traffyck-3 - Medallion Press

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Medallion Press, Inc.
Printed in USA
“As chilling as Kiev in winter, TRAFFYCK is a thrilling tale
of crime and geopolitics, leaping from Ukraine to the U.S.
and back again. Populated with complex and appealing—or
terrifying—characters, the story offers up a glimpse of life in a
ruthless but little-known underworld, in which specters from
the past—among them Chernobyl—arise at every turn.”
—Jeffery Deaver, Worldwide Best-Selling Author of
The Bone Collector
“The twin tragedies of human trafficking and Chernobyl
are the compelling backdrops of Michael Beres’ fascinating
novel. Caught within the bleak and toxic environment of a
Chernobyl village, the characters reveal the moral decisions
that will either free or enslave their souls. TRAFFYCK is a
great story with a captivating style that realistically illuminates dark forces tempered by the persistence of humanity.”
—Irene Zabytko, Author of The Sky Unwashed
“TRAFFYCK pulls the reader into a bleak but fascinating
world. The people and events ring true cover to cover and
make us care. Author Beres takes us on a tour through the
darkness, and makes us glad we came along.”
—John Lutz, Shamus and Edgar Award-winner
“TRAFFYCK is a great novel with compelling characters and
an in-your-face story that never lets up. This book exposes a
world heretofore unknown to most of us, one that Michael
Beres makes frighteningly real.”
—Harry Hunsicker, Shamus Award-nominated author of
the Lee Henry Oswald thriller series and former executive
vice president of the Mystery Writers of America
DEDICATION
To those held captive—may you escape to a peaceful world
Published 2009 by Medallion Press, Inc.
The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO
is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 by Michael Beres
Cover Design by Adam Mock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written
permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
Typeset in Minion Pro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beres, Michael.
Traffyck / Michael Beres.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60542-105-6
1. Human trafficking--Fiction. 2. Private investigators--Fiction. 3. Chernobyl
Nuclear Accident, Chornobyl’, Ukraine, 1986 Fiction. 4. Ukraine--Fiction. 5.
Chicago (Ill.)--Fiction. 6. Carpathian Mountains--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E7516T73 2009
813’.6--dc22
2009022829
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research for this novel introduced me to the terror of victims
and their families, and also to the compassion of brave
rescuers. Unfortunately, my research also introduced me to
brutal barbarians who enslave others. Mere words cannot
express the level of my sorrow for the victims, my anger at the
victimizers, and my regard for the rescuers. Organizations such
as the International Organization for Migration, La Strada, and
Immigration Customs Enforcement are especially important in
fighting this violation of human beings.
Chapter
one
“Because we two Gypsies live on separate continents, security wolves data-mine our conversations. Yet only aunts, uncles,
cousins, nieces, and nephews decipher our thoughts.”
Janos Nagy, private investigator
“The young soul denies death, performing pinball ricochets
in search of sanctuary. Before resting in peace, he creates stratagems of vengeance.”
Ilonka Horvath, professor of mathematics
Lazlo Horvath’s old legs began to cramp as he paced the threadbare pathway worn into his living room carpet, reading and rereading the two quotes in his spiral notebook. Finally, he held
the notebook at his side, walked to the window, and stared down
from his third-floor apartment at Chicago’s Humboldt Park
Ukrainian neighborhood. Afternoon traffic was frenetic with
delivery vans, cars, buses, and even a passing motorcycle gang.
That morning he had driven a similar obstacle course with his
niece Ilonka to O’Hare Airport for her return flight to Kiev.
Ilonka had come for the funeral of her sister, Tamara,
who lived with Lazlo and died of what Ukrainians, even here
1
in Chicago a quarter century later, called Chernobyl disease.
Ilonka gave the eulogy using a portable voice amplifier she
brought with her from Kiev, the same one she used for university lectures.
Ilonka’s voice was permanently whisper quiet as a result of
complications from having her thyroid removed. To Lazlo, her
voice was a violin bow barely touching strings.
“When I was a little girl before Chernobyl, you shared puzzles, beginning with the simplest . . . ‘A girl stands at the bank of
the Pripyat River with a three-liter bucket and a five-liter bucket.
Somehow she must bring home exactly four liters . . .’ This is
life, Uncle: a personal puzzle to solve. For one to give up in the
midst of his puzzle degrades the lives of those still at work on their
puzzles.”
Lazlo leaned forward to watch the rumbling motorcycles
disappear up the street. If only he had been an irreverent young
man in 1986, he might have done more to prevent tragedy: his
brother Mihaly, an engineer at Chernobyl, dying shortly after
the explosion; Mihaly’s wife, Nina, and her daughters, Anna and
Ilonka, all treated for cancer over the years; Lazlo’s wife, Juli,
who carried Mihaly’s child in her womb out of the Chernobyl
Zone, dying here in Chicago during the celebration of the 2000
New Year; and now Tamara, his stepdaughter and niece, dead
because of the radiation that penetrated Juli’s womb as they fled
Ukraine without the aid of motorcycles.
Lazlo turned back to his notebook, where the two quotes
rebuked him. The first was from a phone conversation with
Janos (pronounced yah-nosh), who was on holiday, which really
meant incognito because of a hornet’s nest. There were plenty
of hornets’ nests buzzing in Ukraine, and Janos made a habit of
poking them.
2
Because we two Gypsies live on separate
continents, security wolves data-mine our
conversations. Yet only aunts, uncles, cousins,
nieces, and nephews decipher our thoughts.
In 1985, Janos was Lazlo’s apprentice, the only other
Hungarian in Kiev’s militia office—thus, the “we two Gypsies”
reference. In 1986, after Chernobyl, KGB operatives forced
Lazlo to flee. Lazlo last saw Janos in 2008 when he visited independent Ukraine. At Kiev’s Casino Budapest, they danced with
an energetic pair of women from the La Strada organization
who said they were looking into human trafficking. Perhaps
one of these women had led Janos to the hornet’s nest.
The second quote was a paraphrase from Lazlo’s niece Ilonka.
The young soul denies death, performing
pinball ricochets in search of sanctuary. Before
resting in peace, he creates stratagems of vengeance.
She’d made the comment yesterday, after witnessing the
tragic death of Jermaine, an eight-year-old boy from Lazlo’s
building. A delivery van crushed Jermaine as he ran for a fluorescent orange Frisbee.
Lazlo did not tell Ilonka the Frisbee was his gift to Jermaine.
Nor did he tell her about Jermaine deciding he would be called
Gypsy in his neighborhood gang. The reason for not revealing
these things boiled down to Lazlo having once killed another
boy named Gypsy years earlier on the Romanian border and
then relating the story to Jermaine to frighten him.
“Do you not see, Jermaine? I was no older than your gang
leader. I was in Soviet Army, but we were still boys. I am sent to
arrest another boy. But when gun meets gun, at least one is likely
to die. Gangs create never-ending vengeance. Gangs are boys
killing boys.”
3
“Was the one you shot black like me?”
“No, he was not black. His skin was what we call olive-colored.”
“He had green skin?”
“Not green . . . but darker than white.”
“That’s me, Gypsy. Darker than white . . . so dark none of this
ethnic cleansing crap they do over there can wash it off.”
“Another time you and I will discuss ethnic cleansing.”
“Yeah, ethnic cleansing . . .”
Lazlo dropped the notebook containing the quotes from
Janos and Ilonka to the floor and stood closer to his window.
Perhaps a sniper would shoot him and the police would make a
chalk outline of him on his threadbare carpet. He spoke aloud
to the imaginary sniper: “Take aim, sniper. With Ilonka back
to Kiev, and both Tamara and Jermaine dead, nothing remains
for me. I tell the boy about the Gypsy as a warning to avoid
street gangs, and street traffic kills him. I should run into traffic
where Jermaine died. Eventually, my blood stain will wear away
and traffic will take me wherever old souls go.”
But Lazlo knew he could not betray Ilonka, the brave
Chernobyl survivor. And there was Janos, another Gypsy counting on him. Janos Nagy, who poked his nose into the human
trafficker hornet’s nest. The same traffickers who sent “merchandise” to so-called “employment” offices in Chicago, offices Lazlo
visited when his FBI or ICE contacts needed his services.
