St. Petersburg Noir

by Natalia Smirnova

  Although … his gaze latched onto a figure dancing madly in the crashing, colorful gloom. The tall bitch was swinging her mane and slithering to the music like liquid flame. He examined her round ass, narrow waist, and high breasts with approval. When she emerged from the crowd, he walked up and asked for a light.

  “Have a light!” She grinned, holding out a lock of her tousled hair. A rough voice, as if she had cigarette smoke in her throat.

  He smiled. “I’m afraid of burning myself.”

  Her ruffled, bright red hair really did remind him of a bonfire.

  “My name is Anatoly.”

  “Zlata.” She offered a curtsey.

  “You’ll have a drink with me,” he said assertively, and he ordered two daiquiris from the bartender. “I love this swill,” Anatoly added to get the conversation going.

  Zlata squinted her eyes, which held a hint of green, and sloshed her glass with a chuckle.

  Up and down.

  Puffy lips and fat straw.

  Up and down.

  Anatoly swallowed and nearly choked.

  “Did you know that daiquiris are the preferred drink of Havana whores?” she shouted over the club’s din, but the hammers in Anatoly’s ears were drumming too loud.

  “What?”

  She repeated herself. Her hot mouth was now next to his ear. He tried to feel up her bare knee, but she flicked the impertinent hand away.

  Anatoly stared blankly at his glass of yellow liquid. She bubbled with laughter; in the chic ultraviolet, her teeth were blue pearls.

  He felt like hitting her in the face till she bled. She was laughing at him. Him! This close to becoming a deputy in the city parliament! A year away from becoming the second capital’s deputy governor! Yeah, he could always make a call for a girl.

  They’d come. The best were from the massage parlors. Black, white, yellow. Thin, fat, pregnant, whatever. And for free. Hadn’t he once provided them with protection? Just let them whine … But that was low-hanging fruit. It didn’t hang any lower … It was interesting to toy with them, track them down, a trap here, a trap there, bring them to bay, attack … Now that was a hunt. The cleverer the beast, the sweeter the victory.

  Caveman was sweating and grinning. She looked at his large head, meaty ears and cheeks, and red neck—Nozdrev’s spitting image. They were all alike there at the feeding trough: the Russian power breed. An oily little smile and a dash of money grease in his voice.

  “This little skirt of yours … I adore minis,” he said, making eye contact.

  “And I don’t,” she replied. “You know when women’s dresses started getting shorter? After World War I. After all that lead decimated the supply of men, there was competition for the ones left over. Miniskirts were invented after World War II. There’s a man’s death in every millimeter of bared female leg.”

  “Gothic,” Anatoly attempted to recall the young people’s slang.

  “No. But I know where it really is gothic.” She held out a shiny key.

  “What’s this?”

  “Have you heard, the Dostoevsky Museum opened an offsite exhibit?”

  “A museum?” Anatoly felt himself tuning out.

  “An offsite exhibit from the torture chamber”—she smiled broadly—“like at the Peter and Paul Fortress, only more naturalistic. I lead tours there, and the guard is my good friend. Sometimes I get the keys from him for the night. When I really want to let my feelings go”—Zlata shot a glance at him and gazed down—“and my body.”

  The bitch was a little twisted. All the better. They say redheads are hurricanes in bed. We’ll just see about that today … He thought it over briefly and beamed the best smile in his collection.

  “I have an idea!” he said, a little too enthusiastically.

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m inviting you to dinner. Dinner in a torture chamber. Sound good?” He snuck a glance at himself in the mirror and was satisfied. “You provide the key. I’ll take care of the rest …”

  She hesitated a moment before answering.

  “What are you blushing about?” he cackled.

  “Fact: redheads blush very easily.”

  Anatoly had a hard time restraining the urge to lunge and throw her down right on the table, sweep the glasses aside with a crash, and … Settle down … What’s that the Arabs say? Anticipation whets the appetite.

  She finally nodded. “Okay.”

