by Skip Horack
The apartment had a small bed with a synthetic comforter that still had tags. Creased white sheets and one pillow. A table and two chairs. A dresser, a desk, and a couch. There was a computer Karen had said I could use, but if she owned a phone or a TV they were both gone now. Her closet was locked and her dresser had been emptied. There was no food at all in the icebox or the cabinets. The microwave was immaculate; the pots and plates and pans and utensils like they’d just come from the store. No pictures, no books, no calendar. It seemed impossible Karen Yang lived there. That anyone had ever lived there. I suspected the computer might contain clues, but I could only log in as a guest. My password was Visitor0.
I called Sam in. It was early, but I killed the lights. My sleeping bag was spread across that uncomfortable comforter, and I yanked off my Red Wings and lay down. I had a towel for Sam by the door, but he crept closer, then dropped to the floor beside the bed. I could hear him breathing.
I hadn’t napped for more than an hour when I woke to Sam barking at my phone. I had on jeans, but no shirt, no socks. The room was dark, the tile cold, and I was bumbling around on the balls of my feet. The phone cut off before I could get to it, then someone rang the apartment bell. Again Sam barked, and I stubbed my toe on the doorsill going into the garage. Fuck fuck fuck. Viktor had my address. This must be him.
I switched a light on. It was freezing with the sun gone. A Volvo was parked too far forward, and I slid myself through the narrow gap between the drywall and the front bumper. The bell sounded again; Sam barked again. “I’m coming,” I hollered. It was Viktor all right. I could smell his cigar.
To the side of the garage was a concrete room that served as the building’s entrance, and an iron gate kept the world at bay. I stepped out from the garage and saw Viktor on the sidewalk. He was pacing back and forth behind the bars, and though I was the one who was locked away, in his black pants and black jacket he looked like a silver-browed zoo ape.
“Marina didn’t show,” I said.
“I know this.” Viktor pitched his cigar into the street, then grabbed one of the bars with his wide hand. “I have a message from her.”
“I need to put a shirt on. I’ll be right back.”
He latched onto another of the bars. He was twice my age, but even so, it seemed as if he could tear that gate off the hinges. “You are already all the way out here! Let me in.”
His stopping-by-unannounced, probation-officer act had me ticked, but I made my way across the concrete to let him inside. He saw me shivering and laughed. I’m sure San Francisco cold has nothing on Russia cold, and when I opened the gate he slapped my bare shoulder, muttered a word I think might have meant pussy.
Viktor and I sat on the couch while he tried to salvage our partnership. I was fastening the snaps of my work shirt, and he was brushing at the scab on Sam’s ear. Marina had told him her phone had died. That she hadn’t been able to call him sooner to relay she wouldn’t be making Simple Pleasures. That she’d had to run a few unexpected errands for her employers. Right. Even Viktor didn’t sound like he believed her. “But come to my home for dinner tomorrow,” he said. “You can meet her then.”
“What about your cell? You couldn’t return my call?”
“I forgot my phone in the Mercedes. Sorry. A bad day for phones. I am just hearing all of this. So now I am here.”
“That check I gave you? I’d like it back.”
“You do not want this anymore?”
“I don’t.”
“I would not cheat you.” He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and produced my check. “It is two-fifty for each woman you meet. Give this to me after our dinner. Is that better? You have spent much more than that to be here this week. You are upset. And maybe too you are nervous. But you cannot let that ruin everything.”
He was calling me a pussy again, basically. His light eyes seemed sleepy but earnest as he pressed the check into my hand. Perhaps it was all a lie, a con, but he had a point. There was little to lose.
“You’re positive she will be there?”
“I am positive! We will have a very nice evening.” He pulled a Ziploc from another pocket and showed it to me. “Some chicken pieces for the patient,” he said.
