Moscow Noir (10 page)
The picnic drags on. It’s looking to be dawn soon. I examine the faces of the men surrounding me. They’re stinking drunk but not repulsive. They’re just talking a little louder, and more and more often their hands, with their thick short fingers, slice the air dangerously close to whoever they’re talking to. Yes, the word “danger” right now couldn’t be more accurate. These men, unpredictable and invested with almost limitless power, could do something terrible stone sober, but now …
Another bottle makes the rounds. And another. I’ve stopped counting and stopped being amazed at the foresight of those gathered. How much did they bring? Their business discussions are drawing to a close. Here and there—bursts of laughter. The cops are in a great mood today.
“Banderas!” a cop shouts from the other end of the field. “Listen, they told me that after a liter you can hit nine out of ten with either hand! They were lying, right?”
“No way.” Nikolai Petrovich throws back his heavy head. “They only lied about one thing: it’s ten out of ten. Even after two.”
The field laughs. This slippery topic ought to be shut down, it seems to me, and I even open my mouth, but they get ahead of me. I think things over too long to say anything original.
“Well now, let’s see if it’s true.” A man of about fifty totters out to the middle of the field. I know him. He’s the deputy chief detective from the next department over. A colonel. He was in line for a promotion to Moscow homicide, but something didn’t work out. They say it was the vodka again. The colonel takes an apple from the pocket of his pretentious leather jacket, blows tobacco flakes off it, and places it on his own head. The field bursts into laughter again.
“Watch,” the young agent Khmarin elbows me in the side. “Something’s about to happen.”
To be honest, I’m scared, but Khmarin is perfectly calm and smiling his big gap-toothed smile.
“Two years ago Banderas stood three Tajiks here, rapists. They didn’t want to write confessions. He put an apple on top of each head, and took out two barrels. They say it stank of shit, but nothing bad happened.”
“Did they write them?”
“Sure did. You’d write anything if a bullet grazed your head.” Khmarin sniffs. “True, I didn’t actually see it. But that’s what people say.”
I don’t doubt that’s exactly how it all went down, but my alarm doesn’t abate. I’m looking at Voronov. He’s very, very drunk. Catching my look, he smiles and the tips of his mustache go up. He comes closer, leans toward my face, bathing me in a haze of vodka, and whispers, “If you get together with an old friend and buy a case of pepper vodka, you can have a pretty decent time of it. You just have to leave your guns at home. Someone told me that too, but I forgot. Just so you remember, student.”
I’m gripped by panic, but changing anything—that’s out of my hands. The colonel stands in the middle of the field and keeps smiling idiotically. The apple is shaking on his head, looking to fall. Voronov marks off twenty-five paces and stands facing him. The cops fall silent. You can touch the silence now, you can cut it with a knife and spread it on bread. Snow crunches under someone’s feet; the officers are freezing in the winter woods, and warm boots are not their style. Voronov gets his nonregulation TT out of his left holster, examines it carefully, and closes his eyes for a second. Right now I can feel him as if I’ve entered into his mind. He aims with eyes closed, without raising the barrel. The next instant something terrible happens. Chilled from standing there in one place, the colonel sneezes. We still haven’t heard the sound and don’t realize what’s happening. All we see is his face suddenly crumple. His mouth opens wide, the apple falls off his shaven head, and the night silence is shredded by gunshot. He sneezes and drops like a sack into the snow. His legs bend, his arms fling awkwardly to the side, and the 7.62 caliber bullet pierces his head like it’s a ripe melon—straight through. Now his left leg twitches spasmodically—the tiniest bit. Once, twice, three times. All his muscles tense and his chest rises and falls. The thousand and first corpse on the field.
No one seems surprised. The agents collect the remains of their feasting silently and efficiently and toss the bottles and snacks into their trunks. One after another the engines start up and the dry snow creaks under their wheels. Another three minutes or so probably pass, or maybe it’s an eternity. And here we are. The two of us on the field. Voronov nervously squeezes the TT in his hand, and I’m frozen in an awkward pose on the mossy concrete.
