Voroshilovgrad (53 page)

“Everything you're saying makes perfect sense,” I said. “But, see—Injured got shot and my brother hightailed it out of here a while ago now. They were doing all the right things, like you said, but I didn't help. Look, I agree with you. But the funny thing is that they're down in the trenches thinking they can wipe everyone
else out . . . but, it turns out that they're the ones getting knocked down, one by one—they're being squeezed out of this town and soon enough they'll all get squeezed out.”

“You think so?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, they might get squeezed out,” the presbyter said. “Maybe. But still—they'll stick together until the very end, you know what I mean? Herman, I've met a lot of different people in my life. All kinds of people. The majority of them were weak and vulnerable. The majority of them have betrayed their friends and family. I think it was because they were so vulnerable. No matter how you slice it, life makes people wimps and traitor. I'm telling you that as a priest. If they all get squeezed out, like you said, then I'm going out with them, because I'm down in the trenches too, Herman. We have the same sense of responsibility. And the same sense of gratitude.”

He took out the phone again and turned it off, listening to the rustling of the grass. The late afternoon sun had rolled out behind the hospital wall, its red edges touching the windows of the intensive care unit.

“Sometimes I'll show them tricks, too,” the presbyter said out of the blue.

“Huh?”

“Tricks,” the presbyter repeated, “circus tricks. When I was getting treatment they taught us some tricks. That was part of our therapy. They said it was supposed to bring us back to our childhood days. One of the addicts was in the circus. He worked as a juggler. He was even wearing a clown outfit when they brought
him in. He taught us how to do it. Look here,” the presbyter said, magically producing a bottle of pure alcohol out of his jacket pocket and bending over to fix his shoelace. He took a quick pull from the bottle and hid it. Then he produced a Zippo lighter out of thin air, put it up to his face, and exhaled a heavy jet of blue flame.

Frightened, I leapt back. But a moment later he was his old self, just sitting there, watching me with his calm and pensive eyes.

“Now
that's
group therapy.”

I didn't know how to respond.

“Where are you headin'?” he asked.

“I gotta take care of some business. Some very important business.”

“All right then,” he said, dismissing me. “Call if you need me. You've got my number.”

“So, you're saying it's all about gratitude and responsibility?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said, nodding. “Gratitude and responsibility.”

There were slot machines on the first floor of the hotel. A few guys that looked like Communist Youth League members with glassy eyes were sitting on high chairs in front of them, and a girl, who had red-dyed hair and red Keds, was sleeping in an upright position leaning on the windowsill. Some Chechens were scurrying down the hallway, carrying boxes with grapefruits thumping around in them. I went over to the front desk, told the girl there
my name, and asked whether anyone had been looking for me. She immediately gave me a room number. “It's nice when people are looking forward to seeing you,” I thought as I went upstairs.

The hotel was like a partially sunken ship—not everyone had escaped, but mostly because there really wasn't anywhere to escape to. I walked down a long, dark hallway. It smelled of paint and hotel furniture.

The door was half-open. I could hear a shower running. I knocked, but nobody answered. I pushed it open and stepped inside. There were two beds separated by a desk. It was messy—pairs of jeans, baseball caps, rumpled sheets, and mustard-stained women's magazines were scattered all over the place. One bed was empty, while a guy, younger than me, no more than twenty-five-years old, was sitting on the other one. Sitting there and holding a cup of fruit yogurt, the itchy hotel blanket pulled up to his chin. A laptop was resting on the chair in front of him, playing hard-core porn. The sound was off. It was as though the actors didn't want to disturb anyone. The guy didn't notice me coming in until something—my reflection in the monitor, probably—tipped him off. He dropped his yogurt, which splatted into a sweet half-moon on the floor, and hurriedly adjusted something down there before tossing the shaggy blanket to the side rather abruptly—possibly too abruptly—and hopped onto the floor. He was wearing tracksuit pants, brand-name ones, and a white T-shirt. He looked like a train passenger in first class who had just slid out of his fancy suit and made himself comfortable for the journey. Much as Olga had reported, he really did have a bald spot on the side of his head, but it didn't make him look any older. He had something fitted
in his left ear that resembled a heavy hearing aid. Slamming some keys on the laptop in an attempt to shut off the porn, he then deigned to look at me, brashly if not quite confidently. The image on the screen had frozen, a women's golden head interrupted in the middle of desperately sucking on something or other, bobbing in perfect clarity in the dimness behind my host, but he didn't notice.

“Herman?” he asked a bit too nonchalantly, extending his hand. “I'm Dima. Take a seat,” he said, pointing to a chair by the door.

I tossed an issue of
Cosmo
, smeared with something sticky, onto the floor. Dima looked as though he was dying to lunge over and to pick up the magazine, but he restrained himself. He just stood there, examining me from head to toe and gradually collecting himself and trying to decide how he should behave around me. The blonde behind him was still sucking on some otherworldly object, her radiant hair clashing with Dima's track pants.

I didn't have a chance to speak before the shower fell silent and Dima's partner, a chubby, long-haired guy wearing blue pajamas and fluffy, girly slippers, barged into the room. At first he just paced around, drying his hair with a striped towel. He didn't notice me at first; it was only after picking up on the tension in his buddy's face that he sent a sideways glance my way and did up all three buttons on his top.

“This is Herman,” Dima informed him, doing his best to sound chipper.

“Vladik,” the long-haired guy introduced himself coldly.

Then he swayed in my direction without actually taking a step toward me, possibly trying to figure out whether or not it was appropriate to shake my hand. He decided against it. And, really,
I wasn't in any hurry to shake hands either.

