Vodka (9 page)

She began to sketch out the second revolution over hamburgers and fries.

When it comes to reforming command economies, there are two schools of thought. The first, shock therapy, holds that it’s best to enact all reforms at once; the social and economic upheaval is so great that a short, sharp jolt is preferable to prolonging the torture with a piecemeal approach. The gradualists take the opposite view; for them, reforms should be staggered in order to avoid large drops in output and mass unemployment, which will in turn threaten political stability and therefore the reform process itself.

Borzov had decided to go with the former. They were going to raze the entire communist structure—clearly the institutions of the communist state were inimical to the spirit of enterprise—and in its stead erect a market economy. If this was implemented quickly and vigorously, the essentials of such an economy would begin to function almost immediately, and the economy would then gain the momentum it needed. The role of the state was simple: to establish the rules of the capitalist game and watch the new society unfold. This was where privatization came in; more specifically, Red October.

“We’re just going to do one auction to start with,” Alice said. “The Red October distillery.”

“Only one?” It was Harry; Alice bet he’d sat in the front row at varsity lectures.

“Yes, only one, to show it can be done. Parliament meets March ninth, and we need to have everything wrapped by then. So the auction will take place the Monday before that, the second.”

“Two months?” Bob’s bottom lip bumped against the straw of his Coke. “That’s
absurd.”
He gestured around the restaurant. “It took McDonald’s fourteen
years
to open this place.”

“You really think it’s impossible, Bob, walk out now and I’ll find someone else, no hard feelings. Yes, two months is very short—and even shorter because we can’t go see Red October until next Monday because they’re all on New Year vacation—but it’s not absurd.”

“We’re gonna have to work twenty-four seven.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“My wife might. She wasn’t that keen on coming here in the first place.”

“She should meet my husband. Harry?”

Harry shook his head. “Bring it on.”

“No wife?” A redundant question. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“Boyfriend?
Hardly. No, none of the above. Young, free and single.” He looked around the room. “And keen-to-mingle. Bob, have you
seen
the chicks in here? I’m fouling my gutchies.”

“Harry, you’re depriving some village of an idiot,” Alice said. “You’re happy to give yourself to me for two months?”

“Is that an offer?”

Alice clicked her tongue. “It’s a phase you’re going through. You’ll grow out of it.”

“This afternoon, if there’s a God,” Bob said.

She saw herself suddenly as Harry must have seen her: smart and sassy and sexy, the girl everyone had wanted to befriend at school, the one who’d share a smoke and drink behind the bike stands, the first one to have a boyfriend, the one who never studied but got good grades. He couldn’t have guessed, this soon after meeting her, the depths below. No one ever could.

“OK.” Alice’s tone was serious. “Enough. We’re gonna show these bastards a bit of good ol’ American kickass. First up, division of labor. Working on the kind of model we used in Eastern Europe, I think the best way is to establish six working groups—we’ll take charge of two each.” She reached into a plastic folder and brought out four small dossiers. “I’ve tried to tailor these to your individual strengths and experience, so if you’ve got a problem with them, I want to hear it now rather than in a month’s time.”

She pushed the top two dossiers over to Bob. “Bob, you’re a banker, and you’ve also done a bit of recruitment in your time, am I right? So I want you to head up procedures and staffing. Procedures involves devising a workable auction system in as much detail as possible: finding and preparing an auction center here in Moscow, establishing communication links to the EBRD in London and the IMF in DC—and then pretending those links don’t work whenever they say something we don’t want to hear. Staffing means finding, hiring, training, paying … and firing when they’re not up to it; and some of them won’t be, you can count on that. Any questions?”

“Thousands.”

“I’ll hear them later.” The other two dossiers went across the table to Harry. “Harry, your responsibility is all legal and company work. You have to study the relevant corporate documents to ensure that everything’s aboveboard, arrange for incomplete or illegal documents to be rewritten and ensure that everyone understands what’s legal and what’s not.
And
you’ll need to go through Red October’s books with the finest-tooth comb you can find. Accounts, figures, prospects, viability, strengths and weaknesses. Shove a microscope up their ass.”

“How come
I
get the shitty jobs?”

“The shitty jobs?” Alice couldn’t tell whether Harry was joking or not.

“Alice, no one here has the first clue what the law even
is
right now. How am I going to work out what’s legal and what’s not? And have you ever
seen
a set of Soviet accounts? My nephew’s ten months old, and he makes more sense than they do.”