Lazlo considered how odd human language was. The noun
traffic, innocent-sounding until it became the verb in its conjugated forms trafficked and trafficking, the added k reminding
Lazlo of the leading letter of KGB, as well as the leading letter
of the KGB officer who tried to destroy his family—Komarov. If
only, just as destruction finally came to Komarov, Lazlo could
reach out and bring destruction to an obvious enemy to avenge
Jermaine’s death. If only life were as simple as letters: FBI
4
for Federal Bureau of Investigation, ICE for Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, KGB for Russian words meaning Special
Department of the Soviet Committee of State Security, SBU for
Ukrainian words meaning Security Service of Ukraine—and
DON’T WALK, the warning at the intersection Jermaine might
have heeded if he had used the crosswalk.
As Lazlo stood at the window, he realized his fists were
clenched and he had held his breath since speaking aloud.
Sounds of heavy traffic vibrated the window glass, but there
were no gunshots and he turned from the window, took a deep
breath, and retrieved his notebook from the floor. Perhaps
someday soon there would be something he could do to even
his score with God.
Whereas afternoon traffic was heavy in Chicago, it was almost nonexistent several time zones away in the Carpathian
Mountains. A light breeze blew, the sun was low on the horizon, and all was silent on the mountain road in northeastern
Romania near the Ukrainian and Moldavian borders. Not a
soul in sight, whether Chernobyl or Cossack souls or the souls
of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs who once wandered here.
But suddenly, several deer feeding at the side of the road
stood still, ears erect and open. A green Mercedes van appeared
around the bend and the deer leapt into the shelter of the beech
and pine forest as the van sped past, followed by a tan Zhiguli
station wagon. Although the road curved back and forth as
it climbed into the mountain pass, the station wagon passed
the van; then the van passed the station wagon. Tempting the
odds of there being no other vehicles on the desolate road, they
5
continued passing one another as they sped up the mountain.
Eventually, after the vehicles were gone, the deer wandered
back out to the side of the road, where fresh greens had emerged
in soil irrigated by the mountain’s runoff. With the coming of
spring, new life emerges for all species, except the one taking
over the world with its tricks, its so-called businesses, and its
impatience.
His was a terrible business, and Ivan Babii found himself asking God’s forgiveness for faking blindness. When his mother
was alive, she insisted God forgave even the most abhorrent sins.
He had been able to live with murder, even when forced to kill
his feeble-minded and loose-tongued uncle. He had been able
to live with arranging Moldavian sex holidays, pairing teenaged
girls from poverty-stricken families with foreign middle-aged
men. Unfortunately, guilt piled on as he aged, and he wondered
if he was becoming feeble-minded. Would he have felt guilt if he
had stayed married to Elena? Would a wife have allowed such
things?
Boys will be boys, the saying goes. But then they become
men, some of them like him.
And women? A woman would never allow his current business to exist. Never!
During his younger years, Ivan Babii had been proficient
at faking blindness. This afternoon he made an attempt to recapture blindness by resting his eyes. He kept his eyes closed
even as he stood up from his desk. He kept them closed as he
laughed, thinking of words rather than images, recalling how
Andropov—Pyotr not Yuri—long ago at the beginning of the
6
Internet age suggested the sequence T-R-A-F-F-Y-C-K instead
of T-R-A-F-F-I-C-K so parental controls would not block Web
sites registered in various countries.
Ivan Babii’s eyes burned as he squeezed them tightly shut
the way he sometimes did at the monitor when pretending to
watch the handiwork of video crews. During this session he was
especially nervous, unable to sleep last night. Was sleeplessness
due to his boyhood dreams of brutal treatment? Or was it due
to the brutal treatment of children by the pornographers? Babii
opened his eyes slowly and turned from his desk to the window.
At one thousand meters, on the slopes of the northern
Carpathians, it began snowing. Gypsy winds elbowed graywhite clouds through valleys, and ancient peaks worn to the
shapes of pencil erasers began to whiten. Perhaps the winds
originated at Pietrosu Summit, a hundred kilometers to the west,
or even Mount Hoverla over the border in Ukraine. Someone
had placed Orthodox crucifixes on both summits; therefore,
this unusual late-spring snow could be God’s work.
Sunlight shining through ice crystals put on a kaleidoscopic
show. The forest needed moisture, but the snow evaporated in
the mountain air. It was an earthly metaphor. In order to evolve
life from ice crystals and cosmic crumbs, countless beginnings
would have taken place, all but a select few sacrificed, leading
to the formation of life and, ultimately, the babe in the woods
called man, who immediately began wondering about the
architect of it all.
In the 1970s, when Ivan was a babe in the Moldavian
woods, he attended a single-room school run by a predatory
male teacher named Master Ceausescu, whose claim to fame
was having the same name as the brutal president of Moldova’s
neighbor, Romania. While Master Ceausescu prowled from girl
to girl in class, stooping low to look beneath dresses, Ivan suf-
7
fered barbs from older boys who discovered the similarity of
his surname to the English word baby. “Ivan Babii, the baby,”
they whispered each year, until the day Uncle Iosif drove him to
school and unsmilingly displayed various pistols and automatic
rifles during Ivan’s show-and-tell assignment. Apparently his
uncle was also aware of Master Ceausescu’s leanings, and several of Uncle Iosif’s glances his way had a lasting effect. From
then on, not only did the other boys leave Ivan’s name alone, but
Master Ceausescu’s hobby, peering beneath girls’ dresses and
calling a certain one inside while others were in the play yard,
also ended.
Because of torment caused by his name, Ivan fought back
by learning words. These days, variations in spelling, especially
using the Greek rather than the Cyrillic alphabet, fascinated
him. He followed trends in publications and on the Internet.
After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, use of Ukrainian versus Russian became contentious. The capital could be Kiev or
Kyiv or Kyiw or even Kyyiv; the river could be Dnepr or Dniepr
or Dnipro.
Ivan recalled an especially interesting discussion with his
business associate Pyotr Alexeyevich Andropov, a Russianized
Ukrainian who enjoyed pointing out that Pyotr Alexeyevich
was shared with Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov, Peter I the Great,
ruler of the Russian Empire from 1682 to 1725. Andropov,
descended from a hard line Marxist-Leninist family, was tall
and imposing, as was Peter I. Andropov visited Romania some
time back, posing as an Orthodox cleric with a beard grown
for the trip, even though Peter I was known to despise beards.
During their discussion, Andropov insisted Chernobyl be
spelled Chornobyl because the museum in Kiev (Kyiv) was called
Ukrainian National Museum “Chornobyl.” During Andropov’s
visit, he complained of discipline among young people at his
8
compound. Andropov mentioned a particular resident having
the same given name as Babii; the young Ivan lifted weights,
and many at the compound referred to him as Ivan the Terrible.
These were Ivan Babii’s thoughts as he stood at his window in the lodge office. The lodge was fifty kilometers from
the nearest Romanian mountain village, twenty kilometers
from Ukraine’s frontier, and one hundred kilometers from the
border of his Moldavian homeland. The phenomenon of snow
evaporating before making it to the ground was visible through
a clearing cut years earlier west of the lodge to provide a view of
the mountains. Although he was alone in the office, Babii said,
“Beau-ti-ful,” drawing out the pronunciation in English.
Babii had begun using the word after seeing the American
Godfather films. Even now, staring at this marvel of nature, he
thought how beau-ti-ful it would have been if, back in the old
days in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Boris Gerlak’s
body, with its load of bullets, could have evaporated away to
nothing before hitting the marshy ground along the road to
Odessa. Bullets traced back to the Makarov auto pistol Uncle
Iosif failed to melt down because of his dementia. Beautiful.
Although KGB lab evidence had not convinced the drunken
Moldavian judge of Babii’s guilt, evidence linking him to sex
holiday and drug businesses ruined him during the collapse of
the Soviet Union, a time when he could have risen to prosperity
in the new Moldova. He had been forced not only into exile but
also into finding another business.
It had been called the Moldovenesc Camp when he bought it.
Now it was called the Moldovenesc Self-Awareness Sanatorium.
