by Reid Astor
Lars looks away, a bitter smile twisting on his lips, and it’s all the affirmation he needs. “She had that shit started with your father years ago. A promise to him to take down Svetlana’s empire, because he couldn’t, he knew he’d never get out so long as he lived. As if there was nothing in it for her,” he says, derisively. “Congratulations on your inheritance, by the way. My superiors are gonna give me shit for letting Lana become a lead-filled meat-sack instead of the massive court takedown we had planned to dismantle the mob, but hey, tomayto tom-ah-to, right? No more debt, right, Diamond Eyes?”
“Don’t talk about it so lightly,” he says, looking to his own shoulder and the gauze across it, feeling the shiver that succumbs over him as he hears that nickname again. He can almost feel the stitches shifting with every movement of his muscle. “That money... it’s dirty.”
Lars looks at him sharply. “Fuck, don’t tell me you won’t take it?”
“My parents gave their life for it. I won’t do them the disrespect,” he grunts, though he can almost see the filth and drugs on his hands as he imagines the sum he must be inheriting. “And is that all... Agent Cromwell?”
The man doesn’t seem to want that to be all. But he gives a curt nod, eyes fixed on him intently now. Niklas can see how red they are, see even the faintest outlines of contacts that must have given Lars’ eyes that crimson hue all along. At the core, he thinks, this man is just a disgruntled animal clawing on to something to feel better inside.
“Svetlana was right saying we had more in common than we thought,” he says, surprised at his own sudden calmness and placidity towards him. “You really love me, then?”
“Yes, damn it,” Lars gasps, seeming surprised at even himself with how earnest and heavy that single word comes out. He seems even dismayed, looking down and scratching at a stray lock of dark hair in his face. “How many fucking times do I have to say it, Nikky?” he mutters.
He lowers his head and looks to the sheets, to the bullet wound in his shoulder, and thinks of Svetlana and the initials A.B. on her wrist. Love. What a strange and abhorrent word that is to him; who thinks of love at the bottom of the stained and corrupt city of Couer, busy with their tangled life, coked up and drunk?
“Kiss me,” he says, and Lars obliges.
It’s a taste devoid of flavor on the man’s lips this morning- something close to the void and emptiness and a faint, base flavor. Lars kisses almost timidly, gently, hands on his cheeks, seeming to expect in every brush of them that he’ll be stopped.
He’s never loved anything solid in his life- he’d loved Couer, his brothers, Luka, and his mother, but they were all icons to higher ideas, like saints standing as conduits to the Lord.
But maybe that’s all it really comes down to. He flexes his hands in his left arm and feels the pain climb up his muscles, shaking him awake, bringing him to incline his head against the man’s and welcome him, feels the sheer nothingness, the steady march beat in his ribs.
It reminds him of how his hands never shake when he holds a weapon.
People have done worse than Lars has in love, he reminds himself, bringing his mind back to those faded initials and Svetlana’s smile. He’s tasted her blood now. He can wash everything away in the blood he’s seen in his dreams, confessional- perhaps, even, he can wash away Lars.
He turns his head away, brushing off his hands with his own and cleaning his mouth. No. He sees clearly as ever now he doesn’t love him, at least not in any natural way a person should. That it’s true; they shouldn’t ever be in the same room, the same city. There are cosmic dances that the Hindus wrote their poems, epics, on in extensive details- dances of the Great Destroyer and his consort, stars torn in and rebuilt in the wheels of destruction- and Lars- Lawrence- brings to mind all of that in the most restrained of his embraces.
“You, in love, are a dog with rabies, Agent,” he says. “A bloodhound for all that counts. Good for a job and nothing else. You’re a weapon, and you’re terrible for me.”
The man’s shoulders are shaking, but he can’t tell if it’s with grief or laughter.
To Niklas’ mild surprise, he leaves without being told to, dressing in clipped, practiced speed, and doesn’t look at him again. He slams the door on his way out, the hollow thudding noise echoing briefly before absorbing into the hermetic nothing of the hospital room.
* * *
There are two things you can do in the situation when the investigation crew marches in to your cafe to tear down the main support pillar and build it back up again only greeted by a downfall of plastic packets and debris as the entire upper floor of the premise collapses on itself.