I nodded, and he tossed them to Sam one by one. Sam’s tail started whacking against the side of my leg, and when the chicken was all gone Viktor went into the kitchen area and washed his hands. He seemed somewhat disgusted by how small the place was, and even more so by the lack of a TV. Earlier, walking in, that had been the first thing he’d commented on.
“Do you want to hear a joke?” He was opening and closing Karen Yang’s cabinets for some reason. “A Vovochka joke. He is a Russian boy. A student.”
I sighed. “Go ahead.” Malcolm had ruined me on jokes, but at least his were short. I doubted Viktor’s would be. It had happened in imperceptible degrees, this transition of his from dour marriage pimp to jovial comrade.
He was looking in the icebox now. Three blocks from the apartment, down closer to the beach, was a Safeway supermarket I’d hit up already. I had a few beers in the icebox, a few groceries, and he took out two Budweisers. “Is okay?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He twisted both bottles open and walked across the room to hand one over. I was still on the couch; he was standing in front of me.
“Vovochka is in the classroom. His teacher, she is at the chalkboard.” He pointed at me as he paced and then at himself. I was one of the students. He was the teacher. Sam was sitting on his haunches, watching with his head tilted.
“The teacher, she draws on the board.” Viktor turned and traced something in the air with his finger, then spun back around and began talking like a woman. “What is this I have drawn, Roy?”
“A heart?”
He gulped at his Budweiser, then set the bottle on the table. “It is an apple. I have drawn an apple for the class.” He pivoted and made as if he was erasing the chalkboard. Apparently even in Russia you are required to sit there dumb-faced until the third-act punch line comes. Again Viktor drew in the air, and again he looked to me. “And what have I drawn now?”
“Don’t know. A pineapple?”
“No. It is a pear.” He stage-whispered to Sam. “Our Roy is not so very smart, is he?”
Then quit, I was thinking, but he spun and drew once more. He called on a child sitting to my right.
“Vovochka?” he chirped. “What is it that you see? I will give you a hint. The monkeys, they eat them.”
Viktor hurried over and sat beside me on the couch. He was Vovochka now. “Teacher,” he said. “Why would you draw such a thing? Monkeys do not eat dicks!”
At last the end had come —but no, instead Viktor stood, waving his hands like a frazzled teacher. “Vovochka! I am getting the principal!” He ran out the apartment, slamming the door. So a fourth act, I reckoned.
Sam whined. “Don’t fret,” I said. “He’s coming back.”
I took a sip of my beer as we waited for the joke to continue. In a moment the door opened, and Viktor walked in from the garage. He glared at the couch. “What have you done this time, Vovochka?” He asked this in a serious voice, a man’s voice. The school principal. He turned and looked behind him at the phantom chalkboard. “Shame on you! Last week you broke a window and yesterday you started a fight.” He pounded at the wall with his fist. “And today —today you have drawn a dick on the board!”
Viktor came closer, leaning over until his face was right in mine, then poked at one of the snaps on my shirt. “Laugh,” he said, as himself now. “It was a banana, you see?”
“I do see. Funny.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Because nothing was like it appeared.”
I’d been above the Marvel Court dead end since ten o’clock Saturday morning, watching for Joni, but also flipping through my copy of Salted Waters.
What I was doing was crazy, no story of Russian romance would save me, but I knew of no other way. I thought of another teenage girl’s house, of Eliza Sprague’s parents screaming at me while she cried on the couch.
Then, two hours in, I looked up from a poem describing a famous ghost ship and saw a magazine-in-hand someone standing on the small balcony carved into the wall of the yellow stucco. Not Nancy. A lanky girl wearing red sweatpants and an electric blue sweatshirt with I ♥ NY on the front. She settled into a cushioned chair, then slid her socked feet between the wooden slats of the balcony’s low railing. I was maybe forty yards away and level with her, yet she didn’t appear to have noticed me. Long brown hair hid her face, but this had to be Joni. I’d found her. I ♥ NY. White letters, a red heart. This girl had probably been to Manhattan —me, Disney World was the farthest I’d traveled before this trip. My earliest memory of Tommy blossomed in my mind. I’m cheering mechanical pirates, my brother beside me, egging me on.
