Traffyck (5 page)

When she arrived, she tried to get closer, but a fireman stopped her. She screamed to the fireman and to a militiaman that her husband might be in the store. Behind her, she felt the heat of the sun on her neck and shoulders. A jet taking off from Zhulyany Airport roared, shaking the ground and air and even the handlebars of her bicycle. The militiaman had placed his pudgy hand on hers and said, “We will wait here. He must have gone for help when the fire started.”

The heat from the fire and from the bicycle ride without a cool down made her feel faint. She took the water bottle from her bicycle and gulped half the water, preparing herself to pull Viktor free of the flames when he appeared at the doorway. But the doorway was the mouth of Satan.

She tried to pull away from the militiaman so she could go around to the alleyway behind the buildings, but the militiaman held her in place. As she stood watching the flames, she was aware of being jostled by onlookers. At one point, her bicycle was being pulled from her until the militiaman at her side yelled at someone and pulled her and the bicycle closer to his side.

She felt dizzy and squeezed the handlebars of her bicycle. Another militiaman who said, “It will be all right,” held her up by her other arm.

As she watched, several firemen in masks pushed their way into the video store with hoses spraying like fans. The flames at the doorway changed to steam and smoke. Behind her, another jet was taking off, shaking the ground as if to say, “I don’t give a damn about you down there. I’ve got important passengers.”

After the roar of the jet faded, all was surprisingly quiet. Traffic had been detoured, and the sirens had stopped. Even the roar of flames had stopped. As she stood between the two militiamen, Mariya thought now she would hear Viktor call to her. His cell phone did not work, and he had gone to a phone booth. He would call her cell phone, and it would begin ringing in her bicycle bag. Or he would come back to the fire and see her in the crowd and call to her. She scanned the onlookers for Viktor until a sigh, as if they had seen fireworks, arose from the crowd.

When she looked back toward the building she saw water spouting from several hoses putting out the roof fires. The spray from the hoses had created a fountain as if to celebrate the extinguishing of the blaze, as if to celebrate Viktor’s arrival at her side.

But Viktor was not there, and the building hissed at her like a serpent, or like the sizzling of bacon at one of those childhood picnics when her father made the fire too large and her mother complained and complained.

The cardboard sign taped to the inside of the front window— “Adult Books, Magazines, Videos”—smoldered and burned. The window cracked and fell out onto the ground in crooked, uneven shards. The rush of air from the missing window rekindled the fire, and heat swept across the crowd, making them back away as several masked firemen rushed in with hoses to relieve the ones who had run out of the store when the window broke.

When Mariya heard one fireman yell to another that there were two bodies inside along with a car, which might explode, she passed out.

She came awake in the backseat of a militia car. Onlookers outside the car stared at her with strange, sad-happy faces. Sad when they looked at her, happy when they glanced to one another. To her, the faces said,
Thank God it was you, not us
.

Someone yelled, “Hey, Natasha!” and when she looked in the direction of the voice, she saw the two thugs who had hung out of the Mercedes sedan during her ride. The men waved and smiled.

The militia car started, and she felt the blast of warm and smoky air on her face from the ventilation system. When the militiaman in the seat next to her reached over and started rolling down the window, another militiaman outside shouted.

“Wait!” The militiaman was holding her bicycle. “What about this?”

A child’s voice said, “Ride it, and save gasoline,” and this made everyone laugh.

It was a comic scene, the fat militiaman holding onto her violet bicycle while everyone laughed at him. Viktor would have enjoyed the scene, would have laughed like hell and made her laugh, if he had only been there.

A young man standing at the fringe of the crowd took a cigarette from the pack in his rolled-up tee shirt sleeve. He put the cigarette behind his ear and rerolled the pack in his sleeve. He did not take the cigarette from his ear to light it. He left it there and continued staring at the smoldering building. The man was thin, with stringy black hair. He wore faded jeans and heeled boots like an American cowboy.

When the militia car with the woman inside drove off, followed by another militia car with the bicycle sticking out of its trunk, the young man walked slowly away from the scene. He went south on a side street of dilapidated, low buildings toward the sweet smell of jet fuel blowing his way from the airport. He turned in to an alley toward the airport. Within a grove of young chestnut trees planted along the airport fence, the man got into a tan Zhiguli station wagon parked in the shade of a mature chestnut tree, which must have been there prior to the planting of the grove. The shade had kept the car relatively cool in the late summer heat.

A young woman sat in the passenger seat of the Zhiguli. She was knitting something blue and green, but she put the knitting aside when the young man got in. She had red hair cut short and wore heavy makeup, her lips bright red, her eyelids charcoal gray. The woman turned and looked at the man but did not smile or acknowledge him in any other way.

Once inside the car, the man started the engine and turned the air-circulating fan on high. He pulled a pair of rubber gloves from his rear pocket, separated them, and handed them to the woman. The woman picked up a Russian Orthodox Bible from the floor of the car and inserted the gloves individually into the Bible, folding them and slowly closing the Bible as if each marked a passage she meditated on. Then she returned the Bible to the floor. When the woman spoke, her voice sounded young. A girl hidden beneath heavy makeup.

“I saw the smoke,” she said in Ukrainian.

