Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  Some five minutes later, I heard Oleg mumbling something. I opened my eyes and saw his face in the rear-view mirror, wearing a look of concern. Although the ride seemed smooth, he was acting as if he were fighting the steering wheel. He said a few words in Russian to Grigory, who said there was a problem with a tire.

  Oleg yanked the car onto the right shoulder of the one-way road and stopped. Then, with not a shred of warning, our world was turned upside down.

  With dizzying suddenness, a long and baleful-looking black sedan, having sliced between the Mercedes and Richard’s Lada Niva, crept up behind us and screeched to a stop. By all appearances, it was a Zil, a Russian-made car that for many years were hardly ever seen except on the highways around Moscow in the so-called ‘KGB lane’, the one that could only be used by KGB agents. Little wonder that the Zils send shudders down the spines of Russians everywhere.

  Now, the shudders went down my spine, more so when I saw five men inside the Zil who looked and dressed much like Oleg all jump out and come right at the Mercedes. One of them pulled open the unlocked door beside me, and he and another man reached in. Too stunned to react, I felt myself being dragged out of the car by my arms like a rag doll.

  I was screaming now. I tried somehow to dig my heels into the asphalt of the road to brake the momentum of my upper body but could feel myself being manhandled, my feet merely scraping the pavement as I was carried along and quickly forced into the back seat of the Zil.

  With no control of my body, it was as if I was a spectator watching myself in a movie. I could hear my voice pleading and crying, feel hands holding me down, but my brain couldn’t process it all fast enough to realise that this was actually happening to me. I could also see, as if through a tunnel, that Danny had been pulled from the front seat of the Mercedes and was now in the back, flanked by two men, one of whom had a vice-like grip on the hair at the base of Danny’s neck. Oleg had turned around in the driver’s seat and was waving his fist just inches from Danny’s face.

  I tried calling out to him, but nothing came out of my mouth. And in the next instant, the Mercedes had driven off with a great roar. I looked to follow its path down the road but almost immediately lost sight of it.

  I craned my neck looking all around. I saw Richard Markson behind us, still sitting at the wheel of his Lada Niva, white with fear, seemingly unable to move, incapable of being any help, having evidently been ordered to do as he was told.

  I was alone. Danny was gone, and all I could see were two grotesque men holding me down. All I could smell was their foul breath. What was going to happen to me? Was I about to be killed? Raped? Dumped on this isolated road? And why was this happening at all? What the hell was going on?

  ‘MONEY! MONEY!’

  The answer was revealed up ahead in the Mercedes where two men were holding Danny in a hammerlock. Grigory Miasnikov, who had said nothing during the abduction, was ready to speak. Slowly turning around in the front passenger seat, he began, tersely rolling out words that had no doubt been scripted for weeks.

  ‘These gentlemen,’ he said, ‘are here to collect the money you owe to the Far East Trading Company, Vladivostok. One point six million dollars. You will not leave the country until this debt is paid.’

  Now it was all becoming clear. When Mr. Rud had given the Weinstocks his revised wish list at that tense meeting in the Sputnik Hotel lobby last September, he likely had no intention of settling for barter. He wanted cash—the price of the original value of the fertiliser shipment.

  Less clear was the extent of the conspiracy between Rud and Miasnikov. Rud may have schemed with Grigory to sabotage the infamous shipment in order to blame Yvonne and Danny for not protecting it, or Grigory might have gone behind Rud’s back and feigned surprise when Rud reported the bad shipment to him. In the latter case, Rud would have been just as duped by Miasnikov as had the Weinstocks. Still, it took no leap of imagination to believe Rud had inflated the fertiliser price from the start. Now that price was the bottom line in an extortion plot.

  The only goods being bartered now were the lives of Yvonne and Danny Weinstock. When Danny realised this, he could hardly believe it. Grigory, the man he and Yvonne had so trusted, had been unmasked as a traitor. If only he could get his hands around this traitor’s neck, he thought. But his anger at Miasnikov was eclipsed by his concern for Yvonne. ‘Where is she?’ he kept asking Grigory, who insisted no harm would come to her, which was plausible given that Miasnikov needed Yvonne and Danny alive if he were to collect his ransom.