The colonel’s corpse.
Our eyes meet. Banderas walks over to me and looks me up and down. He throws the gun at my feet.
“Keep it. It’s a present.” He turns on his heel and walks toward his car. “Boy, cops don’t go to prison. They die fast there. Or stop being cops. Or stop being at all.”
“And so?”
“You still don’t understand.”
“Aha.”
“Aha. Idiot. You’re a cop. That’s all. God help you. And if he does—you’ll understand real fast. Bye for now.”
He starts his engine and leaves. I’m alone. I sit like that for another hour, until my drunk is completely passed. My brain is now amazingly clear, and I know what I have to do.
I put on my gloves and pick the TT up by the barrel. I painstakingly wipe the whole gun with my handkerchief and walk over to the corpse. I try desperately to remember whether our colonel was a lefty or not. No, I don’t think so. His fingers have already started to stiffen, but all is not lost. I put the gun in his right hand and carefully survey the field. Yes, all’s well. The apple is lying a meter from the corpse—yellow with a red blush. I pick it up and take a big bite. I like slightly frozen apples. What can I say?
There’s nothing more to do here. Crunching on the apple, I quickly take the path toward Rostokinsky Road. I still have some money. I have to grab a passing car and make my way home. And be at work at 8 a.m. tomorrow.
I know what’ll happen in the morning. Banderas will look me in the eye and I’ll nod silently. He’ll nod in reply and shake my hand. Just like that. Two men shaking hands. He won’t ask questions, since he never asked me to do anything the day before. Everything I did, I did myself, of my own free will. Any one of us in the smoke-filled two-by-three offices at 12 Boitsovaya Street would have done the same.
The months and years will pass, and Nikolai Petrovich and I will share the same two-man office.
We’ll catch, solve, and punish or tell the pesky vics to fuck off.
Old man, you shouldn’t have put your valuable property where everyone could see it. Even on the surveillance cameras in stores they write:
The management is not responsible for your valuables
. What the hell are we supposed to do?
As it is, we have a heightened sense of fairness, and the next Internal Affairs office over, by the way, has an excellent deputy chief detective now. A young muzhik, smart. A recovering alcoholic, they say; doesn’t drink at all. I should stop by and say hello someday. First we’ll repair the Moskvich since it’s not respectable to go to a first meeting with a colleague with these rusty fins.
I remember everything and know everything, and everyone else knows it too. And I have absolutely nothing to fear. For the last five months I’ve either been staying home or going to the prosecutor’s office. I’m lucky they kept me under house arrest and didn’t send me to Lefortovo because it’s close. Such a stupid thing, you know? It was really dark there, and scary, I admit it. None of us knew what would be there behind the door, and I was standing in front. I haven’t been junior or a student or a probationer for a long time, but I was in front again. My whole life I’ve been in front. When the muscle took out the door and jumped aside, I went in and fired at the sound. Now in my statements—however many there’ve been—I write:
She thrust something out toward me
. It was a syringe, just a syringe. But at the time I nearly shat myself, word of honor, and fired four times. I shoot well, though not as well as Voronov. When they take us out to the range once a year, he still hits ten out of ten, and my best record is eight. The officer there says that’s actually pretty good. But this time I was like a different person: all four bullets went in side by side, and after that the girl had no chest left.
She was nineteen or so, I don’t remember anymore. My investigator is a good guy, my age. I know before any arrest he’ll let me go home. I call Nikolai Petrovich, we go to our field, and I suggest a game. He can’t refuse me. But he shoots better. This is how it has to be. They can’t put me in prison. I’ll die there. Cops don’t go to prison. They stop being cops there or they die. And it doesn’t make a rat’s ass bit of difference which.
