by S L Shelton
“Zalupa?”
He looked at me and smiled. “Dickhead,” he said, chuckling like a boy, pleased to have insulted his brother in English as well as Russian. A rare indulgence, I think.
“Your brother? You let your brother steal her from you?” Reggie asked. “That’s just wrong,” he said.
His brow crinkled. “Rodka always takes everything from me. He gets the best whores first. He drives the fancy cars and leaves me with the twenty-year-old Fiat.” He paused for a few seconds, thinking about the other ways his brother had slighted him. “He carries around a shiny gun under his jacket, and then tells me all I can have is this.” He pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open. Reggie and I looked at each other for a second, but Reggie shook his head indicating not to worry about it. “He says I’d shoot my foot off if he gave me gun. One time...just one time I shoot hole in floor, and he never lets me forget.”
He closed the knife again and set it on the table in front of him. “He gets to take his pick of all the loot in warehouse, but I’m not allowed to touch,” he continued, dropping his fist on the arm of the chair. “Says I can’t be trusted.”
“Mon, that’s just wrong,” Reggie said sympathetically, gesturing for me to voice my support as well.
“It’s not right how he treats you,” I said, adding my words to the growing supportive soup in his chemically-addled brain.
“He has the best stuff,” Elvis said, and then he remembered something and pulled Barb’s phone out of his pocket. “He always had better phone than me too. Then yesterday, at the...this place we were at, he handed me bag of phones and computers and stuff and said, ‘Burn it.’ I looked in bag and Rodka hit me—here,” he said, rubbing the side of his face.
“He says, ‘Don’t open it. Burn it.’ So he gets in truck and drives off with...” He hesitated, censoring himself. “And drives off with the pretty girl, and I’m standing there pouring gasoline on bag filled with better stuff than I got.” He paused to rub his jaw again.
“But I outsmarted him,” Elvis said, grinning. “While bag was burning, I hear noise. So I go over and look in grass, and there it is,” he said, turning Barb’s phone over and over in his hand, admiring it. “It wasn’t in bag. So I didn’t break his rules. Now I have better phone than he does.”
“Good for you,” I said supportively. Very good indeed, I thought. “But why did you let him take your girl?”
“He didn’t just take her, he took them all. Him and the Serbs,” he said.
Serbs! I was right!
An angry sneer pulled the sides of his mouth down. “In old days, no Serb would dare talk to Russian the way they talk to us.” He leaned forward and picked up his knife again. “In old days, we would cut them from ear to ear just for looking at us disrespectfully,” he said, motioning with his closed knife, making an imaginary line from one side of his face to the other. Then he fell back heavily into the chair. “This is good shit.”
“Tank ya, mon,” Reggie said. “Your fire went out...ya need to blaze it again.”
Elvis brought his joint back to his lips and put the lighter to it again. More than half the joint was still there. He took two deep, heavy tokes and then a lighter third hit before he sat back and relaxed again.
Reggie and I looked at each other for a moment before he shrugged, indicating he didn’t know where to go next with the conversation. I nodded.
“So Rodka knows how to drive a big truck?” I asked.
“Pfft. I drive truck better than he does. He’s always grinding gears,” he said and then made the sound of grinding gears. “Rrrrrrrrannnnnkk. Grrrrrrannnnnnk. But he can fly helicopter.”
“What kind of truck is it? Dump truck?” Reggie continued, trying to draw more information out.
“No, no, no, no. Box truck. For produce. We took it from the dock. Changed the plate so the musora...uh, cops wouldn’t know. And covered the box with canvas,” he replied and then paused, thinking. “If they get pinched, it will be the Russians to take fall, not Serbs.”
“I wouldn’t think it possible for Serbs to give orders to Russians,” I said re-plucking the note that seemed to upset him. “It seems...wrong.”
