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Authors: Michael Beres

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Political, #General

Traffyck (38 page)

BOOK: Traffyck
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“Why did you change your mind?” asked Janos.

“Perhaps because of the girl,” said Mariya.

“The girl?”

“While riding, I looked down a side street in Kilija and saw a girl who could not have been more than sixteen. She wore a short skirt and low-cut blouse. A large man stood behind her, hands on his hips and legs spread. I wanted to turn down the street and ride my bicycle at high speed directly into the pimp bastard. I would have castrated him with my front wheel!”

“So you think we will castrate pimps?” asked Janos.

“Putting a few of them out of business would be satisfactory,” said Mariya.

Vasily was alone in his cabin with the door locked. He sat on the edge of his cot with his AK-47 resting on his lap. Earlier in the evening after dinner, Pyotr had given another vague lecture about “good works,” followed by an announcement of the discovery on the east beach of the drowned body of one of his favorite teachers, a young woman named Katya. Pyotr eulogized Katya as if he were an evangelical preacher. Many were moved to tears.

Vasily had not spoken to Pyotr since their argument and was not aware of the drowning. Following Pyotr’s eulogy of Katya, Vasily had walked through the dark woods to the cemetery, where many had been buried over the years—some overtaken by disease, others brought back from the outside world where they had been killed, but most the helpless victims of Chernobyl.

At the cemetery, Vasily had pried open one end of the coffin Ivan’s followers had nailed securely for the service to take place the next day. After seeing that the coffin contained not the body of Katya, but only a few centimeters of sand, Vasily re-nailed the coffin, using his jacket to muffle the sound of his knife handle, which he used as a hammer.

So now, here he sat, Vasily Alexievich Kovalenko, an early member of Pyotr’s compound, a man whose guilt lingered. A man who would have gone to prison as a recruiter, had not Pyotr stepped in and rescued him with the help of SBU comrades. Not only had SBU officials been given their pick of girls, and boys, but also church officials had gotten their share. In return for funds from their collection baskets, living “gifts” had been delivered to deacons, priests, and even a bishop, at private apartments in Kiev and other Ukraine cities.

Vasily Alexievich Kovalenko gripped his AK-47 tightly, recalling his younger days on the streets of Kiev, telling teenaged girls how they could help their families by taking the jobs he offered. At first, he had worked for a Kiev syndicate, and the girls became strippers. Some girls enjoyed being strippers and made good money. But eventually, girls who were promised jobs as waitresses and housekeepers and even dancers were simply put onto the Balkan Trail, and he received his commission, knowingly selling them to be brutalized in far-off lands. And now Katya, the most innocent of all, a young woman who took pity on Chernobyl survivors, was not in her coffin, and most likely on her way to somewhere…

In the corner of Vasily’s cabin was a backpack he had taken on several missions off the peninsula. The backpack was rounded and full. He had packed it with clothing and enough food to last a week. Now it was simply a matter of deciding when to leave. It had to be soon because Ivan’s power had increased in direct proportion to Pyotr’s madness. If Vasily did not leave soon, Ivan would most likely change the locks on the boats. This would be disastrous because Vasily would be forced to travel overland through the radiation fields.

As Vasily sat on his cot, he recalled the last time he had been off the peninsula. He recalled the raid on the lodge in the Carpathians and the trip back across the border with the three girls and one boy he had wanted to set free along the highway. If he had disobeyed Pyotr then, if he had let them go, perhaps things would be different.

The insanity began with the arrival of the four from the Carpathians. Pyotr, in the process of going mad, had taken the frail girl to his cabin. Had Lyudmilla, traumatized by her experience in the mountains, been sent to the left bank for medical care? Had Pyotr raped her?

Vasily stood and leaned his AK-47 in the corner next to his backpack. He went to the window and looked out at the darkening dusk beneath the canopy of the trees. Then he clenched his fist and slammed it into the wall, splintering one of the horizontal pine boards.

The sign at the entrance said “Kytaj Rest Lodge.” The husband and wife owners were very large, weighing at least 125 kilos each, in their sixties, and wearing clothing gone gray from years of washing. The husband introduced himself simply as Guzun and stared at Mariya as if he had not seen a woman in years. Guzun’s wife did not introduce herself but kept busy behind the small counter in the lobby, peeking out suspiciously at Mariya. The lodge was constructed of logs, the ceiling held up by exposed pine beams dark from age and from years of smoke from the huge stone fireplace on the north wall.

“It has lasted through two wars,” said Guzun, lighting a home-rolled cigarette that smelled like swamp reed.

Guzun remembered Aleksandr Vasilievich Shved.

“He loved to eat. He spoke of food all the time, keeping my wife in the kitchen. He said he liked hamburgers, so for lunch one day she made hamburgers.” Guzun laughed and coughed. “He said they were better than McDonald’s hamburgers. Relish stuck to his mustache!”

“Besides eating, what else did Shved do while he was here?” asked Janos.