  Still, Danny was worried sick. Just as Yvonne had seen glimpses of him being abused, he had seen her being dragged off, heard her screams. Both of them were relieved when, at a railroad crossing, the Mercedes stopped and the Zil caught up and stopped a few feet behind. (As did the Lada Niva, the meek and terrified Markson having been ordered by Miasnikov to follow behind the other two cars.) At that moment, Yvonne and Danny finally could see each other again. Each made a waving gesture with their hand. Thank God, Danny thought.

  They’d been separated for a number of reasons, including ease of handling and the inability to be able to fabricate any information for which the kidnappers would ask.

  But, mostly, it was to instill a greater sense of fear in each. Yvonne was especially vulnerable, since no one in the Zil could speak English, and even if they could, had been told not to say a word about the ransom plot; that was for Miasnikov to do, alone. She did, however, realise as much when, at the railroad crossing, Oleg got out of the Mercedes and walked over to the Zil. He spoke briefly to the driver, then leaned into the car and barked unintelligibly at Yvonne, who could make out only the words ‘Money! Money!’ He then returned to the Mercedes, and the two cars moved along again.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ Danny asked Grigory, who said nothing. The men to Danny’s left and right twisted his arms tighter behind him, making him groan.

  Daylight was fading in the gray sky. It was only the beginning of the nightmare.

  It was, I now knew, a kidnapping. But who were the kidnappers? A gang? The Mob? Were we random targets, or was it planned? Was Grigory kidnapped too? The fear came over me like a sheet of ice. Just before Danny disappeared again, I saw what looked to be a gun being pointed at the back of his neck. I asked the men in the Zil if I had in fact seen a gun. ‘Dah. Gun,’ one of them said. As if to keep up with their brethren in the other car, the man to my left took out his own gun, and the one to my right unfurled a knife and held it to my neck. They held me intractably by the arms and around the neck. I could barely move or breathe.

  Clumsily, they tried to maintain a pretense that they were actually keeping me safe. They would tell me in their pidgin English that the driver was ‘militia’ or ‘police.’ I imagine they did this as a way to keep me from resisting. Not that I could have. In my state of shock, my body had shut down. I felt like I had on the night George was killed in our driveway. I grew very cold and shaky. Nothing made sense in my head. My stomach was in knots. I felt as if I would become violently sick at any minute. They must have thought so, too. So afraid was I that the guy with the gun had an itchy trigger finger that I pointed to my stomach and said, ‘Baby … baby,’ thinking that they wouldn’t kill me if they thought I was pregnant. But they just thought I was making a motion that I was about to vomit. One pointed to the floor of the car.

  ‘Be sick!’ he said. Instead, I just went limp and waited, for what I had no idea.

  After about forty minutes, the mystery of where we were going ended when the Zil rolled through a neighborhood of one- and two-level homes that were, by Russian standards, upper-class havens, but by Western standards were monuments to white trash. In the middle of one block, we turned into a driveway and drove through an open, ten-foot-high iron gate. Grigory’s Mercedes was already parked there, and behind the Zil came Richard Markson in his Lada Niva—I’m sure still dumbfounded by what he had seen happen but too petrified to question what was happening before his eyes. With all three cars on the pro
perty, one of the men in the Zil jumped out and closed the gate, which made a harrowing, clanging noise, like a jail cell being slammed shut.

  Taken out of the car, still clutching my handbag—which I held on to the whole time, perhaps for some semblance of security—I stood before a sight that would haunt me forever: the dacha that would indeed be my prison cell. It was two stories high, a solid brick mausoleum, and in terrible disrepair. Construction work evidently had been going on; there were planks of wood and loose bricks strewn all over the grounds. As if from out of an Edgar Allan Poe novel, dogs barked hysterically in the backyard.

  As I was led up the walkway, the front door opened. On the other side was hell.

  When the door closed behind me, I felt swallowed up by a dark and dank still life. Windows were sealed, thin curtains drawn shroud-like around them. The foyer and living room were lit with an eerie harshness by a single light bulb on the ceiling. My hands still held behind me, I was roughly led into a small room with uncovered twin beds jammed against opposite walls.

