God Lives in St. Petersburg (13 page)

“Zdraste,”
I said, seeing Ryan’s jaw drop open like a chain-snapped portcullis. Sergei had passed out.

Her hand rose from my shoulder and fluttered around stylishly. “Oh, no, no, no, ze Russian is unnecessary,” she said. She pouted. “You don’t remember me, Alec?”

Had I screwed this woman? I didn’t think so. If I had I would have run around spray-painting it on the sidewalks. “I—I’m not sure,” I said.

“How embarrassing for me,” she said, with a loud, solitary laugh. “I am Lena, acqvaintance of your friend Trenton. Ve met at party, two months ago, I sink.”

Trent was a Shark who worked for Boeing, the kind of guy you wound up doing cocaine with if you were around him for longer than five minutes. I remembered the party. At least, I remembered arriving at the party. “Oh, yeah. Trent’s party.”

She laughed again. “You are a terrible liar, Alec.” She extended her hand. I took it and she yanked me up from my chair. “You vill make it up to me viz dance at Dutch Club.”

The Dutch Club was a mobster-haunted hive across town, a place I knew Ryan didn’t have a chance in. I looked over at him, eyebrows raised in apology. “Well,” I said, glad to be rid of his sad-sack bullshit.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, standing up, wobbling a little. “Thanks for everything, Alec. Maybe, you know, I’ll see you again sometime.”

“No, no, vait, vait,” Lena said, stepping between us. “Your friend”—she put a black-fingernailed hand on Ryan’s acne-splotched cheek—“von’t be coming to Dutch Club viz us?”

“I’ve got a flight tomorrow,” Ryan said, swallowing.

Lena nuzzled up against him—they were the same height—and put a hand on Ryan’s left hip, her fingernails raking across his blue jeans. “Alec,” she said, looking over at me, “vhat is your silly friend’s name?”

“Ryan,” I said.

“Vhy is your friend Ryan such idiot?”

“Maybe you should ask him.”

Her face moved toward his, stopping when her black lips brushed against the cracked fissures of his. “Vhy von’t you come to Dutch Club, idiot? Come dance viz me. Fuck your stupid flight.”

Ryan looked at me for help, his face a twitchy, nervous white orb. I said nothing.

Lena stepped away from Ryan and looped her arm through mine. We started to walk away, Lena’s rump swaying so broadly it smacked me on the hip with every step. “Wait!” Ryan called. We turned. With a guilty-looking smile Ryan was behind us, dragging Sergei, one of the table’s chairs upended behind them.

Underneath the Dutch Club’s neon sign were the words AMERICAN DANCE CLUB in English, and even though it was probably the hippest place in the Capital, it fell a little short of this. For one thing, you don’t find many Kalashnikov-toting security guards in American dance clubs, and usually the hookers don’t outnumber the patrons, a mathematical goof tricky enough to send that Malthus guy home thinking. The rest of the formula—seizure-inducing lights, manufactured smoke, music so loud it felt as if something were laying eggs in your eardrum— they had down cold.

We deposited Sergei in the back of the Land Cruiser and stumbled up to the Dutch Club’s entrance. I was drunker than I thought, and by this point Ryan was having trouble finishing his sentences. Already I could tell Lena and I were not going to happen, at least not tonight. I’d taken it upon myself to drive, and Lena spent the trip across town sitting in Ryan’s lap, sticking her tongue down his throat and fishing her hand into his pants. Ryan fought back with a weird mixture of total surrender followed by violent rebuff. When he pushed her away Lena would laugh—throaty, loud, off-putting—and continue undeterred. The Dutch Club guard manning the velvet rope recognized me and waved us inside, past the surly line that spanned two blocks.

Once we were in, Lena got behind Ryan and shoved him out onto the dance floor the way a bully might push a kid into a school bathroom for a beating. The dance floor was not too crowded and Lena hit its scarred vinyl planks atwirl, then lapsed into some incredibly intricate serpentine rumba that had her wrapping herself around Ryan, who was obviously
way
out of his fucking league. I was tempted to get him back to the Ta-Ta but stopped myself when I saw the look on his face. He stood in the floor’s precise center, grinning, clapping out of time, bobbing like a cork, while Lena vamped all around him. Soon the floor filled up with fat, tieless, Nike-wearing mafiosi and their teenage whores in sheer black stockings and fake pearls. Lena and Ryan disappeared in the tangle. He had one night left, I thought. It might as well be a good one.

