by Chad Huskins
Rideau leaned back in her seat, shocked to her core. “They couldn’t have at least warned her? They couldn’t have moved Rubashkin to—”
“They tried. She didn’t accept their advice or their warnings. If they had forced her to go, if government vehicles had shown up at her apartment and forced her to leave, the vory would have known for sure that FSB knew they were targeting her next, and that their code had been broken. Not only would they have changed it, but our two embedded operatives might’ve been killed. Everything would have been lost.” Dominika shrugged. “Rubashkin was only a small witness, important enough that she could’ve taken down one or two vory, but not nearly important enough to bring down the families with her testimony alone. Therefore, FSB did not see her as a particularly high priority.”
The room seemed darker. Outside, the wind had picked up again. Aurélie Rideau could scarcely believe what she was hearing. She’d worked in policing long enough that she knew sometimes things like this happened, that sometimes small sacrifices—very small—were made in order to catch the bigger game, but not an assassination. Never an assassination. One might let a drug deal slide over here, or even a small business get burned over there, if you knew the owner was insured, and if you knew no one was in the building, and if the stakes were high enough. But no life could be sacrificed. Not ever.
The waiter came by, dropping off their main dishes.
“Thank you, and could we have the check, please? I may have to leave a bit prematurely.”
The two women ate in silence, while Rideau ruminated.
A war. They think of it as a war. A slow-moving invasion, led by vory who encroach on their politics every year, slowly but surely taking them over. There would probably never be a vor as Prime Minister, because, like many syndicates, the vory preferred to be the power behind the throne. So, how long would it be before the Prime Minister was surrounded by vory?
Portions of the Russian Mafia had risen in prominence and power since the new millennium started off. There was one leader that even the American FBI and CIA had admitted could probably influence the global economy with a single phone call.
Rideau had believed that recent movements by all police agencies around the world had stunted the growth of criminal organizations, and she had felt proud to be a part of the engine driving those movements, but she’d just received a reality check. After all the progress she’d made liaising with these people, they had gone out of their way to abrogate and undermine those helpful procedures that Interpol and others had brought into the mix. And for what? Because they wanted to do it their way, always their way. Their stubbornness was still winning out.
“Why are you telling me this?” she finally asked. “Why trust me with this information?”
“Because not all Russians are stubborn assholes,” Dominika said. “Just like not all Muslims are terrorists and not all Christians believe in heaven.”
“But why me? What can I possibly do with this information now, except go back to my superiors and piss them off with it?”
The waiter buzzed by, filled their wineglasses to the top, and dropped off the check in a little folding book. Dominika took it at once and slipped her Visa inside. “Can I get a box to take the rest of this home?”
“Of course,” he said.
When the waiter had disappeared, she looked at Rideau and said, “I invited you here without much hope that you would show up. I didn’t exactly give you any reason to trust me. Yet here you are. I suppose you’re hoping to do more than just see what little Tattar and Blok are going to allow you to see.”
Rideau nodded. “I came here to pick up the trail of Yuri Shcherbakov,” she said. “He’s been running free too long, and nobody can touch him.”
“The Grey Wolf killed your colleague, did he not? Detective-Inspector Dubois?”
She nodded again. “Yes, he did.”
Dominika nodded. “I thought I recalled hearing that through the grapevine. Was he a close friend?”
Rideau shrugged. “Not very close, but a friend. And a good man. A dedicated man.”
“That’s why I decided to say something to you, of all people. Well, it was that, and the look on your face when you laid your eyes on Vasilisa Rubashkin.” She took a sip of wine. “Like me, you don’t care for Churchill’s strategies. I think you probably feel there are other ways to win a war.”
The waiter returned with her Visa, a to-go box for her crab and remaining oysters, and two copies of the receipt. Dominika signed one copy and left it on the table. She also scribbled something else on her copy of the receipt, and left it on the table also. The leftover crab was easy to toss into her to-go box. Then, checking her watch, she said, “I’d better get back. They’ll want me to talk to Chelyabinsk Police about the non-comply, and to make sure that any detectives in Moscow Police also understand that a non-comply has been issued.”
