Vodka (30 page)

Irk had too many questions and not enough information to answer them. Even if he did have the knowledge at hand, would he have had the aptitude to use it? He was nothing if not conscious of his own limitations. The West, the decadent capitalist West, knew how to breed serial killers. Through necessity, they had also learned how to catch them. Moscow detectives had not.

“It might be worth considering bringing in outside help on this one,” he said.

Denisov’s eyes narrowed in a parody of suspicion. “What do you mean, ‘outside help’?”

“The FBI? Scotland Yard, perhaps.”

“You must be joking.”

“They’ve repeatedly said they’re happy to help if we need them.”

“And I’ve repeatedly told them they can go piss up a rope.”

“I’m digging up the ground with my dick on this one, Denis Denisovich. I need more than I’m being given if I’m to skim off the cream.”

“You and Sidorouk, you’re just the same—always blaming your tools, the pair of you. Everyone else manages, Juku, so why can’t you? But no, you have to be different. Why do you assume the Westerners will be better than us?”

“They have more experience than we do. Much more.”

“So would you if you had the crime they do.”

“We
do
have the crime they do. Very nearly, at any rate.”

“I’ll tell you what they’d say—
nothing
, that’s what. When they could be bothered to peel the whores off their cocks and crawl smirking out of their three-hundred-dollar beds at the National, they’d fob us off with revelations of the bleeding obvious: the killer’s a man, history of mental illness and drug use, he’s a loner, he’s paranoid, he’s probably fucked his mother, fuck your mother! He eats, he sleeps, he breathes, he drinks vodka. I could find out more from the damn horoscopes.”

A vast map of Moscow covered the wall behind Denisov’s desk. It was an old Soviet chart, and half the street names were out-of-date, changed since the August coup. Nevertheless, Denisov would still have this map in a decade’s time, Irk thought, he was the kind of guy who’d always refer to Tverskaya as Gorky Street, Yekaterinburg as Sverdlovsk, St. Petersburg as Leningrad.

“The FBI and Scotland Yard have an excellent record in solving—”

“I see where you’re coming from, Juku, don’t get me wrong. The only reason you even speak Russian is that you were part of the Soviet Union. Your alphabet is Roman not Cyrillic, you’re Catholic rather than Orthodox. Deep down, you Estonians have always been Western, no matter how much we’ve tried to educate you. If you want to adopt Western ways, you’ve only to reach deep inside and recover a part of yourself, whereas I would have to go far outside myself, give up part of myself. You might be prepared to do that; I’m not. I went to Estonia on vacation last year, did you know that?
To Parnu, by the sea. Lovely place—until the waiter threw the food in my lap, just because I was Russian. Estonians are chickenshit, all of you. What did they say during the Baltic uprisings? Estonians would die for their freedom—to the last Lithuanian. It’s true, isn’t it? Thirteen dead fighting the Soviets in Vilnius, five killed in Riga—and in Tallinn, a big fat zero. So I’ve had enough of all your griping about how Russia’s shit and Estonia’s so much better, how the kroon’s pegged to the deutschmark and the ruble to thin air. I know all that. But I know this too: Estonians live better and complain more than anyone else in the Soviet Union.” Irk thought better of correcting Denisov’s geopolitics. “You’re all whiners. If your precious Estonia is so wonderful, why the fuck did you leave?”

“You really want to know?”

“Unlike you, Juku, I don’t ask questions for the sake of it.”

“I left because my wife and best friend were killed. They were in a car crash, hit by a truck on the road to Tartu. Imagine that, Denis Denisovich; imagine having to go and identify the bodies of the two people who meant more to you than anyone else in the world. Imagine then discovering that they’d been fucking each other behind your back for six months. What could a place hold for you after that?”

Denisov was silent; for once, Irk seemed to have gotten through to him. He went on. “So I asked for a transfer out of Tallinn. Where do you want to go? they asked. Anywhere in the union, I said. I’d had the Russian language forced down my damn throat since I could walk; I figured I might as well use it. They came back with three options: Magadan, Minsk or Moscow.” Irk
snorted. “That’s the kind of choice they used to give you in the labor camps, isn’t it? Do you want a bullet through the temple or in the mouth? So
that’s
why I moan; because I had my country taken from me twice, first by you fuckers, the Russians, the people I hated, and then by Elvira and Mart, the people I loved. And when I left, where did I go? To Moscow, right to the heart of the enemy. Tell me that’s not a
Russian
thing to have done.”

Irk stood up and strode, almost ran, toward the door.

“Where the hell are you going?” Denisov’s voice was agitated; a detective walking out on him would certainly count as disorderly.

“To the mountain to steal tomatoes, to the village to catch butterflies. None of your business.”

Irk stalked angrily from headquarters and down the avenue, past the statue of Vladimir Vysotsky, guitar slung across his back and his arms flung wide. Irk had seen Vysotsky play Hamlet in Tallinn in the late seventies, not long before his death; he’d been
electric
, his black-jeaned prince a lone voice not in the court of Elsinore but in the asphyxiating closeness of the Soviet Union.
Hamlet
was the archetypal Russian tragedy, Irk thought, because everyone died: Hamlet died, Ophelia died, Polonius and Laertes died, the king and queen died. Hamlet’s father
started
the play dead. Shakespeare should really have set it in Moscow. Irk wondered what Vysotsky, Russia’s own bard, would make of this freedom he’d fought so hard for.