  Against the back wall was an old brownish-red sofa, on which I was told to sit.

  As I sank into that old couch, my head was spinning. If Danny was in this hell house, where was he? Where was Miasnikov? Why wouldn’t anybody tell me what was happening?

  I thought of running out of the room, out of the house, but just then an old woman with gray hair wearing a housecoat and slippers came into the room with a fairly well-dressed younger woman, her black hair tied back tightly behind her head. Both sat down on the sofa, and the younger woman, whom the old lady called Marusia, asked me if I would like some tea. Vacantly, I answered yes, and they left again, returning in a few minutes with Marusia carrying a cup and saucer, which she handed to me. All I could think to do was stick the cup under my nose and sniff. If the tea was poisoned, maybe I could smell it.

  The old lady—a classic ‘babushka,’ as Russians call a grandmother, and as I would come to identify her since no one ever called her by name—took the cup and poured a small bit into the saucer. She then sipped from the saucer with a slurping sound, to indicate the tea was okay to drink. She handed the cup back to me. What’s this, tea before dying? I thought, lifting it to my mouth. I drank some, and when Marusia stayed with me, I turned to her for answers.

  ‘You are Marusia?’ I said. She nodded. She spoke no English and I very little Russian. I remembered the word charasho—a way of asking if everything is going to be okay. ‘Charasho?’ I pleaded, ‘Charasho?’ She kept on nodding yes, and I kept on wanting to believe her. She did have a comforting way about her, and she promptly went into the kitchen and brought me a plate with barely-edible-looking food on it: a cold lamb chop, cold french fries, and a slice of cucumber, not that I had any appetite. But her efforts to put me at ease were interrupted by the crude sound of a thump and then a man howling in pain, coming from somewhere upstairs.

  Oh my God, I thought. That’s Danny! What are they doing to him? That cold chill ripped through my veins again. I wanted to run out of the room and go to Danny, but then a moment later, I was stunned to see Danny, still wearing his overcoat, being ushered into the room by two more of those thuggish men dressed in black pants and black knit shirts, who were nearly identical and quite possibly brothers, one of them very overweight. The first thing I noticed was a red bruise on Danny’s forehead. But while he was pale and shaken, he walked surely and steadily to where I was sitting. I drew myself up, and he threw his arms around me, whereupon I unconsciously recoiled from him, not because of Danny, but because, out of fear, I’d erected a wall around my emotions and my person. I didn’t want to be touched; I just wanted to get out of that house.

  Danny had apparently been given only a few minutes with me, to tell me the bare facts of why we’d been abducted.

  ‘This is the deal,’ he said, his voice quiet but his words blunt. ‘We have to come up with one point six million dollars within three days, or they’ll hang us. It has to do with the fertiliser deal in Vladivostok.’

  For whatever reason, my initial reaction was not fear or shock. It was to remember Matthew Hurd’s threat when we sacked him, which I had so easily dismissed. Now, his seething words flooded back into my head: ‘I’m going to crucify you!’ At this point, I didn’t put two and two together about Grigory Miasnikov—whom I still wasn’t sure had not been kidnapped along with us. ‘That bastard Matthew!’ I spat out. ‘I’m sure he started this whole thing. If I could just see him now, I’d kill him!’

  I was allowed to say no more. The fat brother grabbed my arm roughly, forcibly took me from the room, and walked me up the staircase to another dimly lit cave of a room, an open lounge area with a silver-and-black patterned couch against the rear wall. As soon as I walked in, my eyes were captured by the outline of two figures seated at a matching couch across the room. Focusing on them, I recognised Grigory Miasnikov. Just as in the Mercedes, he sat next to that nauseating hulk Oleg. If Grigory was in any trouble, he certainly seemed not to be bothered. In fact, he seemed rather comfortable. After I was told to sit on the couch, Oleg began chattering in Russian at me. Grigory, as usual, translated, but spoke in such a wan voice that I could not hear him.

  ‘I can’t hear you!’ I barked impudently, it having now dawned on me that Grigory was no innocent bystander in this plot. Irrationally, my emotions now turned angry. And I wanted some answers. ‘Come and sit next to me,’ I said. He reluctantly got up, crossed the room, and sat down. ‘Grigory, did you know this was going to happen?’ I asked.

