The quantum solution, p.26
The Quantum Solution, page 26
“I’ll live,” Lyudmila replied dryly.
“Okay, we gotta move. Think you can walk?”
Lyudmila shot her a venomous look, rose, and with Evan’s strong arm around her, regained her feet. Together they staggered along, heads down, backs bowed. Evan prayed there wasn’t more than one sniper in the attacking group. The odds were heavily in their favor; snipers were a curious bunch, always working alone, never in groups or even in tandem with another sharpshooter.
“Who the hell are these people?” she asked.
“Who knew we were here?” Lyudmila queried.
“It’s got to be a small number.”
Lyudmila gave her another sharp look. “But still unknown.”
“I doubt very much one of Tribe’s competitors would mount such an attack. That leaves your nemesis, Major Korokova.”
“After Istanbul my security has been airtight. How would she know?”
“Well, wasn’t it your partner von Kleist’s seaplane that took you here?” Evan said sharply.
“Former partner. And yes, it was, but I’ve told you, he is not the leak. I know him. Drop it.” Lyudmila’s voice equally sharp.
Evan said nothing more, because her mind flashed back to the texts Inessa had shown them. Evan had timed it, made sure it was under thirty seconds so it couldn’t be traced. But what if it had been? What if Korokova was somehow able to make the trace? That would explain the hit team’s presence here. Except … It would have been easy enough to storm Tribe’s villa on the other side of the island, but they didn’t. They waited, tracked the helo to this hidden bastion. Which meant they were after not only Lyudmila but Ionescu, their rogue quantum physicist. They wanted Lyudmila dead and Ionescu back in Moscow.
All of this raced through her mind at lightning speed. For only a second or two she considered spilling it all to Lyudmila. But what good would it do? It was only a theory, after all. She might only muddy the waters.
“It doesn’t matter,” Evan said with finality. “We have to deal with the here and now. Later, when we’re safely away, we’ll have time to figure out why.”
After a moment or two, Lyudmila nodded, but she looked deeply troubled. She didn’t like loose ends. Neither did Evan, but this very well might be a loose end of her own doing. For the time being, at least, she needed to tuck away that possibility and get on with surviving this assault with their bodies and limbs intact.
“Promise me one thing,” Lyudmila said abruptly.
Evan looked at her.
“Ionescu is my responsibility. I arranged his exfiltration, after all. But from here on out I can’t keep my eye on both him and Timur.”
“You want me to take care of the boy.”
“This is my wish, yes.”
“All right, but I’m not so good as a babysitter.”
“You did just fine with your sister’s children,” Lyudmila pointed out. “You saved them when no one else could.”
Evan saw no point in continuing to object. She bobbed her head in acquiescence.
At length, they reached the end of the junipers. Peering out, Evan saw three figures—Tribe, Ionescu, and Timur—huddled under the shelter of the last palm before the volcanic scree began. This was what she had intuited, why the assailants had sprayed only the rear of the house with semiautomatic fire: they were acting as beaters, people in the hunt to flush out the prey and herd them in the direction of those who would shoot them dead.
Evan knew they couldn’t go forward and there was of course no turning back. But they weren’t trapped. Lifting her head, she caught Tribe’s attention, made a whirling motion with her forefinger. He nodded, mouthed Thank God for you, took out his cell, and punched in what Evan knew must be the number of the helo pilot. Moments later, the engine coughed to life and the rotors started spinning. In the next instant, the side door slid open and she signaled for the trio up ahead to sprint to safety. At the same time, she stood up out of the last of the junipers, began to judiciously pepper the upper slope of palms with fire from the weapon she’d taken off the dead security guard. Unlike in films where the hero or villain just kept firing, she did so in short bursts, moving the muzzle in an unidentifiable pattern. As a result answering fire was sporadic and desultory.
Once Tribe and his charges, forearms over eyes squinting against wind and debris, clambered into the helo, she held her free hand out to Lyudmila and they began their perilous trek. The helo’s rotors were at top speed; it was ready to take off at an instant’s notice.