I waded through the ocean of whores to the bar, ordered a drink, and struck up a conversation with a fey young girl named Tanya. The next thing I knew I was getting blown in a corner of the Dutch Club’s women’s bathroom while a bevy of women crowded around the mirror to reapply their makeup. It wasn’t very good—Tanya kept nicking me with her teeth—and the fact that I wasn’t yet sure if she was a whore or not made it a little hard to concentrate. Paying for sex is just about the biggest turnoff I can imagine, other than shitting in a hole. Tanya must have sensed my distance because she wrapped her lips around me even tighter and squeezed my balls with her free hand about twice as hard as was necessary. Two people were fucking in one of the stalls next to us. Outside the bathroom, techno-bass pounded in Kong-summoning booms. I closed my eyes and imagined Lena blowing me instead. It seemed unbelievable that I wouldn’t remember her, especially if she was at Trent’s party. I’d screwed some mutty German girl at Trent’s party, hadn’t I? I suddenly remembered freebasing, together with Trent, a thimbleful of coke that filled my head with icy confidence and then stumbling into a bedroom with her. And wasn’t it a little fucking odd—this I thought with sudden, startling clarity—that Lena was a friend of Trent’s, since everyone pretty much knew that Trent was as gay as a picnic basket?

My eyes opened. I glanced down to see a puzzled Tanya shaking my nontumescent dick. She looked up at me with a shy wet-lipped smile and said, in heartbreaking English, “Me no good, Meester Alec?”
Oh, Ryan
, I thought,
oh, buddy
, zipped up, gave Tanya ten dollars American, and strode out to find him.

It didn’t take long. They were still on the dance floor, grinding and making out like two teenagers, Ryan’s hands clutching the globes of Lena’s ass. There was no other way to do it: I walked up to them, peeled them apart, and then pushed Lena away hard on her breastless chest. She tumbled back and sat down on the floor, looking up at me open-mouthed and muss-headed, her lipstick smeared all over her face and one of her strappy black shoes hanging from her big toe. “You stay the fuck away!” I shouted, and grabbed Ryan by the arm.

I got across the dance floor before he figured out what was happening. When we reached the edge he turned to go back, his face a twist of drunken spite. “What the hell, Alec!” he said, trying to pull away. “Just what the hell?” His arms were flailing, his eyes half closed.

“Come on,” I said, “we’re leaving. Fun’s over.”

“I want that girl.” He looked back at Lena. She was still sitting on the floor, watching us, lights flashing across her black dress.

“No, you don’t,” I said, giving him a good hard yank on his arm. “Come on, Christian. Time to go.”

A low blow, maybe, but it worked. He stopped struggling and looked back at her briefly. When he turned to me, some shiny sense of belated recognition was sparkling in his eyes. “Why don’t I want her, Alec?”

“Let’s go, Ryan.” Even though he’d figured it out, I couldn’t bear telling him.

Now he grabbed me, both his hands digging into my white button-down shirt. “Why
don’t
I, Alec?”

“Look,” I said, as one Russian pop song gave way to another—indistinguishable—Russian pop song, “we’ve got to go. All right?”

What happened next is kind of hard to describe. Something caught my attention—I don’t remember what—and at the same time Ryan wildly swung his arm back to wrestle it free from mine. He’d caught me off guard and so his arm went flying without any resistance. The song had ended, the floor was clearing, and walking right behind Ryan was a squat, crooked-nosed gangster. Ryan’s elbow caught him in the face, breaking his sunglasses and, from the look of it, doing some serious damage to the guy’s eye. He swore, bent over, cupping his eye, and when he looked up at us it was as if his eyeball had been injected with a syringeful of blood. He started saying something in Russian—too quickly for me to understand—and then a flat-topped goon in a squarish suit had Ryan in a headlock. Ryan didn’t fight—didn’t do anything—he only kind of hung there, like a Puritan in the stocks. It was left to me to punch the guy, and when I hit him, I guess the force was with me. I mean, I killed him, though I didn’t find that out until a lot later. All I remember is this satisfying feeling of something hard going
splat
under my knuckle—this must have been his nose—and he let go of Ryan as if I’d said the magic words.

