Zrada

by Lance Charnes

“Yes, I’m seriously considering Carson’s offer.”

  The gravelstorm stops; mud speckles the windows. At least it’s not removing the paint.

  Stas snaps, “That wasn’t the plan.”

  “I know it isn’t the plan. I made the plan. The plan didn’t work as well as I wanted. Now I am making a new plan.”

  Stas glances at Stepaniak. He snarls—not for the first time, Stepaniak’s reminded of the unwrapped mummies in the British Museum—then focuses on the road again. “Sell the paintings, you said.” Even when he’s not growling, he growls. Too many cigarettes. “Get another half-million for them, you said. That means another quarter-million for me. Like hell we give that up. Kill the bitch and take it all.”

  Stepaniak doesn’t like Stas assuming he’ll get half now that Vadim’s out of the picture. Those two were supposed to split half. Also, Stepaniak never likes it when Stas comes up with his own ideas. They’re usually impractical or involve lots of dead bodies; either way, bad for business. “Were you paying attention back there? Did you see what happened? The militia found us again. How did that happen? We were clear of them last night.”

  “Lucky. Coincidence.”

  Hard to imagine how the man’s still alive, believing that nonsense. “They almost found us at the meeting point yesterday. Tell me, Stas, how lucky are those people? How many coincidences? No. Once we get the money, we can go to the West and be rid of those militia idiots forever. Carson’s offer is a good starting point. If we kill her, the DeWitt woman may send someone looking for us. Or Carson’s mafiya pakhan”—godfather—“will object. She owes him money.”

  “But…we give up the icon? I thought you had a buyer already.”

  He does. Flexibility is key. “Patience, dear Stas. I said ‘starting point.’ I need to think how we can turn it our way. Turn right up here.”

  “Right?”

  “We will go south, then west. We need to leave the militia’s neighborhood.”

  Stas’s mouth hangs open. “We’ll go right past them.”

  “By the time they get all their chickens in the coop, we’ll be far away.” He hopes.

  Stas drifts the corner and tears east along the edge of a reservoir. He grumbles something Stepaniak ignores. “Did you fuck her?”

  Stepaniak chuckles. Nothing gets by Stas…eventually. “Of course I did. We had a lovely weekend together in Kyiv four years ago.” Now that Stas isn’t trying to kill them both, Stepaniak can lean back into his very comfortable black-leather seat. “Have you ever stayed in the Eleven Mirrors Design Hotel? The best hotel in Kyiv. TripAdvisor says so. It was…superb. You must try it sometime.”

  Stas rolls his eyes. “You fucked…her.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Did you look above her tits?”

  “Don’t be typical, dear Stas. Yes, she has an honest face. Yes, she may be plain. But…” He leans toward Stas. “When the clothes come off? She is amazing. And she’s a lion in bed. A lion. Have you ever had sex with a lion?”

  “I don’t do animals.”

  Metaphor is lost on the man. Stepaniak pulls his phone from his car coat’s inside pocket and brings up the tracker app. Carson and the painting are still where he left them. He hopes she’ll be careful. He doesn’t want the militia to find her…yet.

  Chapter 9

  Carson, flat on her stomach, watches as two militiamen walk along the ruts the Range Rover’s tires left in the wet grass ten meters away.

  She’s screened by the underbrush in the stand of trees she’s colonized since two that morning. The militia senior sergeant and corporal are in the field west of it. If they know she’s watching them, they’re hiding it well.

  While her eyes follow the militiamen around, her brain puzzles over two very important things she learned a few minutes ago.

  One: Stepaniak can find her wherever she goes.

  Two: the militia can find Stepaniak.

  She doesn’t feel good about either of them. The only way Stepaniak can track her is by using some kind of GPS bug on something she’s carrying. Did he have enough time to stash something in the briefcase? Did he plant something on me when he groped me? Is it on the picture? She’ll have to check that out when she’s not knee-deep in militia.

  One important thing she didn’t learn: can only Stepaniak find her, or can the militia, too?