PURE PONDS, DIRTY SEX OR TWO ARMY BUDDIES MEET
Translated by Amy Pieterse
A
s usual, Maxim walked at full speed coming out of the Pure Ponds metro station, throwing his muscular legs out in front of him as though they were the cranks of an engine. Actually, an engine—lacking vision, hearing, and a sense of smell—would have had a much easier time in this “heavenly” corner of Moscow. Maxim had to squeeze through two chains of sweaty people, human sandwiches who were handing out poorly printed leaflets with the addresses of a translation agency. Past the piss-stinking bums draped nonchalantly all over the Griboedov Memorial. Past the crazy, long-haired old man with a loud amp who sang psalms accompanied by Arabic music. Past a dozen dogs that took turns drilling the same lascivious bitch. Past the foul creek that our shortsighted forefathers had, for some reason, chosen to call
Pure
.
Maxim recalled a song that Igor Talkov had sung in his time. Sung until he caught a bullet at a showman’s showdown. A bullet straight out of a handgun that sent him to his final resting place. The mawkish lyrics were a parody of the present situation:
Pure Ponds and shy willow trees/Resemble maidens who’ve fallen silent at the water’s edge/Pure Ponds, timeless dream of green/My childhood shore, where the accordion sounds.
Willows? What willows? More like disgusting benches with morons lounging around on them. What accordion? Only the monotonous thumping of electronic music blaring from the windows of cars stuck in a traffic jam.
And maidens? Sluts, all of them!
Maxim hated places like this, places that were once steeped in an aura of history or cultural tradition. Now that Moscow had stuffed itself with oil dollars to the point that it was about to explode and send pus flying in all directions, places like this were identified in his mind with unwashed, stinky socks.
Of course, he could have pretended to be a machine and slipped off to his base, which long ago had been the Jatarang Indian restaurant. He might have moved on by, blind, deaf, and paying no attention to anything. But he was another type of machine entirely. And his capabilities and functions were very different. He had survived to the age of forty thanks only to his capacity to observe the details of his surroundings, any of which might prove a lethal threat to him.
Before, in the mountains of Afghanistan, death could lurk in the swaying movement of a twig, or the suspiciously smooth (not by the hand of the wind, but the hand of a minelayer) dust on the road.
Later, after he’d finished his service and killing became both his trade and his boss, with a big fat wallet, a lawyer, and a manager, the bony face of death could be hiding behind the dark tinted windows of a jeep, in a crowd, around the corner … anywhere. There was no front line anymore, no rear guard, no fortified base. The front line was wherever Max happened to be.
Now that he had chosen to play big time—which he did not so much for the money (he had enough already), but rather to prove to himself and to others that at the age of forty he could still be a match for any little twenty-year-old chump—he was surrounded by death on all sides. Theoretically, guns with silencers could be aimed at his forehead, and at the back of his skull, at his temples, right side, and left, simultaneously. It couldn’t be ruled out that at that very moment someone was aiming an infrared beam at the top of his head. Despite the enviable virtuosity of his five human senses, honed to perfection, he remained vulnerable. He needed his animal instinct. And it had not once betrayed him. Although just once would be enough.
Three weeks ago, Maxim had accepted an invitation to play an amusing game. The jackpot was ten million. The last player (out of twelve) left alive would be declared the winner. The rules were simple. The game board was the Moscow area, within the limits of the beltway. Each player chose his own weapon. You could hook a howitzer to the back of your jeep and drive around town with it, or carrry a sharpened nail file in your pocket. Players were to kill competitors in any way possible, filming the process on a webcam that was connected to an online server. The game’s powerful organizers refused assistance to contestants taken into police custody during play. Such individuals would be put on trial, hence disqualified from the game. They were allotted one month. If there was more than one player left alive when the time was up, the referee would draw lots and the unfortunates would be shot in the head.
The contenders were told that a group of around twenty millionaires were behind the game. They were the ones at the bottom of the
Forbes
list, the ones with only a sorry twenty or thirty million to their names, which they had come by in the drug trade or illegal gambling. Maxim didn’t really give a damn about who, what, or where. There’s a lot of money sloshing around in this sweepstakes, where folks bet on people, not on horses, cutting each other up with great expertise. As long as they coughed up the prize money at the end of it.
