Burn Artist

Chapter 16

Grigori screamed and dropped the pistol, clawing at his jacket and shirt as murmurs and shouts of horror bubbled up around us. Men stared at me in fear, crossing themselves and refusing to meet my eyes, as my father tore his clothing to reveal a blazing sun wheel, charred and bleeding.

“It was you!” He pointed at me, looking between his friends. “You all saw it! You saw him curse me! He killed Slava!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped back.

“Get the hell out of Alexi’s face.” Vassily spoke up from behind me.

But the damage was done. There was a bad charge building in the crowd, dark eyes and dark intent, and suddenly, I knew what it must have felt like to be accused of witchcraft within the confines of a village.

“I’m going to blow your fucking brains out on the street!” Grisha roared, but he was in agony and I knew it. His clumsy swing missed entirely, and I turned just as Rodion burst through the crowd.

“What the hell’s going on?” Rodion snarled. “Alexi, my chain started burning… was that fucking spook trying to hit me again?”

“He tried to attack me as well,” I said firmly, lifting my voice so that others could hear.

“He cursed me! He fucking cursed me!” Grigori lunged at us, but the presence of our Avtoritet broke the gathering storm. Three men came forward to collect him by the arms and keep him away, lest he punch Rodion instead of me in his drunken temper.

“What the hell did I walk in on?” Rodion looked between the two of us, arms crossed. “The manager came down and asked everyone to get out… did you curse Grigori? What?”

“I emphatically did not put that curse mark on my father.” I sniffed. “He was waving a gun in my face when Kovacs made his next attempt to mark us. The talismans worked, but the attempt made on me deflected onto Grigori somehow.”

“You fucking freak! You fag! You little bottom bitch!” My father, red-faced and screaming, had lost any ability to contain himself or pretend well enough to be persuasive. He was terrified. It was the best thing I’d ever heard, and I only had one working ear.

“Fucking hell.” Rodion rubbed his face. “That means he’s going to call and—”

There was a double ‘whoop-whoop’ from down the street, and the crackle of a speaker radio from one of two NYPD cruisers that had reached the scene. “Everyone move off the road! Off the road! Break it up!”

“Fuck this.” Rodion ground his teeth, and waved at everyone who still remained. “Get out of here, you slags! Anyone who wants to keep going, we’re moving it to the Fox!”

“Come on, Lexi. Let’s get the hell out.” Vassily shoved my jacket into my hands, and pulled me away as Grisha continued to curse and spit in my direction.

We jogged over to my car and clambered inside, slamming the doors and locking them. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, I was shaking, not from fear, but from a deep, savage joy. Kovacs’ curse had deflected onto my father. He was going to spend the rest of his short, miserable life in terror, unable to control what was to come, and then he was going to burn to death. I wouldn’t even have to touch him. He could and would try to kill me before the inevitable… but all I had to do was hold him off for twenty-four hours, max, and then he was gone forever. It felt unreal.

“I don’t think I want to go home just yet,” I said, pulling out onto the street and away. “Did Rodion say he was continuing the party at the Sly Fox?”

“Eh?” Vassily looked over at me. “What? Are you serious?”

“Am I ever not serious?”

He shook his head. “Something’s gotten into you, man. Flirting with chicks, standing up to your old man, and now you want to go to a bar? Where’s Alexi, and what the fuck did you do to him?”

“Someone is about to incinerate my father tonight or tomorrow. I think it’s a cause for celebration,” I said, too cheerfully.

“Oh. Right. Jesus, you’re creepy when you smile.” Vassily sighed. “Okay, so. Let’s celebrate this morbid shit, but I want you to have a drink with me. A real, proper drink.”

“No.” It was a reflex as much as a real denial. “No, you know I won’t drink.”

“Well, you need to. You’re wound tighter than a watch spring and you have been for sixteen fucking years. You grind your teeth in your sleep, for fuck’s sake.”

I recoiled a little. “I do?”

“You do. I’m surprised you still HAVE teeth.”

Self-conscious, I ran my tongue over them, checking for damage. “That still doesn’t mean—”

“Seriously. I just want to see you relaxed for once,” Vassily said. “Let go of the badass monk act and live a little. You said it yourself: Grisha’s toast. There’s nothing you could do for him, even if you wanted to, and I dunno about you, but all this cursing shit is making me remember my mortality.”

“I know what alcohol does to people. You know I don’t—”

“Alexi.” Vassily’s voice hardened. “You’re not your dad. You’re not going to turn into a psycho rage-beast after a couple glasses of vodka and beat up someone’s puppy, okay?”

I frowned, tongue-tied.