Even though Joni was far away and ill defined, out of reach, she felt like more than a fact confirmed. She was a maiden in a tower. Nancy’s tower. For the next half hour I watched her, unable to sneak away, afraid if I even scratched my nose she would detect movement on that hillside. Then the door to the balcony opened, and ice-blond Nancy summoned her daughter inside. Joni closed her magazine, stood, and went into the house, but I sat there, fingers crossed she might come down to Marvel Court. That she would be alone, off to run some errand, and I would have the courage to approach her. She’d glance my way —and calmly, gently, I would tell her who I was.
Joni never reappeared, but she wasn’t just a name now. Things were moving forward, and I was excited but anxious. Too anxious. Before very long the apartment seemed like a cage. I had a little time until my dinner with Marina at Viktor’s, and though I was tempted to stand her up to soothe my pride, I grabbed a tennis ball and took Sam to run around so he’d be good for the night.
Sam and I walked Forty-Sixth Avenue’s blanched and lonely corridor, our shadows lengthening with the falling sun, and waited for a break in the traffic on Fulton before crossing over to the emerald tree line of Golden Gate Park. West for a block, then —and at the corner of Forty-Seventh Avenue I considered the killing acre. A woman had died there, but there was no way to tell.
The archery range was a large grass field bordered on three sides by a dense jumble of bushes. There was a sign forbidding dogs, but since it was late I didn’t expect to be harassed. I soldiered on, scanning the field for cats, skunks, archers, dead people —then I was about to unclip Sam’s leash when something made me stop. One of those sixth-sense feelings. I turned and saw an extremely tall man in dark clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. He was standing within an ivied knot of rhododendrons, an arm held up away from his side, a hefty bird perched on his gloved fist. A falcon or maybe a hawk. Here was Viktor’s sokolnik, I realized.
In the dim light I couldn’t see much of the falconer, but he was definitely watching me. I assumed there were statutes and ordinances and commandments against any form of hunting in the park —but I had Sam on the archery range, so I suppose that made both of us scofflaws. I gave a chopping half wave, but the falconer didn’t wave back. Instead he emerged from the rhododendrons and moved away at a quick pace, heading for the street.
Sinister fucker. And the tallest man I’d ever seen in the flesh. Looking at him felt like walking under a ladder. I threw the ball for Sam, lit a cigarette, and watched him do his thing. When he returned I had him make a few more retrieves, then snapped him back to the leash. The sun had set, and it was mostly dark. On the way out of the park we passed alongside a white sedan stopped by the killing acre. The car looked plain enough to be an unmarked police cruiser, but there was just an old guy sitting behind the wheel. He smiled and began flashing the interior dome light, trying to draw me closer. I saw a smiling pervert, then nothing, a smiling pervert, then nothing. I shook my head at him and kept on.
I showered, then wiped at the mirror with a towel. Shaggy, squinting me. My hair was at least two months uncut, and I shaved for the first time in almost a week. In these moments when I’m cleaning myself up —mowing shaving cream and clipping at nails, spitting flossed threads of blood and gargling mouthwash —I often pretend like I’m carving. Like when I’m done chipping away I’ll see some of the boy I was, or even Tommy, hiding under that adult decay. But not now, not ever. So I just did the best I could for Marina, and once I was through I combed my bangs out of my eyes, the wings behind my ears, put on a nicer pair of jeans and a collared shirt.
After his comedy act on Friday Viktor had drunk two more of my Budweisers and talked mainly about Viktor. He was a homeowner, and since I doubted homes came cheap in that city, clearly he was doing something right. His four limos were parked throughout the tumbleweed neighborhood, rotating with the schedules of the street sweepers, and before dawn every morning he drove a master-of-the-universe stockbroker to a building downtown in the Mercedes. Then, after the markets had closed in New York, he headed back to fetch the man. As for those limos, Viktor hardly ever drove them himself. “I have people,” he’d said. “But not for Mr. Dworkin. He is a decamillionaire.”