There were only six days left, but he was already bone-tired. He had killed not only five of his opponents, but nine others as well. Collateral damage, it’s called. Three of them were merely the victims of a misunderstanding. A case of mistaken identity. But they had acted suspicious too. And it wasn’t like he had a lot of time to make sure. In that situation, it’s just a matter of who pulls the trigger first. None of them pointed a gun at him, but then, not one of those poor suckers had even had a gun on him to shoot with. Tough luck.
Six of them deserved to die. One of the players had hired them as informers for next to nothing. They shadowed his opponents and kept him notified of their whereabouts. Maxim didn’t feel sorry for them at all. Nope. He recalled how one of them, a nervous guy of around thirty, begged him to spare his life. Said he needed the cash because his five-year-old daughter had sarcoma and needed expensive treatment, or she’d die. And if he died, she wouldn’t make it. Maxim almost let him go, in exchange for the telephone number of the player who hired him. But when he found out it was the same guy who had killed Arkady, his old army buddy, he couldn’t restrain himself. He broke the kid’s neck so quick the guy didn’t even notice his own death. It’s different if you’re nailed to a hospital bed, but not many healthy people see it coming. Death is especially quick at the hands of people who make it their profession. Fast as a bullet that has already found a home inside a lifeless body by the time the shot rings out.
Maxim sure hadn’t expected to find Arkady’s name among the players. They had been close friends back in Kandahar, with ghosts firing mortars at their marine company. And there was Nikita too. They had been the only ones left alive in their platoon. They made a vow of eternal friendship. But a lot had changed since then. Things were different now. And they weren’t the same guys they had been either. Life’s a bitch.
“I really need the cash,” said Arkady, staring at Maxim over the bridge of his nose. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I have no choice either,” Maxim replied. “Although I could do without the cash. In fact, I could even help you out, I’ve got some savings. But it’s too late now to call it quits.”
It was true, the players were already in the game. They’d signed a contract with the devil in blood. Refusal to continue with the game carried a risk of the secret being leaked, so any such player would be liquidated. Everything was absolutely fair. And gentlemanly.
Obviously, Maxim and Arkady agreed that they would not kill each other under any circumstances. If, by the end of the month, only the two of them were left, then lots would be drawn to decide the answer of “to be or not to be,” a bullet shot out of the barrel of a gun in a game of Russian roulette. After all, they were army buddies and not some pussy bastards off the street.
The agonizing problem solved itself, really.
He walked on, scanning everything up ahead—to the left, to the right, behind him—calculating all the possibilities for how the present situation might develop. Two clerks, a mother and daughter, three rough-looking losers, a wino, a student, a bum, a prostitute, an old man, WHO’S THAT? An athlete? Yes, definitely an athlete. Three teenagers with snowboards, a spaced-out druggie, WHO IS HE? HE’S GOT HIS RIGHT HAND IN HIS POCKET! No, his wrist is straight, and the pocket’s too small, yeah, he’s just a jerk. And old woman trying to look younger than her age, a suicide case definitely a suicide, a workaholic, a cop, a guy looking down at the grou—NIKITA!
Yes, it was him. It wasn’t easy to recognize the handsome and easygoing buddy he had known from his army days in this unkempt person, slumped over on a bench with a one-liter plastic bottle of extra strong Ohota beer. Ripped sneakers, his big toes nearly poking out of them, threadbare jeans, a filthy coat. Gray hair speckled his five-day-old stubble and made its way up to his temples and into his once black hair. But most horrifying of all was the expression in his eyes: dull and lonely like an autumn swamp. His gaze wasn’t staring inward. It wasn’t staring outward either. It was unfocused and wandering somewhere in the direction of nonexistence.
Maxim paused, although in the present situation this wasn’t very safe. But he couldn’t just walk past a friend who looked like he needed help.
“Nikita!”
“Oh, it’s you,” Nikita said, as though he hardly recognized the person he was speaking to.
“What’s all that?” asked Maxim, nodding at the plastic bottle that seemed to be a primary attribute of all the downtrodden and hopeless.