The firing became steadier and Evan had to keep turning to cover her and Lyudmila, who was limping along faster than Evan had imagined possible. The strand became pockmarked by bullets, but the zigzag route the two of them took kept them from getting hit, though some of the bullets came scarily close.
At the helo, Evan pushed Lyudmila up as helping hands from inside lifted her off her feet. Two shots hit the side of the helo. It was not a war machine; it wasn’t designed to take gunfire. Evan turned and, with slitted eyes, blindly emptied what was left in the magazine into the palms. As she turned to the helo a bullet almost got her. She could feel the hot wind of the bullet’s passage. The helo’s racket was deafening.
Then she was inside and the pilot lifted off, ascending as fast as the machine would allow, pushing it to the very edge of its ability. The helo trembled and shook, taking more gunfire from below. Then it was peeling off to the left, riding over the volcanic overflow, which now had darkened in the sunset’s waning aura. Night was creeping in, which could only help them while they were still in range of the semiautomatic fire. Now far less accurate the higher they flew.
Lyudmila had crawled over the seats and was huddled between Ionescu and Timur. The boy’s eyes were wide and staring, his breath hot in his mouth, but to his credit he wasn’t crying, he wasn’t panicking. It was impossible to have a conversation over the noise, but Tribe smiled at Evan, squeezing her shoulder. It was the first time since she had come to work for him that he had touched her. Odd and somehow sad that it came at this moment.
Evan’s cell buzzed against her thigh, and, taking it from her pants’ pocket, she read with mounting alarm the long text from Ben: outlining the conversation An Binh had overheard at the Carat bar between George Wilson and Zahra, Wilson’s sudden shocking death, Zahra’s sequestering, the revelation that it was Wes Connerly, not Wilson, whom Zahra was traitorously in league with, and Connerly’s subsequent confession that it was Tribe who had outflanked the bidders for the breakthrough of weaponizing time crystals by making a preemptive bid. She glanced up to see Tribe smiling at her, nodding. But had his smile changed subtly or had her perspective on him caused her to think so. Either way, she didn’t want him touching her again.
She was about to punch in a reply to Ben when she heard a whine like an armada of wasps.
“Watch—!” was all she had time to say before the ground-to-air missile struck the central stem holding the rotors in place. The craft bellowed like an elephant in mortal pain. It shivered and shook. Without the rotors it canted over, lurched heavily, hurtled downward in its death spiral.
Below them, the volcano seethed, steamed, glowing evilly. It ran red as blood.
PART THREE
ACTUALIZATION
Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”—also known as quantum entanglement. In entanglement, one of the basic concepts of quantum physics, the properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.
—extract from the National Science Foundation, July 6, 2020
41
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Rotten to the core. That’s what Minister Darko Kusnetsov thought as he put as much distance between himself and the Kremlin as he could, as fast as he was able. The Kremlin, he thought, is like an old man who never bothered to take care of his teeth and now in ones and twos they’re falling out.
The first thing he did upon entering his sprawling apartment was to shuck off the horrific black-and-gold uniform the Sovereign had had made for him and which he had insisted Kusnetsov wear before he left his presence. “I want to see you,” he had said. “I want to finally see the real you.” Even off his frame the uniform emitted the distinct odor of fascism, something he’d never have believed was possible in the Motherland.
If Kusnetsov had harbored any doubts about the rumors going around in FSB circles about the Sovereign’s health his scarifying visit with him today erased all of them. It was eminently apparent that the Sovereign was insane. Perhaps the illness that had come upon him during the eighteen months he was incommunicado, holed up with only a dozen doctors, had started to affect his brain, or maybe he knew his time on earth was fast running out. Either way, Kusnetsov knew, he was a menace not only to the Western world but to the Federation itself.
There was no way he, Kusnetsov, could stand idly by and allow the Sovereign’s increasingly irrational actions to completely destroy Russia. For a brief moment he thought about going to the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly. Almost immediately he recognized the foolishness of the idea. The Sovereign had neutered the Duma’s power some time ago. Those who disagreed with him were arrested on trumped-up charges or simply disappeared. As he dressed in jeans and an open-collar shirt, he wondered how many bodies would be found if the Moskva River were ever dredged.
He looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of his closet door. No natty Italian suit, no French shirt and tie for him today. That kind of outfit would stand out like a rose among weeds where he was going.
* * *
The ghetto of Chelobit’evo, approximately thirteen miles north of Moscow center, was inhabited largely by Muslims, immigrants for the most part from Dagestan or Chechnya, most of whom spoke Tajik or Uzbek, rather than Russian.
As a young man, a raw FSB recruit, Kusnetsov had been assigned to take care of a drug-smuggling ring there. He went with two experienced officers a decade older than he was. Apparently, “taking care of” the ring meant shooting them all to death, confiscating their drugs, and selling them back to the poor inhabitants of Chelobit’evo at a price substantially higher than what they were used to paying. “The price of doing business,” the older agents had told their buyers over and over again. Afterward, they offered Kusnetsov a tenth of their take. He returned alone later that night and distributed the funds to those most in need.
No trees, no medical clinics, no mass transit, and for love or money not a parking spot to be had. He did, however, drive past a Fix Price where everything cost ninety-nine rubles, several low-end groceries whose shelves were nowadays mostly empty, three “alcomarts” selling cheap liquor, the shops dotted amid monolithic apartment blocks erected with adulterated materials that cracked, split, and peeled six months to a year after they were built. The interiors, Kusnetsov recalled, reeked like a latrine papered with rotting cabbage leaves.
In the distance he could hear kids yelling, calling to one another, taunting. Dogs took their heads out of overturned garbage cans to shoot him hostile looks as his car slowly rolled by. A pair of men of indeterminate age sat outside an alcomart, heads nodding, a line of empty bottles at their feet. Once in a while, a car would hiccough by, its engine wheezing like an asthmatic. Overhead what streetlights still worked sputtered on and off, unsure how close they were to death. Beyond, the sky seemed to phosphoresce, to have turned to liquid.
Hasan was waiting for him outside the halal butcher shop he owned. Hasan was a big man in every way—tall, wide, with a substantial belly that belied the speed and muscle he could bring into play at a moment’s notice.
Kusnetsov drove up onto the sidewalk and parked. They greeted each other in the ritual way. Hasan’s eyes, oily as black olives, sparkled in the light emanating from his shop. The harsh light made valleys of the creases and scars on Hasan’s face.
“My friend,” Hasan said in a low voice. He handed over a small packet. “Very difficult to get.”
“Isn’t everything these days.”
“But this…” Hasan smacked his lips. “Very, very difficult.” He gave Kusnetsov a price.
“What? You’re robbing me blind, Hasan.”
“On the contrary, my friend, I have given you the friends and family discount.”
Kusnetsov laughed softly, handed over a roll of bills, which Hasan pocketed so fast it was barely visible.
“By the way,” Hasan said, “you are being followed.”
“Indeed.”
“One of yours?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Say the word and I will take care of him.”
Kusnetsov had no doubt that Hasan would; he’d seen him in startling action. “Ah, no, Hasan, I have other plans for him.” He set off with Hasan by his side. “Let’s take a detour to Miryam’s.”
Hasan’s face lit up like a will-o’-the-wisp. “Now there’s a plan I can get behind. Remember the Katzenjammer Twins?”
“Is that what we called them?”
“Sure.”
“Right. How could I forget?”
Hasan sighed. “Those were the days.”
When Kusnetsov threw him a look he just laughed.
Here in the ghettos, nowadays off limits to the police, no crime was ever investigated, no offense reported. The ghettos of Moscow were worlds unto themselves. Muslims and non-Muslims alike frequented the alcomarts and places like Miryam’s.