“Your charm will overcome all obstacles, I’ve no doubt.”

“And while we slave at the coalface, what are
you
going to be doing?”

“Oh, nothing much—just trying to stop the whole damn thing from sinking, that’s all. And kicking your butts when you start bitching. I’ll supervise the steering group, which will be in overall charge of the assignment, and will”—she made a show of checking her notes to get the phrasing correct—“‘obtain rapid and effective decisions on all aspects of the case,’ or so it says here. I’ll also look after PR; we have to promote and publicize this thing, and I’m prettier than either of you.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Bob said. The stubble around his goatee was like patches of blackened wheat. “I hate to sound negative, Alice, but—this could all go to shit, right?”

They were both looking at Alice intently, and she saw the depth of their apprehension.

“Yes,” she said eventually. “Yes, it could. Even if we work our buns off, it could all go to shit. But it
definitely
will if we don’t. Come on, guys. Be positive. It’s an
adventure
.”

When they left the restaurant—barely after three, and already dark—a dozen or so vegetarian protesters had gathered outside, led by a young man wearing a fake silver beard and a padded coat. A placard around his neck read
Tolstoy says: “forget meat, stay with wheat.”

“Tolstoy?” Alice said.

“I am the great Lev Tolstoy himself, reincarnated.”

“What’s your real name?”

“I told you, I am the …”

She skewered him with turquoise eyes until, shamefacedly, he muttered: “Vasily.”

Above the beard, his skin was smooth. “How old are you, Vasily?” she asked.

“Sixteen.” He offered her a veggie burger. “I’m a business student, you know.”

The McDonald’s crowd ebbed and flowed around them with haughty indifference. Most Russians find even the idea of vegetarianism absolutely bewildering; it’s hard enough to find food as it is, let alone when you halve your options by refusing to eat meat. Vasily gestured disconsolately around him. “They don’t understand,” he said. “That’s always the way it is in Russia. Any good idea you have here, it’s ten years too early.”

Sabirzhan had made Sharmukhamedov stand stock-still for hours, until the Chechen thought that the veins in his legs were going to burst. Then Sabirzhan had cuffed Sharmukhamedov’s hands together, placed them between the Chechen’s knees, attached the cuffs to a pulley and hung him upside down. His belly was beach-ball round but hard as a quarried boulder; it didn’t sag.

“The sparrow,” Lev said when he came to check on progress. “A gulag favorite.”

“One of the KGB’s premier techniques,” Sabirzhan agreed. “I’m applying it according to recognized methods.” “Applied,” as one would apply a soothing unguent.

Lev had twin lightning bolts tattooed on his right arm, a sign of never having confessed to anything. “What’s he told you?”

“Nothing useful. But he will.”

“We haven’t got much longer.”

“Forty-eight hours? He’ll break long before then.”

“And you can take a break too. We’re leaving for the Vek in half an hour.” The Serebryany Vek was a
banya
near the Bolshoi now converted into a restaurant where caviar was piled into mountains on the sideboards, chandeliers bowed deferentially from the ceilings and liveried waiters whipped domed metal covers from dishes as though they were magicians performing tricks.

“Oh, go on without me.”

“Tengiz, it’s New Year.”

“Yeah—and what’s there to celebrate?” At midnight, the old regime would be officially extinct; joy enough for Lev, who’d refused even to recognize its existence, but calamity for Sabirzhan, KGB officer and sworn upholder of the Motherland.

Lev had asked out of courtesy and expediency, and was glad that Sabirzhan had refused. He’d no more have wanted to spend his New Year with Sabirzhan than with Josef Stalin, but Sabirzhan was powerful in Red October, and it never did to alienate one’s allies unnecessarily.

“What are you going to do instead?” he asked.

Sabirzhan glanced toward Sharmukhamedov. The Chechen’s bald head was visibly reddening as the blood flowed into it. “Spend some time with my new friend, probably.”

Right next door to Red Square, the Rossiya Hotel is perhaps the quintessential example of Soviet architecture. An oblong hollowed out around two inner courtyards, it’s almost a kilometer in circumference and covers ten acres. Even in a city with its fair share of ugly buildings, the Rossiya stands out, a graying monolith whose size is matched only by the numbing uniformity of its design.
The Russians say that the best thing about staying there is that you can’t see the Rossiya.

