Moscow Noir (11 page)
Nikita gave him an address. It was nearby, 12 Pure Ponds Boulevard.
Maxim waited around until someone opened the door at the main entrance and then held it open for the young mother pushing a stroller. He went up to the third floor and turned off the switch in the fuse box he found in the hallway. Behind the door, where Nikita’s wife Zhanna lived, the television set fell silent.
Maxim went up one more flight of stairs. He waited, giving her time to call the electric company, who would tell her that everything was working down at the station and that she should check her fuse box.
Of course, Zhanna peered through the peephole, but not seeing even the smallest sign of danger she opened the door. Before she had time to realize what was happening, she was back inside the apartment, a hand pressed over her mouth and her arms clamped to her sides.
Maxim turned the key in the lock twice and carried Zhanna deeper into the apartment.
She tried to resist.
“Don’t make any noise,” he said in a whisper. “If you keep quiet, I’ll let you live. Got it? Whisper.” Slowly, he uncovered her mouth and relaxed his grip. Zhanna was silent as she studied the intruder.
“Money?” she asked softly.
“No.”
“Oh, I get it. My jackass sent you over to say hi. My ex-jackass, that is.”
“He said you were smart, and he wasn’t lying.”
It was then that Maxim noticed that she was also beautiful. Beautiful, as in sexy. The thought occurred to him that there was no real difference between one rape or two. Nikita would understand.
So he changed the character of his grasp: from clenched, to imploring.
He noticed with surprise that she did not try to resist. On the contrary, she seemed to press her body toward him (and she smelled so deliciously female!). She gasped with excitement.
Maxim had an instant hard-on.
But he didn’t lose his head. He took off his coat with the webcam that was always hooked up to the game server, and hung it up in the hall so that the camera was facing the wall. There was no reason for them to watch this.
Zhanna moaned. She squeaked. It was unbelievable. You only come across this kind of girl once every six months, Maxim thought to himself.
He drilled her in her cornhole like a wild animal. Like a baboon. Like an orangutan. And she enjoyed it.
That crazy bitch couldn’t get enough. “More!” she howled, cursing like a Shanghai whore giving herself to a platoon of sailors.
They peeled themselves apart. He listened without interrupting as she praised him. He listened as she cursed her impotent husband. As she begged him to stay. Forever. How happy they would be together. Fucking amazing. Those were the exact words she used:
Fucking amazing
. But she didn’t just say them. She sang the words, which lost their foulness and gained a certain eloquence. Maxim listened quietly, nodding his head. Dream on, baby, he thought. Dream on.
And then he drilled her some more, with the same ferocity.
He came.
Then he noticed she had an Adam’s apple.
Fuck!
A transvestite!
It was a dirty and dangerous game that Nikita had gotten him into.
He stayed cool, not letting on that he had noticed.
“Let me get us some drinks,” said the transvestite. “Okay?”
“Sure.”
The transvestite brought in two glasses of wine from the next room. And Maxim realized that he wouldn’t drink it even at gunpoint.
He took the glass.
“What’s wrong?”
“I want to watch you drink. You’re so beautiful, I’m sure you drink beautifully too. My cock is ready for action just watching you.”
The transvestite laughed, and took two sips. His Adam’s apple went up and down two times and then stilled. It wasn’t that big. But it was obviously a man’s.
Maxim set his glass down.
“Why don’t we start off with the usual question,” he said, his fingers locking around the transvestite’s throat. Not too tight, but probing. “Who are you working for? Tell me quietly.”
In all likelihood, at that very moment Nikita was glued to his own transmitter, which connected to an opponent’s webcam and mic, and it was extremely important that he not hear a thing. Each player had a transmitter that allowed him to hook up to his opponent’s channels and receive picture and sound from their webcams, broadcast nonstop. The pictures helped players track each other down if they recognized their opponent’s location.
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do. Now listen carefully: this is your one chance to stay alive. Tell me the truth. Everything, and in great detail. Who hired you and why? And what do they want from me?”
The transvestite shrank back. And spilled the beans. About how they sometimes sent people to him who he didn’t know. And he “served” them, the same way he had served Maxim. Then he would put clonidine into their wine. And when his client fell asleep, he would call a certain Artyom, who would finish them off while they were still knocked out. Then, at night, the body would be taken away by two bald guys in a jeep. The transvestite knew nothing more. The answer why seemed pretty clear, but who was behind this? That was the question.
