Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  But it didn’t happen. Instead, Oleg, while squeezing my ear, began yelling, ‘Money! Money!’

  Desperately, I repeated what I had said downstairs: ‘We have no money. We have no secret bank accounts in Hong Kong.’

  I reached for my handbag and pulled out the chequebook for that account, with the account number of our personal bank account in Hong Kong.

  ‘This is our personal bank account,’ I said. ‘It has ten dollars in it. You can check it yourself.’

  Believing I was trying to con him, Oleg erupted in deranged laughter. Then, with the blade turned sideways, he brought the knife up over my head and bashed me hard with it on the top of my skull. It stung like a massive hornet bite, and a bump rose from my scalp. I let out another wail, but when my eyes cleared and I looked for Oleg, he was gone, and I was alone with one of his blackhearts, a tall, particularly nasty one they called Sascha.

  This man seemed to live in the same outfit, a brown, double-breasted, pin-striped suit he must have thought made him look like a gangster, and from what I could tell, he had no idea what was a shave or a bath. A permanent smirk creased his grizzled face like a disfiguring scar. Appropriately, since Oleg treated him like sludge, he was only too eager to do the gang’s dirtiest jobs.

  It was this germ-ridden attack dog who had come into the bedroom the night before and made me so uncomfortable. That, however, was only act one. Apparently, Oleg had let him off the leash now for act two.

  As I sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my hand over my pounding head, Sascha—’the Snake,’ as we would take to calling him for his creepy, sleazy, night-crawling ways—slithered to the bed and grinned, oozing what I supposed he meant to be sexuality; instead, it was just snake oil. He began to rub my shoulders, his sausage-like fingers digging deeply into my shoulder blades. I inched away, but with an abrupt push, he had me lying spread-eagle on the bed, then he mounted me. He began thrusting his hips between my legs while pinning my upper body. However, I was more worried about the gun in his belt, which I could feel pressing against my hip bone.

  Reflexively, my voice cried out, ‘Danny! Danny!’ And while I knew he could hear me downstairs, I also knew there’d be nothing he could do. There was nothing I could do, either. This was to be the rape I had been expecting, dreading, unsuccessfully trying to push out of my mind.

  Or would it? By chance, it struck me that I had seen a plumpish woman in the house called Masha. Hoping with all my might that she was this animal’s wife, I screamed, ‘Masha! Masha!’

  Amazingly, it worked. As soon as the name flew out, so did Sascha. Immediately, he lifted himself off of me before he could do any harm and scampered out of the room before Masha could see what he was doing.

  Again, had the situation not been so grim, it might have been amusing that a wannabe gangster who carried a gun and would likely kill on the order of Oleg became a shivering lamb at the mention of his wife’s name. Rather than laugh, I breathed yet another deep sigh of relief. Thank God, I told myself.

  As shaken as I was, I was pleased I had gotten the better of the Snake. It was another small victory. But, as with all of the small victories I’d had so far, it was plenty good enough for now.

  A DEAD TURKEY

  Downstairs, Danny won a small victory of his own when the interrogation ended and he was escorted back to the bedroom to be reunited with Yvonne. For the rest of that Tuesday, Yvonne and he were left undisturbed. By the luck of the calendar, they had caught a break.

  As it happened, the next day was the start of the Russian new year. Oleg and Grigory had family matters to tend. Meanwhile, the babushka and the other women would be using the kitchen all day, cooking what would be sumptuous meals for the next day when even more people would be coming to the dacha.

  Yvonne and Danny had seen how serious the brood was about their holiday meals by the gargantuan, mule-size turkey that lay dead on the floor outside the kitchen by the cellar. In the early evening, the babushka and Marusia would begin plucking and preparing the bird, and that process clearly trumped interrogating the two imprisoned Australians, even on Oleg’s list of priorities.

  By mid-afternoon, Grigory had gone home to his wife and children, meaning no one could have translated anyway. Upstairs, Sascha and a few other goons—family members all, Yvonne and Danny had concluded—draped themselves in front of the television in the lounge, drinking vodka and making the usual noise and periodic checks on the Weinstocks in the bedroom.

