The Russian Heist, page 4
Torpor waged its battle for his mind, but his body had already sent up the white flag. It was a real struggle to think.
“He said you were right for it, ‘perfect,’ he said.” Her face was partially hidden by the frosted halo of her hair.
Macbride felt his new surreal world tipping on its axis. Apparently he wasn’thearingright;thismadenosenseatall.Hehoistedhisbulktoahalfsitting position.
“My name’s Roberta,” she said. “Everybody calls me Bobbi.”
Smittycameintotheroommunchingfromabagof potatochips.“Now that ain’t exactly right, honey bun. I’ve called you lots of names.”
Bobbi, furious, “You said he agreed, asshole!”
Nausea,rampantagain,madethefloorrotate.Hestretchedouthisarms like struts, one against the back of the couch, one against the coffee table. What were these godawful people talking about?
Smittyplacedanotherchipintohismouth,balleduptheemptybagwith a crackling noise and tossed it over his shoulder, and managed to give it a theatrical kick behind him. He wiped his hands on his pants.
“OK,” he said and came up behind her and rested one hand on her hip. HesaidtoMacbride,“Youremembermesayingsomethinglastnightabout a million?” He gave Bobbi’s rump a little slap.
“No,” Macbride wheezed out. “What are you talking about?”
“You dint let me finish,” Bobbi pouted to her husband.
“That piece-of-shit truck I was driving. We was taking a deposit to the airport, same run as last week. I reckon, what with two other trucks running similar routes, we got close to a five, six million inside.”
“Government money,” Bobbi added. “For rebuilding Iraq.” She pronounced it like most newscasters with a long diphthong.
“Fucking-A,” said Smith. “Our tax dollars going bye-bye to the ragheads.”
Macbride was confused by the non sequiturs floating around his head like moths. Now they were talking about Iraq.
“Someone had better start making sense—” he said.
“We’re going to steal it,” Smith said.
“Hellfire yes, we’re going to steal it,” Bobbi added.
“What—what—whatareyoutwotalkingabout?”Macbride,withmuch laboredbreath,proppedhimself ontohisthrobbingelbowandyelpedatthe sudden blitz of pain. His bleared vision forced him to twist his head from one to the other, and back again. Bobbi’s tawny eyes, however, said, “No joke.” Smith bounced on his toes, heel-to-toe, like a little kid contemplating great mischief.
Macbride exerted himself, tried to get off the sofa, but only slumped against the back. This circle of hell seemed even stranger. He stared at the stained teeth of the little man, grinning down at him like a satyr coming upon a wood nymph. No, more like a minnow about to swallow a whale—him.
“How’s that for fuckin’ economics, professor?”
“See, I been watching you,” Smith said to him much later with a leercreasing his face.
The brittle disc of sun was fading already and taking away the daylight at the windows. Soon he would need to turn on a light to see them clearly, buthehadnotroublehearingthem.Theyprowledaroundhisrooms,Smith sniffing like a fox, always aware of him, grinning, but Macbride had the creeping sensation this odd pair was not merely trying to impress him with a fantastic boast.
Smith had managed to locate a can of ginger ale and some crackers. Macbride didn’t know which to be more disgusted by—the robustness of Smith’s appetite or the sheer lunacy of what he was hearing.
Bobbiwasmakingcoffeeinthekitchen,singingsomethingclichédabout hearts stomped flat and beer. Macbride, less groggy now, and more than a little afraid, held his aching head in his hands and tried to conjure forth a solutiontomakeallthisdisappear.Smith’sgratingvoicewasasteadyklaxon in his ears.
“I fuckin’ told you why,” Smith said. “The Got-damn guy’s half-nigger. All that rap shit, coon jive. A big strike in my book.”
Tony the bartender. Macbride’s tongue was too thick for much speech and his brain still sluggish, trying to back away. Get out, walk, run awaywas all it formulated in his hour of need.
Bobbi handed Macbride a mug of coffee. He noticed a slight redness at thetipsof herfingers—excessivehandwashing,theparanoidnurse’sanswer to funky nosocomial infections in hospitals.
“Thank you,” he said. It tasted like varnish and scalded his palate immediately—microwaved; even worse—instant. A relic abandoned in the cupboard from Siobhan’s days, no doubt; he thought of her with ambivalence, an almost wife, whose once voracious sexual appetite was offset by her blithe indifference to cooking in general and his demand for Frenchpressed coffee in particular.
