Vodka (18 page)

Sabirzhan reiterated what he’d told Irk: that the case was political or criminal, possibly both, but certainly not a matter for homicide. Denisov shook his head.

“You think you can come in here and push us around like that? You can’t pull that state security crap on us anymore—those days are gone. This case is ours, Juku’s—unless and until he finds evidence to the contrary.” Denisov turned to Irk. “You find me a concrete link between the murder and either the privatization process or organized crime, then you can pass it on. Only then.”

Denisov had three perfectly symmetrical lines of skin under each eye; they could have been remnants of a melted candle, perhaps, or tribal markings. The rest of his face was perfectly ordinary, standard homo sovieticus. Photograph Denisov and superimpose a black strip across his eyes, like they did in pictures of Spetsnazy special forces soldiers, and he’d be unrecognizable.

Kovalenko was the press liaison officer, and he worked out of a windowless bunker in the bowels of Petrovka.
An apt reflection, Irk thought, of his status in an organization committed to telling the public as little as possible about what they were (or, more usually, weren’t) doing. Kovalenko’s salary was even more risible than his colleagues’; he was more or less officially expected to make up the difference with payments from reporters grateful for tip-offs.

Irk set down a bottle on Kovalenko’s desk. “Eesti Viin,” he said. “Rich and creamy, bottled in Tallinn—not the muck the kiosks here sell.”

Kovalenko was too well mannered to grab at the bottle, but only just. “And in return?”

“In return, I want you to tell any hack who asks that the body fished from the river by Red October this morning was a drunk.” Drunks were hauled from the Moscow—in it or on top of it, depending on the season—with monotonous regularity, usually with their flies open because they’d overbalanced when taking a leak. It was news when a day passed
without
such an episode.

“What was it really?”

“If you don’t know, you can’t tell anyone, can you?”

“All right,” Sabirzhan said, “maybe this will convince you: Vladimir worked in a kiosk at the Novokuznetskaya metro station. I hear they had a visit from Chechens the other day.”

“I’ll go down there later.”

“Why not now?”

“Because I have to do house-to-house down by the river.”

“You? You’re a senior investigator.”

Irk shrugged. Of course a senior detective shouldn’t have been performing such basic tasks; he should have
sent his uniformed subordinates instead. But when it came to house-to-house, the uniforms invariably seemed to find other matters worthier of their attention; even the most resourceful policeman found it difficult to extract bribes on such assignments. Irk had given up trying to fight the system; it was easier to just get on and do it himself.

It wasn’t as if it was going to do any good. Up and down piss-soaked stairs because the elevators were out of order, back and forth across death-race roads, only to discover what he’d suspected all along—that if anybody
had
seen anything, they certainly weren’t going to tell the police. Even in Moscow, many people were slow to appreciate that a visit from the police was no longer an inevitable prelude to ten years in Siberia.

On the way to Novokuznetskaya, Irk thought how much Moscow was a city of lines. Pensioners crocodiled outside metro stations, holding summer dresses and sun hats against their chests, in the middle of a Moscow freeze; shop assistants stood in front of their own stores and offered goods cheaper than you could get them inside; kiosks were strung out on sidewalks and underpasses, jostling each other in glass and metal. If you couldn’t find what you wanted at one kiosk, the next one would certainly have it, or the one after that. Japanese electronics and Danish hams here, French cheese and Korean condoms there. Ninja Turtles and Barbie dolls? Three units that way. Snickers, Mars and Bounty bars? Next one along, sir, but I’d check the expiration dates if I were you. Hey, while you’re here, perhaps you’d like some bootleg tapes? We’ve got Elton John, Sting, Genesis, and all the Rod Stewart you could ever want.

It was typically contrary, then, that the kiosk Vladimir Kullam had helped run stood in proud isolation. Irk came out of the metro station and there it was, a stone’s throw from the Tretyakov Gallery. The kiosk door was divided in two like those found in stables; when he was inside, the operator kept the bottom half closed and served people through the top. The operator in this case was a sullen youth with red hair and freckles.

“Is this where Vladimir Kullam”—Irk checked his tenses—“works?”

