Vodka (77 page)

Snow was piled car-high on the verges, and the paths were littered with malevolent gray chunks of ice. Beyond tracts of whitened grass and shrubs wrapped in burlap against the winter, skaters glided serenely on the ice rink. Recognizing Lewis and the others waiting in line to rent skates, Alice went to join them.

Alice had always been a good skater—figure skating, of course, not speed skating, because to be a good speed skater you need thighs that can kick-start a Concorde. For Alice, skating was virtually the only method of human propulsion that wasn’t in some way ungainly, and when she got it right she felt as if she were soaring.

They took to the ice with varying degrees of grace and success: Harry was surprisingly good, Christina unsurprisingly bad, and there was nearly an international incident when Lewis managed to stop by the simple but antisocial method of plowing straight into the nearest old woman. One by one they retired to sit beside the rink and eat their picnic, leaving Alice to skate alone, her thoughts turning in circles with her blades.

Lev was gone, her job was gone. Should she leave Lewis or stay with him, leave Moscow or stay here, stay in finance or try journalism—or just keep on skating, drinking, spiraling, until she’d eliminated every course but one?

Alice skated on. Her nose and lips were cold and doubtless turning purple, but the rest of her felt warmed by all the vodka she’d drunk. She imagined her insides
pulsing like the core of a reactor. Hadn’t one of the early privatization proposals she’d received been from a company wanting to make “Thermonuclear” vodka?

Her eye was suddenly caught by a man pushing himself along on a trolley. He had no legs, she saw, but he was amazingly sure-footed—well, sure-wheeled—riding over the iced ruts rather than through them. It was Rodion, she realized, pumping away with his massive arms.

“Rodya!” She skated over to the side of the rink. “Rodya!”

He slowed and smiled at her. “You skate well. I saw you.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

“You’re certainly well equipped.” He pointed at her clothes—skates, fur coat, gloves, fur hat—and then looked past her to Josh. “Yours?”

Alice indicated Bob and Christina. “Theirs.”

Josh, perpetually inquisitive, was already on his way over, chewing extravagantly on a piece of toffee. “All those candies.” Alice tutted in mock disapproval. “Won’t your ass get stuck shut?”

Christina was talking loudly about how Moscow was no place for children, not really, not American children at any rate; she made Josh sit under a sunlamp every other day, she said, to counteract the lack of sunlight and vitamin D.

Whenever Alice worried that she was a bad person, she was reassured to discover that Josh loved her as much as ever. Children were clear-sighted judges of good and evil, weren’t they? Malice can deceive the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it may be hidden, a child will sense it and be repelled by it.
Alice might have been wrong-headed, muddled, out of control, confused, all that—but malicious and deliberately hurtful, definitely not. Quite the opposite, in fact. What had all her lying to Lewis been about, if not to keep him from being hurt?

Josh was chatting to Rodion as if he were a favorite uncle. Rodion grinned at him and began to sing in a deliberately absurd falsetto and Josh clapped his hands and laughed. Rodion asked if he could have a candy, and when Josh gave him one, he pretended to swallow it and then magicked it out of Josh’s ear.

“What’s going on, Alice?” Christina shouted.

“We’re fine,” Alice replied, resisting the urge to flip Christina the finger.

“You’ve got another one in your ear,” Rodion told Josh.

Josh felt inside both ears. “Have not.”

“Have too.” Rodion leaned forward and plucked the candy from his ear again.

“More!” Josh cried. “More!”

Rodion ducked out of the sling he used to carry his belongings, hopped off his trolley and, placing his hands flat on the ground, slowly turned his head and trunk through a full circle, like a gymnast on the rings. Then he began somersaulting down the path, Josh tumbling end over end to keep up with him, all the way to the nearest corner, and all the way back.

“Auntie Alice,” Josh said, “will you give me a piggyback? On the ice?”

“Sure.”

There was a pile of vodka bottles—all empty, of course—heaped against the edge of the rink. Alice took eight bottles, four in each hand, their necks between her
fingers, and set them out in a line on the rink, each one a couple of paces from the next. Then she squatted down, let Josh climb onto her shoulders, and gripped his legs under her armpits as she straightened up.

“Alice, what are you doing?” Christina said.

“Aw, Mom, we’re fine,” Josh replied.

