Moscow Noir Read online

  Just in case, purely by intuition I stayed away from Stary at the ball. I also had a ticket in my pocket for a plane that would take me across the planet the very next day. If you were to examine the situation as a whole, then of course Stary had no real reason to be upset with me, even if he were to find out about my golden bank card. But Stary rarely examined a situation from afar. In that respect he was nearsighted. He looked at things close-up, made decisions quickly, and shot unexpectedly (though not himself, of course). Furthermore, I would no longer be working for him; and, well, yes—I had a ticket…

  “Ladies, choose your partners!”

  When the slow dance was announced, Death approached me slowly. She invited me without a word, motioning with her hand. She was not ugly. She was just your average old lady with a scythe, a skull mask, thick white hair, and a mantle that reached down to the floor; but I had no desire to dance with her. Nonetheless, I nodded politely and stepped toward her. The hand that beckoned me was wrapped in a white leather glove covered in little diamond studs. I took one look at that glove and I knew it would be better not to refuse her request. God knows whose spoiled little bitch I might offend in the process. It would be so stupid to get a bullet in the head, not because of my new credit card, shiny and golden like life itself, but because of somebody’s bitch dressed up like Death.

  I took her by the waist, which was surprisingly slim beneath the shapeless clothing, with a slight feeling of disgust. We began to dance and she leaned close to me with her bony face. The synthetic locks of gray hair tickled my nose, and I prepared myself for the smell of rot, the smell of decomposition and mold, but I sensed none of this. There was only the smell of expensive perfume. Only when she laughed, only when she spoke quietly, only then did I notice the thick red locks peering out from beneath her wig.

  “But you weren’t wearing a disguise…”

  “I put one on so Stary wouldn’t recognize me.”

  “Why do you want to hide from him?”

  “What do you mean ‘why’?” asked Foxy. “So that I can dance with you.”

  “You took that costume with you just so you could dance with me?”

  “Yes,” said Foxy. “Yes, yes!”

  And then she lifted her mask up, just a little, and she kissed me. Very gently. She tasted of cheap apricot-flavored chewing gum. She made my head spin. I lost my voice.

  Stary’s guys were nearby. Some of them were even looking at us funny.

  “They see us!” I gasped, leading her to the center of the hall.

  “Not us. They saw you,” said Foxy calmly. “You, dancing with Death. They couldn’t have recognized me.”

  And she kissed me again, and I thought it was a good thing I was wearing loose trousers. At first I was thinking of wearing those tight black ones…

  Then she asked me: “How are you going to spend your five hundred grand?”

  And at that moment the size of my pants didn’t matter, because all of that blood poured right back to my brain and temples. My head stopped spinning, and for a moment I let go of Foxy, but then hugged her and pulled her toward me again. I shook her to the music and asked her the stupidest question that I could, given the situation. “How do you know? How?”

  And Foxy Lee said it was hidden mics. She said there were tapes. She said that Stary recorded all my telephone conversations. “Don’t be afraid, no one heard them but me. I took them with me, and Stary doesn’t know… I was the only one who heard them, only me, only me…”

  Listening to her hot apricot whisper I understood for the first time in my life that it was possible to kill for money.

  But maybe killing her wouldn’t be necessary. After all, she is very beautiful, and I’m no stranger to mercy. Besides, killing her wouldn’t be that easy, the little snake!

  “Is 50 percent enough for you?” I asked, feeling like a gentleman.

  She suddenly pulled her hand out of my grasp. She pulled her hand away and shook it as though it had been burned.

  “You want more?” I asked, dumbstruck.

  She stepped back. Then again. Then she removed her mask.

  Her face was pale, so pale that her golden freckles seemed brown. There were tears in her eyes, though maybe they were just shining with anger. Her lips were trembling like a child moments away from wailing out loud.

  “I don’t need your money,” said Foxy Lee. “I just wanted to give you all the tapes. Just in case.”

