My heart turned cold. “He isn't? Did he leave already? He said he was visiting you.”
"No, I haven't seen him today." In the background, I heard the laughter of children. Mariya’s sometimes-boyfriend had two, a little girl and even younger boy. The sound carried through the handset, piercing the silence between Mariya and me. She sighed. “Alexi, you should know by now. Everything that comes out of that man’s mouth is horseshit. He’s probably at Vanya’s.”
The apologetic tone in her voice didn’t soften the knowledge that Vassily had lied to me. He’d never lied to me before like this, not about his whereabouts. “Thank you. I’ll check there.”
“Brothers. Oy.” She groaned before she hung up.
Vanya’s phone rang out. With numb fingers, I tried a second time, stabbing the pen into a sticky note pad that was soon full of dark pinpoint holes. After five rings, a blurry voice I didn’t immediately recognize picked up. “Whozat?”
“I want to speak with Vassily,” I said, tonelessly.
There was a pause. “Who wants to know?”
When the speaker shifted from flippancy to suspicion, I was able to place the name to the voice. It was Mikhail, Lev’s bodyguard. The one who had been at the scene with Nacari. “Mikhail, it’s Alexi. You need to put Vassily on the phone.”
“Oh, uh... hey, Molotchik. Fuck, man, he’s, uh… he’s still lying down,” Mikhail slurred. “Yeah. In his room.”
I could practically smell the alcohol on the other man’s breath over the phone, and my lip curled in disgust. Drunk. Vassily would be drunk, too. “Throw some ice on him. I’ll be there in twenty minutes to pick him up.”
“Whoa, hang on, man. You might want to give him a whi—”
I slammed the receiver down and whirled up from the chair on my heel, storming off through the house to collect a bucket, and Vassily’s best interview suit.
My dreams, invaded by the ghosts of the past. My home, invaded by a demon. And now, my best friend, lying to me. I wanted to kill something, but there was nothing to kill except Vassily... and I had a sneaking suspicion that he was already well on the road to killing himself.
Chapter 13
Vanya’s house wasn’t Vanya’s actual residence, the split-level with his wife and children and Great Dane. When the muzhiki of the Organization said they were going to Vanya’s, they meant the Coney Island penthouse with the wraparound windows, fully stocked bar, and generously proportioned callgirls.
I was so angry I was running a fever. A few seconds after I banged on the door, I heard a shuffling, lurching rustle from inside. An unfamiliar blonde woman answered, dressed in nothing but one of Vanya’s enormous striped business shirts. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She had dried flakes of lipstick stuck to her lips. “Allo?”
“They’re expecting me.” The woman’s shirt was open. I looked down sharply, staring at her vivid pink toenails. “Here to pick up Vassily.”
She laughed a shrill laugh that was the same color as her nail polish and let me pass. “Vasyl? Vasyl is no good, my friend. He bombed it out.”
I ground my teeth on the way past, scoping the room. Every single light in the house was on, the TV was on but tuned to a dead channel, the screen humming and blank. The fancy granite breakfast counter was cluttered with bottles, cigarette butts, and empty takeout containers. Mikhail lay face-down on the white leather sofa in his briefs. He still had the cordless phone in his hand, and peered up at me as I went by. "Sh'Lexi! You wan' Vvvasya? He’s, he’s…”
That was as far as he got before he had to lie back down and think about it some more. Fortunately, I already knew where Vassily would be.
The guest bedroom, like the rest of Vanya’s house, was a study in Orientalist fetishism, with rice paper screens and fake silk and geisha dolls. Vanya was an Eric Lustbader fan, and despite being a racist slob, he had a thing for Japanese decor. His house was a temple to mafiya excess, wealth he gained through managing AEROMOR on Sergei’s behalf. The guest bedroom was usually clean, in a sleazy, tasteless sort of way, but I was aghast to find it close and dank. Bags of trash were piled next to a dusty paper screen. The bed was unmade, empty whiskey bottles and beer cans scattered next to the dresser. The red silk sheets were dark with sweat.
The en suite door was open and occupied. I turned into the doorway and stopped, lips pressed together in a bloodless line as my gaze flicked from one point to the next. Vassily, naked and half-sprawled over the edge of the bathtub. A half-finished bottle of pepper horilka spilled beside him. A razor, powder residue, and an empty cellophane twist left on the lid of the toilet.