There were other brothels in Chelobit’evo, but none more renowned and certainly none as good. Despite her surroundings Miryam was a stickler for cleanliness and peace. Any patron who caused a fight or abused her girls was summarily kicked out, banned for life. Her place of business was fronted by a pawnshop trading in openly stolen goods. The proprietor was also open to providing personal loans at outrageously usurious rates. It was not unusual for one of his hired goons to go after deadbeats and fuck them up royally.
Miryam, with the selective blindness of pragmatism, ignored the goings-on at the front of her house. Her attention was wholly on her own domain—two floors of perfumed idylls for which her repeat clients scrimped and saved in order to forget their troubles, at least for one night.
Walking through the pawnshop, they passed cases of handguns, AR-15s, and other assorted assault weapons lit up by the hideous overhead fluorescent glare. In the rear of the shop a plain metal door opened onto a deliciously dim parlor straight out of the British 1880s, complete with velvet love seats, mahogany side tables, lamps with fringed shades. An ersatz fireplace was set into one wall, flanked by a pair of awful paintings of a horse race and a stag at bay.
Miryam herself greeted them, and not merely because they were different from her normal clientele in every respect. She greeted all her clients herself. Miryam had a Pre-Raphaelite figure and a face like Francesc Masriera’s painting of Salome, which was to say like something between a seductress and a warrior princess. She deliberately heightened the effect by wearing a long skirt of orange velvet that only partially covered her diaphanous undergarment.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, gentlemen,” she said, her voice as well as her eyes full of mischief.
“We’d like to book Chama’s room,” Kusnetsov said, “if it’s available.”
Miryam grinned, showing a gold tooth that winked at them as if in collusion. “For you two, it’s always available.”
They vanished up the stairs but did not go far, turning and waiting for whoever was tailing Kusnetsov to make his appearance. It took a while—perhaps he had thought to wait outside but got antsy, or maybe he took the time to make sure Kusnetsov hadn’t slipped out the back. In any event a man finally did push through the metal door, took a look around the parlor at the paintings, the fake fireplace, the two young women indolently entertaining their johns on the love seat, sniffed at the air redolent with wafts of weed and opium. They could see his face darkening with righteous rage. As he stepped up to intimidate Miryam, Kusnetsov tapped Hasan on the shoulder, whispered, “You’re on.”
At once Hasan came barreling down the stairs, calling out, “Is this jerk bothering you, Miryam?”
“I can take care of myself,” Miryam huffed.
“Not with me, you can’t.” The man brandished a Glock 17, pushed the muzzle into her face, making her back up so Kusnetsov, standing in the shadowed staircase, was positioned just behind the man.
Hasan gave it his best shout. “You can’t fucking threaten her like that!”
As the man turned his head toward Hasan, Kusnetsov leapt down the stairs, chopped down with the edge of his hand into the side of the man’s neck where the nerve bundle was hidden under skin and viscera. The man went down as if he’d been poleaxed.
As he and Hasan hefted the man, Kusnetsov thanked Miryam.
“Always a pleasure,” she said with a crafty smile. “One of these days maybe you’ll think of the perfect way to pay me back.”
* * *
Chama’s room was upstairs, through the last door on the left. It was always empty now. After Chama was murdered during a break-in, Miryam didn’t have the heart to give it to another one of her girls, even the new one she’d hired in Chama’s stead. Chama had been one of Miryam’s favorites. Hasan had felt the same way, which is why he’d enlisted Kusnetsov’s help in finding the perpetrators—the Katzenjammer Twins, as they came to be called. The two of them lasted three days, after which the room had to be hosed down with bleach and aired out for a week.
This was where they brought the man who had been tailing Kusnetsov. They sat him in a sturdy wooden chair. Hasan leaned over him, flipped open a gravity knife, stuck the point of the blade into the man’s left nostril.
“I saw this in Chinatown.” He turned briefly to Kusnetsov. “You ever see Chinatown? No time, huh? Too busy being a good little apparatchik.”
Kusnetsov let out a snort. Far from being offended, he knew this was part of the personal bantering that went on between them. They were ostensibly on opposite sides of the law—whatever could be called law, which morphed to suit the regime’s purposes that week, day, hour. Often, they both had a good laugh over that sad state of affairs.
