Disposable Asset

by John Altman

  He straightened, grunting with surprise.

  She jumped on to his back, weighing less than a blade of grass, less than an afterthought. He reached around, closing one massive hand around her twig-thin throat, and plucked her free. Brought her around front, where he could see the thing in her hand. A ribbon, a belt … no. The window sash.

  And then he understood.

  He flung her across the room, into a corner, where she struck her head and then lay helpless and whimpering, exposed for the betraying little whore she was.

  Now the dragon was awake, the dragon that had made Yuri undisputed champion in the most brutal of sports, the dragon that would not rest until the woman was so much bloodied pulp to be scraped off the floor, which would teach her, yes, it would teach her the wisdom of biting the hand that fed you. When your captor decided to slip you an extra ration, just from the goodness of his heart, just because he was a decent fellow who took pity on a helpless bitch, you should not take advantage. She would learn.

  ‘Pizda,’ he muttered. Cunt.

  Footsteps pounded down the hall. Yakov and Viktor burst into the room as one. Yuri’s veil of rage lifted momentarily; he saw them exchange a look and then move forward, each reaching for one well-muscled arm, struggling to restrain him.

  Then the veil fell again, and he flung them clear, one in each direction. He turned back to the woman, huddled crying in the corner. The fallen sash with which she had tried to strangle him beside her on the floor. He felt a new wave of sympathy for his dear departed father. The philanderer, they had called him, and everyone, all the aunts and sisters and second cousins, had clucked about what a bad man he had been, what an unfaithful husband and lousy Papa. But had they ever once thought that maybe Mother had brought it on herself? Maybe she had stroked Father’s ego, leading him on, just as this bitch had done to Yuri, only to jump on his back, to try to strangle him, metaphorically or otherwise, the instant his guard was down? Had they ever put themselves in Papa’s place? A man tried to be generous, and what did he get in return? Betrayal.

  Growling, he advanced. The dragon was awake now, and nothing, nothing could stop him—

  A gun spoke harshly.

  Yuri sat down, hard.

  The fury drained away, replaced by pain. He drew a long, hard, shuddering breath. He looked over at Viktor, the whelp, holding a PSM pistol in two shaking hands.

  The boy had shot him.

  The woman was still crying softly.

  Shades of gray washed across the room. Yuri touched a corner of his mouth. His fingers came away red. His heartbeat was a fading mutter. The dragon was curling up, refolding vast leathery wings.

  He looked at the woman. Their eyes met, and for an instant he read something in hers – something sad and victorious and furious and hopeless all at once.

  He took one more breath, shuddered it out, and lay still.

  Yakov stood unsteadily. He moved to Yuri, poked him with a toe. No response. He looked at Viktor, and then at the woman.

  ‘You,’ he said darkly. ‘You had better be worth it.’

  VYBORG

  Nikolai opened his eyes.

  For a long time he lay looking passively at Sputnik, not moving. Something rattled in the center of his brain, thud-thump-thunk. He recognized that thud-thump-thunk from the year before, when he’d taken a bad spill on the ice out on the bay. At the time, he hadn’t known he’d taken a bad spill. One minute he’d been skating along faster than a race car, faster than a rocket ship, screaming laughter. The next he’d been on his back, looking up at a livid sky partly blocked out by a circle of concerned faces, with that syncopated beat pounding in the back of his head. In the days that followed, a tender lump had risen on his skull. Mama and Sasha had argued about whether he had suffered a SEVERE TRAUMA (Mama’s words) and needed a hospital. Sasha had insisted that the boy would be OK, if they just left well enough alone, and sure enough, Nikolai soon had been.

  But now the ragged pounding headache was back. Looking at the simple geometrical shape of the glow-in-the-dark Sputnik, he tried to figure out why that should be. Had he taken another fall on the ice? No. Something else had happened. And it had been something bad. The headache was just the start of it. His belly was empty. He’d apparently wet his bed – he was lying in a sticky puddle – but that, too, was just the start of it. Not only was something wrong, he realized then. Everything was wrong. Everything he’d ever taken for granted, everything that made the scary world OK—

  It came like a thunderclap:

  Mama was sick.