Guzun thought for a time, staring at the ceiling like a philosopher. Guzun needed a shave, and his nose hairs were extremely long. “Shved relaxed in his cabin, drove into town, walked out on the peninsula, and asked about the fence. He wanted to know if anyone lived there. I told him Gypsies camped there even though the Orthodox Church owns the land. I also told him rumors of wild horses left over from the Gypsies. He took a rowboat around the peninsula.”

“Did he say whether he met anyone on the peninsula?” asked Mariya.

A question from Mariya made Guzun perk up, straightening his shirt collar, combing back his thin hair with his fingertips. “He met no one, my dear.”

Back at the counter, Guzun’s wife cleared her throat noisily.

“How long was Shved out in the rowboat?” asked Janos.

“All day,” said Guzun. “My wife made a box lunch. Four pork sandwiches and homemade potato salad, a thermos of tea, and for desert—”

“When he returned at the end of the day, did he say anything about it?”

“He loved the food,” said Guzun.

“Not the food,” said Janos. “Did Shved say anything about the peninsula?”

“Simply that it was peaceful and quiet and there were many birds. This is what most guests come for, the watching of birds.”

“Is anyone on the peninsula now?”

“A few Gypsies,” said Guzun. “I smell their campfires. They will be gone next month. In winter, one can walk around the peninsula; spring and fall are dangerous with choppy water colder than witch tits.” Guzun smiled toward Mariya. Guzun’s wife coughed again.

“Did Shved say anything to you when he checked out?”

“No,” said Guzun. “He simply left the key in the room, along with a note.”

“A note? Do you have it?”

“I threw it away.”

“What did it say?”

Guzun inhaled on his cigarette stub, rubbed his nose hairs for a while, smashed the stub in an ashtray on a nearby table, then said, “I think he said something about going to Sevastopol. Yes, he wanted to go to Sevastopol because there was a sanatorium there run by traffickers who went out on beaches and kidnapped young women bathing in the nude.”

“He said all of that in a note?”

“Yes, how could I forget something like that?”

“Why would he tell you that?”

“I don’t know,” said Guzun. “Perhaps I was supposed to tell you.”

“But you did not save the note?”

“At the bottom of the note, he asked that I throw it away,” said Guzun, looking puzzled.

Except for two middle-aged women saying they were bird watchers, the lodge was empty. The cabin Shved had stayed in was available, so Janos rented it for the night. He also rented a rowboat, telling Guzun they wanted to go out early in the morning.

Although Janos and Mariya had not eaten since lunch in the camper van, they would not go hungry. Guzun’s wife packed a box containing pork sandwiches, cookies, and a bottle of tea.

“Cabin number six is beyond that hill,” said Guzun, pointing the way. “You must walk. There is no drive. There will be clean bed linen in the cabinet. The rowboat is at your dock.”

At the top of the hill on their way to the cabin, they could see the south shore of the peninsula reaching out into the estuary. The sun was setting, and the small peninsula shadowed.

“We are not waiting until morning, are we, Janos?”

“No. We will go tonight. It will be best to surprise whoever is there.”

“Can you swim?” asked Mariya.

“A little,” said Janos, looking down the hill toward the water. “I see life vests in the boat.”

The cabin was at the base of the hill near the water’s edge. River birch trees surrounded the cabin. Its log walls and shingles were dark and damp, and Janos wondered how many times it had flooded. Firewood was stacked outside the door.

“What time should we go?” asked Mariya.

“After dark,” said Janos. “In the meantime, we will see if Shved left anything besides his strange note.”

“Do you think he left the note?”

“It seems odd. It would be like saying meet me at a certain street address. No, it does not sound like Shved at all.”

Janos unlocked the cabin door and pushed it open. A tomb-like dampness greeted them. Mariya watched as he groped around on the wall, finally found a switch, and turned on a dim ceiling light.

“Do you think Viktor acquired his fear of boats out on this peninsula?”

“Perhaps we will find out.”

Mariya thought about her bicycle ride to Kilija earlier that afternoon. She thought about how she had wished she and Janos could escape and become Gypsies. But it was impossible to escape the puzzle, the search for truth.

Inside the cold cabin, Janos held her and kissed her. Then he searched the wall for a light switch. Even though it was not yet dark outside, the cabin windows were small and the canopy of trees created a permanent dusk. Once the lights were on, they began searching the plain and dreary cabin for anything, however small, Aleksandr Vasilievich Shved might have left behind.

That night, after everyone else in the bunkhouse had fallen asleep, Nadia and Lena left their beds, stood together in the dark and dressed, and went out into the cold night. They crept along the edge of the woods near Pyotr’s cabin, where smoke from the fireplace chimney scented the air. There was a light on in the cabin, and they could see Pyotr sitting at his desk, speaking on a telephone. They heard the generator running in the woodshed behind Pyotr’s cabin. But when the generator suddenly slowed to a stop and the light from the cabin window darkened, they hurried away from the cabin down the path to the beach.

It was even colder out from beneath the trees. They walked at least a kilometer away from where the path emerged from the woods, and sat on a smooth rock where the sand of the beach began. The rock was warmer than the air, having saved some of the day’s sunlight. Lena had brought along a blanket, and they huddled together beneath it.

BOOK: Traffyck
3.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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