“That, and the Fox is boring as shit without anything to drink.” He waved a hand, still scuffed from brawling, and lit up a cigarette out the window. “Not unless you’re looking for some old Chinese broad to sell you bootleg smokes and porno magazines. Which you can get there, by the way, if you go down that hallway in the back.”

He was not exaggerating. The Sly Fox was a seedy dive in the old Ukrainian part of East Village, part of our wide-ranging protection racket and a favorite of our muzhiki. It was a pigsty on its better days, and tonight, it was two steps removed from a midden. I could smell urine out on the street. People weaved around and laughed outside. About twenty other people from Rodion’s party were there, laughing with the bouncer – not one of the crew, but friendly enough with the Organizatsiya to pass as one. I jammed my earplug in as we went down the stairs, descending into red-lit darkness.

The Fox was also always busy. Rodion was already inside, as were Lev and Semyon. They both looked quite out of place in their fine linen suits. I went and found a booth while Vassily went to go and get drinks, trusting him to bring something I might find tolerable. A few passersby stopped to greet me with a mixture of shock and surprise. No one had expected me to follow the party.

Vassily returned, and banged a short tumbler down on the table as he took his seat beside me. He had a beer and a tumbler of the same stuff, which was dark and smelled strongly of blueberries.

“What’s this?” I regarded it warily.

“Rakija. Blueberry moonshine. Totally up your alley.”

My mouth drew across. I didn’t touch the drink.

“Look, if you start trying to beat on me, I’m fully capable of pounding your ass into the pavement, alright?” Vassily slid his arm over my shoulders, and I was suddenly hyperaware of how close he was. My mouth went dry, heart pounding in a way I usually only experienced in the heat of a kill.

Slowly, I picked up the glass and sniffed. It smelled yellow and purple to me. I took a single swallow, and to my surprise, the painful noise of the bar momentarily receded. The berry flavor was dry and sharp, a little sweet, and strong enough to numb the tongue. It was the combination of taste and texture that did it, working just like peppermint oil.

Vassily laughed at my expression. He smacked me between the shoulders, and I nearly snorted the stuff out my nose. “See? Is that so bad?”

I looked up to see Lev watching us from the central table. He was leaning on his linked forearms while Semyon talked to Ovar and Nicolai about something, and when he noticed me observing him he averted his gaze. But he had seen me drink.

“It’s alright,” I replied. I had another mouthful, and a strange fluttering sensation passed through my chest. I thought it was nervous butterflies at first, until I realized that the feeling was actually the muscles of my chest relaxing. Feeling oddly, slightly competitive, I drained the rest of the glass and slammed it down.

“It doesn’t kill you to let the reins loose now and then, Lexi.” Vassily pushed the other glass to me and raised his beer. “I’ll make a hedonist out of you yet. Bud’mo!”[25]

“Bud’mo?” I echoed him, and fought down a twinge of baseless anxiety as I followed his lead. I already felt a bit dizzy, but Vassily was unfazed. Happily tipsy and far more at ease than he’d been at the Tea Room, Vassily looked more handsome than ever. I was fairly sure that I was flushed red, like a boiled crab.

While he was at the bar, Lev left his place and took the seat in front of me, a small smile playing over his mouth. In the red light, his green eyes looked black.

“I see you’re having fun, Alexi,” he said. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you let loose.”

The Rakija had gone down smoothly. I was a little dizzy, but could still speak properly. “Apparently it happens on occasion.”

“Indeed. Look… I wanted to talk with you about something.” His expression turned a little serious, and he leaned across the table so that I could hear him. Half-deaf, I did the same. “Something about Grigori.”

Just his name was enough to sour my belly, until I remembered that he was on the fast track to the crematorium. “Go on.”

“Rodion is angry with him,” he said, his voice thick with conspiracy. “All of the activity with Maslak has… put him in a difficult position. Your father has been racking up debt after debt, borrowing money from his friends, and hasn’t been paying them back.”

My eyes narrowed. “For how long?”

“Three or four years now,” Lev replied. “It’s… a bad state of affairs. Our Avtoritet asked him to repay him some of the money to cover the costs of this operation, but he has been making excuses.”

Owing money to your Avtoritet was generally not good for one’s health. Refusing to pay him back was almost a guarantee. “What is he borrowing for?”

“We don’t know, exactly.” Lev tilted his head, drumming his fingers on the table. “There is… some concern that he’s investing in a side business. Gambling, maybe. Drugs.”

That was not good news, and whatever fractional relief I’d gained from a couple of drinks evaporated. Merit was not hereditary in the Organizatsiya, but debts were.

