Vodka (7 page)

Butuzov lowered the binoculars fast and grabbed Ozers’s arm. “Quick! Let’s go.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“I’ve got an idea.” Butuzov was already running toward the parking lot.

He’d fired the engine of their deliberately nondescript Volga saloon and was already reversing in an extravagant circle before Ozers managed to close his door. The Volga, sufficiently dirty to make the color of its paint work a matter for conjecture rather than observation, shot down the Kolomenskoe access road far quicker than either its suspension or the road surface warranted. Broken nose and straggly beard arranged in violent concentration, Butuzov took two right turns and, after slowing briefly at a junction to get his bearings, a third onto a side street pocked with cheerless apartment houses. He stopped with a lurch and reached under the dashboard for the lever to release the hood catch.

“What’s wrong?” said Ozers.

“Pretend we’ve broken down.”

“In this piece of shit? That won’t be hard.”

Butuzov walked around to the front of the car, propped the hood open and began to peer at the Volga’s innards. He was not a moment too soon; the Comstar van was already coming around the corner. Butuzov straightened, turned and held out his hand. For a moment, he thought that the driver hadn’t seen him or was simply ignoring him; then the van pulled to the side and stopped a few feet away. The driver leaned out the window.

“Thanks for stopping,” said Butuzov. “You got some jump cables?”

“You got some vodka?”

“A bottle in the boot.”

“Then I’ve got some jump cables.”

“He’d have done it for free in the old days,” muttered Ozers. Everybody wanted to be paid nowadays, and vodka was the universal currency.

The Comstar driver got out of his van. His trousers flapped an inch or so above his ankles; his socks were thin enough in places to be leaking skin, and his shoes were cheap Soviet plastic.

There were several bottles in the Volga’s trunk; few Russian motorists venture onto the roads without. Butuzov picked the cheapest and fished out three glasses from a cardboard box; it’s the height of bad manners to swig straight from the bottle.

“Here we go,” he said, handing them each a glass. “Keeps the cold out.” He pulled the foil top off the bottle and poured them each one hundred grams. “I’m Kiril, he’s Eduard.”

“Maltsev, Yaroslav.” The Comstar man shook their hands; his palm was slippery from patting the gel on his hair. “My friends call me Yarik.”

“Well, Yarik, your good health.” They clinked glasses. Maltsev downed his in one, Ozers and Butuzov sipped, for Lev banned any more than moderate drinking. “A drunken person has no secret,” the
vor
liked to say, “and I’ve never met an alcoholic man of honor.”

Butuzov indicated the Comstar logo on the side of the van. “Fixing phones?”

“Installing them.” Maltsev jerked his head back toward Karkadann’s estate. “Fancy house back there. Some coon with more money than sense. Top-of-the-range stuff, high-speed lines, nothing but the best. Black-ass could call the space station with that lot.”

“It’s Saturday; must have been a big job, to get you out at the weekend.”

“That’s the way it is now. Weekends, holidays—you need the money, you work whenever they say. If they pay you, who cares? Anyway, I’ve finished now.”

“Let’s get on with it, then,” Ozers said.

Maltsev emptied his glass, went around to the back of his van and yanked open the rear doors. Butuzov turned to Ozers and whispered, “Pretend the car won’t start. Make a big song and dance. Keep your foot on the throttle and flood the engine if you can—just enough to distract him for a minute or so.”

Ozers nodded. The bags under his eyes were sufficiently pronounced to be knife scars.

Maltsev reappeared with jump leads dangling from his hand like grass snakes. He opened the van’s hood, attached the clips to his battery and repeated the process under the Volga’s hood. When all the clips were attached, he started his engine and signaled to Ozers that he should follow suit.

Butuzov heard the Volga’s engine cough asthmatically and die. He walked quietly around to the back of the Comstar van and looked inside. Everything he needed was within reach of the door, which was good; climbing inside would shift the van’s weight and alert Maltsev. It would of course have been easier simply to shoot Maltsev and steal the van, but keeping civilians safe was one of Lev’s most sacred tenets. Mafiosi could harm fellow Mafiosi, Lev said, but never the man in the street.

“Try again,” Butuzov heard Maltsev shout over the noise of his engine, followed by, “Don’t keep pumping the gas, you’ll flood the fucking thing.”

Three abortive efforts at starting the Volga later, Butuzov reappeared and gave Ozers a discreet nod. When Ozers next turned the key in the ignition, he twisted it fully rather than halfway as he had been doing before, and the engine started perfectly.

“Thanks for your help, Yarik.” Butuzov handed Maltsev the vodka bottle. “Don’t spill any, eh?” With the foil cap removed, there was no way of closing the bottle. Proper drinkers always finish an open bottle; when they go to the fridge, it’s to get a new bottle rather than put the current one back for another day.

“I won’t. You can count on that.”

The flush in Maltsev’s cheeks wasn’t entirely due to the cold. Butuzov suspected that Maltsev would opt for the simplest way of avoiding spillage and relocate the vodka from bottle to stomach.

