The man, already terrified, lost even more color. “Vasilly. Vasilly is real?”
Maxim smiled and nodded.
“I’ll call Roman’s man tomorrow.”
“I thought you would,” Maxim said. “But there’s just one little problem.” The room fell silent as Maxim turned towards Ned, who had been doing nothing but standing and watching since the boy collapsed out of his grasp. “Our new associate . . . no, our friend . . . he is our friend,” Maxim said with what Ned thought was implied warmness. “He is new and we need to know we can trust him. So . . . how do I put this delicately? . . . he’s going to have to hurt either your son or your wife.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Choose.”
“Do it to me.”
Maxim made a disappointed noise with his tongue and teeth. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. It would be pointless. Choose between the two. Or maybe we should involve Sarah?”
The father didn’t hesitate. He looked down and said, “My wife.”
The woman screamed and tried to run, but Artur caught her. He pinned her arms behind her back. Maxim sidled over, his gun still aimed at the father’s face. He handed Ned his knife. The woman looked at Ned, staring deeply into his eyes. The look on her face was of pure hatred. It was clear she expected no mercy.
Maxim broke the silence. “Stick it in her nose. Farther,” he said dispassionately. “Now pull.”
Ned did exactly as he was instructed. The woman doubled over and then fell to the floor, holding her gushing nose and emitting a shocking scream. Weathers rushed over to her with a towel and held it to her face. She slapped him and crawled away, pressing the towel to her nose.
Ned looked up at Maxim. He could tell his own mouth was open, but could not shut it. “There!” Maxim said, patting Ned on the back. “Now we go.”
Back in the Lincoln, Artur and Maxim were chattering happily to each other and Ned in Russian and English. Eventually, Artur broke the revelry. “Now we can go to the Frying Pan,” he said jubilantly. “Except you have to change your shirt.”
Ned looked down to the right side of his chest. The blood stains on his shirt were already turning dark brown on the white-and-blue pattern. It was only then when he realized that the cold, almost damp feeling of shock was still over him. “Don’t worry,” Artur said, before Ned could collect himself. “We can take you to Maxim’s.”
Maxim cut him short. “Uh uh, my wife sees him, she’ll start asking questions and make me stay home with her—and I want to go to the Frying Pan.”
Artur laughed and grabbed his cell phone. He hit a contact and then started talking in Russian, it sounded like he was negotiating in a jolly way. “Okay, we’re going to Sergei’s,” he said to Maxim, then he looked at Ned. “Too bad for you, though. Sergei won’t have anything nice for you to wear.” Then he gave the driver some directions in Russian.
They arrived not long after at a modest house in Queens. Ned saw some cars out front, but none he recognized. He was led in by Artur and Maxim, and the trio was greeted by a fat man Ned remembered from Café Whatever. They were led into a predictably garish living room and given vodkas. There were already four men present, and Ned was relieved to see that Semyon was among them. Although Semyon suddenly became very quiet and looked nervous when he saw Ned’s face.
Artur began to recount the night’s activities excitedly in Russian, re-enacting some of the more violent parts. Ned shuddered (he hoped imperceptibly) when Artur got to the part about him slicing through the woman’s nose. At that point, Semyon rose from his chair, grinned proudly and put his arm around Ned. He made a loud pronouncement in Russian, and everybody except Ned laughed affably. Ned quietly asked Semyon if he could talk with him alone. Semyon reluctantly agreed.
“I can’t go to the Frying Pan.”
“Why not? Petra will be there.”
“I know, I know, I’m just too freaked out.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you hear? We just came back from torturing an innocent family?”
“Innocent? That man was innocent just because he is white American like you?”
“Well, his wife and son aren’t gangsters.”
Semyon shook his head. “That is no matter of ours.”
“What about those people? They saw our faces. I think Maxim even called Artur by name once.”
Semyon laughed. “These are not the kind of people who will call the police,” he said. “And did Maxim mention Vasilly?”
