Vodka Read Online Free PDF Page B

Alice a few moments to realize that it was because the hammer and sickle no longer rippled from the flagpole. In its place was the Russian tricolor, striped in white, blue and red; the same colors, Alice thought, as those of America, Britain and France, the countries tasked with helping revive the stricken Russia.
    “They put it on upside down last night, can you believe?” said Quarrie. “Down comes the hammer and sickle, up goes the tricolor—and the red stripe’s at the top! Stupid asses. Too much vodka, I wouldn’t doubt. Then the artificial wind machine to make the flag flutter didn’t work. They had to give it a good kick to get it going. Percussive maintenance, I think they call it. That’s the way most Russian problems get solved. To cap it all, they launched an enormous hot-air balloon in the same three colors. It rose a few feet, then crashed back to earth. Not the most auspicious start.”
    “Nor much of an omen,” said Lewis, perking up for the first time since their arrival.
    The Metropol was entirely to Lewis’s taste, which was to say it was sufficiently luxurious to kid him that he wasn’t in Russia. He retired to the bathroom to soak away thoughts of the great unwashed outside, while Alice plucked four Smirnoff miniatures from the minibar and drained them with systematic relish as she stood at the window, looking down at the patches of neon signs flickering uncertainly, the dancing headlights of crazy drivers, the gargantuan buildings that loomed like supertankers from the darkness, and the people, the people, scurrying fifty yards below the remote and omnipotent goddess who’d come from the promised land to spread the gospel according to the almighty dollar.

5
Friday, December 27, 1991
    T he limousine pulled up around the back of the president’s official residence, a neoclassical triangular building that used to serve as the senate. The driver, a thickset southerner named Ruslan with beetle brows and an ill-fitting suit, opened the door for Alice. The cold was dry and seemed almost industrial; it hurt her nostrils the moment she stepped out of the car.
    “I’ll be waiting here for you when you come out,” Ruslan said.
    “You’ll be keeping yourself warm while I’m gone?”
    He looked at her blankly, perhaps surprised at how good her Russian was. Alice opened the passenger door and pulled a bottle of vodka from the glove compartment. Ruslan sized her up fast and smiled. “Best heating known to man,” he said.
    She grinned back. “Save some for me.”
    The president’s office was at the end of a long corridor carpeted in red. Alice passed through an anteroom bulging with stone-faced men in gray suits and into a small conference room, where she waited until a secretary arrived to escort her into the inner sanctum.
    Anatoly Nikolayevich Borzov, president of the Russian Federation and now the Kremlin’s inhabitant, kissed Alice’s hand, took a step backward the better to admire her, nodded approvingly and steered her by the elbow toward a white leather armchair. Gorbachev hadbeen gone barely thirty-six hours, and already there was no trace of him. Rumor had it that Borzov had moved in even before Gorbachev had left, piling Gorbachev’s possessions in the corridor as though he were holding a fire sale. Now the office was a shrine to Russia and Borzov in equal measures.
    Huge paintings dominated the walls: Lentulov’s
St. Basil’s Cathedral
, Surikov’s
The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy
, Polonev’s
Moscow Courtyard.
Along the plasterboard, smaller frames jostled for space: prints of prerevolutionary streets and czarist armies, icons of apostles, and scores of photographs, all without exception featuring Borzov himself, his drinker’s luminous face glowing under the statesman’s stiff helmet of white hair. Borzov in a bulldozer, Borzov outside McDonald’s on Pushkin Square, Borzov laughing with colleagues.
    “You’ll take a hundred grams with the chief?” he