The ancient two-lane blacktop disintegrated into bitumite before surrendering, at last, to reddish gravel. The gravel road pressed up the elevated thighs of the range, testing the old Bronco's gears, the doors and hood and windshield splashed with mud against which the wipers could barely compete.
Sergei eased the brake, shifted into park, and pulled the key from the ignition. The key was a simple silver key, no lights, no buttons for locks or alarms. You lost it, you walked. He drew one finger along the dash, which was grey with the previous owner's cigarette ash. Best thousand dollars I ever spent. He climbed out of the battered Bronco and stretched.
Sergei Kostyn possessed a flat, wide face, sooty hair, and Slavic eyes, the classic look of Old Moscow, where his lineage went back to the time of Ivan the Terrible, perhaps even further. Thin and muscular, Sergei felt at home in old denim, and his heavy boots and callused hands made him look like he belonged here.
But he did not belong here.
The silence of the woods blanketed the road. The trees were monstrous and close, and the air felt cold. Sergei pulled an Oh Henry!from his pocket, devoured the bar, then neatly flattened and folded the yellow wrapper and placed it in his pocket. He drew the Glock 9mm from the other inside pocket of his jacket. Oiled. Smooth. Black. He'd traded ten stolen game jerseys for the pistol. Sergei touched his thumb to the muzzle, where it left a smudge of soot on his curlicues. The Glock had recently been fired.
He left the Bronco and padded into the deep green of the rain forest, stepping so carefully an observer would think he was walking through a minefield. Whitish twigs snagged his clothes and scrabbled like claws toward his cheeks. The ancient trunks creaked. A spongy squash rose up from the moss with every hesitant step.
By the time he reached the edge of a sheer inland cliff, he was shivering. All the river valley and the body of the Pacific Range exploded before him in a panorama of giants. It could have been Romania, or Norway, or Patagonia. But it wasn't. It was British Columbia, 100 kilometers northwest of Pemberton. Sergei was running out of options, out of time, and out of map.
Hard to believe, he thought, Icame to this country to play hockey.
He stared. The misty mountains stared back. The sheer cliff face plummeted beneath his feet in an ugly Precambrian scar.
As he turned to leave, a sound touched his ears—a rhythmic beating that bounced amongst the hills. Sergei scanned the landscape, squinting, and then he spied it. Small and fast. A helicopter. They were looking for him.
He pulled out his cell phone and tossed it over the cliff, then began to maneuver his way back to the Bronco. North was Alaska. South, Washington. East was the high Rockies and west the ocean.
That's the problem with mountains, Sergei thought. A million places to hide. Nowhere to run.
* * * *
It would be dark soon but there was no way he could risk headlights. A damp chill set in amongst the trees and the goldenrod. He thought he heard a wolf howl, but maybe it was his imagination.
Sergei set off in four-wheel drive toward the abandoned work camp. The gravel road wound higher through the oppressive B.C. woods.
Around him Sergei could see tire ruts and tread marks and footprints and animal tracks. At the abandoned camp the gravel road became a logging road, all mud and puddles and cigarette butts. The camp—vacant windows, rusting roofs—noticed the Bronco as it passed. Maybe, it whispered, you will be reclaimed by nature, just like me. The camp made Sergei sad. A piece of history . . . lost.
No, spoke another voice, history is never lost. Only camouflaged.
After the work camp the tire tracks disappeared and the Bronco bounced through the muck like its namesake. Sergei grew seasick from all the movement.
When the logging road surrendered to a slim cart track the human footprints, too, disappeared. It was dusk. The sky was silver with mist. The radio didn't work and neither did the heater.
Sergei tapped the lump in his denim jacket once again and thought of how all of this had happened. There was, he had learned, a civilization in nature. And, too, there were wolves among men.
* * * *
Twenty-second overall. That was how Sergei Kostyn had been drafted, in 2008, by the L.A. Kings, then traded to the Vancouver Canucks. The embassy hand-delivered his visa. The team deposited a million dollars into his bank account. He flew to Vancouver first class on KLM. Canadians didn't mess around when it came to professional hockey.
Russians didn't mess around when it came to making money.