The young man’s voice also sounded younger than he looked. “Two birds with one stone, as they say in America.” He turned toward the woman and grinned. “Before we return to Ukraine’s asshole, we will go somewhere to fuck.”

The young woman looked down, her head bowed as if in prayer. When she nodded, the young man retrieved a red baseball cap from beneath the front seat, put the cap on backwards, and drove out from the shade of the chestnut tree.

CHAPTER
THREE

Following the American Gypsy’s suggestion, the Ukrainian Gypsy named Janos traveled at night on deserted roads, moving from one camp to another while most slept and others, with murder or vengeance in mind, searched cities. Janos was alone in his caravan. Violins accompanied his journey, the caravan rocking and swaying as its diesel-fed horses propelled it across the mountains. Although diesel fuel was costly, his caravan was a small and efficient five-cylinder camper van. By using his handheld GPS, he was able to stay off main highways.

The mountains lit by a waning moon resembled the lower jaw of a monster. With Gypsy violins playing on the caravan’s CD player, he could have been anywhere in the world. Perhaps the Alps in Austria or the Rockies in America. But these mountains were toothless, without snowcapped peaks. And when the rapid tempo of a
czardas
ended and he reached across to the caravan’s dashboard to eject the CD, a news station from Uzhgorod blasted from the speakers, reminding him he was in Ukraine on the western slope of the Carpathians.

It was three in the morning, and Uzhgorod FM was the only powerful station on the air. He retrieved another CD from the console, inserted it, waited a few seconds, and felt a sense of nostalgia and satisfaction when the lilting violin of Sandor Lakatos coming over the front and rear speakers filled the caravan from stem to stern.

This was the second year in a row Janos Nagy, ex-Kiev militiaman, now owner and sole employee of Nagy Investigative Agency in Kiev’s Podil District, had rented a camper van. Last year he had traveled in spring, enjoying the Black Sea before tourist season. This year, he postponed a holiday because of bad economic times, but finally made an escape from Kiev for several days due to professional hazards.

He had been hired to investigate the bombing of a female clinic in the Podil District. While pursuing the case, he had come upon a possible connection between the source of the explosives and a local Orthodox Church leader. When the nature of his investigation leaked out, the summer heat was turned up.

“The Gypsy versus God’s children,” as one of Kiev’s tabloids put it. The Gypsy making a “baseless” link between Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza, a leader in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and the bombing of a clinic that performed abortions. “A campaign of lies,” fellow clergymen were calling it. “No evidence of any sort,” Rogoza said during an interview on Kiev Radio, after which he asked men and women of all faiths to pray for him. Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza, who was once rumored to have had a lover other than his wife, but who turned the rumors around, making them seem part of an effort of the Kiev Patriarchate to destroy the obviously valid Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in which he resided.

A month later, after the Rogoza incident began to cool, came the fatal shooting of a female doctor in front of another Podil female clinic, followed a week later by a bomb through the Gypsy’s office window that filled his butt cheeks with glass and moved his office farther north in Podil. The bombing did not literally move the office, but it did convince Janos to relocate when his two-day hospital stay ended.

The bomb was not large enough to kill a man, unless he swallowed it. The Kiev militia laboratory technician called it a “double-base, single-base, nitrocellulose magnesium colloid,” sounding like a university lecturer as he explained its operation. None of this interested Janos, except its size. A table tennis ball had shattered his window, exploding on impact and making the glass into shrapnel, which penetrated his slacks where his posterior was exposed at the cut-out lower back of his cheap office chair. Except for the glass in his posterior and a few pieces in his calves, the rest of him had been saved by the backrest of the chair and by the fact that he was bent over asleep on his desk when the bomb exploded.

It was splendid advertising for the Nagy Investigative Agency: First, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church accuses him of being the anti-Christ; next, one of his clients, a doctor at a Podil female clinic, is murdered; finally, Janos gets bombed in the ass while he’s asleep at his desk.

As Janos drove through the darkness, he adjusted his position on the bucket seat and could feel the bits of glass still embedded in him. Even his ass was a Gypsy, unable to stay still more than a few minutes because of the stings biting him the way mosquitoes did the previous year at the caravan camp near Odessa when he and Svetlana made love on a moonlit picnic bench in the primitive area of the camp.

Lakatos played a slow piece now, the violin a voice crying from its E and A strings and moaning from its G and D strings. Voices in the night, the high-pitched ones reminding him of Svetlana’s laugh, the low-pitched ones reminding him of Svetlana’s moan as they made love.

Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva, one of a handful of female investigators in Kiev’s militia. Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva, who called him Gypsy while he was still a member of Kiev’s militia because of his mentor, Lazlo Horvath, who was also called Gypsy, was also Hungarian-Ukrainian, and also played the violin. Svetlana Kovaleva, who vacationed with him last year and made him feel years younger, especially the night she danced for him.

A waning moonlit night exactly like this. A deserted campsite near the Black Sea. A flickering campfire lighting up the bottoms of sparse trees and the side of the camper van. Janos, Gypsy Number Two, brings out his Chinese-made violin and, after a screechy start and the application of additional rosin, serenades Svetlana who sits, wrapped in a blanket, on a boulder near the fire. He plays a Hungarian folk song he has practiced for weeks. The first part of the song is slow and gentle with an ever-so-light touch of horsehair on strings.