Vodka (26 page)

The last photograph in the album showed Sabirzhan himself, sitting upright with a girl of about eleven or twelve on his lap. He was smiling for the camera; she was in profile, staring away from the lens. In the context of the album, it was an unremarkable snapshot, and Irk had to look again before he saw two things. Firstly, the girl was Raisa Rustanova. Secondly, she was pushing down with both arms as she tried to wriggle off Sabirzhan, whose forearm was tensed around her waist with the effort of restraining her.

Children know, Irk thought; children always know.

Alice walked the streets to clear her head, and saw that the economic outlook was not universally gloomy, at least not on the main shopping drag of Tverskaya. There were three kinds of sausage in the shops: thirty-five-ounce sticks of the rubbery, boiled flesh-colored kind, smoked salami and pale link ones. There were eggs, frozen chickens, butter, cottage cheese, smoked and canned fish, red caviar, soft rose meringues in boxes and long beige strips of pastila candies. No one was asking for ration coupons. Bookshops unable to cram their wares onto shelves spilled them onto the sidewalk, spreading the books across rugs. Alice rifled excitedly through the editions, finding Agatha Christie and James
Bond, computer manuals and analyses of the USSR’s collapse, translations of Smith, Keynes, Hayek and Galbraith, Bibles, books on yoga and meditation, Sakharov’s autobiography—everything, in fact, apart from Marx and Lenin.

She took a wide arc through the back streets until she found herself outside the old KGB headquarters: Lubyanka. What she saw there stopped her dead. A line of people stretched for half a mile or more, starting outside the Children’s World toy shop, continuing over the traffic mound where Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s statue had been so unceremoniously toppled in August (the decision to build the toy shop here in the first place had apparently been in tribute to Iron Feliks himself, who in true Russian style had combined the founding of the secret police with chairing a commission on children’s welfare), and snaking all the way down the hill, past the Bolshoi and into Red Square.

Even by Soviet standards, it was too long to be a line of shoppers. Alice went closer, and saw they were traders, sellers. They were offering pens, brassieres, coats, shoes, kettles, perfume, vodka, food. They cradled their wares to their chests, or laid them out on filthy newspapers and upside-down wooden crates. It wasn’t aesthetic; nor was it seemly or civilized. But newborn infants aren’t beauties when they first appear; only the parents can see what a gorgeous person will, in time, grow of that crumpled red creature. It was shabby and messy and amateur, but it was
there.

Russia’s nascent merchants came in all shapes and sizes: a young woman with glasses rubbed shoulders with an old man in a Red Army overcoat; two old women wearing headscarves chatted in low voices. Alice
made for the nearest person, a middle-aged man holding a pair of women’s pink shoes.

“How much do you want for the shoes?” she asked.

“Whatever you’ll give me. I’m a teacher, I’m not used to this sort of thing.”

“You’ll never make any money that way,” she said. “It’s up to you to set a price. Decide what you think is fair and add a bit more. A buyer will start lower than what he thinks is fair. You haggle back and forth for a while and meet in the middle.”

The teacher looked down at her feet. “Anyway, they’re not your size.”

Alice smiled at him and walked away, ecstatic. She knew that market economies always start from trade. When supply is limited and demand great, entrepreneurs concentrate on selling goods with high markups—clothes, perfumes, electronics, liquor—and they do so in big, rich cities. Only when the market is reasonably saturated do they move upstream, from small-scale consumer production to heavier industrial manufacturing. That the traders were here at all confirmed Alice’s view that men and women are natural, instinctive capitalists, and that—regardless of what Lev had said back at the distillery—Russians are no different from anybody else. The planned economy may have held back their inherent entrepreneurial ability, but it hadn’t managed to quench their innate human desire and drive to take risks, accumulate capital and better themselves. These people would be the driving force for change in Russia, she’d have bet her house on it—until she remembered that she lived in a hotel.

Wednesday, January 15, 1992

I
rk’s car was still being repaired, and available squad vehicles were becoming rarer than teetotalers, so he took the metro again. Moscow had become a city of posters, he realized as he walked to the station; posters plastered everywhere,
everywhere
, on lampposts, trees, telephone booths, walls, shopwindows, even the metro itself, which the Party had boasted would never carry a single piece of capitalist advertising—but here they were, placards of a city trying to pull itself up by its bootstraps, shrieking about crash courses in economics and banking and computers and foreign languages, or selling apartments and dachas and cars, no time wasters and no rubles, serious dollar buyers only.

There were two staircases leading to the platform. Like everyone else going down, Irk ignored the “no entry” sign and headed for the staircase reserved for passengers ascending from the platform. This should by rights have caused a bottleneck, with the downward flow colliding with people coming the other way—but of course all the passengers coming up were using the staircase reserved for those coming down, again simply because it was marked “no entry.” It was exquisitely Russian, he thought; superbly communal, breaking regulations purely because they were there, and flipping the system on its head while still making it work. A million minor contradictions somehow
produced overall order. The biggest contradiction of all was when there was no contradiction, surely?

Irk hadn’t seen Sabirzhan since he’d brought him into Petrovka more than thirty-six hours ago. This was deliberate. Sabirzhan was a professional interrogator; he’d probably forgotten more about extracting information than Irk would ever know, which meant that he’d know every resistance technique around. Irk had therefore figured that his best strategy was to be counterintuitive. Even Sabirzhan might be put on edge by a day and a half cooling his heels, wondering what evidence the prosecutor’s office was digging up. Now was the time for Irk to see if he could exploit such uncertainty.