Dominika stepped out of the booth, and held her hand out to Rideau. “It was good to meet you.”
“I’m still not sure what you expect me to do with this information.”
“You don’t have to go any further than this, Aurélie. I know that you have a wife to think of, but if you’re really thinking about making a difference, here’s your chance.”
“My chance for what?”
“Check the receipt before you leave. Make sure I left a tip.” She picked up her to-go box and turned to leave, and Rideau noticed she was wearing the same long coat as before. However, across from Rideau, where Dominika had been sitting, there was another long coat, this one was dark red.
“Wait. You forgot your other coat.”
Dominika must have heard her, because the chatter in the restaurant wasn’t at all loud. Yet still, she left the restaurant without a glance back.
Rideau looked at the coat, then reached forward and lifted the receipt. Dominika had indeed left a tip. Flipping it over, she found writing on the back: Grand Hotel Vidgof. Room 533. Take the coat. Inside the right pocket. It’s yours. You may need it. Good luck.
It took a moment to absorb that. What exactly was Dominika doing here?
Rideau’s mind raced with so many questions. First of all, hadn’t Tattar said he’d set her up with a room at the Grand Hotel Vidgof? Yes, he said it was room 412. I remember that specifically. So then why had Dominika written Room 533? What was she…?
Then, like tumbles in a lock, gateways in her mind slowly began to open to a possibility. It didn’t seem feasible at first, and so she dismissed it outright, moving along to other theories. But slowly, the notion returned. It gnawed at her, and she at it. She couldn’t stop picking at it like a scab. It was like a tongue touching an empty socket where a tooth had been. It demanded her attention.
No, she thought. Rideau’s mind once more rejected the notion, but the notion just wouldn’t die. It came back unbidden, as relentless as disease. No. No, it can’t be. They wouldn’t do that. Her heart started racing, and, despite the cold, she started sweating. FSB set me up in a room in the same hotel as the Grey Wolf? No, she wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. Because if they had done that…
If they did that, then they knowingly put me right beside him. And that can’t be just mere coincidence. Interpol didn’t believe in coincidences. They called it a convergence.
Aurélie Rideau suddenly had to contend with the fact that she had been set up for assassination, handed over to the Grey Wolf on a platter. He had killed Vasilisa Rubashkin, target number one, and now…now they were just going to feed him his second meal.
Blood close to boiling, Rideau wadded up the receipt and stuffed it into her purse. She took out her cell phone, which was still getting poor reception, and was able to look up a couple of reputable taxi services. Her hands were shaking as she called three of them before she finally found one that was still driving in this weather.
When the taxi arrived, Rideau was glad to see it had chains on its tires. She got up and pulled on her coat. Warily, she lifted the red coat and went over to the front co
unter to grab a mint on her way out. Once inside, she told the driver, “Grand Hotel Vidgof. You know it?”
“Of course,” he said. “Big, fancy hotel. You have a room there?”
“Yes,” she said distantly. Her mind was racing with possibilities, leaping at phantoms.
As they pulled out of the parking lot, the driver made chitchat. “Are you new to the city?”
“No,” she said, shivering as much from nerves as from the cold burrowing into her bones. Rideau rested the red coat on her lap, and was curious when she felt something rather heavy was inside it. She found the right pocket, reached inside. “I’ve been here a few times before.”
The driver started to say something, then suddenly slammed on the brakes. “Damn mongrels!” Rideau nearly hit her head on the back of the passenger seat. She looked ahead. A pack of four gray-and-black dogs had slinked in front of the headlights. They paused for a moment and looked at the taxi. The driver honked several times, but the dogs just kept looking at the car. At her. Rideau looked at those reflective eyes, mesmerized for a moment, trying to decipher their meaning while her mind tried to contend with Dominika’s many revelations.