Business at the sanatorium was profitable. First came the Turks
and their hunger for light-complexioned girls. Next came Arabs,
Czechs, and Greeks, taking his girls away via the same Balkan
Trail used to smuggle drugs and weapons. Some of the younger
9
ones could be sent back to Ukraine where they originated and
be redirected to Russia or Dubai. A few years ago, several U.S.
strip clubs made purchases. Then, with prostitution legalized by
Germany and Netherlands, the sky was the limit. His original
plan had been to turn the sanatorium into a resort for sex
holidays, but time and technology had passed him by. Internet
filmmakers were lured to his mountain retreat by privacy,
the availability of panoramic shots between takes, and, oddly
enough, the presence of horseflesh, which apparently enhanced
the interest of clients who used their computer monitors and
their hands rather than other human beings, or other animals,
for sexual satisfaction.
This year business was especially profitable because an
American filmmaker named Donner had mysteriously disappeared from his Ukraine mountain retreat. Donner, the fool
who’d insisted on calling him “Baby” while he was alive, had
opened the underground business to Ivan Babii. This season,
in the same way young horses are led up from the foothills in
spring, sweet young ones had been brought up to his lodge.
Three girls who spoke Ukrainian, plus a boy who spoke Russian
and Ukrainian. The boy and one of the girls supposedly from
Kiev with their showoff haircuts, body piercings, and clothing.
Tough street demons until they arrived here.
All four were over sixteen. No more babies for Babii. Ethical
standards had not caused the age limit, nor the fact Donner was
American and several American law enforcement officials had
visited Ukraine and Romania seeking the source of the videos.
The reason Babii had moved away from children was a current
trend among sexual addicts—a preference for tough teenagers
brought to their knees. Babii, the man from Moldova, had become the connection for delivering tough-looking young ones
to Romania and getting them out, selling them across several
10
borders and time zones.
Vakhabov, originally from Uzbekistan, was the Kiev connection. Vakhabov insisted teenagers could be found wandering the streets. But with NGOs like La Strada making trouble
and the US appointing itself trafficking sheriff in order to work
with the SBU, the simple use of “employment” agencies was no
longer enough.
“A promise of Odessa sunshine is replaced by a trip through
Moldova,” said Vakhabov. “We simply borrow them, while at the
same time using opiates to calm them. They forget everything.
Even if they wander off and make their way back to Ukraine . . .
even if they find a shepherd hut with supplies and cross the border into the Nature Park, they will have clear heads, remembering nothing. Perhaps a trip to a Kiev clinic and some concern
at first, but in the end they blame themselves. It is like fishing.
We may even hook them more than once. Back in Kiev, they
may decide to return to families. We bring families together,
Ivan. Newly adopted families abroad, or the families they left in
Ukraine. Catch and release. Fishermen in the Chernobyl region
do it because of radiation. As they say in America, it’s win-win.”
Vakhabov was insane. But if Babii did not supply an outlet
for Vakhabov’s girls and boys, someone else would, someone in
Moldova or Slovakia or Poland or Russia or Albania or here in
Romania, where Babii was only one of many. Vakhabov coined
the phrase “Chernobyl Trail,” saying this would confuse antitrafficking agents because no trafficker in his right mind would
venture across the Chernobyl Zone. Traffickers used the trails
established decades earlier for smuggling drugs and weapons.
With lack of jobs, trafficking of individuals was inevitable. If
Vakhabov did not grab lost souls wandering the streets, another
trafficker would get them. Perhaps a cult would get them, like
the one run by Andropov who insisted he had found God.
11
Babii thought briefly of his mother. When he was a boy
she lit enough votive candles at her Orthodox bedroom shrine
to heat the house. His mother complained about evils in the
world, yet ignored—until the night on her deathbed—the business his father and Uncle Iosif had gotten into after the fall of
the Soviet Union.
“They sell drugs, Ivan. I’ve known for years and prayed
nightly to the Virgin’s icon. Do not follow them, Ivan. Go to
school and stay away. Promise you’ll stay away from it.”
But, of course, he did not stay away from it. At school there
was money to be had, and his connections were ready-made.
Ivan Babii, the Kiev University connection.
When Babii heard a muffled scream in another part of the
lodge, he put a finger to one ear as if to itch himself, but actually to make the sound of today’s business disappear. Outside,
the snow-bearing cloud passed and the sun, heading toward the
western horizon, shone down through virgin pines. There could
not be screams here. It was much too peaceful. He had been assured the new arrivals were sufficiently sedated. He stopped
itching his ear and listened carefully. Now he heard only a gentle feminine whimper, much more peaceful, as it should be at
the Moldovenesc Self-Awareness Sanatorium, where inquiries
on the listed phone line resulted in a message saying the sanatorium was booked in advance and to call the Bucharest number,
which was changed regularly and led nowhere.
For the occasional mountain traveler who wandered into the
sanatorium, Babii patterned his operation after one he’d visited
in Sevastopol years earlier. There, a wide-eyed, bald woman had
intoned in a mix of Russian and Ukrainian, “Business exploded
after the Chernobyl explosion. When the Union fell, we became
part of the new age.” So he was. Isn’t this what new agers and
liberals claimed? Nothing is really good or evil? Everything
12
simply is?
The whimpering finally stopped, which meant Belak and his
Slovak crew were between takes. Filming would soon be finished,
and all four young ones would be given back to Vakhabov. By tomorrow night they would be fed and gone, and Babii could relax
instead of pacing his office like a child with his hand stuck in a jar
of sweets. A fifty-year-old who feels older than his age because of
this idiotic guilt! Perhaps it was time to get out, to run away from
this business.
As he stood at his window at the end of the crisp, spring
afternoon, the last thing Babii expected to see was a group of
young priests emerging from the woods beyond the stables. Not
bearded Orthodox priests wearing cassocks. These priests were
clean-shaven and wore black tops and Roman collars. They ran
quickly in and out of the slanting shade cast by virgin pines,
leaping over tree trunks like thin mountain wolves.
Babii blinked his eyes. One moment the young priests were
imagined and would soon be erased like evaporating snowflakes; the next moment they were real and he recognized the
familiar shapes of the AK-47 rifles they carried. As he dove to
the floor, the window imploded and glass cascaded down on
him. Before he could crawl to the filing cabinet where he kept
his own AK-47, a voice yelled, “Stop!”
Babii turned to look over his shoulder. The priest stood
outside the broken window aiming at him and smiling as if he
would soon give his blessing. The priest had blond hair and fair
skin and was muscular. A handsome young man, a strong and
merciful man. Then the priest aimed the AK-47 low and shot
Babii through the backs of his knees.
The pain made Babii think of his mother and his childhood
and going to confession at St. Mikola church. He thought of
his confirmation—Uncle Iosif’s hand on the shoulder of the
13
boy who would someday have to kill him—and his marriage to
Elena and his loneliness when she left him after he fled Moldova.
Finally, he thought of his unhappiness here and his plan to escape the barbarity.
Through the pain, Babii heard shots and screams; not teenagers screaming, but grown men. He tried to crawl to the door,
but the pain was too great. On the verge of passing out, he realized the shooting had stopped. Beyond the pain, he fantasized
this had been a mistake. He stared down at the fresh office carpet, put in only a few weeks earlier. When he tried to breathe
through his nose instead of his mouth, he could smell the carpet.
Suddenly, he was turned brutally onto his back, his legs feeling like stakes driven into his torso. His face was to one side,
and he was aware of the feel of the carpet on his cheek. He
saw hiking boots, black slacks, black shirt, and Roman collar as
the priest stepped to his side. He wanted to sink into the fibers
of the carpet and reemerge, new and fresh, a young man who
could defend himself. Or a young man confessing his sins and
promising to live a holy life.
When he looked up to the priest’s face, the young man who
had shot him through the backs of his knees smiled down at
him. Babii tried to return his own smile to the peculiar smile
on the priest’s face. He tried to cry out for help but lacked the
strength. He tried to say the prayer of contrition he’d known
from boyhood. Finally able to mumble, he pleaded as best
he could in Romanian and Ukrainian and Russian and even
English. But it was no use. The Avtomat Kalashnickova - 47,
named for its 1947 inventor, Mikhail Kalashnikov, was raised
toward Ivan Babii’s head.
The priest aimed the gun between Babii’s eyes and fired.
Beautiful.
