The Boy from Reactor 4

by Orest Stelmach

  She placed the package on the table and pulled an index card from an inside jacket pocket. She read from the card in Russian, not Ukrainian:

  The mind withers in the wind.

  A thief grows old.

  Time to retire and reflect,

  And rob and steal.

  “S Dniom Rozdenija,” she said, wishing him happy birthday. “From Ilya Milanovich and the Bratsky Krug.”

  The Circle of Brothers. The twenty most senior former Soviet bloc criminals in the world. Most of them were Russian, while he was Ukrainian, so they would always be extra wary of each other. Still, it was a classy move on their part. Victor closed his eyes and let her words hang in the air for a few seconds, nodding with appreciation.

  “Thank you. It is good to be remembered by old friends, especially when they are oceans away.” He pointed toward the vodka. “Let’s have a drink. But first, tell me a little bit about yourself.”

  The courier put her left hand on her hip and thrust it to one side. Victor felt a slight stirring in his groin he hadn’t experienced for months. Victor knew she wasn’t part of his birthday gift, but he was certainly willing to play along. She circled around and sat on the desk facing him, legs spread wide. Victor caught a whiff of orange blossoms, violet, and tobacco.

  She nudged her right shoe off with her left one. It thumped to the floor. Her toes were snuggled in panty hose. She slid them onto his crotch and extended her right hand toward him, palm down. Tattoos. The kind earned in a Russian or Ukrainian prison. And in the outside world as a reward for criminal achievements and loyalty. They told a person’s life story in pictures.

  Victor put on his reading glasses and studied the tattoos in the center of her hand in a clockwise fashion.

  A circle with a bull’s-eye in the middle. “You grew up an orphan. You spent time in the Round Stone, an educational labor colony.” Her toes massaged him. “They taught you well.”

  A sickle with a stake driven through it. “You began stealing out of hunger during your Soviet life.”

  Five bold dots: four watchtowers and a convict. Prison. “You’ve been through the Crosses.”

  A little girl clinging to a goose flying through the air. “You are a single mother.” She pressed harder with her toes. “You know when to put your foot down.”

  The word OMYT in bold letters. Russian for “whirlpool.” “It’s hard for a man to get away from you once he’s in your clutches.” Victor closed his eyes for a moment and savored the pleasure. “Why would he want to?”

  He shifted his attention to her knuckles. If she was known in the criminal world by a certain name, this is where it would be spelled out. He read the letters on four fingers just above the nail.

  “Puma,” he said.

  She pulled her foot back and dropped it to the floor.

  “No. Don’t stop—”

  Puma hissed and flashed two more tattoos on the back of her other hand.

  A leopard grinned with its mouth open, gun in its left paw and knife in its right. “Death to bitches and traitors,” Victor said, breathless.

  Puma snarled. “When you’re a woman, men search your breasts real careful…”

  An X beside three skulls and crossbones: An executioner. A hit man.

  “But no one ever pats down the forearms,” she said.

  She snapped her arms out and made a cross with her body. Small black revolvers sprang into her palms from under her jacket.

  “Your cousin, Kirilo, sends you birthday greetings from Kyiv. He says to tell you your father was a bitch.” Puma turned her guns on Victor. “Death to bitches and their sons.”

  “Anya,” Victor said, barely managing to get the name out in time.

  She froze.

  Victor tapped the manila folder. “I have pictures of Anya.”

  Puma’s lips parted with astonishment, flashing the promise of yellow-and-black teeth.

  “Would you like to see some pictures of your beautiful daughter? Playing an hour ago in Shevchenko Park?”

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN NADIA GOT home to her apartment on East Eighty-Second Street at 11:55 p.m., she bolted the door and called the doorman to make sure he remembered: “No visitors under any circumstances.”

  Water dripped from her clothes and pooled at her feet. She went straight to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of Mount Eden chardonnay. Crystal trembling in her hand, she downed a glass of the buttery anesthetic in two takes. She poured another one and took it with her into a hot, steaming bath.

