The Apex Predator (Kindle Single)

by Michael Koryta

  THE APEX PREDATOR

  By Michael Koryta

  The Cleveland organized crime scene changed overnight in 1977 due to a car bomb that killed Danny Greene, the Irish mobster. Thirty-five years later, it changed again, due to a rug.

  Dainius Belov had enjoyed an unprecedented run at the top of the city’s crime empire since arriving from Russia in the spring of 1991. He was smart, he was ruthless, he was cautious, and he was protected by a man named Thor.

  In their 22 years together, rivals had risen and fallen, both from the outside world and within their own, on a regular basis, and most often at Thor’s hand. There was a time, maybe, when this role as primary enforcer would have bothered Thor. That time was hard for him to recall, though, and after enough years he was no longer certain it had ever existed. The craft of killing came to him in stages. First had been the obvious — kill or be killed. It was important to be skilled in a violent world. In a place alive with predators, the apex predator lived the longest. Later, there was money in murder, and money promised things, or at least told lovely lies. Thor had come to believe it was the latter, but, nevertheless, it had been a stage. The last stage, or what he understood to be the last stage in his time with Belov, was an understanding that a loyal and violent man was always a man of value in the sort of world where Thor had always lived. Do what you were told, when you were told — and only what, and only when, and those in power took notice. It was through a cultivation of these understandings that Thor had won Belov’s favor in Russia, and it was through Belov that Thor had escaped Russia. At the time, he had not anticipated they would remain together so long. All he’d wanted was out. What he’d won in the end was simply a relocation. The bloody world traveled with them.

  He’d seen his first murder victim at the age of 4, and at the age of 6, he witnessed his first killing — his father bleeding out on a snow-covered Moscow sidewalk in front of his family, felled by bullets fired from inside a black sedan with a crack in the rear window. First for police investigators, and then for himself for years afterward, Thor tried to remember any visual detail of the car or the shooters beyond the color and that cracked window. He never succeeded.

  The car lingered in memory, his father less so, and the impact of the killing, probably least of all as the years passed and the body count rose. The English word for the way Thor felt about killing was desensitized, but he did not think that it was a proper fit. Maybe he was overly sensitized. Maybe he understood more than most. Maybe the people who had not killed or could not imagine being killed were the desensitized breed.

  He had stopped worrying about that long ago.

  Because Dainius Belov was cautious, because he was cunning, he did not conduct business at his home. Once, a private investigator had located him through his house staff and it was only because of Thor’s carefully articulated risk-reward debate that the PI had not been killed. The detective, a man named Lincoln Perry, was not a man of consequence, Thor had explained, and time had borne out his promise: No harm had come to them after allowing Perry to live.

  No business had been conducted in Belov’s house on Lake Boulevard, either.

  * * *

  When Belov summoned Thor to the home in the spring of 2011, it was only because he was so ill that he could not stand, plagued by a cancer that infected him but could not kill him. Radiation had killed the cancer, or held it at bay at least, and most of the city would never know he had been so weak.

  It was during that one visit that Thor met the tiger cub.

  Belov was staying in a bedroom that looked out over the water and on that day the sun was high and the sky was cloudless and Lake Erie had a hard blue glitter. There were monitors and machines surrounding the bed and there were tubes and wires connected to Belov and a small tiger was trying to pull the wires free, and it made Belov laugh. Thor had never seen the cat. He asked why Belov had such a thing.

  “He’s one of us! From near our homeland, at least. And look at him. Just sit and watch him. Better yet — feel his fur.”

  Thor was standing in the doorway and would have to get down on the floor to touch the cat and he was not comfortable kneeling in Belov’s presence. In anyone’s presence. But the tiger had lost interest in the wires and was trying to climb Thor’s leg by then, so strong for such a small animal, and his eyes were golden and intense, fixed upon Thor’s blue eyes as if he understood much about him. Somehow, standing there looking down at the animal, Thor believed that it was true. That the cat did understand much. It was not a feeling he had encountered with many humans. A woman once, long ago. She was dead now.

  “He is from Siberia?” Thor asked, because that was what he understood of such tigers.

  “His kind originates there at least. Now? Now they are bred here in barns. Garages. They are not so hard to find, not in this country.”

  That both surprised Thor and disappointed him. Upon hearing it he was glad that Belov had saved the cat. He lowered himself onto the floor and the tiger crawled into his lap immediately and curled one paw around Thor’s back and swiped.

  “No, no, no,” Thor said, and then he removed his gun from the spine holster that the tiger had somehow sensed. He placed it on a high shelf where the cat could not reach it and Belov laughed until the laughter hurt him and became true shaking and the tears became those of pain. Belov had never wept in Thor’s presence and Thor had never been unarmed in his.

  All of this was because of the cat.

  He was a marvelous creature. He was all paws and head it seemed, and his legs didn’t work in sync just yet; when he tried to move quickly one would get ahead of the other and eventually he would spill himself over, tumble upright, and try again. He was always lifting his head, craning his neck, trying to get a higher vantage point, as if there was too much he could not see and that was a source of concern. Thor held him and lifted him high so he could observe all that he wanted. When he showed him the lake, the cat yawned, his pink tongue curling out and wrapping up to the tip of his nose. He was incredibly soft and incredibly warm.