Sergei was barely in Canada a month when he was contacted by an emigré social committee: the Winter Palace Friendship Club. It was a front, of course. During Stalin, the club would have been involved in espionage. Today, crime. Tomorrow, who knew? Sergei went to their hall, laughed at their jokes, played their dominoes, sipped their vodka. He quickly discovered theirs was more than a committee, it was a network. The Winter Palace had friends at the airport, relatives who were border guards, contacts on all the Native reserves along the west coast, bus drivers for Greyhound, stewards on the ferries, and entire crews on crab boats who went far into the Bering Sea, sometimes too far.
“One small favour,” the man had asked, and he smiled like a salamander in his Italian suit as they drank Slivovitz at a café on Knox Avenue as though it were Odessa and not Vancouver.
“But I only play hockey,” Sergei resisted.
The man in the Italian suit reclined. “In our lives . . . we do many things that are one thing.” Then he had spread his hands and smiled apologetically, as if there was nothing else to be done.
It was a package. Destined for a team trainer who spoke Vietnamese. Sergei knew it was drugs. Five pounds of marijuana, a few other goodies. The teams are a ripe market, the trainer blabbed, for everything from steroids for the rookies to Viagra for the coach. But mostly weed.
Over the course of the winter, Sergei Kostyn became a power forward and a courier. Teammates kept him at a distance. The Winter Palace demanded more and more favours. Unsavoury characters in black leather coats began to linger around the rink. There were incidents. An expensive Audi had its tires slashed. The fiancée of the arena security chief was beat to a pulp on her way home from work. The Vietnamese trainer quit unexpectedly, then disappeared. Eventually, the owners had enough. Better to ship trouble off than deal with it. Sergei got a pink slip. Unconditional release. He'd heard of players, prominent players, dogged by mobsters and banished back to Russia—Bure, Yashin, others—but Sergei never dreamed it would happen to him.
He shook his head, smiling grimly, and accelerated up the overgrown cart track at a suicidal speed, the old Ford motor screaming like a senior citizen forced to lift weights. The Winter Palace had underestimated him. Just because they lived in North America didn't mean Sergei Kostyn wasn't as Russian as they were, so Sergei thought with the mind of a Tsar and acted with the temper of a Cossack. The man with the Italian suit showed up at his condo grinning like a jackal. Sergei beat him to death with a fiberglass hockey stick. He broke into the city's biggest grow-op and released five gallons of Roundup. He rammed his Escalade into the foyer of the Winter Palace hall and lit the gas tank with the Glock. Then he bought the Bronco and ran.
And they were looking for him.
A tremendous jolt snapped Sergei out of his reflection and he realized it was twilight and that he was no longer on the track because there was no track.
He stopped the Bronco and got out. A wide, marshy meadow, bordered by sentinel hemlock, surrounded him. The white mist that had hovered over the mountaintop was now hovering over Sergei. Unfolding a tattered map, he found the logging road, and the cart track, but nothing more. His finger traced off the edge of the paper.
“Here there be monsters,” Sergei whispered.
Far above, or far below, the helicopter went on beating. Searching. Waiting for a headlight, a campfire. Anything.
Sergei knew he couldn't stay. You're on the run, he thought. So run.
He buttoned his denim jacket and en
tered the steep forest on foot. It was true, the past didn't ever die. It slept, it hid, it blended in with its surroundings, but it never truly went away. The past cast a shadow, owned a taste and a smell. The past, Sergei sensed, lay all around him, large as a mountain.
The promising Russian forward, clammy beneath his clothes, wove through the saplings and the tree trunks, disappearing up the incline into the Pacific forest gloom. He was trying to climb away from something that could not be outrun. Sergei Kostyn's entire life up to that point suddenly condensed. Missed opportunities and wrong turns. Hesitant choices and broken promises. Bad people, bad timing, and bad luck. All of it hovered over him. All of it lay across his shoulders like a backpack nuke whose timer was counting down to zero.
* * * *
The high-elevation forest was an obstacle course where a broken ankle waited around every turn. Sergei sweated. His breath came in ragged chops despite an athlete's lungs. In the blank and starless sky, the helicopter continued to buzz.
