Vodka (62 page)

“The answer’s no, then.”

“They did find
something.
Sackfuls of privatization vouchers, to be precise. Vouchers stolen from the Ostozhenka branch of Sberbank on Monday.”

Alone again and reduced to dependence on others for the very basics of food, water and shelter. They chose
what they gave her. Whatever she asked for, she didn’t get. That was why she had no tissues, even though her body was still counting the days. Her tears flowed with the blood; she wanted to continue leaking until there was nothing left of her.

Friday, February 28, 1992

T
he next tape must have been made overnight. The call to the Kremlin came before breakfast, giving a location near the Yermolov Theatre. Cars were sent for Arkin, Lev and Knight; they were all in the presidential office inside twenty minutes.

The footage began with a shot of Karkadann holding a rubber tube. Alice was tied to a chair. She squirmed against the ropes, seemingly more intent on easing the pressure on her ruined backside than trying to free herself. Karkadann walked over to Alice, flexed his free hand, clenched it into a fist and drove it into her stomach.

No one in Borzov’s office dared glance at Lev.

As Alice gasped for air, Karkadann fed one end of the pipe into her mouth. Alice tried to bite down on it, but she needed the air too much to keep her mouth closed. The tube went farther in, finding first the back of Alice’s mouth and then her throat. Karkadann fed it slowly down, careful to get it into Alice’s stomach and
not her lungs. Alice’s coughing gradually subsided to a low whistle. Like a conjuror producing rabbits, Kark-adann pulled a plastic funnel out of his pocket and fitted it to the end of the tube.

Alice’s eyes were as wide as her mouth. Knight rubbed at his face.

Karkadann reached down to the floor, disappearing momentarily from view, and reappeared with a bottle of vodka. He opened it, held it above the funnel and started to pour. Zhorzh’s camera was not so tight on Alice’s face that he couldn’t get the bottle in as well, and he held firm, as though the steady glugging of an emptying vodka bottle had hypnotized him.

Alice was trying to say something, and she looked as though she was grimacing. Only Lev realized that she was in fact trying to smile, and heard the word she couldn’t quite enunciate.

“More,” she was saying, “more,” with the abandon of someone with nothing left to lose.

It was the rubber snake as much as the vodka that made her stomach rebel, though there were few places for the vomit to go. Some made it out of her mouth, shooting from the sides and onto her cheeks and chin, but she swallowed just as much straight back again, and still the vodka kept coming, remorseless and relentless.

When the bottle was finished, Karkadann held it up to the camera and dropped it on the floor. Behind him, out of focus, Alice was thrashing around like a landed fish.

“This is your last chance,” Karkadann said. “I’ve put back the deadline twice. You now have until eight o’clock tomorrow morning. After that, there’ll be no more extensions. If my demands are not met by then, I
will personally ensure that Mrs. Liddell gets a traditional Tsentralnaya send-off.”

The picture flickered and dissolved to static.

“What does he mean, a traditional Tsentralnaya send-off?” Knight said.

Lev looked at them with the pitilessness of a worldly man forced to shock cloistered people. “It’s very simple. They strip you naked, wrap you in razor wire and put you in the trunk of a car, which they then set on fire. You either burn to death or shred yourself to bits trying to escape.”

Arkin had said there was no way they could get in touch with Karkadann on their own initiative.

The man had murdered his own wife and son. He’d kill his enemy’s lover in a heartbeat.

Lev went back to Red October and sat at his desk for an hour before dialing the Belgrade.

For a man accustomed to getting something at the snap of his fingers, the waiting seemed endless. Lev forced himself to think back to the gulag. He’d spent years there, every day like the last and also like the next. A few hours now was nothing in comparison.

Karkadann called late in the afternoon. Lev didn’t know whether the message had taken that long to reach him, or whether he’d received it earlier and decided to make Lev sweat for a while before replying. He didn’t much care either way. It was enough that Karkadann had rung.

“What do you want?” Karkadann said.

Lev thought of the way Karkadann had hit Alice. He thought of how traditional Chechen culture proscribed vendettas against women. He thought of what else the
Chechens might have done to her when the camera wasn’t on. He thought of the attempt to kill him at the Vek, and of the goat’s-wool sweater. And then he banished all such thoughts to his innermost soul.

“I want to discuss settlement terms with you,” he said, and his voice was perfectly neutral.

“No discussion. You have my terms—agree to them, or I hang up.”

“They won’t call off the auction, and they wouldn’t allow me to transfer Red October to you even if I wanted; you must know that. I’ll offer you the most you can reasonably expect to get.”

“I can get what I asked for,” said Karkadann, but his voice was already softening. Lev knew he was the first person in two days to have at least listened to the Chechen.

“Once the auction’s gone ahead, it’s too late for you, there’ll be too much public dilution of the company. So, on Monday morning, I’ll shift the auction’s location at the last minute. My excuse will be the million vouchers you stole from Sberbank; I’ll say the change of venue is a regrettable but necessary measure to protect Red October against Chechen corruption. The public won’t know where to find the auction, so they won’t get any shares. After that, on the quiet, I’ll hand over Red October to you.”

