Zrada

by Lance Charnes

  Instead of shock, gratitude, or amazement, Galina gives her disappointment. “That’s not enough. I need eleven thousand.”

  What? That’s crazy talk. “I’m paying in euros, not hryvnia.”

  “I know. I need eleven thousand. No less.”

  Carson recognizes the set to Galina’s face; it’s the same expression Carson uses when she digs in her heels. Looking at Galina is almost like looking in the mirror. Sometime she’ll get a chance to think about that. “Why?”

  “What you ask for is dangerous. I could lose my car. I could be shot. You have to pay for that. It seems that you need me more than I need you. So.” Her tone’s completely even, like she’s haggling for turnips in the local market.

  If Galina was pulling a number out of the air, it would more likely be a multiple of five or ten. Eleven thousand is a specific number. She wants something. She’s motivated.

  But agreeing means violating the first rule of effective graft: never pay more than the going rate. If she overpays, she signals that she either doesn’t know the local market, or she spends her money foolishly. Either way, she makes herself a target.

  Galina’s right about one thing, though—Carson needs her if she’s going to get out of this dump.

  It’s not your money. It’s not the agency’s money. Who cares?

  It’s the principle. I hate being extorted.

  You don’t get to stand on principle, you dart.

  Carson’s internal voice pisses her off sometimes. She grits her teeth. “Twenty percent in advance. Thirty percent when we get the other picture. The other fifty when you get me across the line. Don’t even try to counter—that’s as good as it gets.”

  “Hmpf.” Galina points to the ground in front of Carson. “Put the money there, then back away.”

  Carson counts out bills by feel in her left pocket. They’re soggy, of course, like the rest of her. She drops them on the gravel, then steps back three paces.

  The half-hearted rain doesn’t seem to bother Galina. She lunges forward, scoops up the notes, then retreats well out of Carson’s reach to count them. “You gave me too much. Here.” She holds out a bill.

  “Keep it. I’ll take it off your progress payment.” It’s interesting that Galina would offer to give back the overpayment. Maybe she’s semi-honest. That’d be a nice change.

  Maybe this will work.

  Galina shoves the money into one of her work shirt’s breast pockets. “You have a deal, Tarasenko. I will take you where you want to go. But if you cheat me…” She hefts the shotgun.

  Chapter 11

  Carson sits on a wood-plank bench set on two overturned plastic buckets on what passes for Galina’s back porch. She’s barefoot and down to her underwear, a ratty towel, and Vadim’s HK. Galina let her wash her shirt and jeans in the kitchen sink (mostly mud removal); the water drizzling from the tap didn’t look much cleaner than what went down the drain. Whatever. It’s so good to be rid of the body armor for a while. She wishes she could dump the longline Cheata compression bra too—twenty-seven hours in the thing is about fifteen hours too long—but walking around topless sounds like a bad idea right now. Besides, she needs someplace to hide the money she took from the briefcase.

  She took advantage of being mostly undressed to check her clothes for a GPS bug. Nothing. It must be in the briefcase or the painting. She’ll look when Galina isn’t snooping around.

  Heitmann’s phone got nearly thirty minutes of charge inside. Enough to call Olivia.

  “I worried for you,” Olivia says after the normal greetings. As usual, her voice’s warm and calm. “When I lost your mobile’s location, I feared you’d come to harm.”

  “Battery died.” It’s good to hear that somebody’s worried about her. Carson doesn’t have many friends left—most were in the Toronto Police Service, and nearly all of them ghosted on her after she got chucked out. “Find One-Thirteen’s phone?”

  “Sorry, no. He may have switched it off. But I did find yours.”

  Yes! “Where?”

  “Let’s see…it’s passed Vyshneva and appears to be approaching Novozarivka.” She says the names slowly, like she’s sounding them out.

  Carson brings up the GPS and finds the towns southwest of Olhynske. “Great. Text me updates? I’m gonna follow him.”

  “Of course. Are you well?”

