How Dark the World Becomes (6 page)

Archie was relaxed and smiling. A smiling thief is never to be trusted, which is why I make it a habit to smile as little as possible. Archie, on the other hand, always smiled, and today I smiled back—I was only scowling on the inside.

“You mind if I smoke?” he asked and offered me a cigar from his plastic humidor. 

“Go ahead.” But I waved off the cigar. “You know them things are gonna kill ya, Archie.”

“Well, it’s damned sure something will. May as well be something I like.” It was hard logic to argue with. 

For most of my life, all I ever smoked was the local weed, just like Archie. That’s all there was. Braka, they call it. It’s got something like nicotine in it, something that jingles you, and that was enough. Then when I hit some cash one time, I sprang for an imported cigar, shipped all the way from Earth. 

Perfect. 

Everything about it was perfect: the little brown wood humidor it came in, the way the leaf was rolled around it just so, even the cigar band was perfect. I lingered over that cigar for probably two or three hours, and never had to relight it once. It burned smooth and even and cool, and the flavor just got richer the longer it burned; it never got that sour taste the cheap local cigars did down toward the bottom. 

Perfect.

But it ruined me for the local weed, and I couldn’t afford to smoke imported cigars for the rest of my life, so I just quit. 

We talked about this and that for a while. He asked where Ricky was; I said he’d apparently split, but maybe the provosts had picked him up—nobody knew for sure. We were firewalling all his operations so they’d be hard to come back on, even if he talked. They could pick up a couple of the guys, but the banks were safe and we’d moved a couple Lotto counting rooms to new locations. His two top guys—the first ones the provosts might pick up—we’d already pulled out of the loop and put up in safe houses for a while, just till things cooled down.

He nodded in approval. If it occurred to him that this also took Kolya’s two most likely allies inside my organization out of circulation, he didn’t let on. 

After a while, he got up to leave. But before he walked out, as if he almost forgot but remembered just in time, he said, “Oh, yeah. Kolya’s got dinner reservations at Quann’s for tonight. Wants all us captains there. You know, if you can make it. No business, just social. Says we don’t get together enough anymore. You be there?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”

Sure.
Great.

*   *   *

So there I was, sitting to Kolya’s right, with Archie across the table, Bear Bernardini to my right, and the other four “captains” filling the eight-top. If Archie was in Kolya’s pocket, Bear was stuck up his asshole.

Kolya was in a good mood, laughing and joking with the guys. Kolya’s a little shorter than me, with a thick dark moustache and thicker, coarse, straight hair, clipped short on the sides and combed back off his forehead. His hairline made his forehead look low, which suggested a sluggish mind, but one look at his eyes and you knew better. His eyes told you he was always measuring, weighing, calculating. Everything was carefully assessed and then filed away. But at the same time, there was this playfulness in his eyes that let you know he was having a great time sizing you up, deciding what he was going to do about you. It made it hard to hate him—this unmeasured joy he took in his life. That’s probably another reason I didn’t want a war. No doubt about it, Kolya was a monster without conscience or mercy, but I liked him. What does that tell you about me? 

I figured Ricky would be the main topic of conversation, but he wasn’t. While we were waiting for our drinks, Kolya mentioned that Archie had filled him in on what we were doing about Ricky’s “disappearance,” and it sounded okay to him. Had we heard anything from him? Nope. Just weird, he said, but he may have been thinking that Ricky had lost his nerve and just left. Not likely, but not impossible, either. To work,
Maskirovka
doesn’t need to persuade, only confuse. 

Our drinks came, along with a shaker of coarse ground pepper. Kolya dumped pepper in his double vodka—Cossack style—and threw it back in one gulp. 

“Some broad named Marfoglia stop by your office the other day?” Kolya asked, seemingly out of the blue.

“Good-looking coppery blonde, green eyes, great set of legs, and dressed like a million
Cottos
?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s her.” 

“Nope. Ain’t seen nobody like that,” I answered, and Archie laughed so hard beer came out of his nose. I grinned over at him, but watched for Kolya’s reaction out of the corner of my eye. I’d been caught flat-footed, and when I am, I always admit the little thing to cover the big thing—that’s another side of
maskirovka
.

“Why?” I asked.