There were two people looking at the statue, a father and son. The father was small with greasy hair; his glasses were cracked, and his cheap suit hung off him like sackcloth. The son was a replica in miniature. If
anything, his clothes fit even worse: the jacket was two sizes too big, and the collar of his shirt flopped from his neck. They looked like they were going out for the evening; it was probably the only time in the year they could afford to do so. Perhaps it was the son’s birthday. Where were their coats? It was freezing. Irk wondered where the mother, the wife was. The possibilities—divorced, dead, separated—reminded him of what had happened back in Tallinn.

As they stood looking at the statue, the son turned to his father and wrapped his arms around his waist, clasping him so tightly that he knocked his glasses half off his nose. Irk watched them for a second, son with father, father with son. It was a moment of warmth to melt this cold, cold city, and Irk felt his eyes prick even as he remembered that Moscow did not believe in tears

Sunday, January 19, 1992

L
ev’s penthouse was in the Kotelniki building, twenty-four stories above the junction of the Moscow and Yauza rivers. The Kotelniki is one of the so-called Seven Sisters, Stalin’s gothic skyscrapers that dominate the Moscow skyline like vast, layered wedding cakes pockmarked with windows and girded with crenellations, their vertiginous spires topped by glowing ruby stars as they reach for the clouds. The
Kotelniki aside, there’s an apartment house at Kudrinskaya Square near the American embassy; two ministries, Transport and Foreign Affairs; two hotels, the Ukrainia and the Leningradskaya; and the Moscow State University in the Lenin Hills.

Lev was brooding, and it was Karkadann who loomed spectral in his thoughts; Karkadann, the man who was surely behind the deaths of three children already; Karkadann, now in hiding and nowhere to be found.

There would be less to brood about, Lev thought, if he could comprehend more. As someone who had spent much of his adult life in prison, how could he hope to understand a hoodlum barely out of school who was already earning millions? It was like appointing a member of the Communist Youth to the Politburo. A man needed to grow, to accumulate experience; he shouldn’t expect things to be his by right. Lev had worked hard to be where he was, he’d done his time—that was what being a
vor
meant.

Decades on, he still recalled with pride the words of the three
vory
who had sponsored his entry into the brotherhood (three sponsors, when you needed only two for the Party): “His behavior and aspirations are totally in accordance with the
vory
worldview,” they’d said. “He staunchly defies camp discipline and is practically never out of the punishment cell. His soul is pure, so let him in.”

Let him in they had, rechristening him Lev, the lion. The name was initially for his flowing mane, but it wasn’t long before it also stood for his natural leadership. He’d never used his birth name again—there was no one left who remembered him by that name; he had
no family but the
vory
now. After the initiation ceremony came the admittance tattoos—a dagger-pierced heart and a suit of aces inside the cross—the first of the hundreds that now swarmed his skin. News of his admission had spread through the gulags, from the harsh northern route of Vologda, Kotlas, Vorkuta, Salekhard, Norilsk, Kolyma and Magadan; down to Komsomolsk and Sovetskaya Gavan near the Mongolian border, to Bratsk and Taishet in western Siberia and the Kazak hellholes of Karaganda, Ekibastuz and Dzhezkazgan.

Camp life was different once you were a
vor.
Lev was now entitled to a corner of the cell to himself, away from the door and the communal toilet where the small fry and homosexuals were forced to cluster. When Lev wanted to watch television, his underlings were made to pedal exercise bikes to ensure a steady flow of electricity; if he wanted them to take a fall for him, that was their duty. But he had responsibilities too: he couldn’t lose his senses when drinking vodka, he had to honor his debts and, most importantly, he was charged with making and enforcing regulations, gathering information, organizing prison life and making necessary and sometimes unpleasant decisions. Without these, effective leadership was impossible.

Lev was jerked out of his reverie by the arrival of Juku Irk. It was the first time the investigator had been to the apartment, and he seemed suitably impressed. The ceilings were high, the finishings marble, steel and hardwood. The bar was topped with leather, and the carpet on which he walked—having first exchanged his shoes for the slippers provided for guests—was thick and white. On the far wall of the living room, an icon sat
atop a prayer:
O Mother Russia, your role is sacrifice. No land like ours has been called upon by history. No land like ours has the deep will to respond.

Lev gave Irk a handshake, a vodka and an armchair; Irk began to give Lev a précis of the investigation’s progress, but only got as far as his visit to the Belgrade when Lev interrupted.

“You went to see Karkadann?” Lev exclaimed. “Where is he?”

“They blindfolded me. I couldn’t find it again if I tried.”

“How was he? What did he look like?”

“What did he look like?” Irk considered the question for a moment. “Hollow.”

“Did he admit responsibility?”

“He didn’t give me a straight answer.”

“For heaven’s sake—it’s so
obvious.”

“I’m keeping an open mind.”

“You’re keeping an empty mind, Investigator. I expected more of you.”

“All right.” There was only so much bullying a man could take. “Let’s assume you’re right. Let’s assume that Karkadann
is
behind all this. Why not negotiate with him?”

Lev steepled his fingers. “You’re an educated man. You know what Kutuzov told Napoleon.”

“That was different.”

“Not in the slightest.” Lev quoted the great general: “‘I should be cursed by posterity were I regarded as the first to take any steps toward a settlement of any sort. Such is the spirit of my nation.’ And so it remains, Investigator. Even if I
could
get Karkadann to talk with me, what would be the point? In Russia, it’s victory or
defeat, nothing else will do. Feuding’s bad for everyone, but the only way to peace is hegemony, and the only way to hegemony is by eliminating the opposition.”

Irk had heard it all before. Russians may enchant with their arts and inspire with their courage, but horror, tragedy and drunkenness spiral through their genes. He finished his vodka and got to his feet.

“How can I help you, Lev, if you won’t help me?”

Monday, January 20, 1992