“Not ‘Serbs… These Serbs. Especially Vukasin Popovich,” he said, lowering his voice as if Popovich could hear if his name were spoken aloud. “That guy scare everyone, with his evil eye and his big scar,” he said, putting his finger up to the corner of his ear and letting it trail down his neck, indicating where the ‘big scar’ was on the Serb.
“Rodka had meeting with Popovich last week. He had eight of us with him. Popovich only three… Popovich say, ‘You and your men get clean truck. Truck will be here, your men will be there.’”
Elvis paused to take another hit from his joint. It was nearly gone now. “Vova didn’t like the way Popovich was talking to Rodka—like he was dog. So he steps up to him. Rodka tried to stop him. But Popovich hit him—”
Elvis made a quick chopping motion with his hand.
“Hard. Fast. Vova didn’t even have time to put hands up. He fell dead,” he said, an expression of sadness on his face. “And still, even with all us there, we just stood and said, ‘Yes sir.’”
“Vova was your friend?” I asked sympathetically.
“Vova was hui...a dick,” he said and spat to the side. “But he was Russian. He should not be treated so. Rodka did nothing. Just watched poor Vova twitch.” He did his impression of Vova twitching.
“And then he took the pretty girl,” I said, steering the conversation back to the subject of Barb.
“Da. But it was Popovich. Rodka just does what they say. She’s on her way to Dusseldorf with my brother,” he said, sounding as if he were going to fall asleep at any moment. My heart jumped at the new information. Dusseldorf!
“Dusseldorf? Well they must be there by now,” I said, snapping him out of his haze.
“Da. They were supposed to wait in Dusseldorf for heat to die down and get new truck or train or something. Left me here to babysit whores.”
“All them whores and just you to watch over them?” Reggie jumped in.
“Me, Dima, and Sobaka. I’m in charge. Those two shit brains,” he elaborated, grinning.
Elvis was drifting fast. I looked over at Reggie and nodded my head. He typed something on his phone before setting it aside.
In a few moments, there was a loud pounding on the door of the apartment. The heaviness of the strikes made it sound as if the door was going to come down. Elvis sat bolt upright as if he had been prodded in the ass with electricity.
“Interpol!” A voice yelled through the door. “Elvis Sobolev. Open the door.”
Not letting Elvis gain his wits, I looked at the phone on the table and pointed at it. “Interpol! They tracked the phone! They’ll get your brother!” I shouted.
Elvis’s eyes shot open wide, and fear gripped him as he stared at Barb’s phone. He reached for it and then pulled his hand back as if it were a snake ready to bite him.
“Do you have a safe place to go?” I asked, trying to sound as desperate as possible.
He looked around the apartment rapidly as if he was looking for a place to hide there. “What am I going to do? You have to help me!” he said pleadingly, shaking in fear and confusion.
“Elvis!” I yelled and then slapped him hard across his face. His eyes turned to me with sudden anger. “My friend,” I said. “You need a safe place. You need to warn Rodka. Do you have a safe place to go? I will take you,” I said in long slow syllables, my hands on both sides of his face.
“D, d, da—ya…yes!” he sputtered out finally.
I looked at Reggie, and he smiled. He gave me the thumbs up, and then said, “Go out de back, mon. I will stall dem.”
I grabbed my bag from the couch and the phone from the table as Elvis and I ran to the back hallway before turning to go down a narrow flight of stairs in the very back. At the bottom, one door led to the back of Reggie’s shop, the other into an alley.
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nbsp; We stumbled into the alley. I held Elvis by the arm, keeping him from falling backward. “Which way?” I asked. “Where are we going?”
“The club,” he said haltingly, before staggering ahead of me.
I rushed up beside him to help steady him. “Walk normally,” I said, “Don’t run. It will attract attention.”
He straightened himself and slowed his pace. We wobbled along the alley for a way, and when we got to a cross street, Elvis looked in both directions as if he were lost. After a moment’s pause, he turned right, back toward the canal. We crossed the bridge to the other side, walked left and then right down a very, very narrow alleyway with glass doors and red lights on both sides. Elvis kept looking over his shoulder to make sure we weren’t being followed.
