Vodka (64 page)

A
lice had hoped for good weather—sunshine would surely bring more people out—but she was disappointed from the moment she opened the curtains. It was one of those mornings when even starting the day requires an unusual, almost heroic effort. A mist of fine, drizzling rain enveloped the whole city, swallowing up every ray of light, every gleam of color, and transforming everything into one smoky, leaden, indistinguishable mass. It was daylight, and yet it seemed as though it were still night.

On days like these, Moscow seemed not a city on the rise but one mired in the depths of communist uniformity. People walked with their heads down, hurrying away from their past rather than toward their future. Although Alice was used to vast areas being little more than construction sites, it suddenly seemed that the builders were merely papering over cracks rather than laying proper foundations. When she looked across the skyline, she could hardly see a single crane. She couldn’t believe that there was a capital city in the world, certainly in Europe and certainly of a large country, where less was actually being
built.

She had arranged to meet Harry and Bob for breakfast in the Ukrainia Hotel, across the river from the exhibition hall. The lobby was packed and noisy when she arrived, with policemen shouting at gangsters, gangsters
shouting at hotel staff, hotel staff shouting at policemen. Just about the only people who weren’t shouting were Harry, who looked as if he was about to throw up, and four shell-suited men lying on the floor, dead. Alice hurried over to Harry.

“What happened?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

He looked at her vaguely before collecting himself and giving her a nonchalant, this-kind-of-thing-happens-to-me-every-day smile. “Shoot-out. I got here just as it was starting.” Now that he had an audience, he was warming quickly to his story. “Someone shouted, another guy pushed someone else, a fourth guy pulled out his gun and fired—and then everyone was diving for cover. It was like the Alamo. Wouldn’t want to be the cleaners who have to redd this place up.”

It was just past seven in the morning. The men, no doubt low-ranking Mafiosi, had almost certainly been drinking all night. Alice looked at the nearest corpse, slumped against the wall like a drunk. His face was fat and doughy, reeking of piggish stupidity even in death. Moscow was crawling with men like this, too brainless by half for any responsible authority to allow them within reach of a bottle of vodka, let alone a submachine gun.

Alice saw a knoll of humid ectoplasm sliding slowly down the wall behind the man’s head, and felt a twinge of bashful guilt; she hadn’t meant that he was
literally
brainless.

“You wanna go somewhere else for breakfast?” she asked.

“No, no. I’m fine.” Harry glanced again at the wet flecks of gray. “I might go easy on the scrambled eggs, though.”

Bob was coming through the main door. Alice hurried over, intercepted him before he saw too much of the carnage, and steered him firmly toward the dining room. The maître d’ wished them good morning and ushered them to a table. There was nothing in his manner to suggest that anything out of the ordinary had happened—he had the Russian ability to absorb the uncommon.

Harry went around the buffet tables as though he were participating in one of those supermarket sweep competitions where contestants are given a minute to cram a cart with as many items as they could. If it was on display, it went on his tray: buckwheat porridge;
egg
fritters with cottage cheese; fried eggs; and of course a mountain of blinis. No wonder he was putting on weight.

Alice took a small plateful and picked at no more than half of it. She could hardly eat for worrying, and it wasn’t even about whether the auction would be a success or not. Her mind was swimming with trivialities: personnel badges, generator back-up, food and drink—tea and coffee, that was, no vodka!—and spares, spares, spares.

“How’re you feeling?” she asked Bob.

He swallowed nervously. “Like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Alice’s first thought, confused but unworried, was that she’d walked into the wrong hall. The place was empty: no tables, no chairs, no dais for the supervisors. She clicked her tongue in irritation and was turning to leave when she saw two things more or less simultaneously: the sign on the door, which told her that she was indeed
in Pavilion II, Hall 3; and a couple of privatization posters left on the far wall as if to taunt her.

Suddenly very, very cold, Alice felt as though she were falling through space.