The plastic packets, you are so duly informed from your hospital bed, are your trust fund, cleverly packed away until Daniel DeLane decided it was time to bequeath it to you. And in each of the twenty-five that have thumped down from where they were hidden in the sagging, moaning floorboards of yore (excluding the one that conveniently went missing when the crew 'cleaned up a little' and was recovered at the hands of one viciously grinning Lars Verdura) is forty thousand dollars in cash.
A million dollars of dirty money made untouchable all in all from your mother and father.
Firstly, after clearing your debt from your mother's hospital bills and student loans, you can go back to school immediately, haul ass and leave the cafe for dead. Thanks to Etburn Novik, a shattered surveillance device and no objective record of what happened, you are acquitted of all charges of second-degree murder. The youth plea bargains, and is, frankly, safer behind bars than out in the world.
You can go on to graduate with honors, secure yourself a job at a competent firm cities away from Couer and put the city and all her corruption behind her.
Or you can stay in the city just long enough to watch the renovation crew reinvent your old cafe, tear out the floors and all their rot and purge the walls. You can watch your mother's dreams and memories systematically stripped away and replaced with new wood, new structures, better pipelines- and then sell it. Let it become some chic bookstore or McDonalds, for all you give a damn about.
And you can talk to your mother, at least a little, out the window of that little apartment you've gotten with Viola Faraday on a decent end of town near the university. You can tell the wind you're sorry, and put your old rosary and all the bad memories it has on your mother’s grave. She always carried the weight you knew you would balk under.
Or you can carve a third path out of nothing and do them both. Niklas does, and he doesn't quite know why. Something about watching Etburn Novik's trial has put him back to opening books on law, something about the blood he dreams of waking up to in dark rooms pooled up to his ankles. Maybe it's just the winter that's put an old chill in his bones and told him to seek something else. That winter cold now plunges to the very heart of him through his bullet wound scar and the pain keeps him up at night, at least until he can drink himself into somnolent stupor.
The Ishmael, or what used to be it, is being retitled and evaluated for building safety and selling. He doesn't know what he'll do until then, so he settles for studying, running, reading.
He never sees Germaine Kartoffeln again, except in whispers painting portraits of quiet terror in the underworld- and that is fine. Something sparks with anger in him to think of her, of her gentle hands and smile and words and the smooth, razor-blade honed execution of her plot. He spends considerable effort driving his thoughts away from her now, trying to remember her for the smell of magnolias, peach lipstick, clever passing coffeehouse repartee.
Tethys still drops by, somehow managing to simultaneously call Etburn a heathen punk and still get grudging gestures of friendship from both Niklas and Viola. He still drops by weeds and ferns and extract and medication, and apparently has made some kind of job at it at the local dispensary. Niklas tries not to think about it too much.
Viola, he knows, writes Etburn letters every other week and drops them off, though they both expertly ignore this fact and he word
lessly deposits replies on the kitchen table when they come in. Etburn writes her thick, heavy letters on college-ruled thin stationery- about what, he doesn’t know, and nothing in the girl’s eyes or manner ever betrays it beyond the way she grips those letters. She gets up earlier now, goes to work at the local convenience store earlier, bursts into the wintry daylight with a flushed face and dewy eyes and all frantic smiles as she drapes an extra blanket on him on her way out.
Niklas would ask what she’s working so hard for, what Etburn writes her, but every time he is tempted to, he remembers the looks she gives him every time she smells alcohol on him, sees it on hand. The polite turning away, mechanical reaching for two books from the shelf- one for him, one for her. “Is this one good? O… blomob?” she awkwardly reads the title in self-taught Russian, puts it in his hands before he can tell her. Then she puts music in her headphones, takes her book to her room and withdraws altogether, never once commenting on the bottle in his hand.
Sometimes they need their respective medicine. It hurts him that he has to let her see it, but he makes it up to her in ways- he takes her to movies, he remembers her birthday, he says nothing when he finds her writing, posting letters. Once he even buys her a plush convenience store unicorn and coffee in a jumbled effort to cheer her up on finals- he leaves them on her door and finds them hours later, cold, and her asleep at her desk over letters he daren’t read.