Then, the dogs finally slinked away, vanishing into the blizzard.
“Damn things are running amok tonight. I’ll bet I’ve almost hit five or six. The storm must be driving them mad. Not the best time for a visit, eh?” said the driver.
Rideau’s hand wrapped around the cold, hard object that Dominika had left inside the red coat. Rideau knew at once what it was. “Maybe not,” she said, folding the coat back up and sitting on the seat next to her. “Or maybe so.”
Normalcy had been restored. Kaley was just a girl again. Just a girl, and nobody’s life was in her hands. It was just another day at school. There had never been any Spencer Pelletier, never been any Others or any Prisoner, and, thankfully, never any children held at the mercy of rapists and pimps.
If only she could believe that. If only she still lived in the world that the kids around her lived in.
Still, she was able to retain some of her old self. For whatever reason, it was just easier to accept her life at school at this point. The butterflies in her stomach were fluttering around in anticipation of what Laquanda and Nancy might say or do, now that their forces were once again combined.
Kaley accepted her tray—not tacos, just meatloaf, yeck!—and tried to find a seat at the table nowhere near the Mondo Bitches. But, wouldn’t you know it, there was nowhere else to sit. Most people didn’t really like either Nancy Boyle or Laquanda Everest. However, neither did they go out of their way to tell the Mondo Bitches this; easier to just avoided them. The Mondo Bitches suspected others loathed them, of course (Kaley could sense this much), and it didn’t bother them. As a matter of fact, they had started to revel in it. If neither of these girls married rich, then years from now, Kaley predicted they would be diddling any bad boy that threw beer bottles at passing cars, would be knocked up just before or just after graduating high school, and would live a life bouncing between cashier jobs and fighting for alimony and child support checks.
Like Mom, she thought, walking over to take her seat, which was right next to Laquanda. As a matter of fact, imagining Laquanda Everest or Nancy Boyle as younger versions of Jovita Dupré was incredibly easy. Surely they would have children of their own someday, and their own private horror story would be having children that they both loved and despised; loved for some maternalistic instinct, and despised for their youth and potential to have lives that they themselves had not. That future possibility seemed laid out before her as plain as words on a page. What a terrible outcome for both parent and child.
Kaley used her plastic fork to push around her meatloaf. She wasn’t feeling very hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since before leaving the house that morning (Spencer hadn’t shared any of his fries, and she’d been too afraid to ask). A glance at the clock showed the time: 12:35 PM. Had it really only been four hours since the nightmare began? And was it really over? What were the four kids in the car doing right now? And what about Peter, the boy she had sensed in the trunk? Were they safe now?
“Pshh, this is some ol’ bullshit,” Nancy complained. “This meatloaf ain’t even cooked.”
“I know, right?” Laquanda agreed.
The usual lunchroom chatter was little more than the buzzing of busy bees to her now. Kaley’s mind was far afield, and yet also directed inward. Mindlocked on Peter and the others’ safety, she barely tasted the food she shoveled into her mouth. She felt bogged down by all that she had experienced in the last year. Is this the way it is? she wondered. Is the whole world built from evil? It was a thought as terrifying—perhaps even more so—than the Prisoner himself.
Was everyone just some version of Dmitry Ankundinov? Some version of Jovita Dupré? Some version of Zakhar Ogorodnikov? Some version of the Mondo Bitches? Some version of the corrupt Atlanta PD officers that had allowed the vory and the Rainbow Room to prosper? Was it true that evil…oh, God, did Spencer Pelletier have it right? Was evil the normal state of the universe, and good some kind of aberration? Were greed, lust, and the search for power the fundamental forces behind every living creature in the universe, and was good just some kind of mutation that occasionally, and mistakenly, cropped up?
It made a certain kind of sense. How else could any species exist if it didn’t become competitive? And what else was competition born from, if not the marriage of envy, lust, and the need to control one’s own environment, as well as the environment of others?
If that’s true, what does it mean for me and Shan? What does it mean, if evil is natural and good is unnatural?
