Vodka (66 page)

The bar was up to 180 kilos now. With a bellow, Lev hoisted the weight to his shoulders, hesitated, gasped, and shouted with effort and exultation as he shoved it above his head. When the weight smashed to the mats this time, he threw out his chest, raised one arm and roared what sounded like a challenge to the heavens: “Victory or death!”

Lev and Karkadann had agreed to meet in the same
banya
as before. As before, Lev was there first; as before,
he waited long minutes in the steam until Karkadann arrived. This time, however, he did not chide the Chechen for his tardiness.

“You’re a man of your word,” Lev said. “You let Alice go, and I thank you for that.”

“What did you think I’d do? We’re not animals, you know.”

The silver chair? Force-feeding vodka? Lev choked back his bile. “And the children?”

“Have any more been killed?” Lev shrugged to concede the point. “There you are, then. Are
you
a man of
your
word?”

“I did what I said I’d do.”

“And now? Red October’s mine, yes? You’ve brought the paperwork?”

The flush on Karkadann’s skin was not just from the heat, it was also the excitement of finally being able to touch what he wanted. In all human experience, there’s little sweeter than victory.

“It’s so good, to be in the
banya
after working out,” Lev said. His arms, thick as tree trunks, were akimbo, the vast muscles at rest. “I never know when I’ll train. Sometimes deep in the night, sometimes in the morning. I never repeat myself. Only I understand what’s right for me. Yes, I’ve suffered sprains and ruptures, but I continued with my lifts regardless. The injuries didn’t matter. They went away.” He smiled. “Toss some water on the rocks, would you?”

Karkadann’s initial reaction was to refuse, a childish antipathy to doing anything for anybody, but he hesitated only slightly before leaning forward and reaching for the water. He was nearer the rocks, after all, and he’d won; he could afford to show some magnanimity.

His eyes were off Lev for no more than a few seconds, but that was time enough. Lev curled his left arm around the front of Karkadann’s neck, dragging him suddenly backward. Karkadann instinctively reached not for the oak banister around his neck but for absent guns on a naked body, on his right thigh, under his left armpit. By the time Karkadann had realized his mistake, Lev had folded his right arm across the back of Karkadann’s neck, left hand on right biceps and vice versa.

A man whose arms could lift almost four hundred fifty pounds had no problem snapping another man’s neck like kindling. Karkadann jerked twice and was still. Lev released his grip and laid Karkadann on a bench. He was quite, quite dead.

“Insults I could handle, even a direct attempt on my life,” Lev said, “but to take a woman and threaten me through her, to strip her naked and humiliate her—no, no, that’s not the act of a man.” His black eyes shone from beneath the forest of his eyebrows, and he beamed a huge, beatific grin that made happy wreaths of his jowls.

He stepped out of the
banya
and into the anteroom, watching his skin prickle as the sudden coolness wicked heat from him. The two sets of bodyguards were waiting. Lev shook his head at them, to indicate there’d been a problem in finding agreement. Karkadann had called this meeting, so he’d be the one to stay in the banya until Lev had showered, changed and left, that was the etiquette. As before, when Karkadann had left first, it was embarrassing to be in a man’s company once you’d failed to find common ground with him.

He showered quickly, but without visibly hurrying. Although the Chechens shouldn’t go in to get Karkadann
until Lev had left the building, Lev didn’t want to take the chance. Within seven minutes he was dressed and moving through the restaurant with his protective phalanx, then out the front door, onto the sidewalk and into the convoy. It was with a delicious leap of imagination that he fancied he heard the first outraged shouts from within as his car pulled away.

The television news played the
Godfather
theme as accompaniment to reports of Karkadann’s death.

“It’s an outrage!” Lev watched the footage through narrowed eyes. “He was an upstart punk, not a godfather. It’s not an accolade you just put on like a coat—it has to be earned. That’s the music they should play for
me when I
die.”

Thursday, March 5, 1992

N
ear the tip of the Luzhniki district’s marshy tongue lies the Novodevichiy Cemetery, and in all of Moscow only the Kremlin Wall is a more prestigious place to be buried. Nikita Khrushchev, the only Soviet leader not to be interred under the Kremlin, lies here under a bronze cannonball headlocked between jagged white and black monoliths, representations of the good and bad in his life. Nearer the main gate is Nikolai Gogol, the great writer with a pathological fear of
death, mistakenly buried alive following a cataleptic fit. The inside of his coffin bears the claw marks of his desperate hands. Here too are Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Bulgakov, Shostakovich, Molotov, Eisenstein, Maya-kovksy—and now Karkadann, his place secured by money, a reflection of an age as mercilessly accurate as Chekhov’s plays or Eisenstein’s films were of theirs.

Karkadann died as he’d lived, a Muslim in name only. Muslims should be buried among their own kind; Karkadann had chosen to lie among the Orthodox and the godless. Muslim graves should be built and marked in a simple way, for extravagance is false vanity; Karkadann’s marble headstone was studded with diamonds and pictured him dangling the keys of his Mercedes from his right hand. Muslim corpses should be covered with plain white cotton sheets; Karkadann wore his best Savile Row suit. Muslims should be laid on their right side so they can face Mecca; Karkadann was on his back, as though taking a nap. Muslim traditions recommend a casket only if the soil is wet or loose; Karkadann’s coffin was walled in layers of silver and bronze, its lid was thick plate glass, and the corpse lay on a couch of white satin and tufted cushions. The catafalque was enclosed in a chamber of black velvet trimmed with gold brocade and silver tassels, flanked by two pyramids of pink satin.