Ned was shocked. “Yeah, yeah he did.”
Semyon sighed. “There will be no trouble.”
Ned put on a look he hoped Semyon would find significant. “Why?” he asked. “You’re going to have to tell me why Vasilly holds such power over people.”
“Another time,” he said smiling. “But now, we party. You don’t want them to think you aren’t man enough to party, do you?”
“No.”
Chapter Nine
Ned’s eyes popped open with what he thought was an audible crack. Moving his dry eyelids over his eyes literally hurt, almost as much as the sunlight pouring in through the window. He started to get up to close the blinds, but came crashing back down. His head felt like it weighed a ton. It hurt to move anything, but when he moved his head, he felt a nauseous jolt in his gut.
Flat on his back, he rotated his head painfully left and then excruciatingly right. He was alone in a moderately sized bedroom, decorated in what he had come to recognize as the standard Russian style of warring patterns and over-vibrant solids. The door to the room was closed, as was the closet, but another was open. When he saw a toilet inside, he felt a wave of relief cross his body. Summoning all his strength, he ran for it.
He emerged about a half hour later feeling about twenty pounds lighter, but only very slightly relieved. He was walking stooped over with tiny, shuffling steps like a very old man. He made for the door and down the stairs. He recognized it as Sergei’s house. He could hear talking from the kitchen.
When he entered, there was a loud whoop of approval from the three men sitting at the kitchen table. The pain that rushed through Ned’s head was so immediate and intense, it was all he could do not to vomit right where he was standing.
Semyon must have realized that because, with a dramatic and condescending “awwww,” he helped Ned to a chair. The Russians laughed. “There is only one cure,” he said amiably and handed Ned a shot of vodka.
It was all he could do to get the vodka down, but once the burning, sick sensation went away, Ned had to admit he was already feeling a bit better. When he finally got up the energy to talk, he croaked, “What was that shit I was drinking last night?”
All the men laughed. “Cherry vodka,” Semyon finally said. “It’s an old Russian tradition. They fill a big vat with cherries or some other fruit (mangoes are also nice), fill it to top with vodka, then let it sit. After a while, the drink comes out red, tastes just like juice or soda, only better. It is very, very easy to get extremely drunk on it as it seems like you aren’t drinking at all, until you try to stand up. I should have warned you—the hangovers can be absolutely brutal.”
Ned shot him a dirty look that was so exaggerated that he hoped Semyon understood he meant it in a friendly way.
Sergei laughed. “It looked like he had a very good time with Nicky.” Semyon was quick to agree, and gave Ned a playful cuff to the arm.
“Who’s Nicky?” Ned asked. “I thought I was with Petra.”
“You were with Petra,” Sergei laughed. “But you did or said something I didn’t catch, and she got very angry and called you ‘a dirty drunk.’ ”
“Oh, yeah?” Ned said. “Then she left?”
“Not right away,” Semyon added. “But after you said ‘shut up, whore—go back to Moldova,’ she did.” He and Sergei laughed. Ned didn’t remember a second of it. “We thought it was funny because she is very proud of being from Odessa. What an insult. I don’t know how you do it.”
“And Nicky?”
<
br /> “Nikita, she is another model, also from Odessa,” Sergei said. “She has always hated Petra, so when you insulted her, you immediately became Nicky’s very good friend.”
They all laughed, even Ned, who decided that the vodka-to-kill-a-hangover theory had significant merit. “But you of all people should know this,” Semyon added. “You spent almost an hour in the ladies’ room with her.”
Ned was shocked at that news, but didn’t want to sound like he didn’t remember what happened, so he just nodded, and, when he thought of it, said, “We didn’t talk much.” Hoots of congratulation followed, and at least two guys patted Ned on the back.
Back in the SUV and headed towards Delaware, Ned realized not only that his hangover was fast disappearing, but that Semyon was still a little drunk. He was sipping vodka from his water bottle. Ned thought it was a good time to get a little more information out of him.
