Vodka (85 page)

Two Spetsnaz trussed Galya’s hands behind her back and pressed her head against the floor. When she tried to shout her innocence, she took a smack in the mouth. This was how they worked: secure everyone first, then sort it out later. Bodies writhed through the smoke, disoriented, choking and eyes streaming, Lev was struggling against six men, and it was all they could do to keep him in check.

There were people everywhere, barking shouts and gunfire in staccato flicks. Alice’s throat hurt, that was the only way she knew she was screaming, because she sure as hell couldn’t hear it above the shots and the yelling and the wet slaps as bodies hit the floor or were flung
against walls. She was on her feet now, out into the fresh air of the fire escape and down, down, down, Lev and Galya with her, shins and ankles cracked hard against the metal rungs and the leathered lumps of dead Mafiosi, and this was where the endless circles of deceit had gotten them all, into the back of Spetsnaz trucks and howling through the streets of Moscow.

Galina was taken home; Lev and Alice were brought to the Kremlin. They were confined to one of the guest apartments, a gilded prison where they were provided with all the comforts and told absolutely nothing. There were guards at their door and outside their window, all silent as Trappist monks; there were no telephones in the apartment, and the nearest they had to contact with the outside world was a television set and the view over the battlements out across the river. In the square below, staff bustled with tables and chairs. Saturday would be Borzov’s seventieth birthday, and a ball was being held in his honor.

Lev kept constant watch over Alice, reassuring and protecting her in equal measures. They talked until the wee hours before curling around each other, their clothes firmly on. Alice muttered about being embarrassed with all the guards there, and not knowing what was happening to them, but they both knew that excuses did not equal reasons.

Wednesday, March 25, 1992

B
orzov had summoned Lev; just Lev, not Alice. Before he left her, Lev kissed her hard and told her everything would be all right, and he said it with such sincerity that he almost believed it himself. As they walked to Borzov’s office, he dwarfed the guards who surrounded him. Watching from the window, Alice thought of tugboats escorting a super tanker from harbor.

Borzov and Arkin were waiting. Vodka was poured and pleasantries exchanged. Arkin handed Lev a copy of
Pravda.
“A country abandoned by its government,” the headline screamed. Underneath, the text continued in more sober fashion. “Under communism, there was a social contract, guaranteeing a safety net in return for political acquiescence. Now the government continues to run things, but for its own benefit only. It has abandoned the social contract.”

The figures made depressing reading. Three percent thought the government guaranteed timely payment of wages, pensions and salaries. Another three percent—or perhaps the same three percent—thought that social protection of the unemployed, homeless and needy was all it could be. Six percent thought Russia was moving in the right direction; double that number thought it was stationary. They were clearly misguided, Lev thought; Russia was never stationary. Four percent thought the government was doing a good job fighting organized crime, and
eight percent approved of the way in which law and order was maintained.

“What do you think?” Arkin said.

“The eight percent who approve of law and order is promising.”

“Anatoly Nikolayevich wants you to come to the chief’s birthday on Saturday,” Borzov said happily, “and he wants you to try and kill him there.”

The assassination attempt would not be for real, of course. Lev’s gun would be loaded with blanks. The important thing was that it would
look
real, and therefore engender public sympathy for Borzov and swing back in his favor the public opinion that had been ebbing ever since the August coup and was now, after the shelling of the White House, approaching dangerously low levels. Borzov had no qualms about being authoritarian—a state of emergency was still in effect—but he didn’t want to be unpopular with it. All good dictators are popular at least for a while; one in six Russians still think of Stalin as their greatest leader. But things were changing, and he couldn’t rule as they had in the old days, not indefinitely.

“Anatoly Nikolayevich believes absolutely in what he’s trying to do,” Borzov said, “and in time the Russian people will too; but he needs that time.”

So this was the plan, as audacious, radical and harebrained as most Russian programs tend to be. Lev would fire the gun; the bodyguards would overpower him and bundle Borzov out of the room; the press would be told that Lev had gone berserk, even after Borzov had been decent enough to extend him an olive branch by inviting him to the ball; and Lev would be ostensibly jailed. In
reality, he and Alice would be free to start a new life wherever they pleased, and Borzov would afford them every resource necessary to do this.

“It’s absurd,” Lev said.

“It’s perfect,” Arkin said. “Motive, means, opportunity. It’ll take Anatoly Nikolayevich back to the people, which is where he belongs.”

It was an article of faith among many Russians that Gorbachev had organized the August coup, Lev thought. Why couldn’t Borzov set up an assassination attempt against himself?

“You’re asking me to give up everything I have here. Everything I’ve worked for; everything I’ve believed in.” Neither Borzov nor Arkin demurred. “And if I don’t?”

“You’ve confessed to the murder of Rodion Khruminsch,” Arkin said. “We have it on tape. You’ll spend the rest of your life in Butyurka.”

