Vodka (47 page)

Monday, February 10, 1992

I
t was still dark, but the area around the Vera Mukhina sculpture was lit up like a television studio. Irk saw discarded McDonald’s wrappers, three half-liter bottles of vodka—empty, naturally—and a young girl, whitened first by blood loss and then by the merciless glare of the arc lights.

The girl was lying on her back. Irk stepped forward and looked into her eyes. Once again, there was no reflection of the murderer; all he saw was himself, embittered, angry, bewildered and so very, very tired. Every option he took turned out to be useless against an enemy who was both ubiquitous and invisible. Damn
Arkin, he thought, damn Arkin for putting him back on the case.

Vera Mukhina’s stainless-steel rendition of the worker and farm girl is one of the most famous sculptures in all Russia. The worker clasps a hammer and the farm girl a sickle; they hold their hands high in solidarity as they stride boldly toward the glorious Soviet future, his apron and her skirt rippling out behind them in horizontal pleats. Stalin used to come at night and stare at the sculpture for hours. It was rumored that Trotsky’s profile could be seen in the drapery’s folds.

The policemen on the scene hopped from foot to foot, wafting vodka with every exhalation. If the bottles by the sculpture hadn’t been empty before, it was no mystery that they were now.

Irk looked away from the girl toward the VDNKh, the Exhibition of Economic Achievements Park. Marx himself would have been proud of the pavilions’ names: Atomic Energy, Coal Industry, Biology, Education, Physics, Trade Unions, Electrotechnology, Agriculture and Grain. But their grandiose architecture now mocked the denuded halls where imported cars and televisions had ousted local products, and where merchants touted their wares as if they were in the souk.

Death of a child, death of a nation. Irk wondered whether he could still tell the difference.

Unsure whether to be reassured or disturbed that he still had an appetite, Irk stopped at the Petrovka canteen. His hunger lasted for as long as it took him to search without joy for solids in the watery goulash. Where the girl’s corpse had failed, Petrovka cuisine had succeeded. His hunger evaporated.

He went up to see Denisov, who was so engrossed in the television that it was several moments before he noticed Irk. US Air Force carriers were arriving at Domodevo Airport with the first aid consignments of Operation Provide Hope. Transport aircraft landed with wobbling wings before disgorging the contents of their fat bellies onto the grimy snow. The pallets were unloaded by immaculately uniformed USAF officers, square of jaw and straight of back. Next to them, the assisting Russian conscripts looked like toy soldiers, pale-faced and shivering as they passed bottles of vodka around to ward off the cold.

“What are they delivering?” Irk asked.

“Food. Prepackaged army meals left over from the Gulf War, which they’re getting rid of because they’re nearing their sell-by date. If we don’t take them, they’ll throw them away. It’s an insult. Leftovers are what you give animals, not human beings.” Denisov hawked again, but this time didn’t follow through; his phlegm was clearly not rising as fast as his bile. “We’re a great people, Juku. We’ll settle things ourselves, with our state and our government. There’s a world of difference between help and handouts. The West gives us this today—who knows what they’ll ask in return tomorrow? This is free cheese in the mousetrap. For all I know, the meat there’s been poisoned. I wouldn’t feed it to my dog.”

“I didn’t know you had a dog, Denis Denisovich.”

“I don’t.”

Rodion was waiting for Irk down in the lobby of Petrovka, ignoring the stares of the able-bodied. “I heard it on the news,” he said. “Thought you’d like some moral support.”

“I’d like a drink, that’s what I’d like.”

Rodion laughed. “We’ll make a Russian out of you yet, Juku.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Rodya, but the longer this goes on, the happier I am to be Estonian. Yes, I’d love a drink, but I have to go back to the VDNKh.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“It’s a crime scene, Rodya.”

“And I’m a … material witness—is that what you call it?”

“You’ve been watching too many cop shows.”

“I’m part of the investigation, at any rate.”

Irk thought for a moment. Two heads were better than one and, as always, he could do with the company. “All right.”

