It was a song so old that no one could say for certain who wrote it. It had been covered by everyone from Lead Belly to Nirvana and spoke of a mystery, the woman who hid in the pines, and a murdered husband. And in some places, if a troubled woman with a bruised face or a broken heart sang the words, legends said the pine girl would step from where the cold wind blows to take revenge. Johnny didn’t believe any of that and he laughed when he slapped Becky’s face.
They found his head in a driving wheel, but his body was never found.
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
I ignored Sophie’s warning even as the room filled with Russians bristled. I quickly returned to biggest of them, a bruiser with prominent ears, resolving my features into an embarrassed smile, continuing to play the moron, but one that had caught on. Seeing my features finally arrange themselves into some manner of intelligence, Ears put a hand on my shoulder to firmly guide me back to the exit. Knowing I shouldn’t, I couldn’t help but shrug his hand off. A moment boiled between me and him, supercharging the room. Feeling brittle as a China plate I gave him a smile and said, “Sure, yeah, I’ll go look for him.”
I quickly walked out. I looked over my shoulder to see him smiling like a predator through the crack between door and jamb before he firmly closed the door behind me. I felt my skin burn with an ancient kind of humiliation as the tension defused into chattering sounds on the other side of the door.
With nothing better to do I followed Ears’ instructions. Lost as I was at least it might take me back outside where the house was easier to navigate. Following along in the silent hallway I could hear the party out somewhere in the house, a steady throb that was translating into dull ache behind my eyes. After half-a-dozen turns through the mansion’s inner labyrinth, I was glad it wasn’t any closer to the festivities as I came to an external door. I stepped through it, causing some security apparatus to beep at the shell of the house being momentarily broken, probably alerting someone, somewhere. I was just grateful it didn’t sound a full-fledged alarm.
I stepped out onto a green, grassy veranda, covered by a lattice of white woodwork supported by a grid of more Grecian pillars, these ones small and numerous. The moonlight filtered through the vines that sparsely grew through the framework overhead and I could hear the surf pounding against the cliffside that Mitnick’s house rested not far from. I walked towards that, feeling the gentle wind cool the skin on my face, the moon’s light almost cleansing. Breathing deep, regaining my balance I began to think about what I might do next. If there had been any doubt that Sergei had at least been known to Mitnick’s crew, their reaction had 86’ed that. But why were they so reluctant to admit he existed? Even the instructions out to here weren’t an admission of that, just a way to get an idiot out of the way. If a comrade was missing, why didn’t they have questions for me? That left only a few conclusions.
I hardly noticed the beep from the door, naval gazing as I was, trying to puzzle things out. As it was I barely got myself turned around in time to block the first punch and only partially at that. It was like deflecting a Christmas ham. The Bruiser from the other room was there and he didn’t let that stop him, swinging with his other fist, catching me in the ribs. I might have been able to do something about it, but his two friends swarmed in from the sides, kicking and punching, sending me down. It just became a confusion of shadows after that, them never letting up, punctuating the air with blows. Somewhere in there was enough to disengage my brain and the night didn’t even have moonlight anymore.
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
At my abrupt entrance everyone stopped and stared at me, surprise quickly resolving itself into hostility as the Russians realized none of them knew who I was. Judging by the black leather jackets and tattoos peeking out from collars and cuffs of their dark clothes, I had stumbled on Mitnick’s boys or some kind of punk rock mortician meeting.
By the distance from the main party I bet this is where their boss had some of them stowed away, keeping everyone placated with vodka and herring. Now that they had found lady companionship, they weren’t too happy about being interrupted. Fortunately, all eyes were on me otherwise someone might have noticed Sophie’s surprised recognition.
The one with the cue stick stopped using it as a pretend phallus and shifted it to one hand as you might a club. He said something I didn’t quite catch, but I’m sure it was some variation of “Who are you?”
I went to raise an apologetic hand, prepared to leave the bunch when I noticed the man sitting next to Sophie, barely older than a fresh-faced recruit. He was very close to her indeed, and had a hand placed on her knee, perhaps there due to some joking or maybe with some encouragement. That tiny thing stopped me as surely as he had pointed a pistol at me. I felt my jaw reflexively clench, as if prepared to take an incoming fist.
When my withdrawal from the room wasn’t immediate the man with the cue stick repeated himself. The words, increasing in hostility, brought my attention back to him. He wasn’t the most senior of the men, maybe half-a-dozen in all. There was a variety of ages among them, but he was on the grayer end of the scale, a buzzed cut mafia middle manager with hair thinning at his temples. His ears stood out prominently from his head and I had to control a sudden urge to pin them back to his skull. Instead I blinked moisture out of my eyes and said, “Sorry, what?”
