Disposable Asset

by John Altman

  Cassie loitered within earshot, cleaning a smudge off her sunglasses, glancing at her wrist as if considering a watch. After ten minutes, the man and his son rolled off down a narrow street. She followed. Referring to her map, noting the cottage into which they disappeared. She might return after dark, allow herself entrance, and see what she could find inside.

  On the next block, she found herself walking behind another family of four. The mother and father bickered in the flat, equivocal way of parents trying to conceal a quarrel from children. A boy of approximately six held a squeeze packet of apple sauce in one hand, a book featuring a picture of Cheburashka on the cover in the other. A baby was expertly crooked in the mother’s muscular arm.

  ‘Just that if you’ve seen one,’ the mother was saying, ‘you’ve kind of seen them all.’

  ‘So if you don’t want to go, just say so.’

  ‘It’s not even the real cathedral, is it? It’s only a few years old.’

  ‘So if you don’t want to go, just say so.’

  ‘It’s just that Danya gets heavy.’

  ‘So. If. You. Don’t. Want. To—’

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘There. Was that so hard?’

  Their Russian, with its hardening of final soft labials, placed them as tourists from the south. The father wore a hipster’s scraggly beard and thin sideburns, a denim jacket insufficient for the weather, and a distinctly unhip fanny pack. The mother wore a stylish hooded cape, a short bobbed haircut, and a harried air.

  ‘So,’ said the father, ‘you want to just get on the train?’

  ‘Maybe find something to eat first. Then hop on in time for his nap.’

  ‘Where do you want to eat?’

  ‘Anywhere. The closest place.’

  ‘Right here.’

  As they clustered around a menu under glass, a crowd of Finns came up the sidewalk. Jostling ensued. Interposing herself between the Finns and the Russians, Cassie let herself be pushed up against the hipster and his fanny pack. Under cover of the press of bodies, she used her stomach to hold the bag against his waist, maintaining pressure, as her fingers worked the zipper. Wallet, phone, loose cash – passports. She nimbly plucked out four red booklets, left the pack unzipped, and melted away down the block.

  A white Bukhanka van, windows tinted far beyond the legal limit of seventy percent VLT, cruised slowly down the opposite side of the street. Averting her face, slipping the passports into the folded map, she walked smoothly on.

  On the next block she turned into a restaurant which awkwardly combined Irish leitmotifs with Asian, Mexican, and Native American. Inside a locked bathroom stall, she examined her haul. The family’s name was Reznikov. The mother’s and boy’s passports were several years old – the woman, Raisa, looked like a different person, fresh-faced and rested and optimistic; the boy, Maxim, was a baby, chubby-cheeked and tow-headed – and included no biometric chip. The father and infant had newer documents, including chips. She tore the latter two passports into shreds, flushing the chips down the toilet, leaving the remaining scraps in a trash bin so as not to risk clogging the plumbing.

  Outside again, she headed back toward the lighthouse, taking note now of cars parked along the cobblestones. She would wait to steal one until tomorrow morning, so as to give no time for an alarm to be raised. She would make certain that the numbers at the end of the license, which identified the oblast from which the vehicle harkened, matched her cover story. Plenty of tourists in town; no shortage of vehicles from which to choose.

  She walked past a homeless woman whose raggedy clothes looked suspiciously fresh, as if recently distressed by hand. A man lackadaisically moving a wide push-broom across a sidewalk, who paused to watch her go by. Another selling saffron pretzels, following her with incisive dark eyes. She ignored them all, looking pointedly straight ahead, putting one foot mechanically in front of the other, and climbed the hill, past the lighthouse, back to the waiting cottage.

  In the rear of the white Bukhanka van, Ravensdale held tightly to an armrest.

  Leaving behind the cobblestoned streets, they see-sawed across dirt roads, ditches, and darkening snowy fields. As the local representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs delivered a never-ending monologue about the houses they passed, the techs handling the equipment – both imported from Petersburg – exchanged derisive glances. Ravensdale couldn’t tell if the disdain was intended for the unfortunates under discussion, for the IA representative, or for himself.