14
Just off the mountain road beyond a small sign announcing
“Moldovenesc Self-Awareness Sanatorium—Private,” a green
Mercedes van and a tan Zhiguli station wagon were backed into
the unpaved entry road side by side. Stands of beech and pine
shadowed the entrance. If someone had driven past minutes
earlier, they might have heard shots. But no one had driven past.
For several seconds, footsteps erupted behind the vehicles,
the van rocking slightly on its suspension as passengers boarded
from behind. Two armed young men in black with Roman collars ran to the van’s driver and passenger side doors, got in, and
sped off to the north.
The muscular young man who shot Babii, and an even
younger man in his teens who wore a black sweatshirt over his
Roman collar and bib, remained. They put their AK-47s into
the station wagon and stood to the side of the car. The boy in
the sweatshirt was thin with dark, stringy hair. The blond, muscular man, perhaps in his late twenties, stared back toward the
lodge building with wide, unblinking blue eyes. They spoke to
one another in Ukrainian.
“It will burn quickly,” said the boy. “Everything is dry.”
“Vasily has decided not to burn it,” said the young man.
“Our cans of gasoline have become too expensive.”
The boy look puzzled. “But Vasily is already gone and Pyotr
said—”
“I am joking,” said the young man. “Pyotr said Vasily is in
charge. Fire attracts attention, flames spread in the underbrush,
and innocent people living in the area could be hurt.”
15
Something seemed to click in the boy’s countenance. He
looked down, walked slowly to the front passenger side of the
station wagon, and got in.
Behind the station wagon, the senior among these young
men dressed as non-Orthodox priests stooped down, took a twig
from the ground, and traced a circle in the dry soil on the entry
road. Inside the circle, he traced a cross. Then he stood, pushed
the twig into his pocket, used his foot to wipe out the crude image he had traced in the soil, and went to the station wagon.
After the station wagon drove off, all was silent and still as the
sunset turned treetops purplish orange and night came on.
Several nights later in another wooded compound many kilometers from the mountains, three men sat in the shadows on
the front porch of a cabin. The men sat around a small table,
speaking Russian and Ukrainian alternately. The only light
came through a curtain from inside the cabin, from the brilliant stars above, and from the glow of the cigarette one of the
men was smoking.
It was a clear, cool, windless spring night. One of the nonsmokers had silver hair, which glowed in the window light.
Although seated, the silver-haired man was obviously much
taller than the other two. The other nonsmoker was heavyset,
bearded, and fidgety in his seat. The tall silver-haired man had
just asked the other two if they thought the meeting had been
successful.
“It depends how you measure success,” said the man with
the glowing cigarette. “We agreed all four should stay. End of
business.”
16
“Their stay will be profitable,” said the tall silver-haired
man. “They have arrived at an emotional moment in their lives.”
“I suppose, Pyotr Alexeyevich, living here you are familiar
with emotional problems,” said the cigarette smoker. “In any
case, what you do with your Natashas and Nikolais is your business. My concern is security and corruption in Kiev. With this
in mind, tonight’s visit will be my final trip here.”
“Certainly,” said the tall silver-haired man. “I do not expect
a man in your position to take unnecessary risk. We’ll still be
able to accommodate your special needs.”
The cigarette smoker coughed uncomfortably, then said,
“We’re getting off track. How do you justify the presence of
four young people to the others now that your storm troopers
have dragged them here?”
“Perhaps you would have shipped them to Turkey,” said the
bearded heavyset man.
“Submitting to the demand of the market,” added the tall
silver-haired man. “We once sent older girls to Turkey because
they know how to control them, and boys we sent to—”
“Do not assume what I would do!” shouted the smoker.
“You do not see what happens to the girls when they are gone!
I accuse you both . . . No! We are all three guilty! We ship our
blonds via the Balkan Trail to Bedouins so they can smuggle
them through the desert in order that Israelis have their vengeance for the Holocaust!” The smoker coughed up phlegm and
spit off to the side. “Israelis want our girls so their young men
will not rape their own girls!” He coughed up more phlegm
and spit, then spoke more quietly, but still in anger. “Pyotr
Alexeyevich, my concern is your lack of discipline and how this
complicates matters!”
The tall silver-haired man spoke in a steady but firm voice.
“If you have been offended, I apologize. The past is the past. I
17
agree we share the guilt. We’ve made our decision, and since I am
responsible for discipline here, I will deal with it appropriately.”
“How?” asked the bearded heavyset man.
“I will assign a mentor to each. If necessary, we use light
doses of medication.”
The cigarette smoker was still angry. “And I suppose when
the hair in their armpits grows long enough, they’ll become
good little soldiers like the rest, with you, Pyotr, as their messiah! You once said, ‘Like Mr. Bill Gates, we develop one copy
and sell it again and again.’ You treat teenagers like computer
software!”
The man named Pyotr ran a hand through his silver hair.
“At least I admit past mistakes. At least here the ones who have
not gone down the Balkan Trail escape abuse in back rooms by
politicians and religious leaders who are chauffeured about Kiev
in Zils and Bentleys!”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Out in the woods surrounding the compound, insects and small reptiles sang what
sounded like a dirge in a minor key. Eventually the smoker
smashed his cigarette butt in an ashtray. “We consider ourselves an indestructible troika. Out here in the dark so we can’t
look one another in the eye.”
“Has anyone found them yet?” asked the bearded heavyset
man.
“Who?” asked the cigarette smoker, still smashing the butt.
“The filmmakers in the Romanian mountains.”
“No. But it can’t be long before the stench reaches the
road. What is next on your agenda, Pyotr? Weren’t the clinics
enough? Would it not be best to confine your actions to—”
“No!” shouted the silver-haired man.
The bearded heavyset man sighed, “Turmoil demands a
cooling off period, Pyotr. Even though I am Orthodox, dressing
18
boys as Catholic priests was unwise.”
“Did you both come here to confront me?” asked the silverhaired man.
The cigarette smoker lit another, took a deep drag, said, “My
men on the left bank are nervous about the comings and goings
and theatrics of your people. You’ve had most of the ammunition moved onto the peninsula, and my men wonder who has
the key to the armory.”
“Only myself, Vasily, and Ivan have keys,” said the silverhaired man. “I would be more concerned about your lungs
than life here on the peninsula. I saw you sneaking a smoke on
Kiev television while reporters chased you out one of the lesserknown entrances of the House of Government. Hasn’t anyone
told you killing yourself with cigarettes is old school?”
The cigarette smoker inhaled, blew a thick stream of smoke
toward the silver-haired man, and then said in a low voice, “The
idiot filmmaker rotting in the mountains was named Ivan. I
never trust a man named Ivan. As for my smoking, perhaps
like our Chernobyl expatriates, I am in search of a convenient
way to expire.”
There was a long, tense silence. Finally, the bearded heavyset man struggled to his feet. “We took care of business. The
teenagers stay. Although my church has worked on the project
for millennia, our newly enlightened Pyotr must be given his
opportunity to cleanse his corner of Ukraine of its evils. We
will see how far he gets.”
The silver-haired man named Pyotr also stood, towering
above the other two, anger obvious in his stance. “It’s definitely
time to leave, gentlemen. The van is waiting on the left bank to
take you back to Kiev.”
In the shadows, the three men shook hands reluctantly.
Then, invisible to one another but obvious to an observer in the
19
woods seeing the men backlit on the porch, the cigarette smoker
and the bearded heavyset man wiped their hands on their trousers, as if the tall silver-haired man called Pyotr had power over
them and they were trying to wipe it away.
A young man in sweatshirt and jeans approached with a
flashlight, pointing the way to lead the visitors down a path into
the woods. The flashlight was in the young man’s left hand,
which was on the end of an arm half the length it should have
been. His right hand, also on a shortened arm, hung limply,
bumping against his side as he limped ahead of the cigarette
smoker and the bearded heavyset man. Beyond the dark woods
the gurgle of water could be heard against a shoreline.
Pyotr Alexeyevich, the tall silver-haired man who shared
his name with Peter the Great, stood with his normal-length
arms at his sides. After the wriggling flashlight beam disappeared down the path, Pyotr raised his head and stared up at the
stars. As if to celebrate the departure of the visitors, several tree
frogs began tuning their instruments in the surrounding forest.