The worker and farm girl is one of two statues outside the VDNKh; the other is the space obelisk, a shining rocket that trails a diverging jet stream and is faced in sheets of titanium that seem to ignite even in the palest sun. On one side of the plinth, engineers and scientists strive to put a cosmonaut in his rocket; on the other, Lenin leads the masses into space while a woman offers her baby to the sun.

As Irk and Rodion passed, a man was standing by the obelisk, endlessly declaiming to himself: “I was a cosmonaut. I knew Gagarin, I flew on
Voshkod 1.
I went all the way to outer space, and came all the way back. I saw the entire globe—the deserts, the seas, all the places I’d heard of but never laid eyes on. And of all the places on earth I could have landed, I had the bad luck to land right back in the Soviet Union.”

The man saw Rodion and shuddered. Rodion
stared straight ahead with the excessive determination of one who is hurt but determined not to show it. When it comes to the disabled, the Russians employ neither linguistic euphemisms nor uneasy piety. If you’re handicapped, you’re in with the lunatics, the imbeciles and the idiots—unsuitable participants in the Soviet experiment, imperfect materials in a perfect society. It’s an approach whose only merit is its complete lack of hypocrisy.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” said Irk, offering him the opportunity to leave without losing face.

“What, you think I’m bothered by jerks like him? I’ve had years to get used to it. I’ve long since given up on expecting people to understand. How could they? Afghanistan’s the forgotten war, the buried war, the hidden-under-the-carpet war. Survivors of the Great Patriotic War—they’re proper veterans, but not the
afgantsy.
They got medals for being at Stalingrad, Leningrad, Berlin; we got nailed to the cross to expiate a nation’s sins. If they see me going to the window for war veterans, people say, ‘Hey you, boy—you’re in the wrong line!’ Me with no legs, fuck your mother! ‘I defended the Motherland,’ they go, ‘what’s
he
done?’ It’s a waste of time trying to talk to them about trauma and stress disorder, they just sneer and say it never bothered
them
, like they’re made of sterner stuff or something. I’ve got no time for ignorant shits like that.”

The crime scene was still cordoned off, though the sole policeman on duty seemed more interested in flirting with passing women than securing the area. He straightened when he saw Irk and tried to look officious, but it was too late. In a place where no civilian should have
been allowed entry, Irk had seen a child at the base of the sculpture.

“What the hell are you doing?” Irk said. “This is a crime scene, not a pop concert.”

“The area’s secure, sir. It’s just me here.”

“Then what’s that child doing?”

“What child?”

“That child,” Irk said, pointing to the sculpture. The policeman turned to follow his finger.

“There’s no one there, sir.”

And he was right, there wasn’t.

Irk hurried over to the statue. The child was gone, but
where?
There was nothing but open space for a hundred yards in every direction. The kid would’ve had to be an Olympic champion to get away that fast.

Irk shook his head and slapped at his face. He was seeing specters, hallucinating. He’d been working too hard, everyone at Petrovka told him so.

Rodion was by Irk’s side—he moved fast for a man with no legs—and pointing upward.

“What, Rodya—you think he flew?”

“No.
Look
—” Rodion was indicating the folds of the farm girl’s skirts. After a moment Irk saw it too: the outline of an opening. “Service hatch,” Rodion said, pulling himself up onto the cornice. He began to climb the girl’s left leg. The metal was smooth, but there were plenty of handholds on the statue’s contours. Rodion clung to them with the casual assurance of an orangutan. The sinews in his forearms stood out like piano wires. He reached for the hatch’s handle and pulled it open. “Come on up,” he called down to Irk.

Irk had never been much of a climber, but if a legless
man could get up there, so could he. He hopped onto the plinth, stood on a stack of
Yest Vykhod
magazines—the homeless sold them on Moscow streets—to get some height, and then launched himself up the same route Rodion had taken. Sweating, breathless and with his shins smarting from being bashed against the girl’s substantial calf, he flopped through the service opening and inside the statue.