  ‘And here we have the Platonovs. She spreads her legs for anyone with a kopeck and a bottle of Troinoi Odekolon. He responds by begging all the more cravenly for her affection. Let’s listen, you’ll see … Well, evidently they are taking a break at the moment. But if we swing by again later, after the booze has loosened them up, we’ll get an earful, I promise you. Vasya: up the hill now. Here we have the lighthouse. The keeper is a man named Amalrik. A decent enough old fellow, Amalrik. He knew my father. He’s lived alone since his wife died, almost twenty years ago now. He’s zastenchivyj.’ Timid, shy. ‘Keeps out of trouble. No chance he would ever harbor a fugitive. But just up here, a different story. Yes, a very different story. A Jew – and not just any Jew. His forefathers, they say, helped to write the Protocols themselves. Vasya, slow down; we’ll want to take a close look here.’

  They creaked to a stop behind a stand of taiga. The techs sat up straight and, despite their city sophistication, trained their parabolic mics and thermal imagers as if they had caught a serious lead. Scratch a Bolshevik, Lenin himself had said, and find a chauvinist.

  ‘This one, Rawicz – I always keep my eye on him.’ The thermal picked out a single blotch of color within the cottage: seated, arms slightly raised as if reading a book. The microphone picked up only a discordant howl of wind. ‘He is studying, I gather. They are always plotting … but they are patient. Well, he doesn’t have our fugitive with him. So he lives to plot another day. Vasya: the Ivanova woman now.’

  The hill grew steeper. They neared an isolated cottage: low gate, icy front walk, snowy woodpile. ‘Galina Ivanova. Another embarrassment to our fine town. Such a talented skater, as a girl, that they talked about competition in her future, even the Olympics. But then – what else? – drugs. See, there she is, and there’s her boy.’

  Two swirls of hot pink – a small child propped in the lap of an adult – sat before a cooler swirl of purple, a television or a computer. As the parabolic microphone came into range, a woman’s voice piped through the headphones: Come on, baushki-bau, you can do better than that. A real smile, OK?

  ‘Vasya: To Olga’s now. One of our more decent citizens, Olga Purizhinskaya. Runs the account ledgers at the shipyard, and mostly keeps out of trouble. But she has bad taste in men. And she likes them rough. On a Sunday evening, she’s likely alone, recovering from the weekend, but if we’re very lucky we might get ourselves a show …’

  Cassie juggled the boy on her lap until his face lined up again with the camera. ‘One more,’ she commanded.

  He grinned obediently, and she snapped the shot. ‘Now go play.’

  He wriggled down without arguing, ran back for the living room at full-tilt. A moment later he was happily absorbed again in his game, in which rocket ships and dinosaurs fought a battle royale against stuffed animals and police cars, all to a soundtrack of a grim little song about a bird denied porridge.

  She resized and cropped one photo of each of them, and printed both. With a kitchen knife, she carefully carved out rectangles of the necessary dimensions. Brow ruffling, she used the tip of the blade to scrape the old pictures free of the stolen passports. Two tiny dollops of household glue fixed the new ones in place.

  She laid several items across the bed: sewing kit, scarf, sunglasses, mid-length dark hourglass coat, strip of teal ribbon. Shrugging on the coat, she inspected her reflection in the full-length mirror. The same respectable mother character she had contrived earlier gazed steadily back. The road not taken.

/>   She shrugged off the coat, reversed it. With needle and thread, she attached the sand-colored scarf to the hem of the coat’s sturdy beige lining, and then slipped it on again. The longer, lighter garment made her look both taller and wider, and several years older.

  From the bay, the long, lowing bass note of a ship’s horn sounded dolefully.

  She reversed the coat again, rigged up her ersatz hem with two safety pins. She experimented with the wig – removing it altogether, which revealed her gleaming bare scalp; tucking the back beneath the collar of the coat; tying it up with the ribbon on one side.

