Vodka (87 page)

Courses came and went: sorbet, soup, ham sliced laser-thin, fish, lamb, pancakes filled with curd cheese, potato and nut dumplings with cinnamon and sour cream, more sorbet. Each course was served with its appropriate vodka: the ham came with bison zubrowka (a Russian version, of course) to accentuate the mustard; the pancakes were offset beautifully by Starka; and the lingering aftertaste of pure cherry vodka made it seem as though the dumplings had drawn the alcohol clean away.

Alice had the Kyrgyz prime minister to her right and a telecommunications chairman on her left, and they tried to impress her with tales of yurts and band-widths respectively. The Kyrgyz was funnier and more charming, and she spent most of her time talking to him. On the wall behind her, Prince Vladimir of Kiev stood immortalized in icon, forever showing his twelve sons how to live righteously and wisely.

Lev had the pistol in the inside pocket of a tuxedo cut generously enough to leave no bulge. He chatted amiably with his neighbors. If there was turmoil within, he gave no sign; but when Arkin stood and called for silence, Alice noticed Lev make the slightest, quickest of inhalations. Arkin was to introduce
Borzov, Borzov was to speak, and Lev was to make his move then.

There were two official videographers there tonight, and they swung their cameras toward the prime minister. Borzov had wanted the event recorded for posterity; Arkin wanted taped proof of the attempt on Borzov’s life, to show the nation how close they’d come to losing their leader.

The crowd quieted, and Arkin began to speak. The evening was yet young, he said, and there was much more to come. They’d go from there to the Holy Vestibule, a multiplicity of doorways gilded with ornate golden latticework, and into the Great Kremlin Palace itself for dancing. Before that, however, the president wanted to say a few words.

Borzov rose unsteadily to his feet. The effects of the half-completed blood transfusion had worn off, sped on their way by furious quantities of vodka. He thanked everyone for coming, and had just launched into a story about his time as head of the Sverdlovsk Party committee when he stopped suddenly and peered across the room.

“The chief’s grandson is here!” he exclaimed. “So long past his bedtime, but what a lovely surprise! Come, Edik. Come and give your grandpa a birthday kiss.”

The room was held in a terrible hiatus.

“Anatoly Nikolayevich,” Arkin said, “that’s not your grandson. That’s a camera tripod.”

There was a smattering of laughter from those who thought that the joke was deliberate.

Lev looked across at Arkin, and the prime minister silently willed him forward.
The time is now
, Arkin’s handsome face urged,
do it, do it.
Arkin would trust Lev
when it was all over and he’d done his bit, but not a moment before. It would of course be insane for Lev to do anything other than what he’d agreed, knowing what the consequences would be both for him and for Alice; but illogicality has never been a bar to any course of action in Russia.

It was not a conscious decision on Lev’s part. He felt like an actor who’d just heard his cue, and his feet were taking him to his destination whether he wanted to go there or not, because there was no alternative; any course of action other than the ordained one was unthinkable. He jabbed his hand into his pocket and closed his fingers around the pistol butt. The touch seemed to impart tremendous clarity to his vision. He saw everything as though it were momentarily frozen, with him walking through a tableau: Borzov’s mouth as he talked, drunk enough to have forgotten or not to care that in a few seconds he’d have to pretend to have been shot; Arkin, tense as he waited for events to unfold; the turning faces of the guests as they wondered what Lev was doing interrupting the presidential toast.

Lev was a stride and a half from Borzov now. Out came the gun from his pocket, smooth as he could have hoped, no problems with the barrel catching on the lining, safety off with his left hand, and even though it made no difference he was still careful to aim properly, nine inches below Borzov’s shoulders and dead center, to take out as many vital organs as possible, the reports cracking loudly in the vast hall as he squeezed the trigger, once, twice, again, and the Kremlin guards were already on him and slamming him to the ground, there was nothing fake about their tackles, six of them hitting him at once to ensure that he was taken down, and as the
wind whistled from Lev’s lungs he saw Borzov’s bodyguards bundle their president from the room, Arkin following fast behind them.