  The longer those two out there stomp through the calf-high weeds, the more likely the answer is no. If they could, they’d have come for her by now. Not that that’s super comforting. Any of those bored soldiers milling around on the road just east of her could wander in here to take a leak and stumble across her.

  Those two very important things she learned? They killed off the idea of walking out. She’d be an easy, slow-moving target for Stepaniak.

  Can she really make a deal with him? He didn’t blow her off. When they first met in Kyiv, he talked about owning a string of restaurants and clubs until the dumb bastard crossed a local mobster and ended up in prison. He seemed to miss that life. His story about why he shot her at the exchange made some twisted sense. Stepaniak and his lapdog were obviously trying to pin her down here, not kill her. They had plenty of opportunities for a head shot and didn’t take any.

  Do I trust him enough to do a deal?

  She never actually trusted him very far—he’s too much of a player for that—but their interests sort-of align right now. He wants cash, not art. She has cash and wants that icon. Can they both win? There’s only one way to find out.

  If he’s scamming her, she can kill him later.

  Olhynske is split into two parts. Half is strung out along the so-called highway for over a klick south. The road just north of Carson’s trees stretches west toward a low rise. Roughly half a klick west of the highway, the rest of the town starts to line both sides of that road.

  She’s done hiking the highway. When the militia roars south, she heads west.

  There’s not a tree or building to hide behind for that first half-klick. Carson walks it like she belongs there. It’s a bit of bravado she learned a long time ago as a junior patrol cop walking through neighborhoods where cops were game animals and were always in season.

  Knots of trees mark the edge of the western part of town. Carson ducks into the densest grove to watch and prepare for what’s next. The Halliburton and the portfolio are dangerous to her now: they occupy her hands when she needs them free, and they make her look like she has something worth taking. She buries them in the underbrush and leaf litter. After a lot of internal debate, she also hides the Ksyukha. She still has Vadim’s pistol and her baton tucked away. Being obviously heavily armed won’t help her make friends.

  She’d counted eleven checkpoints on the way into Amvrosiivka with Stepaniak. Even the Kapitán seemed to have trouble getting them through some of them. She can steal a car and the GPS can show her which roads to take, but it can’t tell her where the checkpoints and roadblocks and blown bridges are, or who to bribe and how much. By herself, she probably won’t make it past the first couple of checkpoints.

  So she needs a local guide…preferably one who won’t sell her out first thing.

  A scruffy older man leads an equally scruffy medium-sized dog through the middle of this part of town, away from her. Carson waits for them to get a long way away. She takes a deep breath. Can’t be worse than Moldova. She steps into the middle of the road, straightening her shirt. Then she strolls into town to find a car and a driver.

  A string of concrete utility poles carrying a single electrical cable traces the road’s south side, where most of the development is. A stork’s nest perches on a pole up ahead. Most properties are compounds, not single houses: a house or two, a barn or storage building, sheds, tumbledown fences. A couple look empty, with busted windows and tall weeds. One of the first she passes—faded pink stucco behind an arbor—looks like a giant hand punched through the roof, grabbed everything inside, and scattered it over the yard. />
  And there are flags and bumper stickers. Lots of them. Black, blue, and red horizontal stripes: the DNR. White, blue, and red: Russia. An American Confederate flag without the stars: the battle flag of Novorossiya. Militia flags and stickers of all kinds.

  Carson’s agency backgrounder said only about forty-five percent of the people in the Donbass—mostly the Russian-speakers—support the rebels. All she has to do is find someone from the other fifty-five percent. No problem.

  People stare at her from their front yards. Old women peek from behind lace curtains or printed-pattern drapes that look like bedsheets. An old guy stalks to the road’s edge holding a double-barrel shotgun. An old woman’s voice rasps “Go home!” in Russian.

  The last time Carson got this much hostility from a whole neighborhood, she was in Toronto’s Moss Park area and the locals were reacting to her uniform. I get it, I’m a stranger. But what’s with these people? Whatever it is, she wishes they’d stop. Staying on constant alert is exhausting. Sooner or later, she’ll read a reaction wrong and do something that’ll really piss them off.