Viktor’s house was painted an adobe color, and there was a sunken garage I suspected contained the Mercedes. Off to the side, a series of steps led up to the front door —but I was a few minutes early, so I lingered awhile on the sidewalk. And I was still standing there when I saw Marina turn the corner. She was wearing a puffy pink coat, the hood trimmed with synthetic gray fur I think was meant to resemble a wolf tail. I waited for her at the bottom of the steps. Those black boots again, but I still had three or four inches on her.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Roy.”
Her short hair was brushed straight back, and up close I could see the copper strands were chocolate at the roots. “I am Maria,” she said. “I am sorry for yesterday.” Viktor had told me she was thirty, but I was questioning whether she might be a few years older than that. There were tight wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. Her teeth had a yellowish tint.
“That’s all right. Viktor —”
“The parents, they know nothing.” Marina pressed her hands against her face, and I thought she might scream. “And baby is little Satan.”
I laughed, but she didn’t. Her accent was very thick, her voice even more emotionless and indifferent than Viktor’s had once seemed to me, and though behind her heavy makeup she wasn’t quite the same woman I’d seen from across a pond, she sounded like a world-weary femme fatale, a somber Bond girl.
“Must be rough,” I said.
“Rough?”
“Hard. No fun. Difficult.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “Da. It is very.”
The front door opened, and I saw Viktor’s moon face grinning at us from the top of the steps. He was in his work clothes. Black pants and a black tie. A white shirt like mine, but with the sleeves rolled up on his bulky forearms. He called down. “Come,” he said. “Come, come.”
The pink coat stopped right at the curve of Marina’s waist, and her snug white Levi’s looked stitched to her wide hips. She started up the steps in a sway, the block heels of her boots slapping one-two, one-two against the concrete, and before she made the threshold Viktor kissed her swiftly on the cheek, then crushed my hand. “The new carpet,” he said. “No shoes. No smoking, even.”
Marina was already removing her boots. She’d been there before, I guess, or maybe that was just the Russian way. I shucked my Red Wings and was allowed inside too.
The house was warm and smelled like a good restaurant. I saw a white-walled living room with a black leather couch, two identical easy chairs (black), and a coffee table (also black). On one wall was an enormous flat-screen TV and —resting on the snow-white carpet beneath it —a stereo, a DVD player, and a digital-cable box. On the opposite wall was a cross-shaped mirro
r large enough to nail a Celtic to.
Marina was focused on the TV. There were DVD cases stacked atop the coffee table, and the picture had been paused during some nature video. A killer whale had launched its entire domino body clear of the sea and now hung frozen in midair. The whale matched the white carpet, the black leather. Same with Viktor in his uniform.
“You worked today?” I asked. “On a Saturday?”
Viktor nodded as he loosened his tie. “I had to drive Mr. and Mrs. Dworkin somewhere. I am getting back only now.”
“I was in the park earlier. I saw that falconer guy.”
“The sokolnik? He is very tall, no?”
“Yeah. Very.”
“Sokolnik?” said Marina.
Viktor hollered for his wife, Sonya, and a heavyset woman in a black velvet outfit came out from the kitchen to meet me. She had pillowy skin and pearly hair. I said hello, but Sonya and Viktor and Marina began talking in the mother tongue. I was feeling ignored until Dina the Saluki slunk in from the hallway. She bumped at me, then went searching for Sam. I watched her check all around the living room before she gave up and lay down behind the couch.
I turned to Marina again. Viktor had taken her coat, and underneath she had on a blue top that shimmered when she moved. She’d brought color to that black-and-white room. I looked away, but Sonya had caught me staring. She smiled. “Welcome to our home,” she said.
“Thank you. Whatever you’re cooking smells really great.”