Vodka (22 page)

“And I bet there’s no food in the house.”

“Again, yes.”

“I know your type too well—you’re one of those men who think they can manage without women. Come, Svetlana will feed you.” She tilted her head as though to see him better; he was a good eight inches taller than her. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Keres?”

Paul Keres had been a chess grandmaster. Dead since 1975, but still just about the most famous Estonian in the former Soviet Union. Irk nodded. “Frequently.”

“Good.” She gave him the address. “Seven-thirty, OK? Don’t be late. You stand me up and I’ll come around and eat you.”

The Khruminsches lived in an apartment on Preobrazenskaya, out in the eastern suburbs. Svetlana kissed Irk on both cheeks, took his elbow and steered him between walls covered in strips of adhesive brown
plastic patterned with unconvincing wood-grain finish. Her forearms were massive, like a man’s; in the stale light, the dark hairs on them crawled like centipedes.

Rodion and Galina were in the kitchen; Rodion sitting at the table, Galina jumping to her feet and greeting Irk with smiles and tinkling laughter. What was someone like her, so sultry and alluring, doing with someone as ugly as Rodion? thought Irk. And then he remembered the ease and warmth with which Rodion dealt with the orphans, and chided himself for his shallowness.

Svetlana guided Irk to a chair, shooing away the cat sitting there. Irk saw a flash of blue as the cat leapt to the floor and ran between them.
Blue?
A black cat running between two people was supposed to be bad luck, but…

“Blue, of course.” Svetlana dismissed Irk’s question as though it were the stupidest she’d ever heard. “No, it’s not a genetic mutation. Lyonya’s a pure-bred Archangel blue; very rare, very classy. The first recorded blue belonged to Peter the Great, did you know that? We moved here with them. A cat should always be the first creature to cross the threshold of a new home. All seven came in before us, so they should have given us seven times the luck. Hah! Tell that to poor Raisa. But they’ve all won prizes. Look—”

She pointed to rows of rosettes on the wall, bright colors splashed in serried ranks. Vladimir and Konstantin had won at Solkoniki Park; Nikita was the reigning Grand International Champion of Europe; Josef had triumphed in Kiev, Yuri in Saratov, Mikhail in Krasnoyarsk. Vladimir, Josef, Nikita, Leonid, Yuri, Konstantin and Mikhail, Irk thought; Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and
Gorbachev. Svetlana was evidently one of the millions pining for the Soviet Union.

“They don’t have to parade like dogs. They just have to sit still and look pretty.” Svetlana beckoned Leonid back to her. “Look at their fur. If you brush it one way, it’s blue; the other way, and it’s silver.” Leonid looked at Irk with big emerald eyes, his slender ears sticking up like chimney pots. Svetlana leaned forward and tapped Irk’s knee. “I’ll let you in on a secret. You know what keeps them
so
blue? Vitamin pills and zucchini. And I wash them every other day in automatic washing machine detergent. Some of them like it more than the others, of course; they’ve all got their quirks. Lyonya here, for example, needs vodka in his milk. Two months ago, he knocked a bottle of vodka off the kitchen table—whoops!—and licked the entire contents off the floor. Now he’s become a raving alcoholic, and won’t stop running around until I give him a couple of shots of vodka.”

“Waste of good vodka, if you ask me,” said Rodion. Irk had almost forgotten he was there.

“So,” Irk said, “let’s talk about Raisa.”

Galina and Rodion had their heads close together, speaking in low voices as though their conversation was a litany of secrets. They looked at Irk and then at Svetlana. By some form of family decision, invisible to Irk’s alien eye, it was Galina who was elected to speak for them.

“There
is
someone we think might be responsible,” she said, “but it’s difficult to say who.”

“Difficult because you don’t know?”

“Difficult because he’s a powerful man, and he’s well connected.”

“Don’t tell me it’s Lev.”

“Lev?
Heavens, no—impossible!” they all chorused in unison. “Do you have any idea what he’s done for this family, Investigator?”

“Why don’t you just tell me who you’ve got in mind?”

The Khruminsches looked at each other again. “This can’t have come from us, right?” Galina said. “You understand that?”

“The prosecutor’s office keeps its sources strictly confidential,” Irk said, and caught himself. “Sorry; I sound like a pompous ass. Yes, I’ll keep your names out of it. If need be, I’ll fabricate evidence to justify further investigation.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, I bet,” Rodion said.

“You’re right,” Irk said equably. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“It’s Tengiz Sabirzhan,” Galina said as though in the confessional.

Even among a people who pride themselves on their solicitousness toward children, Sabirzhan showed what some—the Khruminsches included, though they said they were by no means the only ones—felt to be an excessive interest in the school and orphanage. He was often at the Prospekt Mira site, they said, though he’d no real reason to be—he didn’t have a child at the school, and he wasn’t officially involved with the orphanage. Of course, none of the staff there dared take issue with him. Rumors of Sabirzhan’s cruelty and passion for torture preceded him like outriders. If nothing else, Sabirzhan was KGB, and the legacy of fear those initials engendered was dying hard.

What had really convinced the Khruminsches to come forward, though, was the fact that Sabirzhan had a
handful of favorites, and he was brazen in showering gifts and attention on them. Vladimir Kullam and Raisa Rustanova had both been among the “lucky ones.” The tone of Galina’s voice made it clear that she regarded such status as a mixed blessing.

“Sabirzhan was at Vladimir’s house this time last week,” Rodion said.

