Vodka (63 page)

“Kotelniki,” she said, feeling a delicious blast of gasoline-scented heat as she climbed into the back. “I’ve got no money.”

The woman peered at her. “Aren’t you …?”

Alice nodded. “And I need my lover.”

An American would surely have insisted on taking Alice to the police, doing things by the book. This Russian understood Alice all too well: what else would a woman want at a time like this other than her lover? The driver laughed and pulled back into the road.

Lev took Alice in his massive arms and held her as though he’d never let her go again. She was smeared in grime and stank of filth and fear, and he clasped her as though willing her to transfer them all onto him. He bathed her with tenderness and love, as one bathes a child, washing her clean of the ordeal she’d been through, gentle as he soaped the dirt from her wounds. He didn’t ask what had happened, and she didn’t tell; it was enough for her to know that his reticence came from respect for her privacy rather than lack of interest.

By the time he’d brought her breakfast, she was asleep in his bed, dead to the world. He worked the phones.

“Thank heavens for that,” Borzov said through eddies of vodka relief.

“Good for her.” Arkin’s voice was edgier. “I knew that justice would win.”

“I’m so glad she’s safe,” Knight said. “I’ll pass the news on to her husband, if you like.”

Arkin rang back. “We’ll need to debrief her,” he said. “Bring her to the Kremlin at once.”

“She’s been through hell,” Lev said.
“You
can come
here
, when she wakes up.”

Alice slept hard until lunch. When she woke, she wanted to bathe again; she still felt unclean.

“You should call your husband,” Lev said as she lay in steaming water, putting a finger to her lips to forestall any argument. “No, you must. You know that.”

Lewis held the phone away from his ear so that Alice’s voice would seep into the apartment that was so devastatingly empty without her. He was glad she was safe, he said; that was the most important thing. He didn’t ask her what it had been like, or if she was coming home. Nor did he tell her that he hadn’t cried once, not during her captivity, not since she’d left him. Maybe he should have. Each to his own. They’d speak soon, he said.

Dressed and with coffee, Alice faced Arkin.

“You’re OK for the auction on Monday?” he asked.

“For heaven’s sake,” Lev said. “Is that all you think about?”

The deadline had been less than three hours away. If Arkin suspected what Lev had done, he didn’t mention it—and he
would
have mentioned it if he had suspected. But Arkin wouldn’t have capitulated to Karkadann, and Lev would never forget that.

“I’m fine for the auction,” Alice said.

“Darling, you’ve just suffered a …” Lev interjected.

“I said, I’m fine.”

Alice told Irk what she could remember about the apartment where she’d been held. The street names she’d seen gave Irk a location, and she agreed to ride in an unmarked squad car to show him which building she’d escaped from.

“That’s ridiculous,” Lev said. “You can’t take her back there.”

“It’s fine.” Alice was adamant.

The area looked very different in daylight: safer, alien. Irk watched Alice for the shakes, but she’d had a couple of vodkas and her nerves were steady.

“That one, there—” She pointed.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.” She remembered the monkey bars outside.

Irk wasn’t going to take any chances with Petrovka’s men, not after Smolensky Square. Nor was he going to use any men from the 21st Century, even though Lev was practically forcing them on him. An OMON squad raided the building an hour later. The apartment was empty.

Sunday, March 1, 1992

A
lice had scheduled a full auction dress rehearsal at the Krasnaya Presnya exhibition complex and she was determined, against all advice that it could be left to Harry and Bob to run the show, that she would attend as if nothing had happened.

It started badly. She was barely out of her car when one of the volunteers came hurrying up.

“Mrs. Liddell, I’d like to request a three-month leave of absence.”

“Fedosia, after tomorrow you can do what you like.”

“Tomorrow will be too late; I need to go
today.
I can offer my sister to you as a replacement.”

“Without any training? Don’t be absurd.”

“She’s very good, I promise.”

“What’s so urgent?”

“There’s a job in Kazakstan that’s just come up.”

“Kazakstan? What the hell could you want in Kazakstan?”

“Satellite launching.” Fedosia smiled shyly. “My background’s in aeronautical engineering.”

Alice almost laughed. Fedosia was a rocket scientist, quite literally, but here she was helping out at the auction, a job Alice had thought any young Muscovite would have regarded as the pinnacle of their fledgling career. Alice wondered how many of the hundred and fifty volunteers were doing this simply because they were down on their luck. The Russians call it dequalification, when
you’re forced to take jobs way below your station. In Moscow, it’s commonplace. She could afford to lose one person, Alice thought. “All right,” she said. “Go. Go to Kazakstan. Good luck.”

There were a couple of protesters already in place, reserving their spots like shoppers in the winter sales. They waved a banner at Alice as she went past—
Yankee, go home!
—but she hardly noticed, because she could see trouble up ahead. Harry was arguing with a security guard. Alice quickened her step.

“What’s the problem?” Alice asked, stepping between them.

“This guy won’t let me through,” Harry said. “I can’t understand what he’s saying, but he’s giving me the shits.” He looked past Alice’s shoulder and said to the guard, in English: “Listen, buddy, this lady’s in charge here, I’m with her, and so I go where I like.
Capisce?”

He pushed through the doorway and immediately seemed to drop, as though he’d just fallen down a small step. The guard made a face:
I told you so.

