Vodka (51 page)

Alice went through desk drawers and filing cabinets one by one, grateful that Lev didn’t use a computer. Alone and furtive, she kept the main lights off and shielded the beam of her flashlight with her hand; Red October was patrolled by the 21st Century’s security guards, and they wouldn’t be slow to come and investigate anything suspicious. If they found her, would any of them know that she was sleeping with their boss? Shit, this was more dangerous than letting a hungry weasel loose in a nudist colony hot-tub.

There was a bottle of Stolichnaya in the freezer. Alice took it out and filled a glass, watching the vodka as it separated and slid like oil over ice cubes: frigid lava.

Personal considerations intertwined with professional ones, guilt crawled over justice; she couldn’t even see where to make the cut to separate them. Images of what she and Lev had done in this office, over this desk, against this window. She shut them all out and bent herself once more to the task.

Alice spent hours going through Lev’s papers, looking for documents corroborating the bank transfer details. The trail was often patchy, incomplete or confusing—Lev
didn’t keep his records in any discernible order, either through accident or design—and it was well into the wee hours before Alice had worked out for sure what he was doing. The realization came to her gradually: a hint here, an inference there, allowing her to believe and disbelieve before gradually reconciling herself to the idea. It was better that it crept up on her rather than reveal itself all at once, because it was bigger than she’d ever expected. When she saw the whole picture, she was breathless at—and, despite herself, admiring of—his audacity.

Lev was systematically stripping Red October of its assets.

He’d established a new company called Krestyakh, also registered in Nicosia, to which he was transferring the distillery’s buildings and equipment. The dates on the correspondence tallied with those of the bank transfers, and revealed a finely judged pace: not quick enough to arouse suspicion, not slow enough to risk being caught short before privatization. At this rate, auction day would dawn with Red October—the guinea-pig for the entire reform program, the company on which the future of Russia rested—little more than an empty shell.

Under communism, state factory directors who stole from the state were shot. Now, with the economy on its knees, those ruthless enough could obtain previously unimaginable wealth almost overnight. Russia, vast and laden with resources, was like a crashed bullion van, its contents scattered on the ground, and bystanders pushing each other away as they tried to grab the biggest bundle of cash—while the guards were trapped inside, crying uselessly for help.

Her eyes ached from straining to read by the flashlight—she’d already had to replace one set of batteries—and in her excitement and fear she’d forgotten to eat the food she’d brought. She brought it out now: cheese, ham, salty biscuits and some stale bread.

No matter, she thought, there was a simple cure: bread soaked with vodka. She was in a distillery, after all, there was enough vodka here to last her a year … perhaps a month … well, a week … till dawn, at any rate.

Saturday, February 15, 1992

D
awn was when they started coming in, and they didn’t look like cleaners. Lev and Sabirzhan were among the first to arrive. Sabirzhan wasn’t the kind of person to bother himself with mundanities such as cleaning, and even Lev’s insistence on controlling everything that went on in the distillery surely didn’t extend this far. From beside the window in Lev’s office, tucked out of sight, Alice tried to slow the churning in her chest. Her sense of guilt was no longer only about Lewis. Now it encompassed Lev too, as though the night she’d just spent was some sort of illicit affair behind
his
back, cheating on the man with whom she was cheating on her husband.

She watched Lev and Sabirzhan start up the
production line, casual as could be. She heard sounds familiar enough to have become part of her subconscious: the steady sibilance of vodka washing through the machinery, the brittle clanking of bottles wobbling down conveyor belts. Above these noises came laughter and joking. In Soviet times, Black Saturday had occurred once a month, a compulsory workday. But there was nothing remotely downbeat about those there today. What could this be other than a parallel production line, with neither output nor profits finding their way into the distillery ledgers, pure profit for those lucky enough to be in on it?

They were working faster than usual, Alice saw. Why wouldn’t they, when their own money was at stake? Slow for the state, quickly for themselves. She couldn’t even muster the energy to be surprised, let alone outraged.

No wonder Lev had initially been opposed to Red October’s privatization. It was amazing that he’d relented at all. Asset stripping, voucher requisitioning, unregistered exports, and now this. He must have been making a fortune from this distillery, let alone all his other interests. Alice wondered how wealthy he really was—rich enough, surely, to keep accounts in Switzerland or the Caribbean, as well as the company in Cyprus. Perhaps even Lev didn’t know his exact worth.

For Russia, one black market is considered two too few. There’s the shadow economy of underground businesses, unrecorded, unreported and cash only. There’s the virtual economy of Soviet-era manufacturing, which shelters from market pressures by retreating from them and existing instead by barter, credit notes and subsidies. And there’s the offshore economy, where the serious money goes.