The scent of flowers wafted from Karkadann’s grave like a chemical spill. A flowered heart the size of a man stood on an eiderdown of orchids, and around it was an extraordinary display: scabiouses in soft lilac, the graying blue of globe thistles and the firmer shades of hydrangeas and delphiniums; sorrels, spurges, hedge privets and hop flowers all in green; white splashes of
gladioli, chalk plants, lilies, carnations and cornflowers; the pinks and reds of larkspurs, carnations, geraniums, snapdragons and roses; and chrysanthemums in yellow, bronze, purple, apricot and champagne.

The florists must have worked all night, Irk thought. Even given that much of the preparation had been completed long before his death—gang leaders arranged their own funerals as a matter of course—it was still impressive. Only the seriously rich had the clout to get things done that fast. Moscow’s morgues bulged with thousands of bodies unclaimed because there was no one to pay for their interment; even the most basic funerals, with vodka for the gravediggers, entertainment for the mourners and a simple coffin cost around three times the minimum monthly wage. If you were one of the have-nots in life, chances were you’d be one in death too.

Irk should have been celebrating with the rest of Petrovka. Karkadann had been behind the child killings. Karkadann was dead. The murders were therefore over. Yerofeyev, of course, had been quick to claim a share of the credit, though Irk had won the lion’s share of the congratulations. As if he’d had anything to do with it, he thought bitterly. He felt only emptiness: the 21st Century had done what he, senior investigator with the Moscow prosecutor’s office, had been unable to do. No, it was more; they’d done what he’d
been for-bidden
from doing. Irk felt like a man sitting in a pile of shit with his hands and legs tied. He could see the shit, he could smell the shit, but he couldn’t do a single damn thing about it.

Tradition dictates that gang leaders kiss the corpse of a fallen peer. Failure to do so is to admit responsibility
for the death. The charade is followed even when the perpetrator’s identity is known to all. So Irk watched the bosses come up one by one, kingpins of Russian gangland, all bending to kiss the corpse, some also leaving an envelope full of money to keep Karkadann comfortable into the afterlife. They came from all over the former empire: Testarossa from Moscow, St. Petersburg’s Ivan the Hand, Lenchik the Shaking Head from Vladivostok, Murmansk’s Gibbous. Some were named for their appearance: Cyclops, who’d lost an eye in an attack; the Claw, who had an artificial hand; The Bearded, The Bald, The Kike, The Scar. Some had taken their noms de guerre from literature: The Possessed, The Idiot, Zhivago, Oblonsky, Raskolnikov. The only serious player missing was the Jap, who was rumored to be in New York, attracting an unhealthy amount of interest from the FBI. The Jap was said to have spent so much time with the yakuza that he’d adopted their custom of inserting pearls between the outer skin of his cock and its inner core, one pearl for each year spent in jail. The amount of years
he’d
been inside, it must have looked like a studded club.

The last men up to the coffin were the ones who’d had most to gain from Karkadann’s death. Zhorzh dipped his face silently and kissed the corpse: revenant, vampiric. Only Lev was left. He moved to the casket with the inexorable purpose of a zeppelin. The cemetery suddenly seemed very still, the living as silent and motionless as those whose sarcophagi they trod underfoot. No one seemed to blink or breathe as they watched Lev looking down at Karkadann’s body.

Lev saw beyond the closed eyes of the dead man to the insolence and hubris that had consumed him. To kiss
the corpse would be to signify respect and affection, when in Karkadann’s case he had never felt either. “Most people have little confidence in tomorrow,” he said half to himself, “so they want it all today. They want to have everything and spend everything, all at the same time. They search and find and embrace their own excess, because they never know when someone might take it all away. It was like that in the gulag too, you know. We had no faith in tomorrow, so we measured our survival in half-days, the rise and fall of the sun. At sunrise, you’d hope to make it through to nightfall. At nightfall, you’d look toward dawn. It was a
system.”
He looked down at Karkadann. “But you, you weren’t of a system. You thought the world revolved around you. That’s what got you killed.”

Lev raised his head and walked away from the coffin.

A beat, maybe two, and the Chechens were raising their guns, but Lev’s bodyguards were quicker, already swarming around their principal and hustling him away from the graveside. There the spurts of flame, there the harsh cracks as guns barked in Slav and Chechen hands alike; there the rips in shirts, there the blood billowing from chests, there the dull thud of men falling to the ground with the life flowing from them. Lev was out of the cemetery within seconds. When the firing stopped, the silence seemed absolute, redoubled. The cemetery was a wasteland.

Irk went to the Khruminsches’ apartment. They’d heard what had happened at Novodevichiy; they were glad Karkadann was dead, and they didn’t understand the unfathomability of Irk’s disappointment. “Life’s not all
neat ends and everything nicely tied,” Sveta said. “What does it matter how Karkadann was killed, so long as he was?”

Irk said he’d take half an hour’s nap before dinner. He slept straight through till dawn.

Friday, March 6, 1992

A
lice had spent days in bed, clutching a succession of vodka bottles to her as a child hugs its favorite teddy bears. The shock of her kidnap had kicked in, delayed but no less real and visceral for that. She felt shy, unable to hold a conversation or leave the apartment; so weak that even a visit to the bathroom needing preparation and recovery; relieved, grinning like a loon at the oddest times; and afraid, the most innocuous sound making her jumpy. Most of all, she felt strange and detached, as though her skin and body weren’t quite her own.