  * * *

  A gold-toothed Tajik in a rusty Lada 6 picked them up and drove them down Petersburg’s deserted night roads. Anatoly couldn’t take his eyes off her, while Zlata gazed out the window at the underlit hulks of the old buildings flashing by and smiled at something.

  “Charming little spot!” he said when the metal lock clanged behind him. Swaying, he walked through the narrow slit of a door. “What stinks?”

  “Ethyl alcohol. The very impressionable start feeling bad and they have to be brought out of their Turgenevan faint. A little alcohol-soaked cotton wool under their nose—and they’re good.”

  The museum lobby greeted them with an enormous plaster executioner with a beard. An ax gleamed in the hands of the red-smocked man. Anatoly playfully touched the steel with his finger. Dull.

  Zlata flipped the switch in the first hall. A thin yellow light bathed the predatory exhibits, which had frozen piranha-like behind the display glass. Anatoly thought some of them may even have stirred impatiently. He felt a chill, ran his palm across his forehead, and burst out laughing.

  “Hello!” Anatoly amiably flicked the nose of a mannequin nicely set on a spike and spotted with stage blood. It didn’t answer, and Anatoly laughed even louder. His head was spinning pleasantly from the adventure and the daiquiris.

  “Where’s our food?” She walked over to a prep table where a broad hatchet had been wedged in a corner. “I propose we raise our glasses.”

  “You really are something!” Anatoly gave her a slap on her rear and immediately received a jab in the chest in return.

  “Remember your manners, boy.”

  “Of course, of course!”

  He raised his hands in jest and pulled out a flask he’d bought at the bar.

  “Are we going to have a tour?” Anatoly winked, splashing them fresh drinks.

  “All night long,” Zlata responded.

  “It’s beautiful,” Anatoly clumsily changed tactics.

  The young woman frowned. Zlata was getting noticeably drunk. It’s time, Anatoly thought, as he always did in these instances. I’ll lay her out right on this table, next to the shiny hatchet, and I’ll watch the nervy bitch squirm naked in the broad blade, bellowing with pleasure …

  He had trouble pulling off the Hugo that crackled under his arms and tried to free the Versace over his tightly belted belly.

  “Easy now, wild man.” She grinned. “Take your seat in the audience. Have you ever seen a striptease in a torture chamber?”

  Anatoly jokingly folded his sweaty palms into a submissive stack on his chest.

  “Oh no.” She wagged her finger at him and undid the top three buttons of his checked shirt. “That’s not how to get me off.”

  “Then how?” Anatoly took a deep breath.

  She pulled him by his tie toward the wooden beams.

  “This hand here, this one here … your head like this … Fine …”

  He was on his knees with his hands poking through the rough openings in the timber walls and his head held by the neck a little higher. His wrists were firmly gripped by thick leather straps.

  “Begin!” Anatoly commanded.

  She bit her lip and slowly freed her taut white breasts from her shirt. Her small pink nipples stared at Anatoly, making him moan in anticipation.

  “See?” she said with a quick intake of breath, moving nearer.

  “Yes …”

  “Look closer,” she whispered in his ear. “This is the last time you’re ever going to see these tits. Or any others.”

  Her knee crunched into the
man’s jaw and his drunk vanished. A completely sober Anatoly understood. The torture chamber’s walls started closing in like a frightened sphincter, and the bloody tattooed mannequin opened its eyes, raised its head, and laughed a plastic chuckle. Anatoly spat out a tooth and shouted, and she immediately slapped tape across his smeared mouth.

  Zlata glanced at the platinum face on his left wrist.

  “It’s midnight, the witching hour! It’s time!” she proclaimed. She tore off his shirt and deftly lowered his trousers and boxers, turning his hairy butt toward the dim museum lamp. She examined her victim critically.

  “Honored ladies and gentlemen!” she announced to the mannequins frozen in eternal convulsions at the back of the hall. “Witches and warlocks! Brothers and sisters! Before you is a fellow seeker of justice in the lynching court of Anatoly Nikolaevich Kvadrat. A leader in making campaign faces for his deputy portfolio, a model family man, yesterday’s athlete, today’s bard, blah blah blah. My God, how tedious! Much more interesting is his unofficial dossier and the way it stinks …” She gave a loud laugh. “We will accompany this with color illustrations. Especially since our ward, as his last wish, expressed an interest in a brief excursion into the history of executions and torture.”