Another question was how had Nikita turned into such a cunt? The traitor! But Maxim tried not to think about that.
“You don’t kill?”
“No,” answered the transvestite, blanching.
“So you guys have a division of labor and everything. You got one son of a bitch working as a decoy, another giving sexual favors, and the third does the killing. Four and five get rid of the body. You guys are a goddamn hockey team!”
“Please don’t kill me,” whispered the transvestite.
“Did you tell me the truth?”
“Yeah, honest. In the beginning I didn’t know what was going on. I just wanted to make a little dough. But then, after that first time, I couldn’t refuse. They’d get me too.”
“All right, you can live. Call him.”
“Who?”
“The killer, Artyom.”
When the door opened, Artyom got a blow on the head with the handle of a gun. As he was collapsing, Maxim saw that it was Nikita.
What a fucking world, Maxim thought. What a goddamn fucking world.
He even spat on the floor. Rather, he spat on Nikita’s stained jacket, which was his uniform.
“All right, holy man, start talking,” said Maxim when Nikita came to.
Nikita was quiet.
“Do you realize you’re not getting out of here alive, you Judas?”
Nikita nodded.
“Did you kill Arkady?”
Nikita nodded his head again, staring at the floor.
“Talk.”
“I had to.”
“What, does your five-year-old daughter have leukemia?” asked Maxim, recalling the thirty-year-old whose neck he’d broken, snapped just like a chicken’s.
“No, I owe big money. They took my wife. Gave me three months to pay.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred grand.”
“Holy shit!” Maxim roared. “What are you doing? I have the money. I have a million! I could have—”
“How was I supposed to know that? It’s like everybody just kind of up and left. Life fuckin’ pulled us apart in all different directions.”
“Okay. I give you my word that I’ll get your wife out of there. Now talk.”
So Nikita started talking again. He told Maxim how the program manager had decided to play under the table. Of course, he kept that secret from the organizers, who paid the prize money. Player number four was supposed to get ten million. No risks on his part, because the manager had put together an unofficial team. That was where Nikita was working. The unofficial team had two functions: guarding number four, and not letting opponents get near him. Also, they got rid of “extra” players using any means possible, including what they had tried on Maxim. The payoff for the mongrel team was supposed to come from the prize money that number four would receive. Nikita agreed. How much the others were getting he didn’t know; naturally, the manager would be taking the largest cut.
When Nikita finished, Maxim handed him a gun with one shot in it.
“Don’t worry about your wife, I’ll get her out. But don’t try any funny stuff, cause you know my response time was always better than yours. Do I make myself clear?”
Nikita nodded and moved into the far room.
Time slowed down to almost a standstill. It got as thick as ketchup that doesn’t want to come out of the bottle in the freezing cold.
Outside, a baby started crying.
Water rumbled in the pipes.
Then it got quiet.
Then a shot rang out.
“That’s it,” said Maxim. “Get dressed.”
The transvestite, chalk-white with fear, started.
“No!”
“Idiot. You’re going with me. You’ll be a witness.”
“Why?!”
“You’re not on trial, darling. But I have to explain to the investors why I crushed all those snakes and cut the manager’s balls off before I killed him.”
Maxim crossed the streetcar tracks and jumped the low barrier dividing the fetid boulevard from the street stinking of exhaust fumes. He strode toward the house with columns, digging the heels of his massive lace-up boots into the road. The manager had twenty minutes left to live. His moronic bodyguards, with earphone wires sticking out from underneath their jacket collars, had even less time.
The transvestite hurried along, sticking close by, in a tight English skirt, his face crumpled in fear. From an outsider’s perspective, it might have looked like a stately middle-aged man walking an exotic, purebred dog.
A bum sitting on a park bench took a sip from the bottle of extra strong Ohota he had just found—miraculously, almost full. What a wonderful evening, he thought to himself.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
F
acewise, Ryabets resembles a skull: gaunt, with a deep-set, chalk-white gaze and lips slightly parted—a permanent grin of large yellowed teeth. At school they called him Skull behind his back but didn’t dare to his face, so they gave him a nickname from his last name: Ryaba.
Now that he’s on the wrong side of fifty, the skull resemblance applies to his whole frame: shriveled and bony.