“Okay, we gotta move. Think you can walk?”
Lyudmila shot her a venomous look, rose, and with Evan’s strong arm around her, regained her feet. Together they staggered along, heads down, backs bowed. Evan prayed there wasn’t more than one sniper in the attacking group. The odds were heavily in their favor; snipers were a curious bunch, always working alone, never in groups or even in tandem with another sharpshooter.
“Who the hell are these people?” she asked.
“Who knew we were here?” Lyudmila queried.
“It’s got to be a small number.”
Lyudmila gave her another sharp look. “But still unknown.”
“I doubt very much one of Tribe’s competitors would mount such an attack. That leaves your nemesis, Major Korokova.”
“After Istanbul my security has been airtight. How would she know?”
“Well, wasn’t it your partner von Kleist’s seaplane that took you here?” Evan said sharply.
“Former partner. And yes, it was, but I’ve told you, he is not the leak. I know him. Drop it.” Lyudmila’s voice equally sharp.
Evan said nothing more, because her mind flashed back to the texts Inessa had shown them. Evan had timed it, made sure it was under thirty seconds so it couldn’t be traced. But what if it had been? What if Korokova was somehow able to make the trace? That would explain the hit team’s presence here. Except … It would have been easy enough to storm Tribe’s villa on the other side of the island, but they didn’t. They waited, tracked the helo to this hidden bastion. Which meant they were after not only Lyudmila but Ionescu, their rogue quantum physicist. They wanted Lyudmila dead and Ionescu back in Moscow.
All of this raced through her mind at lightning speed. For only a second or two she considered spilling it all to Lyudmila. But what good would it do? It was only a theory, after all. She might only muddy the waters.
“It doesn’t matter,” Evan said with finality. “We have to deal with the here and now. Later, when we’re safely away, we’ll have time to figure out why.”
After a moment or two, Lyudmila nodded, but she looked deeply troubled. She didn’t like loose ends. Neither did Evan, but this very well might be a loose end of her own doing. For the time being, at least, she needed to tuck away that possibility and get on with surviving this assault with their bodies and limbs intact.
“Promise me one thing,” Lyudmila said abruptly.
Evan looked at her.
“Ionescu is my responsibility. I arranged his exfiltration, after all. But from here on out I can’t keep my eye on both him and Timur.”
“You want me to take care of the boy.”
“This is my wish, yes.”
“All right, but I’m not so good as a babysitter.”
“You did just fine with your sister’s children,” Lyudmila pointed out. “You saved them when no one else could.”
Evan saw no point in continuing to object. She bobbed her head in acquiescence.
At length, they reached the end of the junipers. Peering out, Evan saw three figures—Tribe, Ionescu, and Timur—huddled under the shelter of the last palm before the volcanic scree began. This was what she had intuited, why the assailants had sprayed only the rear of the house with semiautomatic fire: they were acting as beaters, people in the hunt to flush out the prey and herd them in the direction of those who would shoot them dead.
Evan knew they couldn’t go forward and there was of course no turning back. But they weren’t trapped. Lifting her head, she caught Tribe’s attention, made a whirling motion with her forefinger. He nodded, mouthed Thank God for you, took out his cell, and punched in what Evan knew must be the number of the helo pilot. Moments later, the engine coughed to life and the rotors started spinning. In the next instant, the side door slid open and she signaled for the trio up ahead to sprint to safety. At the same time, she stood up out of the last of the junipers, began to judiciously pepper the upper slope of palms with fire from the weapon she’d taken off the dead security guard. Unlike in films where the hero or villain just kept firing, she did so in short bursts, moving the muzzle in an unidentifiable pattern. As a result answering fire was sporadic and desultory.
Once Tribe and his charges, forearms over eyes squinting against wind and debris, clambered into the helo, she held her free hand out to Lyudmila and they began their perilous trek. The helo’s rotors were at top speed; it was ready to take off at an instant’s notice.