  After a forty-five-minute soak, Nadia showered, washed her hair, and wrapped it in a towel. She lay down in bed to rest her eyes for fifteen minutes and woke up two hours later. She dried her hair, slipped into her favorite pajamas (the ones with the pink gorillas), and ordered a succotash of green beans and corn from Gracie’s Diner.

  While waiting for her dinner to arrive, Nadia studied Internet search results for Andrew Steen. Google had 2.4 million hits for such a spelling. Another 815,000 if she spelled it “Stene.” That was over 3.2 million matches for the two most likely spellings alone.

  Find Damian…Find Andrew Steen.

  As Nadia’s mind drifted, her eyes scanned the amethyst sticky notes taped to the border of her iMac: call Marko, mail COBRA payment, call Mama (that one was so old the color had faded to lavender), schedule lunch with Johnny Tanner, Milan’s phone number—

  Nadia grabbed her cell phone and tapped the digits into the keypad.

  “The number you have dialed is out of service.”

  She sank back in her chair. It was probably a prepaid phone.

  When her godfather was murdered a year ago, Nadia returned home to Connecticut for his funeral. She grew up in an insular Ukrainian community. Her parents were immigrants. Although she was born in Hartford, Nadia went to kindergarten speaking only Ukrainian. She went to Uke school twice a week for seventeen years and even served as an altar girl at the Ukrainian Catholic Church. In fact, that was her nickname in the community. The “Altar Girl.” Her parents put enormous pressure on her to be a good Ukrainian American and a superior student in both schools. Once she left for college at Colgate, she never came back until the funeral.

  The deeper she dug into her godfather’s killing, the more she realized she never really knew the Ukrainian American people she had grown up with. Among them was her father, the scowling and screaming family man who seemed to hate every minute of his life. He died when Nadia was thirteen, before she ever had a chance to ask him about the source of his perpetual discontent.

  Her investigation put her life in jeopardy. Nadia uncovered a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring for priceless icons and relics from Ukraine and solved her godfather’s murder. The FBI shut down the ring and arrested the killer, a childhood friend of Nadia’s. The event was reported in local papers. People in the Uke community knew who she was now. Milan must have heard about her exploits. He must have assumed she was a proven troubleshooter of some kind, and now he was probably dead.

  Millions of dollars. Those were Milan’s words. His shooting and abduction off the street implied they might be true. Nadia’s savings were running out. It didn’t matter if Milan was referring to a pot of cash or an object of value.

  She had to find out more, and she knew who had the answers.

  CHAPTER 8

  PUMA SAT SOBBING quietly in a chair. Her twin revolvers lay unloaded beside the pictures of her daughter on the desk. Victor rubbed her shoulder as he circled around her like a nurse comforting a terminal patient.

  “There, there,” he said. “It’s not your fault. I had my suspicions when an old friend from the Bratsky Krug called to tell me they were sending you with a special package. I thought you might be working for my cousin. But I wasn’t sure until the guns appeared in your hands.” Victor pointed to the package she’d brought. “Is that for me?”

  She nodded.

  “May I?”

  He didn’t wait for her to answer before removing the paper. In the framed photograph,
Victor stood posing beside two members of the Krug in front of a three-story cinder block building. The grim looks on their emaciated faces told their story.

  “Brygidki,” Victor said, holding the picture for her to see. “It used to be a nunnery in Lviv until the NKVD—the secret police under Stalin—took over. I did seven years for stealing a shipment of grain. One day, the NKVD took a local priest and crucified him for giving a sermon in the underground church before Christmas. They nailed him to a wall. Cut a hole in his stomach while he was still alive and put a dead fetus in it.”

  Puma looked away, fresh tears flowing.

  Victor scowled. “Why are you crying?”

  “Anya. My daughter. She is sick. That’s why I took this job.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She has trouble swallowing and breathing. She needs thyroid surgery, or she will die.”

  “I see.”