At breakfast Ryabets is reading the
Moskovskii Komsomolets
police blotter. While he’s tapping around the butt end of his egg with a spoon, while he’s peeling off the shell, he skims through the second-grade girl lost in the taiga outside Krasnoyarsk—takes a bite of buttered bread and chews—the drunk officer who shot a soldier—takes a sip of ersatz coffee—the …
Under “Private Prison with Torture Chamber in Silver Pine Forest,” it says that the cops picked up a naked vagrant wearing handcuffs, right there on the street in broad daylight, with a cracked skull and evidence of beatings to his body. The vagrant called himself Andryukha and managed to say he’d been tortured in a cellar with “electricity and tongs.” He whispered the address, 43 Second Line, then fell silent. They didn’t get Andryukha to No. 67 Hospital in time. He died in a traffic jam without regaining consciousness. The cops went to the address but the jailers were gone and the trail was cold. But the prison was remarkable: three cells with a stun gun, tongs, a rack, a Spanish boot, and all kinds of other things. The two corpses were also Silver Pine Forest vagrants.
An investigation is under way
.
Ryabets sets the newspaper aside and looks out the window. July. Hazy, hot, and stuffy. When he’s finished with breakfast, he puts his Marlboros, towel, swimsuit, three big sausage sandwiches (carefully wrapped in that same newspaper so they wouldn’t go bad), a bottle of water, a bottle of 777 port, and a plastic cup into a paper bag.
He tucks his short-sleeved shirt into his pants and slips on his sandals. Two trolley stops to Kaluzhskaya and then the subway to Kitai-Gorod. The route remembers itself, even though the last time he took it was back in the early 1970s, when Kitai-Gorod was called Nogin Square. Transfer to the purple line to Polezhaevskaya. He’ll ask from there.
Not much out the trolley window has changed in all those years: dust, buildings, poplar trees. Here’s the arched bridge and to the left another bridge—red cables, looks new. Beyond that the river and the Krylatskie Hills. The trolley dives down a slope and stops at a square. Ryabets gets out.
A few streets fanning away, fences, and behind the fences pines and high dacha roofs. Ryabets glances around—should be here somewhere. There used to be a beer stand here, but not anymore. They’d gone from the beer stand to the dacha last time. Not him. His feelings were hurt so he went home. Bolt took his book away from him. A word clicked in his memory:
Decameron
. Oh yeah—a stinging sleet slashing at the burn site, his heel making little holes in the black muck—the cover was charred, with dark blue, intricate twisting letters, Bolt’s book … He came here in the fall, before the army. How could he not? No, later.
It’s too hot for port … He then bought beer at a stand and took a sharp left turn into the woods.
Ryabets sleeps briefly. Right here under this willow. The beer-sun has taken it out of him. More like dozing, with quick dreams involving water splashing, children squealing, and a female mocking whisper directly above him. He opens his eyes but no one’s there and it’s quiet. Close them and all over again—a squeal, a splash, a whisper. And a rustling—are they stealing his bag? No one, a total haze. He sits up, gazing blearily at the river and at the white church on the opposite bank, cockeyed.
Below—stretch his legs out—the evening water lightly laps-spills over. Music, laughter, a shashlik smell coming from beyond the fence on the private beach. A volleyball thumps. A little closer, in a chaise longue, a woman with a book. The view from behind: short haircut, folds in her neck, the edge of her glasses, her ass. Ryabets reaches into his swimsuit and tugs and tugs—nothing doing. A languid spite sours inside him. He did drag himself all the way out here! Halfway—no, all the way—across Moscow!
The woman is approached by another, younger, who leans over and says something as her white breasts rise lusciously from her blue swimsuit. Ryabets is back in his trunks, kneading away furiously. Nothing. The cupola radiates an officious sneer. He gives the church a dirty look and kneads and kneads. Out of the corner of his eye he notices Luscious observing him, a combination of revulsion and curiosity on her face. He pulls out his hand. Just scratching. He stands up—his trunks sag in back—scrambles down the bank, and swims noisily. The water isn’t refreshing; it’s too warm.
Ryabets slowly plies the shoreline, watching Luscious. You’d think he wouldn’t care, but imagine, he’s horny; he feels dumb too, old goat.
Once Luscious leaves, Ryabets moves ashore. He towels off and gets out the 777: to drink or not to drink? No, first go
there.
He eats his sandwich, takes one last look at the address in the paper, gets dressed, and leaves.