  “Enough.” Carson won’t bug Olivia about stuff she can’t fix. She watches gray clouds march across the gray sky. “Text me One-Seven-Nine’s number. I might have an art question.” One-Seven-Nine is Matt, the only guy she knows who knows anything about art.

  “Of course. Do be careful. If you think your mobile is about to die, please send a message so I don’t try to muster the SAS when I lose your signal.”

  “You can do that?” That’s worth killing the phone.

  “We shall see.”

  The ZAZ Slavuta liftback is a scabby five-door that looks like an escapee from the ‘90s. It once was dark blue, but chalky white skin cancer’s taken over the roof and hood. Gravel and salt scour from the winters has chewed away at the rocker and quarter panels. Silver duct tape patches splits in the vinyl upholstery. Galina had to work at getting it running. It sounds like an angry sewing machine and it’s obvious there’s not much suspension left. With all the stuff Galina packed in the car, it looks like they’re going camping for a week rather than taking a few hours’ drive.

  Half an hour out of Olhynske, fields and the strings of trees between them pass by Carson’s window as the car trundles south on the allegedly paved road. The rain’s stopped for a while, but the sky’s still overcast. Heat leaks out the front vents.

  Carson glances behind her. The portfolio and her Ksyukha are on the floor behind Galina’s seat. The money’s behind Carson in an olive-drab rucksack Galina gave her. The Halliburton was a great piece of luggage, but it was heavy and incredibly obvious.

  Carson’s clothes are warm and damp by now instead of cold and dripping. Galina gave her a threadbare plaid flannel shirt—not unlike the one Carson sleeps in when it’s cold and her bed’s empty—to wear over her polo. “Your clothes are too nice for here,” she’d said. It’s a man’s shirt. Galina wears a battered silver wedding band on her right ring finger. Carson remembered pictures of a decent-looking man at the farmhouse. Not the man himself, though.

  Carson says, “Anybody taking care of your place while you’re gone?”

  “Yes. A neighbor.” Galina also washed up and changed clothes before they left. The smell of strong soap replaces her previous scent of sweat and dirt. She’s wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt with an elaborate red-gold-and-white geometric design on the chest.

  “You trust him?”

  “Yes.”

  Okay, Galina’s not a talker. That’s fine with Carson; neither is she. Still, she’d like to learn more about how things work here. “You don’t like the Makiivka Brigade.”

  “I don’t like any of them. Gangsters and criminals pretending to be soldiers. That one I hate more.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know anything about them?”

  “No.”

  Galina nods like Carson just confirmed her worst suspicions. “They destroy houses and schools. They kill the wounded and people surrendering to them. They sell prisoners into slavery at labor camps. They steal from villages and take crops from farmers. They recruit children to fight for them.”

  Carson thinks back to the kid at the chicken farm. He was in his mid-teens at most. “They better or worse than the other militias?”

  “There can be worse things?”

  “Torture. Mass executions. Weaponized rape. Sex trafficking.”

  Galina glances at her, frowning. “You have seen such things?”

  Carson looks away, staring at the muddy sky.

  Some silence passes along with the plowed fields. Galina finally says, “These things happen here, too. I don’t know if the Makiivka scum do them, but
I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Carson’s backgrounder said the war’s “dirty,” but didn’t go into details. More and more, she understands Galina’s shotgun “Why are you still here?”

  Galina chews her lower lip for a while. “That farm is mine. My babka left it to me. We didn’t want to leave it to these…kolorady.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s an insect in America, in the state of Colorado. A potato beetle. It’s a pest. It’s black and orange, like the Saint George ribbon. The terrorists, the militias—they all wear this ribbon. More destructive pests.”

  Carson had seen the ribbon on the militia troops’ utility blouses but didn’t know what it meant until now. “You said ‘we.’ You and who else?”

  “My husband.”

  “This is his shirt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks for the clothes.”

  “Now you don’t stand out so much.”

  Except she does: even winter pale with no makeup, she looks healthier than anybody else she’s seen here. “Where’s your husband?”