Christ, how much fuel could one chopper carry? Then Sergei understood: There was more than one. Perhaps two or three, working in shifts. They must really want him. He must have pissed off the Winter Palace in a serious way.
Out of nowhere, a branch, sharp as talons. It missed his eyeball by a millimeter. Sergei grunted and spun and fell to the ground, instantly wet. The moment his body hit the moss, a tsunami of exhaustion rolled over him, the most profound wave of fatigue he had ever experienced. All the jetlag, all the hangovers, all the early-morning practices and late-night drills rolled into a ball couldn't compare. Going to sleep and dying on this cold Canadian mountain suddenly seemed like not a bad thing after all.
Then, blinking, Sergei saw it through the alpine fir. A campfire. And a shadow.
* * * *
Sergei could see an orange fire dancing upon a circular stockade of ponderosa pine. The flames themselves were ballet dancers whose fragrant smoke carried swirling sparks skyward into the branches. Every now and then a burning log cracked. The clearing gave up the aromas of dried needles and boiled berries and charred game.
Around the campfire, a solitary figure moved, slowly and deliberately, as if he was very sore or very old or both. The figure, even at a distance, appeared thin, almost malnourished, and its limbs swayed as if they too were brittle branches concluding in tiny twigs. The figure wore a cloth cap with a short peak, a sort of tunic covered in patches, and leggings that came up to the knees.
Despite the strange scene, Sergei could no longer fight his heavy eyes.
Number 50 slept.
* * * *
Sergei Kostyn awoke in a panic. The helicopter was loud, and close.
He rose, drawing the Glock, and staggered into the encampment like a zombie. The Winter Palace, no doubt, had zeroed in on the campfire. From above, in the black range, it must have appeared as a beacon, calling out Sergei's mistakes, welcoming his past to exact an easy revenge.
The mysterious old man was nowhere to be seen. Only his clutter. Sergei believed he had stumbled into the home of a hermit and, despite the peril, a waterfall of envy poured over him. What a blessed life. What an escape! Imagine the freedom, Sergei thought. All the nature one could swallow, none of the pitfalls of humanity. Sergei envisioned an idyllic hermit's life. A man could dwell alone in these mountains for a hundred years and never cross paths with anything bigger than a fox.
Then Sergei looked closer. An Asaki rifle, rusted and tarnished, leaned against a pine. Above it, pinned to the bark, a small faded Rising Sun made of tin. And the tent, there among the needles. Were they not Japanese characters scrawled across the canvas in either blood or berry juice? Sergei had been forced to study Japanese during Grade 9 of school, when the history of the 1905 war had been taught. The clumsy characters on the tent read:
I have been castrated by shame.
Beside the tent, Sergei stared into the sepia face of Emperor Hirohito, hung on a branch with a string. Beside the Emperor loomed the man in the Italian suit, smiling his salamander grin.
* * * *
“I thought I killed you,” Sergei rasped.
“You almost did,” the man answered. “But I'm awfully hard to snuff out.” His grin widened, even through sutured lips and two black eyes and a head wrapped in bandages. In one hand he held a Makarov pistol. He offered the other hand to Sergei.
“I don't believe I've ever told you my name,” said the man. “I am Laszlo Gorbatov. Around the Winter Palace, however, they call me Rasputin.”
Sergei shivered. Just my luck. The contact I've spoken to for six months is one of the most notorious killers in Russia. The authorities have been searching for Rasputin since Glasnost. And here he was in Vancouver all along.
Rasputin looked around and may have been raising his eyebrows but the bandages were in the way. “Interesting hovel. Middle of nowhere. Imperial Japanese décor.” He shifted his eyes back to Sergei and giggled. “I believe you've stumbled across a Japanese soldier who doesn't know the war is over!”
“In British Columbia? In twenty-eleven?” The campfire sizzled, red embers shimmering as though alive.
“Don't you know your history?” said the assassin. “The Japanese occupied two of the Aleutian Islands in nineteen forty-two. Japanese I-boats shelled Oregon. They floated incendiary balloons over Washington State to start forest fires. And Japanese commandoes landed on remote beaches along Canada's west coast.”
“Fascinating.” Sergei tightened his grip on the Glock.
“But then, such an aging warrior would be almost ninety. Much too old to help a fool like you.”