The Kremlin has a hospital, but it’s not capable of dealing with gunshot wounds, so the charade had been extended to encompass the Sklifosovsky. Russian leaders are usually treated at the Kremlinovka, far out to the west, but in a crisis such as this they’d go closer to home, and the Sklifosovsky has the best emergency department in the country.

The presidential limousine and its motorcycle outriders shot from the Savior Gate and across Red Square. Shimmering in upturned lights behind them, the Kremlin was midway between reality and dream, an immense, oppressive vision. In the floodlights, the walls hovered and the swallowtail battlements shivered.

Four frantic minutes through the streets, and then they were pulling up outside the main entrance of the Sklifosovsky, where paramedics were on hand to lay Borzov on a stretcher and wheel him inside. “It’s an emergency!” they shouted, and indeed it was. There was blood gurgling from sucking wounds in Borzov’s torso; he was unconscious, his breath came in shallow pants, and his pulse was fading. The surgeons preparing their instruments under Lewis’s direction would have been amazed to know that the shooting was supposed to have been a setup, as this was definitely not for show. The president was dying.

The ball had broken up in panic and confusion. Alice had been taken back to her apartment in the Kremlin, where she was watching television. Normal programs had been
suspended; every channel carried live footage from Red Square, and the feeds from the video cameras at the ball were already being broadcast. There was Borzov, standing up; there was Lev, walking toward him—they’d removed any footage of Borzov actually speaking, Alice noticed—there was Lev, taking aim; the shots; Borzov staggering, Lev being wrestled to the ground.

Reporters gabbled urgently to anchormen, and then a switch to the Sklifosovsky. Arkin was standing on the front steps. He was covered in blood, and his face was streaked in tears. Alice saw Lewis in the background, still in his surgeon’s scrubs. His clothes were splattered red, his face bathed blue in the revolving lights of the police cars parked nearby. It was the expression on his face that kicked deep into Alice’s senses: Lewis, who usually showed as much emotion as a man doing the weekly shopping, looked as if he was about to be sick, burst into tears, or both.

“Following the shooting incident at the Kremlin this evening,” Arkin said, “Anatoly Nikolayevich Borzov was brought to the Sklifosovsky Hospital with severe external injuries and internal hemorrhaging. The hospital’s finest surgeons have fought to save him, but to no avail. Life extinct was declared ten minutes ago. The president is dead.”

The warders at the Lefortovo came to get Lev a good few hours earlier than he’d expected. He knew better than to ask them why he was being released so soon; they wouldn’t tell him if they knew, and if they didn’t know then they couldn’t tell him. A gaggle of reporters was waiting at the main entrance, so they took him out through a back door that led into a courtyard where a
limousine was waiting. The rear seat was all his, but two Spetsnaz sat opposite with their submachine guns trained on him. When they pulled out of the courtyard, two more cars joined them.

The roads were deserted. Virtually the only vehicles on the streets were police cars slewed across intersections with the policemen leaning against them and slapping luminous traffic-control batons against their thighs as they tried to keep warm. The car Lev was in had special presidential markings; not a single policeman moved to challenge them.

They more or less followed the course of the Yauza River as it headed back into the city. Lev looked around him with the wide eyes of a yokel arrived from the provinces for the first time. After today, he’d never see Moscow again.

The car glided across the Garden Ring and on to Nikoloyamskaya.

“Hey! We should have turned left there—” Lev pointed out the window. “Domodedovo’s that way.” The Spetsnaz remained silent. “What’s going on? Where are we going? What the fuck’s going on?”

Something was very wrong. There was no reason for them to be heading back toward the city center, let alone for no one to be telling him what was happening. Lev thought of flinging open the door and jumping for it, but the car was going too fast, he’d be dead the moment he hit the pavement; and besides, there were no interior handles on the rear doors. He was trapped there until they chose to let him out.

