Vodka (79 page)

In the warehouse, not a trace of movement.

After long beats, Lev stood up and went over to Rodion. He was three or four times his size; a man was this much bigger than his pet dog.

“You’ve made your own law, Rodya, and lived by it. But it’s not for you to decide how you die. I won’t indulge your wish to be beheaded, but nor will I make you suffer unnecessarily. You’ve suffered enough. I sentence you to ten years without the right of correspondence.”

Ten years without the right of correspondence
was the Soviet euphemism for a death sentence.

Lev stepped around behind the amputee, held Rodion’s head still with one massive hand, raised his own revolver with the other, and dispatched a single bullet through Rodion’s brain.

Rodion’s body was dumped outside Petrovka at dusk.

Sveta and Galya hadn’t wanted to see Irk. He’d led the chase for Rodya, and so they blamed him for Rodya’s capture and death. He’d abandoned Rodya to the Mafia, they’d said, and now no one would ever be brought to justice for his murder.

No, Irk had said, he hadn’t abandoned anybody. He’d simply been given no choice.

They hadn’t listened. “Out, out,” they’d screamed. “Fuck off, leave us to our grief!” It wasn’t rational, it wasn’t how he’d have reacted, but what else could he do but obey? Even if they
had
known, what would they have done? A wife might have turned her husband in, but a mother her son? Never.

Irk remembered the relief and joy on the faces of the Americans when he’d brought Josh home, but it was scant consolation. The Khruminsches had been Irk’s only friends in Moscow. He was on his own again.

Wednesday, March 18, 1992

T
he phone was ringing when she returned to the apartment, and she ignored it. Alice didn’t feel like answering, whoever it was. She put the food into the fridge and freezer, and still the phone rang; she ran her
hands under the faucet and dried them on a dishcloth, and still the phone rang. They’d surely hang up the moment she went to pick it up, but no, it was still going.

“Hello?”

“I need to see you.”

It was Lev, his voice rolling like thunder as it jagged lightning in her heart. It seemed eons before Alice managed to speak.

“No.”

“I need to see you,” he repeated.

“I’ve a good life here. I’m calm. I don’t need to stir everything up again.”

“Alice,
please.”

He’d never begged her before, not that she could remember.

You can tell yourself you’re not in love with someone, you can erect thousands of barriers in your mind against them, and if you try hard enough you can convince yourself that you’ve stepped over the very thin line into hatred. You can do all this, as Alice had done, and sometimes it’s simply not enough.

“Where are you?” she asked.

Lev took her in his arms and held her for long minutes of silence. She froze against him at first, but gradually his warmth seeped into her and began to thaw her. When he started to apologize, she turned her face to his and kissed him to shut him up.

A sort of homecoming. They’d been apart two weeks; for them both, it felt like two lifetimes.

Alice drank her first and second glasses to get over the shock of seeing Lev, her third and fourth to celebrate
their reunion. She was halfway through her fifth when he put a hand over the rim.

She looked at him first in sharp rebuke, and then with uncertain wariness. Finally, his silence made her understand what he meant.

“Do you think I need help?” she asked.

There, she’d said it. It hung like a pendulum, swishing back and forth in the air between them.

“Yes.”

“Why?” It sounded too defensive; he hadn’t given her the answer she wanted.

“In all the time I’ve known you, sweetheart, I’ve never once seen you do this—” Lev moved his hand across his throat as though he were cutting it, the gesture Russians make when they’re full. “You drink and drink. You’ve never said, ‘That’s enough.’”

“If I need help, are you going to make me seek it?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Surprised.

“How could I make you do something, Alice? You’d just dig your heels in and do exactly the opposite. You know what you’re like. If I
asked
you to do something, you’d cross an ocean; if I
told
you to do something, you wouldn’t cross the room. You’ll seek help when you want it, not before, and only you can decide when that’ll be. But yes, I think you do need help. And, yes, when you go and find it, I’ll be there for you.”

She knew all the cold medical facts; as a teenager she’d tried to lecture her mother with them. Alcohol abuse can affect the brain, the liver, the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines, the pancreas, the heart, the arteries and veins. It can lead to memory loss, blackouts,
premature aging, chronic coughing, malnutrition, the shakes, tingling sensations in toes and fingers, skin problems and ulcers. Social considerations aside, women are more at risk than men; because they’re lighter, they can absorb and metabolize alcohol quicker, and can therefore end up sustaining greater damage even if they drink less.

“I drink in the evenings, sometimes in the afternoons too—at parties, or when work demands it, or when I’m with you, nice and relaxed and happy like we are now,” she said. “I know what alcoholism is—my mother was one, remember? Real alcoholics drink all the time, morning, noon and night. I’ve never missed a day of work because of alcohol; I’ve never called in sick, I’ve never had to go home because my hangover was too bad to concentrate. Real alcoholics can’t keep jobs, they can’t get out of bed in the morning because they’re so paralyzingly hungover. Sometimes they even sleep in the gutter. I’ve certainly never done
that.”

“I never said ‘alcoholic,’ Alice.” Lev’s voice was soft. “You did.”

Alice slugged a capful of vodka when Lewis was getting his coat and followed him out to the car. She had the keys; he slid reluctantly into the passenger seat. They’d have walked, but it was hardly a night for promenaders: the wind circled and searched, trying to suck their hearts from their chests and the flesh off their bones.