Occasionally, he puts up with a visit from Agent Cromwell.
Lars shows up at the apartment intermittently, abortively, and for no obvious reason other than to drop off something that always turns out to be helpful one way or another. Sometimes he actually makes it in through the threshold, but on most occasions, his gifts go shoved under the crack of the front door or thrown on the welcome mat outside: files, an update on a loophole he's found in the system, and most notably a bouquet with a gun stashed inside it.
He never asks for anything in return any more, but Niklas often catches him looking over the table at him, some lost, rapt expression in his eyes, some druggie haze-stare. One way or another he gets shooed out eventually- by Niklas, by Viola, or by his own cell phone chirruping a sprightly tune through the cold apartment space.
One day, he stops coming altogether. Something about a huge organized crime operation drawing him back up north into the bowels of New York City. Ray doesn’t say much on it by way of details as she drops by that one time, holding a copy of Svetlana’s closed dossier for him to keep. For all he knows the man is dead, overdosed somewhere- the look of his skin and eyes came close to it in the last days.
He still dreams of kissing the man and more, dreams mixed with blood and hands, so many hands choking him- and still wakes up in cold sweat. He has to put himself to sleep at night with law books, readmission letters and liquor, and put up with Viola pretending she doesn’t know in the morning when he tumbles around as quietly as he can with a hangover.
As far as a life goes, it almost works. No amount of confessions absolve him or the hatred he knows still rots in his soul, though his generous scatter of church visits would say otherwise. It takes too much alcohol for him to admit to himself that he still does not regret killing Svetlana, and it takes even more for him to want to reach out to someone, anyone in the night to tell him he’s absolved and on the right path now.
And in the morning, it takes Viola’s empty stare from the doorway to take him off the floor, into the shower and cleaned up and about his day.
But he works, finds a spot at the local library and comes in for training and, eventually, the job itself. He studies. He runs in the morning. He goes to the range and fires the gun Lars has given him until his wrists ache with recoil. He puts Svetlana’s dossier away after one tumultuous night alone of reading. He prays with a new, untainted white plastic rosary that the Pastor has given him.
There’s no Plan anymore. There are just books, the girl he lives with, the pain in his body, the burns on his chest, the waking up in the morning and getting through on a day-to-day basis. There is just mercy he doesn’t think he deserves, steady as his living through the changing of the seasons.
He lives, or he tries to. And he tells himself, that’s what matters.
Afterword
Your author is currently a college senior majoring in Middle Grades Education in the Midwestern U.S., with hopes to teach in the inner city and eventually attain a Master’s degree.
I want to thank my best friend WM for being a generally awesome human being and giving me the support and inspiration desperately needed to push this project through to publishing. Your wonderful attitude and for just outright being there saw me though this and so much more before. I love you, man, in a no homo way (or do I mean it in a homo way?). Let’s have a lot more adventures together in the years, books, stories and shenanigans to come.
I also want to extend thanks to the other people who have stayed in my life, generally for putting up with my silliness and having booze ready for the bad times.
You can follow my life, writing and painting on my blog at:
http://gravitybeams.livejournal.com
http://kollapsar.tumblr.com
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[1]Идти ебать себя: Russian for “Go fuck yourself”
[2] Bulls are considered the executioners, fighters and avengers of the Russian mafia. While Niklas was only in for fiveish years and would have only been a shestyorka/associate of the lowest rank, he's implying here that aside from ' little bull' being a joke about goby fish, his higher-ups were grooming him to be a gang executioner.
[3] Sixth rank, ‘associate’- not fully admitted members of the Bratva/brotherhood. Basically foot soldiers/errand boys. Niklas was in fact more or less a byki/’made man’ by the time he got out.
[4] пизде́ц – pizdéts – “deep shit”, “death” or to denote the end of something.
[5] Suka- bitch, though in this sense Svetlana means ‘traitor’ or turncoat, as the word has a strong connotation in the Bratva towards referring to those who turned away from a life of crime. Suchka- ‘little bitch’, whore, prostitute.