My stomach twisted in a very unpleasant way at the sour smell of vomit and alcohol. My hands ached, fingertips burning against the leather pads. I went over and nudged Vassily with a toe. A thin groan peeled from his lips, and the corners of my eyes began to tic.
“You idiot.” I hauled Vassily’s head back by the hair, pulled my glove off and jammed my fingers in against his pulse. He was alive, at least, but his heartbeat was thready and quick. “You goddamn idiot. Where the fuck did you get coke? Why the fuck are you doing coke?!”
“Lekshiii?” Vassily looked right through me. His nose was bloody, his eyes huge in a very pale, very sweaty face.
“Yes. Lexi, you insufferable, lying moron.” My voice rose in anger. I should have been gentle, but I couldn’t bring myself to baby him. I hauled Vassily back by his underarms and propped him against the side of the spa tub, fighting down the very real urge to kick him in the teeth. Instead, I pulled the glove back on and started the water to wash away the mess in the tub. “Ka'kovo 'hooya? What the fuck do you think you’re doing?! What’ll Mariya say to this? Don’t think I won’t tell her.”
Vassily cringed away from my voice. He tried to reply, but as the words formed, so did the next round of spew. I clapped a hand on his skull and turned his head just in time, pointing his mouth at the porcelain so he puked violently into Vanya’s fancy hot tub.
Between the noise and the smell and the fatigue from the night before, I was going to go off like an atom bomb. I left him to purge and stalked back out into the bedroom, looking for something to keep me busy besides homicide, anything to take the edge off the boiling, seething anger. I ended up stripping the bedsheets, taking the trash out into the kitchen, and putting the room in order, cleaning until the retching stopped. Only then did I go back inside the bathroom. Vassily was lying on his side on the floor, back turned towards me. I could see the fragile, serrated line of his spine, the play of muscles under the huge cross tattoo on his back.
In the doorway, I paused for a moment and sighed.
I mopped Vassily’s face and hands before I eased him over my lap, cradling his cold weight in my arms. It was the first time I’d seen him undressed since he’d gotten out of prison, and now that there was time to look, I noticed things I hadn’t had time to see before. He had a shank scar on his forearm: that was new. He was thinner, his ribs visible through his skin. His nails were cracked. The sight of his toenails, ridged from years of poor nutrition and high stress, brought me back to myself. I looked down the tattooed length of Vassily’s body and then back to his face. He was rousing slowly, gaze wandering as he swam back to consciousness. Eventually, he fixed on my face. His eyes were as bright as black stars, and the expression of intoxicated longing in them made my mouth feel full and blue and bittersweet.
“Moron,” I rumbled. “Can you sit up?”
“Sure. Maybe.” Vassily rasped.
I eventually got him upright and, with some flailing arms and careful bracing, limped over with him to the bed. We had shared a double bed as young boys, but it was odd climbing in beside him as an adult. I was still furious and desperately needed sleep, and because I couldn’t sleep, I wanted to beat the shit out of something. But I couldn’t do that, either.
It was close to an hour before Vassily stirred again. I hadn’t realized I was dozing until his arm groped over my chest, startling me out of a frustrated, dizzy reverie.
My eyes didn’t want to open. When they did, I glared at the rows of paper lamps overhead. They were gaudy and pointless. “What?”
“Sorry.” Vassily patted me awkwardly. Chest, belly, arm. “You’re... good friend. Good. Sorry.”
“If you keep touching me like that, I will break your fingers.”
“Sorry. Was real worried, you know. When you… gone. Sh’ I knew... Lekshi’s real good. Real tough. Sorry.”
I wasn’t certain what Vassily was apologizing for, but it didn’t sound like he was apologizing for the right thing. I frowned. “You listen to me, because I’m only going to say it once. I spent nearly half my childhood dealing with this sort of shit, and I’m not going to put up with it with you.”
“Put up? With what, Lekshi?”
“This bullshit. Your addiction.” I sat up and turned so he couldn’t see my face. “You’re going to clean yourself up.”
