Free Vodka by Boris Starling Page A

“That’s always the way it is in Russia. Any good idea you have here, it’s ten years too early.”
    Sabirzhan had made Sharmukhamedov stand stock-still for hours, until the Chechen thought that the veins in his legs were going to burst. Then Sabirzhan had cuffed Sharmukhamedov’s hands together, placed them between the Chechen’s knees, attached the cuffs to a pulley and hung him upside down. His belly was beach-ball round but hard as a quarried boulder; it didn’t sag.
    “The sparrow,” Lev said when he came to check on progress. “A gulag favorite.”
    “One of the KGB’s premier techniques,” Sabirzhan agreed. “I’m applying it according to recognized methods.” “Applied,” as one would apply a soothing unguent.
    Lev had twin lightning bolts tattooed on his right arm, a sign of never having confessed to anything. “What’s he told you?”
    “Nothing useful. But he will.”
    “We haven’t got much longer.”
    “Forty-eight hours? He’ll break long before then.”
    “And you can take a break too. We’re leaving for the Vek in half an hour.” The Serebryany Vek was a
banya
near the Bolshoi now converted into a restaurant where caviar was piled into mountains on the sideboards, chandeliers bowed deferentially from the ceilings and liveried waiters whipped domed metal covers from dishes as though they were magicians performing tricks.
    “Oh, go on without me.”
    “Tengiz, it’s New Year.”
    “Yeah—and what’s there to celebrate?” At midnight, the old regime would be officially extinct; joy enough for Lev, who’d refused even to recognize its existence, but calamity for Sabirzhan, KGB officer and sworn upholder of the Motherland.
    Lev had asked out of courtesy and expediency, and was glad that Sabirzhan had refused. He’d no more have wanted to spend his New Year with Sabirzhan than with Josef Stalin, but Sabirzhan was powerful in Red October, and it never did to alienate one’s allies unnecessarily.
    “What are you going to do instead?” he asked.
    Sabirzhan glanced toward Sharmukhamedov. The Chechen’s bald head was visibly reddening as the blood flowed into it. “Spend some time with my new friend, probably.”
    Right next door to Red Square, the Rossiya Hotel is perhaps the quintessential example of Soviet architecture. An oblong hollowed out around two inner courtyards, it’s almost a kilometer in circumference and covers ten acres. Even in a city with its fair share of ugly buildings, the Rossiya stands out, a graying monolith whose size is matched only by the numbing uniformity of its design.The Russians say that the best thing about staying there is that you can’t see the Rossiya.
    Lewis was unimpressed. “What a shithole. No decent city would allow that kind of eyesore.”
    The New Year clientele could have inspired Dante to rework the
Inferno:
stubble-scalped men with black turtlenecks and lumps under their blazers patrolled the lobby, while leggy Russian jezebels with dolphin-tight bodies strolled through the hotel stores, looking fetching in Chanel suits and impossibly high heels. Whores and pimps, small-time operators who’d bought concessions from the management to operate here, orbited around each other like planets, gravitating toward each potential client as though he were the firmament’s brightest star. It was a troika of unholy fluidity, and one where every member could claim to be both exploiter and exploited.
    Bob had swapped slacks and a sports jacket for a suit, though it clung uneasily to him and he knew it. His wife Christina peered at Alice from under her bob and proffered a damp hand. “Good to know you,” she said in a tone that suggested it was anything but. Christina was four inches shorter than Alice and a similar amount wider through the hips; she knew where the men’s attention would be, especially when Harry turned up with a stunning blonde called Vika.
    “How much did you have to pay her?” Alice asked Harry once they were out of