  Two distinct women were emerging in the mirror. One was a younger and sportier Cassie – correction, Raisa Reznikov, from Kursk – with sunglasses, a half-ponytail, and a short dark hourglass figure. The other, almost an entirely different person, came into being after she popped the lenses out of the sunglasses, turned the coat inside-out, and released the hem and ponytail: an older, taller, wider version, with full bell of blonde hair, long light coat, and bespectacled academic mien.

  The younger, sportier model was the woman who would pass through customs during the morning rush-hour crowd. But if something went wrong – coat inside-out, hem released, lenses popped out, ribbon untied – this woman would vanish, and the other woman would take her place. Presto.

  Practicing, she got the change down to ten seconds.

  Nine.

  Eight.

  Eight.

  Eight again.

  Eight was as good as it would get.

  She locked eyes with her reflection. We’re going to meet my husband in Helsinki. We’ve traveled together from Kursk, but decided to split up for a few days. Must strike just the right note of sullen hostility. There had been a marital spat here. The prying of a nosy customs official would not be welcome. He’s coming by train with our daughter, through Imatra. Got this idea into his head that she’d like to see the dam. Of course, it’s really he who wants to see the dam. He’s an overgrown boy, when you get down to it. If the customs agent was female, she might add one last dash of conspiratorial sorority. You know how they are. But there she would stop. Must not overplay her hand. And must not touch her face or wig, cross her arms or lean away … And must not equivocate. No I guesses. No lengthy over-complications to put her gawky Russian on full display. In and out; decisive. Yes is the better answer.

  She rehearsed again, timed herself changing disguises again. She had lost a second, bringing her back to nine.

  ‘Here,’ she said and patted her lap.

  Nikolai climbed up unquestioningly. He wore his favorite space-themed pajamas, with the snug booties built right in, and held a plastic cup of juice with a flexible straw. (Mama would never let him drink juice right before bed. There were advantages, he was deciding, to having Katya as a caretaker.) Settling in, he looked expectantly at the row of bedtime books arranged on the dresser top. Maybe, as Katya was unfamiliar with Mama’s rules, he could convince her to read more than the usual two. Maybe three, or even four …

  ‘Once upon a time,’ she said gravely, ‘there was a little bunny rabbit named Nikolai.’

  Mama had never told him a story which didn’t come from a book. But Mama was still at the doctor’s office, and hence nowhere to be seen, and Katya was the grown-up. He blinked and gave her his full attention.

  She rumpled his hair affectionately. ‘And Nikolai lived with his mama. And there was a nice lady bunny rabbit who lived with them too, named Katya. Their best friend.’

  He laughed. ‘But that’s our names.’

  ‘So they are.’

  It was a silly story she was telling, about bunny rabbits with the same names as real people. But the look on her face was not silly. It was the look grown-ups wore to indicate that something very serious was under discussion, that I am not playing a game here, Kolya.

  She paused for a moment, looking at him intently, making sure he appreciated the gravity of the story he was about to hear. And despite the brightness of the room – the overhead bulb burning, the colorful well-lit rocket ships marching cheerily around the wainscoting – a shiver trickled liquidly down his spine.

  ‘Now in the world of bunny rabbits, you know, cats are really bad. Cats like to attack bunnies, and scratch them up, and bite them, and sometimes even eat them. There was one cat who was the worst of all. The king of all evil cats. His name was Koschei.’

  Nikolai nodded somberly. Every child knew of Koschei the Deathless, the ancient and hideous monster who might come after you if you didn’t eat your vegetables or go to sleep on time. Koschei could not be killed the way a man could. Unless one could track down his soul, he was immortal. And his soul was not easily found. It hid inside a needle, which hid inside an egg, which hid inside a duck, which hid inside a hare, which hid inside an iron chest, which was buried beneath a green oak tree, which grew on a mysterious disappearing island …

  ‘There was only one rabbit who scared Koschei. This was a very special, very magical bunny rabbit named Maxim. And do you know the funny thing? Maxim looked just like Nikolai.’

  ‘Just like him?’

  ‘Just exactly like him. So. One day, Nikolai and his Mama and Katya were out in the garden, eating breakfast. They liked to eat carrots and lettuce and cabbage and peas and potatoes and onions and chives. There they were, happily nibbling away and minding their own business, when all of a sudden the evil cats conducted a raid. Do you know what a raid is?’