“Hey, hey. What? I’m not... not…”
“No. That’s not how this works. I know it’s not how it works. And if you don’t get clean, that’s it. You’re moving out. I won’t have this in my house.”
My words hung in another protracted period of silence. When Vassily spoke again, his voice cracked. “That’s fucked. You’d break off with me because... ‘cause I went on a bender?”
I knew what cocaine did to people. I’d never used, never dreamed of using, but I’d seen enough people use it like this to know what happened afterward. The gibbering and gabbering, the violence, the superman complex, the burnout. “After your lecturing of me last night?” My voice felt cold in my own throat. “I watched my father destroy my mother and himself with this kind of behavior. Thanks to you, I just had to relive every day I spent cleaning up after them. If you want to kill yourself, fine. But I won’t hold your hand while you jump.”
Vassily lay on his pile of pillows, stunned. “You’d kill me?”
“I didn’t say that,” I replied. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“Yeah...” He looked up past his arm at the ceiling. “Yeah. I guess.”
“And in unrelated news, you have a parole meeting in—” I checked my watch. “Fifty minutes.”
“Parole?” Vassily’s eyes narrowed, then widened like blue saucers. “Oh, fuck. FUCK! Shitfuckmothershit.”
“Yes. And you’re going. I brought your suit. So come on, get up.”
As I pulled away from the bed, a wiry hand clapped around my wrist and stopped me in my tracks. Vassily’s right hand, the one with the intricately inked skull. A snake’s tail wove through it, part of a design that wound its way up his arm to his bare shoulder.
“Lexi... don’t kick me out.” His voice was higher than what I was used to hearing, fragile and desperate. “Please. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again, all right?”
How many times had I heard it? The pleading, the ‘it won’t happen again’? Grigori always said the same thing. The last bender was always the last. Then came the storm clouds, the bad mood, the stressful day, and the bottles returned to the house.
“Sure thing.” Heavily, I reached back and clasped Vassily’s hand before peeling it from my arm. “Come on now, get up. It’s time we got back to the real world.”
*
We were nearly fifteen minutes late to the parole center. Every light on our route turned red before we reached the line, and by the time I’d dropped Vassily off at the office, surly but functionally sober, I wanted to kill something. My car smelled like vomit and pepper-flavored liquor. I wanted to take my fist to every jaywalking pedestrian, every yappy dog, and every shrieking toddler. I was stranded at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy, unable to get a day—just one day—to rest.
The whole mess of circumstance contracted around me, a tight sheath of stress. Yuri, Carmine, my aching knee, the bruises and cuts from the night before—wholly unnoticed by my supposed best friend—the dreams and sense of impeding sickness. I parked on the side of the road and just fought to breathe, hands shaking. This was bullshit. Absolute bullshit. I wasn’t supposed to feel like this. I was a hard man, a spook. And I was struggling with nothing. The oppressive stickiness of the air, the tackiness of my own skin. Nothing.
But a whole lot of nothing makes a something, a small voice said. It makes a NOthing.
Vassily had done a lot of stupid shit in his life, but not drugs. He modeled his father religiously. Simon Lovenko had been everything my father was not, to hear Mariya tell it; a real Vor v Zakone, a handsome ringmaster steeped in thief’s honor and gypsy romanticism. He’d sworn himself clean his whole life, and Vassily had followed in his footsteps… until now. It had been one of the things we’d kept to together as teens, as young adults. We sold drugs; we didn’t take them. We were smarter than that.
What had happened to him in prison? What had they done to him?
Deliriously, I stepped out from the car onto the sweltering pavement. I was back on the Ave under the rail bridge. It was the end of the lunch hour rush, and Brighton Beach Avenue was a packed ambulating gallery of the soon-to-be-former USSR. The cacophony was almost too much to stand, but I had to eat. I had enough energy to either cook or start thinking and looking for Vincent. The former was the more optional option.
But where to even start? I knew how to find people, but missing persons leads weren’t really my specialty. If I’d wanted to train as a detective, I’d have sold my soul to the mussora, the Vigiles Magicarum, for a badge. The only place I’d known to look for sure was Vincent’s house, and I hadn’t been able to find much there. It was a no-go zone now. The Laguettas probably knew his hangouts, but asking around too much about someone like Vincent was dangerous. The Mexican cartels wanted him. Manelli wanted him. Also, asking the wrong people—people who didn’t know he was missing—would cost Lev face. It wasn’t a good idea to cause your Avtoritet a loss of face. All I had after that was Jana, and maybe Yuri’s friends. Of the two options, I preferred dealing with Jana.
