The Doves of Ohanavank (45 page)

It was twenty degrees below zero and Nicolai’s bones were freezing. His mother was sick in their tiny apartment in Moscow, burning with a forty degree Celsius fever and coughing blood. She had told him about Ayvazian
before, and shown him pictures, but he was not allowed to meet him. She had raised Nicolai in that apartment alone. That’s why she had stopped bringing clients home when he had turned five. She was thirty-five years old, and on her deathbed. She called Nicolai to her side, and gave him a piece of paper.

“This is where you can find him,” she whispered. “You can now go and introduce yourself.”

Nicolai asked a friend from the days when he had been a member of a street gang to drive him to the address on the piece of paper. They drove through the icy streets and parked a few meters from the entrance of the apartment building. Nicolai was rehearsing what he’d say to him. He was nervous and angry and yet he felt an unusual anticipation. He was about to get out of the car when Ayvazian left the building with three other men. He was wearing a thick, dark-gray winter coat with a black fur collar, and a Russian fur hat. They were talking and laughing, and got into a black sedan parked by the entrance of the building. One of the men got behind the wheel, Ayvazian in the passenger seat, and the other two in the back.

“Let’s follow them,” he told his friend, who was curious himself. He followed the sedan to the hotel. The four men left the car at the entrance and walked in. An attendant came to park the car.

Nicolai’s friend parked by the curbside. He stayed in the car while Nicolai walked to the entrance of the hotel and watched through the huge glass doors as Ayvazian and his friends walked down the wide hallway and entered a room on the right. He waited outside for five minutes, in the freezing weather, to make sure that was not just a stop on their way to somewhere else. He did not have on the right clothes. His coat was light and very old, he had a simple wool hat and gloves that had tears in them, exposing his knuckles, which were turning blue.

He did not know what to expect in the room that Ayvazian had entered, but he did not care. The doorman tried to stop him, but he kept walking. “I’ll only be a minute,” he said, “I have to give a message to one of your guests.” The doorman watched him walk into the ballroom and Ayvazian’s party. He relaxed. That room was swarming with bodyguards.

Two muscular men were standing at either side of the door inside the ballroom. One grabbed Nicolai as he walked in. “You’re in the wrong place,” he said, “out!” The scene inside mesmerized Nicolai. Huge crystal
chandeliers hung from the eight-meter high ceiling, crystal sconces were all over the walls and gold moldings decorated the walls, framing rectangular spaces where huge paintings hung. His eyes scanned the room looking for Ayvazian. People were mostly standing with glasses in their hands, others were seated in large armchairs. They all seemed to know each other.

“Out,” said the bodyguard again, pushing him.

“I have to talk to that man,” said Nicolai pointing at Ayvazian. “I have an important message for him.”

“He does not want to hear your message. Leave, now.” The bodyguard grabbed Nicolai’s arm so hard that it hurt. He pushed him over the threshold and blocked his way. “If you don’t leave now, something bad is going to happen to you.”

“Ayvazian!” screamed Nicolai at the top of his lungs. “One word, please.” The bodyguard slapped him so hard that he stumbled to the floor and his nose started to bleed. Nicolai was quick to get back on his feet. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and looked inside. He saw someone approaching him. Ayvazian was watching from inside.

“Who are you and what’s your business here?” asked the man.

“Tell Ayvazian that Evgeniya’s son is here with an important message. It will take only a minute.”

The man walked back and whispered in Ayvazian’s ear. Ayvazian walked toward the door, but to Nicolai he looked like a bull charging to make a kill. He reached Nicolai and pushed him a few meters into the hallway.

“What do you want?” he hissed.

“Sorry to interrupt your party, esteemed father,” said Nicolai, “but my mother is sick. She’ll probably be dead by the time I get back home. I thought you should know.”

“Once again, what do you want?!” Ayvazian’s face was turning red. The dying woman did not seem to interest him.

“I am your son!” Nicolai raised his voice. The last thing Ayvazian wanted is to cause a scene in front of his guests. He took a wad of cash from his pocket and threw it at Nicolai. “Don’t bother me again,” he hissed, and walked back inside, telling the bodyguards to shut the door and not let him in again.

Nicolai’s mother died the next morning. She had been one of Ayvazian’s early victims. He had just turned twenty-one and, eager to prove himself to his boss, he had beaten and raped her into submission, and she eventually
accepted her fate as a prostitute. But she had managed to keep her pregnancy a secret until the seventh month. The doctor that the boss kept at the time had refused to perform an abortion at that late stage. She was seventeen when she gave birth to Nicolai. That was eighteen years ago; today Ayvazian would have forced an abortion even at that late stage.

She had challenged him to recognize Nicolai as his son. He had been livid. She was persistent, but so was he. In the end, he allowed her to work freely, for herself, and raise the boy. She gave him her maiden name, but she registered his father’s name as Sergei.

“Don’t bring him up again,” he had told her. “I don’t want to hear about him, or to see you again. You’re free and you’re on your own.”

“I will tell him about you, Sergei,” she had said, spitting at him. “One day, he’ll want to know who his father is. And I promise you he will know the truth.”

And Nicolai learned the truth. The whole truth, over time, as he was growing up, as Evgeniya told it to him. By the time he turned sixteen, she had told him about the rape, her profession and the person responsible for it all.

His mother was kind and caring, but miserable. He had never seen her happy. He watched her come home in the morning, sleep until mid-afternoon, spend the afternoons in her nightgown watching TV, and then get ready and leave for work in the evening. He, as a young boy, would watch TV all night while his mother was out, and sleep late like her. She would not be up to wake him up in time to get ready for school.