“My point being, Alexi, that you should make sure you have plenty of money saved for the short term, depending on what happens tonight and tomorrow. If not then, then in the coming twelve months or so,” Lev continued. “I’m aware that there is growing tension between father and son… so I’d like to advise you to let nature take its course instead of interfering directly. You could turn current events into a good opportunity for a promotion in the coming years. Naturally, if you were to learn anything about the money and what your father has been spending it on, you should consider reporting it to me directly.”

I got what he meant, and was both puzzled and slightly threatened. Why would he help me? “I see. I’ll take it under advisement, Advokat.”

Lev glanced over my shoulder, and then rose as Vassily returned with Nicolai. I filed Lev’s information to the back of my mind as they sat, setting down a bottle and two more glasses to play the time-honored Slavic game of ‘drink the bottle dry’.

Somehow, one bottle turned into three. After that, we were out of the booth and playing some kind of game involving dominos at Rodion’s table with him and our other brat’ye, who clearly didn’t regret Grisha’s absence. My memory began to get spotty at that point, the same point where I began to feel good – very good. Warm, limber, even loud. The sense of inclusion was markedly different like this, and Vassily had been right: I didn’t suddenly want to beat up on women or scream obscenities at black people. Loosened up, I was relieved of an undercurrent of pain in knees, back and shoulders that I hadn’t even realized had been there. And while Vassily wasn’t always next to me, I was always able to find him in the room by his sly sloping smile, wicked and playful.

It had to have been 4am that we left, because the doors to the bar were closed and we were suddenly outside. The remaining ten or so Yaroshenko men were belting out Russian rock songs at the top of our lungs while we waited for taxis, much to the amusement of unrelated patrons.

“And dream we not of the thunderous spaceport, not of this icy void! We’re dreaming of the grass outside our homes!” Vassily and I were mostly on key, but that was probably a subjective matter as we broke off and tried to find our way to the car.

“Goodbye, brave cosmonauts!” Vassily called back to the other men, who hooted back to us.

I managed to open the door after a few tries, and sunk down in front of the wheel, shaking my head to try and clear it as I fired the engine. The wheel swam in front of my eyes. It was no good.

“Can you drive?” I said – or, more accurately, tried to say. “I’m… I will run us into a telephone pole.”

“I’m an expert at driving!” Vassily pulled me out, and we changed places, and resumed singing a modified version Trava u Doma, the song about cosmonauts. “The risk and bravery is justified! The music of space is flowing into our conversation, and Rodya is getting head in the alley beside Vaselka!”

A weird, stiff spasm bubbled up from deep inside my chest. A laugh? “That is… that is the funniest thing I have ever heard. Why do that call it that, anyway? ‘Getting head’?”

Vassily mimed the act with his hand, and the laugh came out again: harder, this time. I collapsed back against my seat, cackling, as we wobbled our way down the road. Intoxicated I felt like a different person, like some other, more human Alexi sharing the same body with me, but when I looked across at my friend and saw him laughing and happy, I didn’t mind.

I remember reaching the bridge, and I remembered – vaguely – the complicated process of getting from the car to our apartment. It seemed to involve a lot of vertigo and the strange desire to be as physically close to Vassily as possible.

“What was it… what were you saying before?” I couldn’t find my keys in my pocket with my gloves on, and ended up fumbling around for what felt like an hour as I leaned against the threshold.

“What?”

“When we were at the, the restaurant. You were saying something, before my piece of shit, cocksucking excuse for a father started the fight on the street, but I can’t remember.”

“I don’t fucking remember. Jesus, what do you think I am?” He laughed.

We stumbled into the warm darkness of the hallway together, and then I found myself pinned against the wall and unable to breathe. Vassily was kissing me. Heavy, full-mouthed kissing, blue and sweet and delirious, an action I had no idea how to respond to. Everything smelled like blueberry Rakija. I’d never kissed anyone before, but I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began as we slid along the wall and turned around the edge of my bedroom door.

It was pitch black in here, and I fell back onto my bed dizzy and queasy, my skin rippling with the sensation of fur. I felt hands – long, fine boned, and strong – push me down and begin to unbutton my shirt. A great weight pressed down over me, submerging me in the sweet smoke and peppermint scent of Vassily’s breath and the faded cologne of his neck. Even though I knew something was wrong, that I was doing something wrong, I didn’t want it to stop… but underneath the relief and pleasure of a touch that didn’t hurt was nausea so profound that I knew if I didn’t sit up, I was going to throw up.

“Vasyl… my stomach…” Urgently, I pushed up and I scrambled back along the sheets as I tried to avoid being sick, and then my head spun and I plummeted into a single moment of dark nothingness.