Burn Artist

Chapter 5

The rest of the night was spent in more monastic pursuits. Tired and pent up, I consecrated Slava’s bone amulet in a circle drawn on the top of my apartment roof. There was a reason I had bought out the third floor, and that reason was to have a magical workspace in full view of the sun and moon. When that was done and the amulet was charging in a bowl of salt, I slept until Vassily stumbled into house, put him to bed, and immersed back into my nightmares. Between Grigori, Aliens, anxiety, and curses, there was no relief to be found in sleep. Instead, I dreamed of my father and the cat.

When I was very young – maybe six or so – Grisha drove me to one of the projects in Red Hook that was owned by the Organizatsiya. He dragged me by my arm from the car, all the way down the stairs to the basement. In my dream, the walls throbbed red hot.

It was one of father’s ‘lessons’: excursions where I was supposed to ‘toughen up’ and ‘learn how to be a man’. From the age of five onwards, he exposed me to everything he did. He beat people unconscious in front of me. He killed a guy outside of a bakery with a tire iron while I waited on a dustbin, watching every blow. For this particular lesson, he’d brought a cat in a potato sack. He was drunk, of course.

“You have to learn one thing about this world, kiddo. You wanna know what that is? It’s that nothing matters. Not a fucking thing. Everything is like everything else, and it’s all shit. You think anything makes sense?”

“No, sir.” It was hellishly hot down here, and stuffy. The furnace clanked.

“All that matters is being strong, kid. You know why? Any day, the government can just up and throw your fag ass in prison. Your old man was famous. He was gonna go to the Olympics. Then suddenly, bam! My ass was in GULAG! You want to know what I did? Fucking nothing, that’s what. Someone that didn’t like me made shit up to the police, and that was it.”

The question formed in the dream as I had spoken it. “Why would somebody do that?”

“Why? Because humans are garbage. There is no ‘why’. I nearly died twenty times in that hellhole. It ruined my body, and now I’m never going to wrestle again. You think there’s things worse than dying, Alexi?”

“No, sir.”

“What if someone fucks you in the ass? You think you’d rather be somebody’s bitch instead of being dead?”

“No, sir.” I didn’t understand him, but I knew I was supposed to disagree. The words coming from his mouth, huge and distended in the darkness, were meaningless. He looked like an alien, saying alien things.

“Good, because I swear to God, if you turn out to be some kind of sissy faggot, I’ll choke you to death myself.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the dream, as in life, I was paralyzed as he pulled the struggling cat from the bag. It was one of mother’s alley cats. We weren’t allowed to have cats in the house, but she fed close to twenty strays in the yard every night, and every couple of weeks, several of them would go missing. Now, I knew where they went.

“You don’t even fucking know what I’m talking about, do you? Let me show you what happens to pussies in this world, Alexi.”

I was rooted to the floor, cold with black terror. I was an adult in my dream, but I still couldn’t move as he flung open the pig-iron door and threw the cat inside. It screamed, and as it screamed, I screamed.

The earth quaked. A dark shadow bore down on me from above, and I blindly threw a punch out as hard as I could. There was a startled shout, but the shrill yowl and awful stench of the burning cat was still there, blurring slowly into the piercing honk of my alarm clock going off at full blast.

“Morning, sunshine.” Vassily scowled down at me. His wiry hands were wrapped around my wrists. He had an angry red flush across his jaw where I’d punched him.

As I got my bearings, I realized that I was still in bed. The sheets were damp with sweat. “Hhh…What…?”

“You nearly knocked me out. And then what? We’d be late to your… uhh… whatever you set this alarm for.”

Oh, right. “Mariya.” My voice was thick, gluggy and rough. I coughed, winnowing out the present reality from past memory. They were receding already, sliding back down under still mirrored waters. Now that I was awake, I could remember without feeling. “Mariya’s. Brunch. And then we have to… surveillance. Want to come?”

“Surveillance? Oh boy oh boy, do I ever.” Vassily rubbed his face. I couldn’t read his expression.

“Get ready, then. We have to be at the location by three.”

“No worries.”

