Moscow Noir Page 2

  “Listen to me, buddy!” the cop said, his voice rising. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “… two… three…” I whispered.

  “What?!”

  I decided to count to seven, my favorite number, and then shoot.

  “… four…”

  People started filing out of the train that had just pulled in, making a wide semicircle around the spot where I stood with the cop. Some character in a leather jacket with a shaved head shuffled by, looking furtively at us. Then he stopped and stared.

  “Keep moving!” the cop barked at him.

  The guy walked straight toward us.

  “Let me see your ID,” the cop demanded, taken aback.

  “Cn I’ve a wrd ith you, offcr?” mumbled the guy in leather, completely unfazed but slurring every sound. He gestured to the cop amiably.

  The cop turned to me and then to the leather guy—and froze.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” the leather guy said, still slurring his words, but this time in a more commanding tone. “Git ovr here, offcr.”

  Suddenly, the eyes of the officer took on the expression of an animal, a mix of sharp sadness and surprise, and he silently strode over to the leather guy the way a dog goes to its trainer when it has mixed up its commands.

  The fellow in leather whispered a few brief words into the cop’s ear. The cop looked at me from under his brow, nodded dejectedly, and sauntered off into the darkness.

  “Offcr!” the leather guy called after him quietly.

  “Aren’t you frgetting smethin?”

  The cop’s back slumped.

  “Didn ya take smthin tht didn blong to ya?”

  The back didn’t so much as stir.

  “Git outta here,” the guy in leather said, softening, and the cop rushed off, his boots crunching on the frozen crust of snow.

  “Watch it, buddy!” The guy in leather advised me good-naturedly, then winked and moved away.

  “Thanks,” I replied politely, but he didn’t turn around.

  Buddy. Uh-huh, right.

  * * *

  And so I’m waiting for mercy. It should be here soon.

  Here it is now. It just came around the corner, stopped next to the train station, and opened its doors to me.

  Mercy, as everyone knows, is blurry and abstract. It can assume many different forms: from a coin at the bottom of your pocket to a blank check, from a plastic doggie bag to a benefit concert, from a kiss to artificial respiration, from a Validol pill to a shot in the head, from the ability to love to the ability to kill.

  The mercy granted me is concrete. It takes the form of a dirty white bus. It is given to me for one night—this cold, dark, terrible, final, happy, damned night—and I will accept it without hesitation.

  On this cold night, when you can freeze to death in an hour.

  On this dark night, when you can disappear without a trace in a minute.

  On this terrible night, when they’re looking for me high and low: in apartments and bars, in subways and airports, at hotels and movie theaters, in nightclubs and casinos, on the streets and in stairwells.

  On this final night they are looking for me so they can kill me.

  On this happy night, when they won’t find me because no one will think to look for me here, on the Mercy Bus that saves the homeless from hunger and cold.

  Mercy is what I need on this damned night.

  That is why I fall before the open doors of the bus. I cough, I snort, and I wheeze. I crawl on all fours as though I don’t have the strength to stand up, and I stretch my trembling hands toward them—toward three people in blue jackets, with red crosses on their sleeves and the word Mercy on their backs, and gauze masks pulled tight over their faces. I babble, my tongue tripping on the sounds.

  I crawl at their feet, touching their shoes and begging: “… Help… save me…” I sniff, then grovel: “Save me…”

  Foxy taught me to do that. “There aren’t many seats on the bus,” she said. “They only take the ones who are in really bad shape. They drive you around the city all night, keep you warm, feed you, and in the morning bring you back.”

  “Only the ones who are in really bad shape.”

  “Only the ones who are completely down-and-out.”

  “Only the ones who will die without them.”

  Well, at least I wasn’t lying when I groveled. Without them, I really would die. Stary’s men would kill me. They’d hunt me down and kill me like a witless animal.

  Besides, the cops would be after me soon too.

  “I’m fucked, man…”

  And the merciful guys in masks pick me up by the arms and haul me into the bus. Now I am safe. I will be safe all night long, until morning. In the morning I’ll get on the 7:01 train.

  The men in masks seat the swollen, dirty, frozen, decomposing half-people. The Mercy Bus drives off.