She was due to cut the ribbon in just under an hour’s time, and the hall to which thousands of Muscovites would hopefully be flocking—there were at least a hundred outside already, she’d seen the line on her way in—was as barren as the Siberian tundra. This place had been thrumming with activity only yesterday, when she’d conducted the dress rehearsal. Since then, sometime between about seven o’clock the previous evening, when she’d left, and now, everything had been—what? Stolen? Moved out? Burned?

Bob was looking as though he’d seen Stalin’s ghost.

“It’s almost eight o’clock. Where
is
everyone?” said Harry, and Alice was about to round on him for asking such an irrelevant question—where was
everything
, was surely the more pressing matter?—when she realized what he meant. The supervisors at least were supposed to have been there by now, and everyone else should be turning up in the next few minutes, but the three of them were the only people in the hall.

“Pinch me, Harry,” Alice said, her voice wavering. “Hit me, bite me, do something to wake me up. This is all a bad dream, right?”

He shook his head. “Not unless I’m having exactly the same one.”

She found the security guard who’d tried to stop Harry from tramping through the building site the day before. “My hall, it’s empty,” she snapped. “Where is everything? What the hell’s going on?”

The security guard looked surprised. “The auction’s been moved.”

“Moved?”

“Of course.” He nodded in Harry’s direction. “He said you were in charge.”

“Just tell me what happened,” Alice said, spacing the words carefully as though cadence could make everything all right.

“A lot of blokes came along last night and took everything out.”

“Didn’t you ask them what they were doing? Where they were going?”

“They weren’t the kind of people who appreciate questions, if you know what I mean.”

“And you thought I had something to do with this?”

He shrugged. “Of course. I read the papers, you know. He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?”

Alice called the numbers she thought Lev might answer—penthouse and distillery—and several that he probably wouldn’t, such as the Vek, on the grounds that she’d been there with him and it was the longest of long shots that he might be there now.

Wherever he was, he wasn’t answering. She left Harry and Bob at Krasnaya Presnya, along with a growing number of bewildered journalists and camera crews, and, wiping panicked tears from her face, set off to track Lev down herself.

She’d barely turned the corner when she had to pull over and throw up into the gutter, dry-retching long after her stomach had emptied itself. It wasn’t just that this, the culmination of her work—right now, in fact, just about all she had to show for it—had disintegrated
into fiasco; it was the fact that Lev was the one who’d pulled the rug from under her.

Lev, who’d said more times than she could remember how much he loved her.

Lev, who’d told her only last night that everything would be all right, when he’d just come back from putting a bomb under the auction.

Lev, who’d told her to go to breakfast with Harry and Bob because he had things to do, and that he’d see her in the exhibition hall.

Lev, who’d lied, lied, lied.

Alice went to Red October first, because it was closest. She ran past a couple of security guards and up the stairs, two at a time, to the executive floor. It was as empty as the
Marie Celeste.
When she went to the Kotelniki penthouse, there was no one there either.

Lev was the size of a small mountain, and he’d vanished into thin air.

There wasn’t quite as much pandemonium outside the exhibition hall as there was in Alice’s brain, but it was close. It was now half an hour since the auction had been scheduled to start, and Harry and Bob were trying to explain to journalists and would-be bidders alike what was happening. Alice slammed her car to a halt and ran up to them.

“What? What’s going on?” she said.

“What does it look like?” said Harry. “The place is empty, and not a single staff member has turned up.”

Alice looked out at the agitated crowd: policemen trying not to laugh, patrons who were telling each other how they’d always known this capitalism thing was too good to be true and journalists almost visibly licking their lips at how juicy this story was.

“Look on the bright side,” Harry added. “At least the day can’t get any worse.”

At ten o’clock, Alice made a public statement. She’d decided that the best way to play it was simply to be honest. Muscovites are so used to being fed lies that they laugh any “we’re-having-technical-problems” euphemisms all the way to Irkutsk. She confessed everything: that her staff, facilities and equipment were nowhere to be seen, and that, barring the kind of miracle unknown in a nation officially godless until last year, the auction of the Red October distillery was not going to take place today. She was jeered and whistled at for this, and of course for being foreign, though pockets of the crowd also applauded her for her candor, which pleased her.

