Vodka (60 page)

The answer came to Lev more by osmosis than conscious thought. He knew the reason before his brain had framed it into words, and it certainly wasn’t conscious thought that had him toppling like a forest oak onto the floor again, a long way down for such a big man, dragging Alice with him as he yelled once more for everyone to get down, but they didn’t understand. Surely, the danger was over. It was the simplest of double-taps and they couldn’t see it, and his voice was lost in the twin impacts of his body against the floor and the first volley of real bullets through the window.

There were five cars in all, spaced at ten-foot intervals, and this time they passed the Vek as though they were part of a funeral procession. Two gunmen were leaning out of each vehicle, and as they went past they laced the restaurant with methodical rounds, up and down, up and down. They made a double frieze, one at face height, the other at chest level, and from Lev’s prostrate position he could tell what was happening only by the infernal noise of shattering glass and human howls.

The seconds stretched and stretched, and then the rearmost car accelerated away and time speeded up to normal again. Lev looked around. “Alice! Alice!”

She was lying on her side, covered in food. “Well, this was a total waste of makeup.”

“You’re fine,” he said, and he knew she’d heard the anguish in his voice that showed that his love was for real. He peered cautiously up and around before daring to lift first his head and then his torso. The sidewalk was strewn as much with body parts as with entire people. The gunmen had been professionals, their slow and methodical stitching movement had torn heads from bodies and limbs from trunks.

The jazz band was still playing. They would not remember the tune afterward, and their clothing was so saturated with nervous sweat that they needed to change even their shoes, but if they had stopped before their scheduled break, they would have been in breach of their agreement with the management. The Vek could then have withheld their fee—yes, even for a massacre right in front of them.

Inside the restaurant, people were whimpering and yelling, but it wasn’t them Lev was worried about. He was looking for anyone who was silent, because the mute cases are always the most serious. No, everyone was alive. The person shouting loudest was one of the bodyguards.

“What happened to you?” Lev asked.

“Took a bullet in the shoulder.”

“How bad is it?”

“Oh, not very. I’m more worried about my jacket.” He picked at the leather so that Lev could see the bullet hole. “It was new, last week. Now it looks like it’s come from my ass.”

“Fuck your jacket.” Lev glared through the gaping window at the destruction beyond, seeing that his cardinal rule of Mafia disputes had once more been well and truly broken: civilians had not only been involved, they’d
been injured, killed. The Chechens’ indiscrimination offended Lev. When he’d been behind the wire, his quarrel had been with the Soviet system rather than its people. His circumstances and opponents may have changed, but his principles had not.

Lev turned to the bodyguards. “Round up all the injured out there and take them to the hospital,
now.
Don’t wait for the ambulances, you’ll be lucky if they get here before Christmas. And don’t just drop them at those crappy municipal places, either. Take them all to the Sklifosovsky, and tell the staff there that I’ll pay.”

The restaurant was a mess, and there were no insurance policies in Russia worth the name. As his men hurried off, Lev yelled for the Vek’s manager.

“I’ll reimburse you for the damage,” he told him. “Every last cent—you have my word.”

Wednesday, February 26, 1992

T
he penthouse and Red October were the only places Lev felt safe. He sequestered Alice in his office at the distillery and stationed four guards with her. Another eight were in the antechamber where Galina sat. Lev called Sabirzhan and asked—demanded—that he come in.

“Only if you personally guarantee my safety,” Sabirzhan said.

“I guarantee it.”

There were no offers of vodka or chummy handshakes when Sabirzhan arrived; they got straight down to business. “Did you tell the Chechens where to find me?” Lev asked.

“How would I have known where to find you?” Sabirzhan was neither outraged nor defensive, there was no flicker in his eyes as he spoke. The doubt his impassiveness induced was enough to keep Alice quiet. She wouldn’t condemn Galina without knowing for sure.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No. I didn’t tell the Chechens.”

This was why Lev had wanted to bring Sabirzhan in rather than just ask him on the phone: so he could see him face-to-face when he put forth the questions. But he found it as pointless as Irk had back in Petrovka. You couldn’t interrogate a man for whom interrogations were a forte; Sabirzhan knew tricks Lev hadn’t even heard of. Lev could have asked Sabirzhan the same question, over and over until sundown, and still not known one way or the other.

It was luck of the purest kind that Sabirzhan should be leaving the distillery just as a man in a chauffeur’s cap with Old Glory on the peak was approaching the reception desk.

“I’ve come to pick up Alice Liddell,” Sabirzhan heard him say.

“And you are …?” asked the receptionist.

“I’m from the American embassy.”

The limousine drove west toward the embassy, the Stars and Stripes fluttering proudly, provocatively, on its hood.
Alice sat in the back, trying to work out what she’d say to the ambassador when he asked her about the assassination attempt and told her—not for the first time—how concerned Washington was about the way things were going. A solitary Range Rover rode shotgun, now alongside the limousine, now behind, never ahead. It was a simple run from Red October to the embassy; across the Kammeny Bridge, along Znamenka to Arbatskaya, down Novy Arbat and up Novinsky. They were making the last turn, the right from Novy Arbat to Novinsky, when the ambush came.

Have you ever seen orcas, killer whales, on the attack? They flash black and white as flukes and fins break the surface around a gray whale and her calf. The pod of orcas works together to tire their prey and separate mother from calf. They come again and again, sustained and violent, repeatedly ramming into the calf with extraordinary force as the mother tries to get between the killers and her baby, or to swim underneath it and push it out of their way. Eventually, battered to exhaustion, the calf begins to roll in red-stained water, its pectoral fins bleeding and studded with teeth marks where the orcas have been holding it under the water to try and drown it. The mother swims slowly shoreward. Her offspring is lost.