It was surprisingly spacious. Most of the interior had been hollowed out. By the light of three paraffin lamps on the floor, Irk saw half a dozen children, maybe more, curved against the swells of the girl’s stomach. They regarded Irk silently. It was a moment before he spotted Rodion in the shadows. He was the same height as the children, of course, and next to them his face looked absurdly old, as though he were the victim of some dreadful aging disease.

Rodion was sitting—did he sit,
could
one sit on stumps?—next to a boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve. The boy’s eyes were lavishly soulful, reined in by cool, appraising lids.

“This is who you saw,” Rodion said.

“What’s his name?”

“No names,” the boy said. He reached inside his torn shirt and scratched at his armpit—fleas.

“How do you know him?” Irk asked Rodion.

“Been in and out of the orphanage.” Rodion gestured around him. “Like most of them.”

“What’s
his
name?” The boy nodded toward Irk. “Looks like a cop to me. Rodya, what the hell are you doing?” He spoke fast through full, girlish lips. “You know I’m hiding from the cops. That’s why I came here, to turn into a dot.”

“His name’s Juku,” Rodion said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

“He’s a cop.”

“Investigator,” Irk said.

“He doesn’t care what you’ve done,” Rodion said. “He wants to know about the girl.”

“What about her?”

“She’s dead,” Irk said. The boy wiped a strand of hair from in front of his eyes and shrugged. Irk was incredulous. “That doesn’t bother you?”

“You’re here, you’re gone. The dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much, poor devils.”

“What was her name?”

“Nelli.”

“Nelli what?”

The boy shrugged: no idea.

“You seen any Chechens around here?” Irk asked.

The others stirred, muttered. Their voices were unbroken, and their sleeves extended six inches beyond their fingertips. The Chechens; always the Chechens.

“You come to take over their turf, copper? That it? It doesn’t matter, does it? Doesn’t matter who runs things, as long as someone’s fucking the little people, yes?”

“The Chechens—would you recognize any of them?”

“Those coons? They all look the same.”

Twelve years old and already a racist; the boy would make a fine Russian man, Irk thought, if he made it that far. “Did Nelli stay here often?”

“Sometimes. We move around. You see someone when you see them.” He rubbed at his eyes. “That’s enough, Investigator. You can leave us alone now.”

Rodion hugged the boy, and kissed a couple of the other children on both cheeks, Russian-style, as he
headed back toward Irk. They all responded enthusiastically. Irk was struck by how well the children reacted to Rodion. Perhaps it was because he was so small, or because they were less quick than adults to judge on appearances.

Rodion and Irk climbed down the girl’s leg onto the plinth, and from there to the ground. On the far side of Prospekt Mira, tiny lights glittered around the Kosmos Hotel’s horseshoe outline.

“They like you,” Irk said.

“As much as they like anyone. They’re asphalt flowers, those kids. They know the world doesn’t really care about them, Juku. If they don’t grab something from life themselves, no one’s going to do it for them. Most of them aren’t even afraid of your lot. They know they can’t be punished until they’re fourteen.”

“That boy was afraid. He didn’t want me there.”

“He’s sixteen, that’s why.”

“Impossible. He looks about twelve.”

Rodion shrugged. “No one looks their age in Russia.”

A motorbike roared past them, its exhaust unmuffled and reverberating. Irk winced and put his hands to his ears, too late to miss Rodion’s yelp. When Irk looked across, he saw that Rodion was panting, quick, sweaty, heaving breaths.

“What’s wrong?” Irk said. “What’s wrong, Rodya? Calm down, old man, it’s only a motorbike.”

Rodion rubbed his eyes; Irk heard his breathing begin to slow. “Sorry,” Rodion said. “Sorry.”

“What did you think it was?”

Rodion looked askance at him. When he answered, his voice was small. “A machine gun.”

“From Afghanistan?”

“You never really come home. War’s not a film clip, you can’t tear it from your memory.”