Lewis was unimpressed. “What a shithole. No decent city would allow that kind of eyesore.”

The New Year clientele could have inspired Dante to rework the
Inferno:
stubble-scalped men with black turtlenecks and lumps under their blazers patrolled the lobby, while leggy Russian jezebels with dolphin-tight bodies strolled through the hotel stores, looking fetching in Chanel suits and impossibly high heels. Whores and pimps, small-time operators who’d bought concessions from the management to operate here, orbited around each other like planets, gravitating toward each potential client as though he were the firmament’s brightest star. It was a troika of unholy fluidity, and one where every member could claim to be both exploiter and exploited.

Bob had swapped slacks and a sports jacket for a suit, though it clung uneasily to him and he knew it. His wife Christina peered at Alice from under her bob and proffered a damp hand. “Good to know you,” she said in a tone that suggested it was anything but. Christina was four inches shorter than Alice and a similar amount wider through the hips; she knew where the men’s attention would be, especially when Harry turned up with a stunning blonde called Vika.

“How much did you have to pay her?” Alice asked Harry once they were out of earshot.

He waved across the room at Vika and smiled proudly. “Not a dime.” It was just about plausible; Russians found Westerners so exciting that they’d flock to anyone with English as a first language, no matter how unappealing their other attributes. For straight,
single Western men, there was no better place to be, as Moscow was packed with more female beauty than practically any other place on earth. And not cold, haughty types either, but inviting, curious beauty, always looking as if they were just desperate to try something new, trade up, succumb to curiosity or pressure, fall into some wild adventure. There were vixens on every sidewalk, sly seductresses riding down the metro escalators, femmes fatales pouring into the streets.

The beauty of Russian women is above all in their eyes, large and limpid and almost always accentuated by eyeliner.

“You must be from Texas,” Lewis said to Bob.

“Never ask a man if he’s from Texas. If he is, he’ll tell you on his own. If he ain’t, no need to embarrass him.”

He was stretching his vowels so far that Alice feared they’d snap. She’d noticed that all their accents were noticeably, defiantly, regional: Harry dropping D’s in the middle of words, just like a good Pittsburgher; Lewis stressing the start of almost every word, as though he’d forget if more than a syllable passed without emphasis. Asserting their roots so far from home. Alice wondered if she’d been doing likewise, playing up her Boston inflections.

The waiter brought vodka aperitifs and told them that dinner was a set menu: blini with black caviar, smoked salmon in marinated pumpkin sauce, sturgeon soup with dumplings stuffed with crab, breast of pheasant, fillet of beef in red wine, pears with chocolate mousse—all for a hundred dollars a head. A hundred bucks, Alice thought; Russians could work several months for that, perhaps close to a year. When Harry leaned forward to light his cigar from the table candle,
the waiter lunged forward with a Zippo; using candles as lighters is bad luck.

“Haven’t seen a Russkie move so fast since they were kicked out of Afghanistan.” Harry waved the glowing tube at the waiter’s retreating back. “Anyone here been to New Orleans? Just like Moscow; everyone late for work and early home. You know what the Russkies think a workaholic is? An alcoholic in the office!” He tipped his head back and roared at his own joke.

“I’m from New Orleans,” Lewis said.

“Then you’ll know what I’m talking about!” Harry replied, missing the point by such a country mile that Alice actually laughed, half gurgle and half giggle, a saucy, choked chuckle that started high in her head, ended by her knees and earned her a reproving stare from Lewis.

Alice sucked at her vodka and let herself melt into the evening. A few more glasses and she was in the swing, holding court, the boss, taking their deference as her due, ignoring both her own mild unease at being the center of attention and Christina’s murderous stares as she kept the table enthralled with tales of restitution claims from aristocratic families whose land had been confiscated by the Bolsheviks—“there’s one who wants half of Yekaterinburg back”—and some of the more eccentric privatization applications. “A guy in Nizhny Novgorod called me yesterday because he wants to build a distillery on the site of a former nuclear reactor, can you believe it? He’s gonna distill the vodka in the reactor’s water filters and call it ‘thermonuclear.’ Get out of here, I told him, you can’t be serious. And he told me straight, vodka cleans radioactive particles, and that’s why they gave extra rations to crews of Soviet nuclear submarines.”