  The witch walked up to the display glass, which was crowded with exhibits that from a distance resembled a surgeon’s timedarkened instruments.

  “Am I right, Tolya, that you left the Young Communist Workers to join the Democrats? An old dog doesn’t give up its bone easily, huh? You wouldn’t surrender your power just like that … Did the budget cut you out? Honestly, did it? I know it did …” She was concentrating on smearing a black marker across a small steel object that was quite frightening to Anatoly at the present moment.

  “And so, the time has come to become acquainted with the first item in our exhibit.” She walked slowly toward the naked man. He made a muffled sound and shook his head.

  “The brand! The prototype of the prison tattoo!” she exclaimed, and energetically pressed into Anatoly’s sweat-shiny forehead something resembling a large razor with a studded plate on one end. He screamed under the tape and his legs started squirming again.

  “Exactly the same principle. Studs with alcohol-based paint are driven under the convict’s skin. The most widespread brand in Russia was a word.” She took a compact mirror from her bag and brought it up to her victim’s pale face.

  He read the inscription in the drops of blood emerging on his forehead: THIEF.

  He bellowed and jerked but soon tired and coughed muffledly. His bugged-out eyes followed her every movement.

  “Scared, Tolenka? Desperate? Don’t be. You don’t know what that is. Despair is when you’re young and healthy and you don’t want to live. Because you work ten jobs and can’t buy a friggin’ corner to lay your head down. And do you know what it is to be the lowest trash? The lowest educated trash with honest, educated parents who are also the lowest trash? You don’t know, bitch. Guys like you don’t know, but now you’re caught and you’re going to answer and pay for everyone’s sins, and more than likely this will be the sole beautiful act in your whole fat, pointless life …

  “The knout!” She took a leather lash off the wall. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and quoted in a sing-song, “For his first pilfering the guilty man was sentenced to punishment by the knout and loss of his left ear … Pilfering is stealing, and this is how it was punished under canon law in the seventeenth century. Now this is going to hurt a little …”

  She flicked the knout and a frisson of terror passed through Anatoly’s body. He squealed and jerked. The straps held him tight.

  After the tenth lash she threw the knout in the corner and did a few exercises, trying not to breathe hard. She was flushed and under her tousled hair her eyes shone with dilated pupils.

  “Ivan the Terrible came up with a curious method of punishment for those who had absconded with the state treasury,” Zlata said. “As a man of power with a Swiss bank account, Tolya, this should interest you. The czar hung the embezzler of state funds upside down, brought in his relatives, and made them watch the paterfamilias be sawed in half with an ordinary rope. It took a long time, a very long time.”

  She burst out laughing again, sweeping a few fiery locks off her damp forehead.

  “One other item in our exhibit has a simple, boring name, the ‘pear’”—Zlata moved on to the next display case—“but sometimes an executioner could make silent heroes quiver at the mere mention of it. Pay attention. There were pears to be introduced into the mouth and the rectum, and there were vaginal pears. As we know, what makes man different from an animal is his abstract thinking and his ability to create.”

  She came up close to Anatoly, playing with a device that resembled a metal beetle whose belly was decorated with a large screw.

  “Upon being introduced into a person’s natural orifice, the pear opens up with the help of the screw mechanism. Just like an iron flower opening its daisy petals. The internal organs pop like balloons. And you know who the first people who used the anal pear were? Lovers of small boys …”

  She raised her voice, again addressing the silent mannequins: “And who would have thought, honored gentlemen, that this model family man, the father of two children, by the way, and this close to becoming a legislator … It’s shameful, Tolik, how painstakingly you’ve hidden from the electorate your love for little-boy ass …”

  He closed his eyes. Somehow this witch knows everything about me. Everything … She’s insane, truly off her rocker, and that means she’s capable … of anything. But what exactly? What did I ever do to her? What? …

  A deadly anguish turned his arms and legs to cotton. Anatoly shuddered a few times on the floor and fell quiet. The pear lay there beside him.