First he follows the shore and edges around the beach fence, but immediately, in a young pine grove, he runs across some naked men lying there, privates exposed. Ryabets sidesteps them but the farther he goes, the more naked men there are catching some rays, arms spread wide. “Cocksuckers,” he mutters, veering more to the left. He tries not to look but can’t help it. The bushes along the river are filled with naked men’s bodies. He spits. Right in the middle of Moscow!
He fantasizes TNT exploding and scraps of genitalia in the bushes—too many to collect! The bloody image calms him, and Ryabets moves deeper into the woods, emerging on paths that lead to Lake Bezdonka. Evening is falling and the crowds stretch from the riverbank to the park entrance. Ryabets has nearly changed his mind about going to the address in the newspaper. He’s tired. He wants to go home. He’s walking down Tamanskaya when across the street on the left he notices a street sign:
Second Line
. He stands there a second and turns. Did I make the trip for nothing?
The street is suddenly quiet. The dachas are behind a fence. Turrets, porticos, balconies. As if they weren’t right next to that half-naked, heat-wasted mob. No. 43. In back of them, a new red-brick, three-story house. The kind ministers of state and oligarchs live in, Ryabets thinks. Actually, the house gives the impression of being uninhabited. Ryabets “accidentally” pushes the gate, which yields with a light creak. The house is standing where the dacha burned; Ryabets recognizes the lawn behind it and the semicircle of tall pines. But a prison? Construction debris, doorframes in their original packing, the porch unfinished. On the door, yellow police tape—looks like this was indeed the prison.
Cautiously he unsticks the tape and opens the door. Inside it’s half-dark, and he senses the staircase on the right. He gropes for the light switch on the wall and heads downstairs. Exactly: three cells fabricated out of thick sticks. In front of him a table, two chairs, and a mechanism that looks like a welding apparatus. Were the cops too lazy to pull it out? On the floor, reddish-brown spots and broken glass. Torture—and why not? Hah! Vagrants, human matter. Hah!
Ryabets doesn’t linger. It’s all just like the paper said. He goes upstairs, turns off the light, walks out, and puts the tape back. Not a trace of the other dacha, as if it were never there. He wants to go home.
But before he moves out to the street he decides to take a look, refresh his memory, see where he kept watch once upon a time. Over there, over there … Wait, wait …
In the lilac bushes past the pines, in the exact same place, he notices a figure on the ground. The instinct to flee subsides instantly. No cop would sit squatting in the bushes! On top of everything else, it’s a female. She waves. He’s walking, glancing from side to side to make sure no one else is there. But there is. The female has a dog at her feet. It raises its head to Ryabets.
“Got anything to drink?” she asks. “Who are you?”
Definitely a woman. And drunk. Two leathery folds are slipping down her belly from her unbuttoned pink top. Cellulite legs in white ankle socks spread wide. Bezdonka, hah!
While Ryabets is considering her, the woman takes out of her bag (just like his with his Marlboros) a bottle (just like him with his 777), tosses her head back, and glugs down the last of the liquid. She kicks an empty bottle aside.
“Commander, fill my glass! See? Not a drop! I won’t fucking say anything to your wife.”
A flat face, dark, slit eyes, no neck, formless all over.
Like a steak!
Ryabets thinks culinarily.
But something very familiar I can’t put my finger on. What?
“Ryaba? Ryaba! Ryabets! Is that you? Yes, it is!” The woman scrambles onto all fours, straightens up, and starts hobbling toward him, as if she were wearing prostheses. The dog, too, yawns and wags its tail.
Buratina! Fucking amazing. Burataeva!
he shouts in his mind.
This clumsy creature had been Ryabets’s erotic dream. Nadya Burataeva—Buratina, as they’d called her in school. The nickname was a jibe at her flat, half-Kalmyk, but definitely not Buryat, nose.
“And you’re just the same, Ryaba, just the same. Maybe a little shrunken, hee hee hee! Still jerking off?” Burataeva’s a meter away and Ryabets can smell her sour stench. “What are you standing there for? Pour! To our meeting! You wouldn’t begrudge Nadya Burataeva a drink, would you? How many years has it been? Eh? Gotta be thirty.”
Ryabets reaches into his bag, removes the bottle and cup, pulls the cork out with his teeth, pours, and offers it to Buratina. He drinks from the bottle.
“So tell me, how have you been? What’s up?”