She walked over and sat on the ottoman and placed an arm casually around her husband’s knee. Smith’s boyish face beamed at him like one of those withered apple dolls.
“I spoke to you last night,” he said. “Right here, right here on this very spot. I said, ‘You are the one, by God.’”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Macbride said. It was like trying to plug pinprickholesinaballoon.Somewhereabuzzinhisbackbraindredgedup an eerie conversation between them, strangers and drunks, shortly before he passed out on the couch.
“Listen,professor,I’mnotshittingyou—”Smithslappedhishandsand sent crumbs to the floor.
Bobbi leaned over Macbride, her breasts looming into view; her closed hand extended to his and she put something in his hand. “Here, take some Bayer. I found it upstairs in the medicine cabinet while I was cleaning up that disgusting mess.”
“—weneedyour...youreloquence,”Smittyresumedhappily.Theword seemed to please him.
Macbride’svoicewasaraggedwhisper.“ForGod’ssake,Iteachcollege. I’m educated. I’m—he cast about in the detritus of his life looking for the right selfdefinition but found only negatives—I’m not a thief—”
“You’repoorasashithousemouse,”Smithsaidwithabigsliceof contempt.
Hishyenalaughcarriedenoughscorntolapovertheedgesof Macbride’s fatuousresponselikeanunspokenreminderof hisanticsduringlastnight’s circusinthebar.Smithgoose-steppedaroundtheroom,alittleNazionparade. “Haw, remember this, professor? I seen you with that girl.” Macbride could not recall seeing Smith in the Wing Ding before last night.
“Hon, be nice,” said Bobbi. She squeezed his knee hard.
“I seen all your utility bills over on the table,” he said again. “And your bank statements, and your credit card statements. It don’t take no college degree to figure out you need money real bad, man.”
“I’m not that . . . poor,” said Macbride, but his face flushed at the obvious lie.
“Itdon’tmatteragoodGod-damntome,professor.”Smithslappedhis palm on the table for emphasis. “But poor is poor.”
Bobbi sat on the couch the way girls learned to do at school to keep boys from looking up their skirts. He touched his sore eye where the skin was puffy, elastic to the touch.
“That’ll be yellow and purple by tomorrow,” Bobbi said. Macbride thought her crude sensuality a knockdown version of Helena’s—Bobbi’s muslintotheother’ssilk.Buteachwoman’sbeautyhammeredoutthesame message to males. Stare if you can’t help it.
Macbride shivered, chilled, and realized he needed to end this conversation at once.
Before he could speak, Smitty snapped at his wife.
“Zee said he’s not a real professor. Just a part-timer, somebody they fill in with when the real teacher ain’t there. Like a hired bookworm.”
Macbride was galled that a cretin like Smith should discover the truth.
“That because you aren’t good enough, professor?” Bobbi’s gratuitous insult scalded him worse than that liquid filth she called coffee.
Macbride reared up from the sofa. He thrust a finger toward the door. “Get out of my house, both of you!” His voice quavered, broke, a bottledup dam released. Standing made him light-headed, so he immediately sat down. His rage was already spent from the effort.
Bobbi tugged angrily at her husband’s arm. “I told you this was a mistake, you idiot.”
Smith refused to budge. He glared at Macbride. “It ain’t a mistake, God damn it! He knowsthat!”
Heallowedhimself tobeurgedoutthedoorbyhiswife.Heglaredback at Macbride with fury. Only when the door banged shut against the jamb was he dimly aware that he needed to breathe. He was giddy with fear and hispalmswerewet.Hefeltasif hehadjustwalkedoffstagefromanall-day, third-rate melodrama.
He listened to thechuk-kerchuk-chukof an engine turning over in the iron cold, become a throaty purr, and then fade down the driveway. Blood thrummedinhisveins.Pocketsof coldairswirledaroundhisbarefeet.He heard the cat jump from his window seat onto the hardwood floors. It soundedexcessivelyloudlikeapistolshotinthesilenceof hisemptyhouse.
“Has it come to this?” he asked the bare walls. He saw the same forlorn,shadowyrectangles,thelastremnantsof thephotosandprintspacked and gone with wife number three. Masochistic reminders of his failures as a man and husband.
His house violated. His dignity and peace a shambles . . .
Whatdignity?Areedyvoiceinsidehisheadenquired.Itsoundedweirdly like Smith’s.
What peace, asshole?