Butyurka is one of Moscow’s most notorious jails. It had been the starting point for czarist convoys of prisoners bound for Siberia, a wasteland they’d reached not in cattle trucks or on horseback, but on foot, and in fetters. After the revolution, Butyurka had become an overcrowded transit prison, cramming cells to six times their supposed limit and squeezing two thousand men, including Solzhenitsyn, into the church, where they’d been obliged to drink soup from their coattails. Borzov wasn’t going to dignify Lev as an enemy of the state by sending him back to the Lefortovo, where he’d still have an active network of accomplices.

He laughed. “Butyurka? I’ve spent half my life in the gulag. You think I care about going to Butyurka?”

“Before, no. Now …” Arkin let the word hang in the air. “You’d never see your lover again.”

Borzov was silent, Lev noted. It was Arkin playing the hard man, stabbing home the president’s wishes, his master’s voice.

“I need time to think,” Lev said.

“No. No time. Decide
now.
If you say no, you’ll never see her again. You’ll go straight from here to Butyurka. We’ll take her out of the Savior Gate and dump her in Red Square. You’re all she has left. You can do that to her, abandon her, and then spend the next twenty years climbing the walls of your cell because you chose wrong.”

“Your methods stink.”

“My methods are for the greater good.”

“My?”

“Our.”

Lev turned to Borzov. “You have mixed eyes, Anatoly Nikolayevich.”

“How so?”

“I see a dreamer in one eye and a fool in the other.”

Arkin stiffened at the insult, but Borzov laughed; he recognized the truth of it. “Perfect to lead a nation of dreamers and fools, then,” he said.

Thursday, March 26, 1992

T
he
Izvestiya
front page carried the story of the cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who’d returned to earth yesterday after ten months in space only to discover
that, on a salary of fifteen hundred rubles a month, he was more or less broke. Krikalev, Russia’s own Major Tom, had blasted off last May as a resident of Leningrad in the Soviet Union; he’d returned as one of St. Petersburg in Russia. This was the third time he’d tried to land; the coup attempt had kept him aloft last August, and a dispute between Russia and Kazakstan over who owned the Baikonur cosmodrome had repeated the process two months later. Judging by the shock and consternation on his face, Alice thought, Krikalev would rather have stayed up in space until the end of time, far from the madding crowd and all the bullshit. She wondered whether he’d had enough vodka to last him.

Lev and Alice would go and live in the middle of nowhere. A couple could lose themselves in Russia’s vastness till the end of time, safe from any pursuers. There were places where the locals still didn’t realize communism was no more, and where they’d have cared even less if they had known; places that took days to reach, accessible not by train and car but boat and horseback; places where they didn’t even know who Borzov was.

In the lamp-washed glow of their Kremlin apartment, they planned their new life together: they’d have a small cottage, outbuildings, a garden with tomato plants down one end, some livestock too, a well, they’d be entirely self-sufficient, at one with the earth like true peasants.

They’d go to villages where the women would wait for the bread truck, and where they’d gather around and take their loaves, simply and without fuss, when it arrived. There’d be no pushing or jostling, let alone
raised voices; everyone would know that they’d get their allocation, so they’d stand in line and gossip quietly. One of the old women would begin to sing “By the Long Road,” and the rest of them would take up the chant, slowly coming in when it felt right to them. An old Russian folk song is like a weir; it may look as though it’s no longer flowing, but in its depths it’s ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates, and its stillness is an illusion.

Lake Baikal, Lev said; that was where they should start, because Baikal is the perfect metaphor for Russia. It’s unimaginably vast in both dimensions. It holds more water than all five of America’s Great Lakes combined, and it’s steeped in its own ecosystem, teeming with plant and animal species, many of them unique.

Alice had changed. Before, she couldn’t even have considered living such a timeless existence. Now she was ready to give everything up for Lev. She’d die for him, she said, and insisted on this when he demurred. It’s something that people always say, but she really meant it: she really would.

It was mutual, he said.

For Lev and Alice, everything they’d ever believed and lived for had been swept away. That was how they saw each other now, stripped to the bone and beyond.

Friday, March 27, 1992

T
he waiting was almost over. This was the last night they’d spend in Moscow, the city Alice loved so much.

The schedule for tomorrow had been fully worked out. In the evening, just before the ball, Lev would be given a gun filled with blanks. There’d be dinner, and then Borzov would make a speech. It was then, when everyone was watching, that Lev would make the apparent assassination attempt. Afterward he would be taken to Lefortovo prison, just for show. Any would-be presidential assassin would automatically be taken to Lefortovo, the traditional place of incarceration for enemies of the state. Lev’s presence there, no matter how brief, was therefore imperative to the charade. With appearances satisfied, he’d be secretly removed from Lefortovo later that evening and driven to Domodedovo Airport, where Alice would be waiting. They’d board a military plane bound for Baikal, and they’d disappear.