Vodka (73 page)

Breathlessly, Irk told Zhorzh what he’d found in the sewers. Zhorzh thought for a long time before answering—at least, it seemed to Irk like a long time, though in
reality it was probably less than a minute. “It was never us,” Zhorzh said simply.

“What?”

“Never. We’d no idea who was doing it, or why.”

“But you claimed responsibility.”

“Of course. It suited our purposes.”

Irk shook his head, more to clear the fog than in disagreement with Zhorzh. “You wanted people to think that of you?”

“Like Karkadann told you, Investigator: we’re Chechens. They think that of us anyway.”

“OK. Tell me this: if it wasn’t you, why did you try and scare me into surrendering the case?”

Zhorzh ran a hand through the white streak in his hair.
“Because
it wasn’t us. Karkadann knew that if you dug around long enough, you’d realize all the evidence against us was circumstantial. Worse, you might find the real killer. The moment you did, all the pressure we were placing on Lev would have dissolved. It wasn’t that we feared you proving we were responsible; we feared you finding out that
it wasn’t us.”

Onward, onward; to stop, even to slow down, would have forced Irk to confront the humiliation of having gotten things so terribly wrong.

Investigators know surgeons, it’s an occupational hazard of the job. Irk went from hospital to hospital, asking—in confidence, of course—what they knew of black-market blood. Some denied any knowledge outright; what they didn’t say couldn’t get them into trouble. Others hinted at the truth, leaving Irk to pick his way through shifting shapes of information and evasion. Yes, they’d heard it was a problem in other hospitals, but
not here, heavens no, their own procedures were well tested and thorough.

Only one surgeon was totally frank with him, and if that was because he was American and therefore used to transparency, or if it was because Irk, having seen a photograph of the man’s wife on his desk, had remarked that he’d had the pleasure of meeting her and that her beauty was matched only by her charm, well, so be it; a man got his breaks where he could. Lewis’s accent made some words hard for Irk to understand, but that was offset by the slowness of his cadence.

“No offense to your country, Investigator …” he said.

“I’m Estonian. It’s not my country.”

“Even better. Black market? Yes, it’s a problem. I had to sack someone the other day for raiding our supplies and selling them. And of course you have to check all incoming blood too—you can’t simply accept the supplier’s word that it’s safe. I’ve had to throw out stock that’s contaminated, diseased, improperly refrigerated or otherwise substandard.”

Children’s blood was less likely to be substandard, Irk supposed; children had less time and opportunity to pollute themselves with vodka and heroin and AIDS.

“You deal with the suppliers directly?”

“You know how this place works better than I do, Investigator. Even the middlemen have middlemen. I keep well away from them.”

Of course you do, Irk thought. You’re American; your hands are cleaner than Pontius Pilate’s.

“You saw the container marks on the body, I take it?” Sidorouk said.

“I’ve just been to the hospitals asking about black-market blood.”

Sidorouk paused. “I wouldn’t dream of making suggestions, Juku, but…”

“You’re going to anyway, aren’t you?”

Sidorouk gestured at the cadaver. “Look at her neck.” Irk did so. It was dotted with small tracts of dried blood. “Closer, down at the throat.” Whorls of dark brown, smeared on the skin. “Now the left temple, next to the wound.” A scab of desiccated saliva.

Saliva, whorls: licking, Irk thought, licking, tasting … The connection came in a rush. The killer wasn’t taking the blood to sell on the black market; he was taking it to
drink.

If a vampire was going to strike anywhere, Sidorouk said, Russia was as good a place as any. Looming large in Russian folklore is a bogeyman named Myertovjec, a brute with a purple face whose victims are the sons of werewolves or witches, or those who’ve cursed their own father or the church. Myertovjec responds to soft and hard treatment alike: if sprinkling poppy seeds along the road from the tomb to the deceased’s house doesn’t work, a stake through the chest to nail the beast to the coffin usually does the trick.

Vampires are supposed to command weaker wills; this at least was something to which Irk could relate. This vampire had drained Irk’s energy even as he’d dominated his thoughts. Irk’s lassitude had been debilitating. Some days, he’d climbed the stairs to his office only by grabbing the banister and pulling himself up arm over arm, as though hauling an anchor aboard a boat.

Why children? They were smaller than adults, of course, and easier to subdue. But why their
blood?
For rejuvenation? Reinvention? Was the vampire—the
killer
, vampires don’t exist, he reminded himself—was the killer harking back to his own childhood, an idyll, real or imagined? Or perhaps he was revisiting the sins of a dreadful adolescence on these children?

He?
Why shouldn’t the killer be a woman? Sidorouk recounted the tale of the Transylvanian countess Erzsebet Bathory, who killed more than 650 young women and bathed in their blood, which she believed would keep her forever young. She’d been sentenced to life imprisonment in a windowless room, and had died there three years later.

The killer could easily be a woman, Irk thought. What about menstruation? Women lose blood every month, would a deranged female want to replace that somehow? The victims were children; did pregnancy have anything to do with it?

No, this was ridiculous. How would Irk know, one way or the other? He was a man, men know nothing about women, and the police force was a good generation away from being enlightened enough to employ women in anything higher than a clerical capacity.

So, assume that the killer’s a man as opposed to a woman or a supernatural being. He would cast a shadow and have a reflection, and Irk would find him through detective work, steady and prosaic. The killer wasn’t going to be a creature who could fly, or hypnotize a beautiful woman out of bed in the middle of a thunderstorm; he wouldn’t be able to turn into mist and slither through keyholes, or command the elements, or survive on human blood alone. He wouldn’t be as strong as
twenty men, nor possessed of everlasting youth. He wouldn’t be the master of bats, moths, wolves, rats, foxes and owls, and he wouldn’t climb walls like an insect.