“How do you know?” Irk replied.

“German told me.”

“I interr—I questioned him. For hours. He didn’t mention it.”

Rodion shrugged. “And then Sabirzhan was at the orphanage on Wednesday.”

“The day before Raisa failed to turn up at roll call.”

“Exactly.”

“We really shouldn’t speculate as to what happened,” Svetlana said before spending ten minutes doing exactly that. Maybe Sabirzhan had tried to seduce the children and they’d resisted. Perhaps, not knowing the violence he was capable of, they’d threatened to expose him to Lev or someone even higher. Whatever the truth, there was something not right with the man, that was for sure.

Irk chewed on his lower lip. Sabirzhan had been keen to get Irk reassigned right from the get-go. His reasons had seemed plausible enough at the time, but his actions made even more sense if he was the guilty man. As far as Irk was aware, serial killers tended to confine themselves to one gender. Admittedly, his knowledge was scant; officially, there had been no serial killers in the Soviet Union, and therefore investigators had no need to study their motives and methods. Another triumph for totalitarian law enforcement.

They ate—chicken legs from the US, known as Bush’s legs because imports had begun under the current Washington administration—and drank. As the evening progressed and the level in the vodka bottle diminished, so the conversation moved away from the case and everyone seemed to relax. Svetlana bustled around and flirted with Irk in a matronly way. Galina spoke enthusiastically of all the Western pop bands she and her friends were listening to, though of course there’d never,
ever
, be any group half as good as the Beatles. Even Rodion began to lighten up, rattling off a succession of jokes filthy enough to have made a tart blush.

They discussed how the city was being knocked off its bearings, forcing its citizens to fend for themselves, and agreed that their defenselessness was not only material, it was inner, psychological, a feeling of desolation. Moscow has always been a city of kitchens; great kitchens, to be sure, kitchens with the world’s best conversing, drinking, schmoozing, seducing, plotting and (most importantly for any Russian) philosophizing. With vodka, food, cigarettes and a handy guitar, Russians will settle down to swap stories, teach each other a few songs, and indulge in heart-to-hearts as only they can.

Irk was enjoying himself. Even a man as content with his own company as Irk was could be solitary for only so long, and when he looked at his watch, he was astonished to see that it was after one in the morning, too late for the last metro back. He could have gone into the street and flagged down a car—people were so desperate to make money that virtually every driver on the road offered himself as an impromptu taxi—but the Khruminsches were having none of it. There was a sofa bed here in the living room; he could take that, and
they’d all go in to work together tomorrow. Irk glanced at Svetlana to see whether this was her roundabout method of seduction, but all she gave him was a demure kiss on the cheek before disappearing into her room.

Irk liked to read before going to bed, so he took the first book he saw from the shelf. It was Pushkin, of course; every Russian house has Pushkin, it’s almost a constitutional requirement.

“What have you found?” asked Rodya.

Irk opened it at random and began to read. “The horses once again are riding: Jingle-jingle go the bells … I see: the ghosts are gathering amidst the whitening plains.”

Rodya snatched the book from Irk’s hands, slammed it shut and tossed it on the floor. “Ghosts!” he said. “Ghosts, from Afghanistan. How can I listen, when in my head the horse is an armored transport vehicle, the bells are the clanking of its treads and the white plains are yellow sand? I don’t even have Pushkin anymore, fuck it!”

Monday, January 13, 1992

I
rk and the Khruminsches left the apartment on Preobrazenskaya just after seven in the morning. When they descended the stairs—the elevator was out of order,
again
, Svetlana said—Irk could barely keep pace; Rodion had the balance of a cat. Once in the street,
Galina handed Rodion a small wooden trolley and a thick pair of gloves. He sat on the trolley, pulled on the gloves, and propelled himself along the sidewalk with strong, confident pushes.

“I’ve had enough practice,” Rodion said, and Irk heard the bitterness in his voice.

Svetlana stopped to chat briefly with two janitors wrapped in padded jackets and orange hats against the grim freeze. Every winter, armed with snow shovels, twig brooms and ice hammers, they and thousands like them battled to clear half a million cubic feet of snow from the streets. Their struggle was a very Russian one: unceasing, mighty and with the maintenance of normality its only aim—normality, in this instance, being open streets, passable sidewalks and roofs free from deadly icicles. Only in the summer, when their duties turned to planting tulips, tending lawns, sweeping litter and generally brightening up the neighborhood, could anything as radical as improvement be considered.

Galina kept walking; Rodion kept pushing, weaving between cracks in the sidewalks and angled paving stones. Irk hesitated, unsure whether to go on with the youngsters or stay with Svetlana. He ended up walking by himself. Svetlana caught him up, puffing from the effort, and gestured angrily at her son and daughter-in-law.

“An exchange of pleasantries, that’s all it is. Yet they have to make their point, don’t they?”

Every Soviet leader since Stalin had used janitors as informers. Sly old women denounced their neighbors to the secret police or pointed out the apartments that housed enemies of the people. Galina and Rodion
were of a generation that knew change; they saw no reason to fraternize or ingratiate themselves with such people.

Two men in hooded coats were standing in front of Galina and Rodion, forcing them to stop. For a moment Irk thought that it was accidental, the kind of thing that leads to an absurd dance as both parties go for the same space two or three times before finally getting it right with laughing apologies. But when he saw the deliberateness of the men’s stance, and the darkness of their skin beneath their hoods, he knew they were Chechens and this was trouble.