Chapter 4
Monday, the Day after Christmas: Dimitri Andreivich Byko He was bored looking at fuck books. His cousin said—this was back during the store’s annual Halloween leather and bondage sale—that it would be a few more months, maybe after this Christmas, before it was safe to go home. Home meant “Little Odessa,” Brighton Beach, not Ukraine, certainly not Krivoy Rog where he was born, a windswept village that principallyraisedbeetsandsoldthemtoMuscovitesstandinginmile-longqueues. The place became a radioactive black hole after Cho’rnobyl. A month before that, his papers to get him to New York were secured by his uncle.
His father had taught him to drive the big commune trucks before he was ten. Everybody worked in his family—mother,sister, two older brothers. He barely remembered Yuri, killed in Afghanistan. His job in the city wastohosedownthemuddybeetswithbucketsof waterfromGorkyPark. His hands were calloused and dirty from hard work that began before the sun broke over the hills. A crescent of black soil packed under the cuticles had to be dug out with a penknife. A little rain made his work easier, the pinkwaterflowedintothegutterslikeblood,butagoodsoakingcausedhis fathertocurselikeagypsyanddrinkhimself blindonbrewfromfermented turnips.ItmeantDimitrihadtolifttheheavybagsbackontothetruckbed and cover them with a canvas tarp; then he had to make sure he got his father up into the truck after he passed out. Rubles had become so worthless that he could not afford to bribe the city militia into letting them stay the night. A long time ago that was. Now he was a man his father would have feared to strike.
WithAlekseidead,therewasnoreasontohangaround,yethisunclehad been firm. Stay put,it isn’t safe. That Moscow business was taking too long to be put right, and it made him suspicious. Dimitri slammed the phone down. Za chto? Why? Aleksei had enemies, and he might have gotten himself into something he couldn’t fix. Dimitri knew his cousin would try to cheat the devil in hell if he could.
His mind revolved around the dark possibilities of betrayal, and he was playing the angles like a lethal chess match when he became aware of a woman’s presence. She was standing in front of the swingers’ magazines, a tall blonde, one hip cocked. She didn’t look like the women he usually saw—mostly dykes in butch haircuts and plaid shirts, or girls clutching their boyfriends while they stood around giggling at the sex toys and whispering to each other. Once in a while a middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman would enter to checkouttheleathergoodsororderwhipsandharnessesorthelatestdominatrix outfits in Nazi-black Lycra. This one was around thirties—a big, dyed blonde with a loping gait that drew every male’s eyes to her. Even the homosexuals checking out the gay magazines stole furtive glances.
Dimitri tracked the buttery hair from his high vantage behind the counter; he guessed she was with the small man standing near the DVDs. He put aside his thoughts about New York and homed in on her. He’d make eye contact with her at the counter. The little man kept looking back toseewhereshewas.Dimitrihadreservesof patience;heknewhowtowait before striking.
She wandered back toward the front but didn’t look at him. The man called her over in the familiarity of husbands. Her scent lingered near the counter where she passed. He showed her the sign meant to keep highschool punks out of the hardcore section; then she turned toward Dimitri and smiled directly at him. Aleksei used to joke about calluses on Dimitri’s palms after a shift in this lurid pink sea of glossy flesh, but it was untrue. Dimitri learned all he needed to know about masculine stamina from the older girls on the farms by thirteen. Later, because of his growing business interests in Moscow or because of confinement in prison, he learned to acceptthesexualdroughtsinthesamecalmwaythatheacceptedthepleasures of having many women at once. He found that a usable skill in Manhattan, too, where married men in sex clubs let him enjoy their wives on mattresses in full view, while the husbands watched him perform. Aleksei usedtooffertofixhimupwithoneof hisgirlfriends,butherarelysaidyes. It was his cousin who bled to death in front of a woman, not he.
TheshopAlekseibought,withalittlehardpersuasionontheowner,sat in the middle of the Youngstown-Warren corridor, a billion-dollar developmentof tightlypackedstripmalls,specialtystores,fast-foodrestaurants, some of the classier chains and national franchises of retail, and a few nightclubs catering to the well-to-do suburbanite. The area bordering the corridorwaszonedforprofessionalbuildings.Itwasn’tNewYorkCitybut it was better than hiding among the shabby tenements of Little Odessa with their putrid smells of cabbage and cat urine.