  A skinny, muddy stray dog trots out from a driveway, sniffs, then follows Carson, barking. Not “Are you my friend?” barking; the “I’m gonna rip your legs off” kind. Even the dogs hate me. Its attitude’s way bigger than its body, so Carson tries to ignore it.

  Her reception doesn’t improve as she moves on. People must be leaving the fields to come give her the stink-eye. She hears muttered curses, hissing, the ever-popular suka. Go back to the West. Leave us alone. She’d be more afraid if there were able-bodied, fighting-age men here, but there aren’t. The only guy in his twenties is missing half an arm; he spits on the ground when she passes. The few youngish women look as old and shopworn as the middle-aged women who are probably their moms.

  The western part of Olhynske stretches over a kilometer until the road dead-ends into a plowed field. Carson turns to take stock. Despite the heckling, nobody except the dog approached her, though she’ll be gossip fodder for the next month. She doesn’t care. She’d counted four cars or trucks at houses without rebel or Russian flags. With any luck, one of those will get her out of here.

  Three of the four candidates are south of the road. Carson skirts the nearest farmhouse and counts off as she heads east through what passes for back yards.

  The “back yards” are mazes of bleached-out wooden sheds, chicken coops, vegetable gardens, wire fences, beehives, rabbit hutches, chopping blocks, sawhorses, and busted junk. And mud. And the occasional wanna-be watchdog with too much time on its paws.

  The fifth house from the west end is the first with a possibly useful car. Carson winds through a collection of rusty green and red oil drums. She finds a babusya sweeping her back step with the kind of straw broom Carson’s seen in pictures from a century ago. The granny’s less than five feet tall and shaped like a concrete block, a symphony in clashing floral prints.

  Carson’s sure she looks like she swam across the Black Sea to get here. She finger-combs her shortish brown hair as best she can, makes sure her shirttail covers the butt of her pistol, then clears her throat. “Dobri ranok, babka.” Ukrainian for good morning, grandmother.

  The old woman’s head jerks up. She smells prey. Her eyes are like cinders from a wildfire—small but hot and bright. Her face prunes when she sees Carson. She changes up her grip on her broom so she can swing it like a baseball bat. “Get away from me! Get off my land! You young people always bring me trouble…”

  Carson retreats. She knows when she’s overmatched. Not that it’s a high-speed chase; she can walk briskly and still outpace the deadly broom as the granny hobbles after her, screeching curses. The ninja granny’s parting shot: “You young girls are nothing but trouble!”

  It’s been years since anybody called Carson a “young girl.”

  The second candidate car sits five properties down the road. A peek through a rear window reveals dust and mold invading a tiny, abandoned bedroom. The puke-green Lada she’d seen from the street is on blocks and has no engine.

  She slogs through the mud past angry geese, snorting pigs, and nosy dogs. What if I can’t use any of the four cars? Try the other part of Olhynske? Go back to Amvrosiivka? Jack a car and try my luck on the road solo? None of those options sound great.

  The last possibly useful car on the south side of the road is nine farms down. The house is small compared to its neighbors—squarish, whitewashed brick, peeling green window trim, and a corrugated iron roof crusted with moss. The weathered clapboard storage building behind it looks like it’ll fall over the next time a big truck drives by. Its door is open; Carson can’t tell if there’s somebody inside or if the hinges are busted. There’s not as much crap in the back yard as there was at some other houses, but there’s still a lot. She skirts a disintegrating chickenless chicken coop, squeegees her hair flat, then knocks on the back door.

  No answer. She tries again. Nothing.

  Someone pumps a shotgun behind her.

  Chapter 10

  A woman stands in the storage building’s doorway seven or eight meters away from Carson. Wear on her square face. My age? Hard to tell. Shorter than Carson. Sturdy but not overweight. Her darkish hair’s under a kerchief that’s faded to a non-color. Her work shirt probably started life as red or brown, but it’s turned a warm gray from too much sun and harsh washing.

  The shotgun’s steady. The woman holds it like she knows how. The eyes boring into Carson from behind the sights are almost as dark and motionless as the shotgun’s muzzle.