The redhead regarded him suspiciously. “Yeah,” he conceded eventually.

“And you are?”

“You can call me Timofei.” He was framed by hundreds of vodka bottles. Irk held his investigator badge out like a talisman.

“Well, Timofei, did you know Vladimir?”

“Yeah.”

“We fished him out of the river this morning.”

Timofei shrugged.

“That doesn’t bother you?” Irk asked.

“It happens.” Timofei fished under the counter and brought out a couple of magazines. “You want some porn, Investigator?”

“Do I look like I do?”

“Every man looks like he does. Here, I’ve got
Penthouse
—fifteen rubles a peek, four hundred to buy. Or you can have
Andrei
for half that.”
Andrei
was a home-grown and blurred version of
Penthouse;
the women were prettier, the production values inevitably much worse. All in all, thought Irk, it evened itself out. “Or there’s
Rabotnitsa
for the wife.”
Rabotnitsa
—literally “Woman Worker”—owed its circulation of ten million
to an anodyne selection of knitting patterns, recipe cards and porridge diets; there was nothing on career women, nothing on sex.

“I don’t have a wife. Who runs this place?”

“I do.”

“No, bonehead. Who
really
runs it? Who do you pay your protection to?” Irk’s expression warned Timofei off repeating his claims to grandeur.

“The 21st Century.”

That made sense. Kiosks were not only lucrative; as a cash business, they were also good for laundering dirty money. However, while the world was no poorer for one more dead Mafioso, Vladimir Kullam’s loss meant something. Even in Moscow, children were different.

“Not the Chechens?”

“Do the 21st Century look like Chechens? I don’t think so.”

“Ever had trouble from any Chechens?”

“No.” Too quick. Irk cocked his head.

“Timofei, no one’ll know what you tell me.”

“What I’m telling you is this; the Chechens have never given me any trouble.”

It was extraordinary, Irk thought; Timofei was protected by one of the most powerful gangs in the city, but still the Chechens had struck such terror into him that he’d lie about them.

“And what
I’m
telling
you
is this: tell me the truth, or I’ll haul you down to Petrovka.”

“On what grounds?”

“I don’t need grounds, you know that as well as I do.” Irk was bullying; he hated himself for it, but he needed to find out what had happened.

Timofei glanced left and right to make sure no one
was looking, and beckoned Irk closer. He believed Irk’s threats, and that depressed Irk even more. Like most people, Timofei clearly assumed that all officials were corrupt.

“They came around on Monday.”

“Was Vladimir with you then?”

“Yes.”

“What did the Chechens want?”

“The action—what else?”

“Had they ever been around before?”

“Once.”

“When?”

“Last week.”

“What did they do?”

“The first time, nothing. The second time, they reached in here, grabbed us by the collar, yanked us clean out of the kiosk and told us to go with them rather than the 21st Century.”

“What did you say?”

“That they should sort it out with the 21st Century themselves. That’s how these things work.”

Timofei didn’t tell Irk how he’d yelped as his shins had scraped the sill, and again when the Chechens had dropped him onto the sidewalk. He didn’t say how he’d pleaded when the leader had pulled a switchblade from his pocket: “Don’t stab me, please don’t stab me, not with the gut straightener,” he, Timofei, gabbling in panicked soprano, a frightened child the moment he was out of his protective box. He didn’t say how his eyes had brimmed with fear as the Chechen had flicked the blade, placed the knife against his shirt and sliced two triangles out of the fabric; why, he didn’t know. He didn’t say how, though they were on a main street, no drivers had
slowed to offer help and no pedestrians had checked their stride as they walked past. He didn’t say how the man’s silence had been more frightening than any amount of threats.

He didn’t tell Irk any of this, nor did he need to. Irk knew, the gist if not the details. He’d seen too many gangsters put the frighteners on too many of Moscow’s little people.

The Chechens could have killed Vladimir as a warning, Irk thought. It was possible, no more.

“Would you recognize them again?” he asked. “The Chechens?” Timofei shook his head. “Not even one of them? Come on, Timofei, you can do better than that.”

“There was one, yes. The leader, the guy who pulled me from the kiosk.”

“Describe him.”

“White streak in his hair.”