Irk was sure of another thing: the killer wouldn’t cease voluntarily. Only his own death or capture could contain the perverse fires within him that led him to kill. He was the ultimate consumer, unfettered by any kind of restraints apart from the need not to get caught, and he played off the weaknesses and moral contradictions that rent society from top to bottom. The vampire had chosen the darker path, and he was willing to go the distance.

Tverskaya was lined with an army of whores, five or six deep and wearing next to nothing, the cold making their bare legs blue under electric-green miniskirts. In Pushkin Square, twelve-year-olds lined up for hamburgers at McDonald’s and sold them at a profit. The lines stretched around the block; it was the slowest fast food in the world.

An old woman walked up and down the line, muttering to herself before grabbing Alice by the arm. “I wish my death would come sooner. I won’t beg, I won’t be pitied. You know why people pity beggars? Because, compared to beggars, they don’t seem so pathetic themselves.”

I wish my death would come sooner.
Alice repeated the words to herself as she staggered down the sidewalk. She needed a permanent touch, like a radio that dissolved into static the moment you removed your hand from the aerial. She needed to be grounded.

I wish my death would come sooner.
It would solve so many problems, and it would be so easy. All Alice would
have to do was climb over the side of a bridge and step off, then down through the thinning ice, a couple of lungfuls of water, and she’d be gone.

You could skate across the surface when the river was frozen over, but in Moscow things moved in four dimensions, and time was taking her under and showing her the dark hearts of existence, as it did to everyone who wasn’t just passing through. Maybe she could simply throw herself in front of a train the next time she was in a metro station. Thousands had been killed in the rush to complete the first line in the thirties, what difference would one more make? The metro was brutally efficient; she’d never have to wait more than three minutes.

No, no, it was stupid of her to think this way. However bad she felt, it would never be enough. Alice couldn’t conceive of a despair on earth that was sufficiently powerful to extinguish her frenzied, perhaps even indecent, thirst for life.

Sunday, March 15, 1992

T
he cartoon in
Izvestiya
said it all. Three panels, from left to right: Lenin in ankle boots, because in his day Russia had only been inch-deep in shit; Stalin up to the knees in his trademark cavalry boots; and now Borzov, fishing waders flapping around his thighs as he
looked thoughtfully at one of the full bodysuits worn by the sewer maintenance crews.

Borzov was drunk and maudlin. “You know your Shakespeare, Kolya? You know your
Macbeth?
What does a man need in old age? Honor, love, obedience and a troop of friends. And what’s the president got? None of them, that’s what. Look outside, Kolya. Those oafs in parliament do untold damage to the nation, but when the president puts them in their place, the people turn against him. Newspapers, television, people in the streets with banners, they all say the same thing.”

There was little Arkin could do but hear the old man out. He knew the problem perfectly well: the gap between reality and expectation had proved too much for people and president alike. Wounded by his own errors, by the implacable hatred and resistance of his enemies, and most of all by his inability to deliver miracles to this enormous, impoverished country, Borzov was proving too weak to manage the revolution and justify his people’s trust.

The Kremlin doctors had suggested that Borzov was manic depressive. There had been depression, inactivity and despair; there had been energy, elation and activity. Nobody had thought out a plan more quickly, carried it out more slowly or abandoned it more easily.

As if deliberately confirming Arkin’s fears, Borzov spoke again. “Anatoly Nikolayevich was too hasty in his reaction to the siege, Kolya. Perhaps we should quietly abandon some of these new policies before they become too entrenched.”

“Anatoly Nikolayevich, that’s absurd. This is what Gorbachev did, remember? Swing from one extreme to
the other, make concession after concession. He tried to please everyone and ended up satisfying no one.”

“Things are different now.”

“Human nature’s always the same.”

“Why haven’t those useless fools found Lev yet?” The discussion was over.

“He’s got a network of supporters with no love for the cops. He’ll be hard to track down.”

“Find him, Kolya. We don’t want him running around causing trouble.”

The papers were full of the vampire, relaying every blood-engorged detail to their readers with lip-smacking relish and speculating wildly. One organized crime gang had lost a card game to another one, and the stake was fifty children’s lives; Jews were sacrificing Christian children for their rituals; the murders were the work of a high-ranking government official who rode around in a black Volga sedan with a special license plate beginning with the letters SSO—the Russian acronym for
Death to Soviet Children.

Muscovites drank down every last detail and came back for more. The vampire, Irk thought, could be seen as a convenient form of retribution for the reformists’ zeal. Muscovites, Russians, human beings, want love, life and power, but in wanting these things they risk exactly the opposite: hate, death and exploitation. To understand this predicament was to understand the vampire, the true symbol of a society in decline and at war with itself.

Seven hours at Petrovka chasing leads that went nowhere was enough for anyone. Irk went out west to
the Vagankovskoye Cemetery, where vampire hunters armed with crucifixes, spades and stakes of sharpened aspen huddled around small fires and shared bottles of vodka. They were waiting for the creaking of a coffin lid or the sound of moving earth under the snow. The safest and surest way of cutting short a vampire’s immortality was to trace it to its lair. They’d already been around the entire cemetery looking for empty coffins into which they could place crucifixes, which would prevent the vampire returning and send it crumbling to dust in the first rays of dawn. Inherent in Russian belief is the concept of the earth’s purity and sanctity; the soil will not put up with dead sinners. “Trust the earth not to have you,” the cemetery vigilantes muttered to their unseen enemy. “Trust the earth not to have you.”

Across the rows of graves, Irk saw a familiar figure. Grateful for the relief, he hurried over like a swimmer striking out for land. “Rodya! What are you doing here?”