“What’s happened?” Alice said.

Harry pulled first one foot and then the other clear of the sludge. They came out with extravagant three-syllable sucking sounds, like oxen tramping through mud. His trouser ankles and shoes were covered in mud, wet cement and paint. He had walked onto a building site, which the security guard had been trying to direct him away from.

Alice was heading through another door, the one that led to the main body of the exhibition hall. Studiously looking anywhere but at the security guard, Harry squelched after her. “I thought the guy was just being a typical Russian jerk, trying to tell me what to do,” he said.

“No, Harry.” Alice was torn between being angry and trying not to laugh. “You were being a typical
American
asshole, not believing what he told you simply because he was Russian.”

Harry was getting fatter by the week. Alice could see it in the way his jowls lapped at his collar, in the stretch of his shirt over his belt. She’d have thought that all that sex he was boasting about would be keeping him thin. His tan—
no one
had a tan in a Moscow winter—was suffused with orange, and seemed accentuated at the points on his temples where skin met hair. Definitely a tanning parlor job, thought Alice. Harry looked one notch up from a sex tourist in Thailand. She wondered how much he knew about her ordeal, about the video. Was the look on his face sympathetic or salacious? Either way, she didn’t want to know. If she was going to get through today, and tomorrow, and the rest of her life, she was going to have to close the door on the whole sorry episode.

“How are you?” he asked. “After all the … I mean…”

“Do me a favor, Harry. You don’t ask, and I won’t tell.”

Bob was waiting for them by the main desk. “How
are
you, Alice?”

“Ask Harry.”

“Have you seen Lewis? He’s been worried sick about you.”

“We’ve got an auction to run here.”

The auction was to take place in Pavilion II, Hall 3: thirty-two-thousand square feet that was currently filled with tricolors, posters, tables and people. Alice ignored the hush that fell over the room when she
entered. She stepped up to the podium, steadied herself against the lectern provided and began bombarding the staff with questions, to make sure they were on their toes.

Where did the applications go? To the sorters, who’d rank them according to the type of bid and then file them.

What about the tally forms? To the chief counters, for final checking before being sent to computer operators in the processing unit.

She was a passerby without a voucher; how did they deal with that?

She filled out specimen forms but left them deliberately incomplete to see whether the tellers noticed; she left out an address, an identity number, perhaps the number of vouchers bid or whether the bid was passive or active, even the applicant’s name.

How many lines would there be outside? Two: one for individuals, the other for corporate entities, and on no account should the two be confused.

What identity did bidders need? Individuals required passports; corporate entities needed their charter, notarized copies of statutory documents, declarations of any state-owned interest in them, and of course the representative’s authorization to sign.

She shouted and screamed to check that security was alert.

Eighteen hours to go, and the staff was still getting things wrong. “If you’re not sure,” Alice yelled, “then do something very un-Russian: ask!”

The rehearsal lasted until the evening. Alice felt as though she were studying for exams, and the point was
approaching when she simply had to stop worrying and trust that everything would work out, if not perfectly, then more or less all right. She was going to cut a ribbon and open the auction at nine o’clock sharp the next morning—Borzov and Arkin, still evidently hedging their bets, had both found pressing reasons why they couldn’t do the honors—and after that, she didn’t know whether to expect ten people or ten thousand.

She had no strength left. If she hadn’t had the lectern to cling to for support, she would have slumped into an exhausted heap. There was nothing she could do now but hope and pray—oh, and quell her nerves with the best part of a half-liter.

Lev was out on Mafia business and didn’t get back till late.

“How was it?” he asked.

“Pretty average.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly, I’m shitting myself.”

“It’ll be all right,” he said, kissing the crown of her head. “It’ll be all right.”

“You’re more confident than I am.”

He flicked through the channels on the TV and picked absently at some pickled herrings.

“You seem distracted,” she said.

“Me? I’m fine.”

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what you’re not telling me.”

He smiled playfully. “There are many things I don’t tell you.”

“Like what?”

“Like many things. I don’t even know half of them myself. You’re American, Alice; I’m Russian. You’ve one soul, I’ve two—a public one and a private one.”

“You think that’s exclusive to Russians? You should spend some time on Wall Street. On the trading floors, no one dares show sympathy, weakness, vulnerability, the slightest need for human kindness.” Every day there had brought a test of one kind or another. She recalled how colleagues had left hard-core pornography on her desk to see how she’d react, and been chastened when she’d glanced at the pictures and told the nearest guy that his sister was looking well.

Lev’s expression showed that he didn’t think much of the comparison. He leaned over and sang softly in Alice’s ear:

“What’s your shell made out of, Mr. Tortoise?

I said, and looked him in the eye.

Just from the lessons fear has taught us,

Were the words of his reply.

In Russia’s land we find our way through circles of deceit.

The smiling mask cannot conceal your neighbor’s cloven feet.”

The crevasses of his face were deep; scars and pits marking a latent thuggish belligerence born of necessity and laid down over the years, layer after layer, carapace against a hostile world. Whatever Lev chose to show her would be merely what he wanted to, the tip of the iceberg. From time to time the iceberg would rotate, bringing different parts to the surface, but it was too big for each part to receive its time in the sun. There’d always be concealed depths, areas forever clandestine.

Monday, March 2, 1992