“You didn’t hear a name?”

“We weren’t on a date, Investigator. Besides, he never said a word.”

“No matter.” Every official in Moscow knew what Zhorzh looked like. Irk changed tack. “How does it work? You and the 21st Century?”

“They take a bit, I take a bit.”

“How much of each?”

“Seventy-five, twenty-five.” The tone of Timofei’s voice told Irk that he wasn’t the one ending up with the lion’s share. “But they sort out any crap for me. And I still earn in three days what my parents do in a month.”

“What about
school?”

“What
about
school? What’s the point? There are special schools for chess, math, languages, sporting prodigies, but none for people like me at the other end
of the class. I got punished the whole time, ignored if I was lucky. Normal life is lousy, Investigator. I can get richer here than anywhere else.”

Irk gestured to the vodka bottles. “You drink this stuff?”

“These particular bottles? They let me have one a week.”

“You ever take any more? On the sly?”

“They’d kill me if I did.”

“Literally?”

“Literally.”

Irk felt his ears prick. “They told you that, or you’ve seen them do it to other people?”

“Not with my own eyes, no. But you hear things.”

“And Vladimir—would he have tried to rip them off?”

Timofei shrugged again. “Maybe. Vova was a bright boy, and you get people who think they’re too smart to get caught. If he was selling some under the counter without telling them and they got wind of it, then yeah, they’d have killed him. But it wouldn’t have been because he’d taken it for himself. Vladimir never drank vodka.”

“Why not?”

“He thought it would stunt his growth.”

Men from all three Slav gangs—the 21st Century Association, the Solntsevskaya, and the Podolskaya—crammed into the ballroom of the Rossiya Hotel; hundreds upon hundreds of them, reeking of aftershave and anticipation. The chairs were arranged in strict order of rank, ranging from the lowest orders at the back to the higher echelons in the front rows. On the podium was a table at which sat the
vory
troika: Lev in the middle,
flanked by Testarossa and Gibbous, the Podolskaya’s new leader.

Their years in the gulags had taught the
vory
to appreciate the value of organization. Their command structures were as vertical and rigid as those of an army or political party, and this was just as much a gathering of the faithful as any party conference had been, though these men dressed better and exercised more than any communist delegates ever had. Waiters traversed the rows with hundred-gram glasses and bottles of vodka. The gangs rarely came together like this, for there was danger as well as safety in numbers: a single bomb would have wiped out an entire generation of
vory.

When Lev stood and called for silence, he looked like a bear balancing on its hind legs. They watched him as raptly as any ideologue had ever been transfixed by Lenin or Trotsky.

“Brothers, we stand on the threshold of a vast conflict. We’re up against an evil man, a man who will not listen to reason; a man who has chosen to launch his campaign with the most despicable and cowardly act imaginable: the murder of an innocent child.”

This was the rub. Karkadann was a new creature for Lev, and one that he wasn’t entirely sure how to handle. It wasn’t just that the man was clearly psychotic; it was that there seemed such a simplicity to him. Most gang leaders play a tactical game, weighing the odds, waiting for the right moment to make their move. For Karkadann, it appeared, the only moment was now; everything was either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, and the odds could go to hell.

“We outlasted Soviet power. The Communists failed to destroy us because no matter what they did to us we
remained true, we kept our structure, our ideology, we survived. Now we face a different enemy, but we’ll triumph just the same. We’re superior to the Chechens in culture and morality. We pay the hospital bills of our wounded, we provide for the families of jailed men. We’re better trained, better disciplined and better armed than they are. We
will
annihilate them, I promise you that.”

They applauded when Lev paused; they stopped when he held up his hand for silence. Lev motioned that they should stand. It was time for the toast.

“We must remember that what’s more important than anything else to us is not money, but brotherhood. That’s what gives us our strength.”

Glasses brimmed in sweating hands; there wasn’t a man there who wouldn’t have killed for Lev, and that was one of his greatest strengths.

“So let’s drink to our cause, which is always to support one another, to remain united. If a person is alone, he counts for nothing. But if we are united and support each other, then we are strong and everyone will fear us. Let’s drink, Brothers! To unity!”