?” the manager asked. “Grozny?”

“The entire Chechen Republic.”

The manager raised an eyebrow. “That’s more than a million vouchers.”

They gestured to a fleet of vehicles outside. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

“There are no more elastic bands to wrap them with; is that a problem?” the manager asked. “The girls are using cut-up strips of condoms instead; they say it’s no great loss, their husbands refuse to wear them anyway.” He took a sheet of paper from a drawer. “I’ll need you to sign the authorization order. It allows you to take the vouchers away, and transfers responsibility for their safekeeping from us to you.”

“No problem,” they said, each man signing with an illegible flourish.

Another consignment of vouchers arrived at Red October, though this one numbered thousands rather than millions: one for each distillery worker, real or mythical. Lev took the packages into his office and locked them in the safe.

The intercom buzzed. He crossed over to the desk and flicked it on. “Yes?”

“Tengiz calling for you,” Galina said.

“Tell him to go to hell.”

“He’d really like to—”

“You heard me, Galya.”

Galina clicked off the intercom and took Sabirzhan off hold. “He won’t talk to you, Tengiz.”

“Galya, I need to see him.”

“Why?”

“This thing’s gone far enough. Someone has to make the first move toward reconciliation, but since he won’t let me in the distillery, what can I do?”

She sat up straighter. “You’re all out of favors with me.”

“Just tell me … is he going anywhere I could catch him?”

“Well …” She sucked air through her teeth. “You didn’t hear this from me, but I’ve just made reservations for him at the Vek. Tomorrow night, eight o’clock. You could, I don’t know, go there for dinner with a couple of people, accidentally on purpose, and act like it’s a big surprise to see him.”

“I’ll do that. Not a word, eh? You’re a star. Thanks, Galya.”

“You can leave me alone now.”

Sabirzhan walked across Red Square, where an army of municipal workers were still clearing up yesterday’s debris. The display windows in the GUM department store gaped jagged where they’d been broken. Nearby, a man in a laborer’s jacket was scrubbing at a stain easily recognizable as blood, even against the dark red of the cobbles.

The riot had jolted the government, but no more. Borzov was still in power; Arkin had lambasted the rioters as hooligans and reactionaries trying to derail the forces of progress; the West was still supporting the privatization program; and Lev was still in the distillery. Nothing had changed. The auction was in a week, that was all the time he had left.

Sabirzhan had one option remaining. It was a course of action he’d considered in the past but always rejected, save as a last resort. He got in his car and headed west—to Smolensky Square, where the Chechens were.

Tuesday, February 25, 1992

S
ame Sberbank branch and same manager as the previous day; four different Chechens, this time in the uniforms of the Grozny police. “There have been some irregularities in the voucher pick-up schedule,” one of them said. “You still have the authorization order?”

“Of course.”

“Give it to me. We’re taking it in for forensic testing.”

The bank manager opened his drawer. “No,” the Chechen said. “Don’t touch it—we must do this properly.” He opened a small bag and brought out a pair of rubber gloves, some tweezers and a clear plastic envelope. On went the gloves, the tweezers gripped at the paper, the authorization order was dropped in the envelope.

“Shouldn’t we report this?” the bank manager said, goggle-eyed at his bit part in such a drama. “To Petrovka—to the Kremlin, even?”

“Who do you think asked us to come here in the first place? Just let us handle it; there’s a good fellow.”

The Chechens were back at the Belgrade Hotel inside the hour. They had a million vouchers and the authorization order. Sberbank had absolutely no record that they’d ever been there. When Karkadann heard the news, he corrugated his face into something that began as a grimace and ended as a smile—the first anyone had seen from him in a long time.

Officially, vouchers could be sold for cash, invested in an enterprise of the holder’s choice, or put in a voucher investment fund. Unofficially, and entirely predictably, a fourth market had sprung up overnight: vouchers could be traded for vodka, usually at the rate of one for three bottles. All over Moscow, kiosk owners put up signs saying: “Vouchers bought here.” In the old central post office, now the city’s raw materials and commodities exchange, a bust of Lenin watched inscrutably as dealers added vouchers to the list of goods bought and sold. On the sidewalk outside, Arkin could be found urging an old man not to sell his voucher, but rather to invest it wisely. “Nikolai Valentinovich,” the old man replied, “I’d sell it to you right now if I thought you were fool enough to buy it.”

The maître d’ at the Vek greeted Lev like a long-lost friend. It was the first time Lev had been there since New Year’s Eve. Both Lev and Alice had dressed up for the occasion. Places like this thrived on exclusivity and patrons were expected to make the effort.

Even after everything that had happened over the previous few days, none of the other diners whispered or pointed fingers at Lev and Alice. She half wanted someone to, just so she could give them a piece of her mind; her period wasn’t far off, and a good rant would leach away some of her tension.

A table was presented, chairs pulled out, vodka and menus brought. The bodyguards sat at adjacent tables, close enough to see, too far away to hear. Lev chose an apple-filled goose, Alice a perch fish packed with mince and with olives for eyes. A jazz band played as softly and
unceasingly as a river beneath the conversation. Outside, the dim sodium glow of the streetlights cast a suitably downbeat tinge on the perpetual stream of drones who trudged past. Home to work, work to home, nothing in between but survival.

Was it obscene, Alice thought, that they could come to a place like this and spend two hundred dollars a head? Of course. But then, many Muscovites were so poor that a trip to McDonald’s seemed grotesquely extravagant.

They were halfway through their entrées when the attack came.

Three cars, BMWs by the look of them, passing at high speed, Chechens leaning out the windows while their guns spat flames at the Vek’s window. “Down!” Lev yelled. “Everybody down!” and they were plunging for the floor even as he shouted. In the half-second separating chair from carpet, Lev saw everything with remarkable clarity: passersby scattering and falling in terror onto the sidewalk outside; his own bodyguards waving their weapons around in frustrated impotence, unable to fire because the cars had gone and there were too many civilians in the way; Alice’s face pressed against the ground, eyes scrunched shut in fear.

No, Lev thought, there’s something wrong. He clambered upright with ursine determination, ignoring a warning from one of his guards that he should keep down. It was what he’d heard, or rather what he
hadn’t
heard, like the dog that didn’t bark. He hadn’t heard all the things he’d expected to: he hadn’t heard breaking glass, or grunts and screams from people taking bullets in their guts. Lev knew these sounds as well as he knew Pushkin, and there was only one explanation for their absence: the Chechens had been using blanks.

The others were slowly getting to their feet. They dusted themselves off and looked with bewilderment at the Vek’s windows, entirely undamaged, and at the people outside, laughing nervously as they helped each other up. “They were using blanks!” someone shouted, and they could all see that, but Lev’s mind was already one step on. Yes, they’d been using blanks—but why?