  Foxy Lee, my girl, my little train-station slut, my sweet guardian angel, found me a safe lair to hide in. Safe and stinking.

  God almighty, what a stench! I’d give every greenback in my possession for a mask—the kind those brothers of mercy have. Gimme a mask, man, gimme a mask!

  The windows of the bus are draped in thin threads of frost, adorned in snowy cobwebs, covered from the inside with a frozen glaze. That thin glaze is all that separates the stinking, sticky warmth of our bus from the piercing cleanliness of the city. Out there it is easy and painful to breathe. With each breath, your nostrils seem to stick together. Out there my killers are looking for me, swearing and cursing, inhaling and exhaling the frozen air.

  Here, inside, trying not to breathe through my nose, I scrape out an ugly peephole in the perfect pattern of the frosted window, and I look out.

  We crawl along past the Atrium, and the engine roars and trembles in helpless convulsions. The mall glows with neon. Half-naked mannequins pose in shop windows, and others just like them, only dressed up in fur coats and winter jackets, surge through the glass doors to the twenty-four-hour cash registers. In the glare of headlights, streetlamps, and billboards, in a red snowstorm, the people, their faces rust-colored, look like frolicking devils. Their cars, parked seven rows deep, form the seven circles of hell—a honking Moscow hell, where traffic jams happen even at midnight.

  Still, this place seemed by far the best location for the Merciful Monsters Charity Ball. The idea for the ChaBa (Charity Ball) belonged to me and me alone, though I had planned to rent a cushy theater like the MKhAT, or a concert hall, or at the very least a fancy nightclub.

  Stary was the one who wanted to have the Charity Ball in the Atrium. Stary and Foxy Lee spent a lot of time in the Atrium. Foxy liked buying perfume, lotion, high heels, clothes, lingerie, bedding, shampoo, cookies, and sauces in nearly industrial quantities. Stary, I can’t deny it, waited for her patiently, no matter how long it took. He even made excuses to his bleary-eyed bodyguards: “She had a tough frickin’ childhood, so frickin’ cool it! And cover your frickin’ traps when you yawn, goddamnit!” While Foxy was shopping, he liked to kill time in a restaurant, eating sushi and washing it down with tequila, before going to a movie. He thought of himself as a film buff. From time to time, along with his lovers and security guards, Stary would take one of his subordinates to the Atrium. The invitation was the boss’s seal of approval and guaranteed promotion, prosperity, and impunity to the recipient for some time to come.

  This period usually lasted no more than two months. When his shelf life ran out, the favorite was thrown onto the garbage heap (that is to say, demoted to personal chauffeur of the second secretary’s assistant, or fired, or wiped off the face of the earth, depending on Stary’s mood).

  From the beginning of November, I accompanied Foxy and Stary to the Atrium. Toward the end of December I was still the favorite, although I sensed that my time was running out. Late that month, Stary called me to the Atrium, sent Foxy off shopping, knocked back a double shot of tequila, and announced: “A friend of mine used to light a candle at the Cathedral of Christ
the Savior if things were going good for him. I always thought that a candle wasn’t enough. But I kept quiet because he was doing all right and I wasn’t. Now my friend’s in prison. It’ll be a long, long time before he gets out. And now things are going good for me.”

  Stary was doing all right. He had found a cozy place for himself on the Pipeline. His perch was nonetheless precarious enough that he was ready to bail out any minute (the Pipeline didn’t quite belong to him yet, at least not completely). He didn’t experience any discomfort in his backside, however (because the Pipeline did not entirely belong to someone else). He sat placidly and listened to the faint gurgle of the black blood of Russia as it flowed abroad.

  “I’m swimming in oil! She’s black and she’s mine!” Stary said this with carnivorous relish, as though he was talking about a naked and capricious African princess who gave herself to him at night with shrieks, tears, and moans. It tormented and affronted me in the most idiotic, awkward, and ridiculous way. When the boss used this expression, which he did very often, an ill-fated black princess appeared before my eyes: moist, nimble, shapely, and bearing a certain resemblance to Halle Berry. A second later, her image was replaced by that of a red-haired girl. The one Stary really did fuck. Foxy. Does Foxy moan when she comes? Does she close her whitish fox eyes, or do they go large and glassy, like those of a stuffed animal? These questions preoccupied me a great deal.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, boss, of course!”