Lev may not have been told where they were going, but he knew the moment they got there. His destination was
a vast concrete labyrinth, one of Moscow’s most recognizable buildings—and certainly its most feared. They were at the Lubyanka.

He was numb beyond reaction. He’d done everything he’d been asked to. The charade in the Kremlin was supposed to have been the end of it all. There was nothing left in him anymore; he didn’t have the energy to respond.

The tunnel that led down to the Lubyanka’s underground parking swallowed the car. Lev tried not to gag. He hated the smell of parking lots, too many exhaust fumes in too small an area.

They were waiting for him in a corner; a dozen or so Spetsnaz, and in the middle Sabirzhan, trembling with the suppressed thrill of a teenage boy about to lose his virginity.

When they opened the door, Lev stepped from the car with as much dignity as he could muster. He wasn’t going to let Sabirzhan’s thugs drag him out like terriers down a rabbit warren.

The Lubyanka’s corridors were cream and green, the colors of institutions. On the first basement floor, the paint was scratched and chipped, and the farther down one went below the ground, the more the walls were stained with patches of rusty brown, the color of dried blood.

No one was telling Alice anything; her guards were as silent as ever. Lev’s words spun in her head. “The fucker’s lucky they’re only giving me blanks, let’s put it that way.”

The bullets must have been real. She’d no idea how he had got hold of them, but then again Lev had
contacts everywhere. He’d spent decades running criminal empires from behind the wire—a couple of bullets in the center of Moscow would surely be child’s play.

What Alice couldn’t see was
why
he’d done it. Even if Lev had really wanted to kill Borzov—and she was sure what he’d said was hyperbole rather than serious intent—he must have known it’d solve nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it had instantly destroyed their escape and all their plans for the future. What about Baikal, and jumping in the snow after making love in the
banya?
What about their own vegetable garden and long, lazy days in the summer heat? What about
her?
How could he have done this to her?

Alice had questions for everything and answers for nothing.

It was too much for her to take in at once. If the guards had been talking to her, she’d have asked them for a vodka, no question. Just one glass, to take the edge off it all. Just to be normal again.

Sunday, March 29, 1992

S
abirzhan’s face filled the darkness around Lev. Dripping Poison, they called him, and it suited him well. There were no inherent contradictions in Sabirzhan’s character, Lev thought, and he had only one side to him—evil—which was rather un-Russian. Well, Sabirzhan was a
Georgian really, so perhaps it was unfair to apply Russian criteria.

When Lev thought more, he realized he was wrong. Sabirzhan was no more or less unilateral than the next man. He was boorish, disgusting and without kindness, but he was also intelligent and astute. Who would have guessed his darker undercurrents on first acquaintance? It was a good thing when a man differed from his image; it showed he wasn’t a type.

Sabirzhan’s breath was coming in short, tongue-lolling pants, anticipation at the pleasure to come. He wasn’t racing a deadline, as he’d been with Sharmukhamedov. He would have as long as he needed, and this time the end would come when
he
chose. He thought of the way Lev had thrown him to the wolves at Petrovka; it felt good to win now.

He pressed a ring of cold metal against Lev’s right ankle, moving it as a dog would sniff as he sought the best spot: on the anklebone itself, or against the webbing of skin that wrapped around the Achilles tendon? The gun barrel slipped, adjusted, settled.

Lev heard the shot and smelled the gunpowder burn. It seemed a long, long time before he felt his joint explode.

Alice gave up the search for sleep at dawn, and turned on the television, more for comfort than anything else. The assassination—though she was forcing herself still to think of it as a pantomime, as it had been intended—was being aired continuously. If she missed it on one channel, she didn’t have to wait long until another channel ran it. She watched the footage over and over again. On the
fourth or fifth showing, by which time she could have closed her eyes and replayed the scene stride for stride in her head, she saw something that jagged at her.