  “Her father was a liquidator in Chernobyl. He bulldozed cars, trucks, and ambulances under the ground so the nuclear particles on top of them wouldn’t blow to Kyiv. They told us not to have children…but…these pictures of Anya…How did you get them?”

  Victor glanced at the snapshots of a sad, malnourished girl playing on a swing with a babushka. “They were taken by the sons of an old friend of mine—twins, to be exact—and sent by computer. Young people. They know all about these things.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She is wherever her grandmother has taken her. No one has touched her. And no one will.”

  “She won’t be hurt?”

  “Not only won’t she be hurt, I’ll arrange for her to have her surgery at the best facility in Kyiv, where they are experts on this disease. You have my word as a thief.”

  Puma regarded Victor with disbelief. “You would do that? You would pay for my Anya’s surgery?”

  “Yes.”

  Puma’s eyes sparkled. She raised Victor’s hand to her lips, but he pulled it away before she could kiss it.

  Victor squeezed her shoulder. “It’s time.”

  She blanched. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Victor opened the door. Stefan and two of his men came in. Stefan saw the guns on the table. He looked at Victor, the guns, Puma, and back to Victor again. They stared at each other without saying a word.

  Stefan ordered his men to take Puma away. Victor nodded his head with approval as she left with the stoic expression of a true thief.

  Stefan closed the door behind them. He walked over to Victor’s prized possession, the only painting in the room. A dove fluttered in the palm of a maiden dressed in a colorful peasant shirt as she danced in a field of wheat. The deceased artist, Edward Kozak, had arrived in New York on the same boat as Victor.

  “The maiden and the dove, the dove and the maiden,” Stefan said. “I love them so.”

  “Me too. Especially since that appraiser said it’s worth a hundred thousand.” Victor told him about the surgery for Puma’s daughter. “Find out how much it will cost. Then call Milanovich in Moscow and ask him for a loan.”

  Stefan nodded at the painting. “You could sell…”

  “Never. I’d rather die. Make the call.”

  “We have no money, and now you’re going into debt with Moscow for sentimental reasons. You’re scaring me. I think you’re going senile and maybe I should leave you.”

  “The day I stop scaring you is the day you should leave me.”

  “We both have to truly believe the money situation is hopeless. Only then will we get a windfall.”

  “Hopeless? By God, you are going senile. Why?”

  “Because the greatest opportunities present themselves when all hope is lost. Now, I have to go,” Victor said, reaching for the beret and coat on the corner hanger. “I’m late for my chess match in the park.”

  CHAPTER 9

  NADIA JUMPED IN a taxi on Sunday morning and arrived at St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church on Seventh Street at 10:00 a.m. When she got her job on Wall Street, she stopped practicing her religion, which is to say she changed her affiliation to the greenback. Sundays were for sleeping in after six consecutive twelve-hour days. Once she lost her job, however, Nadia started attending Mass regularly again, just like all the other pathetic people who worshipped only in times of need. The self-loathing this inspired was exceeded by the tranquility provided by her childhood sanctuary. She was learning to forgive herself. For losing her job, being childless, and living alone.

  After the liturgy, Nadia stayed alert to her surroundings. An ethnically diverse crowd mixed beneath the warm sun on Second Avenue. Some headed to church in jeans, others to brunch in their Sunday best. The street teemed with pedestrians. No one could harm her without drawing attention to himself.

  At Veselka on Second and Ninth Street, Nadia sat with her back to a wall, facing the entry to the Ukrainian soul food restaurant. She ate a plate of cheese-and-potato dumplings called vareniky and nursed a second cup of coffee until 1:00 p.m., when the Duma bookstore opened.

  Paul Obon beamed when he saw Nadia and shook her hand with both of his. He was the living incarnation of the Monopoly Man, with a single strand of gray hair atop his bald head. He smelled of old books and rolled around the nooks and crannies of his cramped store with unfettered zeal.

  “How did your meeting with Milan go?” he said.

  Nadia had called Obon before meeting Milan, to confirm he was a legitimate member of the community.