  What does she smell like? What does she taste like?

  “So, anyway, I’m doing pretty good. And I’m a superstitious man, so I think I owe something to the Big Guy. But I’m not going to light up any candles. Because candles won’t cut it. I think I should do something for charity.”

  What about the shape of her nipples? What color are they? And what about her freckles? Freckles sprinkled her pale skin like gold dust. Does she have them all over?

  “You seem like a smart guy. So I want you to think up some kind of charity event. A real tearjerker. Something to make everyone bawl. So that I seem like a father to everyone, you know what I mean? So they’ll think of me afterward when the time comes. You know, elect me. You get it. So, think something up. You got imagination.”

  That’s when I created the ChaBa.

  It was the end of December, my time was almost up, Stary was eating sushi, and Foxy was throwing money to the wind. I thought up the idea for ChaBa in a whirlwind of inspiration and despair. I thought of ChaBa because I thought that a little money wouldn’t hurt me, in the end.

  “Merciful Monsters Charity Ball,” I announced proudly.

  “What’s that?” said Stary, stabbing a morsel of sushi with one of his chopsticks.

  “A costume ball and masquerade. Real fancy. Real stylish. We’ll have Ksyusha Sobchak, Zemfira, Renata Litvinova, Zverev, I don’t know who else, maybe Fedya Bondarchuk, some red-carpet types, Rublyevka wives, a couple oligarchs, some ministers, I dunno.”

  “And?”

  “And everybody dresses up like monsters. They eat, drink, dance, get high, fuck, and the whole thing will be on TV.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “There’ll be invitations, which the merciful monsters will get only after making a donation to some charity organization like, I dunno, Destitute Russia. Yeah, Destitute Russia. All profits go to the poor and homeless.”

  “Homeless…” Stary murmured absently.

  It was a smart move on my part. Stary always had a soft spot for the poor and the homeless. That is to say, always since the day he hired an underage redheaded whore for five bucks and took her from Kursk station to his place, a humble three-story mansion overlooking the Yauza River. He fucked her, fed her, kept her warm, and decided to keep her for good, like a lost cat. From that day, Stary imagined himself to be the protector of the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.

  He often got on my nerves, telling me about their first night together. How she started weeping when he told her she could stay…

  “Monsters, huh? I like it! There was a movie called Monster’s Ball. Yeah, a movie… with, you know, what’s-her-name in it.”

  …And how she couldn’t calm down, and kept on sobbing like a baby so that she couldn’t even say her name. (Carefully and kindly, Stary first threw away the used condom, then offered the girl shelter, and then decided to introduce himself.)

  “What’s her name, the black one…”

  “Halle Berry.”

  “That’s right, Halle Berry.”

  …And how she told him through her tears, “M-m-my name is L—L—L—”

  “Lee? You must be Foxy Lee with your red hair,” Stary suggested, laughing, and when she stopped crying she said, “Foxy, I like that. I’m Lisa, actually.”

  “Monsters Ball, I like the sound of that. Monsters help the homeless! You’ve got some smarts, all right! Monsters. I’ll get ’em all over here to the Atrium.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll rent the Atrium for the night, no problem.”

  …And how they laughed afterward, and how “Lisa” didn’t really stick, but that sweet Lee did. That Lee really did stick. Foxy Lee, it almost sounds Chinese.

  Foxy Lee, my red-haired little girl.

  She said that she liked me from the very beginning. I could never figure out whether she really liked me, or whether I just didn’t disgust her. Or maybe she didn’t really care one way or the other. On the whole, Foxy acted like a typical female of the species: she didn’t get uppity, and she deferred to the strongest male, never forgetting that there were other males around grazing, and that his status as “strongest” was always temporary.