To Pyotr, the frogs were obviously using the Russian rather than
the non-Russian pronunciation to call their mates. He smiled as
he continued staring up to the heavens.
All of this occurred in spring when it was cool in the Carpathians
and in northern Ukraine. During spring and even into early
summer, the pulls and tugs of powerful elements in this subsurface world were in equilibrium. Good versus evil maintaining a
delicate balance, which resulted in temporary harmony.
But in mid-summer, the weather changed and the heat was
turned on by southerly winds and by a Kiev private investiga-
20
tor named Aleksandr Vasilievich Shved. Young people were
missing, pornography makers were dead, and Shved wanted the
Ukraine underworld to dance on hot coals. Unfortunately, excess heat can be dangerous.
Here is what Shved once said to his colleague Janos Nagy
who had, like him, opted to leave the Kiev militia and start his
own private business: “The underlying problem with increasing the heat, Janos, my Gypsy friend, is that often you cannot
distance your ass hairs from the flames quickly enough.”
21
Chapter
two
In a small bathroom, all in white, including walls, sink, shower,
toilet, towels, and vinyl floor, a woman, dressed in a body-hugging multicolored top and tight black shorts reaching mid-thigh,
stood before a mirror. Her hands, encased in leather fingerless
gloves, rested on her hips. She shifted her weight to her left leg,
making that hip jut out to the side. Her blond hair lay disheveled on her shoulders. Ringlets of curls at her temples and neck
were wet and tight. Her tanned arms and legs glistened with
perspiration. A single droplet of perspiration hung from the
tip of her small nose. The woman reached out her tongue, captured the droplet of perspiration, smiled at her image, turned
sideways to the mirror, and admired her profile. Not bad for a
forty-two-year-old, she thought.
The woman opened the bathroom door to a small bedroom.
In the center of the bedroom were twin beds pushed together,
both with tan, silk, flat sheets pulled back. A pair of men’s slippers tucked half under one of the twin beds disrupted the symmetry of the linen bed skirt. A violet-colored trail bicycle with
an eggshell-shaped riding helmet hung upside down from the
handlebars leaned against one wall. The woman walked to the
bicycle, took off her fingerless gloves, and deposited them into
22
the bowl of the helmet. She placed her right hand on the bicycle’s seat while massaging her buttocks with her left hand.
When the phone rang, she moved quickly to the night table
beside the bed.
“Yes?” she answered in Ukrainian.
“Mariya, it’s me.”
“The voice is familiar,” she said, smiling.
“I’m sorry to have become the wet noodle after dinner last
night . . . especially after your dance for me. I will make amends
this evening.”
“How will you do that? Be honest, Viktor. Even if the SBU
is listening, they’ll assume you’re simply attending to business.
Be specific.”
“Your name is an irony, Mariya.” Something interrupted
Viktor for a moment, the phone making muffled sounds before
he was back, speaking more softly. “You start a man on fire. But
please, I would rather not speak of these things on the phone.”
“What can we do in the apartment that we cannot do over
the phone?”
“A taste test,” whispered Viktor.
“Wine tasting?”
“Mariya tasting.”
“In that case, I’ll shower. I just returned from a long ride.”
“You have ridden every day since spring.” Another muffled
interruption. “And today you rode in this heat?”
“Yes.”
“In the black riding shorts, your buttocks shifting side to
side drives men mad.”
“How can you say such a thing with explicit video containers staring you in the face? Perhaps I should ride without
shorts.”
“What a man cannot see is more sensual, Mariya.”
23
“So, why do customers flock to your hole-in-the-wall like
seagulls in Odessa?”
“The customer is more aroused imagining what he will see
than when he sees it. My hole-in-the-wall is an anticlimax.
Especially when he returns home and begins watching the
video for which he spent a day’s wage. Some forget to count
their change, others return demanding their money back.
You’ve seen them. Of course they act differently when a woman
is here.”
“How do they act?”
“They hold video cases in front of their faces, hiding while
they watch you. A woman in an adult video store is ambrosia.”
“For them or for you?” No answer. “Do you want me to
come to your store today?”
“No! No, Mariya. Not today.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I can tell something is not right. You were talking in your
sleep again last night.”
“What did I say?”
“God’s final judgment of the children . . . the same mumblings.”
“Mariya?” There was a change in Viktor’s voice, a lowering
of pitch.
“What?”
“I’ll have to call you back.”
After she hung up, Mariya stared at the phone and waited.
Viktor usually joked or changed the subject when she brought
up the dreams, but something on the other end had interrupted
him. Perhaps a jet was taking off at nearby Zhulyany Airport
and he couldn’t hear her. No, she would have heard the roar
over the phone and, as in the past, he would have simply waited
24
for the jet to finish its takeoff.
Mariya touched a fist-sized quartz crystal resting on the
night table beside the phone. She felt the unbending, unchanging sharpness of its corners. Viktor had given her the crystal after their marriage, saying its power would compel her to remain
true to him. The crystal had been on the night table on her side
of the bed ever since. Sometimes she reached out to touch its
faces and corners as Viktor slept. Not really believing the crystal had power, but finding the feel of its symmetry, its solidity,
and its always being there comforting.
When the phone rang, Mariya picked it up quickly. “Hi.”
“And hi to yourself.” A man’s voice, not Viktor’s. “My company has recently acquired premium apartments in all areas of
Kiev. Perhaps you would be interested—”
“I have an apartment, comrade!” said Mariya, slamming
the phone down.
On the night table beside the phone and the crystal was
the wedding photograph. Only a month earlier, at the Polish
Catholic church chosen by Viktor, the priest had said, “Do you,
Mariya?” and “Do you, Viktor?” Only a month earlier they had
made it official after living together for a year. During their
prenuptial year together, Viktor had bought several insurance
policies for his adult video store saying an adult video store in
his section of Kiev’s southwest district needed insurance. The
store was crammed between two dilapidated warehouses, and
he feared a fire in the middle of the night. Viktor’s vow at the
altar had been preceded by his vow to rid himself of the pornography shop within a year. Viktor hated it when she referred to
his store as a pornography shop.
“It’s an adult video store, Mariya. The videos are seconds
from closets with swinging doors at the backs of so-called bookstores. So don’t tell me who’s selling pornography!”
25
Mariya picked up the phone, tried the store’s number. No
answer. Twelve rings and no answer, not even the answering
machine. She tried again; still no answer after twenty rings.
On the third try, she got a busy signal. She held the crystal with
her left hand. It was unchanging, so unlike people’s lives. For a
moment she wondered if it had all gone too fast—she and Viktor
getting married when she knew virtually nothing of his past.
She tried his cell phone number and got the message saying the
phone was unavailable. Whenever he left his cell phone in his
precious BMW parked in the back room with the overhead door
closed, her calls never got through.
Mariya put the crystal down, went into the bathroom, refilled her water bottle, came out to her bicycle, and slipped the
bottle into its holder on the down tube.
While Mariya placed several more unanswered calls to the
store and to Viktor’s cell phone, she recalled Viktor’s lowered
tone of voice before he had abruptly hung up. Something was
wrong, and the phone was no use!
Mariya took her riding gloves out of the helmet, put them
on, strapped the helmet beneath her chin, made sure her keys
and cell phone were in the saddle bag, and carried her bicycle
down the two flights of stairs to the street.
The reason Mariya took her bicycle instead of the Audi Viktor
gave her as a wedding gift was that she knew she would make
better time. She’d ride the bicycle path along the river toward
the Caves Monastery, then side streets, zigzagging her way to
bypass railway and bus stations. On side streets, she’d avoid
afternoon traffic. But why the hurry? Simply because the phone
26
didn’t work and because Viktor had lowered his voice? Yes, that
was why. And if everything was as it should be, Viktor would
greet her at the entrance and have a fine afternoon watching the
browsers peer at her skin-tight riding outfit with smiles on their
faces. At closing time, they would put her bicycle in the back of
his BMW and tonight he would be in her arms instead of in the
dream world, which had taken him away from her during the
past two weeks.
It was only seven kilometers to the airport, and this morning she had ridden thirty along the trails. Seven kilometers was
nothing, and if she kept up her pace she’d be to the store in
minutes.