  “Fine,” Nadia said. “Have you seen him today?”

  “Who, Milan?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Why? Didn’t you get along?”

  “Oh, yes. No, everything was fine. Just fine. I was wondering…Do you have a minute to talk?”

  “Of course. I have some books that need protection. Would you mind helping?”

  “My pleasure.”

  They moved to a small table in the center of the room. A neat stack of old books sat beside a box of plastic book covers. Obon folded a sheet of plastic to fit the binding of the first book.

  Nadia said, “Does the name Damian mean anything to you?”

  “Damian. A fine name. Parents don’t choose it enough. Greek origin. Divine power. Fate.”

  “No. I mean, is there a Damian in the community here?”

  He slipped the front book cover into the plastic sleeve he’d created and paused. “Damian…Damian…No, I don’t think so.”

  “Hmm. What about people you deal with outside New York? Anyone well-known in the broader Ukrainian American community by that name?”

  He gave it some more thought and shook his head. “No. It’s an unusual given name, and I’m sure I’d remember anyone who answered to it. Why do you ask?”

  He finished covering the first book and asked Nadia to put it in a glass-enclosed bookcase. The Minstrel, by Taras Shevchenko. Poet laureate, exiled for nationalism by the Soviet government.

  “I overheard the name in a conversation between two people on the street,” Nadia said.

  Obon studied the binding of the next book. “That sounds mysterious, Nadia. Of course, there was the infamous Damian, well-known in less savory circles, but I’m sure you’re not referring to him.”

  Nadia’s ears perked up. “Really. Tell me anyways. Why less savory circles?”

  “Because he was a vor.”

  “A vor?”

  “A member of Vorskoi Mir,” he said in Russian. He switched back to Ukrainian. “‘The Thieves’ World.’”

  “Ukrainian and Russian mafiya?” Nadia said.

  “If you are thinking of the crime groups that are popular in the press and films—Range Rovers, mansions, villas, and big-haired blondes—no. That is the avtoritet. ‘The authority.’ They are a younger generation defined by the pursuit of material wealth and consumption.”

  He handed Nadia the second book. Boa Constrictor, by Ivan Franko. Jailed by the Soviet government for arguing Marxism was a religion of hatred.

/>   “The vor is something entirely different,” Obon said as he began work on a third. “The literal translation of Vory v Zakony is ‘thieves with a common law.’ A loose organization of criminals that have their own set of social norms. Vory v Zakony was formed in prisons in 1682 under Peter the Great. Their members swear allegiance to an austere code of ethics. They cannot marry, have families, hold jobs, or assist the government in any way. Their stature is depicted by tattoos on their bodies. Earned in and outside of prison. They were traditionally known for their anti-materialistic behavior. Sometimes they gave back to the poor in their communities. Like Robin Hood. Most vory were vicious, but some less so. Some were held in such high regard they resolved community disputes in private courtrooms.”

  “Vory v Zakony still exist today?”

  “Yes, but their numbers are dwindling. It’s old-school. Once the Soviet Union fell apart and capitalism came to Russia, allegiances among criminals went out the window. Young people just don’t care about the old traditions. It’s the same in prison as it is on the streets. Also, many vory died in the Bitches War in the 1950s.”

  “The what?”

  “The Bitches War. Stalin drafted criminals during World War II. Some vory left prison and fought for their homeland. When they returned to jail after the war, their former cellmates dubbed them ‘bitches’ for helping the government. The Bitches War broke out. Stalin encouraged it, hoping they’d all kill each other. But they didn’t. The bitches perished, the true vory survived.”

  “And they’re in this country? In the United States?”

  “They’re scattered everywhere. Estimates I’ve read, maybe five hundred to a thousand true vory left. Power is based on money, weapons, and willpower. The young avtoritet with global reach and connections have no interest in the old ways. A few vory did well during perestroika, abandoned their oath, and became avtoritet themselves. But for the most part, the only place where vory remain powerful is in prison.”