  “Away.”

  “Is he fighting?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “But he’s still alive.”

  “Yes. He hasn’t come back yet.”

  Even Carson can figure out this is an open sore. “Should I stop asking?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No. It’s natural to ask. He will come home. I will bring him home.”

  That last remark—more a vow—gives Carson something to gnaw on for a while. “Must be hard, with so many neighbors supporting the rebels.” No answer. “How long to get to the contact line?”

  “How long do you think?”

  “I don’t know. It took us over four hours to get from there to Amvrosiivka.”

  “Hmpf.” Galina shakes her head. “You had an official escort, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now you don’t. Nothing happens quickly here, except maybe death. We wait in queues everyplace now. Trips we used to finish in hours now take days. There’s no point to even trying to predict how long we will be going from here to there.” Galina glances at Carson. “You said you are from the West. Where?”

  “Canada.”

  “Hmm.” She gives Carson the side-eye for a beat. “Where did you get that gun?”

  “The Ksyukha? From a dead militiaman.”

  Galina nods once. “Do you know how to use it?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Be careful who you show it to. There are too many boys here who want to prove they are men.”

  What a surprise. Carson scans the simple medium-gray dashboard for a twelve-volt plug but doesn’t find one. There’s a working ashtray that takes her back a couple decades. “Do you have a charger in here?”

  Galina flips open the glove box. It’s full of junk—including a bunch of rolled-up rags and a big flashlight—but Carson immediately locks onto a twelve-volt socket with a USB adapter and a MicroUSB cable, flopping loose on the end of a pair of wires. “Perfect. Thanks.”

  Galina punches on the radio. What comes out sounds like Leonard Cohen singing disco with a backup girl chorus. She chair-dances a little. All cleaned up, she looks less weathered and younger than before, definitely within shouting range of Carson’s age. She has a pleasant but unremarkable face; she shouldn’t give up farming for modeling anytime soon.

  They crawl through a town even smaller than Olhynske. Rust and weeds and potholes and planters made of old truck tires; wherever the money is in this area, it’s not here. Then more fields. They’re not setting any land-speed records, though that’s smart given how rough the pavement is. They pass the rusted, burned-out wedge of a BMP infantry fighting vehicle. Its broken tracks trail across what passes for a shoulder. Galina doesn’t seem to notice; Carson stares. How many men were inside when it torched?

  Is Stepaniak chasing us? Olivia hasn’t texted her lately, but cell coverage is crap out here. That Range Rover can travel these roads a lot faster than this little tin box. In one way, that would make things easier; they could finish their business and be done with the whole thing.

  And what if Stepaniak and Stas come out shooting?

  Carson’s guilt about not mentioning the possible danger gets heavier with time. Is this the best time to tell her? Better now than when he catches up with them. “Galina…? Something I should’ve told you.”

  The song ends; so does the chair-dancing. “The bandits don’t want to see you?”

  “Maybe not. It’s complicated.”

  “If they are bandits, I think it isn’t so complicated.”

  “Maybe. They drive a black Range Rover. Two men. They know how to use their weapons.” She watches tree trunks slide by. “Sorry. Should’ve told you before.”

  “Yes. I thought they might look for you. Anyone who pays so much money so fast must be in much trouble.”

  The Russian DJ cycles through several numbers. The performers are all from the Eurovision Song Contest, something like American Idol times ten for Europe. The semi-finals are tonight. Galina chair-dances or sings along silently to all but the Russian entry, a tenor over-selling a syrupy love song. The car sings along, too, with a collection of squeaks, rattles, thunks, and groans. Carson gnaws on raw carrots from Galina’s kitchen as muddy fields drift by.

  Then the traffic stops.

  Carson sticks her head out the window. A line of cars and trucks stands still as far as she can see. People step out to stretch. One guy wades into the knee-high grass to piss; there aren’t even any trees to go behind.

  Galina sighs, turns off the engine, then leans back in her seat.