  For a time, they even invited the couple in to watch with them, though Yvonne and Danny could understand little of what they were seeing. Russian New Year or not, though, their respite would be brief. Oleg and Grigory simply could not let the kidnapping stretch any longer than necessary.

  The wheels had to start turning on the ransom. The interrogations would resume soon enough. When they would, the Weinstocks knew this: They had better be able to come up with better answers.

  10

  DAY THREE:

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8th,

  THE DACHA AND MOSCOW

  It was much harder for me to sleep than Danny. While he had a way of shutting things out and drifting off, my eyes refused to close. Any noise close to the room, car horns from the street, and every clang of the front gate would cause my head to jump from the pillow. Whenever I was in the room for long hours, I would hear a train running on nearby tracks. A railway station being just up the block from the house, I would pass time playing a little game, counting the minutes until I would hear the whistle blow and the train screech to a stop.

  As best I could tell, the train came through no less than five times a day. I would think, God, what I would give to have a seat on that train right now. I even imagined it was the Orient Express, that I was on it, staring out of the window as the train chugged along the banks of the Blue Danube.

  Though not nearly as picturesque, the scenery outside the window of the bedroom offered more escapism—even though there was not a chance of escape. The window was tiny, two feet by two feet, and covered by iron bars on the outside. It was low to the floor, and I found myself spending a good bit of time on my knees, my nose pressed to the glass, staring at the snow-blanketed street below. People would be trudging through the snow to the station. Small children romped on sleds. Old women carried bundles of groceries. Sometimes I would open the window an inch or two, so I could breathe the cold, fresh air.

  Just like inside the dacha, life went on all around us on the outside. Many people walking in the street were aware we were being held. I would notice certain people regularly replace others in the same spot, as though they were taking shifts as sentries, watching up and down the block. I could only theorise that nearly everyone in the neighborhood was being paid off by Oleg to keep quiet about strange things they may see going on at the house. What those things were, I didn’t really want to know.

  Trapped within the depressing confines of the house, I had been able to survey much of the two floors that were our world. The dacha itself sat in a streetscape of cookie-cutter houses straight from Fiddler on the Roof, with their broken picket fences and baying dogs. The exterior had some sort of brick extension marked by irregular design patterns and blobby cement bubbles in the brickwork. Everything was in a state of unfinished renovation. Piles of wood were strewn all over, and there were sheds stacked with building materials.

  Inside the house, tackiness collided with out-of-place luxury. In different rooms, there were no less than six sofas upholstered in horribly gaudy velvet or leather. The main lounge next to our bedroom had an expensive television and video equipment that few Russians could have afforded without some connection to the Mob or the black market. There were six or more bedrooms, which I came to identify by the color of the brocade cloth that fully lined each one. Oleg’s bedroom, one of four on the second floor, was pink; ours was the ‘orange room,’ with the brocade covering everything including the light switch, which we had to feel around in the dark to find.

  None of the rooms, even t
he purple-wallpapered bathroom, had a door. All had hanging pieces of cloth over the archway, possibly because the doors had been removed during the renovations, or because Oleg was paranoid about not being able to know what was going on at all times in every room. The ceilings in the entire house were so cheaply plastered that some were buckling. The banisters on the stairway and around the upstairs landing were patched with unfinished planks of pine. All the workmanship was uneven, unprofessional, and lopsided. Pieces of wood had to be nailed across the corners to keep the walls from collapsing. The underground heating system would get too hot and shut down for hours at a time.

  We were also becoming more familiar with the gallery of knaves populating the house. Oleg’s teenage daughter, Nella, liked to pad barefoot around the halls and would bound into our room uninvited. If she knew about the beatings and why we were there, it didn’t bother her. All she cared about was that she was studying English in school and could practice speaking with us. We were a great novelty for her. Yet, for all her apparent disconnect with reality—and with any sense of personal hygiene—she made me think of my own daughters. Melanie had never gone a day without hearing my voice, even when I was on a business trip. She would be upset back home, along with everyone else, since no one had heard from us in over two days. And every time I saw Nella, I became terribly despondent, because it put the same thought in my head: Was I ever going to see my beautiful children again?