  “How many months old is he?” Thor asked, and Belov laughed again, shorter this time, cautious.

  “Five weeks.”

  “Weeks!” It seemed impossible. He was already so big. “What does he eat?”

  It turned out that the tiger was still bottle-fed, despite his size. Belov urged Thor to feed him and for a reason Thor could not explain he did not want to do this, but Belov was insistent and so Thor held the bottle of milk and the tiger reached and grasped it on both sides with his paws, surprisingly dexterous, and gulped and swallowed. When the bottle was empty he swatted it aside and chased it as would a housecat, only once again the undeveloped coordination became his undoing, and he somersaulted over his head and onto his back, bemused eyes facing a ceiling where once there had been a floor. This time when Belov laughed Thor nearly did as well. Nearly.

  “Would you like one?” Belov asked.

  Yes, Thor wanted to say. The animal was magnificent. He wanted one very badly. But the cat was only five weeks old and already so big.

  “I could not care for it,” he said.

  Belov gave a dismissive wave of the hand, but he was tiring then, the visit had gone on too long already, and whatever argument he might have offered did not come. They spoke then only of topics of business and Thor soon left the house.

  * * *

  There was a man named Tobias who lived on Clark Avenue in an area that had once been home to stockyards. The buildings were vacant now — so much of the city was — and behind graffiti-laced brick walls and broken windows the rooms looked as they were supposed to, cavernous and empty and dusty. You had to look very hard to find the cameras, and the
n, when you followed the angle of the lenses, you’d find the canvas tarpaulins stretched out over forgotten wooden pallets stacked in one corner. Remove the tarpaulins and those top pallets would be empty and broken, designed to cause anyone who cared to inspect them to lose interest swiftly. Remove the top six, though, and you’d find black garbage bags inside the pallets, and inside the garbage bags you would find $50,0000 of counterfeit currency in $20 and $10 bills.

  There were 85 garbage bags.

  Even in fake bills, $4.2 million seemed like a lot when taken all at once. It was less impressive when parceled out in small quantities, which was the manner in which it was to be distributed. Unfortunately, Tobias, whose job it was to distribute those bills, had become a bit too convinced of the ease of his task. Unfortunately, Tobias was unaware of the cameras that Belov had installed long before he installed Tobias.

  In the past three months, the contents of one and a half garbage bags had left the abandoned building in Tobias’s pockets. It amounted to $75,000, which was hardly a fortune, but it was more money than was wise to steal from Dainius Belov. By about $75,000.

  If Thor had one regret when it came to required dealings with close associates, it was that they understood his purpose all too well. There was no confusion about him; his errands were specific, and they were understood.

  So it came to pass that when he arrived on Clark Avenue and knocked on the rusted steel door in the alley, Tobias began to weep even before the door was all the way open. Not resist, just weep.

  “This is not necessary,” he said.

  “You understand why I am here,” Thor said.

  “It’s going to be replaced. It was always going to be replaced. Not only that, it was going to be replaced by real money!”

  He was screaming now and though the street was quiet, and had been quiet for years in this particular stretch of the neighborhood, Thor had never cared for noise, and so he pushed Tobias back into the building and let the heavy door slam shut behind them. Inside, the empty space stretched for at least 10,000 square feet and it was lit by a single fluorescent light in the corner where Tobias usually sat. There was an old barber’s chair there, something they’d pulled out of a dumpster because it had seemed amusing to someone at some time, and it was propped up on one side by a cinder block for balance. Beside the chair was a tall table with three ashtrays, all of them full. Tobias didn’t have much to do with his time here; just wait and watch the bags of fake money and consider what could be purchased with them. It was not a job for the weak-willed or the impulsive.

  “Please calm down,” Thor said. Though his voice was always soft it was somehow never calming, a problem he had no idea how to fix. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the voice. “Please. I do not want you to shout.”

  Whatever his voice lacked in calming qualities it made up in instructive impact. People tended to listen. Tobias stopped shouting. He wiped sweat from his face and said, softly, “Sorry, man. It’s just…your fucking eyes.”

  “My eyes?”

  “They just…forget it.”

  “No. Please explain your concern with my eyes.”

  Tobias wiped his face again and said, “They never show anything. I could whisper or I could scream, I could lie or tell the truth, I could beg you or tell you that your mother is a filthy whore, and your eyes wouldn’t change.”

  “I apologize,” Thor said. “I do not know if that is something that is in my control, but I promise you that I will consider it. Now, please sit down. Tell me what happened. I need to understand how it went wrong.”

  After Thor gestured back out of the darkness and into the light, they walked together to the corner of the warehouse.

  “Sit down and tell me why it happened,” Thor said, and Tobias sat in the old barber’s chair, his feet propped up, the only thing missing the smock to keep his clothes clean. Thor did not sit. He was standing in full view of the cameras that had once watched Tobias, but he was aware that the cameras had been turned off. They were alone in a room where once cattle had waited to die. Though it had been many years, the smell of them wasn’t entirely gone.

