Vodka (84 page)

“You could fight it.”

“Why?”

“Lewis, what’s brought this on?”

Lewis almost smiled. “He did.”

“He?”

“Lev. When he brought me to see him the day after you’d stormed out of the Aragvi, to tell me where you were and that you were OK. I didn’t want to listen at the time, but when I’d calmed down and thought about what he’d said, it made sense. He made me realize something I’d been blind to before: you were my addiction just as much as vodka was yours. And by refusing to recognize that, I hadn’t helped you, or me, or us.”

“Lewis, you can’t blame yourself for this. It was my drinking that fucked everything up.”

“Yes, but there are ways and means to get around it, and I didn’t choose any of them.”

“This is…”

“Addictive behavior’s the same, it doesn’t matter what it focuses on. The only way to get over it is to break it. To start with, I denied you had a problem. When I accepted there was something wrong, first I played it down, then I blamed other things for it, then I rationalized it, then I intellectualized it; then I became hostile to it.”

Alice could hear Christina’s voice from next door, hectoring. The world would end before Christina ran out of things to moan about. Alice gestured with her head back toward the dining room. “I’m surprised Christina and Bob are still here, after what happened to Josh. How is he?”

“A touch of concussion, but otherwise fine. He has no idea what happened to him—Bob told him he took a tumble on the ice and bumped his head. It was pretty easy to convince him that the stuff about a goblin dragging him into his cave was all just a bad dream.”

“What about the others? I guess they think I’m the devil incarnate after all this.”

“You really want to know?”

They were his friends, really, not hers. Alice shook her head. “No.”

“Good. You can probably guess, anyway.”

“The only one whose reaction matters is you.”

It sounded trite, but he knew she wouldn’t have come here unless it was true. “Well, as you can see, there’s one more stage after hostility.”

“Which is?”

“Acceptance. You’re an alcoholic and I’m not; I love you and you don’t love me. That’s the way it is, and I
don’t have the energy to keep hiding from it or to hate you for it. I lost you a long time ago. If you want a divorce, I won’t stand in your way.”

The sobs gushed from Alice till she feared being drowned in her own tears.

Tuesday, March 24, 1992

T
he T-4 prickled against Galina’s skin. It was taped to the small of her back, hidden under both a shirt and a sweater, but as far as she was concerned, it could hardly have been more obvious if she’d taken it out, painted it pink and waved it around the room. She was sure Lev would notice that something was awry. Was she walking funny, did her voice sound strained? All she had to do was leave, say she was sorry, it didn’t matter; walk out and leave him none the wiser.

None the wiser, and still free. She thought of Rodya, dead because of the madness that had consumed him. She thought of Sveta, back at the school on Prospekt Mira because life must go on, she must endure, even when her only son was dead and she’d never now be a grandmother. Galina hadn’t told Sveta anything of her plan, because Sveta would have tried to talk her out of it. Galina thought of what Alice had said when she’d convinced her to pass over the Nicosia phone number, about doing things properly; doing things properly
meant not letting people get away with killing other people. She collected herself and resolved that she would do this: get Lev to admit, mention, agree, confess, whatever, that he’d killed Rodya. This was the moment she’d been waiting for ever since Irk had come to tell her that Rodya was dead, and now that it was on her it seemed too soon by half.

The Spetsnaz were there, vanloads and vanloads of them. Some were disguised as maintenance men and window cleaners. Others were dressed all in black and had come up the Kotelniki’s fire escapes and elevator shafts, ready to shoot their way in at a moment’s notice. Lev’s bodyguards were the best in the business, and they’d see off most attacks that rival Mafia bosses could consider, let alone anything run by the police, but a full-scale assault by army special forces was a different matter altogether.

Galina was desperately thirsty. She wanted a drink—not vodka, of course, she needed to keep a clear head—but there was no mineral water in sight, and Moscow tap water isn’t safe to drink without being boiled first, especially in spring, when the melting snow cover slides a goodly proportion of the city’s pollutants into the river.

Lev was looking straight at Galina. He knows, Galina thought, he knows. Don’t be so stupid, her reason said, of course he’s going to be looking at you, you’re the only person here.

“Has that Georgian weasel wrecked my distillery yet?” he asked.

Galina shrugged. “You know how things are.”

“You’re working for
him
now? What’s going on there?”

Galina didn’t want to discuss Red October with Lev, and she didn’t know how a professional would react—wait him out, or try and steer the conversation around—but she was conscious that the transmitter’s batteries were finite, so she did what came naturally: she blurted out what was on her mind. “What happened to Rodya?”

Lev was perfectly still for a moment, then he sat back in his chair, nodding to himself.
“That’s
what you’ve come about. Of course.” He looked at the ceiling, as though pondering what to tell her. Was he embarrassed? That would be a first, Galina thought.

“He was my husband,” she said. “Any woman would want to know.”

“Rodya was sick,” Lev said. “No, he was more than sick. He was wounded, in torment.”

“We could have gotten him help. Not here—abroad, where they’ve got the right pills.”

“He was too sick for pills, Galya. This … it’s hard for you to understand. Don’t take this the wrong way, but to me Rodya seemed like a wounded animal. He was in agony. There’s only one way to deal with a wounded animal, Galya. If you see a dog on the road, hit by a car but still alive, what do you do? Do you drive around it? Not if you have a heart. You line it up under your wheels and put it out of its misery.”