After the river trail, she faced the sun as she sped up side
streets. When she turned and looked behind, she saw her shadow
racing behind. On a downgrade, she shifted to a higher gear and
kept it there. Even with the wind in her face, she kept up with and
often passed moving traffic. She passed cars waiting at a signal,
hugged the curb, and turned right before the signal changed.
As she neared the airport and the warehouse district of the
video store, she was forced onto a main street and had to pass
a two-block line of traffic on an airport overpass. One car had
pulled close to the curb, forcing her to slow down. She shouted,
“Move over!” in Ukrainian and snaked past. In her mirror, she
saw a startled woman staring through the car’s windshield.
Back on side streets, she headed south, coasted through a
stop sign, heard a horn sound and a man’s voice shout, “Hey,
Natasha, wait for us!” The rush of wind at her ears had lessened,
and she could hear the heartbeat flutter of chain on sprocket.
Before the street to the video store, a Mercedes sedan sped
alongside, keeping up with her. The voice from several blocks
back said, “Hey, Natasha!” again. When she glanced sideways,
she saw two greasy Mafia types in multicolored shirts, one at
27
the front window, one at the back window, both with shoulders,
heads, and arms out of the car. The one at the rear window
reached out and slapped her behind.
“Natasha! You are my dream! I’ll never wash my hand
again!”
“He is love starved for all Natashas!” shouted the young
man in the front seat.
“I eat Natashas,” said another inside. “But I think you are
Kimmy. I’ve seen you before.”
The men stayed even with her as she pedaled hard, watching side streets and alley entrances and parked cars, riding a
fine line between parked cars and traffic, riding the edge of a
crystal. As she approached one parked car, she saw someone
inside and braked hard when the driver’s door swung out into
her path. The Mafia thugs pulled ahead, shouted, and swore at
the man who had opened his door. The man slammed himself
inside and let her pass.
She raced ahead, passed a slow-moving truck. When she
turned onto the street leading to Viktor’s video store, a traffic
signal stopped the thugs behind the truck. They sounded their
horn, screaming obscenities.
Once on the street, with warehouses surrounding her, she
could see it. Several blocks ahead black smoke rose into the air
where it was carried northeast by the wind toward the city.
She pedaled harder, causing a car to skid to a stop at an
intersection. A militiaman shouted at her from his patrol car.
Above, a jet coming in for a landing groaned and whined as
it crossed over an airport fence. But the flashing lights of the
militia car and the yelling militiaman and the jet and the honking horns no longer mattered. Soon she would be with Viktor.
Soon she would be standing with him outside the burning video
store. She’d tell him how much she had worried and he would
28
hold her in his arms as the flames and smoke shot skyward.
A block away, she saw the video store was indeed the source
of the fire. A series of attached buildings with flat, tarred roofs
was also aflame, sending thick, black smoke into the blue sky.
The video store was at the center of the inferno. Soon, very
soon, she’d be close enough to see Viktor with his hands in his
pockets and his shoulders raised in a perpetual shrug.
She rode the final block, yelling, “Viktor!” But none of the
gathered spectators answered.
Mariya had entered hell, the video store blazing along with its
attached buildings like a giant version of a roaring picnic fire
when she was a girl. The fire so hot when her father cut slabs of
bacon to put on a stick and shove into the flames and drip blackened grease onto rye bread for aunts, uncles, and cousins. The
fire drying lips and eyes, beckoning her into its orange tunnels
where nothing can live but fire.
When she arrived, she tried to get closer, but a fireman
stopped her. She screamed to the fireman and to a militiaman
that her husband might be in the store. Behind her, she felt the
heat of the sun on her neck and shoulders. A jet taking off from
Zhulyany Airport roared, shaking the ground and air and even
the handlebars of her bicycle. The militiaman had placed his
pudgy hand on hers and said, “We will wait here. He must have
gone for help when the fire started.”
The heat from the fire and from the bicycle ride without a
cool down made her feel faint. She took the water bottle from
her bicycle and gulped half the water, preparing herself to pull
Viktor free of the flames when he appeared at the doorway. But
29
the doorway was the mouth of Satan.
She tried to pull away from the militiaman so she could go
around to the alleyway behind the buildings, but the militiaman
held her in place. As she stood watching the flames, she was
aware of being jostled by onlookers. At one point, her bicycle
was being pulled from her until the militiaman at her side yelled
at someone and pulled her and the bicycle closer to his side.
She felt dizzy and squeezed the handlebars of her bicycle.
Another militiaman who said, “It will be all right,” held her up
by her other arm.
As she watched, several firemen in masks pushed their way
into the video store with hoses spraying like fans. The flames at
the doorway changed to steam and smoke. Behind her, another
jet was taking off, shaking the ground as if to say, “I don’t give
a damn about you down there. I’ve got important passengers.”
After the roar of the jet faded, all was surprisingly quiet.
Traffic had been detoured, and the sirens had stopped. Even the
roar of flames had stopped. As she stood between the two militiamen, Mariya thought now she would hear Viktor call to her.
His cell phone did not work, and he had gone to a phone booth.
He would call her cell phone, and it would begin ringing in her
bicycle bag. Or he would come back to the fire and see her in
the crowd and call to her. She scanned the onlookers for Viktor
until a sigh, as if they had seen fireworks, arose from the crowd.
When she looked back toward the building she saw water
spouting from several hoses putting out the roof fires. The spray
from the hoses had created a fountain as if to celebrate the extinguishing of the blaze, as if to celebrate Viktor’s arrival at her side.
But Viktor was not there, and the building hissed at her like
a serpent, or like the sizzling of bacon at one of those childhood
picnics when her father made the fire too large and her mother
complained and complained.
30
The cardboard sign taped to the inside of the front window— “Adult Books, Magazines, Videos”—smoldered and
burned. The window cracked and fell out onto the ground in
crooked, uneven shards. The rush of air from the missing window rekindled the fire, and heat swept across the crowd, making them back away as several masked firemen rushed in with
hoses to relieve the ones who had run out of the store when the
window broke.
When Mariya heard one fireman yell to another that there
were two bodies inside along with a car, which might explode,
she passed out.
She came awake in the backseat of a militia car. Onlookers outside the car stared at her with strange, sad-happy faces. Sad
when they looked at her, happy when they glanced to one another. To her, the faces said, Thank God it was you, not us.
Someone yelled, “Hey, Natasha!” and when she looked in the
direction of the voice, she saw the two thugs who had hung out of
the Mercedes sedan during her ride. The men waved and smiled.
The militia car started, and she felt the blast of warm and
smoky air on her face from the ventilation system. When the
militiaman in the seat next to her reached over and started rolling down the window, another militiaman outside shouted.
“Wait!” The militiaman was holding her bicycle. “What
about this?”
A child’s voice said, “Ride it, and save gasoline,” and this
made everyone laugh.
It was a comic scene, the fat militiaman holding onto her
violet bicycle while everyone laughed at him. Viktor would
31
have enjoyed the scene, would have laughed like hell and made
her laugh, if he had only been there.
A young man standing at the fringe of the crowd took a cigarette from the pack in his rolled-up tee shirt sleeve. He put the
cigarette behind his ear and rerolled the pack in his sleeve. He
did not take the cigarette from his ear to light it. He left it there
and continued staring at the smoldering building. The man was
thin, with stringy black hair. He wore faded jeans and heeled
boots like an American cowboy.
When the militia car with the woman inside drove off, followed by another militia car with the bicycle sticking out of its
trunk, the young man walked slowly away from the scene. He
went south on a side street of dilapidated, low buildings toward
the sweet smell of jet fuel blowing his way from the airport.
He turned in to an alley toward the airport. Within a grove of
young chestnut trees planted along the airport fence, the man
got into a tan Zhiguli station wagon parked in the shade of a
mature chestnut tree, which must have been there prior to the
planting of the grove. The shade had kept the car relatively cool
in the late summer heat.
A young woman sat in the passenger seat of the Zhiguli.
She was knitting something blue and green, but she put the
knitting aside when the young man got in. She had red hair cut
short and wore heavy makeup, her lips bright red, her eyelids
charcoal gray. The woman turned and looked at the man but
did not smile or acknowledge him in any other way.