  Carson waits until the soprano belting a power ballad segues into a man doing an R&B-ish dance cut before she says anything. “What’s happening?”

  “Checkpoint.”

  Chapter 12

  Already? Carson shakes her head. “Whose checkpoint?”

  Galina shrugs. “Can’t tell yet. It could be anyone.”

  It could be the Makiivka Brigade. “How does this work?”

  “We wait. When we get there, we pay the bribe and they pretend to search the car. Then we go.”

  Probably not that simple. “We went through eleven checkpoints between the contact line and Amvrosiivka. Why so many?”

  Galina gives her an amused glance. “Only eleven? Every militia has them all around their land. It’s for money. The police make them too, same reason. The mafiya does it. Sometimes bandits make them, though they do it to stop cars and steal from them.” She sees something in Carson’s face and laughs. “I told you what you want isn’t easy.”

  “I know.” Carson brings up the GPS on Heitmann’s phone. “Where are we?”

  “North of Kumachove.”

  Another country town, this one several times the size of Olhynske, sprawled along a jumble of two-lane roads. Carson shows Galina the screen. “Look. Can we take this road here and drive through town to get past the roadblock?”

  Galina shrugs. “If they haven’t blocked it. They probably have. You should go see.”

  Not what Carson expected. “Why me?”

  “This was your idea.”

  “Fine.” Carson steps into the gray morning.

  Galina settles into her seat. “Be careful. You are worth a lot of money to me.”

  Safer to leave the money here or take it? Carson grabs the knapsack.

  It’s cool and humid outside with a steady west wind. Better than a lot of early May days Carson remembers from back home. The north sky is dark and dramatic; not her problem yet. She adjusts the straps on the knapsack full of money and hikes south past the traffic.

  The string of stopped cars seems endless. New cars, old cars (lots of those), semis, box trucks. A pair of draft horses grazes on the shoulder, hooked to a flatbed cart with truck wheels and a load of lumber. People mill on the road, chatting, smoking, pacing, talkin
g on their phones. A gang of little boys throws rocks at a turretless tank hulk rotting in a field about ten meters from the road. Tieless older men in suits, women in sweatsuits and scuffs, kids in pajamas, teen girls in short skirts and platforms huddled in knots to keep warm. A fortyish man with a missing leg swings down the road on his crutches with a string bag of groceries hanging around his neck. No fighting-age men or teenaged boys.

  So these are Ukrainians.

  They’re not like the Canuck Ukrainians back home. Those don’t look much different from the English or French except maybe for their cheekbones. These people look smaller, paler, hungrier. Their Eastern European fashion sense doesn’t help: mismatched colors, clashing patterns, ugly shoes, those teenagers shivering in minis. Yes, Canada’s rich and Ukraine’s poor and the Donbass is even poorer. Carson remembers seeing lots of pretty people in Kyiv, but that makes sense—all the pretty people go to the big city. It’s like natural selection. She thought about that a lot when she moved to Toronto and learned how tough the competition was in the dating game.

  The southbound line of cars curves to the left. A stutter of northbound traffic rolls past her. The fringes of Kumachove dust the land to her ten o’clock: little farms, knots of trees, plowed fields. It’s a walkable distance away. Can they drive it?

  She reaches the road she’d seen on the GPS. It’s blocked by a Mad Max-reject SUV with bolted-on armor, a heavy machinegun mounted on the roof, and the Makiivka Brigade’s crest on the driver’s door. The militiaman behind the gun and the driver behind the wheel watch her go by. Because I’m female? Because they recognize me? She tries to not pay too much attention to them and to not call attention to herself as she passes. That’s hard. At five-nine she’s the tallest woman she’s seen out here, and as Galina pointed out, beneath the flannel shirt her clothes are nicer than most.

  Militia troops eye her as she passes. Once again she walks like she belongs and knows where she’s going, hoping that’ll put them off. It may also help that between the body armor and her compression bra, she looks almost flat-chested. Unless they like that here.