“No!” The wounded animal was in Galina’s cry.

“It was the best thing to do, Galya. It was the
merciful
thing to do.”

She was crying now, and Lev was on his feet, enveloping her in his vast arms. Her husband’s executioner, she thought, trying to comfort her for what he’d done. She pushed back against him, and when he didn’t yield she surrendered to it, burying her face in a
chest so massive that she could suffocate herself there, and he pulled her closer, pressing the wire harder against her skin.

The sensation jerked Galina through her tears. Would he feel the transmitter under her clothes? Why weren’t the Spetsnaz here? Lev had told her what had happened, more or less … That was it, she thought: more or less. He’d implied much, but what had he actually said? They wouldn’t come in until they had a proper confession, and they wouldn’t get a confession if he found the wire. She wriggled free of him.

“Let me get you some vodka,” Lev said.

“Did you kill Rodya?” she said. Too bold?

He was walking across the room, toward the sideboard, and answered her without turning around. “What I did was for the best, Galya. Please don’t ask any more.”

“I need to know.”

He poured two glasses and came back with them. “Why?”

“Because … of course I do.”

He handed her a glass and sat down. “Don’t do this to yourself, Galya.”

“Just tell me. Please.”

Alice walked into the room.

“Galya! I didn’t know you were here.” Alice started across the carpet toward her, and then stopped. Her instinctive reaction at seeing Galya had been happiness; it was only afterward that she’d remembered they weren’t friends, and why. They’d liked each other once. To Alice, it seemed as though their quarrels—like everything else—had taken place in another lifetime.

Lev saw Alice’s confusion, and misinterpreted it. “It’s for medicinal purposes, darling,” he said, gesturing
at the vodka. “I’m about to give Galya a nasty shock. Perhaps you’d prefer to leave the room.”

“I want to see what’s happening in the world,” Alice said, and turned on the television.

Lev, ignorant of the schism between Alice and Galina; Galina, ignorant of Alice’s long fall to the bottom of the bottle and slow rise back; Alice, ignorant of the magnitude of what Galina had come for. Lev opened his mouth to order Alice out, but that would spark an argument, and he was aware, too aware, of her fragility. Perhaps, he thought, this would be easier if she were there. She could give Galya some support, woman to woman. It was a feeble excuse, and Lev was disgusted at himself for making it, but he turned to Galina anyway.

“It was quick. He felt no pain.”

“What was quick?”

“Rodya’s death.”

Noise from the corner; a reporter talking excitedly. Would the Spetsnaz still be able to hear over the noise from the television? Galina moved closer to Lev, no longer caring if it seemed strange. “How did he die?”

“He was shot.”

“Who shot him?”

Lev was a
vor
, and
vory
killed people, even when those people had worked for them, even when the
vor
had befriended their families.
Vory
killed people, and until then Lev had never found it hard to admit. Until a young woman’s relentless, naive probing had weakened him in a way that decades in a jail cell could never have.

“I shot him.”

“You shot him?” You,
you:
that was where she’d laid the emphasis.

“Yes, I shot him—who else?”

Where time had raced before, eating up the transmitter’s precious batteries, it suddenly juddered to a halt. For Galina, every second that the Spetsnaz didn’t come kicking down the door and smashing through the windows stretched as long as a Brezhnev speech; and every moment that passed unchanged brought with it imagined scenarios of doom. The transmission had broken down; they were fighting with Lev’s men outside; 21st Century thugs were raping and killing Sveta in revenge for Galina’s treason.

Galina couldn’t believe what Lev had said; she could believe it all too easily. She raised her glass unsteadily at him, mockery of a toast.
“In vodka veritas,”
she said.

“There was no alternative,” Lev said. Why did he feel the need to explain himself? “Years in one of those stinking jails waiting for …” he stumbled over his words, as his voice had seemed momentarily to be coming back at him from the television set: “… waiting for some judge to get off his ass”—there it was again, definitely coming in stereo, and he knew what it meant even as Galina and Alice shot puzzled looks at each other, finally reunited, albeit only in bewilderment. The frequency on which the T-4 was transmitting was too near that of the television channel Alice was watching, and so it was broadcasting Lev’s voice back through the set. Lev knew what the sound meant, every gangster did, they were paranoid about wires.

Galina, confused, stepped away from Lev’s chair toward Alice, near enough the television set to send a piercing shriek of feedback around the room, and Lev fixed her with the certainty of his glare, deepest hurt and murderous hatred. She knew it must be something to do with the wire. This wouldn’t have happened with the
Nagra, Galina thought helplessly. She should have been firmer back at the Kremlin—
her
, against the two most powerful men in the land, how could she have been?

“In vodka veritas,”
Galina said, and then again, more frantically,
“in vodka veritas, in vodka veritas
—” the last one little more than a yelp.

Galina was backing toward the door, Lev hissing and spitting as he rose from his chair like an erupting volcano, Alice asking: “What the hell’s going on?” and it was all Galina could do to keep her legs moving through mists of white panic, and suddenly the world exploded, light and smoke everywhere, and Galina thought for a moment, really believed, that Lev had somehow spontaneously combusted with rage, and as her eyes streamed and she lost all notion of which way was up, she realized that it was of course the Spetsnaz with their thunder-flashes coming to the rescue, and not a moment too soon.