“You tell her, Josh,” Alice giggled. She skated once around the perimeter of the rink, minutely but constantly adjusting her balance as Josh shifted on her shoulders, before approaching the row of vodka bottles at speed and passing through them in an expert slalom.

“Yeah!” Josh shouted. “Way to go, Auntie Alice! Again!”

She turned and made a second approach run, except this time she spun around at the last moment and took the line backward, crossing and uncrossing her legs for each alternate bottle.

“Do be careful,” Christina said. “That looks awful dangerous.”

The vodka hummed in Alice’s brain; she felt invincible. She squeezed her upper arms tighter against Josh’s legs. “Ready for a jump and spin?”

“Yeah!”

“OK, here goes. Katya Witt, eat your heart out.”

Alice hadn’t done a jump in years, but she could remember the basics: speed and confidence, speed and confidence. She took long strides to get herself moving, feeling her quadriceps stretching as her legs extended, and then shorter steps to maintain the velocity. One deep breath as she gathered herself, and up they went.

It was all wrong, Alice knew that the moment her skates left the ice. Her balance was hopelessly off, and Josh’s weight above her shoulderline was making it even
worse. She was falling backward, and if she landed on her back then Josh would hit the ice hard—and she couldn’t have that. But if she managed to twist herself so she was falling forward instead, his knees would take both her weight and his, and she couldn’t have that either. All these thoughts came pinging through her head in fractions of a second, as did the solution. And so Alice ducked her head and flipped Josh over the top of it, still holding him, so that she would hit the ice first and he would land on top of her.

The impact didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would. She was drunk enough to be reasonably limp, and the padding of her jacket and hat helped cushion the blow. A moment after she’d landed, she caught a mouthful of downy parka as Josh landed on her face. But he was all right, and so was she. He bounced off her with high-pitched squeals.

“Great! Let’s do it again, Auntie Alice! Let’s do it again!”

Alice lay still for a moment, her eyes filled with the unrelenting gray of the Moscow sky, and then she began to laugh hysterically.

“Josh! Josh!” It was Christina. “Are you OK?”

“Mom, I’
m fine.
That was
great.”

Lewis appeared in Alice’s vision, on his knees beside her. “I was over by the shoot-da-chute, I didn’t see anything. What happened?”

“I fell. I’m fine.”

“Let me check. Where did you hit your head?” He removed her hat and ran a hand over her head, probing through her hair for any damage. She reached up and guided his hand to a place on the back of her skull. “There.”

His fingers moved like a pianist’s. “Just a boo-boo. You’ll have a bump and a headache.”

“That’s called a hangover, Lewis.”

“Don’t joke, Alice.” He felt again, to be sure. “You’re lucky. A hickey, nothing more.”

“A hickey?” Harry said. “You’d better be worried if your wife’s got a hickey … I mean …” He trailed off into communal silence; memories of Alice and Lev were still too raw.

“A hickey in New Orleans is a bump on the head,” Lewis said neutrally. “We call the other thing a passion mark.” He hopped to his feet, and Christina took his place in Alice’s face. “What the hell were you playing at, Alice? How could you be so irresponsible?”

“Probably,” Alice giggled, “because I’m drunk.”

“You’re damn right. It’s disgraceful.”

“Christina”—Alice propped herself up on one elbow—“it was an accident. Josh isn’t hurt, and neither am I.”

“You think I couldn’t care less about you? He’s not hurt by sheer chance; you’re not hurt because you’re so pickled. I don’t want you touching my son ever again, you hear me?”

“I love your son as though he were mine.”

“Then maybe you should
have
your own.”

“Maybe you should shut the fuck up.”

“Come on, Alice,” said Lewis. “I’ll take you home.”

“Home? Why home?”

“Don’t start this.”

“Home, because that’s where a woman should be? Not me. I have a brain and I have balls and I use them both, and fuck you all.”

“I think we should
all
go home,” said Bob. He was
making damping motions with his hands, to calm things down. “Come on, Christina. Josh! Home!”

Alice was looking at Lewis, and she saw the panic flash in his eyes as he realized.

“Josh!” Bob shouted again, swiveling on the spot as he looked for his son.

Josh was nowhere to be seen. Nor, for that matter, was Rodion.

“He’ll be all right,” said Alice weakly.

“Well, he’s clearly not, is he, you stupid bitch?” Christina snapped.