  Mama wouldn’t wake up.

  Mama might be—

  He climbed out of bed, groaning. After pausing to let the sour sloshing in his stomach abate, he started toward the living room … and then came to an abrupt stop.

  A woman stood in one corner of his bedroom.

  Watching him.

  She was pretty, with creamy skin beneath a fur-trimmed hat. Standing motionless in the platinum morning light, she looked like a mannequin.

  Nikolai’s thumb moved to his mouth. For a small eternity he looked back at the woman in silence, trying to puzzle out the implications of this latest development. At last he called uncertainly toward the living room: ‘Mamochka.’

  No reply, except the winter-whine of wind coming off the bay.

  ‘Mamochka,’ he called again.

  ‘Nikolai,’ the woman said.

  He stared at her.

  ‘Your Mama went to see the doctor. She asked me to look after you. Do you understand?’

  Mutely, he nodded.

  ‘If you do everything I say,’ she said, ‘we’ll get through this fine. And your Mama will come home, and everything will go back to normal. But in order for that to happen, you have to do everything I say. OK?’

  He nodded again, glazed.

  ‘And if you don’t … Well. We don’t even need to talk about that, do we?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Good.’ She touched his tacky clothes. ‘So. Baushki-bau. My name’s Katya. Let’s get you washed up.’

  Before drawing a bath, she stripped off his pee-stained shirt and pants. Nikolai accepted without resisting. His head was still pealing rhythmically; simply remaining on his feet required effort.

  In the bath, he zoomed and swooshed toy boats around, splashing, as she lathered him up. The warm water made the ringing in his head recede, and he became lost in the play. The boats were riding not through water but through space. The wooden boats were aliens, and the plastic boats were good guys, outnumbered but brave. Many laser guns were fired, many waves of attackers repelled. In the end, the aliens soared up into the sky, heading back to their home planet, defeated.

  The woman’s ministrations were inexpert. The water grew too cold, and then when she tried to correct it, too hot. Nikolai got soap in his eyes, which stung. But he managed not to cry. He would not be a baby. He would be a big boy and do everything she said, and then Mama would come home and everything would go back to normal.

  After toweling dry, they returned to his room. She helped him struggle into clean clothes. ‘Hungry?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  He sat at the kitchen table, watching, as she did something at the stove. This time there was no snake-like hiss, no tick-tick-tick. After a few minutes, the smell of cooking food filled the house. After a few minutes more, she did something at the sink with the sieve. Then she poured noodles into a bowl. Adding a jar of sauce from the cupboard, she mixed. It did not taste like Mama’s cooking. It was overdone and too salty. Nikolai was hungry enough that he cleaned his bowl anyway. Then he asked for seconds.

  West of town, a search party moved slowly across rutted ground.

  Junior Lieutenant Golod of the Saint Petersburg politsiya placed his boots with care amidst loose boulders and snowy mud. On either side, dogs snuffled busily, pausing every few moments to resample the scent brandished by their handlers.

  Suddenly, Golod tripped over a gnarled root, sprawling down with a cu
rse. Someone laughed harshly. Golod regained his feet, face burning. Not his fault, he thought angrily, that he wasn’t uncultured, nekulturny, like some of the men in the search party, country bumpkins accustomed to negotiating such uneven ground. Not his fault that he was used to sidewalks, pavement, the fruits of the modern era.

  They moved again, through trees, scrub brush, wilderness, separated by a frozen estuary from civilization, from the red-and-white lighthouse, the toy-sized town. A faint cold breeze rustled pine needles. The sun in the sky was dull, utterly lacking in warmth.

