Vodka (37 page)

Monday, January 27, 1992

“G
ood morning, Mrs. Liddell. I believe I owe you an explanation.”

Lev’s tone was civil, no more and no less, and it was shot through with an indifference that cut Alice deep. Civil is what you are with clients and acquaintances, she thought, not with someone with whom you’d lain naked in this very office. He’d used the
word “explanation,” and her mind shied away from the implications even as her gut tugged them in one by one. As far as Alice was concerned, “explanation” usually meant “excuse.”

“I thought we’d agreed that you would call me Alice.” Her voice trembled with the effort of stanching; apprehension, anger and tears were all lining up.

“You asked what was going on with the workers.” He was gone from her, as impassively remote as an Easter Island statue. “It’s very simple. The money they were handing over to Sabirzhan came from several sources.” He ticked them off on his fingers. Alice wished she had the strength to reach across the table and snap them one by one. “Bonuses they’ve earned, free allowances from the trade union, rewards for efficiency proposals, fictitious wages paid for fictitious work.”

“So why the hell do they give it to
you?”

“Because it’s not really theirs to start with, and because it’s not for my personal enrichment.”

“And the rest.”

“You doubt me? You doubt my integrity,
Alice?”
He spat her name, and she felt sick. “That money provides bribes and gifts for suppliers and contractors; that money, therefore, is needed for the future of this factory. No bribes equals no permits, no raw materials, no retail space. No bribes equals no jobs. They get their wages, but their wages aren’t paid in full unless the plan is met, and the plan will not be met without subterfuge.”

The plan—that was the way all industry had worked in the Soviet Union. Every last aspect had been planned, no detail too picayune: what should be
produced, at what cost, from what materials, for what price, for which customers, on what time schedule, with how many workers and at what wages. The plan. For the atheists of central communism, it had been the Godhead; to the high priests of capitalism, it was devilry.

“That’s exactly the kind of shit privatization will stamp out.”

“Maybe so, but until then, things go on just the same as they always have. If I didn’t do this, my workers would starve.”

“You run a criminal gang. You could afford to pay the lot of them from your own pocket.”

“They make more from me than I take from them.”

“That’s
bullshit.”

“You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? Have you ever heard the saying
ne pesh, ne mash
—if you don’t drink, you’re not one of us? In this case, it’s slightly different.
Ne beresh, ne mash:
if you don’t take bribes, you’re not one of us. Either we subordinate ourselves to the laws of corruption governing the trade system, or we find ourselves ejected from that system.”

“That system is history.”

“That system is alive and kicking, and the sooner you realize it, the better.”

Lev had offered Alice, Bob and Harry one of the distillery’s better offices, and Alice spent ten minutes in the ladies’ toilet composing herself before going back there. “Better” was in this case strictly a relative term. The fluorescent swathes on the ceiling washed the room in a milky radiance that highlighted its shortcomings. It was barely a few strides from one side to the other, and the
walls were patched with gray paint. Even the smell of cabbage seemed stronger than usual.

Western executives are used to vast corner offices, tinted glass and brushed steel; this place would have disgraced a student magazine, but Alice loved it. It was suitably humble for the great transformation she would help wreak. The French Revolution had been hatched on a tennis court; the Nazis had met in a Munich beer cellar; the Bolsheviks themselves had plotted on Tottenham Court Road in London. Great changes need unassuming beginnings, she felt.

Bob was nowhere to be found. Harry was rootling around on all fours beneath a desk all but invisible beneath towers of documents. “The fuck are you doing, Harry?” Alice said.

“Looking for my pen.”

“Harry, there’s only one part of you that’s visible, and I have to say, it seems a somewhat unlikely orifice for you to be speaking through.”

Harry backed out and up, brushing dust off the pen. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“Fine. Why?”

He studied her face. “You look … preoccupied, I guess.”

I should tell him
, Alice thought. Harry and Bob had a right to know that children were being killed because of what they were doing. She should tell him—and she didn’t, because she knew what his reaction would be. Lev had said how squeamish Westerners were, and he was right. If Harry or Bob wanted out—and at least one of them surely would—Alice would be back where she started, and she couldn’t afford that, not with so little time left.

She changed the subject. “How you doing with the books?”

“I can understand about one word in ten, and all of those are probably lies.”

“Find a recording of Brezhnev’s speeches, and you’ll get used to it fast enough.”

Harry shrugged. Any information he could glean from the books would probably be insufficient, misleading, irrelevant or all three. The law required that valuation be based on the book values for fixed assets, current assets, current liabilities, net current assets, net assets and capital, but all these were badly distorted. Book values were traditionally overstated to make it appear as though production targets had been reached and quotas filled; these particular ones had been set on New Year’s Day, and therefore took no account of subsequent inflation.

Decoding Russian balance sheets was more of an art than a science. Russian accounting was still based on the Soviet model, designed to detect misuse of state funds rather than provide information about company performance. A popular Soviet joke had the director of an enterprise interviewing candidates for the post of chief accountant. He asked each candidate the same question: “How much is one plus one?” The man who got the job was the one who answered: “How much do you need, Comrade Director?”