They went to the Aragvi, a Georgian restaurant on Tverskaya next to a statue of Yuri Dolgoruky, Moscow’s founder. Georgians like to say, only half in jest, that Dolgoruky had at least had the sense to create his city near a good place to eat.

A car alarm was blaring by the restaurant entrance, its tune shifting every few seconds—now simple two-tone, now a police siren, space invaders, something that sounded like a Tarzan imitation. It stopped just as Alice and Lewis passed it.

“That’s a shame,” she said. “I was hoping it would launch into the ‘1812 Overture.’”

The moment they were inside the Aragvi’s front door, they began to shed layers. The restaurant, like almost every other building in Moscow, was overheated. Some buildings needed their air-conditioning on constantly, even during winter, to stop their rooms from turning into saunas. Exterior and interior temperatures were rarely, if ever, in sync.

The coatroom attendant gave Lewis and Alice ticket numbers 40 and 42 for their coats; there was no 41, as that was when Hitler had invaded Russia, and no 45 either, because victory over the hated Nazis was sacred, to be enjoyed by everybody rather than any specific individual.

A waiter led them to their table and asked them what they wanted to drink.

“I’ll take me a glass of red wine,” Lewis said.

“I’ll have a Smirnoff Black,” Alice said.

The waiter nodded approvingly. “Large or small glass?”

“A bottle.”

“I don’t think so, Alice,” Lewis said. He turned to the waiter. “A glass will be fine.”

“A bottle,” Alice repeated.

“A real man would help you drink it, rather than argue about it,” the waiter muttered to himself, and Alice laughed as he departed.

They sat in uncomfortable silence. Alice picked a couple of wrapped sugar lumps from the bowl and turned them over in her hands. The wrappers were patterned in an unfortunate brown, white and black motif that made them look at first glance like cigarette butts. Lewis inspected the artificial flowers.

When the waiter returned, Alice virtually snatched the Smirnoff from him. She drained her first glass in one gulp and was halfway through her second when she saw Lewis’s expression.

“Are you going to be like this all evening?” he said.

His tone made her childishly defensive. “Probably.”

“Well, if you won’t have a good time, I will.”

The waiter was still there, ready to take their order and pretending not to hear their argument. Alice asked for mushrooms baked in sour cream and trout with nuts and plum sauce. Lewis chose a selection of cold fish delicacies and spicy red bean stew.

Alice was still just about sober enough for Lewis’s determined jolliness to soften rather than irritate her. To forestall another argument, she veered to neutral topics—films, books, plans for the summer—anything, in fact, other than the invisible elephants around which they skated with studied nonchalance.

The level in the bottle of Smirnoff Black went steadily south. She was getting very drunk.

“I think it’s time we left,” Lewis said.

“Why? We still have dessert and coffee to come.”

“Not the restaurant—Moscow. I think it’s time we left Moscow.”

“Why?”

“Because I hate it here. And it’s not as if you’ve got any reason to stay, is it?”

Lewis could make the most throwaway comments sound hurtful. Alice bit her lip. The vodka afterburn hummed under her tongue.

“Is it?” he persisted.

It was bubbling inside her now, a rising tide:
Tell him, tell him and get it over with.
Alice lifted the candle from the center of the table and began to play with it, twisting it through two planes to make the wax drip in different patterns down the side.

“For God’s sake, Alice, it’s a simple enough question.”

Nerves jangling, she started suddenly, involuntarily, tipping the dangling columns of molten wax onto her fingers, right on her wedding ring. She yelped in pain and scrabbled to pull the ring off, metal on both sides hot against her skin. It came off in a rush, spinning across the table while Alice shook her hands to ease the pain. A livid crimson weal marked the place where the ring had been. She’d been branded.

“I saw him today,” she blurted. “I saw him, I saw Lev, and I’m going to do it to you again, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry, but it’s him I love, him I can’t live without, and I want to be here with him, here in Moscow.”

Alice was up and out the door before Lewis could speak. She couldn’t bear to look at his face or hear his reply, she couldn’t bear to watch his heart being broken again. She didn’t pause to get her coat from the coat-room; she didn’t even take what was left of the vodka.

There were grim flashes that may or may not have been the green snake of drunken hallucination; fleeing from herself like a dog with rabies, Alice could no longer tell.

She passed a conga line of old women standing shoulder to shoulder, stamping their feet while their
blank eyes gazed into the distance. The women’s gray heads and black ankle-length coats made them look like crows, and their rough hands held out merchandise varied enough to have filled several bazaars: loaves, Ukrainian sausages, Chinese handkerchiefs, T-shirts, used boots, old cameras, faucets, showerheads, milk, laundry detergent, lamps, washbasins, doorknobs, frying pans, toothpaste, glue, string, old shoes and ersatz designer clothing.

Next to the women, two men were slumped underneath a statue of Lenin with his right arm flung out before him as if he was directing traffic. There was nothing else for him to direct anymore, after all. The men were brandishing a bottle of vodka. As Alice staggered past, they called out to her. “Hey, you! Yes, you, will you be the third one?”

Ah-ha, she thought—a vodka troika. When it comes to drinking, three is the lucky number. She changed course, listing like a galleon, and headed for her newfound companions.

A well-dressed woman hissed at Alice. “It’s bad enough for the men, let alone you.”

Alice put her right thumb between her first and second fingers and jabbed the ensemble in the woman’s direction. “Get stuffed,” she snarled.