Vodka (33 page)

“Good, because … because the Russian lyre has three strings: sadness, skepticism and irony. The sad fate of our country is to show the rest of the world how not to live.”

“Huh? You were just telling me how great Russia is.”

“Embrace chaos,” Lev said. “Reconcile yourself to the loss of a few details. Hope that in the end it will all even out.” He pushed himself to his feet and walked away before Alice could ask whether he was talking about the party, privatization, or something else entirely.

Wednesday, January 22, 1992

A
nother day, another anonymous apartment, this time in an equally faceless high-rise in the northern district of Ostankino, a few blocks from the national television tower. Karkadann had arrived just before dawn, sneaking in under cover of darkness. His men stood guard discreetly but purposefully at all the building’s vulnerable points: at the main entrance, on the fire escapes, and of course within the apartment itself. Karkadann sipped green tea and wished he was back at Kolomenskoe. This was no way for a man of honor to live, but the only alternative was to return to Grozny, and that he would not do, not while there were still battles to be fought here.

He carried Lev’s image in his head. With every day and every fresh indignity, skulking from safe house to safe house like a fugitive, he wished more pain and destruction on his enemy. When it was all over, and he had brought Lev to his knees, then he would kill him—not before. Karkadann would take the agonies he was suffering and visit them on Lev, with interest.

There were shouts from outside. Karkadann saw alarm bloom on Zhorzh’s face—was this it, had the Slavs somehow found where they were?—but the bodyguards were well trained, and none were running in to hustle them away. Zhorzh went to the edge of the window and peered out.

“Some kind of demonstration,” said Karkadann, joining him at the window.

In the street below, placards waved above crowded heads. Karkadann saw a poster of Borzov clutching a bottle of vodka in one hand and a naked girl in the other, with the caption
Happy New Year, life is getting better.
Fifty yards away, on the other side of the street, he could make out Borzov himself, and Arkin too. But it looked as though their gentle walkabout was turning into a near riot.

As the crowd surged and jostled, the bodyguards recoiled and pushed back, movements like seawater finding channels on a beach. Some people lost their footing on the icy pavement. In the bitter air—it was seven degrees below—tempers were beginning to fray. A woman with dark roots and thick foundation appeared in front of the presidential group. “What are we supposed to eat?” she yelled.

“You can slice the president up,” said Borzov, “but that won’t last you long.”

It was the kind of throwaway line he had been applauded for back when he’d been helping shoulder the Soviet Union to the cliff’s edge. Now it seemed callous and facetious. Arkin, who had been walking half a pace behind, moved forward, all but pushing Borzov out of the way before he could say anything else inflammatory.

The president was accustomed to being received rapturously wherever he went, hailed as the heroic defender of a nation. Now, for the first time, Borzov was moving out of kilter with the Russian people. The reaction to liberalization, Arkin thought, was proceeding faster than the process itself: from shock to trouble, via hope, in three weeks flat.

“You’ve misinformed the president, Kolya,” Borzov
hissed at Arkin. “You assured him that liberalization was proceeding well and that the people were making the best of it.”

Arkin had told Borzov no such thing, though saying so would be pointless. When Borzov was in a mood like this, there was no reasoning with him.

The bodyguards ushered them through the crowds and into the nearest store. Ostankino was dirty and down-at-heel, yet this shop would not have looked out of place on the Arbat. Its stone floors were scrubbed spotless, its paintwork was new and gleaming. The place had clearly been tarted up for their visit.

The store’s owner, almost overwhelmed by the great honor being paid to his establishment, introduced himself as Artur Kapitonov, took Arkin’s hand in both of his and practically prostrated himself in front of Borzov. It was, he said, a compliment to have such eminent men in his humble store; they could take anything they wanted, on the house, it would be his pleasure.

Borzov was in no mood to be soft-soaped. He peered at the price labels on the shelves—six rubles for a loaf, sixty for a bottle of vodka—and snapped, “Is this really what you charge people?”

Kapitonov blinked furiously, as though he hadn’t understood the question. The lines at the edges of his eyes, footmarks of an entire flock of crows, furrowed and deepened.

“Is it?”

“It’s what the market dictates, Anatoly Nikolayevich,” Kapitonov stammered.

“It’s ripping people off, that’s what it is. You will halve all these prices,
now.”

“Anatoly Nikolayevich, my suppliers already charge—”

“Then you’re fired.” Borzov turned to his bodyguards. “Empty the store, give the goods to the people.” He cut short Kapitonov’s protests. “You did say we could take anything we wanted.”

Kapitonov could do nothing but watch as the presidential bodyguards cleared his shelves. Bread, biscuits, onions, cabbages, potatoes, eggs, poultry and vodka all went. Borzov led the guards from the store and beamed as he watched them wade into the crowd, where the merchandise was snatched from them before they could even start handing it out.