Sergei remembered the old man beside the campfire, moving in the wavering orange. The tunic he wore. The rifle.
Rasputin concluded, “I enjoy ice hockey. A shame your career is over.”
A strange clarity settled over the half-lit encampment, making the hair on the back of Sergei's neck stand on end. Suddenly, he knew, knew, how the progression of human existence worked. Sergei perceived it all as a great universal train. The tracks were Fate. The rolling stock, genes. But human beings were not pulled by the locomotive of life, they were pushed by the combined engines of all their past decisions, or decisions that had been made on their behalf.
Sergei's past—as distant as his ancestors starving on the narod, as recent as swinging his hockey stick into Rasputin's face—adopted a new dimension. The past was alive—awake and important. Then it stepped aside and allowed the present to resume.
As Rasputin extended his arm and aimed the pistol, the cold night breeze shifted, blowing smoke into the killer's face.
Sergei leapt.
Here's the scouting report on this 22-year-old late bloomer. Came up with Moscow Dynamo, where he earned a reputation for lightning reflexes. Kostyn's speed and agility allows him to evade the opponent's enforcers just fine. You can't hit what you can't catch.
Rasputin fired blindly into the smoke but Sergei was already rolling before the tent and raising the Glock.
Another asset of this young forward is his skating ability. Kostyn impressed at the preseason camp and with those sweet feet he's been described as a young Denis Savard
Before Sergei could pull the trigger, Rasputin fired again. Sergei reacted, spinning safely to the left. He fired one shot blind just to show he meant business, then sprinted zigzag toward the closest cover.
Kostyn's acceleration is equally impressive. On off nights he skates like a brick but when his game is on, Sergei Kostyn is Baryshnikov.
The Winter Palace assassin finished his clip, but all he hit was B.C. timber. Sergei reached the safety of the enormous pine and cradled the Glock as Rasputin slid around the fire and reloaded. He was good. He didn't taunt. He didn't speak. He wasn't even breathing heavily. He just killed.
Game 7, Sergei thought. Breakaway.
Number 50 decked.
He thrust his head beyond the left side of the pine with every intention of yanking it back, which he did as four rounds tore chunks from the damp brown bar
k. Then Sergei thrust his head and one shoulder and one arm beyond the right side of the pine, one finger already squeezing the Glock's trigger.
Rasputin was waiting.
The tiny nugget of steel (bullets have not been made of lead for decades) struck Sergei directly between the eyes, tearing a path directly through his limbic cortex.
Sergei's frozen finger managed one shot as his body slumped to the earth. The 9mm round hit the campfire, upsetting a log that immediately set Rasputin's pant leg on fire.
The assassin bent over, cursing.
There was big history and there was small history. When Sergeant Ishiro Omoto, age nineteen, climbed from the deck of submarine I-27 into a rubber dinghy on a moonless night in 1942, in the choppy waters of Jervis Inlet, it was, in every respect, small history. Sergeant Omoto's dinghy capsized in the surf and all of his explosives got wet. Three days later his partner was devoured by a bear. In 1943, I-27 was sunk by the cruiser Manhattan. The war moved on, and Sergeant Omoto was left in the wilderness of the Pacific Ranges, ashamed, suspicious, confused, but forever loyal to the Rising Sun.
Every good assassin has a sixth sense. Rasputin was no exception. At the last second he spun—the tent flap made the softest whisper.
The figure before him shouted, once and loud, but it was really more of a bark than a shout. "Banzai!"
Rasputin's eyes bulged as the rusty bayonet plunged to the hilt into his abdomen, slicing his pink liver in two.
The Winter Palace killer stared, incredulous—this cannot happen to me!—as the withered mummy drew back its colorless lips and twisted the blade a little deeper.
Blood leaked down Rasputin's chin in a single red line. The pain, he thought, was crystalline. Rasputin's legs gave out slowly so that he folded to the ground rather than fell. Before his vision surrendered, the Russian noticed that all of the branches of the towering trees were filled with faces. Faces of people he had cheated, had hurt, had killed. Then the faces slowly evaporated and they took Rasputin with them into the high mountain darkness.
EQMM, May 2012 Page 14