  She pulled out a parcel from underneath her gown and handed it to me.

  If only I hadn’t hurt Foxy Lee’s feelings. If only she hadn’t taken off that mask.

  The merciful in masks are giving the bums grub—instant ramen noodles. I also grab the noodles, so as not to stick out from the rest of them, but I can’t eat the stuff. I can’t get it down my throat.

  Don’t ever trying eating ramen noodles in a bus packed full of bums, even if you’re really hungry.

  To be clear, I hadn’t eaten in more than a day. But I gave away my portion to the guys at the back of the bus (incidentally, no one sat down next to me, which is typical—as though I was the one reeking like a thousand dead rats, not them). Then I went back to my seat.

  At Paveletskaya station we pick up three more bums. They stink worse than the seven from Savelovskaya. They are seated in the only remaining free seats, right next to me.

  If I hadn’t offended Foxy Lee, if she hadn’t taken off her mask, everything might have been different. Stary wouldn’t have realized that Death, the disgusting old lady with a scythe I’d been feeling up, was his woman, his redheaded little fox. He wouldn’t have sicced his bald assholes on me, and I wouldn’t have dropped the parcel with the tapes onto the floor when the fuckers bent my hand behind my back. And Stary wouldn’t have heard the tapes, and would never have known where the charity money went, and he wouldn’t have ripped up my airplane ticket, and he wouldn’t have taken my golden bank card, and I wouldn’t have ended up tied to a chair in a secret room in his mansion on the bank of the Yauza River… if only I hadn’t offended Foxy.

  Though it must be said that things didn’t end so bad after all. Really, everything turned out great, and apart from the stench I have to put up with now, I’m actually happy.

  My gold card is with me again, and my half-million is still on it—I checked. Early in the morning I’ll get off this shit-wagon and take in a lungful of clean, cold air at Kursk station. One of our guys will meet me there with new documents and tickets for the Moscow-Odessa train in a third-class car. “We can’t have the documents done before the morning,” said Foxy. “The main thing is that they don’t find you during the night, and in the morning you get on the train. No one in his right mind will look for you in a third-class car.” In Odessa I’ll meet Foxy Lee and we’ll board a ferry for Istanbul. (“No one in his right mind will look for us on that lousy raft full of cheap whores and Ukrainian profiteers sleeping on their striped bags.”)

  “Does the ferry operate in the winter?” I asked.

  “Of course it does!” said Foxy “How do you know?”

  “Cause I’ve been on it.”

  “With the cheap whores?”

  She looked at me sadly, with mild surprise. Like a stray dog being punished for a puddle of urine from yesterday that had already seeped into the floor.

  “The cots were hard,” Foxy said thoughtfully. “And sometimes the boat tossed and heaved like mad. Do you get seasick?”

  I don’t get seasick. And no one will spoil the moment for me. We’ll be on a Turkish ferry, and I’ll be drinking whiskey and Foxy will have liqueur, and we’ll walk around on the deck and enjoy the waves. And all night we’ll roll around on one of those hard cots, then sleep awhile, and then I’ll fuck her again.

  I’ll fuck her at dawn when we’re coming into the Bosphorus.

  We’ll spend the day in Istanbul and have Turks shine our shoes and fill us up with tea. They’ll pour our coffee for us, and stare at Foxy and call her Guzel, and then in the evening we’ll fly away to
the other side of the world. We’ll buy ourselves hats and sunscreen, and we’ll eat fruit and play tennis and snort coke. We’ll fly on a glider and swim in the ocean every day.

  And every day, every single day, I am going to thank her. Because if it wasn’t for Foxy, I would be swimming in the Yauza River right now underneath a layer of ice. I’d be blue, swollen, and dead.

  Foxy saved me.

  It happened when I no longer had any hope at all. I was sitting naked, tied to the chair in the middle of the room. Stary stood opposite me, looking at me with an expression of boredom in the face.