The firing became steadier and Evan had to keep turning to cover her and Lyudmila, who was limping along faster than Evan had imagined possible. The strand became pockmarked by bullets, but the zigzag route the two of them took kept them from getting hit, though some of the bullets came scarily close.
At the helo, Evan pushed Lyudmila up as helping hands from inside lifted her off her feet. Two shots hit the side of the helo. It was not a war machine; it wasn’t designed to take gunfire. Evan turned and, with slitted eyes, blindly emptied what was left in the magazine into the palms. As she turned to the helo a bullet almost got her. She could feel the hot wind of the bullet’s passage. The helo’s racket was deafening.
Then she was inside and the pilot lifted off, ascending as fast as the machine would allow, pushing it to the very edge of its ability. The helo trembled and shook, taking more gunfire from below. Then it was peeling off to the left, riding over the volcanic overflow, which now had darkened in the sunset’s waning aura. Night was creeping in, which could only help them while they were still in range of the semiautomatic fire. Now far less accurate the higher they flew.
Lyudmila had crawled over the seats and was huddled between Ionescu and Timur. The boy’s eyes were wide and staring, his breath hot in his mouth, but to his credit he wasn’t crying, he wasn’t panicking. It was impossible to have a conversation over the noise, but Tribe smiled at Evan, squeezing her shoulder. It was the first time since she had come to work for him that he had touched her. Odd and somehow sad that it came at this moment.
Evan’s cell buzzed against her thigh, and, taking it from her pants’ pocket, she read with mounting alarm the long text from Ben: outlining the conversation An Binh had overheard at the Carat bar between George Wilson and Zahra, Wilson’s sudden shocking death, Zahra’s sequestering, the revelation that it was Wes Connerly, not Wilson, whom Zahra was traitorously in league with, and Connerly’s subsequent confession that it was Tribe who had outflanked the bidders for the breakthrough of weaponizing time crystals by making a preemptive bid. She glanced up to see Tribe smiling at her, nodding. But had his smile changed subtly or had her perspective on him caused her to think so. Either way, she didn’t want him touching her again.
She was about to punch in a reply to Ben when she heard a whine like an armada of wasps.
“Watch—!” was all she had time to say before the ground-to-air missile struck the central stem holding the rotors in place. The craft bellowed like an elephant in mortal pain. It shivered and shook. Without the rotors it canted over, lurched heavily, hurtled downward in its death spiral.
Below them, the volcano seethed, steamed, glowing evilly. It ran red as blood.
PART THREE
ACTUALIZATION
Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”—also known as quantum entanglement. In entanglement, one of the basic concepts of quantum physics, the properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.
—extract from the National Science Foundation, July 6, 2020
41
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Rotten to the core. That’s what Minister Darko Kusnetsov thought as he put as much distance between himself and the Kremlin as he could, as fast as he was able. The Kremlin, he thought, is like an old man who never bothered to take care of his teeth and now in ones and twos they’re falling out.
The first thing he did upon entering his sprawling apartment was to shuck off the horrific black-and-gold uniform the Sovereign had had made for him and which he had insisted Kusnetsov wear before he left his presence. “I want to see you,” he had said. “I want to finally see the real you.” Even off his frame the uniform emitted the distinct odor of fascism, something he’d never have believed was possible in the Motherland.
If Kusnetsov had harbored any doubts about the rumors going around in FSB circles about the Sovereign’s health his scarifying visit with him today erased all of them. It was eminently apparent that the Sovereign was insane. Perhaps the illness that had come upon him during the eighteen months he was incommunicado, holed up with only a dozen doctors, had started to affect his brain, or maybe he knew his time on earth was fast running out. Either way, Kusnetsov knew, he was a menace not only to the Western world but to the Federation itself.
There was no way he, Kusnetsov, could stand idly by and allow the Sovereign’s increasingly irrational actions to completely destroy Russia. For a brief moment he thought about going to the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly. Almost immediately he recognized the foolishness of the idea. The Sovereign had neutered the Duma’s power some time ago. Those who disagreed with him were arrested on trumped-up charges or simply disappeared. As he dressed in jeans and an open-collar shirt, he wondered how many bodies would be found if the Moskva River were ever dredged.
He looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of his closet door. No natty Italian suit, no French shirt and tie for him today. That kind of outfit would stand out like a rose among weeds where he was going.
* * *
The ghetto of Chelobit’evo, approximately thirteen miles north of Moscow center, was inhabited largely by Muslims, immigrants for the most part from Dagestan or Chechnya, most of whom spoke Tajik or Uzbek, rather than Russian.
As a young man, a raw FSB recruit, Kusnetsov had been assigned to take care of a drug-smuggling ring there. He went with two experienced officers a decade older than he was. Apparently, “taking care of” the ring meant shooting them all to death, confiscating their drugs, and selling them back to the poor inhabitants of Chelobit’evo at a price substantially higher than what they were used to paying. “The price of doing business,” the older agents had told their buyers over and over again. Afterward, they offered Kusnetsov a tenth of their take. He returned alone later that night and distributed the funds to those most in need.
No trees, no medical clinics, no mass transit, and for love or money not a parking spot to be had. He did, however, drive past a Fix Price where everything cost ninety-nine rubles, several low-end groceries whose shelves were nowadays mostly empty, three “alcomarts” selling cheap liquor, the shops dotted amid monolithic apartment blocks erected with adulterated materials that cracked, split, and peeled six months to a year after they were built. The interiors, Kusnetsov recalled, reeked like a latrine papered with rotting cabbage leaves.
In the distance he could hear kids yelling, calling to one another, taunting. Dogs took their heads out of overturned garbage cans to shoot him hostile looks as his car slowly rolled by. A pair of men of indeterminate age sat outside an alcomart, heads nodding, a line of empty bottles at their feet. Once in a while, a car would hiccough by, its engine wheezing like an asthmatic. Overhead what streetlights still worked sputtered on and off, unsure how close they were to death. Beyond, the sky seemed to phosphoresce, to have turned to liquid.
Hasan was waiting for him outside the halal butcher shop he owned. Hasan was a big man in every way—tall, wide, with a substantial belly that belied the speed and muscle he could bring into play at a moment’s notice.
Kusnetsov drove up onto the sidewalk and parked. They greeted each other in the ritual way. Hasan’s eyes, oily as black olives, sparkled in the light emanating from his shop. The harsh light made valleys of the creases and scars on Hasan’s face.
“My friend,” Hasan said in a low voice. He handed over a small packet. “Very difficult to get.”
“Isn’t everything these days.”
“But this…” Hasan smacked his lips. “Very, very difficult.” He gave Kusnetsov a price.
“What? You’re robbing me blind, Hasan.”
“On the contrary, my friend, I have given you the friends and family discount.”
Kusnetsov laughed softly, handed over a roll of bills, which Hasan pocketed so fast it was barely visible.
“By the way,” Hasan said, “you are being followed.”
“Indeed.”
“One of yours?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Say the word and I will take care of him.”
Kusnetsov had no doubt that Hasan would; he’d seen him in startling action. “Ah, no, Hasan, I have other plans for him.” He set off with Hasan by his side. “Let’s take a detour to Miryam’s.”
Hasan’s face lit up like a will-o’-the-wisp. “Now there’s a plan I can get behind. Remember the Katzenjammer Twins?”
“Is that what we called them?”
“Sure.”
“Right. How could I forget?”
Hasan sighed. “Those were the days.”
When Kusnetsov threw him a look he just laughed.
Here in the ghettos, nowadays off limits to the police, no crime was ever investigated, no offense reported. The ghettos of Moscow were worlds unto themselves. Muslims and non-Muslims alike frequented the alcomarts and places like Miryam’s.
There were other brothels in Chelobit’evo, but none more renowned and certainly none as good. Despite her surroundings Miryam was a stickler for cleanliness and peace. Any patron who caused a fight or abused her girls was summarily kicked out, banned for life. Her place of business was fronted by a pawnshop trading in openly stolen goods. The proprietor was also open to providing personal loans at outrageously usurious rates. It was not unusual for one of his hired goons to go after deadbeats and fuck them up royally.
