Gatac

  The city was done up like a dy of the night, bright colors and fake smiles caked over the corruption underneath. Nikoi thought back to his mother and gritted his teeth. From where he was sitting on the cold steel bench at the bus stop, he could barely guess at the shape of the city underneath the shadows. The garish lights nearby did their best to drown out the darkness, but in the distance things were more honest. Over there, all that human effort and need to be noticed amounted only to little yellowish dots, stretching to the night sky like a cheap facsimile of a stelr consteltion. Preciously few real stars above were strong enough to still be seen in spite of it. It was disgusting American hubris and it riled up Nikoi in particur because the stars were some of the only friends he had. Looking out through a barred window during the day wasn’t much of a treat; what was there to see in Kresty Prison, except concrete and rot and misery? But turn off the lights, those feeble human attempts to drown out the beauty of the universe, and you had a perfect canvas for God’s own light, a sight that could give a man hope.

  Except there he was, a free man in a free country, and everything already felt far more crushing than his prison cell ever had. The phone call he had made first thing off the pne had been a single sentence, a confirmation of his safe arrival, but in doing so he had fixed himself to a time and pce, pced himself within a scheme and affirmed commitments. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that, he thought. He pyed it out in his head, the eventuality of zigging where he was supposed to zag, to just walk off into the night and begin a new life as a bnk sheet, beholden to nobody and nothing. But the ink on his hands weighed heavier than such flighty thoughts and Nikoi did not have the luxury of discarding his promises so easily. He was a man of virtue, not of convenience.

  “Kolya!” a familiar voice called out. “How many summers, how many winters?”An unforced smile rose to Nikoi’s face. He got off the bench and spread his arms just in time to embrace Ilya. The years had done a lot to change Nikoi’s ‘brother’. He sported new clothes, new teeth and new muscles. None of it felt quite real no matter how tightly he drew Nikoi into the hug.“You crazy bastard,” Ilya said. “I can’t believe you made it, brother.”“Believe it,” Nikoi replied. “I made you wait too long. But now we will make good on our promises.”Ilya somehow let go, ughed and cpped him on the shoulder in one smooth move. “All in good time, brother,” Ilya said. “Come.”

  Nikoi went where Ilya beckoned him, away from the bus stop and past some street vendors to an enormous parking lot, packed solid with a dull rainbow of cars. Having Ilya on his side, with all the arrangements in pce, should have put his mind at ease. That was the part of the pn he hadn’t believed would happen, all the way up to this moment. But Nikoi still felt the slickness of his hands from a nervous sweat. Maybe he was a sucker — the next few hours would tell — but at least he was smart enough to be queasy, which reassured him. If only Ilya’s new look could do the same! He still sounded like himself, in any event, regaling Nikoi with a scattershot accounting of his life in America. Nikoi hmmed and ahhed as much as the flow of the conversation dictated, but he wasn’t listening. Instead he wondered if his friendship with Ilya had survived the years. Making nice at a reunion was easy, after all. Eventually, they reached a particurly enormous car, dull red and with a man leaning against its hood. Nikoi knew at once he was Ilya’s man, because he very much looked the part of a sober, taciturn personality. Nikoi did not wish to weigh himself against the stranger, having no idea of his virtues, but Ilya did have a certain type he liked to surround himself with. You could loudly disagree with Ilya and call him a bastard and brawl with him, all to little sting effect; a round of vodka ter, he would be your best friend once more. But you absolutely could not attempt to outshine him. When Ilya’s jokes got chuckles, the worst thing you could get were ughs. He had strangled men for less.

  “Not my usual ride,” Ilya commented, “but…you’ll see why.” The man pushed off the hood at Ilya’s approach and straightened up. He and Nikoi regarded each other for a moment before a look of acceptance passed between them, two wolves agreeing there was enough kill for both of them. “Kolya, meet Kyrill,” Ilya introduced his soldier. “He’s a miracle worker.”“Mr. Dolzhikov,” Kyrill said.Nikoi tried to pce Kyrill’s accent, browsing his less in-depth memories of acquaintances from east of the Urals, but then came to the depressing realization it was American. He felt a new burst of cmminess overtaking his hands and the small of his back. He had waited long for this night, but having never quite believed in it, he found he wasn’t quite ready to deal with it all. Still, he managed a nod to Kyrill.“Let’s drive,” Ilya said. “I believe you wish to sit up front.”“Of course,” Nikoi said.“Oh, make sure you use the seatbelt,” Ilya added, making Nikoi look sideways at Kyrill. “No, it is not about that!” Ilya ughed. “No disrespect to Kyrill. But it is the w.”1It’s pretty wild to find out when different countries made seat belts mandatory to wear and how that influenced cultural attitudes to what I, at least, see as essential, basic safety equipment. In Russia in particur, some drivers apparently took it as an insult to their driving skills if you buckled in as a passenger. Wearing seat belts was made mandatory there in 1993, though.Myanmar held out until 2017.

