Vodka (74 page)

Rodion gestured at the nearest two graves. “Mates of mine; died in Afghanistan.” There were a couple of women with him, wrapped like mummies against the cold. “These are their mothers, Ira and Lena,” Rodion said. “This is Juku—he’s an investigator with the prosecutor’s office.”

“Rodion’s a friend of mine,” Irk said.

“He’s a good man,” Ira said. “He always comes here, you know. Twice, three times a week. A lot of them don’t bother.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Rodion said. “The mothers are always here, Juku. You see one hurrying from the bus in the evening after work, another already sitting by the graveside crying, a third painting the railing around her son’s grave. That’s how they get to know each other, that’s how they got to know me.”

Lena handed Irk a piece of paper, half torn along the lines where it had been folded and unfolded on umpteen occasions. “This is what the government sent me,” she said. He opened it and read:
Your son perished while fulfilling his international duty in Afghanistan.
“Not very comforting, is it?” Lena said.

“Tell us what it was like, Rodya,” Ira said. “The truth, this time. You never tell us the truth, you lie to save our sensibilities.”

“Mama, trust me. You wouldn’t want to know the truth unless you’d been there, and if you’d been there you wouldn’t have to ask for it.”

“Why couldn’t
he
have come back and
you
died?” Lena said suddenly, and there was silence, everyone shocked and no one knowing where to look. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s OK, Mama,” Rodion said. “I understand. I’ll see you next time. Come on, Juku.”

Irk followed him through the cemetery. “Next time?” he said.

“There’s always a next time, because there’ll never be one for the poor sods we’ve come to remember. She’ll be there with a bottle of vodka and a thousand apologies, embracing me as if I were her own son, saying over and over how she never meant it, grief does funny things to people, and we’ll cry and hug. The mothers at least try to understand, Juku. No one else does, not really. ‘We never sent you there,’ they say. ‘We didn’t send you to Afghanistan.’”

Back at the Khruminsches’ apartment, they settled down in front of a crime show called
Six Hundred Seconds
, each one counted down on a clock in the corner
of the screen while the host—Alexander Nevzorov, a former movie stuntman and son of a KGB officer—narrated footage for which no detail seemed too gruesome. That was especially true tonight, when Nevzorov was dedicating every one of those six hundred seconds to the story of the Moscow vampire.

“When the need to kill arises,” Nevzorov said, “the vampire can no more decide not to kill than a normal man can decide not to eat when he’s hungry or not to drink when he’s thirsty. The vampire can make and follow a plan to find a victim, even a subtle and convoluted plan. But until he obtains the release that killing offers, he’ll be depressed and irritable, he might suffer from headaches or insomnia. Blood will no longer satiate him, it’ll simply intensify the craving, a deadly snowball effect whereby the more he gets, the more he wants.”

Like all the best programs,
Six Hundred Seconds
was from St. Petersburg. Moscow journalists couldn’t make decent television if their lives depended on it. No matter how sprawlingly enormous it becomes, Moscow will always be a village at heart, retaining peasant superstitions. No wonder the vampire came here, Irk thought, because here people would believe in it. In contrast, Peter is a foreign, prodigal son, ashamed of its country-bumpkin mother. The vampire wouldn’t have lasted a second in Peter.

Asleep on the sofa, too tired even to have gotten undressed, Irk fretted lonely in his nightmare.

He was walking through corridors lit in crimson, pathways to hell. There were goths and rubber fetishists, men with tapestries of tattoos and women pierced like pincushions. Eyebrows had been shaved off
and redrawn in eyeliner; lips were slashed crimson and traced black.

Irk was with a girl called Roza; her cheeks were snowy and her lips scarlet. People greeted Roza warmly, Irk more guardedly; in here, without makeup or ornaments, he was the freak. “You want to stay here,” Roza whispered, pulling him into a side room, “we have to make you look normal.” She pushed him down into a chair. “This won’t take long.” She rummaged in a wicker basket, and gave him a makeup job as basic as hers before holding up a mirror.

“You like?” Irk nodded. He thought he looked like a clown.

They went back out into the corridors, and from there into a cavernous hall where a band was playing on an elevated stage strewn with skulls and bones. Irk saw four musicians, stripped to the waist and soaked with sweat. In the pit below the stage, the crowd was loving it. When the singer yelled, Irk saw that his teeth were filed to gleaming points. In cages suspended above the stage, dancers flailed with whips and handcuffs, or writhed upside down, hanging like bats.

The band finished their set with triumphant howls and ran off the stage. In their place came an apparition in sweeping black, a woman with unnervingly real horns sprouting from her hairline.

“Plastic surgery,” Roza said. “That’s the Mistress, the head of the coven.”

“She’s young to be in charge, isn’t she?”

Roza smiled. “She’s eighty.”

“Rubbish. She’s half that, tops.”

The Mistress’s voice rang through the speakers. “Mortal life is short, but we are not of this world. We
must liberate our souls from human flesh. We drink blood to reaffirm our membership of the religion of rulers. We are vampires, immortal masters of the earth. We drink for power, for surrender, for immortality. Those who fail are lost to the winds of time.”