  “You used to work out?” he asked finally, nodding at my six-pack abdomen.

  Stary himself was heavy—not too overweight, about twenty pounds, but he hated sports.

  “I work out,” I said. I didn’t want to use the past tense.

  “You did,” Stary corrected me. “You used to work out.”

  Again, a pause hung in the air.

  “Are you gonna beat me up?” I asked, just to break the silence.

  He shook his head. No, he wasn’t going to beat me. He was just waiting for the guys to bring him a bucket.

  Not only was Stary fascinated with the world of film, he was also interested in literature. His favorite book was Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow. He especially liked the scene where Schultz the Mafia boss orders his men to put the “cement slippers” on the traitor, Bo Weinberg, and then throw him into the sea.

  An ice hole in the Yauza River was much more effective than the ocean. They could drill a hole in no time. But cement mix and a bucket were harder to come by, even in Stary’s mansion. So he had to send his thugs out to buy both. They’d been gone more than thirty minutes, and it was getting late. (They got the bucket right away, at the Atrium, as a matter of fact. They’d hit some snags with the cement mix, though.) They called Stary every few minutes to relate their latest fiasco.

  I was shaking.

  “I’m cold,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

  Stary’s cell phone rang once again, the theme song from the movie Boomer, and I gave a start. I began to shudder violently. Not because of the cold; it was just that I didn’t want to die.

  “What do you mean you still haven’t gotten it?”

  There are people like that—they look like teddy bears, with button eyes and a button nose. But when they get angry, they look like hawks.

  Stary is that kind—when he gets angry, his dull gray eyes take on a noble, mercuric hue, and the earthy shade of his face drains to an aristocratic paleness. His unremarkable nose becomes beaklike, and his bushy brows rise and fall like deathly black wings. In other words, he was handsome when he was angry (and because he was often in such a state, you could say he was handsome most of the time).

  “Bastards!” Stary yelled into the phone. “Drive over to Palych’s construction site and have him pour some for you!”

  That was when Foxy came in. Stary didn’t see her; he was standing with his back to her. But I saw everything perfectly. She was barefoot, messy looking, her red hair was tangled, and her right cheek looked swollen. She peered at him with hatred, with absolute hatred—such absolute hatred that I even felt the malicious pleasure of a jealous male, although god knows I had more important things to focus on just then.

  “I’m telling you, he’s got cement!”

  Still keeping her eyes on his back, she took a figurine off the shelf (not even a figurine—it was more like a bronze blob, a piece, as they say, of modern art) and approached him, stepping softly with her bare feet. She waited for him to say, “Okay, see ya,” and hang up before she hauled off and slammed that piece of modern art into the back of his head.

  Slowly, and somehow picturesquely, he fell.

  He died almost immediately. His last words were: “I’m cold.”

  He really did love the movies, poor guy. A rug spattered in blood, his woman, her hands stained red, “I’m cold”—so Hollywood. Until Foxy Lee untied me and I had checked his pulse, I almost thought he was faking it.

  But he died for real.

  Naked, shivering, and pathetic, standing over Stary’s dead body, I offended Foxy again. I asked her what she wanted—as in, how much I owed her for the favor. I gave the dead body a little kick.

  That’s when she started to cry. She cried long and hard, like a baby, like an inconsolable child. She was probably crying like that the first day Stary brought her here. She was sobbing and gasping and she couldn’t stop. She kept saying, “I don’t nee… nee… nee…” I hugged her and stroked her hair. I felt ashamed, really ashamed, even before she managed to say, “I don’t need anything. I did it for you. He wanted to kill you!”

  I was ashamed. I hid my face in her hair and asked her to forgive me.

  Then she whispered: “If you want me, you can have me.”

  I was already naked, and she undressed quickly. Stary was staring at us out of one bloodied eye. He kept watching silently as I got the answers to my questions.

  I found out that Foxy moans.