  She’s serious. Watch yourself.

  Carson rests her palms on the fronts of her thighs so the woman can see that her hands aren’t up to anything. She says “Good morning” in Ukrainian.

  “What do you want?” Also Ukrainian; possibly a good sign. Hostile, though.

  A glance shows Carson there’s nobody else in the field. Nobody answered her knock on the door. If there’s a man, he’d have shown up by now. She’d planned to appeal to a guy’s greed and vanity. She hadn’t expected to find a woman on her own.

  How do I play this? She lives in a war zone. Who knows the kind of shit she’s put up with. She won’t trust some random stranger just because we both have vaginas. What does she need to hear?

  Something she’s probably said to somebody else. “I need your help.”

  The woman shuffles a couple meters across the gravel paving her yard. She moves well with a weapon; the shotgun never wavers from Carson’s head. “Who are you? What are you?”

  “My name is…Tarasenko.” Carson’s real last name. She hopes that being a fellow Ukrainian will score some points. It doesn’t extend to first names, though; a few minutes with Google would turn up all kinds of shit that won’t help the trust issue any. “I’m from the West. I’m fighting a terrorist militia in this area.” The Ukrainian government calls the war here an “anti-terrorist operation”; she hopes the woman will make that connection.

  Trust her? Trust isn’t a huge part of Carson’s mental toolkit. She hasn’t found a lot of people she can trust even if she’s inclined to. Call this wrong and this woman could just bury Carson in the field and get on with her life.

  No flags, no bumper stickers, no decals. If she believes in anything, she’s hiding it. That means only one thing around here. Carson takes a deep breath. Time to commit. “This militia stole two expensive paintings from the West. I have to rescue them before the militia sells them. I got one. Bandits stole the other, an icon, and killed my associate. I need to get it back, then take it and the painting to the West.”

  Yeah, it sounds like a bad spy novel. It’s the best she can do. If she had a usable phone, she could call Matt, her partner in a couple big projects last year. He’s good at making up stories.

  The woman hasn’t shot her yet. “Where is it? The painting you have?”

  “Edge of town.” She’d point, but hand gestures and sudden movements aren’t a good idea.

  “A
re you alone?”

  Carson hesitates. Yes is the truth, but it gives this woman a clear road to make her disappear. But if she’s not alone, what does she need here? “Tak.” Yes.

  The woman pulls her face away from the shotgun’s stock so she can look at Carson through both eyes. The shotgun’s still aimed, just lower. She stares at Carson for a short eternity. “What do you want?”

  “You have a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drive me to where the bandits are, then to the line of contact. I’ll pay you.”

  The woman’s eyebrows arch. “It isn’t that simple.”

  “I know. It’s simpler than walking.”

  “There are many checkpoints. I will have to pay bribes.”

  “I’ll pay them.”

  “Petrol is expensive and hard to get.”

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  The shotgun’s muzzle sinks a bit. It’s now pointing at Carson’s gut. “Which militia?”

  “The Makiivka Brigade.”

  The woman’s face clouds over. “You are sure of this?”

  “Blue-and-black shield with a yellow sun?”

  The woman’s lips—none too lush to begin with—turn into lines. “When you took that painting, did you kill any of them?”

  Carson hopes the woman’s reaction means she’s sick of the militias, not that she thinks Carson is a bandit. “Would that be a problem?”

  “For them, not for me.”

  Good answer. “Between me and my associate, about a dozen.”

  Another long stare. Then the woman nestles the shotgun’s barrel in the crook of her left arm. The ghost of a smile revives her lips. “Not nearly enough.”

  Exactly the reaction Carson hoped for. “What do I call you?”

  “Demchuk, Galina Lukayivna. How much will you pay?”

  Good question. The backgrounder said that the average monthly wage in the rebel areas is a bit over 5,700 hryvnia (around €200), the Ukrainian currency nobody in the East wants. Pensioners get less than €80 a month. What the agency pays Carson in a day would be an unimaginable fortune here. “Two thousand euros for you and your car, plus all your expenses.”