  “Adultery is a mortal sin,” the witch sang out, “but death by pear sometimes comes too quickly. Therefore, we’ll leave the fruit for dessert.”

  She busied herself with something at another display, then walked up to Anatoly and disdainfully touched his small, shriveled member with the tip of her shoe. A blade resembling a table knife gleamed dully in her hand.

  “Spousal betrayal, Tolya, was punished mercilessly, regardless of the defendant’s regalia. I also heard that before you were in state service you used to traffic in young girls, right? So you see, the same fate awaited procurers. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Plain old castration. Point of fact: as autopsies of eunuchs’ corpses have shown, the castrate’s cock was small and underdeveloped. The hair on his body was sparse and absent altogether from his limbs and anus. There was almost no hair in the armpits or on the genitalia.” Suddenly, she winked. “But if they got to you younger, castration might help preserve your luxurious head of hair. The hair on eunuchs’ heads grows beautifully. But now, alas, it’s too late.”

  The knife clattered next to the metal pear. Anatoly whimpered, slowly shaking his head.

  “I’m tired,” she confided, resting her hand on his big head, “but you and I will be done soon. How would you like to conclude our graphic tour, after the practical part is over, with our trial of the pear and a couple of other things? The stake? The noose? The ax? Forgive me, the axes here are props, so we have at our disposal only two options. Although, wait … I’ve got an idea of how we can combine it all! We’ll start with impaling. Look what I have here! Every bit as good as a spike.”

  The candidate for deputy looked with horror at the fat black dildo in her fingers. Zlata took her time pulling out a tube of lubricant and squeezed a generous stream on the plastic.

  “You now have a real chance of finding out what Havana whores experience in their thankless work … Don’t squirm, please. You’re making it hard for me … There we go …”

  A muffled squeal ripped from under the bloodied tape.

  * * *

  “Hello, Stas? The deed is done. Where we agreed … Yeah, he’s lying there half-dead. Awaiting his promised death … Yes. Gather those hacks of yours, t
he TV guys, and any other gawkers you can find, and hurry over to the scene of the crime. You’ve got the duplicate key and the cash as agreed?”

  She turned off her cell phone and pulled out the battery and SIM card. She locked the museum door, turned her face into the cold night wind, and dove into the dark alleys.

  The order had been fulfilled: one down. He was a candidate—and now he was fucked. Not a bad performance. That monster was going to be sinning on the down-low now. It had been worked out so precisely. True, it was too bad about the bribed museum guard. On the other hand, why sell yourself out for a case of vodka? That’s cheap … And now he was going to be looking for you. A wild goose chase. Hah! I’m hard to track down; I never repeat myself. Never. Remember that, my fine friends. Past and future candidates …

  She came out on a small square by the favorite church of Rodion Raskolnikov’s father. She stopped, looking at the cupolas’ black kernels hovering above the earth. Their crosses scratched the night’s low clouds, but you couldn’t hear them sliding across the dark sky. She shut her eyes and listened closely, just like when she was a child and someone seemed to be walking around up there, in the sky. All you have to do is squint and be perfectly still—and you’ll hear steps …

  It was quiet in the sky. She chuckled and opened her eyes. She had to get out of town and be quick about it. She could milk the cash she’d made for a good six months—until the next election. Somewhere in the Far East. Or Kostroma. Oh, fuck it.

  The fact is, everyone makes a living as best he can.

  Your work should bring you satisfaction.

  PART II

  A WATERY GRAVE

  PEAU DE CHAGRIN

  NATALIA KURCHATOVA & KSENIA VENGLINSKAYA

  Rybatskoye

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  This story began when Kolyan, who lived in a redbrick house right under the Vantovy Bridge, found out that the homeless little towhead by the Rybatskoye metro station, where mainly unemployed punks, gypsies, and profiteers collected, was his own daughter Shurka.