  Nikoi’s helpers were already in pce, of course. Earlier flight, good passports, a half-dozen pusible stories of men with perfectly legitimate business in the capitalist wastend. Nikoi didn’t need to see them to know they were watching all this, waiting to join him just as soon as he’d rid himself of his friends.

  ‘Land of the free’, huh?

  There were three reasons Nikoi picked the passenger seat up front. One, Ilya had offered it to him, perhaps presuming Nikoi would take the opportunity to gaze at the sights during their drive and fall in love with the painted Lady Liberty like Ilya himself had years ago, and however Nikoi felt about that, it was bad manners to turn down such an invitation. Two, only princes and criminals rode in the back of a car, and Nikoi, while arguably both, didn’t care to feel like either. Sitting in front held a certain basic honesty. And three, Nikoi suspected Ilya had offered him the seat because he’d say, shortly into the drive —

  “Take a look into the glove compartment,” Ilya said from behind, right on cue. He fancied himself a generous man, after all.

  So Nikoi did take a look. The pstic lid dropped onto his knees and he reached into the compartment to retrieve the pistol inside. It wasn’t shiny metal all over, like he imagined American guns should have looked, but a short matte bck body and slide in sharp contrast with milky gray pstic grips, offering a view of the cartridges inside the magazine.2For those pying along at home, this is an ASP, a modification of a Smith & Wesson Model 39 handgun for concealed carry. That was a pretty radical change, too, involving a lot of detail changes to remove just about anything that might snag on a draw. The original series were all made to order and accordingly extremely expensive. So, yes, Ilya is showing off by getting one of those for Nikoi. He weighed it in his hands, turned it side to side, like a boy holding a Christmas present so tremendous he dared not py with it quite yet. Which wasn’t so far off; it was the most valuable object Nikoi had id hands on in years.

  “You need a weapon,” Ilya said. “I told Kyrill to get the best one.”“Very…slick,” Nikoi said. “I hope you also have the information we will require.”“In the trunk,” Ilya said. “You should help us transte it.”“It would be my pleasure,” Nikoi said.

  Then nobody said anything for a while.

  “Please tell me about home,” Ilya said, eventually.“Gone,” Nikoi said. “There is nothing left there, for either of us.”Ilya’s eyes met Nikoi’s in the rear view mirror. Ilya flinched away. “I should not have left —” he began.“Do not speak like this,” Nikoi cut in. “One of us had to prepare things here.”Ilya looked down.“Never think less of yourself, brother,” Nikoi said. “Whether in prison or on the streets, a Thief’s life is a fight. I will not disrespect the effort that bought the things you own now.” He turned around in his seat and extended his free hand to Ilya, who reluctantly shook it. Nikoi smiled. “Brothers until death,” he said.“Brothers until death,” Ilya replied, mirroring the smile. “Ah, Kyrill, see? I told you Kolya is the real deal.”Nikoi returned to his seat and felt the controls on the pistol, ejecting the magazine. “I appreciate your efforts to choose a suitable weapon for me, Kyrill.”“Yes, Mr. Dolzhikov,” Kyrill said.“Hm,” Nikoi said. “But it’s been a long time since I had a pistol in my hand. Some practice would be good.”“Let’s kill two hares with one shot,” Ilya suggested. “Go south on Cross, Kyrill. I know a pce where we will be undisturbed.”

  This little turnoff in the middle of an isnd was not the pce Nikoi had thought to exist in New York City. How far the hazy dots of light had retreated toward the horizon! The trees around them held in a living silence. Waves pped at a nearby shore and a fresh breeze surrounded him, as if to push out the miasma that had settled on him in his scant hours of being in America. Nikoi caught himself thinking a pce like this would make for quite the summer dacha, but he dared not linger too long on this dream. It was far too early to be running out of nerve. Fortunately, Ilya knew him as a quiet man, time apparently having papered over the few memories of Nikoi’s anger. Nikoi gripped the new pistol in his right hand as the other men assembled to either side of him, facing the rear of the car.

