Page 137 of Nothing More

Serge leaned over and they conversed behind Ilya’s raised hand in Russian. Tenny caught the snatch of a name: Misha.

The actual bratva boss.

They bickered.

“….shut the fuck up,” Ilya hissed at the end, voice rising. Then he batted Serge away and sat forward, elbows on the table. “I’m the boss, yes.” His chest puffed out with a pride he had no right to feel. “I can sell to you. What do you want it for?”

Tenny smiled. “Well, now, I can’t just go around advertising that, can I?”

~*~

Misha had backed the cobra into a loading bay across the street from the target building, and they ate a fast-food lunch in the car while they watched for anything telling. The smell of grease and cold fries was nauseating, as the heater kicked it up around their faces. Toly was too warm, his skin itchy – hisconsciousitchy. He pushed up his beanie to scratch his scalp and then tugged it back down again.

“Nervous?” Misha asked.

“No.” And Toly wasn’t, per se. But guilt was an unusual sensation, like a scratchy, ill-fitting sweater. “How many days will we do this?” he asked. “We have no way of knowing when he gets deliveries.”

“No,” he agreed. “But Pushkin’s a lazy bastard. He doesn’t like to go out more than a couple times a week.”

Toly wouldn’t know. He’d cut himself off from all things Russian when he agreed to prospect with the Dogs. Most days, he told himself he didn’t miss it.

They lapsed back into silence, which had always been their way together. Across the street, hired cars with drivers pulled up to the sidewalk so sharply-dressed men and women carrying briefcases could climb into the back seats, most of them with cellphones pressed to their ears. These were the city’s money makers, the big spenders, and bigger earners. The jet-set crowd who’d all die early of heart attacks from the stress of trading such huge sums of money, filthy rich, but too busy to enjoy it. And somewhere amongst them was the son of a Moscow butcher with an axe to grind. Perhaps literally.

Lost in his own musings, wondering what sort of man the Butcher’s son would prove to be, Toly was startled by Misha’s voice.

“What’s it like? Being in your club, I mean.”

The question itself was even more startling than the sudden sound of him speaking. Toly turned his head to gauge his expression, which didn’t prove all that helpful. Misha was smooth as stone, as though he’d just delivered a riddle, and was waiting for Toly to give the wrong answer.

Even after everything, Toly found he was still unable to offer a smart remark or flip answer to Misha. Some habits were too deeply ingrained to ever break. So he considered a moment, because he’d never been the best with words, especially not when it came to nebulous concepts – and that’s what the club was, at its heart. You could define it in concrete terms, sure…but that didn’t mean you’d helped someoneunderstandit.

Finally, he said, “They call it a family…and it is. Brothers of choice, that sort of thing. Loyalty above all. But…it’s sort of like its own country, too. Church is like the government sitting down, taking a vote. Everyone gets his say – even if we know that the president has the final say-so in the end.”

Misha made a quiet, dismissive sound. “How very Western of you.”

He made a face. “It’s not like the American government: it’s not stealing from poor people and lying about everything you say you’ll do.”

“Heh. YouunderstandAmerican government?”

“I understand it’s every bit as crooked as ours, only it pretends not to be,” he said, too defensively.

Misha tilted his head, a silent concession, and looked back out through the windshield – which Toly had forgotten to do, in his defining. “And do you like it? Having a ‘vote.’?” Skepticism on the word, as if it was a foreign concept, or as though he doubted that the vote was all that legitimate. Either way, it left Toly bristling.

He tried not to show it. “I like having a competent leader,” he said.

“Hm. Most do.”

Toly owed him nothing in the way of an explanation – nothing – but found himself compelled to add, “I didn’t think anyone would trust me, after what I’d been.” He regretted it the moment he’d said it, face burning with embarrassment, tempted to squirm down into his seat and pull his hat down over his face.

Misha said, “And here you are sitting with me. And lying to them all.” Then, before Toly could react: “There. Look. Pushkin.”

A rusted-out van coughed its way around the corner, backfired, and sputtered into the alley, belching exhaust that couldn’t pass a yearly inspection. The hard slap of déjà vu that struck at sight of it knocked Toly’s shock and anger at Misha’s last comment straight out of his head. He’d never dealt with Pushkin directly, but he knew his face, knew his particular stink of unwashed skin and chewing tobacco; remembered the wet, eager gleam in Oleg’s eyes whenever he’d showed up with a delivery.

The difference was: Oleg had wanted Pushkin’s deliveries for himself. The Butcher’s son would have a very different use for them.

Misha popped his door. “Come on.”

The relentless cold of the past two weeks had given way to a tricky, damp warmth. A front was moving toward them, ready to dump almost a foot of snow, the weathermen said, but the lead-up meant patchy sun and elevated temperatures. It had brought people out onto the sidewalk in droves; some walking with a destination in mind, but most out for a stroll, faces tipped to the sky, eyes half-closed, enjoying the momentary shift in the weather. The crowd meant they had to dodge and weave their way to the crosswalk, but it also provided suitable cover. Pushkin never noticed them. They crossed the street and got all the way down the alley, the noise from behind them covering the sound of their footfalls.