  Looking almost contrite, he uttered softly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you organise it?’

  ‘No.’

  Grigory was always a very cool customer who never let on too much of what he knew. But, now, I could tell he was lying through his teeth.

  Oleg apparently had heard enough of our chit-chat. He seemed to be thinking, ‘Who’s the captive here, anyway?’ It was a look that led me to wonder if perhaps the big-talking Miasnikov was in fact the brains of the operation or just a toady for this comic-book thug Oleg, who strode across the room and ripped my handbag out of my tight grip. He took the bag back with him to the other couch and spilled the contents. Finding a small plastic container with about a hundred dollars in American bills, he slipped it into his pocket, then dumped the rest back in the bag and threw it in my lap.

  He looked at me, his eyes burning, and motioned ‘get up,’ his lower lip snarling. I could tell that fiddling with my purse was just the prelude to something far more frightening. He directed me to an adjoining, smaller room. Having taken off my purple coat in the steamy heat that made the house seem like a furnace, I was wearing a white T-shirt, a pair of black sweatpants, and sneakers as I tread across the wood floor toward the small, unlit room. I had barely gotten through the doorway when I caught just a glimpse of Oleg raising an open hand—too late to avoid the stinging slap to one side of my face, then the other. I sank to the floor, my vision flickering, too stunned to cry out.

  Looking up, I saw Oleg gripping in his hands a thin wooden stick with nails embedded in it, apparently taken from the garbage pile of the construction work. He pulled me from the floor by my right elbow and swung the stick, which cracked against my thigh, then on the back of my other arm. Feeling those rusty nail heads dig into my flesh, I wailed loudly, only to feel his fist crashing hard into the pit of my stomach, knocking the wind out of me and sending me to the floor again, clutching my middle and writhing in searing pain.

  Trying to regain my breath and my senses, I could hear what sounded like Marusia’s voice bellowing from out in the hallway to Oleg to stop hitting me. Looking annoyed, he left me on the floor while he walked back into the larger room and turned up the volume on an old television set to drown out her cries. He then came back and slapped me around some more. All I could do was lie there, covering my head with my forearms, as his hand pounded my arms, shoulders, and back. When he at last stopped, he squeezed my arm and pulled me up to my feet, which were now bare, my shoes having co
me off while I was being dragged around. Oleg walked me out of the lounge and down the stairs, past the kitchen, until we came to a dirty crawlspace behind the kitchen where there was a trapdoor on the floor. He opened it to reveal a cellar—more like a pit—maybe six feet by six feet, which apparently was used as a food storage bin since an empty potato sack lay on the ground.

  ‘No! No! Not in there!’ I protested, but, not wanting to feel the crack of that stick, I climbed slowly down a tiny ladder and slithered into the hole. Oleg didn’t wait for me to get settled inside before slamming shut the trapdoor, which hit me on the forehead as I was turning my body around, leaving a bump that I could feel growing. It was black as tar inside there, and numbingly cold. Smaller than a jail cell, it was in every sense a rat hole, only far too inhumane for a rat to live in.

  The door opened a few minutes later. It was Marusia, who handed me my coat—that wonderful purple coat I had bought with Wendy Rayman, laughingly saying I’d need it to survive my first Russian winter. Now, I wrapped my freezing body in it and sat, my legs curled under me, in the dark. I looked at the luminescent dial of my wristwatch. It was 5pm.

  THE BABUSHKA’S NOOSE

  After five hours, the kidnapping part of the plot had worked without a hitch. Earlier, when the Weinstocks had arrived at the dacha, Grigory Miasnikov had taken care of a possible loose thread in Richard Markson, who had not known of the kidnapping plan yet had seen everything happen before his startled eyes from his Lada Niva. This could have been a monumental slip-up by Miasnikov—who could have told Markson to rest easy on this Sunday, that he would pick up the couple at the airport. Markson, though, was such a meddlesome brown-noser that Grigory couldn’t ditch the young man. Besides, Richard had picked up Yvonne and Danny in the past; they might have been skeptical if he wasn’t there today.