* * *
Ryabets is sitting under a pine facing Buratina. Echoes of her fate surface right away. She was burning up in the fire so she jumped, broke her foot and back, spent a long time in recovery, and after all that discovered she was pregnant. It was born dead, actually. She went quickly downhill. Her parents supported her but she drank, then her lover (a recidivist) did and she drank, they put him in jail and she drank, her parents died and she drank, another pregnancy and she drank, a miscarriage and she drank, she sold everything and drank, her apartment too and drank, disappeared and drank.
“This is Polkan,” she introduces.
Ryabets nods but the dog isn’t taking to him.
“Don’t wet your pants, Ryaba, he won’t touch you. He’s been with me since he was born. Andryukha brought him when he was just a puppy, thi-i-is little. You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, Ryaba!” Buratina hiccups. And in a gleeful non sequitur: “They shut down the beer stand a long time ago, back under Gorbachev. And all the stores too. We go over the bridge, to Priboy. I’ve been living here ten years, Ryaba, across Bezdonka. I’m moving to Kazan station now. They say it’s a rich place—you can take melons off the trains from the Chuchmeks. You won’t die of hunger near a train station. I’m not staying here, no way.”
“Why?” Ryabets recalls the morning paper.
“Hell if I know!” Buratina shrugs. “Everyone’s run off. Even Andryukha. He promised me. ‘You and me, Nadya, we’ll go to Kazan station, I won’t abandon you.’ So where’s Andryukha now? Kaput. Hee hee hee.”
“Why are you limping?”
“I’m limping? What do you mean I’m limping? What do you mean? I know why I’m limping, I know. But I won’t tell you. Never!” Then she mutters under her breath, “Maybe I’m Madame de La Vallière! Listen, Ryaba, I’m limping because I’m Madame de La Vallière!”
If Ryabets had known how to put his emotions into words, it would have come out something like this:
Did I really lust after this woman once? Her? Me? Incredible!
Ryabets crinkles his nose.
“… How I’ve lived this long I don’t remember, Ryaba. I took a leap from the second floor! Broke both my little legs. I could’ve suffocated. All the others did: my Alik, and Lidukha, and those other two, I don’t remember who they were. And that fat one who carried around the pictures of women.”
“Boltyansky?”
“That’s it, Ryaba, exactly! He suffocated.” And suddenly she winks. “Should I tell you?”
“What?”
“This! Remember how you used to moon over me, Ryaba? Remember? Hee hee hee! You did, I know you did! But I wouldn’t give it up for you! I would for anyone else, but not you.” She falls silent and starts rocking from side to side.
“Is it true there was a prison here?”
“Definitely. Yes!” And now he can’t tell whether it’s the drink talking or she’s serious. “I won’t let you have any now either, so don’t get any ideas! Don’t you look at how old I am … You’re no stud yourself. All skin and bones. They used to call you Skull, remember?” She fell silent for several moments, then suddenly: “Andryukha died here. Kirei died and Sabel died. We were four in this pipe—I mean the four of us lived together … I’m all alone now … Andryukha left a week ago, said he’d grab me some booze … He didn’t … It’s scary here, Ryaba. Where can I take Polkan? Huh? They won’t let him into the train station. Will you take him?”
“That’s all I need.”
“Yeah, right. You like a little port now and then too, I see! Like when we were kids. Don’t you make enough for a little brandy, Ryaba? What’s your job these days?”
“Cook.”
Buratina whistles. “In a restaurant?”
“A cafeteria. I feed the black-assed negroes at the university. Fortunately, it’s only ten minutes from home.”
“What do you cook for them?”
“Oh, everything: goulash, groats, cabbage soup.”
“Did you ever try foie gras?”
“That’s only a name: it’s goose liver. What’s there to try? Put it in rassolnik, potroshki—just the ticket. And the cucumbers have to be thickly sliced, preferably marinated.” Ryabets pauses to pour for Buratina. “Here’s to our meeting!” He takes a swig.
“Ryaba, you know why I wouldn’t let you have any? You look all cold, but on the inside—phooey! One of those. Us girls didn’t like you; you had this look, like you wanted to maul us. Maul us with your eyes and go down there with your nose. Hee hee hee! Our dear departed Bolt was like that too, but I felt sorry for him. Who was going to give that fatso any? He carried those dirty pictures around, but you mooned, you just egged me on. Oh, poor Bolt! And poor Mesropych, even if he was a stinker.”