When we got to the next street, we turned left again and then right once more before we came to another alley. We turned into the alley and walked to the back of a hotel. Stairs went up from the alley to the hotel, and beside them was a short staircase down to the club. When he looked over his shoulder again and saw nothing, he breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, my friend,” he said, slapping me roughly on my back.
When we entered the club, there was music playing over the speakers, though it was still early in the day. There was no one to be seen until we rounded the corner and passed through a beaded curtain into a dark, narrow dance floor, surrounded on both sides by tables and booths. It was a small space. Long and narrow.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darker environment. The music was typical techno club music—house beat with some old movie dialogue dubbed into it. A male singer was mumbling something in Russian in the background. I don’t know that I could have made it out even if I spoke Russian, it was that distorted.
At the end of the dance floor was a bar. There, a man and two women sat on stools while another woman stood behind the bar. Aside from them, the club was empty.
Elvis said something to the man in Russian I didn’t understand, but I understood his name to be Dima. Dima gave him a bored look, but he got up and went back the way we had come. We passed through a doorway beside the bar into a narrow hallway with bathrooms on one side and a door marked “Kantoor” on the other.
We went in to find a man with his pants around his ankles having sex with a woman bent over a desk, naked.
“Elvis!” the man said, smiling. The woman looked around the side of the man and smiled at us both as we came through the door.
“Sobaka. Not on the desk. Idiot,” he said in English, showing me he was in charge. He spoke to him as he would a beloved pet who had knocked over the trash again.
“Sorry, boss,” Sobaka said sheepishly. He pulled up his pants, prompting the girl to gathered her clothes. As soon as Sobaka zipped the fly on his jeans, he turned to face me and Elvis.
He looked at me suspiciously.
“I sent Dima to house to watch the girls. I have to go on business trip. I want you to lock the club up and keep an eye on things here. No one but family gets in,” Elvis said to Sobaka as the girl got dressed.
“What about him?” Sobaka said, gesturing toward me.
“Huh? Oh. Alex. He is helping me,” he said, and then he leaned down to reach in the desk drawer, falling forward and catching himself with his hand.
“What’s wrong, Yefim?” Sobaka asked, using his given name, reaching for Elvis’s elbow.
“Rasta weed.” Elvis said, smiling. “The new stuff is good shit.”
Sobaka gave a toothy grin, nodding in understanding.
“I have to lay low for a couple of days, so you are in charge till I get back. No partying. Everyone stays sharp,” he said, nodding toward the girl Sobaka had been screwing. She had just finished dressing when she heard this and looked up with a pout.
“You got it, boss. Be careful,” he said, and then touched the girl at the base of her back to indicate it was time to leave. I was surprised how he touched her so gently, almost lovingly. With all Reggie had said about the Russians, I half expected to see shoving and slapping.
“He’s in love,” Elvis said after he had closed the door. “Bad to fall in love with a whore. But he has had bad life. Maybe she make him happy,” he said and then shook his head as if that would clear it.
“Money,” he said, remembering suddenly, and then he reached for the bottom drawer.
When he stood, he was holding a stack of euros and a pistol. My chest tightened as he produced it. He tucked the pistol in his waistband and the euros into his jacket pocket.
“If Interpol catches you with a gun, it could go very badly,” I said, hoping to get him to ditch the pistol.
He thought about it for a second and then put the gun back in the drawer, retrieving a phone instead. He shoved the phone into his pocket, grabbed a bag out of the closet, and then walked to the wall, where some keys were hanging on a peg board.
He reached for one set of keys, but paused before grabbing the ones beside them instead.
We walked back into the bar area where the two women were still sitting, sipping on tall drinks through straws. Elvis and I walked past them, but after a few steps he stopped and turned toward them. I just kept hoping that if I followed along, he would take me to Barb…or at least to someone who could. I half expected him to look at me at any moment, and say, “It’s been nice, now buzz off.”