I got to my feet, wooden and dizzy, and stumbled to the bathroom. The first thing I did was throw up. It was loud and painful and unpleasant, but I felt better afterward. Once I had purged, I showered, brushed my teeth, and tried to plow through the fugue toward wakefulness. Food would help; coffee would help more. By three p.m., I would hopefully be reasonably alert and ready to go hunt our man.

Mariya’s deli was an oasis in the chaos of Brighton Beach. Shadowed by the railway overhead and a blue and white awning, the glass-fronted corner store was always cool in the summer. There was no menu on the wall and little decoration inside, but it always smelled like fried butter, sugar, vanilla and tea. Mariya was Vassily’s elder sister. By extension, she was my adopted sister, and the only maternal figure I could ever remember having.

We had keys, so we went in through the cramped back hallway. I closed the door on the hot bustle of the street outside, and we moved through the cool darkness of the corridor to the kitchen. Mariya was in there, busily boiling pelmeni[15] and chopping onions. Vassily knocked on the door frame, and she looked over with arched eyebrows and then a gracious smile very much like her brother’s.

“My boys!” She left her food to meet us halfway across the kitchen. She kissed Vassily briefly and platonically on the lips and face, and then bent down to kiss me on both cheeks. “Look at you both! Alexi Grigoriovich, you have dark rings around your eyes. You’re exhausted. Why aren’t you sleeping more?”

“Life and work,” I replied, shrugging. I tried to be nonchalant, but my stomach was hot and dry after the morning’s nightmare and subsequent puking. Mariya’s warm, blue-fur voice was a balm over the memories of my father.

“You know how it is. No rest for the wicked,” Vassily added.

Mariya clucked her tongue in disapproval, reaching out to straighten my collar. I let her. She was one of two people in the world I let touch me beyond a handshake or a pat on the back. “I swear, the pair of you look thinner every time I see you. You’re working too hard. Do I need to go and kick Rodion in the tuches?”[16]

“You could try.” Vassily grinned at the thought of it. “He’s got a pretty hard ass, though. I bet you could swipe a credit card down the middle of that thing.”

“Oy gevalt. I swear, these friends of yours are going to kill you both one of these days.” Mariya tutted, hustling back to the stove. It was still early afternoon, and she was managing the kitchen by herself. The rush didn’t start until after four. “So, you’ve come here to eat my food and dirty my chairs, have you?”

“And drink your kompot,”[17] Vassily said. “Pretty much. Me and Alexi figured you’d want to see us before Court on Monday.”

“Nonono, Semych. Don’t remind me of that.” Mariya shook her head, scowling as she strained the dumplings out of the pot and heaped them on a plate. “I don’t even want to think about you in that place. Not to mention, prison. What a nightmare.”

“I’m not going to prison, Mari.”

She turned to look back at us. Like Vassily, she was black haired and blue eyed, tall, handsome, and hawkish. Brother and sister were almost the same height, an even six feet. Unlike Vassily, she had no tattoos and no scars gained from combat. She had lost both parents and three brothers to the criminal life, and the Organizatsiya was not for her. “That’s what Antoni thought, too.”

“Toni was put away for murder. The Fed arrested me for tax and credit card stuff.” Vassily waved her off with a long hand. “It’s not a big deal, sis.”

“It’s a big deal since RICO,” she retorted. “But ayy, let’s not talk about it. I don’t want to bring bad luck on us before we go to the courtroom. What do you boys want to eat?”

“I would dig the hell out of a chicken sandwich and some blintz,” Vassily replied.

Despite the heat, I was in the mood for something warm. “Veal pelmeni would be wonderful, Maritka. And coffee.”

“Go out back and wait, then.” She resumed dishing up, shooing us away with a hand. “I’ve got Vanya and his goons out front all wanting their food. After that, I’ll bring it out with some kompot.”

“Everything all right out there?” Vassily’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “They aren’t treating you badly, are they?”

“No no.” Mariya laughed, a warm, rich blue sound. “They’re all just hungry, Semych. Don’t worry about a thing.”

Nearly every day after elementary school, we had gone to Mariya’s shop to eat dinner and do our homework in the same empty storeroom. Mariya kept bulk ingredients in there these days, but the same wooden table and chairs Vassily and I had used as children was still in here. It was a pleasant, relaxing start to what was bound to be an interesting day scoping out Jacob Maslak and seeing what we could do to make his life a living hell.