That we made it out of the club was a miracle. That we made it to the Toyota was a miracle. And that no one shot us as we were peeling out was a miracle. But I realized the miracle quiver was empty when minutes later I looked in the rearview mirror and saw two Mercedes-Benzes on our tail and rapidly closing the distance. There was a cellular phone in the glove box, which I had to scream at Ryan twelve times to get for me—he was gone, he’d lost it—but finally he did. He said,
“Here! Here! Take
it!”
and covered his face with his hands. That was the last thing I heard the poor kid say:
“Here! Here! Take it!”
Pretty shitty last words, I think. Anyway, I called the embassy switchboard, shouted into the phone what was happening, where we were, that I was driving as fast as I could. Sergei woke up in the backseat and said something to me. I heard a pop, and then another. Suddenly I couldn’t steer worth shit; they’d shot out the Land Cruiser’s tires. The next thing I remember is picking glass from my hair. I’d flipped the Toyota, apparently, trying to turn too fast on too few tires, and we went tumbling through the front window of an
apteka
, a pharmacy.

I didn’t have a scratch on me, not a single fucking mark. And I hadn’t even been wearing my seat belt. The Toyota was upside down, all its windows shattered. A lot of the broken glass from the pharmacy’s big windows had splashed inside the Toyota, too, so my only problem was all the glass in my hair. Relieved, happy, I started picking the shit out, piece by piece. Then I looked over at Ryan. There’s some debate whether or not he was dead by then. All I can tell you is that if he wasn’t dead he was going to be soon: A massive, nasty shard of glass had pierced his throat, severing his right carotid artery. His eyes were open and there wasn’t much blood yet, so it was very tempting to start talking to him because he didn’t look that bad. I mean, there was a huge piece of glass sticking out of his throat, but not anything too bad. I tried to get out of the car but couldn’t, so I sat there next to Ryan, looking into his eyes, while somewhere behind us tires bit into cement and car doors slammed.

They pulled Ryan out first. The instant they moved his body, blood started squirting. Sergei and I were next. Sergei’s nose looked like a smashed ketchup bottle, and he was bawling—too drunk, I think, to understand what was happening. They dragged us into the middle of the deserted street and pushed us to our knees. I’ll never get over how empty the streets were. It wasn’t even that late yet—eleven, maybe midnight. I saw Ryan’s body, face down, next to an open manhole, the guy he’d hit with his elbow standing with one foot on Ryan’s neck. He kicked Ryan in the ribs a few times—his hand still cupped over his eye—then pulled out a small handgun and shot Ryan twice in the head. Again, there was no blood, and Ryan’s body didn’t even seem to register that it had been shot. It was like the guy had blanks in his gun. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but it was strange. They pushed his body into the manhole. I don’t remember hearing a splash.

They shot Sergei next. This happened so quickly I’m sad we never got to say anything to each other. One moment we’re kneeling there side by side, the next a pop explodes next to my ear and Sergei flops face-first onto the pavement. Why they waited to do me, I don’t know, but the guy who shot Ryan and the guy who shot Sergei had an impromptu conference while the third and fourth guy held my arms behind my back. I’ve been told it was because they knew who I was, but I doubt it. Why, then, would they have executed Sergei? You don’t fuck with the embassy, and every gangster knew it.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Genghis Ron and a fleet of embassy security vehicles pulled up half a minute later. The mobsters gave up without a fight, probably since they knew they had the receipt on every judge in the Capital. Back at the embassy, Genghis Ron read me the riot act. The next day I was on a plane back to Washington, where I spent a week eating room service and sleeping with a medium-attractive congressional page I picked up on the Mall and not answering the phone in my hotel room, which rang every seventeen seconds. Back in the Capital, my father was a dervish of spin, working the hush-up gears like a seasoned apparatchik. Not that it mattered. A BBC reporter (a young lady, it retrospectively occurs to me, whose visiting sister I probably should not have slept with and never called again) broke the story and—well, there’s no need for me to go on. You know the rest.

I do feel awful that my dad lost his job. None of it was
his
fault. I feel awful for Ryan’s family too, which is a big part of the reason my lawyer wanted me to tell
my
side of the story—to demonstrate that their wrongful-death suit is, in his words, “misguided.” It’s my hope that I’ve done so.

As for the man I killed, there might be some trouble. I doubt anything much will come of it—I
was
the ambassador’s son, after all—but I’m being arraigned, if you can believe that, in the Capital next month. As slight as the chance may be, my lawyer says, I have to prepare myself for the fact that I might yet see the interior of a Capital prison cell.
Prepare
myself, the guy says. Gee, if you put it that way, I suppose I can
prepare
myself. Why I hired an American lawyer I have no idea. I’m told, though, that some of the cells have flush toilets. I’ll have to look into that.