“She came to see me this afternoon,” Kolya answered.

I nodded. 

“She came to me, what? Couple days ago,” I improvised. “Stuck-up pain in the ass—definitely not my type . . . one of those ice queens you like so much. I gave her your name. What did she want?”

Kolya was looking at me, frowning, but in thought, not suspicion. I’d known him long enough to know when he’s trying to figure out what’s going on, as opposed to trying to figure out how he should kill you.

“It’s complicated,” he answered.

I turned to Bear Bernardini to my right.

“That means he hasn’t figured out how to nail her yet.” The rest of the table burst into laughter at that one—because only the truth is really funny.

She
was
Kolya’s type: distant, self-assured, and very controlled—the conservative tailored suits, the perfect hair and makeup. Something about that combination turned him on. But when he was done with them, they were never as confident or self-assured, ever again, and I think that turned him on even more. There was something fetishistic about it, this need to deface a particular sort of beauty, something like an urge to break a delicate piece of porcelain. 

But it wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t sure quite what she’d said to Kolya, or why, but whatever it was, it had probably screwed me—and maybe screwed me to death. So she’d decided to get in bed with this monster herself, and whatever happened to her there wasn’t any skin off me.

I took a big drink of my scotch and grimaced, but right away shot Archie a big grin to cover it up. For the first time in years Jerry Lopez had made my drink full strength—stiffer even, maybe a double. What the hell was he thinking? I looked over at the bar, and he was polishing a glass, looking down. He glanced up, saw me looking at him, and made eye contact for a couple seconds. No apology, no smile, just a serious look for a moment, and then he went back to polishing the glass.

When birds stop singing . . . 

I pretended to take another sip of my scotch. My lips started to tingle. The scotch was spiked with something, no question, and Jerry—bless his soul—had done the only thing he could to alert me.

Had Kolya poisoned me? Probably not. You poison someone in a restaurant, the public health guys start asking questions. More likely it was a drug to make me seem drunk—then haul me out of here and finish me someplace else. I wondered how many of the other captains were in on this? Maybe just Archie . . . otherwise why make things so complicated?

Kolya leaned over toward me and smiled.

“Good to see you, pal,” he said. He’d said that when I first got there, but it had been jovial, public. This was private and, I thought, a little wistful. “Long time,” he added, and nodded. “We used to get together all the time, you know? Hardly at all anymore. What happened?”

“Yeah, those were pretty good days,” I agreed. “You know . . . once we got our asses out of the gutter and started making some buckage.”

He laughed and nodded. 

“Yeah, sure. But you know, even the gutter wasn’t as bad as it could have been for a couple
bezprizornyi
like us. We covered each other’s backs in those days.”

“Kept each other alive more than once,” I agreed, but felt the familiar flush of guilt that thinking about the old days always brought. Sure, we’d covered each other’s backs. Sure.

Maybe it was the drug working, but I started feeling blue, or maybe just sentimental. On one hand, Kolya was a rabid dog, but on the other, he was my oldest friend. And the truth was we’d made a good team because we were two of a kind—twin sons of different parents. Had we both changed so much since then? Had he gotten crazier? Had I found a conscience? Or were we still two of a kind, and all my angst just so much self-indulgent bullshit? 

Now we sat over a drink, just like we had a thousand times before, and I knew it was the last time we’d ever do it, as long as we lived. It made me feel sad, even as my lips tingled from the drug Kolya had used to make it easier to murder me.

“What happened?” he asked again. He wanted an answer, was even a little desperate for one, maybe because if he didn’t get it right now, the odds were he never would.

I shrugged and shook my head.

“Hell, Kolya, who knows? You get busy with one thing or the other, business, the lady . . . guess I won’t have that distraction anymore. You knew Cinti split, right?” Then I frowned and looked down, as if something just occurred to me, and then I looked back up at Kolya. 

“Hey, you don’t think . . . Cinti and
Ricky
?” But then I shook my head and looked away. “Nah.”

But I’d seen a moment of uncertainty in Kolya’s eyes, and that happens about as often as Ukraine wins the World Cup—which still hasn’t happened in my lifetime. Kolya knew Ricky had a thing for Cinti, and so now he was thinking maybe they did go off together—who knows? And if so, maybe slipping a mickey to old Sasha was contraindicated. Not that he could take it back now, but if I kept him mentally off balance, even a little, maybe I could wiggle out of this alive.