“We can play the blame game afterward,” said Bob. “Wherever they’ve gone to, they can’t have gone far. Let’s split up. Christina and I will go over there—” He pointed north, up toward the Kremlin. “Harry, you go there—” West, in the direction of the river. “And Alice and Lewis, that way—” South, to the main body of the park. East was across the ice rink, and they could see that Josh and Rodion weren’t there. “If you see a policeman, tell him what’s happened. We’ll meet back here in fifteen minutes.”

It was hard enough to stay balanced on Gorky Park’s ice-slippery paths when walking normally; panic and haste made it twice as difficult. Harry and Christina both fell over within a few strides of setting off, and Bob and Lewis looked in danger of following suit. Alice was the only one who seemed unaffected. As she ran, she wondered whether it was because she’d started walking like a Russian, carrying her weight above her belt.

Through the trees, she could hear Christina’s keening, a mother crying for her child.

Alice ran as though the hounds of hell were at her heels. Vodka and adrenaline had made her extraordinarily
alert. When she scanned opening vistas of startled passersby and empty fairground rides, she felt as though her brain were capable of processing vast amounts of information in the blink of an eye. Lewis was finding it hard to keep up. She heard him yelp, and when she looked around he was emerging from a pile of blackened slush.

They stopped, looked and ran; stopped, looked and ran; and nothing, no sign. There were too many people—perfect for a legless man to hide himself and a small boy. “Have you seen them?” she asked passersby breathlessly. “Have you seen them?” Shrugs, blank looks, commiserations; nothing helpful.

Around another corner and there they were, more than a hundred yards ahead, glimpsed fleetingly through a space in the throng. It looked as though Josh was slung over Rodion’s shoulder. Alice cupped her hands to her mouth and hollered. “Rodya! Josh!”

Rodion looked around and then turned away. She was about to shout again when she saw them disappear into the ground, and the sight stopped her dead.
Into the ground?

Later, Alice wouldn’t remember covering the space between where she’d been standing and where they’d vanished. Suddenly she found herself standing by a manhole cover, sitting slightly askew, improperly replaced, and she knew.

Lewis was at her side. “What the—?”

“Quick!” she barked. “Give me a two-kopeck piece!”

Irk hadn’t enough men to mount a full-scale search of the sewers, so he was left with two options. Either he could hunt Rodya by himself, and he was not sure he was
mentally or physically strong enough for that; or he could finally bite the bullet, go to Lev, take a dozen Mafiosi, and be grateful for their help.

Like most things to which Russians refer as choices, it was nothing of the sort.

Alice was waiting for them at the manhole. It took them twenty minutes to get there, and each of those seemed like a lifetime. If Josh … if something happened to him …

Lewis had gone back to the rendezvous by the ice rink to collect the others. They stood and watched as Irk led his temporary allies down into the underworld. “You find him, you hear me?” Christina shouted. “You find him!” And then they were gone.

The sewers were a labyrinth. Irk had to second-guess Rodion, or they would never catch him.

Rodion had heard Alice shout, so he’d know the chase would be on. He wouldn’t risk killing Josh somewhere open, where he might be found. Instead he’d take him into the unknowable depths. On the other hand, he must have been desperate to snatch someone in broad daylight from a woman who knew him. Rodya had nothing left to lose now that his name was known and his cover blown. Irk thought briefly of Sveta and Galya, still blissfully ignorant that they’d borne and married a monster respectively. Then he thought of the times Rodya had offered to “help” with the case, and his heart hardened once more.

Irk ran his flashlight down three tunnels before he found what he was looking for: tracks. They were intermittent and sometimes faint, but they were definitely there. Extended drag marks where the tips of Josh’s little
boots had trailed; splayed marks from Rodya’s hands; knurled lines from the wheels of Rodya’s trolley.

Irk led the way. In the larger pipes, the men could walk four abreast; smaller sewers forced them into a stooping single file, past electric pumps that maintained flows at least ankle-deep and thus concealed the tracks that were Josh’s only lifeline. Irk lost the trail, found it again, lost and found—he needed Theseus’ thread. When they came across a stream running red, Irk started; his first thought was that he was wading through blood, but the accompanying chemical smell reproached him for his silliness. The red flow was nothing more sinister than the efflux from a paintworks.