The Chechens came in four Land Cruisers. The first accelerated in front of the American convoy and braked sharply; the second and third tried to push in between the Range Rover and the limousine; the fourth took up position behind the battle, to block off following traffic.

The embassy limousine swerved around the first Land Cruiser with a lurch that threw Alice to the floor.
She saw a Chechen face as she went down, and was torn between apprehension and admiration. Was there nothing these guys wouldn’t try?

The first Land Cruiser darted hard to the right and smacked the limousine broadside. The next two took out the Range Rover, bumping it to and fro, never allowing it a path back to its calf, and finally sending it skidding across the carriageway and into the barriers. The fourth moved up behind the limousine. Double up, separate and destroy; Admiral Nelson would have been proud.

All four orcas moved in on the calf.

Boxed in on every side, the limousine could do nothing but glide to a halt. Men out on the road, guns leveled, urgent guttural cries that mean the same in every tongue in the world. The chauffeur turned to Alice. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “We’ll get you out of this.”

“If you think that, my friend, you must have drunk more than me.”

The Chechens were motioning for Alice to come out or they’d shoot the lock and then her too. She’d no idea what they had in mind, but as long as it involved her being alive, it was better than sitting in the back of the limousine and waiting for a bullet through the temple.

She opened the door herself and stepped out. Her grace under pressure took the Chechens by surprise; a beat passed before the first man moved forward to grab her. It was strange, but she felt little fear, only curiosity. That was what a couple of vodkas first thing did for you.

Alice was thrown into the back of one of the Land Cruisers. As the vehicle pitched and yawed, she was
blindfolded and trussed by Chechens reeking of gasoline and cigarettes. She tried to remember which way they turned and how long they’d been driving, but soon gave up. There was nothing she could do now. She knew that at some level she must be in shock, and that the enormity of what had happened would eventually register, but for now she surrendered herself to bemused acceptance.

Hard on the brakes, a wide turn and hard on the brakes again. Doors open, men moving. Alice was dragged into the open and then back inside again, the cold a brief, burning brush against her skin. They hurried her through dank passages so fast that her feet touched the ground only intermittently, skating as a heron does when it lands on water. Into a room, down onto a chair. Even through the rag across her eyes, she could tell there was more light than before. She hoped for sunshine, but when they took off the blindfold, she saw that the glare was from a video camera held by a man with a white streak in his hair.

Still Alice felt a curious detachment. It was as if her brain was a building split into several separate apartments; each apartment with its own inhabitants, each inhabitant doing different things.

A man came in. His face was all angles and lines. Alice saw the way everyone else deferred to this man, and she knew who it was. Karkadann, her lover’s archenemy. And now he had what Lev prized most.

Karkadann didn’t greet Alice, or even look in her direction, but the intensity of his hauntedness singed her. She thought of Repin’s famous painting of Ivan the Terrible, wide-eyed in desperate remorse as he cradles the son he’s just killed; the painting Repin himself said
was inspired by the search for an exit from the unbearable tragism in history.

Karkadann motioned Zhorzh to focus on Alice, before personally checking the viewfinder to ensure he was happy with the shot. Then he stepped away and began to speak.

“This is a communiqué for Anatoly Nikolayevich Borzov, president of the Russian Federation. We have in our possession the American woman Alice Liddell, and we will release her on two conditions: that the privatization auction scheduled for Monday is canceled, and that all the holdings of the Red October distillery are transferred to the communal group that represents Chechen interests in Moscow and of which I am head. You have until midday tomorrow to accede to these demands, or Mrs. Liddell will be killed.”

That afternoon Borzov summoned the players to his office: Arkin, Lev and the American ambassador, Walter Knight. Vodka for everyone, even Knight—two years in Moscow had eroded his resistance to drinking at all hours. He’d been here both for the August coup and the killings in Vilnius and Riga, but this was the first crisis to feature an American citizen center stage, and his face was held rigid with tension.

“Our position is very simple,” Borzov said. “Karkadann’s demands are outrageous and nonnegotiable. This is an act of terrorism. We cannot and will not accede to it.”

“That’s your public position?” Knight asked.

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to your private position.” Borzov made a moue: go on. “Publicly, the US government and its
major Western counterparts are in full agreement. But we must also consider the impact this will have on foreign investment in your country. If Mrs. Liddell does not…” He swallowed, picking his words carefully. “If the worst occurs, the murder of an IMF adviser will hardly send out promising signals to institutions who are hoping to do business here.”

“That’s not our most pressing dilemma right now,” Arkin said.

“It’s one you should be keeping in mind, though. I need hardly tell you what Mrs. Liddell’s, er, husband”—he stared straight ahead, determined not to catch Lev’s eye—“and friends think of all this.” Knight had just come from the apartment at Patriarch’s Ponds, where Lewis had said little. “They want her out safely, whatever it takes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they took the first flight back home after that.”

“What else do you expect them to think? We can’t take their feelings into account. Anyway, it won’t come to that. We’re already investigating other methods of resolving the situation.”

“More hostages get killed in shoot-outs than at any other time,” Knight said.

“But we’d be negligent not to plan for armed intervention. And in the meantime, we’ll keep Karkadann talking, get him to extend the deadline while we negotiate. Don’t forget, his hostage is his only bargaining chip. If he kills her, he’s got nothing left.”

Lev made a noise deep in his throat; more precisely, a noise was heard, and it was hard to tell whether it had been voluntary, or in what quantities it mixed assent and distress. “Anatoly Nikolayevich is right,” he said. “Doing what Karkadann demands—that’s out of the
question. There’s not a single worker at Red October who would want to be run by the Chechens. How could I give in to him without betraying all of them? How could I give in to him, full stop?”