“That’s insane. Borzov and Arkin will never forgive you.”

“Borzov and Arkin are prepared to let Alice die. It’s
me
who’ll never forgive
them.
”

“They’ll declare war on us both.”

“The auction in ruins, privatization off, prices spiraling, parliament scenting blood—they won’t even be in power.”

The line hissed at Lev as Karkadann thought through his options. The rival ganglords against the Kremlin: it was an unlikely partnership, but then most alliances in Russia were.

“What do you want from me in return?” Karkadann asked.

“That you let Alice go. And that the child killings stop.”

“How can I let her go if this deal’s secret?”

“You let her escape. Make it look as though she got out under her own steam.”

Another pause. “OK.”

“And the killings. You must call them off.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Like I said: because they won’t. I sit with them, and they know full well it’s my lover we’re talking about. They see her naked, and they couldn’t care less. She’s
nothing
to them.”

“I thought the
vory
didn’t care for women.”

Lev looked at the tattooed inscription on the inside of his left arm:
Fuck Soviet laws; the only rules I follow are my own
, it said.

“So did I,” he said.

Saturday, February 29, 1992

A
lice feigned sleep when she heard her door open sometime in the wee hours. She could tell by the faint smell of rotting carrion that it was the one with the white streak in his hair. Beyond the flimsy barrier of her eyelids, she imagined him standing over her and licking his lips. He said nothing; he always said nothing.

She knew the deadline must be running close now, but she didn’t consciously think of it. She could no more imagine the remainder of her life being counted in hours or minutes than she could conceive of life on another galaxy. To die here, alone and far from the one she loved—no, it was incomprehensible, her mind slammed doors on her, and the more she twisted to find the notion the more elusive it became, until she gave up altogether and thought of vile Chechens raping her because that was more direct, that was easier. Easier!

She heard Zhorzh’s footsteps going back across the room. He opened the door, two steps in, and closed it behind him. She knew the sounds so well now: the squeaking as the hinges strained, the metallic rattle of door in frame, the rusty clunk as the lock engaged—except now there was no clunk.

Alice opened her eyes. No clunk, that was certain, and no sound outside the door either.

There were always sounds, the guards talking, moving back and forth.

It was a trick, surely. She’d open the door, and they’d be on her.

Why bother to trick her? They had her just where they wanted, didn’t they?

She waited long minutes, her mind swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to the other. It was a trick, it was a mistake. These were her last minutes, this was her chance for freedom.

In Alice’s breast, a strange sense of exhilaration. This was survival, this was escape, and all her education and achievements and beauty and success meant nothing.

What did she have to lose? That was where the pendulum ended: what did she have to lose?

She clasped the door handle, hard and then harder as the sweat on her palms slid against the metal. The handle turned beneath her grip and the door began to swing open through creaking that sounded like rifle fire. Alice held her breath, waiting for outraged shouts or worse. She dared exhale only when the door was open and she’d peeked into the empty corridor.

Time was telescoping; every step took an age. She’d barely moved in three days and eaten even less, not to mention the silver chair and the tube in the stomach. She wouldn’t be able to fight an infant or even flee from one, let alone a posse of Chechens. Vodka would give her energy, vodka would give her courage.

Alice remembered something Lev had told her about the Siberian dilemma. At forty degrees below zero, a man who falls through ice into bitterly cold water has two choices: to stay in the water and freeze to death inside a minute, or to get out and freeze to death instantly. A true Siberian is supposed to pull himself out, even though this will kill him quicker. It’s better to
go and meet death head-on rather than simply wait around for it.

Alice went to meet whatever lay in store.

Along the corridor and up a flight of stairs, past a window that offered a glimpse of darkened streets and pulsing streetlights. Noise to her left, voices arguing in the room up ahead, one of them a woman, and Alice was momentarily stunned—if there was a woman here, why hadn’t she seen her?—before she recognized the tinny cadences of a television set. She went low past the open door and didn’t dare look in. At the edges of her vision she saw the backs of four heads, all focused on the program.

A loud belch behind her and she froze, but it was just one of the TV watchers.

Alice was at the front door now. She opened it as softly as she could. A gust of cool moist air from the apartments’ communal corridor outside and she was gone, forcing herself not to run, knowing that she couldn’t have moved faster than a shuffle if she’d tried. Around a corner and up to the tenement’s main door, open and into the street past colored monkey-bars, the cold rasping like sandpaper at her bare skin and scraping ice crystals in her throat.

Freedom was a taste at the roof of her mouth, freedom was alien. How easy it was to get used to not making decisions. For a moment, Alice couldn’t even settle on which way to go. It was the cold that jolted her into action. Naked in a Russian winter, her captors likely to discover her absence at any moment—it didn’t matter which way she went, as long as she did. There was no point having come this far only to die of exposure.

She walked to keep warm and to get distance; she didn’t care where she was. Street signs flashed changes
at her—Dubininskaya, Zatsepskaya, Stremyanny—and still she walked, a madwoman naked on the streets as though in a dream, waving away the cars which were slowing for her until belatedly, through the fog in her mind, came the realization that a car was exactly what she needed. When the next two glided toward the curb, she chose the one driven by a woman.