If hehadbeenbetrayed,thenitmeanthismoneyhisunclekeptforhim was gone, too. The money he was saving for his deal with the Serbs, the ones who supplied his uncle with all he could take—girls in their teens or twenties,neverolderthantwenty-seven,mostfromUkraine,Moldova,Bulgaria,andRomania.TheyweresmuggledtobreakinghousesinBosniaright under the US Army’s nose. A few stayed there to work the GIs in the topless bars and whorehouses built near the bases. The stupid cows believed they were going to work as motel maids and waitresses, au pairgirls or nannies in America, or England, or Italy. That was what the ads promised, of course. But once they were rounded up, stripped, lined up like cattle, and broken by gangs of Serbians, there were no more silly fantasies about their futures.
His uncle put him in charge of them, all crammed into tiny apartments inBrooklynandtheBronx.Hisjobwastokeepthemallworkingattitbars and massage parlors. He gave them all a twenty every morning because he understood women, how stupid they were, and knew you never trusted them. If any gave him trouble, they were taught quickly. If he needed sex ordemandedit,theyhadtogiveit.Thefirstbatchhetooktoplacesaround Times Square but they were so awkward on stage that the bar owners refused to take them, even when he threatened them. So he took them back to the apartment, bought them American CDs, and told them to practice. In a week, they were all making money from noon to four in the morning every day from then on. Lap dances, blow jobs, hand jobs—Dimitri had a chart he brought around and told the proprietors how much to charge for everything, even if customers wanted only to touch them on the ass, tits, or bush. Any problems, call him.
Only one girl had ever fought him with real passion, a Muslim from Herzegovina—she kicked, bit, and scratched. He had knocked her to the floorwhereshelaypantingandcursinghiminherdialect.Whenshewouldn’t stop making her demands to go home, he brought in four other males, and they took turns with her, even took her in the ass—but he finally gave up. He held her down by the throat with one hand and used a nail gun in the center of her forehead. He dumped her in the marshes of Jamaica Bay. Noonewaseversenthome.Evenif thegirlsmanagedtomakethe$60,000 they were told they had to pay back for getting them to America, they wouldn’t want to go home. Some who did were despised by their families and spat upon, some were killed by brothers and male cousins to redeem their tarnished family honor.
When the couple arrived at the counter, he saw glimpses of what they worebeneaththeirheavycoats.Themanhadonaspandexversionof some comic book superhero that outlined his crotch. She wore a French maid’s costumewithfishnetstockingsandherlavishbosomondisplay;hefigured she used duct tape to bundle them for the exaggerated cleavage—too high to be natural. Dimitri’s eye for prime female meat was as scrupulous as a jeweler pondering facets through a loupe.
The man placed four magazines on the counter along with a pack of nudieplayingcards,maleenhancementpills,andstay-hardcrème.AsDimitri rang him up, he saw her staring at him out of the corner of his eye near aplasticbarrelof paperbacksexnovels.Thecoverof theoneshewasleafingthroughshowedacouplewithmassivegenitaliagoingatitdoggiestyle. When she noticed he had paid and left the store, she tossed the book back into the barrel. At the counter she stopped and reached up for a copy of Ohio Connection featured on a display rack. It was one of the magazines the manhadpurchasedamomentago.Sheopeneditatthecounterinfrontof him and tapped a long red fingernail at a photo insert in the middle of the magazine.
“That’s me,” she said.
“It’s a very lovely picture,” Dimitri said. He looked at a small grainy photo of a nude blonde lying on a couch with her long legs spread open to reveal her dark crotch. It wasn’t a perfect image and the breasts were partially obscured by the woman’s arms teasingly crossed in front of her.
Dimitri’s testosterone communicated itself to her in a swift exchange of pheromones. A gnat might have flown through the turbulence in the air and not felt it.
“What’s your name?”
“Bobbi,” she said. Her eyes were odd, like the color of dirty ice when light hits it, and she made a fluttery motion that he had seen flirtatious teenaged girls do.
“What’s your name anyway?” she asked.
“Dimitri Andreivich Byko.” He laid it on with a Ukrainian, rather than Russian, accent. “But all my friends call me ‘Tarzan.’”
She laughed at the bizarre discrepancy.
“You don’t look like Tarzan. Where’s your long hair?”
“No? I have been told I am a twin brother for Johnny Weissmuller.” Weissmuller, in fact, was a boyhood hero; he once spent every Saturday watching the films on a small black-and-white Telefunken set in the communalkitchen.WhenheandAlekseifirstranamokinMoscow,hegrewhis hairoutintolongsun-bleachedlocks—untilthevictimsof hisblitzesbegan giving descriptions of his hair to the militia.