When the bodyguards, sweating despite the cold, had extricated themselves from the throng, Borzov asked how much cash they had on them. The president never carried money himself, of course. “Come on, come on,” Borzov said, clapping his hands, “hand it over.” He then plunged into the crowd himself, handing out sheaves of rubles to the startled protesters: a hundred rubles here, two hundred there, five hundred rubles to another. Those people whose hands weren’t full from the previous giveaway could hardly grab the cash fast enough. It was all the bodyguards could do to pull Borzov back from the grasping hands when the last rubles had gone.

“Anatoly Nikolayevich, you can’t go around doing that,” Arkin remonstrated. “It runs counter to all prevailing economic policies. We can’t conjure up cash from thin air.”

“Anatoly Nikolayevich can do what he likes,” Borzov said.
“Shef darit.”
The chief gives.

They piled back into the presidential limousine and were gone.

Watching from his window, Karkadann shook his head. “How hard can it be to win the war, when that buffoon is Lev’s biggest protector?”

Back in the Kremlin, Borzov slurped at his vodka. “This isn’t a country; it’s a mass of bruises,” he wailed. “Ach, this whole thing is going to be a disaster. Is it too late to stop it?”

“Yes, it is. And you mustn’t think like that, Anatoly Nikolayevich.”

“But, Kolya, there’s no precedent for this. No country has ever shed an empire, reformed its economy and developed a democracy all at once. And now it falls to Anatoly Nikolayevich to accomplish it all. The Russian people are in a different country than the one they knew, and they don’t like it. And who are they blaming? Anatoly Nikolayevich, that’s who. It’s Anatoly Nikolayevich who has to mount the scaffold, Anatoly Nikolayevich who has to put his head under the fucking guillotine. It’s all going to turn out for the worst, Kolya.”

“You know what I’m thinking about?”

Borzov regarded him sullenly, a petulant child. “What?”

“Your plane crash last year. You remember the pain, Anatoly Nikolayevich?”

“How could the chief forget it?” Borzov had been taken to a hospital in Barcelona with a displaced disc. “It was horrible, impossible.”

“Exactly. You couldn’t move your legs. The doctors operated immediately, there was no time even to return to Moscow. The next day, they told you to get up and walk.”

“And Anatoly Nikolayevich laughed in their faces.”

“Exactly. If this had been Russia, you said, you’d have been in bed for six months. But they insisted: Get up and walk.” Arkin lit a cigarette. “You looked around for crutches, and found none. Get up and walk. So you did. One step, another, the sweat pouring off you. You made it to the wall and back, and again, and again.” Arkin exhaled a stream of smoke. “If you could do it, why can’t Russia? We’ve hooked up market electrodes to the frail body of the Russian economy. We’re rousing our paralyzed system and making its vital centers work. We’re dragging the patient off the bed and forcing him to walk.”

Thursday, January 23, 1992

L
ev was full of surprises, not all of them pleasant. If Alice had thought that the privatization agreement—not to mention their behavior at the party two nights ago—would suddenly turn him into a model of cooperation, it took him three hours to change her mind. The three hours, in fact, between the time they were supposed to meet and the moment he deigned to turn up.

“I know you’re a busy man, but we’re really pushed for time.” Alice was careful to make her tone reasonable; she’d already run the full gamut of reactions to his lateness, from irritation to resignation via anger and exasperation. “Punctuality is…”

“… a trait foreign to most Russians, Mrs. Liddell.”
Mrs. Liddell
, still; it threw Alice. Hadn’t they crossed some sort of bridge at the party? If so, why was he being as formal as ever? If not … Well, if not, she must have just been reading too much into something that wasn’t there. She pulled herself back to his words. “You never lived under the old system, Mrs. Liddell, when people had to wait five years for a new car and ten for a private telephone line.”

“I see your point, but I still think you’re full of shit.” She smiled to take the sting from the words. “I’ve got another meeting back at the ministry starting in half an hour. Now I have to cancel it. I thought we’d be through by now—long before now, in fact.”

“If you want to see two people in the same day, schedule one for early morning and the other for late afternoon.” Lev was unfazed, even amused. “Find the most liberal estimate of time needed to do something, and double it. The fast stream never reaches the sea, Mrs. Liddell.”

Wasting time is a very Russian trait; it’s how Russians remind themselves that life is more than just a series of goals and results spiced with numbers.

Lev tapped a bottle. “Here. Take some vodka with me.”

“You can’t soft-soap me with that ‘take some vodka with me’ shit anymore,” Alice snapped, angry above all that he could rouse her to ire so easily.

Lev smiled. Alice wondered whether it was recognition of the effect he was having on her. “Ah, but this vodka is
very
special,” he rumbled. “I’m trying out a new process, and I’d like your input. You’ve already proved yourself a connoisseur.”

She twisted her wedding ring against her finger, pulling at the skin. “We don’t have …”

“It’s a new process of triple rectification. The first distillation takes the purity up to eighty percent, the second and third to the high nineties. Try some.” He poured her a glass. After a moment of resistance, Alice took it, sniffed, drank and wrinkled her nose in disappointment.