Once inside the car, the man started the engine and turned
the air-circulating fan on high. He pulled a pair of rubber
32
gloves from his rear pocket, separated them, and handed them
to the woman. The woman picked up a Russian Orthodox Bible
from the floor of the car and inserted the gloves individually
into the Bible, folding them and slowly closing the Bible as if
each marked a passage she meditated on. Then she returned the
Bible to the floor. When the woman spoke, her voice sounded
young. A girl hidden beneath heavy makeup.
“I saw the smoke,” she said in Ukrainian.
The young man’s voice also sounded younger than he
looked. “Two birds with one stone, as they say in America.” He
turned toward the woman and grinned. “Before we return to
Ukraine’s asshole, we will go somewhere to fuck.”
The young woman looked down, her head bowed as if in
prayer. When she nodded, the young man retrieved a red baseball cap from beneath the front seat, put the cap on backwards,
and drove out from the shade of the chestnut tree.
33
Chapter
three
Following the American Gypsy’s suggestion, the Ukrainian
Gypsy named Janos traveled at night on deserted roads, moving from one camp to another while most slept and others, with
murder or vengeance in mind, searched cities. Janos was alone
in his caravan. Violins accompanied his journey, the caravan
rocking and swaying as its diesel-fed horses propelled it across
the mountains. Although diesel fuel was costly, his caravan
was a small and efficient five-cylinder camper van. By using his
handheld GPS, he was able to stay off main highways.
The mountains lit by a waning moon resembled the lower
jaw of a monster. With Gypsy violins playing on the caravan’s
CD player, he could have been anywhere in the world. Perhaps
the Alps in Austria or the Rockies in America. But these mountains were toothless, without snowcapped peaks. And when the
rapid tempo of a czardas ended and he reached across to the caravan’s dashboard to eject the CD, a news station from Uzhgorod
blasted from the speakers, reminding him he was in Ukraine on
the western slope of the Carpathians.
It was three in the morning, and Uzhgorod FM was the
only powerful station on the air. He retrieved another CD from
the console, inserted it, waited a few seconds, and felt a sense
34
of nostalgia and satisfaction when the lilting violin of Sandor
Lakatos coming over the front and rear speakers filled the
caravan from stem to stern.
This was the second year in a row Janos Nagy, ex-Kiev militiaman, now owner and sole employee of Nagy Investigative Agency
in Kiev’s Podil District, had rented a camper van. Last year he
had traveled in spring, enjoying the Black Sea before tourist season. This year, he postponed a holiday because of bad economic
times, but finally made an escape from Kiev for several days due
to professional hazards.
He had been hired to investigate the bombing of a female
clinic in the Podil District. While pursuing the case, he had
come upon a possible connection between the source of the explosives and a local Orthodox Church leader. When the nature
of his investigation leaked out, the summer heat was turned up.
“The Gypsy versus God’s children,” as one of Kiev’s tabloids put
it. The Gypsy making a “baseless” link between Father Vladimir
Ivanovich Rogoza, a leader in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and
the bombing of a clinic that performed abortions. “A campaign of
lies,” fellow clergymen were calling it. “No evidence of any sort,”
Rogoza said during an interview on Kiev Radio, after which he
asked men and women of all faiths to pray for him. Father Vladimir
Ivanovich Rogoza, who was once rumored to have had a lover other
than his wife, but who turned the rumors around, making them
seem part of an effort of the Kiev Patriarchate to destroy the obviously valid Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church in which he resided.
A month later, after the Rogoza incident began to cool,
came the fatal shooting of a female doctor in front of another
Podil female clinic, followed a week later by a bomb through
the Gypsy’s office window that filled his butt cheeks with glass
and moved his office farther north in Podil. The bombing did
35
not literally move the office, but it did convince Janos to relocate
when his two-day hospital stay ended.
The bomb was not large enough to kill a man, unless he
swallowed it. The Kiev militia laboratory technician called it
a “double-base, single-base, nitrocellulose magnesium colloid,”
sounding like a university lecturer as he explained its operation.
None of this interested Janos, except its size. A table tennis ball
had shattered his window, exploding on impact and making the
glass into shrapnel, which penetrated his slacks where his posterior was exposed at the cut-out lower back of his cheap office
chair. Except for the glass in his posterior and a few pieces in
his calves, the rest of him had been saved by the backrest of the
chair and by the fact that he was bent over asleep on his desk
when the bomb exploded.
It was splendid advertising for the Nagy Investigative
Agency: First, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church accuses him of being the anti-Christ; next,
one of his clients, a doctor at a Podil female clinic, is murdered;
finally, Janos gets bombed in the ass while he’s asleep at his desk.
As Janos drove through the darkness, he adjusted his position on the bucket seat and could feel the bits of glass still embedded in him. Even his ass was a Gypsy, unable to stay still
more than a few minutes because of the stings biting him the
way mosquitoes did the previous year at the caravan camp near
Odessa when he and Svetlana made love on a moonlit picnic
bench in the primitive area of the camp.
Lakatos played a slow piece now, the violin a voice crying from its E and A strings and moaning from its G and D
strings. Voices in the night, the high-pitched ones reminding
him of Svetlana’s laugh, the low-pitched ones reminding him of
Svetlana’s moan as they made love.
Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva, one of a handful of female
36
investigators in Kiev’s militia. Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva,
who called him Gypsy while he was still a member of Kiev’s militia because of his mentor, Lazlo Horvath, who was also called
Gypsy, was also Hungarian-Ukrainian, and also played the violin. Svetlana Kovaleva, who vacationed with him last year and
made him feel years younger, especially the night she danced
for him.
A waning moonlit night exactly like this. A deserted campsite near the Black Sea. A flickering campfire lighting up the
bottoms of sparse trees and the side of the camper van. Janos,
Gypsy Number Two, brings out his Chinese-made violin and,
after a screechy start and the application of additional rosin,
serenades Svetlana who sits, wrapped in a blanket, on a boulder
near the fire. He plays a Hungarian folk song he has practiced
for weeks. The first part of the song is slow and gentle with an
ever-so-light touch of horsehair on strings.
Svetlana turns toward him, her curls black and skin bronze
in the moonlight. “Gypsy music is so sad when it’s played slowly.”
Halfway through the sad section, Svetlana stands and begins dancing about the campfire, arms extended, making her
blanket into wings. Then, when the sad passage is ended and he
launches into the exuberant czardas, Svetlana dances faster and
faster, spinning about the campfire, throwing the blanket aside
and revealing the fact she has removed her blouse and wears
only tight, white slacks.
Svetlana in the moonlight, bronze on top and pure white
from her waist down, a pair of disjointed legs dancing in the night
until, during the heat of the czardas, she climbs atop the picnic
table and removes her slacks. She is all bronze then, his sweaty
fingers clinging to the violin as she dances for him in the light
from the fire. All bronze like some of the icons in Kiev’s cathedrals. Later, when he says this to her, she laughs and says he is
37
the one made of bronze.
After passing through a small village and putting on the high
beams, Janos saw a figure walking on the shoulder of the road.
As he approached he saw a man in an American-style cowboy
hat carrying a duffel bag over one shoulder. The man walked
briskly, swaying from side to side, bow-legged like a Cossack.
Janos shut off the CD player and slowed the camper van,
expecting the man to stick out a thumb. But the man kept walking. Janos reached into the door pocket beside him to be certain his Makarov 9mm pistol was butt up. He glanced toward
the back where the sofa was jack-knifed out into a bed and pillows were stuffed beneath blankets to resemble someone asleep.
When Janos braked to a stop, the man stood at the front corner
of the camper van for a moment, smiling, then walked back to
the door and opened it.
“Would you like a ride?”
“Yes,” said the man, removing his cowboy hat as he climbed in.
The man put his bag between the seats, glanced back, and
when Janos held one finger to his lips, nodded, and spoke softly
in order not to awaken the pillows stuffed beneath the blankets.
His name was Anatoly. When Janos asked if he was a
Cossack, Anatoly laughed, saying he wished he had been born
in the distant past. Instead, he was born shortly before the
Chernobyl explosion in one of the villages closest to the site.
Because he was a boy during the evacuation, he had been unaware of the danger. Like most children from the Zone, he had
gotten plenty of iodine. But he wondered if he would live past his
forties. The reason for this was his recent work salvaging parts
38
from the condemned graveyard of vehicles near Chernobyl.
“Why did you return to the Zone?” asked Janos.