“You sure got this life thing all figured out. Looks like you got it made,” Nikita said, his voice so shrill he was almost shouting.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Maxim scanned the hostile territory around him.
“What’s wrong with
me
? Where were you three years ago? I wrote to you from St. Pete. Tried to get hold of you. And where were you a year ago, when I was all alone, up to my neck in shit? What’s wrong with
me
?”
“Give me a break! I moved into a new place and got a new number. And I’m not in Moscow much anyway. Come on. What can I do to help you now? I mean it, right now.”
It was obvious the guy was in bad shape. He was angry at the whole world, and appeared comfortable that way. His body language was saying,
Forgot about me, the bastards, stabbed me in the back! Not one single son of a bitch came around when I needed help. Well, I don’t need you assholes anymore. Scram!
Guys like that never admit that it is they, and not the “bastards,” “sons of bitches,” or “assholes,” who are to blame for their misfortunes. Backed up by such sentiments, they enjoy not shaving and going for weeks without changing their underwear; guzzling Ohota or Baltika 9 as they go under, until they stop somewhere about six feet beneath the earth’s surface and worms start gnawing at what’s left of them. Even worse, Maxim once heard about a dog breeding company where bull terriers were fed a diet of homeless people, live homeless people, to turn the dogs into killers and cannibals.
“You should have helped me out back then when I needed it, before I ended up in Moscow,” said Nikita.
When, at last, he ran out of excuses to prop up his ego, Nikita told his story. It turned out that three years before, in St. Petersburg, he had made some big money and decided to move to Moscow. What’s the big deal, everybody’s going! It’s the city of unlimited possibilities. So he sold his Petersburg apartment and added that money to the bundle he’d received from Valya Matvienko for working on her election campaign, and bought a three-bedroom apartment at Pure Ponds, one that was big enough to house their whole damn platoon back in Kandahar. He partied for a month, spending dollars like they were five-kopek coins. After that, he settled in. Turned out that the easiest part was finding a mate. Or something like that. Whatever. She was beautiful, smart, sexy, and devoted. Or she seemed devoted back then. That was why, three months later, he awarded her the official status of wife, and a note was made of this both in his passport and in an official registry book.
Making a living in Moscow proved much more difficult. He tried opening a souvenir shop on Taganka. They wouldn’t let him. He set up a snack shop at Kitai-Gorod. It was burned down two weeks later. He signed a contract to deliver a small consignment of Polish perfume. He got cheated, cost him fifty grand. Well, after that he gave up on having his own business and got a job as a security guard at the Reutov casino. His salary, plus the interest he received on the Petersburg money he’d put in the bank, was enough to live on quite comfortably.
Fate, however, decided to play a trick on the Afghan war hero. The bank went bust. With great difficulty, Nikita managed to get a tenth of his savings back. But he lost even that at the very same casino where he worked. He went in one weekend just to try his luck. Just about hit the jackpot too. His wife’s devotion, like snow in April, began to melt steadily.
She soon turned into a terrible fury. Even so, her three other good qualities remained. She was sexy (though she stopped sharing that particular quality with her husband). Beautiful. And smart. In fact, she was smart enough to kick Nikita out of the apartment three days ago.
“What are you, some kind of wuss?” said Maxim. “Show her who’s boss! You’ve got fists, don’t you? Tell her to get the hell out.”
“She reregistered the apartment in her own name. I’m like the heir or something.”
“Then kill her! Have you forgotten how it’s done? Make it look like an accident.”
“I can’t. I just got baptized. I made a vow, for the rest of my life. Besides, look.” Nikita stuck his arms out in front of him, palms facing downward. His fingers shook visibly, like those of an alcoholic.
“Ouch,” said Maxim, shaking his head. “I’d head for a monastery, bro. And how about your vow never to touch the drink again?”
They were both silent for a moment, puffing on their cigarettes.
“How about this,” Maxim said, interrupting the silence. “I’ll kick her out myself. Then you’ll be off the hook. Where’s your place?”