Vodka (67 page)

When Lewis tried to help, she turned away and stared at the wall, ashamed to have caused so much trouble and damage. When he told her to pull herself together and stop feeling sorry for herself, she yelled back at him to fuck off and leave her alone. He understood
nothing
, she shrieked, he knew
nothing.
It was as though she were willing him to throw her out again, and in doing so confirm her transformation from wife to
witch. But he wouldn’t; he was determined to make it work, even if she wasn’t. When he was out and the phone rang, she let the answering machine pick it up, listening without enthusiasm or emotion to disembodied voices: Harry, Bob, Christina, Lewis himself from the hospital, sighing in frustration when she wouldn’t answer.

Not Lev. Never Lev. Not that she cared about him anyway. She’d given strict orders to the whole of her body, down to the last hair, not to show him the smallest sign of love. She’d chained up her love in her heart under ten locks, and there it was suffocating. Her relationship with Lev was over, and she’d failed. The auction was over, and she’d failed there too. Raw, sucking wounds, the both of them, too fresh for scar tissue to have formed.

It wasn’t the solitude that got to Alice first; it was the silence. She padded into the living room, eyes straight ahead so she wouldn’t catch sight of herself in the mirror and see how ghastly she looked, and flicked through the mail she hadn’t opened since leaving Lewis two weeks before. He’d kept it all for her, stacked neatly—that was
so
Lewis, she thought.

One of the letters was from a district court in Moscow. Alice was already wondering what she’d done wrong when, reading further, she saw that it concerned the trial of one Uvarov, Grigori Eduardovich. Uvarov? Uvarov … She remembered now, Uvarov was the traffic cop who’d smashed her headlight a few weeks before.
Weeks
, she thought; weeks, as opposed to months or years, the usual time span of a glacial system. They must have fast-tracked him, which in turn must have been because of her involvement. She was—had been—politically important.

Alice scanned the letter for a date. The hearing was today.

The court was running late. Uvarov’s case should have started ten minutes before, but there was still a full hearing to come—not counting the one just coming to a close—before he would answer three separate charges: extortion (illegally demanding money from Alice); criminal damage (smashing her headlight); and the Soviet-sounding “activities incompatible with his status” (a backup in case the prosecutor was too inept to make either of the first two stick).

There was hardly a room in the courthouse that wasn’t in some way dilapidated. The ceilings wore polka dots of water stains, vast swathes of wallpaper were bidding for freedom. It was the kind of place held together by the plaster.

Alice lowered herself gingerly onto a hard wooden bench in the public gallery above the courtroom and tried to focus not on the pain but on the sorry procession passing below her: now a miscarriage of justice, now a miscreant. Judge Petrenko—juries had been eliminated by the Bolsheviks—confirmed to a kindly-looking old man that the government was banning the Salvation Army on the grounds that it had openly proclaimed itself an army, and was therefore a militarized organization bent on the violent overthrow of the Russian government. The old man protested that the Salvation Army simply wanted to operate community centers providing food, shelter and clothing for the homeless and elderly poor.

There it was, Alice thought: Russian legislation in a nutshell. Most Russians think their laws are excessively
harsh and nonsensical, the only saving grace being that they are rarely enforced. Decades of unjust and irrational rules had turned an entire people into a nation of lawbreakers. Could a system that had been slavishly devoted to the service of state and party now become a neutral arbiter of society, a defender of the constitution, a protector of civil liberties, contracts and private property rights?

When that system defined the Salvation Army as a terrorist organization, the answer seemed clear. The judge shook his head at the old man’s protests and rapped his gavel. “Next case!” Petrenko shouted. “Uvarov, Grigori Eduardovich.”

Alice hurried down from the gallery into the courtroom and took her place in the witness stand. When Uvarov was led in, she almost recoiled in shock. Without his uniform, he seemed smaller, shrunken. He must have lost twenty or so pounds since she’d last seen him, and he hadn’t had many to spare in the first place. Set between hollowed cheeks, his cucumber nose looked even bigger than she remembered.

Uvarov didn’t look at Alice until he was standing in the dock. She’d expected hostility, but what she saw, curiously, was sorrow. Petrenko read out the three charges and asked Uvarov how he pleaded to each.

“Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.” Uvarov’s voice was soft and reedy; the sound of a broken man.

“Good.” Petrenko liked those who pleaded guilty. “Let’s not waste any more time, then.”

“Can I ask the defendant something?” Alice said.

“Do you have to?” Petrenko said.

“I’d like to.”

“I suppose you’ve the right. Go on.”

“Why did you do it?” Alice asked Uvarov, hearing as she did so the sigh from Petrenko that let her know what he thought: that it was just the kind of stupid question a foreigner
would
ask. For the money, dummy, why else?

Uvarov’s first notion—Alice could see it in his eyes—was that she was being sarcastic, or having her own obscure fun at his expense. She nodded at him, to show she was being serious. “I really want to know,” she added, thinking to herself, when did she ever
not
want to know?

Uvarov gripped the edge of the dock. “Because I hadn’t been paid since December. Ten dollars a month—that was my salary. You’d think the police force could have found that amount, wouldn’t you? Not for me, they didn’t. Was that too much to ask—enough money to live? It’s hard, when you’ve a wife and children. Do you know what it feels like, to wake up every morning wondering whether you can feed them that day? I saw you, I realized you were foreign, and foreigners have money, everyone knows that. A hundred bucks to me was a lifeline. What was it to you? A night out.” He looked like he was going to cry. “It was nothing
personal.”

