Vodka (50 page)

Alice didn’t dare call Nicosia again. She’d gotten away with it once, she knew when to twist and when to stick. There was only one way to find out what those figures represented, and that was from Lev himself.

Thursday, February 13, 1992

L
ev was in his office all day. There was no way Alice could get in there and look for the information that would allow her to determine what the Nicosia figures really meant. When she went in to see him, he told her he was busy and would come see her later. Normally, she’d have accepted this without question, but today it barked doubts and questions at her. He didn’t care about her. Did he know what she was up to? Had Galina told him?

Galina herself would be no help, Alice had known that from the moment she’d seen her. Today Galina avoided eye contact and replied to Alice’s questions strictly in monosyllables.

Harry was in the antechamber with an
egg
, which he handed to Galina. “I bought it off a guy outside,” he said. “It’s a fertility symbol.” He winked clumsily.

“As far as you’re concerned, Harry, it’s a futility symbol,” Alice said.

Ignoring her, Galina laughed and kissed Harry, entirely misreading his intentions. “Thank you. I’ll draw a face on it, and it’ll watch Rodion and me as we keep trying. It will be our icon.”

When Galina had a baby, Alice wondered, would she still
want
to come back to work? Would Rodion want her to? A couple of kids down the line, and Alice could envisage a totally different Galina, the spark and soul gradually sucked from her by the relentless domestic demands
of buying food, cooking, washing, cleaning, establishing order in her home and family. She’d have become tough, practical, sensible. The scatty, morally pure Galina whom Alice wanted to enfold in love and protection would be gone. Oh, she’d still occasionally allow herself to be seduced by sentimental music or some impossibly expensive fashion item, but her excesses would be restrained by her duty to her family.

“Now, she’s what I call an executive sweet. Why won’t she date me?” Harry asked Alice in mock exasperation.

“Because she’s married. And she has taste.” Alice’s attempts at reparation were too transparent. Galina was unmoved.

Alice spent the afternoon waiting for Lev to come and see her as he’d promised. Like a child counting the days before Christmas, the prospect underpinned and overhung everything else she was doing. She balanced Lev against her other lover. She wouldn’t have a drink until he came. She’d have a drink because that would
make
him come. She needed to have a clear head to talk to him. She needed a couple of shots to steady her nerves.

Her phone rang at five. It was Yelena, the receptionist; a man was here to see her. When she went down to the lobby, she saw Lewis, leafing through a magazine, oblivious to the doe eyes Yelena was making at him. Yelena had a moon face, accentuated by the band that scraped her hair flat against her skull, and the violent red of her lipstick made her mouth resemble a bloodstain. She’d have been plain in the West; in Moscow, she was teetering on the verge of ugliness.

Alice gave an involuntary jerk of alarm, a movement Lewis looked up a fraction too late to catch. “Darling,” she said brightly. “What a surprise.”

“We’re going to dinner at the Craigs’.” He peered at her. “You can’t have forgotten?”

“No, no.” She
had
forgotten, totally. “I … I thought we were meeting at home, that’s all.”

“I told you this morning that I’d stop by here on the way.”

“So you did. Busy day; must have slipped my mind.”

“Is Harry ready? He’s coming too, I think. Come on, let’s not keep our friends waiting.”

Friends?
Alice didn’t know whether they were
friends.
The thought of an evening spent in their company, listening to Christina whining about the hardships of an expat’s life—secure in her palatial home, complete with Jacuzzi and movie screen—filled Alice with dread. But so far as Lewis was concerned, they were strangers in a strange land, missionaries in a frontier town, and safety lay in cleaving to one’s own kind. Seeing the eagerness in his eyes, she hadn’t the heart to use any of the excuses that had been running through her mind. Feigning enthusiasm, she hurried back upstairs to collect her things. After all, an evening’s penance was the least she could offer Lewis.

Friday, February 14, 1992

A
woman in red stilettos and an electric-blue skirt was picking her way across the road in front of Petrovka, listing as her heels skidded on the ice. Her hair was cut in bangs like an army helmet, and she had put enough kohl around her eyes to pass for a panda. “Hey, copper,” she shouted to Irk. “Wait up.”

A tart. Irk sighed. It was a kopeck to a ruble that she wanted to ask him to pass a message to whichever member of the vice squad was taking his cut from letting her work the streets. In police forces overseas, undercover officers posed as whores; in Moscow, the more enterprising vice officers had recently begun reversing the process, registering whores as undercover agents. That way, the officer could justify regular contacts with the prostitutes, and the prostitutes could claim that they were not breaking the law but working to enforce it. It was genius, in its way. Irk wished he’d thought of it first.

One of the uniforms heading out of Petrovka puffed a cheek with his tongue as the tart passed him. “Darling, you want to take a wafer?” he said.

She didn’t even break stride. “Not if your cock’s as empty as your head.”

Irk chuckled, and changed his mind about talking to her. If a tart wants to help, she can be a policeman’s best friend. Working girls are streetwise. They look and listen; that’s how they stay alive.

The officer who’d propositioned her called out to Irk, “Hey, boss, don’t listen to Aldona. She’s a drumstick.”

“If I
have
got the clap,” she shouted back, flipping the finger, “it must have been from you.”

Irk noticed how thick Aldona’s makeup was. Thick enough to cover bruises, let alone spots.

“You the one in charge of poor Nelli’s case?”

Irk’s pulse quickened. “You knew her?”

“She used to hang around with us sometimes.”