As he approached fifteen it became more difficult to continue this routine, but they had no choice. He was unemployable and no school would accept him, given his spotty academic record. It became very tense in the apartment. He could not stand watching her ‘get ready for work.’ Her clothes, her makeup, and most of all her ‘attitude’ as she got into the mood for her work annoyed him to no end.

A year later he joined a street gang. They’d sleep in abandoned buildings or break into empty apartments in inhabited buildings. They’d steal from stores, and sometimes homes, and mug vulnerable people on quiet streets at night. He was sixteen when his gang cornered a woman in the street and took turns with her. As the youngest, his turn was last. At that point they did not even have to hold her down. She was nearly unconscious. That is how Nicolai lost his virginity.

But Nicolai blamed neither his father nor his mother for this state of affairs. In a practical sense, both seemed exogenous to his condition, so blame was irrelevant. But in an existential sense, neither was exogenous. He had something from each parent, like any other human being. The question that was more relevant to him was who to identify with.

His mother offered nothing with which he wanted to identify. She was not only sad, but also defeated. He did not see in her a victim that needed to be understood and protected. He saw a weakling who had been beaten and made miserable; he saw a loser who did not fight. There was no moral indignation in him when he thought of what his father had done. He did not have the education or the understanding to react on moral grounds. He saw instead someone who had not lost, who was not defeated, who was probably happy, or at least happier than his mother. He saw strength and toughness, and most importantly, he saw success. And he had not even met him yet.

It took Nicolai two years of persistence after his mother’s death to finally convince Ayvazian to take him on. He kept appearing at his door, only to be rebuked and kicked out, but he did not stop. Eventually Ayvazian relented. Nicolai was twenty, his mother was dead, and something in Nicolai reminded Ayvazian of himself. Maybe he could forge the kid into something he could use.

Nicolai worked with Ayvazian for thirteen years before Ayvazian was killed. During that time, he was restricted to Moscow, and there was no contact whatsoever with Ayvazian’s family in Yerevan. Even Viktor, who worked closely with Nicolai the whole time, did not know who he was until the last year, when Ayvazian decided the time had come to take Viktor into his confidence about Nicolai’s identity.

Nicolai and Viktor were Ayvazian’s top two lieutenants in Moscow. Between them, they managed over a dozen henchmen, and ran around fifty prostitutes directly. But few of the henchmen knew both men. Those who worked for Viktor knew Viktor, and those who worked for Nicolai knew Nicolai. Yuri did not know Nicolai.

Among the very few who knew both Viktor and Nicolai were Nono the housekeeper, a few prostitutes, including Anastasia, and of course Ari. But none of these people except Viktor knew about Nicolai’s relationship with Ayvazian. All Ari knew was that Ayvazian had grown fond of Nicolai over the years, and had begun to trust him more and more.

Perhaps that was the reason why, in Ari’s eyes, Nicolai had risen over the years to become third in command, after Ayvazian and Viktor. And when he asked him to come to Moscow right after Ayvazian’s death, Ari did not hesitate. That is when Nicolai told Ari who he was.

Nicolai Filatov enters the study alone. He does not want anyone else in the room when he first comes face to face with Carla. She is standing in front of her desk, in her black pantsuit and white blouse. Her face is stony and serious.

“Good to finally meet you,” he says. Carla sees the resemblance immediately. His eyes are Russian, from his mother, but the shape of his forehead and chin are pure Ayvazian. So are his mannerisms. They sit on the maroon velvet sofa.

“So,” says Carla in her most businesslike voice, “Papa had a boy three years before he had me.”

“That sums it up,” says Nicolai, showing the first hint of a smile.

“When did he find out?”

“He knew all along, from when I was born.”

Carla looks surprised. “But you’ve been working with him for only thirteen years?”

“I met him for the first time when I was eighteen. I started working with him and cousin Viktor two years later.”

It suddenly occurs to Carla that it was around thirteen years ago when she overheard her father say that he wished she were a boy. He must have finally relented and taken the bastard son in right around that time, when he so strongly felt the need for a son. She makes a mental note to tell Nicolai the story one day. For a second, she wonders how differently things might have turned out if he had taken her into the business. He might never have felt the need to accept Nicolai if he had.

“Did you make the video tapes?” she asks, coming to the main question on her mind. She had received the second CD under her door, with the
twenty-second clip of the scene in the orchard that left no doubt about her identity.

“I ordered them made. As an insurance policy. I do not intend to use the second one, if we can work together. And if we cannot, well, then all this,” and Nicolai waves his hand around the room, “becomes irrelevant anyway.”

“You want us to work together?”

“Of course. Why would I be here otherwise?”

“How?”

“You keep running things in Armenia, but you coordinate with me. We split profits fifty-fifty. You also give me half of all the money Papa left behind, both in cash and in the banks.”

“That’s it? You keep one hundred percent of everything else, and I keep half of Armenia?”

“I spent thirteen years building what you call ‘everything else.’ Of course I’ll keep it. You’ve done nothing to earn any of this Carla, and yet you keep half of Armenia. I think if any of this is unfair, it is in your favor.”

Very well played, thinks Carla. Besides, he can send me to jail on a whim. He’s not even mentioning that.

“We obviously disagree on the definition of fair,” she says. “Besides, I don’t think it is about fairness, is it? It is about when it would no longer be worth dealing with each other. So allow me to suggest a slight modification to the arrangement. You keep one hundred percent of Russia, which is probably by far the largest operation anyway, and we split everything else fifty-fifty, not just Armenia. That includes the Ukraine, Dubai and Istanbul, as far as I know.”

“You remind me of Papa,” smiles Nicolai. “Negotiating even when you don’t have a leg to stand on. That is why I’ll accept your suggestion, not because I have to. This is the one and only concession you’ll get from me as my sister. From here on, it is pure business. Do not give me any cause to suspect you, in anything. I can bring everything you have tumbling down on your head.”