  RICHARD MARKSON’S EXILE

  Back in the summer heat of Brighton, the Weinstocks’ two-year-old daughter, Melanie, wanted to talk to her mother, so Susan, the housekeeper, tried to call Yvonne on Tuesday night.

  Getting a call through to Moscow was never easy. The phone system in Russia was archaic. Making direct-dial calls out of the country, once prohibited under the Communists, was still nearly impossible since the phones in use were twenty years behind technological times; cordless phones and fax machines seemed like science-fiction gadgets. Normally, one making an outbound call had to pre-schedule it with an operator; sometimes a call couldn’t be made for days or even a week.

  Even though Matthew Hurd had installed a fax machine in the SovAustralTechnicka office on Chekhova Street, the Weinstocks were not often at the office.

  With Melanie crying for her mother, Susan called the number Yvonne had left her in case of emergencies. That number belonged to Richard Markson.

  ‘Richard? It’s Susan here,’ she said when he picked up the phone. Markson, of course, had been ordered by Miasnikov to stay put in his apartment until further notice after witnessing the Weinstocks’ abduction. He was still baffled by what he had witnessed on the morning of January 6th, and he may not have realised just how much of a worry he was to Grigory. Richard was the only person who could blow the lid off the entire plot. But while he was hardly the quickest thinker in the world, Richard knew enough to deflect Susan.

  ‘Oh,’ he said steadily, ‘you’re after Yvonne and Danny?’

  ‘Yes. How are they?’

  ‘Fine. Unfortunately, Danny forgot to pass on their number. Sorry, can’t help you there.’

  Susan would try Markson again over the next week, only to be fed the same line or hear an endlessly ringing phone. Oh well, she thought, we’ll just have to wait until they call us. The phones in Russia must be useless. Or maybe they’re very busy right now.

  Richard, meanwhile, could take the sight of the same four walls only so long. After five days, he figured he could safely venture outside. He walked down a side street, had the uncomfortable feeling he was being followed, looked around, and saw two men in black overcoats coming up fast behind him. He tried to walk faster, but was jumped by the men, who knocked him off his feet and pummeled him with their fists. ‘Stay home,’ he was told, ‘and if you say one word about the Weinstocks, we’ll kill you and your parents in Australia.’

  Markson stumbled back to his apartment, no doubt realising in exactly how much danger he was. He ran up the stairs, shut the door behind him, and bolted it. He had no intention of going out for another walkabout any time soon.

  A few days thereafter, he would creep out again, but this time he raced to the airport and waited there until he could catch a flight to Australia. There, he would say nothing about the kidnapping or the threats against him and his family. Mostly, he stayed home, dreading that he would hear or read in the media that the Weinstocks had been abducted, even killed. In that case, he resolved, he would plead ignorance.

  On Wednesday, Christmas Day in Russia, Oleg must have felt big-hearted. Either that or he was cowed by the women who wanted Danny and me to come to the dining room table for the early afternoon holiday meal. Oleg petulantly did not join the feast. Instead, he sat out of sight in the kitchen with the babushka, surely as depressing a twosome as ever existed.

  The dining table was a cornucopia of food. Silver fruit bowls were stocked with oranges and apples. There were platters of bright red tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, black and red caviar. And, for a change, fresh bread, both white and black. Platters lined the table with smoked salmon, cracked wheat, and large slabs of butter.

  People were everywhere: men, women, and children in a great cacophony of glasses tinkling, forks being scraped against dishes, kids laughing and crying, and no one shutting his or her mouth for a minute. Masha and another woman named Natasha spooned out portions of food for the children, including Nella and her three-year-old brother, a bratty boy named Piotr. Marusia, whom we knew now to be the wife of one of the thugs named Boris, endlessly shuffled from the kitchen and came back bearing mountainous quantities of food.