  Tobias explained, and Thor listened without speaking. There had been financial troubles that weren’t of Tobias’s making, nor even his responsibility — his sister had gotten into a poor romantic relationship, and there had been a domestic quarrel, and she needed money for rent and for the care of Tobias’s nephew, and all of this had been cared for easily by fake dollars in dusty garbage bags. They would be replaced by real dollars.

  “How soon might that happen?” Thor said when Tobias had spent himself of words and the tears on his cheeks had begun to dry.

  “Immediately! Immediately.”

  “Oh?” Thor shifted his head and raised his eyebrows. “That would be useful, certainly. That would be good.”

  “Dainius will understand?”

  “Dainius would like to see the money returned, yes. He will understand that you have returned the dollars that you owe.”

  “Thank you,” Tobias said. “Thank you, thank you.” He reached behind him then, and another man might have tensed, fearing a gun, but Thor did not fear a gun from Tobias, and Thor was always tensed.

  “Tell him I’m sorry,” Tobias was saying as he withdrew a worn leather wallet. “Tell him that it was for her and my baby nephew, not me. It was not money that went up my nose or into my veins. It went to my family. He has my name, you know. She named her baby after me.”

  Thor watched in silence as Tobias emptied his wallet of currency — two $100 bills, six 20s, one 5. Tobias offered them to him.

  “Three hundred and twenty-five dollars,” Thor said, not moving his own hand. “That would seem to be a bit short.”

  “It’s the start. More every week. More every day.”

  Thor didn’t answer. The money floated there between them in a hand that was now shaking.

  “These are real!” Tobias screamed. “Does he not understand that difference! I will pay him back with real money!”

  The shouting again. It had always bothered Thor, one of the reasons he didn’t care to attend concerts or sporting events, and it bothered him even more when the shouts were directed at him, personally.

  “I will tell him and we will see if he agrees with you that there is a marked difference,” he said. He reached out with his right hand then and accepted the bills, and with it, the fingers that held them. When he pulled back, Tobias stumbled forward and by then Thor’s left hand was already flashing up. Long ago he had trained himself to be almost fully ambidextrous; it was the most useful skill that most men ignored. In the left hand was a black Benchmade pocket knife, a fine knife but a small one, with only a four-inch folding blade. It was long enough, though.

  The blade entered Tobias’s throat on the right side and exited on the left and Thor pushed him back and stepped free and the geyser of warm blood made no contact with him. Tobias stumbled backward and reached for his throat as if to close the wound. He fell into the chair upon which he’d sat for so many hours, staring at those bags of fake dollars. There, where countless men had sat trustingly as razors glided over their skin, he died with his eyes on Thor. Thor waited until it was done, and then he pocketed the $325 to return it to Dainius Belov.

  On the drive home, he was troubled by the nephew who had been named after Tobias, and so he sought to purge it from his mind. He turned his thoughts to the tiger cub then, the somersaulting pursuit of the milk bottle, and he smiled.

  * * *

  Thor did not return to the house on Lake Boulevard until the winter of 2012. This time, it was nearly a social call — Belov summoned him to give him a bottle of vodka that had once belonged to a rival in a place far away. It had been this man’s money that provided Thor and Belov with their exit from Russia, and the initial wealth that began to build Belov’s Cleveland empire. Thor had shot the man twice in the forehead as he prepared to open the vodka, and Belov took the bottle before they left, and six weeks later they had been in America.
/>
  Belov had always kept the bottle.

  Now, in the Christmas season of 2012, he wanted to drink from it. It had been a profitable year and his cancer was in remission and his strength was back. He hungered for some gesture of triumph, it seemed, and had chosen this one, and Thor as his partner in the moment.

  “Here is to enduring,” Belov said in his toast, and Thor thought that was well spoken, for it was all that they’d done: They had conquered nothing, they had only endured better than most. They clinked glasses and drank together and Thor looked out of the window at the sparkling lights of the surrounding houses and then he asked after the tiger cub.

  “Where has it gone?” he said. “Because it is surely not in the house.”

  “Wrong, my friend. Wrong.” Belov was smiling when he said it, and then Thor followed his pointing finger and saw for the first time the rug on the white carpet at the base of the stairs. Orange and black stripes. So beautiful.

  “Would you like one?” Belov said. “This version I am sure you can care for!”

  He threw his head back and laughed in the manner that only untouchable men can achieve. Thor, who knew there was no such thing as an untouchable man, did not remember the last time that he had laughed.

  He didn’t now.

  Thor could not take his eyes off the rug. His mouth was dry despite the vodka. The vodka that had once belonged to a man he’d killed. He took another sip and tried to use the burning taste to remind him of that — killing, killing, he had killed men, he had killed many men.

  Still he could not look away from the rug.

  “What?” Belov said, and his tone had soured. Thor took another drink and when he spoke again his voice was steady, as it always was.

  “I could have one?” he said. “I could have a rug like that?”

  “You can have that one, for all I care. Take it.”

  “No. I mean…one of my own.”

  Belov smiled as if he finally understood. “You would like to choose.”

  “There are choices? This is what you are saying?”