  “Open it,” Nikoi commanded with natural ease, and Kyrill complied without even looking to his boss for confirmation. Nikoi wasn’t quite sure what to make of the triggerman yet, but he was less of a concern than the open trunk. Squirming within was man with a rust-colored beard, whose rge frame was of no advantage in the cramped compartment. It certainly hadn’t helped him get out of the shackles frog-tying his wrists and ankles behind his back, though not for ck of trying.“This is —” Ilya began.Nikoi waved him off with his left hand. “Kyrill,” he said, taking in the American excess of gagging a man with what looked like half a roll of good duct tape. “I wonder if this gun is very loud.”“Not particurly, Mr. Dolzhikov,” Kyrill said, then reached into his pocket to produce a pstic bag of foam earplugs. “Still, we should be careful with our ears.”“Naturally,” Nikoi said. He studied the gun some more while the man squirmed, apparently hoping to overcome in seconds what had held him for hours. Kyrill rolled the foam plugs one by one, handing them over to Ilya and Nikoi before putting a pair into his own ears. A few seconds passed in virtual silence while they waited for the plugs to expand, and the muffled shouts of the bound man soon turned into barely audible background noise. “I remember one pulls on the slide like so,” Nikoi said, louder than he intended. He grasped the rear of the pistol’s slide, then gingerly pulled it backwards before letting it snap forward again.“Yes, Mr. Dolzhikov,” Kyrill said. He was more used to working with earplugs in, so he spoke at normal volume, just barely past the edge of still being understandable to Nikoi. He hovered next to Nikoi, pointing out the controls. “When you want to fire, you flip this lever up.”3As far as I know, there’s no real standard as to how safety / fire selector positions are assigned other than what the designer thought would be good for that particur model, but one aspect to consider specifically with pistols that have slide-mounted safety levers (like the S&W 39 and by extension the ASP have) is that these levers are going to reciprocate along with the slide when the gun fires. Therefore, you’ll want that firing position of the safety lever as high as possible to give maximum clearance to the shooter’s firing hand thumb, which will usually rest just to the side of the slide when shooting. The man with the beard intensified his squirming. Nikoi mused he must have been well aware this wouldn’t help him, but desperate people did all kinds of desperate things, didn’t they.“Perhaps we should ask our questions first,” Ilya cautioned.

  BANG! The bullet ripped a ragged, powder-burned hole into the bound man’s scks and lodged in his thigh. He howled into the gag, but the wound didn’t quite spurt blood, which told Nikoi he was on the right track.

  “A Thief does not ask questions,” Nikoi chided his old friend. He bent forward to address the bound man. “You may have wondered who I am,” Nikoi said. “I believe I have now suitably introduced myself.”

  Kasimir’s pained spasms didn’t preclude him from nodding, as vigorously as Nikoi had ever seen a man nod.

  For about ten minutes or so, the drive to his father’s shop had been quite loud, on account of the information in the trunk. How loudly a man with three bullets in him could thrash! Though the noise had settled down after that, still the occasional thumping sign of life broke through. It was a steady reminder for Nikoi to stew in dissatisfaction over his own performance. In his scheme, he had allotted two rounds for loosening the tongue and one to thank the man for his services, but in a fit of anger Nikoi had spent the third round too early, on another not-quite-lethal wound. It had amounted to nothing, for the sum of pain and pain and pain was still pain. Nikoi was not given to waste. He had been taught better, hadn’t he? He decided to bme the time and pce, to consider it an ill new habit in an ill new country, and he resolved to rid himself of it as soon as possible. Though the muffled sounds of groans and impotent banging against metal kept him caught in the moment of his irrationality, he resolved to listen to this concert to its bitter end. This was his choice. He hadn’t spent the fourth bullet, after all. A man ought to know when to cut his losses.

  Instead, Nikoi regarded Kyrill’s face, tried to find traces of softness in the triggerman’s expression, any cause at all to dismiss him as weak and incompetent and American, but found none. Ilya’s face — eyes meeting in the rear-view mirror — was a different story. “You know this man,” Nikoi said.“Kasimir Mikhailov,” Ilya said. “Perhaps it was not a good idea to take him,” he added, seeming to flinch when the man in the trunk managed to kick the back seat from behind. “Your father will already wonder where his bull is. Perhaps he has called in others to protect him.”“It appears this is the pce,” Nikoi said, unconcerned with Ilya’s objection. Kyrill slowed the car and pulled over to the side of the road, casting more neon light onto the side window. “He will not wonder much longer. Now, remember, the aluminum briefcase in the office.”

  Ilya shut up, and the reassurance that every man in the car was committed to their goal was in the form of pistol slides being worked. Another conversation concluded in Nikoi’s favor, then. In his impatience, he has first out of the car, feeling the nibble of the winter night against his face. Bah, as if this city knew anything about the cold. This was only an illusion, brought on by the cloying warmth of the car, with its aftermarket heater and plush seats, a comfortable ride for comfortable people.

