Free Vodka by Boris Starling Page B

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    He waved across the room at Vika and smiled proudly. “Not a dime.” It was just about plausible; Russians found Westerners so exciting that they’d flock to anyone with English as a first language, no matter how unappealing their other attributes. For straight,single Western men, there was no better place to be, as Moscow was packed with more female beauty than practically any other place on earth. And not cold, haughty types either, but inviting, curious beauty, always looking as if they were just desperate to try something new, trade up, succumb to curiosity or pressure, fall into some wild adventure. There were vixens on every sidewalk, sly seductresses riding down the metro escalators, femmes fatales pouring into the streets.
    The beauty of Russian women is above all in their eyes, large and limpid and almost always accentuated by eyeliner.
    “You must be from Texas,” Lewis said to Bob.
    “Never ask a man if he’s from Texas. If he is, he’ll tell you on his own. If he ain’t, no need to embarrass him.”
    He was stretching his vowels so far that Alice feared they’d snap. She’d noticed that all their accents were noticeably, defiantly, regional: Harry dropping D’s in the middle of words, just like a good Pittsburgher; Lewis stressing the start of almost every word, as though he’d forget if more than a syllable passed without emphasis. Asserting their roots so far from home. Alice wondered if she’d been doing likewise, playing up her Boston inflections.
    The waiter brought vodka aperitifs and told them that dinner was a set menu: blini with black caviar, smoked salmon in marinated pumpkin sauce, sturgeon soup with dumplings stuffed with crab, breast of pheasant, fillet of beef in red wine, pears with chocolate mousse—all for a hundred dollars a head. A hundred bucks, Alice thought; Russians could work several months for that, perhaps close to a year. When Harry leaned forward to light his cigar from the table candle,the waiter lunged forward with a Zippo; using candles as lighters is bad luck.
    “Haven’t seen a Russkie move so fast since they were kicked out of Afghanistan.” Harry waved the glowing tube at the waiter’s retreating back. “Anyone here been to New Orleans? Just like Moscow; everyone late for work and early home. You know what the Russkies think a workaholic is? An alcoholic in the office!” He tipped his head back and roared at his own joke.
    “I’m from New Orleans,” Lewis said.
    “Then you’ll know what I’m talking about!” Harry replied, missing the point by such a country mile that Alice actually laughed, half gurgle and half giggle, a saucy, choked chuckle that started high in her head, ended by her knees and earned her a reproving stare from Lewis.
    Alice sucked at her vodka and let herself melt into the evening. A few more glasses and she was in the swing, holding court, the boss, taking their deference as her due, ignoring both her own mild unease at being the center of attention and Christina’s murderous stares as she kept the table enthralled with tales of restitution claims from aristocratic families whose land had been confiscated by the Bolsheviks—“there’s one who wants half of Yekaterinburg back”—and some of the more eccentric privatization applications. “A guy in Nizhny Novgorod called me yesterday because he wants to build a distillery on the site of a former nuclear reactor, can you believe it? He’s gonna distill the vodka in the reactor’s water filters and call it ‘thermonuclear.’ Get out of here, I told him, you can’t be serious. And he told me straight, vodka cleans radioactive particles, and that’s why they gave extra rations to crews of Soviet nuclear submarines.”
    They all laughed, even Vika. These crazy Russians, what would they think of next?
    Five vodkas to the wind, Alice raised her glass. “We’re going to perform the greatest transformation ever. We’re going to make them be like us. To the end of