One of the men behind Ears began to get up, a big bruiser who easily picked up the young dirty blonde who had been sitting in his lap to set her aside. Some part of me noticed that Sophie and all the women appeared to be fine and unthreatened, which should have made it easy to leave. I continued to stand there.
Ears made a small gesture for the bruiser to hold back, thankfully wanting to show some patience in the boss’ house, and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
I brought out my best sugar-on-top American voice and smiled past a sudden pain in my forehead and swelling feet. “Sorry fellas.” Knowing I should exit immediately or endanger everyone I instead said, “You seen Sergei around?”
The growing heat of promised violence in the room went as cold as the vodka that I desperately wanted a sip of now. Ears shifted his weight to his back foot, narrowing his eyes to an evaluating stare. “Sergei?”
“Yeah, Sergei,” I repeated, all polite and oblivious. “He’s Ukrainian. Like you.”
That caused a slight bristling. Ears said, “Russian.” In the background I noted Sophie getting up and moving slightly to the side, readying herself for whatever might happen next.
“What?”
Ears gestured to himself and the others, “Russian.”
“Oh.” I blinked in a confused fashion, which I didn’t have to fake. Mitnick had Russians in his house. I covered this up by saying, “I thought that Ukraine was, you know, a part of Russia.”
Ears laughed in a way that suggested it might as well be, but said, “No. It is its own country.”
I followed with something that I knew was the wrong thing to say. “My mistake. But that’s a like asking you boys to know the difference between someone from Georgia and Mississippi.”
That caused more puzzlement, Georgia being both a U.S. state and a former republic of the Soviet Union. This resulted in further fuming – like most tough guys when someone started to speak about something they didn’t understand, it made them feel stupid. Lesser. Not a position they were happy to be in.
Having gotten everyone off balance, I pushed a bit more, “So you fellas seen Sergei? He’s a Ukrainian.” I smiled, having met enough Eastern Europeans to know that blissful American cheer would antagonize them further, but unable to stop. As if all this wasn’t enough I threw in, “He’s usually with that crazy brunette? The pale one.”
One of the men shot up, nearly spilling his drink. Another, an older vory at the back, so pale I had thought he was wearing a white shirt, leaned past the two girls that were flanking him to stare accusingly at the younger man. Judging by the number of tattoos and the prominence of the elder’s tattooed star, it was good for his longevity that the younger man quickly gave a believable, bewildered shrug. Ears remained still, keeping everyone else in their place, his squinted eyes, belying a low heat. “You know Sergei?”
I smiled, making like an idiot, happy that we were getting somewhere. “Yeah. We met at the Factory.” Thinking about what Sartre had said about allowing Mitnick’s crew into the club I gave Ears a sly look and said, “Say – haven’t I seen you there with him?”
The growing anger in Ears went out like he had snuffed a candle, so much so I thought I could see the smoke trailing off him. I should have paid more attention to that. Instead I listened more to what he said next. “Sure.” He stepped forward and almost put a hand on my shoulder, but stopped, thinking better of it. Instead he pointed at the door I came in and said, “Go out,” followed by a series of left and right directions. Trying to mentally follow along, I was fairly certain the instructions would take me back outside.
I gave a quick glance to the rest of the crowd to see the other men setting down drinks and moving to stand, getting ready to help me leave if I didn’t. All the women were staring anywhere but the source of the conflict, attuned to the possibility of violence and desiring nothing but to avoid it. Except for Sophie. Behind the men she glared at me, her eyes dilating with the clear message that it was time for me to leave. She couldn’t have made her intentions more clear if she had been signaling with me semaphore.
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
I poured out the drink into the potted plant and moved on. The Dutchman and Mitnick’s conversation kept going and I didn’t want to be spotted. I headed towards the back of the house. I figured it was a good opportunity to explore and if I got caught somewhere I shouldn’t be I could say I had been searching for the card game Mitnick had mentioned. There were a pair of interior doors on either side of the fireplace at the back of the room, but both were crowded with people. Instead I headed out a pair of tall French doors that had been open to let the breeze in. It helped scatter the smell of cigarettes, booze, and desperation.