They watched the Comstar van leave. “If that bottle’s more than glass and air by tonight, I’m a Chechen,” Butuzov said.

“Would you mind telling me what all that was about?”

Maltsev’s one working brake light flared dimly as he paused at the junction, and then he was gone from sight. Butuzov walked over to the nearest parked car and bent down to retrieve what he’d left behind the rear bumper; a set of Comstar engineer’s overalls, and a toolbox.

Sunday, December 29, 1991

T
he guards at Karkadann’s gatehouse—all Chechens, naturally, for Chechens trust only their own kind—frisked Butuzov and searched his van before letting him through. The precautions were standard, and there was no reason for the Chechens to be suspicious. They had no way of knowing that the Comstar logo had been painted on the van only last night, or that the sign writer responsible had been paid five hundred dollars for his services and five hundred more to keep his mouth shut.

At the front door of the mansion itself, however, Sharmukhamedov was more suspicious. His head was freshly shaved and his beard trimmed neater than usual; neither detracted from his air of menace. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“There’s a problem with your lines,” Butuzov said.

“Not that we’ve reported.”

“You wouldn’t have. We picked it up at the central exchange about an hour ago.”

“Who else is affected?”

“Hundreds of people. But our most valuable customers get priority.”

Sharmukhamedov nodded, as if priority was no more than his right. “What happened to the other guy? The one who was here yesterday?”

“Yarik? Sick. Stupid bastard drank some dodgy vodka.”

Maybe it was the use of Maltsev’s name, or the all too plausible intimation of vodka poisoning; either way, Sharmukhamedov’s suspicions seemed to be allayed. He jerked his head back toward the interior of the house; in you come. A moment, a decision; a mistake.

Ozers had wanted to come too, of course, but Butuzov had disagreed and Lev had supported him. Two people for what was one man’s job might arouse suspicion; unlikely, perhaps, but Karkadann was as paranoid as they came, so it wasn’t worth taking the chance. If Butuzov was discovered and things turned nasty, an extra person would make little difference in a house full of armed Chechens. So Butuzov had come alone, unarmed, and very scared.

“I’ll need to see all the phones,” said Butuzov, impressed at how steady his voice sounded.

“Sure. But I’m with you all the time, understand?”

Butuzov shrugged with a nonchalance he didn’t feel. “Whatever.”

The house was warm, huge and unbelievably gaudy. To Butuzov the place seemed overblown and tasteless. Golden nymphs squatted on banister ends or pranced in crystal fountains. The paintings were hideous art nouveau, more often than not made even more vulgar by being set in relief. Karkadann’s bedroom had spreads of scarlet satin and a mirrored ceiling; his bathroom boasted two Jacuzzis.

There were thirty-two handsets in the house, but Butuzov knew the best place for him would be Karkadann’s study. It was hard to see across the room; the overhead chandelier was the only light on, and each window was taped over with cardboard packing sheets. A layman might have assumed this had something
to do with redecoration, but a Mafioso knew better. The sheets were a precaution against snipers; denying a shooter visual into the room and diffusing the body heat of those inside, thus rendering infrared rifle sights useless.

Lying on his back under the desk, Butuzov made a big show of unscrewing the wall socket and poking around among the wires in there; they’d taught him this at the KGB institute, of course, it was the kind of thing he could have done in his sleep. Even if Sharmukhamedov had been lying under the desk with him, he’d have seen nothing. Butuzov had the bug hidden between two fingers, and he simply pressed it among the wires as he fiddled, pushing hard to compensate for the shaking in his hand. But crawling on the floor with a telephone repairman was several notches below Sharmukhamedov’s dignity; he stood and watched, missed and failed.

Butuzov replaced the plastic covering on the socket and sat up fast. He was too much of a professional to wince in anticipation of his head hitting the underside of the table, even though he knew it would have to hurt if it was to be convincing. He spluttered a couple of expletives and rubbed his skull; a quick, almost imperceptible movement of his right hand from scalp to the underside of Karkadann’s desk and the second bug was in place, stuck fast in the middle of the table, far from the reach of straying hands. One device on the phone line and one in the room; all bases covered.

Butuzov emerged from under the table with a wince—his head really ached, there was nothing fake about that—and packed up his toolbox. Sharmukhamedov didn’t ask whether he was hurt.

“All done,” said Butuzov, picking up the handset and making a show of checking for the dial tone.

Monday, December 30, 1991

B
utuzov and Ozers took turns manning the listening post; four hours on, four hours off, like naval watches. They both spoke decent Chechen, enough to understand the gist of conversations, if not their finer nuances. Much of the material was workaday and mundane—Karkadann discussing dinner arrangements with his wife, Karkadann arranging what sounded like a tryst with a mistress—but two dialogues were sufficiently interesting for Butuzov and Ozers to make transcripts in Russian and pass them on to Sabirzhan.

The first was a late-night disagreement—
another
disagreement, by the sound of it—between Karkadann and Ilmar about the wisdom of engaging the Slavic Mafia alliance in battle.

The second, timed just before nine in the morning, was a brief exchange between Karkadann and Sharmukhamedov.