“How did you meet Vasilly?” he asked.
“In the army,” Semyon said, and Ned was surprised that he didn’t even pretend to protest the question. “We were both in the penal battalion in Chechnya.”
“Penal?”
“Yeah, if you are in the army and you do something wrong, you get thrown into the penal battalion. They make you do the worst, shittiest jobs,” he continued. “But it beats being shot at.” He laughed a little.
Ned smiled. “What did you do to get in?”
“I didn’t want to be in the army at all,” Semyon said, clearly desiring to tell the story his way. “I was eighteen, it was 1995. I was caught stealing a BMW and they said it was prison or Chechnya for me. I chose prison. They sent me to Chechnya.” Ned laughed. “Don’t laugh, it is the worst place in the world—not something an American could ever understand in a million years,” Semyon looked serious now, his glassy eyes focusing on something imaginary in front of him. “You are always cold and wet, starving, covered in lice, working, working, working, the officers kick the shit out of you every day and you have no idea how you will die. You don’t think of when you will die because you are sure you will, you just think about how you will die. And you pray all day you don’t get caught by those bearded bastards. If they take you prisoner, they enjoy torturing you—cutting off your fingers, your eyelids, your balls, while they laugh and yell Allahu ackbar!” He shook his head dismissively. “Then they hang the bodies upside down and hide behind them; so for us to get them, we have to shoot at the dead bodies of our friends. Bad shit.”
“So they make the penal battalion fight?”
“Sometimes, but I was in a regular communications company until I got caught with some weed,” he said. “I wouldn’t give it to my sergeant, so they took me and put me in penal battalion. Our job was to load dead bodies onto planes and helicopters for transport back to Russia.”
“And that’s when you met Vasilly?”
“Well, I actually knew who he was earlier,” Semyon said. “A bunch of different units had taken up residence in an old meat cannery, and he was a sniper for the infantry. Everybody knew him because he showed no fear and he hated the Chechens in a way none of us ever could.”
“Why?”
Semyon sighed and looked over at Ned. Then he sucked in a deep breath and made himself comfortable for his little speech. “More history. When there was a Soviet Union, the bosses in Moscow made sure every republic, no matter how far or how awful, had a significant Russian population—anywhere from five to ten percent usually—just to keep an eye on the locals and to reinforce bonds.”
Ned nodded. “That actually makes sense.”
Semyon sniffed haughtily. “Vasilly’s family were in Chechnya before the troubles,” he said. “I forget what his dad did, but when the Soviet Union was falling apart, Dudayev—a former Soviet fighter pilot who served in Afghanistan—declared an independent Chechnya with himself as president.”
“So?”
“So? The place went crazy,” Semyon shouted. “First thing Dudayev did was to let every prisoner out of jail—murderers, rapists, child molesters, everybody.”
“Really? Did it get violent?”
“Yeah, like you wouldn’t believe, but that’s not even the worst part, at least for Vasilly,” Semyon continued. “Chechen culture is not like ours or yours. Families there are organized into little clans called tieps. The tieps look after each other—if something happens to one member, the other members exact revenge. It keeps a lid on the violence.”
“Really?”
Semyon wagged his finger at Ned’s face. “Yes, but not for everyone,” he said. “Russians have no tieps, they are just people, so they became sitting ducks for crime, they were subjected to robbery, rape, murder, kidnapping, enslavement—constantly—and they have no recourse, no help. That is why the war started.”
“And Vasilly joined up to fight?”
Semyon looked down and made a noise that Ned thought he meant to be a laugh. “No, no, no, Vasilly’s family was killed by Chechens when they robbed their apartment,” he said. “And Vasilly dedicated his life to exacting revenge on every single member of the tiep—from what I hear, he killed twenty-six of those bastards, started with the children just to mess with their heads.”
“And then he joined the army?”