“You two, come with us,” he said to the girls. “We’re going on a trip.”
They were attractive, though over-painted. One was tall and dirty blonde; the other was more average-sized, with an olive complexion and black hair. They hopped off their stools as the woman behind the counter pulled out two oversized purses and dropped them on the bar.
The girls grabbed their bags before following behind us, mumbling something that made me think this was an annoyance to them. We went to the front of the club, which happened to be the back of a hotel, and saw Sobaka and his girl behind the counter at the front. She was sitting on his lap, toying with the chain around his neck.
“Lock up behind us. We won’t be back tonight. I’ll call you if I need you,” Elvis said, sounding very much in charge, but still slurring his words all over the place.
When we exited the club, we turned left instead of the way we had come before. A small parking lot was tucked in between some buildings off to the left, and we followed Elvis to a large Mercedes sedan.
He popped the trunk to throw his bag in before coming around and getting behind the wheel. The girls were standing by the back door on the passenger side, so I started to open the front passenger door. I got in, but the girls were still standing outside the car.
Elvis made a rude noise and then got out again. Yelling across the top of the car, he said, “Get in! We must go!”
“But this is Rodka’s car,” the blonde exclaimed. “He will beat us just for being with you in it.” The fear in her face was clear. The olive-skinned girl nodded frantically in agreement. The blonde’s accent sounded Italian, but her English was very good.
“I’m on business for Rodka, and my car isn’t big enough for all of us,” he said, almost pleadingly. The girls looked at the Fiat and then each other before they shrugged and got in the back of the Mercedes.
Elvis mumbled something in Russian as he got back in and buckled his seat belt. He checked the mirrors on both sides of the car before adjusting the one on the passenger side, fussing over details as if we were about to take off in a plane.
He started the car, checked the video display for the backup camera, looked over his shoulder to verify, checked the mirrors again, and then put the car in reverse to back out of the space. As he reached the end of the alley, he signaled with the blinkers and his hand before inching out into traffic.
“Old woman,” I heard one of the girls whisper to the other in the back seat. Elvis glared at them in the rearview mirror.
Once we were on a main street, Elvis sped up—but he still stayed at least five kilometers per hour below the speed limit. We were in the car for only a sho
rt time when he pulled off the road onto a service road that ran parallel to a wide channel or river, I couldn’t tell. When we pulled up to a tall, iron gate, Elvis pushed the button on a remote hanging from the visor and then drove us through.
As we drove around a curved wall and a dense hedge, I saw a large, modern house with an attached, covered dock...a very large one, which accessed the canal with its own man-made cove. It was the house I had seen on the GPS back in Fairfax! This is where Barb’s phone signal was the first time we’d checked it.
Elvis pulled the Mercedes into a covered carport, exited the car, and then went around, retrieving his bag from the trunk. He and the girls walked through the front door after Elvis entered the security code. I followed them into the large, sunken living room where they flopped down on the couch as if they had just run a marathon. I lingered in the foyer and looked around the downstairs.
The house was immense. It was a post and beam modern with stone floors and a glass front, surrounded on two-and-a-half sides by rough block walls. The wide open stairs curved up to a second floor, and on the opposite side of the foyer from the living room, there was a large, formal dining room with a long, heavy, solid oak trestle table surrounded by tall-backed wooden chairs made from the same wood. Through the dining room was an equally large kitchen.
The design brought the kitchen back around to a large, high-ceilinged living room. Against the back wall there was a large, stone fireplace, which rose three stories from the sunken floor to the timber-framed ceiling.
Elvis and the two girls were on the couch in various stages of undress and were already snorting lines of cocaine from the thick, glass table in front of them. It had taken me only three minutes to take my tour of the downstairs and in that time, they had turned the living room into a miniature version of Studio 54.
“Alex!” Elvis exclaimed. “Come, sit, enjoy. Mi casa es su casa.”