  Leading the procession, a soldier abruptly raised a clenched fist. The motley group – a makeshift collection of city and country police, civil and military agency – stumbled to a disorganized stop. In the vanguard, machine guns thumped into gloved hands. A troika of men fanned out, prodding the undergrowth.

  Beside Golod, a man from the PG’s Office narrated the latest development to someone sitting in some warm comfortable room back in Pieter. ‘Called a stop, sir. No, sir, not clear yet why. No, sir, still no indication …’

  Whatever it was, it proved a false alarm. They moved again. Before they had covered another hundred meters, a dog emitted a low, pained whine and then strained forward, tail whipping. A rabbit, driven above ground by hunger, bounded away with two terrific hops, leaving the dog to bark impotently.

  Golod covered a sneeze. Coming down with something. The icing on the cake.

  The search party moved forward again, pounding the brush.

  FOURTEEN

  With the boy safely installed before the television, Cassie conducted another search, this time with the benefit of late watery dawn breaking outside the windows.

  The small house had given up most of its secrets the night before. But there remained a few discoveries still to be made – more evidence of the mysterious vanished man (mud-caked boots in back hall, forgotten clothes in dryer), a cache of food beneath the sink (canned soup, pickled fish, bottled mushrooms, and varenye, a condiment made from berries), and, of most potential value, a computer in the master bedroom, half-covered by a carelessly tossed blanket.

  The computer was a mutt – Chinese tower, Russian keyboard, bootleg American monitor. A few years old, but not a bad set-up, considering. Camera, photo printer, functional Internet connection. Cassie woke it up, spent a few querulous moments acquainting herself with the Cyrillic keyboard. She opened a browser and reconfirmed what she already knew about local geography. Finland was just thirty kilometers away. Googling the Vyborg customs station, she found an official website.

  For the next twenty minutes she read closely, chewing on one thumbnail. The passage, technically at Nuijamaa, was the second most traveled along the lengthy international border. Each year, eight hundred thousand vehicles carried over one million passengers across. The station was well documented in attractive color photographs. There were six lanes for cars and busses, and one devoted exclusively to rail. The Finnish side boasted an institutional-looking white building, a simple blue-and-white flag, a tidy sign proclaiming ‘FINNISH CUSTOMS AND FRONTIER GUARD’. The Russian side was smaller, darker, grayer, with heavy spruce forest crowding in close on every side. The comments section shed light on the nature of the average border-crosser: Finns pouring east every weekend to take advantage of cheap booze, and Russians going the other way, hunting for inexpensive duty-free goods.

  After perusing the website, she moved to the window. Fingers of light streaming through a clear blue sky illumined a picturesque morning, a postcard-perfect view of a town compactly arranged on a narrow peninsula. The bay was dazzling azure farther out, where the ocean’s hoarded warmth beat back General Winter, but ice-white near the shore. Skiffs were frozen in place against docks piled with piping, cables, and drums. A medieval castle rising from an islet competed with the red-and-white lighthouse for the privilege of watching over the small gabled cottages, the cobblestoned streets, the shipyard and decaying sawmill.

  As Sunday morning brightened, she thought, the Finns would bestir themselves slowly after a night of hard drinking. They would swallow aspirin, drink multiple glasses of water, find heavy greasy breakfasts to soak up the alcohol in their stomachs. Then they would head back to the customs station. They would have passports already stamped with visas, which they would carry in handbags and fanny packs. Foggy from hangovers, they would make easy pickings. But she did not speak a word of Finnish. To be useful, any documentation she stole would need to be Russian.

  From the living room, the boy chuckled at something on his TV show. His laugh was nearly as beatific as his eyelashes and cupid’s bow mouth. Nothing was more innocent, she thought, than the laughter of children.

  And nothing was more virtuous than the mother of a young child – or so people tended to think.

  Her brow creased.

  She went to have another look at the dead woman’s wardrobe. After a few moments, she assembled an outfit: modest, cheery, respectable. An upstanding mother’s outfit, the kind of outfit to make a chivalrous man reach to hold a door.