“No, they came and got him,” Semyon said. “Finished with the tiep, he was traveling to Moscow and was arrested on the train with illegal weapon.”
“A gun?”
“No, a grenade launcher.”
Ned’s eyes widened. “So then he went into the penal battalion?”
“Nope, infantry.”
“So how did he get put in the penal battalion?”
“At the cannery,” Semyon said. “We had this small hole in the concrete fence through which we would trade with the Chechens.”
“Really? You would actually trade with the enemy?”
“Yeah, of course,” Semyon said. “But only with the kids, you know—five, six, seven, eight, nine—but once they got to ten years old, all they wanted to do was kill you.”
“What did you trade?”
“We had things they wanted: bullets, grenades, flares, even generators,” Semyon continued. “And they had things we wanted, like weed, butter, meat—you know.”
“You would give the enemy ammunition to kill you?” Ned said, having a hard time wrapping his head around the concept.
“Sure, of course, it’s what we had—and we were starving,” he said vehemently. “They were starving too, but they would rather kill us than eat.”
“So you and Vasilly got caught trading?”
“No, I got caught with a matchbox full of weed,” Semyon said with a resigned tone, “but with Vasilly it was more complicated.”
“How?”
“One night, he followed the kids back to their hideout, an old farm building about two kilometers from the cannery,” Semyon continued. “He killed the boys and filled his pack and his pockets with all their stores—meat, canned fish, weed, pounds and pounds of it—then he took the boys and nailed them upside down by their feet to the outside of the house, took all the weapons and explosives out of the house and set them on fire.”
“Why?”
“It made the Chechens think we were attacking,” Semyon said, as though Ned was stupid for asking. “They came from miles and miles and miles to see their children hanging upside down, dead with their throats cut.”
“What happened to Vasilly?”
“Oh, he went to the gate on the other side and gave each of the guards a can of condensed milk to get back inside. That shit is like gold over there,” Semyon said. “Then he set up a store and started selling the stuff from the house back to us for rubles—real money.”
“And he got in trouble for killing the kids?”
“No, some sergeant was trying to hit him in the jaw with the butt of his rifle.”
“Why? Deal gone wrong?”
“How should I know? They don’t need a reason. They beat us all the time. I once got a punctured lung because some ca
ptain didn’t like my ‘stupid Uzbek face.’” Semyon was angry now. “Anyway, Vasilly kicked him in the ribs and was taken away—ended up in my penal battalion.”
Ned laughed. “Schlepping coffins?”
“Yeah,” Semyon smiled again. “The Russian army always puts remains of the dead in coffins made out of zinc, then welds them shut. The official reason is that government thinks nobody should look inside. It’s too sad, you know.”
“It seems odd, with such a brutal war.”
“It was, but none of us realized it,” Semyon said with his index finger in the air, “until Pavel, Vasilly and I tried to move this one coffin—must have been six hundred pounds. Pavel figured that, since we are all starving, there was more than just a body inside. So we stole it, said it never arrived and took it to an old shed not far from the barracks. It took two weeks to open it, and inside we found . . .”
“Heroin.”
“ Yeah , that’s right, ” Semyon smiled slyly. “Someone, someone high up, was smuggling heroin from Chechnya to Moscow in the coffins, getting rich while we starved and froze and broke our backs.”
“And got shot at by Chechens,” Ned added. “So what happened?”
“Pavel was killed. He was transferred out of penal battalion and back into a mortar crew. He was later found castrated with his fingers gone and his throat cut.” Semyon sighed. “Vasilly was sent back to Moscow after the cease fire. He tried to sell the heroin himself, wound up with Mafia and was hired on as contract killer. He told them about me and when I returned to Moscow, I was given a job as a messenger and delivery boy. I owe Vasilly a great deal.”
“Yeah, sounds like a great guy.”
“He is, in his own way,” Semyon said. “Just promise me you will never, ever do anything to make him mad at you.”
Before Ned could answer, Semyon was snoring.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle Page 33