The statue of Athena was lit by one of the floodlights that dotted the grounds. Celebratory noises issued from the house. Men stood on the steps watching some joker pantomime choking out, going down on his knees, raising a melodramatic hand to the sky as he shriveled in a parody of Sartre’s death.
My headlights painted two figures blocking the drive. Bulky leather jackets marked them as a different kind of blackbird from the rooks. Vory.
I slowed the car to a stop. Both slid their weapons forward to make them visible. I set the MP7 on the passenger’s seat and then pushed down the parking break. I rolled down the window and held out a hand, hoping to signal friendliness, or at least harmlessness. One of them gestured for me to get out of the car.
I looked at the two men in the headlights, both like young recruits reduced to near identical likeness with their pale skin and shaved heads, black leather coats and dark pants. Either of them would be willing to gun me down, and neither of them was important. I thought about Mitnick’s smiling face and what it might take to get close to him.
I had promised Sophie a distraction, though, so I bent over, took out the grenade, pulled the pin, and then pushed it under the parking brake. Jammed between the pedal and the floorboard, the brake would hold the grenade’s safety lever in place until someone released it.
When I came up, both men had their weapons trained on me. I raised empty hands and reached out to open the door from the outside, keeping everything nice and visible. I slowly stepped out of the car, hands in the air.
They were smarter than they looked. They kept their distance until they could see I was alone, not police or overtly French. They asked me something in their Cyrillic tongue. I replied, “I’m here to see Mitnick.” I tried it in both English and French and got nothing. One of them flashed a light on me, lingering on Sartre’s fresh blood. I repeated the one word I knew they’d understand. “Mitnick.”
One stepped forward and I obediently let him slide a hand up and down my sides, finding and extracting the pistol. The other spoke into a handheld. A voice like chocolate covered gravel came back over the radio.
The vory stepped aside. One used the constellation of tattoos along his hand to point me to the house. I started walking.
The laughter and the jokes of the Russians died away as we got closer, all eyes on me. I was grateful to see Pyotr wasn’t in the mix, but the latent hostility in the group made up for his absence. Like walking past a group of angry dogs, I tried not to make eye contact.
In the foyer, I moved toward the stairs, but vory blocked the path. One of my escorts slammed his submachine gun into my back, hard enough that my knees nearly buckled, directing me deeper into the house. I complied and walked past the fountain, towards the door on the right.
Through the parlor and into the interior rooms, I saw none of Mitnick’s men. I kept walking past the hostile eyes of other black-clad vory. I mentally tallied how many I saw. There were a lot of them.
After walking through that long corridor we came to a door I recognized. I entered Mitnick’s library. The roomed smelled of book glue and sea breeze, an odd combination that reminded me of the prison library. Whatever pleasure I might have gotten out of that was robbed by a repetitive wet sound like a broken water pump.
Flanking Mitnick’s big desk with its liquor cabinet globe were two more vory, more grizzled than the others. Their black clothes were nicer, their jewelry bigger and shinier, their hair longer and slick. One was taller, broad-shouldered, going grey, and wore a cross so large it might have been out of penance if it weren’t so flashy. The other was short and narrow shouldered, everything but the diamonds in his ears connected by ropey muscles. He lit a cigarette with a silver lighter.
They both evaluated me with apathetic eyes. This drew my attention enough that I didn’t spot the grey blob behind the desk immediately.
Nearly bald, the pale skin of an older man’s pate barely rose above the desk’s horizon, its owner leaning back in Mitnick’s chair, head tilted towards the ceiling. When I entered he didn’t move other than to open his eyes and glance towards me, his eyes flickering with irritation, followed by a melodramatic sigh.
He raised a lazy hand and gestured towards the seaside of the room’s exits. I waited for more instruction then I realized it wasn’t for me – a young girl, probably not out of her teens, rose up from behind the desk, wiping saliva from her lips with the back of her hand. She looked as a frightened children does at foreign soldiers, a fear of reprisals for breaking undefined rules. She tried to adjust what little clothing she had on but Diamonds grabbed her by the elbow and pushed her towards the door.
The older man behind the desk sat upright, his bulk causing the chair to squeak in protest. His eyes and mouth formed uncaring horizontal lines, only twitching downward as his figure rose up. His skin had the gray flabbiness of age, but his eyes were quick and hard, his open shirt exposing a tattoo of an onion domed palace that could have been Old Town’s own cathedral.
From all of this I wagered a guess. “Oleg Churbinov.”
Photo courtesy of Hert Niks.
To read the previous chapter, go here.
To read the author’s published work, go here.
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