  When Danny and I seated ourselves in the middle of this mad scene, no one looked up. Grunting like animals at feeding time, everyone shoveled all the food they could into their mouths, belching heartily all the while. Boris was at the head of the table, and when Marusia brought out that enormous turkey we’d seen on the floor the night before, he made a big fuss, apparently about there not being a sufficiently large carving knife on the table. One of the other men went into the kitchen and came back with one—the very same machete-sized knife Oleg had menaced me with the day before. When the goon came close to the table, I flinched.

  Being the guests of honour of the ‘Addams Family,’ did not put me in a festive mood. At one point, they all began taking turns lifting their glasses and toasting us ostentatiously and loudly in Russian. Were they aggrandising us? Or were they actually toasting not to our health but to our deaths? Did they just assume they would be taking out our carcasses along with that of the turkey?

  With all of this in mind, I had no trace of an appetite and only nibbled at some turkey. As it was, I had already lost at least five kilos during the two days here, and I could hardly recognise my gaunt face in the bathroom mirror. Danny, by contrast, had no problem stuffing himself along with the others. He had always been that way, able to keep his senses functioning normally, even in times of great stress.

  I, on the other hand, wanted only to numb my senses. For now, that was my escape, and the vodka bottles on the table were my means of doing just that. By Russian tradition, one must completely drain a glass on every toast. I must have emptied five shot glasses of vodka into my gut. Little wonder I don’t recall much else about that meal.

  I was light-headed when we were returned to the upstairs bedroom, yet even all that vodka did not make me sleepy. My nerve endings were still standing straight up. It may have been Christmas in Mother Russia, but Oleg and his men were not Santa’s elves. Always, I expected someone to come out of the shadows and beat us again. I could not avoid the thought that we were living on borrowed time. Oleg hadn’t received the hard information he wanted as to how to get the money. The clock was ticking.

  For Oleg, the feast could not have ended soon enough. When the table had been cleared, the dishes washed, and the women and children gone off to other places in the house, it was time for business again—only now there were some new faces with whom we had to contend.

  At about 4pm, Danny was ta
ken back downstairs to the dining room. I again stood quietly just inside the open archway of the bedroom, listening to what was said. I heard Oleg, but also two voices I didn’t recognise: one, a man speaking in Russian; the other, a man who sounded like a proper British gentleman who translated questions Oleg and the other guy peppered Danny with about making phone calls to our ‘rich relatives’ overseas.

  Danny went through the same drill as the day before, offering nothing new. At one point, he said to the translator, ‘They have threatened to kill us if we do not pay this money,’ he said. ‘Is this true?’ Oleg, who apparently could understand more English than he let on, furnished the answer.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘is true.’

  I imagined by then that the translator knew this already. In fact, something about him made me very curious and very worried. His English was so perfect, his voice so honey-dipped, his manner so civilised, that I could only think: KGB. From what I’d been told by Grigory, Russians who spoke in a bell-clear, British-sounding accent were more than likely or had been KGB agents. Many of them, the sons of wealthy Russians, had been sent to school in England, the brightest of them to Oxford or Cambridge. When they returned to Russia, they became prime targets of KGB recruiters, for their high intelligence and worldliness.

  Grigory, of course, had spent some years in England as a young man, and he too had a tinge of that accent—though this man seemed far more urbane and sophisticated.

  Could these new men, and especially Robert—or whatever his real name was—have been linked to Oleg by Grigory, and was Grigory their boss, or was it the other way around? Were these guys the real string-pullers? Were Oleg and even Grigory just toadies? If Robert was in fact ex-KGB, the circle of plotters had expanded beyond a band of half-crazed gypsies. We might be in the hands of people who had a PhD in torture, people who could eliminate us and not leave as much as a speck of dust behind as evidence. Would their injection into the plot be good or bad for us, or was that ‘choice’ merely the difference between being torn apart by Oleg’s dogs or silently, quietly poisoned? Either way, it wasn’t getting any easier on my nerves.