He’d prepared a bare room for the interview, stripped of anything that might take Sabirzhan’s focus away from him. Tables and chairs had been removed; there were no bookcases, filing cabinets or windows, no posters, maps or calendars. The walls had been repainted white, so there were no irregularities or damp patterns from which Sabirzhan could make shapes and faces. There would be one light: an ordinary desk lamp in the corner that would be barely bright enough for them to see each other.

Irk went to Sabirzhan’s cell himself rather than send a policeman. It would be just the two of them, right from the start; that was the only way it could work. His reservoir of patience was inexhaustible. He would search for Sabirzhan’s weakness, and if it was there, he would find it.

Irk talked about himself to start with, to put Sabirzhan at ease. He spoke of his childhood on the small island of Saaremaa—a part of Estonia largely untouched by Soviet
industry and immigration—and the fantastic medieval castle at Kuressaare, where he’d played with his friends. He spoke of the wrench he’d felt when moving to the capital, Tallinn, and how he’d clung to the fairy tales of his youth by wandering the cobbled back streets of the beautiful Old Town on misty Sunday afternoons. He spoke of Moscow and the way in which it simultaneously energized and depleted him. He spoke and spoke, lacing his words with affability and self-deprecation, and watched for the moment when the habitual suspicion in Sabirzhan’s eyes began to fade.

“I think we’ll grow to like each other, Tengiz Lavrentiyich,” Irk said. “I sincerely hope so.”

Interrogation is usually a duel that ends in one of two ways: confession or acquittal. Irk was unusual in that he looked for something beyond either of those eventualities; he sought the truth. He wanted to find out
why.
It was not enough for him to say that this was Russia and these things happened. He wanted Sabirzhan to hand him his soul.

Irk told Sabirzhan that he’d found the pictures of the children in his apartment. He’d recognized Vladimir Kullam and Raisa Rustanova; the staff at Prospekt Mira had identified the others, and were keeping a close eye on them.

“I sympathize,” he said quietly, to make Sabirzhan strain and concentrate to hear him. “It must be terrible to have a disease society can’t understand—won’t understand, perhaps?” Even in the low light, Irk saw a bubbling of sweat at Sabirzhan’s temple. “Let’s face it, Tengiz, we don’t live in the most enlightened country,
do we? The law still classifies homosexuality as a mental illness; it’s hardly going to push the boat out for child molesters, is it?”

He paused to let Sabirzhan answer, and went on himself when he received silence. “Are you queer, Tengiz? The person who’s doing this, it wouldn’t be surprising if they were queer. Society teaches homosexuals to loathe themselves, and self-loathing leads to destructive behavior. If you
are
queer, Tengiz, you’d better tell me, and soon. You’ll be classified as mad, not bad. You’ll go to a hospital, not jail; you’ll be treated, not left to rot. You’ll get life, not death. You must have seen the inside of prisons here, Tengiz. Imagine what they’d do to you in one of those when they found out you were inside for slicing children open. They’d tear you limb from limb.”

“You can talk all you want, Investigator,” Sabirzhan said, “but I didn’t do it.”

He was still at the dead point of absolute denial. Irk had to get him away from that; he’d be in business only when he did. All he needed was the first yes, and the rest would come. It was like murder itself. Once a man has murdered, he has two choices: stick or twist. It’s a strong man who can stick and still live with himself. Crimes mean secrets, secrets mean isolation, isolation means an urge to confess. Twisting is in many ways easier; the first time’s the easiest. Once that barrier has been breached, the natural compulsion is to keep going, to kill again and again.

“Do what you want, Investigator, but you’ll never get me to admit it, because it’s not true.”

Not true? Irk felt fury rise in him. The KGB had arrested tailors for making suits that didn’t fit; they’d
arrested musicians for playing badly at a concert and spoiling the evening for a Party grandee; they’d arrested teachers for giving low grades to investigators’ daughters. They’d put these people in cells eight inches square and watched them go insane—and Sabirzhan had the gall to talk about what was and wasn’t
true?

Irk spoke only when he’d let his anger ebb from him. “Do what I want? What does that mean, Tengiz? Do you mean torture? Of all the people I’ve ever interrogated, Tengiz, I’ve never hurt one. Electrodes on their genitals? Never. Pulling out their fingernails? Not me. Pentothal truth drugs? I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Two men, a bare room, a prizefight with their minds and wills the only weapons; that was where Irk felt most in the mix. He was a predator hunting prey, and when he was here he cared little for his reputation. The praise that came with success left him indifferent; he shrugged off the criticism that followed failure. He felt that Kipling would have been proud of him.

“What time is it?” Sabirzhan said.

They’d been there hours, though without any light from outside it was impossible to tell exactly how long or whether darkness had fallen.

“I’ve no idea.”

“Look at your watch, then.”

Irk pushed back his sleeve. “I took it off.” He gestured to himself and then to Sabirzhan. “I’m wearing no more than you are, Tengiz. I’m sitting on the same hard floor you are, I haven’t eaten or drunk any more than you, I’m hungry and thirsty like you. We’re in this together.”

“What a load of shit.”

A knock on the door signaled food. Irk opened the door just wide enough to collect the tray. Two meat-filled pastries known as “gastritis,” for obvious reasons; two cups of tea; three hunks of bread.