  And that her eyes stay open, but her pupils dilate and become huge and crazed, like two black full moons.

  And I found out that she smells like an animal and a child at the same time, and she tastes salty, like the sea. That her nipples are hard and brown, and that she has freckles, not only on her face but on her shoulders. And that there is a thin line of red hair that stretches from her navel to her pubis.

  Then she gave me some clothing, his clothing, because Stary had thrown mine away, and she gave me a stack of dollar bills (his) and she gave me a gun (his) and the gold bank card. My bank card.

  As I was leaving, I asked her, “What about you? Are you gonna be okay?”

  And she answered: “What about me? They’ll be looking for you, not me. I’ll stay here and I’ll be miserable. I’ll say he was lying there when I came into the room.” She nodded at Stary.

  Apparently, I didn’t look too ecstatic.

  “All you have to do is make it through the night,” said Foxy. “If we both run away, then they’ll look for both of us and we won’t have any chance at all. If we do it this way, I’ll have everything fixed up by morning. Then you’ll step off the bus and my guy… our guy, that is, will give you new documents, tickets, and new clothes. You have to believe me, honey, no one in his right mind would go looking for you in that stinking bus. No one in his right mind will look for you on a third-class train. We’ll meet up in Odessa, okay? Is that okay with you?”

  I had no objections, because the plan made sense. I had no objections, because I was in love. I had no objections, because Foxy Lee is my guardian angel. Because doubting her would be a sin. She killed him for my sake. And in doing so she harmed herself. That’s a fact. It’s a paradox. I keep thinking about it, and I never stop being amazed: because Stary was the one guarantee she had in life. In killing him, she lost everything—the mansion on the banks of the Yauza River, money, clothes, perfume, bling, expensive cars, shopping trips to the Atrium—everything.

  What would she get in exchange for all that?

  Stary was married, but not to Foxy. His wife lived in a modest three-story building on Rublevsky Highway. With the help of a maid, a physical trainer, and two nannies, she took care of their son. Stary came to visit them from time to time. Foxy knew about it. Stary had bequeathed everything to his wife and son. Foxy knew about that too.

  So what would she get in exchange for all that?

  Me. Just me. And with no guarantees.

  It’s still dark outside the window, but it’s already morning. We’re on our way back. We’re already close: there’s that goddamned Atrium on the other side of Sadovaya. Only five or ten minutes left, no more. All we have to do is turn around at Taganka and drive a little ways to get there, to Kursk. It’s really early, and the Atrium is as depressing as an abandoned medieval castle.

  Things are going good, as Stary used to like to say. Soon this will all be over. Things are going good. One of our guys will meet me on the platform. I�
�ll board the Moscow-Odessa train, a third-class car, and, finally, I’ll get some sleep. No, first I’ll go to the dining car and grab something to eat. Then I’ll go to sleep. Things are going good. Except that—

  There’s one little thing, one small thing that won’t let go of me. Like the dull end of a drill, it pierces my brain. Some business I forgot to take care of, or an unanswered e-mail, a mistake in a quarterly financial report, or the last piece of a puzzle that has fallen behind the couch.

  I still haven’t been able to figure out what that little thing is. Maybe it’s just exhaustion, some inconsequential glitch in my nervous system, some whim, and it would probably be best to ignore it. I should just look out the window and not think, not think, not think…

  I’m just looking out the window—at the road, at the traffic lights, at the Atrium.

  The Mercy Bus driver turns on the radio:

  “… record-breaking cold this month, temperatures tonight have plunged down to thirty-eight below! But it’s going to heat up today, we have a warm front coming in…”

  “…to understand her you gotta know her deep inside, hear every thought, see every…”

  “…shhhhhhhhhhhhh…”

  The bus driver turns the dials mercilessly.

  “…regardless of what you say, transformation on that scale is only possible in a democratic society…”

  “…have you ever really really really ever loved a woman?”

  “…I’ll send you sky-high for a star!…”