That wasn’t much, but it was something. I decided I’d deal with it at home: sleep, food, shower, not necessarily in that order, and then a call in to Jana. It was almost a plan, but I still had the nagging sense that I was forgetting something. Something about Monday night, tonight.
I avoided Mariya’s, even though I’d normally go there for lunch. I couldn’t face her. Instead, I walked half a block to M & I, the neighborhood’s old workhorse deli. I slunk in through the sliding doors and went for the self-serve window, where I numbly scooped chicken katleti and salad into a plastic dish. Kutkha was a distant presence, masked by a smokescreen of fatigue and self-pity. 'True Magus' my ass.
“Alexi!” A familiar smiling face with a braided corona of neat blonde hair loomed up in the corner of my bleary eye.
I nearly threw the dish and the ladle at the wall. I flinched and slammed the food down on the counter instead. “Bozhe, Jana. Oh. Good morning. Afternoon, I mean.”
All faces briefly turned to look before they were once again downcast.
Jana’s hand went to her mouth. She was made up and dressed for work, perfectly crisp in the muggy heat. There was not a single blemish on her spotless white blouse. "Sorry. I just saw you, and thought…”
“No. It’s fine.” It was in that moment I remembered that I hadn’t shaved in two days. I probably reeked of vomit and certainly smelled of old fear, sweat, and violence. “In fact, I was about to go home and give you a call.”
“You were?” she said. “That’s funny. I was just getting lunch, and then I was going to call you and ask you how things were going.”
If Kutkha was right and the universe was a living creature, then it was a merciless sadist with a bad sense of humor. I turned back to the double boiler and resumed dishing up, unable to stop the flush that crept across my cheeks and down my collar. “How serendipitous. I didn’t know you came up this way for lunch.”
“Mmhmm.” Her mouth quirked ruefully, and she took a container herself. “My usual place closed for the da
y. The son of the manager died.”
“No one escapes life alive,” I replied. It felt dull and sour coming out of my mouth, and I fumbled with the lid as I boxed up the dish. “No... I apologize. For that. I shouldn’t say such a thing.”
“No, it’s fine. I didn’t know him–know him, you know?” Her whole body flooded with a smile that I caught when I glanced sidelong at her. “But yes… about that call. I have something I need to talk to you about in private. Do you have time to visit my house?”
Her house? My shoulders stiffened. “No, no. Not today, sorry. But we could go down to the boardwalk. No one will hear.”
“Well, as in, I heard something around the office, and it needs to be somewhere really private.” The smile fixed on her face like a mask. “What about your place?”
My place was a pigsty, post-Yuri. Under the best of circumstances, having a strange woman in my apartment was barely more comfortable than being in the apartment of a strange woman. I glanced furtively at the cashier. “There’s another deli near here where I have access to the back. We can go there and talk.”
“I don’t know, Alexi.” Jana ducked her head a little, and before I could stop her, she reached out and touched my bare forearm with light fingers. Her eyes widened, as surprised as I was by the brief contact, and her hand flew back like she’d been burned. Just as well. “It, um, it involves Lev. But I guess it can wait.”
“Yes. In that case, it should wait.” Feeling increasingly guarded and paranoid, I took a step back from her. If it involved Lev and my investigation, then it couldn’t wait at all. “Look, the boardwalk will be busy, but no one will be listening. As long as we’re moving in a crowd, it’s the safest place for us to be. Even if someone I know sees us there, it’s easily explained. You are clearly an attractive woman.”
“All right, well, that works. Here, I’ll pick that up for you.” She blushed. This poised, confident attorney suddenly looked as shy and awkward as I felt, fumbling her purse a little as she bumped into me again. She slapped a ten down on the cash plate in front of the buxom cashier, who was watching the pair of us as judgmentally as only an old Russian woman could. I grimaced at her, bundled my cheap food, and snatched up the change before I followed Jana’s swishing skirt out the door.
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