Dima went right on scrutinizing me. “Well,” he said, “we've been looking for you. It's a good thing you decided to come by. Isn't that right, Vladik?”

“Yeah,” Vladik agreed glumly.

I understood what they were getting at. Vladik looked plainer. Dima had assigned him the role of bad cop. He was supposed to be breathing down my neck, I figured, intimidating me. And, literalist that he was, Vladik tried to do exactly that, positioning himself by the door so as to actually breathe down my neck, so close I could smell his aftershave. By this logic, Dima must have been good cop, thinking of himself as a real sly motherfucker—he was supposed to come off as just a regular guy, I guessed, someone I could trust. Dima was the one I was supposed to spill my guts to, while Vladik was just there for show.

“We even stopped by the gas station,” Dima said. “And called your brother. Isn't that right, Vladik?”

“We've been dicking around here for five days already,” Vladik said resentfully.

I looked back at the laptop, for lack of anything better to do. The blonde was still shining on the dark screen, refusing to let her prey out of her mouth. Vladik couldn't help but glance over at whatever I was staring at, so he noticed the blonde then too. Dima, seeing that we were both intently examining something behind his back, looked over his shoulder. Before he could react, Vladik burst past him and slammed the laptop shut. Now they were both standing in front of me like a couple of schoolboys being chewed out by their headmaster. They felt that immediately, and
they didn't much like the feeling, so they sat down on Dima's bed simultaneously, carefully maneuvering around the spilled yogurt. The problem was that they didn't feel any less like schoolboys in this position, sitting there and not knowing what to do with their hands. I mean, when it came down to it, we were all feeling more than a little uncomfortable. But we had to move the conversation along.

“Yeah,” Dima said, “you should at least get a phone.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Well, so people could get hold of you,” Dima said. Vladik was, in the meantime, trying to stare me down.

“What do you two want, anyway?”

“We'd like to ask you about a few things,” Vladik said. “Do you know Boris Kolisnichenko?”

“Bolik?”

“Boris,” Vladik corrected me coldly, “Kolisnichenko.”

“Yeah, I know him,” I answered, trying to sound just as steely.

“Were you having some money problems?” Dima asked, going back to trying to sound cheerful and unconcerned.

“What makes you think that?”

“They came right out and told us,” Dima said, chuckling.

“Yeah?” I asked. “What'd they tell ya?”

Dima said, “They said they cleaned you out.”

“They said you were a real sucker,” Vladik added.

“They actually said that, ‘a real sucker'?” I asked.

“Well, they didn't exactly say that word for word,” Dima conceded. “But they said something along those lines.”

“But they didn't call me ‘a real sucker,' did they?”

“No, they didn't,” Dima admitted grudgingly.

“Well, there you have it,” I said.

“What's the difference?” Vladik asked. “They cleaned our clients out too. They screw everyone over.”

“Yeah,” Dima seconded him, “they're in line for a long overdue beating. We just can't seem to catch them in the act—they're sly bastards.”

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked.

“Herman, here's the deal,” said Dima. “It looks like we'll be able to slam them if you help us out.”

“Listen up,” Vladik added threateningly.

“It looks like if you testify against them, they're fucked. And they really screwed you, didn't they?”

“They sure did,” Vladik answered for me.

“And they screwed our clients too!” Dima said, enjoying himself now. “Basically, we gotta take them down together, okay Herman?”

“You got that?” Vladik asked sternly.

“He's got it,” Dima said. “Don't you worry. We'll take care of everything. All you gotta do is testify in court and you'll get your money back. Then we'll handle it from there, all right?”

I kept quiet for a bit, examining the little doggies on Vladik's slippers. Then I said, just for clarity's sake, “So, you're asking me to testify against Bolik? That's what this is about?”

“Yep,” Vladik confirmed, “against Boris.”

“Now what the fuck would make me do a thing like that?”

This really surprised Dima, for some reason. “They screwed you!” he said. “And took your money!” he added, redundantly.

“And you think that's reason enough to sell out my friends?”

“Some friends you got there, Herman,” Dima said. “They took you for a ride.”

“Made a real sucker out of you,” Vladik interjected yet again.

“Shut your mouth,” I told Vladik. “You hear that? Shut your mouth.”

Vladik withered.

“Hey, hey,” Dima said, trying to back his partner up. “Easy now. Let's all calm down.”

“Nah, I'm not gonna calm down,” I continued, addressing Vladik. “Shut your mouth. You understand?”

Vladik tucked his head into his shoulders, causing his wet hair to flow out over his shirt. He finally did, in fact, shut his mouth. But I decided I couldn't leave it there. I l wanted to put an end to all this nonsense once and for all.

“Nah man, do you understand, for real?” I asked Vladik. “You really understand me?”

“He understood you,” Dima said warily. “Herman, he understood.”

“Well, that's good,” I said. “Because this is how it's gonna go—you can spend the night here, but you better catch the first bus out of here tomorrow morning. If I ever see you guys in this town again, you are going to be royally fucked.”

“Herman,” Dima objected rather limply, “what's your deal? We've got your back. We want to punish
them
. Herman, they took you for a ride.”

“How old are you?” I asked him.

“Twenty-four,” Dima answered.

“And I'm twenty-three,” Vladik volunteered for some reason.

“You shut your mouth,” I snapped. “Dude, you're only twenty-four and you're already a complete piece of shit. You realize that? You think I'm gonna start ratting on my friends for some dough? You think I'll turn them in over some money? Where do they even find guys like you? What'd you major in at college?”