Irk saw objects being passed from person to person, metallic sheens glinting under the lights: scalpels and cups. Several were pressed into his hands; he was motioned to take one of each for himself and pass the rest on. Sleeves were rolled up, scalpels applied to skin. Three parallel incisions on the inside of the left forearm, the cups held beneath to catch the draining blood. Only Irk spoiled the symmetry.

Full, the cups were handed around in acts of communion. Irk waved away those offered to him and shuffled closer to Roza. Participants drank greedily and fast; those who sipped too leisurely would find the blood starting to coagulate. Irk felt the bile rise in his throat.

“I see a man who chooses only to observe,” the Mistress shouted.

A moment dripped like blood on tiles. Irk realized that the Mistress was pointing at him.

“You wish to be lost to the winds of time, my friend?”

Her gaze squeezed at Irk’s stomach. Dimly, slowly, he was aware they weren’t playing games anymore—if indeed they ever had been.

“The blood ritual can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself.” The Mistress’s voice was relentless. “If you won’t become an active participant, then we’ll use you as a passive one.”

“What does she mean?” Irk hissed.

“If you won’t drink our blood, we’ll drink yours.”

“No. No way.”

“I thought you wanted to join us.”

“Perhaps a sanctuary feed is in order,” the Mistress said.

Roza looked away. Irk had to nudge her twice before she explained. “A sanctuary feed,” Roza said slowly, “is when the entire herd converges on one donor.”

Everyone was looking at Irk now, their faces heavy with anticipation. He felt their anger and fear. His investigator’s badge was no use to him now; in here, he was the intruder, the outlaw.

Irk tensed himself to run.

“My friend is timid and reluctant,” said Roza.

“And so his blood is tarnished,” the Mistress replied. Was Irk imagining it, or was there a note of disappointment in her voice? “Very well. We’ll find a
willing
volunteer for this most noble of services. Roza, would you escort your friend from the premises?”

Irk burst from sleep like a cork pops from a champagne bottle, and sucked in deep, gulping breaths as though Moscow air was the cleanest and purest of mountain breezes.

In his bag was a copy of
The Master and Margarita
, Bulgakov’s classic tale of how the devil had created havoc in the capital. If Satan came back to Moscow now, Irk thought, he’d find his work already done.

Monday, March 16, 1992

T
estarossa called Lev early in the morning. “Borzov wants to offer you a deal,” he said.

“How so?”

“He’s embarrassed that they can’t find you. It’s making him look weak and stupid. Reading between the lines, he’s also worried about how small his power base is. There’s a lot of support for you out there. He’d rather have you where he can see you than always be wondering what you’re cooking up against him.”

“What’s he offering?”

“An amnesty for what happened in parliament.”

“And in return?”

“You agree not to run for deputy again. To stay out of politics altogether, in fact. And you give up all your interests in Red October.”

Lev thought for long moments. “The first is acceptable. The second’s definitely not.”

“It’s Red October that’s caused all this trouble, as far as he’s concerned. That’s why he put Sabirzhan in charge.”

“Don’t talk to me about that scum. What else? From Borzov, I mean.”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“You can keep everything else. If you ask me, it’s a hell of a deal. The old man’s going soft.”

“The old man is worrying about his popularity ratings.”

Lev considered the offer for an hour. The longer he thought, the more he realized Testarossa was right: it
was
a hell of a deal. Borzov was old, his health was failing, he wasn’t up to the job. In a couple of years tops he’d be out of office, and then all bets would be off.

President and
vor
were photographed together in the Kremlin at lunchtime, all smiles and handshakes. It was a new dawn in Russian politics, Borzov said: reconciliation between enemies. Russia was not yet so blessed with people capable of reconstructing the nation that it could afford to throw them in jail, he added. The flash of sincerity in his eyes might almost have convinced Lev that he meant it.

Petrovka was stuffy, smoky and overheated. Irk went for a walk to clear his head.

The snow was falling heavily again. When he looked behind him, he saw that the snow was already covering his footprints, erasing any trace of his progress. Story of my life, Irk thought, story of my—

And then he was running, footprints be damned, skidding like a penguin through the Petrovka gates, taking the steps two at a time past his astonished colleagues.

What had that asshole photographer from Minsk said the other day in the sewer? That there weren’t any footprints. “There must be,” Irk had replied. “You think he levitates?”

There must be
, but there weren’t, and none around the latest body either—at least none that hadn’t been caused by heavy-footed cops tramping over evidence as though they were getting paid per item destroyed. Irk
was annoyed—no, he was disgusted—that he hadn’t registered the significance of this earlier. It was the kind of thing that only a chance observation would have uncovered. He could have stared at the case files for weeks on end without it coming to light. Reality lies in what’s left out of the picture.

Irk took the photographs of Nelli’s body and went over them with a magnifying glass till his eyes ached. If something was going to show up, it would be here, on dry land by the VDNKh sculpture, where the endless running of the sewers hadn’t washed away evidence.

There
—tracks on the ground, faint and slightly knurled. Wheels, perhaps, with narrow tires. A bicycle? Irk looked closer. The lines were parallel, as far as he could make out. If it was a bicycle, then the tracks would have to have come from two separate machines—unlikely—or the same machine repeating the same route. But no, the lines were symmetrical, perfectly so. Two wheels, separated by an axle. Not a bicycle. Too small to be a car, of course. A baby carriage?

No, all the victims had been too old for carriages.

What else had wheels?