Three black markets, and Lev had fingers in all of them.

Alice’s mind must have wandered. When she next looked down over the factory floor, Lev was nowhere to be seen. She was still searching for him when she heard the fire door at the end of the corridor open. It was Lev, she was sure; she could tell by the cadence of his stride, the long delay between each footfall as his endless legs ate up the ground, and he’d catch her in his office if she didn’t move,
now.

Lev’s office gave onto the antechamber where Galya sat, and the antechamber had two doors—the main one out to the corridor along which Lev was walking, and a smaller side exit onto a gangway high above the distillery floor. Alice had little choice. She’d already filled a satchel with the most incriminating of Lev’s papers. She slung it over her shoulder, hurried out of the office and across the antechamber, fancying that she heard the main door open even as she closed the side one behind her and stepped onto the gangway.

It was horribly exposed, that was for sure. The railing was only waist high, and the latticed metal treads looked a lot less secure than Alice hoped they actually were. When she looked down, she could see all the way through the grids to the floor; a couple of seconds’ drop if she fell—or was pushed. How long would Lev be in his office? If it was only a few minutes, she should stay still, wait for him to leave and sneak out that way. Any longer, and she should find somewhere more secure to hide.

Alice shifted the satchel against her hip and felt a hard bulge in its base. It took her a moment to remember
what it was; she’d brought a camera with her in case she needed to photograph documents. Contenting herself with stealing them instead, she’d forgotten all about the camera. She had documents to back up everything else, but nothing to prove the existence of this illicit production. Pictures would be the icing on the cake, insurance even. Arkin might refuse to read documents, but even he couldn’t ignore evidence on five-by-sevens.

The gangway was high enough to afford the perfect camera angle to capture faces—profiles, at least—rather than anonymous tops of heads. She wanted Lev in there too, but she could catch him when,
if
, he came back. Feeling like a private dick snapping a man with his mistress, she pulled out the camera, turned it on, adjusted the image in the viewfinder and clicked.

The flash sparked, bright and impossible to miss even from twenty yards. It was automatic; Alice had forgotten to disable it. Even as her stomach twisted in self-reproach, the viewfinder picked out faces turning up toward her, fingers pointing, sudden angry shouts where the laughter had been. There was no need for secrecy anymore; safety was what she needed, and fast. Lev would be coming through the door behind her at any moment. The element of surprise she’d banked on had vanished. It was time simply to save her skin.

Alice ran.

The gangway swayed slightly under her feet, but she couldn’t be scared of more than one thing at a time, and getting caught was more than enough to be going on with. She was most of the way across when she heard the door opening behind her and Lev yelling. Alice didn’t even look around. The gangway forked in two and then in two again, branches across the roofs of vats
that held more than a million liters each. If they caught her, would they throw her in one? What a way to go, she thought; she could open her mouth and literally drink herself to death. Talk about being pickled.

She zigzagged over the tops of oceans of vodka destined to fuel heated conversations, silly arguments, hysterical laughter, maudlin tears, pulverizing hangovers, family scandals, acrimonious split-ups, violent rapes and agonizing cirrhoses.

Alice scampered like a fox through landscapes of stainless steel. When the vats ended, she found herself in the treetops of the filtration columns, and even as she was looking behind to check whether Lev was following—he wasn’t—her skin prickled as a column of scorching vapor spat out and dispersed beside her. She looked down, and saw Sabirzhan, far below, holding one of the high-pressure steam jets they used to clean the filtration columns. A touch closer, and it would have taken some of her skin with it, even at this distance.

If she didn’t know before, she knew now: these guys weren’t playing around.

The more Alice ran, however, the less frightened she became. It must have been all the vodka inside her. She appreciated the danger she was in but felt somehow detached from it, as though this were happening to someone else.

A bolted steel ladder ran down the side of each filtration column. Alice chose the one nearest to the corner, the one most hidden from sight—if it was also the easiest to trap her on, then she’d take that chance—and clambered down it, using opposite arms and legs like a quadruped. In the wide-open spaces beyond, voices sounded loud and distorted as they chased her. At
the bottom of the column—she’d come down almost fast enough to make her ears pop—Alice looked both ways, saw nothing and then listened through the echoes to find out where her pursuers were.

Ten yards away, across an expanse of floor that looked about as inviting as a sniper’s alley, Alice saw an alcove full of wooden forklift pallets stacked with vodka crates. She tucked her body low and ran to them. The pallets stopped a yard or so short of the alcove’s ceiling, space enough for Alice to hide without being seen from above. The crates on the end pallet were piled at a slight angle, makeshift steps. She hauled herself up these and lay flat on top, pressing herself down as though by sheer force of will she could make herself invisible.