Outside, perpendicular to the house, stretched a patio of brutalist concrete that rose in rectangles that could have acted as furniture or dragon’s teeth. Couples and groups used them as the former, desperately trying to look interesting or interested, depending on what end of the conversation they were on. One buxom woman merely stared off into the moonlight while a short, round, bespectacled Gallic fellow stared at her chest so hard he might have been about to bury his face in it.
Beyond that lay more impossibly green lawn and the sound of surf. The silhouettes of security personnel, looking more like FSB than mafia, floated around. This close to the ocean the evening’s hot wind was tempered by the cool sea, making it smell like rain. I breathed it in deep.
The desire to leave immediately was strong. I hadn’t been around crowds like this in a long time and at least the day-trippers of Venice had mostly been sober. Being here felt like being trapped in a drunken blob, even the breathable air of the patio feeling a bit claustrophobic with so many people around. Only the guards, remote and neutral, felt normal to me.
What little I had learned so far, though, just felt like a bunch more questions. Sophie was around somewhere – maybe she’d be lucky enough to learn something solid.
Beyond the patio the lawn was scattered with people, the side of the mansion dotted with more french doors that were open, allowing people to move in and out as they pleased. Long, white gossamer drapes hung around the doors, moving between the breeze and the house’s internal climate, occasionally entangling someone too drunk not to avoid the spidery traps.
The house glowed with lights, and by the external ones I could see that not too far in the distance a group was setting up what appeared to be a stage – a band getting ready for a set. A couple was already whirling on the flat dance floor that had been laid out across the grass, moving to their own internal music. A soundcheck crackled through the evening, causing guests who heard it to turn that way like meerkat.
Lured by the promise of entertainment, other people headed outside, leaving a wake of empty glasses, bottles, and other trash. Watching them go I wondered if Mitnick cared if his house was still standing at the end of the night. And I wondered how much money you had to have not to care.
This question only persisted as I went against the flow to head back into the house to continue exploring. I knew, logically, its space had to be finite, but it seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon. A set of lights came on around the stage, causing me to move away from it while drawing more attention from the guests inside. Sticking to the walls of the house I waited for the drunkenly curious to shift their way through the silk of the exits, then ducked into the nearest room.
I stepped into a study or personal library of some kind, thankfully now empty except for a young man passed out on a divan and a middle-aged man trying to amorously rouse him. The older man must have been up to no good – seeing my bulk emerge through the doors, he scuttled out of the room.
The Grecian theme hadn’t consumed this room as it had the rest of the house. It was subdued, with hardwood floors extending up into bookshelves that ran all along the room. A desk grew up off-center. A globe of brass and ptolemaic continents sat next to it. A reading lamp glowed yellow on the desk, inviting someone to sit and read.
Mitnick must have cared about his books, though, because the first few shelves had been cleared, keeping them out of the grubby reach of any guests. It’s possible the shelves were always empty, but I doubted that was the case. The lack of dust supported this. I was mildly surprised Mitnick hadn’t just locked up the room, but I remembered him up on the balcony and that he wasn’t just throwing a party. He was leaving an impression, creating an identity for himself by allowing people to see his home. This room certainly would do that. Perhaps this is where he brought people after he got tired of standing or the party goers were too busy to notice anyone on the balcony.
The desk was locked up tight and the blotter that covered was just an empty green rectangle. The room had three internal exits, seven if you included the two windows on my side and the two mirroring it on the other. I could hear more chatter and splashing from the other set of doors, probably an outdoor pool. Realizing avoiding people is exactly what I shouldn’t be doing here, I picked one of the exits at the back of the room, heading deeper into the house.
The door I chose opened into a long hallway with doors off either side and a surprising amount of quiet. The floor became carpeted, almost as thick as terrycloth, with pedestals against the wall between doors, each holding some piece of complimenting abstract art that resembled a bird’s nest. Opening the closest door it looked like a locker room, but I realized it was a changing room for people going to and from the pool. It was mostly dark, but I thought I heard whispering, so I closed the door and moved on.
I kept trying doors like that, finding mostly empty and uninteresting rooms, feeling increasingly lost, when I opened one that led into an octagonal room. The center of it was dominated by a similarly shaped table, but that was lost under the group of Russians that Sophie and the other women were laughing with. The smell suggested a bottle of vodka wasn’t far away. Several cue sticks leaned up against the table and the room’s walls, suggesting a game of billiards had been abandoned.
Sophie and her dark-haired friend, both close too or in the laps of sitting men, were laughing with glasses in hand as one of the five men in the room was making some kind of lewd joke with a cue.