  ‘It’s when the police come search your house and look around and arrest you.’

  ‘Exactly. And when the evil cats came, Katya grabbed Nikolai, and they ran and hid in their underground hole. But Nikolai’s mama moved too slow. So the evil cats nabbed her and took her away.’

  Another dramatic pause. He licked his lips, waiting.

  ‘Well, every bunny rabbit knew where Koschei took his prisoners – to a jail on the other side of the colony. Nikolai and Katya realized right away that they would need to go and rescue his mama, fast, before anything bad could happen to her. But this was a dangerous time to travel through the bunny rabbit kingdom. Because the evil cats had guards everywhere. And these evil cat guards loved more than anything to arrest bunny rabbits and put them in the jail. And sometimes, when the cats got hungry in the middle of the night, they would go visit the jail and just choose a bunny rabbit at random and then eat them. Munch munch munch.’

  ‘No,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Yes. So, as they were getting ready to go, Nikolai had an idea. He realized that since he looked just like Maxim, the one bunny rabbit all cats were afraid of, he could play a very smart trick! He could pretend he was Maxim. And he could say Katya was his mother, so the evil cats didn’t hurt her either, because they would never dare to hurt Maxim’s mother.’

  ‘But where was the real Maxim?’

  She paused. ‘Nobody knew,’ she said after a moment. ‘Nobody knew, honey. They’d spent their whole lives waiting for him to show up, but he never had. Some bunnies had decided he wasn’t even real at all. They thought he was just a story.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But the evil cats believed in him – that was what mattered now. Because Nikolai and Katya hit the road that very night, heading to the jail, to rescue his Mama. And just as they feared, they didn’t get very far at all before a cat guard pulled them over. “Who are you, and where do you come from?” the guard demanded. And what did Nikolai say?’

  ‘He said, “I’m Maxim, and this is my mama, and you better let us through or you’ll be in serious trouble!”’

  ‘Exactly! And what do you think happened next?’

  ‘The cats let them through.’

  ‘They did.’ Her soft, strong hand stroked hair off his forehead. ‘They did. Because those cats were even more afraid of Maxim, you see, than they were of Koschei. They let the bunny rabbits right through. So the bunnies went on a little longer, along the road, and then some more cats stopped them. “Who are you, and where do you come from?”’

  ‘�
��I’m Maxim, and this is my mama, and you better let us through or you’ll be in serious trouble!”’

  ‘Right! Except they were so scared of him, he didn’t even need to say that part about getting in trouble. He just said, “I’m Maxim, and this is my mama.” And that’s all he had to say, and the cats let them through.’

  Another solemn nod.

  ‘So then they got to the jail. And there were so many cat guards that Nikolai got scared. He wanted to turn around and run back home and hide in his underground hole. But then he knew he would never get his mama back, and some hungry cat might come in the middle of the night, and choose her, and eat her! So even though he was scared, he kept going. He and Katya rolled right up to the front of that jail, to a gate surrounded by evil cats. And what did Nikolai say?’

  ‘“I’m Maxim, and this is my mama!”’

  ‘That’s right. And you know what happened?’

  ‘The cats let them through.’

  ‘That’s right. And then the bunnies saved Mama. And then word went around the kingdom that Maxim had come back, so the evil cats packed their bags and went somewhere else. And everybody lived happily ever after. The end.’

  Nikolai considered. ‘I like how the bunny had my name.’

  ‘He sure did.’ She levered him down on to the floor. ‘Need to use the potty before bed?’

  ‘No.’

  When he climbed beneath his blanket, she killed the overhead. Night lights blinked on, dappling spidery illumination across the painted rocket ships. ‘OK?’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We’re going to go get your mommy tomorrow, Nikolai.’

  Relief flooded through him, so overwhelming that he nearly burst into tears. Silently, he nodded.

  ‘We can play a game when we go. We’ll pretend we’re the bunnies from the story, and you’ll tell everyone you’re Maxim and I’m your mommy. OK?’