In Western business, intangibles are usually minor and easily dealt with. Here, the situation was reversed. How could Harry evaluate cash flow when the majority of every enterprise’s dealings involved promissory notes, barter and unpaid receivables? How could he put a value on the underground economy? How could
growth figures be taken seriously when everyone had an incentive to exaggerate?

Always assuming, of course, that Harry had been given the genuine books in the first place.

Practically every Russian company keeps two sets of books: the official ones, which are sent to the authorities and on which taxes are paid (or, more usually, aren’t); and the unofficial ones, which record the unreported cash transactions as well. The Russians call it “accounting out of the safe.” A businessman chooses how much of his activity to conduct aboveground and how much below, and what the ratios of cash and barter will be in the latter.

For an accountant, the distortion of figures is a nightmare. What looked bad on paper could look much better with all the information at hand. It could also look much, much worse.

“You know accountants,” he said. “If we can’t count it, it don’t exist.”

“Green-light everything, unless it’s totally and irrevocably ludicrous.”

“That’s ridiculous, Alice.”

“That’s also how it is,” she said, teaching him lessons she was still learning herself. “You got the payroll there?”

Harry extracted a file from the middle of one of the document stacks, steadying the top of the pile with one hand while he pulled the file out with the other. “Here you go. Watch out for the gum band holding it together; it’s frayed.”

“Gum band?”
she teased, picking at the rubber band he’d indicated. “It’s called a ’lastic.”

“Not in Pittsburgh, it’s not.”

“And we’re nearer Boston now.” She nodded down
toward the distillery floor. “I’m off to the jungle. Look after Vladimir for me.”

“Vladimir?”

Alice nodded toward a bust of Lenin that had been turned to face the wall. “Vladimir.”

The distillery floor was busier than Alice had witnessed before, though it was only when she saw a large digital clock with the time and date displayed in fading red LEDs that she realized why. It was nearly month’s end, and Russian industry divided each month into three ten-day work periods—decades, they called them. The first decade was
spyachka
, sleepy time, when the previous month’s quota had been met and the pressure was off; then came
goryachka
, the hot time; and finally
likho-radka
, fever: a headlong rush to complete by any means necessary.

Alice went to the bottling department first, because it was the nearest. The payroll listed more than two hundred employees in this section. By the law of averages, even Russian averages, at least one of that two hundred would surely be cooperative. Alice stood for a moment, watching the bottles tottering down the conveyor belts like an army of penguins, and then marched up to a woman in a white coat. She had rounded cheeks and her nose was pointed: a snowman’s face; a snowman’s body too, square and thick. A kerchief covered her graying hair, and her stumpy legs were sheathed in rubber boots. “What’s your name?” Alice asked.

The woman regarded her with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. “What’s yours?”

“You were paid on Friday, right?”

The woman looked around and up—for Lev, Alice realized, as though he were Big Brother, omniscient and ubiquitous. “Right,” the woman said at length, as though expelling a stone.

“The money you got—did you keep it all?”

“All that I was entitled to.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“That’s not very helpful.”

The woman gestured to the nearest wall, where a metal rack held squares of printed cardboard—time cards. “I clock in, do my work, go home. It’s not my job to be helpful.”

The rack was ten rows across and seven down, with two compartments blank: sixty-eight time cards. Alice turned back to the woman. “Those time cards…”

“What about them?”

“They’re just for those people here today, right?”

“You work in this department, your card’s there.”

“Even if you’re not in today?”

“You think people take their cards home and frame them?”

“OK. Thank you.”

Alice turned back to the payroll and counted again. The list of bottling department employees ran to six and a half pages; at thirty-three lines a page, that made more than two hundred, she’d been right the first time. She looked at the title page: the document was dated this month, it was current.

The far side of two hundred bottlers on the payroll, but only sixty-eight of them had time cards. What had happened to the other two thirds?

Tuesday, January 28, 1992

A
lice had discovered the same pattern all the way across the distillery. For every employee she’d physically found—and even then Red October was overstaffed, Alice had reminded herself, like all inefficient Soviet industries—there’d been another, perhaps two, who appeared on the payroll. Of the 25 filtration column washers listed, she’d unearthed only 12; of the 399 recorded as working on the storage vats, just 187. By the time she’d reached the fourth department, the question was not whether the official and actual tallies would be different but by how much. She didn’t tell anyone what she’d found, because she didn’t want news getting back to Lev. Instead, she asked every department head for the names and numbers of those employees under their supervision, and told each one that everything was just as she’d expected.

Alice left the site at Prospekt Mira until last, not merely because it was off the main premises, but also because of the murders; she needed time to steel herself before going. She felt an irrational resentment toward Lev for not telling her earlier. They were lovers now, why should they have secrets from each other? Then she thought of Lewis, and the gulag.