By midday, the waiting masses had begun to thin. About a third of the patrons had wandered off in an all too familiar legacy of dashed hopes. Some still clutched their vouchers, others had torn them up and thrown them in Alice’s face. A proportion of the reporters had left too, convinced that the story had come and gone. Those who remained, in both camps, seemed to be there largely because they had nothing else to do.

At lunchtime, Alice drank vodka, three glasses more or less straight off, and started laughing—what else could she do? It was so bad that it was funny. Borzov and Arkin must have gotten wind of the fiasco; they hadn’t been around, or even contacted her.

She called Lev’s numbers every thirty minutes, on the hour and at half past, and received no answer. She’d left raging messages at each number; she didn’t have the energy for any more.

At six o’clock, the scheduled end of the auction, she,
Bob and Harry reluctantly abandoned the exhibition hall and set off for the Ukrainia, where Alice fully intended to drink the bar dry.

At a quarter past six, as they were crossing Kalininsky Bridge, Lev phoned.

Lev’s sitting room was vast, but Alice crossed it without seeming to touch the ground. She flew at him, talons outstretched. She wanted to rip Lev’s skin from his bones and tear his eyes out. Until that moment, she’d never fully understood the old adage about there being a thin line between love and hate, but she got it now, she’d flipped the coin. He grabbed her wrists and pushed her against the wall so that she couldn’t get enough leverage to kick him.

“How could you?” she shouted. “How could you?”

“What choice did I have?” he said simply. He held her close, both to restrain and comfort her. He was so much bigger than her that she had no real hope of hurting him.

“Let me go,” she said.

He did so. “At least let me explain,” he said.

“I’d like to see you try.”

He told her what had happened, as quickly and simply as he could. There were copies of the staff list for the auction at Red October, of course. Last night, he’d sent two 21st Century men to every staffer’s address—that was 300 Mafiosi, give or take. Each worker had been at home; anyone helping out at the auction would by definition not be earning enough money to go out on a Sunday night. Lev’s men had given every helper one hundred dollars to stay at home the next day and ignore all phone calls. The money was the carrot; the stick
came with the implicit threat of Mafia retribution if these instructions were not obeyed. Five people—a teller, a controller, a counter, a chief counter and a supervisor—had been given half as much money again and told to be at Tsvetnoy Bulvar metro station by seven-thirty the next morning. From there, they’d been taken to the 21st Century’s underground vodka warehouse beneath the Garden Ring, near the junction with Prospekt Mira, now cleaned of the bloodstains from the massacre of the Chechens.

This was where the auction had taken place. The warehouse had been open all day, in accordance with auction regulations, but since no one knew how to get there—or even what was going on—it was unsurprising that there’d been only one bidder. This bidder had of course followed the procedure scrupulously, specifying that he was placing a type one, passive, bid. In doing so he had agreed to accept the final price reached, but had in return been guaranteed at least one share. At the end of the day’s proceedings, with the total number of bids still standing at one, Lev had been presented with twenty-nine percent of the shares in Red October for the grand total of ten thousand rubles—which, at prevailing exchange rates, was substantially less than one American cent.

Alice had sold a similar stake in a Polish soft-drinks factory to Pepsi for fifty million dollars.

“Why?” she spat.
“Why?”

“For you.”

“For me? You’ve ruined
everything.
How was that for me?”

“Karkadann would have killed you.”

“You arranged this with
him?”

Lev told her about their conversation, and how the Chechens had let her escape.

“You should have let me die,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m being perfectly serious.”

“You value this auction over your life?”

“This auction
is
my life.”

“You’re drunk, you don’t mean that.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“You are. I can smell it from here. I’m sorry about what’s happened, I really am, but what else could I do? I live in my own system of coordinates, that’s the pure truth. The new Russia is too fragile for Western morals and manners. It needs hard-hearted pragmatists, men like me, willing to dirty their hands and stain their souls, just to survive. My choice was a matter of life or death. I made the decision that your life was worth more than our auction. I’d make it again.”