Miryam, with the selective blindness of pragmatism, ignored the goings-on at the front of her house. Her attention was wholly on her own domain—two floors of perfumed idylls for which her repeat clients scrimped and saved in order to forget their troubles, at least for one night.
Walking through the pawnshop, they passed cases of handguns, AR-15s, and other assorted assault weapons lit up by the hideous overhead fluorescent glare. In the rear of the shop a plain metal door opened onto a deliciously dim parlor straight out of the British 1880s, complete with velvet love seats, mahogany side tables, lamps with fringed shades. An ersatz fireplace was set into one wall, flanked by a pair of awful paintings of a horse race and a stag at bay.
Miryam herself greeted them, and not merely because they were different from her normal clientele in every respect. She greeted all her clients herself. Miryam had a Pre-Raphaelite figure and a face like Francesc Masriera’s painting of Salome, which was to say like something between a seductress and a warrior princess. She deliberately heightened the effect by wearing a long skirt of orange velvet that only partially covered her diaphanous undergarment.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, gentlemen,” she said, her voice as well as her eyes full of mischief.
“We’d like to book Chama’s room,” Kusnetsov said, “if it’s available.”
Miryam grinned, showing a gold tooth that winked at them as if in collusion. “For you two, it’s always available.”
They vanished up the stairs but did not go far, turning and waiting for whoever was tailing Kusnetsov to make his appearance. It took a while—perhaps he had thought to wait outside but got antsy, or maybe he took the time to make sure Kusnetsov hadn’t slipped out the back. In any event a man finally did push through the metal door, took a look around the parlor at the paintings, the fake fireplace, the two young women indolently entertaining their johns on the love seat, sniffed at the air redolent with wafts of weed and opium. They could see his face darkening with righteous rage. As he stepped up to intimidate Miryam, Kusnetsov tapped Hasan on the shoulder, whispered, “You’re on.”
At once Hasan came barreling down the stairs, calling out, “Is this jerk bothering you, Miryam?”
“I can take care of myself,” Miryam huffed.
“Not with me, you can’t.” The man brandished a Glock 17, pushed the muzzle into her face, making her back up so Kusnetsov, standing in the shadowed staircase, was positioned just behind the man.
Hasan gave it his best shout. “You can’t fucking threaten her like that!”
As the man turned his head toward Hasan, Kusnetsov leapt down the stairs, chopped down with the edge of his hand into the side of the man’s neck where the nerve bundle was hidden under skin and viscera. The man went down as if he’d been poleaxed.
As he and Hasan hefted the man, Kusnetsov thanked Miryam.
“Always a pleasure,” she said with a crafty smile. “One of these days maybe you’ll think of the perfect way to pay me back.”
* * *
Chama’s room was upstairs, through the last door on the left. It was always empty now. After Chama was murdered during a break-in, Miryam didn’t have the heart to give it to another one of her girls, even the new one she’d hired in Chama’s stead. Chama had been one of Miryam’s favorites. Hasan had felt the same way, which is why he’d enlisted Kusnetsov’s help in finding the perpetrators—the Katzenjammer Twins, as they came to be called. The two of them lasted three days, after which the room had to be hosed down with bleach and aired out for a week.
This was where they brought the man who had been tailing Kusnetsov. They sat him in a sturdy wooden chair. Hasan leaned over him, flipped open a gravity knife, stuck the point of the blade into the man’s left nostril.
“I saw this in Chinatown.” He turned briefly to Kusnetsov. “You ever see Chinatown? No time, huh? Too busy being a good little apparatchik.”
Kusnetsov let out a snort. Far from being offended, he knew this was part of the personal bantering that went on between them. They were ostensibly on opposite sides of the law—whatever could be called law, which morphed to suit the regime’s purposes that week, day, hour. Often, they both had a good laugh over that sad state of affairs.