  Facing a mirror, she moved the coarse wig forward on her scalp, then back. She used a heavy layer of foundation to fill out her cheeks, petroleum jelly to change the shape of her eyebrows. Muted red lipstick, a pair of faux-pearl earrings. Small sunglasses perching near the tip of her still-disjointed nose. She admired her reflection: blonde once again, but now an older, grown-up version of herself. Maddie Gunther, Junior, ready to strike off and sell some real estate. Good morning, ma’am. Notice all the direct light. The kitchen has been completely remodeled, and the school system is really very excellent. But there’s another offer on the table, so we want to move quickly …

  The road not taken.

  She took off the sunglasses and the wig, pulled on the ushanka again, and went to check on Nikolai and see about starting some lunch.

  As Train #7017 prepared to leave the station, nine men materialized from shadow.

  One moved toward the engine, hailing the conductor. Three others spread out along the platform, readying automatic weapons. The remaining five moved toward a door in the first passenger car, which after a moment hissed open.

  The team of Spetsnaz Alpha, Spetzgruppa ‘A’, swept through the car, brandishing weapons threateningly, peering closely into faces of startled passengers. Reaching the end of the carriage, they checked the bathroom. Before moving into the space between cars they paused to look, listen, and switch the forward man.

  In this manner they checked the entire length of the train in less than four minutes. Reaching the last car, they returned along the tracks on the far side from the platform, using mirrors mounted on long elbow flashlights to inspect the roof and beneath the undercarriage.

  All clears were exchanged. As train #7017 pulled out of the station, ten minutes behind schedule, the Spetsnaz melted back into shadow.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ Cassie said. ‘You stay put.’

  Seated before his second DVD of the day, Nikolai didn’t answer.

  Outside, echoing church bells hung on cold sunny air. Far out in the bay, distant running lights drifted. After spending a moment orienting herself, she began picking her way down the hill.

  In town she mingled, window-shopping, seeking in reflections the perfect targets. As she did, she became aware of a covert surveillance presence overlaying the town like a foul-smelling blanket. They were being cagey about it – they had learned subtlety. There were no politsiya blatantly consulting tablets, no machine-gun toting soldiers, no buzzing drones or noisy hovering helicopters.

  But low profile or no, they were here, and in greater force than a small border town could justify. A kid braving the icy streets on a bicycle was, on second glance, not a kid at all, but a raw-boned young man with roving eyes. A woman shopping across the way had invisible antennae vibrating like tuning forks: a mirror image of Cassie herself, slyly taking it all in while seeming not to. A man lighting a cigarette on a bench … another eating brunch alone at a window behind a newspaper … another
hawking small souvenir replicas of Vyborg Castle, making change clumsily, as if he’d never done it before …

  She kept moving.

  A couple with two young children, boy and girl, were heading into a bar-restaurant called Nordwest. Following them inside, Cassie picked up a tourist map of the town. Smiling vaguely, she told the hostess she’d be meeting someone. At the bar she ordered a diet soda, watching the family in the mirror. This far north, the physical differences between Finns and Russians were hard to distinguish; everybody was tall, slim, square-faced, fair. But as minutes passed, she picked up snatches of the family’s speech, more cadences than words. The tempo was musical, modulated – lilting Finnish, not square-footed Russian. And so the family was useless to her. She left the restaurant just as two undercover cops came in, all hunched shoulders and sweeping eyes.

  The day was warming. Melting ice dripped from gutters. Plangent wind slipped off the icy bay. As clouds scudded across the sun, ingots of light and shadow alternated on the cobblestoned streets.

  In the town square, by a statue depicting a rather squat Lenin, a thirtyish father chased a boy who rode a bicycle with training wheels. ‘You’re getting it,’ the man said in Russian; ‘you’re getting it; you’re getting it!’ The boy screamed laughter.