“Did she work for the same pimp?”

“She didn’t hang out with us
professionally,”
Aldona said, indignant. “What do you take me for?” Irk raised a hand in apology. “As if there’s not enough competition already,” she added. Her mouth twisted, a smile in umber. “No. Nelli kept our company because it was better than anything else she had.”

“You know where she lived?”

Aldona nodded. “Come with me, I’ll show you.”

The moment Irk stepped inside the internat on Akademika Koroleva, he stopped wondering why Nelli had chosen to spend time with Aldona and the other working girls.

The internat is a mixture of orphanage and asylum. On a scale of abomination, it comes in somewhere between the army barracks and the prison cell. Russians moan about their existence, Irk thought, but those who go through life without ever seeing the inside of internat, barracks or prison—and there are many—should count themselves lucky and shut up.

He walked the corridors as though treading nightmares. Two girls, naked from the waist down, scuttled shrieking past him. Irk saw a boy sitting chained to a
wall, his knees drawn up so high that they seemed to have fused with his head. Open doors gave onto infernal vistas: children sprawled across filthy sheets, matchstick limbs splayed at impossible angles. Under shaven skulls, vacant eyes stared at him through clouds of flies. The rooms were dim, the beds pushed close together. At night, abuse would spread like a forest fire. The air was stacked with a pyramid of odors: breath, sweat, piss and shit; abandon, neglect and decay.

Nelli would have been one of the smaller children at the internat, prey, not predator. The evidence of sexual abuse Sidorouk had found didn’t signal a change in signature or modus operandi as they had assumed. It was irrelevant, Irk thought, and almost choked on the guilt he felt at dismissing such trauma so lightly.

On a veranda, squatting children moaned and rocked in their own private perditions, heedless of the cold. Irk turned away when one of them waved at him and tried to say “papa.” It would be so easy to persuade any of these children to go with him.

Aldona chatted in a low voice to a couple of staff members. When Irk looked surprised at this, she regarded him with no small measure of disdain. “The working girls help out here when we can,” she said. “We outcasts must stick together, Investigator.”

She led him into a kitchen with a table that was too large and a stove that was too small. A pot of dumplings bubbled away. Irk lifted the lid and rested his nostrils in the steam for a moment; it was the first thing he’d smelled in this place that hadn’t made him want either to weep or vomit.

Dimenkova, Aldona said, that was Nelli’s surname. “That was how she was registered, anyway. Like most
kids here, she just blew in. They turn up and are taken in, and there’s never enough room. It’s like pissing against a hurricane.”

“This place is funded by the state, isn’t it?”

“Theoretically. If those pompous bastards have sent any money, do let me know.”

Russia is no place to be a child without parents, Irk knew. The lucky few are sent to decent orphanages—decent in this instance meaning well-funded, and well-funded meaning privately financed, either by foreign organizations or local philanthropists such as Lev, and who cares where the money comes from? The rest are divided between the streets and the internats, their chance of a decent life gone either way. Everybody says that their plight’s a disgrace. Everybody was saying the same thing twenty years ago; everybody will still be saying it in twenty years’ time.

One of the older boys walked past the kitchen door, swigging from a bottle of vodka. Irk watched as he bent down to another child, a smaller one, asleep on the floor. “Come on, sleepy grouse. Let’s go.”

Sleepy Grouse opened one eye, saw the bottle of vodka and shook his head. Aldona leaned forward to follow Irk’s gaze. “The younger ones don’t drink,” she said. “They think it stunts their growth. They want to be as big as they can.”

Timofei had said the same thing about Vladimir Kullam. Good God, Irk thought; only the fear of not being able to look after themselves is keeping our children from the bottle. It wasn’t much of an outlook for the future.

“When did you last see Nelli?” he asked.

“Last weekend.”

“Is there anyone here who could have killed her?”

Aldona gave a short, barking laugh. “Is there anyone here who
couldn’t
have?”

It was Valentine’s night, and the only way Alice could deal with it was to be alone. Lewis had asked her what she was doing; she’d told him she was working late. Lev, apologetic for not making time yesterday, had also asked her what she was doing; she’d told him she couldn’t make it. Both answers were true. Both concealed more than they revealed.

Logic said that Alice couldn’t just go sneaking around the distillery after hours. What if she got caught? What would Lev say? What would he
do?
Would he harm her? She was his lover, sure, but she’d also be a spy, and he was a gang lord. The privatization process was compromised enough as it was—what would the press say if they found out? Didn’t Watergate start with an unauthorized break-in?

Logic also said that Alice should get Arkin to send in the cavalry and impound all Lev’s files. But would he do so? She wasn’t sure. With every extra person she involved, the chance of a snarl-up increased exponentially. Presenting this as a fait accompli was the only way to do it.

The distillery was closed for cleaning over the weekend. It would be empty tonight.

Red October at night, lights off and workers gone, seemed even more cavernous and intimidating than it did during the day. From where Alice stood at the window of Lev’s office, the vast machines seemed to rise from the factory floor like darkened sentinels. Alice turned her back on them and set to work.

The office she’d been allocated had a storage annex, and it was there that she had concealed herself until everyone had left for the weekend. She’d brought along a credit card to slip the lock of Lev’s office if need be, but it was open; he clearly thought his own staff too respectful and the Westerners too scrupulous to sneak in behind his back. Odd, for one so paranoid, she thought; but even the most fearful sometimes grow complacent about their weakest points.