“Because there was no work in the village to which we were
sent. Everyone simply sits in their Chernobyl boxes, drinking
vodka, smoking cigarettes, and speaking of death. You were
correct when you mentioned Cossack because my jobs in villages involve riding horses. My trip to the Zone was a short one,
but not on a horse. I wanted to see the Zone once more before
I traveled south. I move from village to village. Many fields
are still plowed using horses. However, I might go to Nikolaev.
They say there are jobs building ships.”
“Are the ship builders looking for Cossacks?”
Anatoly held his hat up. “This was a gift from the job at
the vehicle graveyard. With this the sun will not add to my
percentages of contracting cancer. It is useful in the fields, but
shipbuilding will pay more. At least this is what I am told.”
Anatoly motioned with his head toward the back. “Your
wife?”
Janos shook his head. “Her name is Natasha.”
Anatoly smiled. “I need only a short ride,” he whispered.
“The next village will do. I work my way toward Nikolaev, and
if I am lucky I will still be alive when I arrive. Also, Nikolaev is
rumored to house smart Natashas who do not allow themselves
to be trafficked abroad.”
Janos and Anatoly laughed quietly, and soon a village sign
came into view—Lakas—and Anatoly bade farewell and went
on his way. The time on the dashboard said four in the morning. Soon farmers would awaken, and perhaps one would offer
a day job and breakfast to a Cossack.
Janos calculated the time difference between western
Ukraine and central United States. Four in the morning here
meant it was still early evening in Chicago. A perfect time to
39
call Lazlo and tell him about the Cossack. A perfect time to
discuss wanderlust, a tradition among Gypsy comrades.
Janos took his cell phone from the console, pushed a button,
saw by the indicator that the village of Lakas had cellular service, prepared himself to speak in generalities, as he always did
on his cell phone, and entered Lazlo’s stored number.
At dusk, when his cell phone rang, Lazlo knew it was Janos before he saw the display of the international number. He sat in
near darkness, a reddish glow from the Humboldt Ukrainian
Restaurant sign across the street visible on the far wall. He
knew Janos would call tonight.
“Is all well, Janos?”
“Except for pinpricks in my ass.”
“You are on the road?”
“Yes.”
Lazlo switched to Hungarian. “I hear it in your voice. The
road is smooth, not like Podil with its troubles. Web sites give
the clergyman in question a long title: deputy chairman of the
Synodal Department for Relations with Armed Forces and Law
Enforcement Agencies.”
“What your police call a snitch insists the man with the long
title contacted an associate of an ex-family exterminator, as well
as a Moscow explosives expert. I am accused by one journal of
having a vendetta against orthodoxy. The article mentioned a
Vatican Army. I would go to the nearest church to light candles,
but they are locked this early in the morning.”
“You were wise to go on holiday.”
“Yes,” said Janos. “Yesterday at this time, a car followed me
40
for some distance. When it finally turned off, you know what
was playing on the CD player?”
“What?”
“‘A Cold Wind Is Blowing, Mother.’”
Lazlo laughed. “One of my favorites.”
“How does the wind blow in Chicago?”
“My niece left today. Perhaps when you return to Kiev, you
can visit her.”
“There is something else in the wind. I hear it in your voice.”
Although he had tried to hide his misery, Lazlo gave in and
told Janos about Jermaine, who wanted to be named Gypsy in
his street gang. He told of the incident in a mix of English and
Hungarian. When he finished all the details, including the funeral the next day, they were both silent, the cell transmitters
and receivers waiting anxiously, a data-mining program on a
super computer measuring the length of the silence, analyzing the use of two languages, and giving the conversation more
meaning than it deserved.
“I am sorry, fellow Gypsy. This boy, Jermaine, is now part of
God. I wish I knew more about death. I wish we could hug . . .
Outside I see a canyon shaped like your nose.”
Lazlo laughed. “The last time we spoke, I assumed your
nose would be mountain-sized because of what you poke it into.”
After a pause, Janos switched from English to Ukrainian.
“Do not worry. My holiday trip will cleanse my soul.”
Lazlo also spoke in Ukrainian. “I remember before
Chernobyl at headquarters. When Chief Investigator Chkalov
assigned you to me, comrades immediately called us Gypsy
Number One and Gypsy Number Two. We became father and
son. Families have multiplied in Ukraine, Janos. Be careful.
Contact Svetlana to test Kiev’s waters before returning.”
“Please give greetings to all aunts, uncles, and cousins.”
41
“You do the same,” said Lazlo. “Best wishes and blessings
to all family . . . uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, every
one of them.”
This is how Lazlo and Janos always ended their telephone
conversations, as if they had dozens of family members, as if
this were one of thousands of phone calls across the globe wishing the best to loved ones. However, earlier in the conversation,
both Lazlo and Janos knew that when they referred to “family,”
what they really meant was Mafia.
At dawn, Janos pulled into a campground just outside another
village with cellular service. There was no one at the small camp
office and only a few other campers scattered about. He parked
at the east edge of the camp near a small canyon to watch the
sunrise. Morning sunlight spreading across gentle green hills
made the canyon ominous, a crack across the face of the Earth
separating him from everything and everyone he’d known.
Inside the small camper van, he poured a Stolichnaya and, after
drinking it down, felt better and went to bed.
He awoke before noon, made an omelet for lunch, took a
folding chair and a Kiev newspaper outside, and ate in the sun.
The campground was empty. Everyone else had gone while he
was asleep. He stared at the horizon beyond the canyon where
the blue of the sky met the green of the hills. The only living
creatures he could see were birds swooping up out of the canyon and down again. There was no wind, and he could hear the
river at the canyon’s bottom.
The Gypsy stirred in his seat, adjusted his position, and
picked up the two-day-old newspaper he had brought with him
42
from the camper van. The news was as usual. A minor mishap
at Borispol Airport in which the wing of a plane clipped the
tail of another; questions concerning whether the new sports
stadium could be justified considering Ukraine’s terrible economy; a fire at a video store near Zhulyany Airport in which arson was suspected—the owner’s body and an unidentified body
found inside. There was no news about the Podil female clinic
bombing, or the killing of the female doctor, or the bombing of
the Nagy Investigative Agency, or the alleged connection with
Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza. Nothing.
Janos took his cell phone from his pocket. Svetlana answered on the sixth ring, her voice throaty as if she were still in
bed, even though he had called her at Kiev headquarters.
“Janos. Is your foot still in your mother?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I was leaving for lunch, and you almost missed me. You
are calling from Wild West?”
“There are mountains.”
“Are you alone?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“I received no invitation.”
“I tried to convince myself I asked.”
“Still the melancholy Gypsy. Yet you are the fortune-teller
who knows when to call. There is a woman who wants to see
you.”
“I am sorry, Svetlana, I—”
“Another woman. Inspector Listov from Darnytsya put her
in contact with me. Are you aware of a fire at a video store near
the airport?”
“I read about it in the newspaper.”
“The woman’s husband died in the fire. Perhaps you should
steel plate your ass before returning home to office number two,
43
which is already subject to watchful eyes.”
“Do you know whose eyes?”
“Simply the same vehicle three nights in a row.”
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“Yes. The woman in question has blond hair, and her name
is Mariya Nemeth.”
“Will you see her again?”
“This Friday. No phone calls.”
“It is a healthy attitude. They say these phones can cause
brain cancer.”
“Rumor,” said Svetlana. “Forget all I have said. These make
fine magazine stories.”
“Tell a story about a meeting at Borispol Airport.”
“Why not Zhulyany?”
“I prefer crowds when I listen to a magazine story. It will take at
least two days to pull my foot out of my mother. Tell the magazine
story lady to meet me at the gate on Monday at flight time for the
first Aerosvit outbound to New York after 10 a.m. Do you have it?”
“I have it. No need to repeat. So, what to do with yourself
until then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. Simply think of me when you flip through
the magazine.”
“I will, Svetlana. You are like a page from a magazine . . .
glossy.”
After he hung up, Janos got out his GPS and planned his
trip back to Kiev.
Later that afternoon, other campers came in and set up.
Campfires lit up the campground and everything seemed at peace.
Then, as other campers fell asleep, a small five-cylinder camper
van started up and cruised slowly through the quiet camp.
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