  When Stary wasn’t looking she never missed a chance to make eyes at me. Although, no, come to think of it, I’m exaggerating. She didn’t really make eyes at me. She just looked me right in the eye, staring; but for too long, and her gaze was too moist. The blood from my head rushed to the pit of my stomach and the skin on my back would be covered in goose-bumps. Then I would recall (genetic memory should never be underestimated) how the backs of my ancestors were covered in hair, and that their hair was said to stand on end at the sight of such females.

  But Stary was the strongest, the alpha male; and she was afraid of him.

  Stary owned millions, and sometimes killed people (although not by his own hand, of course). Stary had gotten the nickname back in kindergarden, because his last name was Starkovsky. He was five years older than me. He was only forty when he died.

  And today was the day he died.

  Our bus is driving from one train station to the next. By the end of the night it will have been to each one in the city. At each stop the men in masks drag in more half-dead bums, until the bus is totally full, until the smell becomes completely unbearable, until we come full circle and end up back at Kursk. This is a mission of mercy. This is the route of suffering.

  At Three Stations Square there was a whole line of frozen beggars. They all wanted to get a place on the bus, but the merciful took only those who couldn’t stand up. Only those who were lying in the dirty snow outside the line.

  That seems pretty dumb to me. Why pick up only the weakest? If you’re going to try to rescue someone, it makes more sense to save the ones who can stand up. They’re stronger. They have a better chance of survival.

  Hey, guys! Save the strongest! You can’t save the fallen ones anyway.

  * * *

  She kissed me for the first time at the Merciful Monsters Charity Ball.

  She wasn’t wearing a costume. (Stary didn’t want his woman looking grotesque.) She was simply wrapped in expensive furs, her red hair down and a fox mask over her face. A simple one like the kind for kids. She was the most beautiful of all—not because everyone else came wearing fangs and bloody or half-decomposed faces, but just objectively. Because she was.

  But I had other things on my mind. Her beauty paled in comparison with that of my new bank card.

  On that night (
as always) Foxy stuck close to Stary, and I (for the first time) tried to remain as far away from him as possible.

  On that night Foxy was just a vague red spot, a red spot that was no longer important and that would remain part of the past.

  On that night I ignored Foxy. I was busy thinking about my bank card, about its golden sheen, about the fifty grand on it. Everything turned out to be so much simpler than I’d expected. Destitute Russia, the fund that we had started, got good press, and the Merciful Monsters Charity Ball was covered in all the media. Stary was on TV and radio, and the announcers never forgot to announce the charity’s bank account number, or else it appeared at the bottom of the screen. Stary’s face appeared on huge billboards all over the city. Hey, there’s one of them now—by the Belorusskay train station, over by the exit to the bridge!

  I designed the ad myself. It’s too bad the reeking losers in the bus are sleeping. It’s too bad they don’t see how well I had everything planned! In the picture, Stary has one arm around a neatly dressed but still unhappy-looking homeless woman, and his other around Philipp Kirkorov, who is dressed up like Freddy Krueger. Instead of a knife, there is a wad of dollars in Freddy’s ring-studded hand. He is handing the dollars to the bum, and the bum is leaning toward him—a true idyll. There was another version with Ksyusha Sobchak in a black evening gown with vampire fangs and a stack of dollars again. The slogan reads, Become a real human, show mercy (or, We don’t need blah-blah, we need ChaBa!). And, of course, the account number below.

  Not many ordinary citizens wanted to become real humans, even little by little. Anyway, I hadn’t exactly been counting on ordinary citizens to begin with.

  The most important of the posh guests were sent invitations embossed in (real) gold, and of course the bank account number was written on each one. Those monsters went all out.

  Having journeyed through the accounts of various individuals and organizations (those of you who have sent money on such a journey will understand; as for those of you who haven’t, tough luck), a sum of half a million dollars ended up in my bank account. As a matter of fact, that is the same amount—$500,000—that Stary spent on the media campaign in preparation for ChaBa. The natural monetary cycle had gone full circle; nothing personal and nothing extra. Nobody knew a thing and everyone was happy. Stary had drawn some good PR, the merciful monsters had gotten their publicity, the television viewers had gotten their circuses, and I had received my bread. The only one who didn’t get anything was Destitute Russia; but no matter how much you give destitute Russia, it will never be enough. Even the guys in the gauze masks know that. Eh, guys?