Just thinking about it placed a heavy burden on her chest, and made it difficult to take another breath. Like being back inside that prison room at the dock house, it was easier just to lie down and give up.
Ward yo heart, chil’. Nan’s advice, coming out of nowhere. Completely useless now. Surrounded on all sides by evil, how could anyone ward their heart entirely? How could anyone prevent themselves from being polluted?
You can’t, Kaley thought. You can’t win. It’s not possible. It’s going to sour me, just like it’s soured Mom. In time, she imagined her life might not be so different than Nancy’s and Laquanda’s.
“You want your potatoes?” Nancy asked.
“Nah,” Laquanda said. “You can have ’em.” After the exchange was done, she asked, “You see Jersey Shore last night?”
“Eck!” Nancy said. “I can’t believe that Mike, like, said he wanted to be a stripper. It’s like, whatever.”
“I know, right? Strippers are all, like, skanks.”
Kaley knew where this was going before the girls ever did. There was a natural progression to things like this. People like Nancy and Laquanda could begin speaking on topics seemingly unrelated to anyone or anything around them, however, they were inherently negative people, and so they would find the worst thing to say on any topic. People were inherently negative; Kaley had read that, for every positive experience people had with waiters or salesmen, they only told between two and three people, but for every negative experience they had, they told between ten and twenty people. This jibed with what she saw in almost every heart around her. Laquanda and Nancy thrived on such negativity. Easier to bring people down than raise yourself up, Kaley thought.
Mixed with their free-roaming hatred for others they deemed beneath them, Nancy and Laquanda would eventually cast their eyes on someone weak in their immediate proximity. It took them no time at all to do exactly this.
“This one right here might make a good stripper someday,” said Laquanda. She wasn’t yet talking about Kaley. Laquanda was pointing out Charity Elsworth, a girl with a beautiful name, but one that, of course, kids who found her buck teeth and pointed chin unattractive had found a way to twist into an awful nickname: they called her “Charity Case.”
“Yeah, she’s skank enough,” tittered Nancy. Charity was in Nancy’s class, and so sat acr
oss from her (likely not her first choice for seating) and was pretending not to hear. Charity kept eating, hoping to be ignored. That ploy didn’t always work. In fact, it often invited more criticism. “But stripper’s about as far as she could go.”
“You don’t think she’d make a good prostitute?” inquired Laquanda.
“Teeth like that, she couldn’t give no decent blowjob. She’d chop that wood down like a beaver.” The girls cackled.
Kaley felt Charity’s shame wash over her. Kaley looked over at the girl. So small and mousy, wearing a faded black Pearl Jam shirt, a pair of faded and ripped jeans (not designed that way, just old), and a blue-and-black flannel shirt tied around her waist. She pushed her long, greasy hair behind her ear. Her face was reddening, because she knew she was being talked about, and because there was no escape.
The shame was difficult for Kaley to contend with. It went deep inside her and took up residence.
“The door has closed,” came a voice on a sourceless wind. It sounded like dry leaves rustling across pavement, a few snapping twigs in there somewhere. Kaley felt the gust of wind barely blowing in her ear. Like a draft, it traveled around the lunchroom, tossed some hair about, as well as a few papers of students using precious lunch time on assignments. “You should not have gone after her. She felt threatened, so she closed the door. Yet, I see another gap. She is being challenged again.”
The Prisoner. He was real, after all. She had imagined none of it. Not that she truly thought she had, only hoped.
It sounded like an argument was going on between the Prisoner and one of the Others. She sensed a violent struggle…
Then, she became aware of water trickling around her feet. Kaley looked down and saw that the murky water had returned, in copious amounts, and it was foaming furiously. At first it moved around her toes, swirling faster and faster. Then it was at her ankles and spreading rapidly across the lunchroom floor. Soon, it was climbing the walls, spreading across the ceiling, and forming swirling eddies. Something was already swimming beneath the water on the ceiling.