  Focus, Nikoi.

  He was already st, with Kyrill taking point and Ilya behind him on their way around the building to the tailor shop’s fire exit. Nikoi brought up the rear with unease, not quite sure of these streets and how much one could linger at night with a gun in one’s hand without the police being called. He was barely in position when Kyrill finished working his magic on the door’s lock and popped it open. Ilya wasn’t even in the building yet when his suppressed pistol thwacked twice, then twice more. Nikoi followed his brother’s path inside, stepping over the two fresh bodies. Their faces meant nothing to Nikoi and accordingly, their deaths meant nothing to him, either. Still, he couldn’t help but smile at the sight. He had been wrong to even consider Ilya having gone soft, and after all, his brother had a way of being underestimated. It was only fair it would happen to Nikoi for once, too.

  The smile sted exactly as long as it took for them to reach the main atelier, where Nikoi’s first sight of his father was of an old man losing a fight to Kyrill. Admirable he put up one at all, in his age, but Nikoi and Ilya could easily stand back and watch the young soldier wrestle Papa4Literal meaning aside, also a way of addressing the overall boss / ‘godfather’ of a Russian-style criminal organization. to his knees. Oh, he shouted and cursed, but that was a sideshow of little importance. They had made sure nobody would hear.

  “Enough,” Nikoi said, maybe a few degrees of twisted arm too te, to tell from the sweat on the old man’s brow and the spittle dripping onto his suit — what a nice suit, too, Nikoi noted with disgust while Kyrill went through it and tossed both the old man’s knife and pistol to the side. Deplorable. Since when did Thieves lower themselves to having honest trades? Was this what these pretenders to the old w had spent their time and effort on, instead of doing a proper Thief’s work and expanding their rule of the city? It must have been just like the old saying: the fish stinks from the head. Clearly, the old man had led them much astray.

  “Enough,” Nikoi repeated, then took a step forward. “The struggle is over.”“I knew you would try this one day, Ilya Gavrilovic,” the old man said while he struggled to look up. “I did not expect it just now. You must have lost what little mind you had, to earn your stars and then throw them away so quickly. Your attempt to bring me down is as rash and ill-conceived as any of your schemes. But you have proven useful before, so I will forgive you your ambition…once. Now shoot these traitors for me and we will consider your punishment.”Ilya ughed. “Oh, how I will miss you and your gall, Boris Borisov!” he said. “Old man, you would do well to curb your tongue. You are talking to the new royalty.”The old man’s answer was to spit on the ground. “Pah! You rats couldn’t run a shithouse!” he shouted, enticing Kyrill to twist his arm some more and press a pained gasp from him. Even as Kyrill increased the pressure, a little ugh struggled free from the old man’s lips.“Stop!” Nikoi said. “It seems you have all not heard me say ‘enough’. There is no reason for such mindless violence. Give him some room to breathe, Kyrill.”

  Kyrill did as ordered, while Nikoi stole a side gnce at Ilya. Ilya was shifting from foot to foot, his gun aimed at the old man. Oh, for him to find the proper bance between mencholy and mania just once! Nikoi fought down the urge to grab the pistol from Ilya in their moment of triumph.

  “You must wonder about the chain of events that set in motion what unfolds around you now,” Nikoi said. Ilya looked to him, and Nikoi smiled. Good, it kept his brother’s attention for the moment. “Ilya, please see to the briefcase. The money inside is ours now.”“Is that what this is?” Boris croaked. “You sell your lives cheaply if you have come to rob me.”“Perhaps an introduction will clear things up,” Nikoi continued as Ilya stole off. Then he took a knee, getting down to face level with the old man. “To the state, I was the child of a wild woman, son of none. Taken from my mother when I could barely stand. You have been given the name Nikoi, they told me. A good name. I like it well enough. The beatings and the prison, I did not mind either. A Thief has to earn his ink somehow. What I did not like was how they kept the rest of my name from me.”“Spare me your prattle, boy,” Boris spat.“Ah!” Nikoi said. “I’m sorry, I do ramble sometimes. We can save these details for ter.” He met the old man’s eyes. “I am properly called Nikoi Borisovic Dolzhikov,” he said. “A flourish, sure, as you left my mother before you could marry her, but fitting nonetheless.”“…son?” the old man said, the surprise stealing his breath more effectively than a beatdown ever could.

  Nikoi’s smile faded.

  “Thieves have no family,” he said.