Uvarov was right, Alice thought. What
was
a hundred bucks to her? To him it was almost a year’s salary, even if he’d been paid it—even if he hadn’t been sacked the moment she’d reported him. There was a reason why policemen were paid so little, of course: it was assumed that they’d make up the shortfall in bribes. They were practically on commission, for heaven’s sake. What can encourage corruption more than assuming it?

Alice saw it all, as sudden and encompassing as a flashing light. It wasn’t just that Uvarov was no longer a policeman; in his eyes, he was no longer a man. Without a
job, he couldn’t be the breadwinner, and providing for one’s family is the sine qua non of Russian manhood. Wasn’t Uvarov exactly the kind of man privatization was supposed to be helping? The ordinary guy trying to make a living in difficult circumstances? Besides, it wasn’t as though Alice had been blameless. She
had
been going the wrong way down the street; she
had
tried to joke her way out of trouble, twice. He’d been doing his job, more or less; she should just have paid up and gone on her way.

Uvarov was here because this was a political case. She had more power than him, she was higher up the food chain. Everyone kept telling her how weak the state was. True, it was weak when it came to taking on powerful organized interests, but, as if in compensation, when it came to the private citizen, it could be too strong.

If Alice was powerful enough to get Uvarov here, she thought, surely she was powerful enough to get him out, even now. She turned to Petrenko.

“Your honor, there’s been an error. This isn’t the policeman who stopped me.”

Petrenko furrowed his brows. “What are you talking about?”

“I was mistaken. Grigori is an innocent man, that’s clear.” Alice looked from Petrenko to Uvarov and back again. It was hard to tell who was more shocked; easy to see who was angrier.

“Come to the altar,” Petrenko hissed.

“The altar?”

“My bench.
Now.”

Alice stepped down from the witness box and walked over to the judge’s bench. Petrenko leaned forward, she stretched upward; they could have been lovers at a window.

“Why are you doing this?” Petrenko whispered.

“I told you.”

“The man is guilty. I’m not going to let him off.”

“I’m the only witness, it’s my word against his. What can you do?”

“Charge you with wasting police time.”

“The police do a perfectly good job of wasting their time without my help.”

“I can’t let him off, Mrs. Liddell.”

“Why the hell not?”

“The judiciary has … standards.”

“Standards?”

Petrenko lowered his voice still further. “Quotas.”

“I see.” Alice nodded; she understood. “And if you fill your quotas…”

Subtly, so no one could see, Petrenko rubbed his thumb against his middle finger. “We get paid. Payment you’d be depriving me of.”

Alice sighed. “How much?”

“Two hundred.”

“That’s absurd.” No, she thought, what was absurd was that she was haggling for Uvarov’s freedom. “Grisha only asked me for one hundred; I’ll give you that, to drop the case.”

“Fine.” It was more than Petrenko had expected, she saw, but it was too late to beat him down now. He sat back in his chair and rapped his gavel.

“The case against Uvarov, Grigori Eduardovich, is dismissed, with my personal recommendation that he be reinstated to his position in the GAI without further ado. The court will now break for lunch.” He leaned forward to Alice again. “That privatization thing seems like a great idea, you know, even after
what happened the other day. I don’t suppose you’ve any spare vouchers lying around, have you?”

Saturday, March 7, 1992

A
lice was killing time. She needed food, so she stopped by a gastronom, a large, box-shaped building with a battered metal door, a mud-covered floor and walls in need of painting and washing. There were few things as time-consuming as shopping in a gastronom. First, Alice went around the store’s seven counters noting the prices of the things she wanted; next, she waited in line at a cashier’s window to buy receipts for each item; and finally she returned to the seven counters, lining up at each one in turn. When she reached the front of the line, the shop assistant tore the receipt down the middle before handing over the food; Alice remembered her schoolteachers doing this on substandard pieces of work.

The whole process would have taken five minutes in an American supermarket; here, it took almost an hour. Alice was glad; she had nothing else to do. She wasn’t living; she was existing.

Zhorzh came to the Kotelniki. He was unaccompanied, unarmed and seemingly unafraid for his personal safety, which made him either very brave or very foolhardy.
Lev allowed himself a small smile less of triumph than of vindication before having the Chechen brought in to see him.

“I’ve come to seek accommodation,” Zhorzh said. Karkadann was gone, Zhorzh was now head of the Chechen gangs; he’d found his voice at last.

“Why should I make a deal?” Lev asked.

“Because it’ll save you a certain amount of trouble, and a fair few deaths too. We wouldn’t go down without a fight. Why would you want to risk more damage to yourselves, when this way you can so easily avoid it? I’m the boss now. You’ll find me more reasonable than my predecessor. What you did to Karkadann was entirely right. You can’t deal with men like that, you can only get rid of them.”

They hammered out the details with remarkable swiftness. The Slav alliance would pay the Chechens twenty-five million dollars for all their existing interests in Moscow. It was a fraction of what the Chechen portfolio was worth, but equally Lev could have taken the whole lot for nothing had he chosen to continue the fight. The money was his way of expressing appreciation for Zhorzh’s sensibleness in coming to the table, and Zhorzh understood it as such. There was more than enough for him to take back to Grozny and invest there.

“You’ve got a week to leave Moscow,” Lev said, “or the deal’s off.”

Sunday, March 8, 1992