So I played along, horsed around with the other guys, even had a chance to pour some of my drink on the floor once when I was facing Bear and he was looking away. I only pretended to drink, but I was starting to feel distant and weak anyway, just from that first gulp. 

“You okay, Sasha?” Kolya asked after a while.

“Yeah . . . maybe shouldna’ skipped lunch, huh? I guess I gotta hit th’ head.”

I got unsteadily to my feet and had to grab the chair back to steady myself.

“Sasha, you’re turning into a lightweight,” one of the guys shouted, and there was laughter all around. I smiled drunkenly and gave them the finger.

“Bear, why don’t you go with him?” Kolya said. “Make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.”

“Sure,” Bear said and stood up beside me and slapped my shoulder fondly. “C’mon pal.” 

So Bear was part of it.

We walked back toward the bathrooms, and I didn’t have to act much to look groggy. My knees were starting to buckle under me, and I had to concentrate on where I was walking. There was a little hallway leading to the bathrooms, out of the line of sight of the dining room, and I stopped there by the two doorways to the heads, leaning against the wall.

“Wha’ d’you guys slip me, Bear?” I asked. 

“What do you mean, Sasha?”

“C’mon. ’Sall over, I know that. Jus’ bu’iness. So wha’d you slip me?”

He looked ashamed.

“I don’t know. One of those stoopie drugs or something. Kolya said you’d be easier to handle . . . I’m sorry, Sasha. Just how it is.”

Nobody ever saw the trick punch coming, and messed up as I was, it still caught Bear hard enough to take the wind out of him. Then I grabbed him by the Adam’s apple, thumb and fingers on either side, inside the throat tendons, and pushed all the way back behind the windpipe, and that paralyzed him. I kicked open the door to the ladies’ room, pulled him in, and looked around. 

Someone was coming out of a stall, so I gave Bear a big kiss on the lips, looked back at her, and yelled, “Hey! Can we get some privacy here?”

She hurried out, and I locked the door behind her with my left hand. I still had Bear by the throat with my right, no air getting to his lungs; he’d already turned bright red, and now the red was shifting to purple. He stopped struggling after a few more seconds, and then slowly slid down the wall to the floor. I held him for a full minute after that—never trust a thief. When I let him go, he still had a pulse, but he was definitely in dreamland. 

I’d picked the ladies’ room because it had a window overlooking the alley; the men’s room was an interior room, a closed box. But when I started over to the window, I fell on my ass halfway there. I was in pretty rocky shape, but I got back up using the sink for support. Three of me looked back from the mirror, all soft and glowy.

I got to the window and cranked it open, but I wasn’t sure if I could even crawl out. My legs had no strength left. The alley was four meters down—I sure couldn’t climb down. I could fall down, but then what, even assuming I didn’t split my head open or break a leg? How far was I going to get? I wasn’t armed, of course. Not polite to come to a sit-down packing. Only one thing to do.

I pulled off my sport coat, wadded it up, and threw it as far out into the alley as I could, out in the splash of yellow-orange light from the windows in the delivery entrances. Then I went back and got in one of the stalls, crouched up on the toilet seat, and braced myself against the wall. I was light-headed, so I kept my head as low between my legs as I could and still keep my balance; this wasn’t going to work if I passed out and fell on the floor. It probably wasn’t going to work anyway, but it was as good a plan as I could come up with on such short notice. I didn’t latch the stall door—that would be a giveaway. I just leaned as far over to the right side as I could, out of the direct line of sight. 

After what seemed like an hour—but was probably only five or ten minutes—there was pounding on the door, lots of swearing, and eventually somebody tripped the lock with a hard key from the outside. I could hear Kolya, Archie, and the others raising hell, but the sound had a distant, hollow quality, as if it came from the other end of a long hallway. It went on for a long time, between swearing at the open window, swearing at my sport coat out in the alley, swearing at each other, swearing at Bear, getting him conscious and moving, and then getting everyone chasing after me. Eventually they went away and it was quiet, except for the rhythmic pounding of blood in my ears.