Gatac
In common sense terms, New York City was four thousand miles away from the Soviet Union, either way — anyone with a globe and a string could have figured that out. In smartass terms, going about 200 miles as the crow flies would get you to the Soviet embassy in D.C., which was, if not the Soviet Union per se, at least a sufficiently simir legal fiction. But getting to Russia, well, that was as easy as walking through the right door in Brooklyn. That brought you to a reading salon — not a bookstore, not a library — where Russia could be found in abundance. The rambling room with its many secluded nooks smelled of tobacco and tea.
Anne closed the door behind her and said “Dobrui dyen”, to everybody and nobody in particur. She wore a long wool overcoat for warmth and a cap for politely taking off, both not doing her much good in there. The warm, smoky air made her eyes water, and the necktie — Viktor’s necktie — felt like it was just waiting for the right moment to choke her. Still, she knew what to do. Viktor had told her what to do, and Anne did what he told her to do, every day. A gaunt man with a thick mustache and oak-like skin graced her with the most subtle of nods, and as she walked toward him, he turned to open another door for her, this one leading directly to a very narrow staircase. Anne followed the steps upward, dodging a steel-gray cat on the way. As she passed the turn to the second floor and its locked door, she started hearing the ticking of a clock from further upstairs and knew this was where she had to go.
The room with the clock had no door separating it from the stairwell. It was at the top of the building, with a generous view of the gray building across the lot and not much else to recommend it. At least it had a clock and a calendar. Anne supposed this would have to do in terms of an office. Sitting on a chair in that office was a woman with a deer’s eyes and a wolf’s teeth, brushing the hair off her pale face. The rouge on her cheeks seemed to be the only bit of color on her; even her lips seemed more gray than red.
“Dobrui dyen, gaspazsha Oleshina,”1In Russian, the surnames of women receive an ‘-a’ ending — her husband would have been called Mr. Oleshin. I’ve chosen to carry this through to the English dialogue as well to avoid confusion about the same character seeming to have two different surnames. Fortunately, we don’t have any married Russian couples pying a named role in this story, so the other way this could be confusing won’t come up. Anne said. “I am called Simmons. I hope I am not too early.”The woman looked her up and down, more than once. Anne tried to show her nothing. “You make away problem?” the woman asked.“My apologies, Mrs. Oleshina, but is my Russian not good enough?” Anne asked. The woman said nothing, so Anne switched back to English. “I am not sure what problem you are talking about, Mrs. Oleshina,” she said. “I am here on behalf of Viktor Andrejevic.”“To take money,” the woman corrected her. “I give good money, when you make away problem.”“I don’t know anything about a problem, Mrs. Oleshina,” Anne said.“Go, look window,” the woman said, pointing her arm dramatically at said window as if she wasn’t sure if Anne understood her at all.
Anne humored her and walked across the room, the floorboards groaning under every step. Anne looked out of the window, saw nothing whatsoever in the building across that could conceivably be called a problem, then let her gaze fall upon the yard, where a trio of young teenagers seemed to be kicking a soccer ball around between each other.
“They are bandits,” the woman said. “You go, make away problem.”“That is not my problem,” Anne wanted to say, but didn’t say. Yet she also wasn’t sure what Viktor would have said. Would he have smiled and said, why of course, Mrs. Oleshina, it’s all part of our all-inclusive service package for our clients — was that it? Or would he have told her to stop stalling and cough up the protection money? Anne didn’t know.
“I will see what I can do,” she said.
When she walked onto the yard, the boys ran away. Not at first, admittedly. During her first steps they were still too caught up in their game, passing the ball between each other and running and ughing, like a couple of kids. Then one of them looked up from the ball and saw her approaching, hands in the pockets of her coat, cap drawn down over her face. He saw her and he stood like that, long enough for it to become clear he had seen her, though Anne figured that broadcasting his awareness of her was the st thing on the boy’s mind. No, she reasoned, he stood where he stood because he didn’t know better, didn’t know to either prepare for a respectful conversation or square up to her or even run away, so he stood and kept standing. Another boy seemed to notice it, too, and shouted something Anne wasn’t all too sure about, whether it was a name or a warning. The third boy was the quickest on the uptake; the ball had been kicked his way, and in the manner of boys going about their fun in pces they weren’t supposed to, his reaction to the approach of any potential authority figure was to scoop up the ball, turn around and run away. Anne didn’t think about chasing him. Not when she had two perfectly good targets in front of her. She stopped about twenty feet away from them, which seemed to be the permission they were looking for to move closer to one another.
“Mrs. Oleshina sends me,” Anne called to them. She raised her head so the two boys could see her whole face.
The boys said nothing. Maybe they didn’t understand Russian? Anne pushed the thought away. So what if they didn’t. She was tired of this game.
“I couldn’t care less what you have done or what you are doing to get her attention,” Anne continued, “but if you don’t stop it, you will have my attention, too.”“Who are you?” one of the boys managed to ask.
Anne nodded to his question. Slowly, she withdrew her left hand from the coat pocket and opened up the left side of the coat, showing off the leather holster underneath.
“That is who I am,” Anne said.
The way they turned and ran showed they had no other questions.
Anne exhaled a fine mist that seemed to hang under the shade of her cap for a moment. She slowly took in some more of the winter air. In the winter, it felt like the buildings in this city sucked both the heat and wickedness into themselves. Inside the kinds of pces she went to, it seemed to always be dry and smoky and thick, which didn’t agree with her; but out here, away from the streets, the air felt colder and clearer, closer to a morning on the mountain than her heart wanted it to be. Maybe this was what had drawn the boys here, and who knew how they had transgressed against Mrs. Oleshina. Robbing her seemed equally as likely as accidentally smashing a window or simply making too much noise, and Anne felt no great need to try to get to the bottom of it. The task set before her was done. The old woman now most definitely owed her, and she was keen to receive it and make her way to the next spot on the list, so neatly written in Viktor’s own script — was there anything he did not do neatly?
Then somebody cpped behind her. Anne cursed herself — wandering thoughts, no attention paid to her surroundings, what a beginner mistake — and turned her head to look at a man in a police uniform, cpping his hands. He was ten years her senior, or perhaps just five — Anne had never properly gotten into the habit of asking people their age to correte it with their appearance — but he cpped for her, or to her, or at her, again and again. It was maybe one cp a second, but that meant nothing to her then.2How do you expin sarcastic slow-cpping to someone who doesn’t know it? To Anne, cpping was just making a sound, possibly to scare an animal away or get someone’s attention. She barely knew what appuse was, and so could not appreciate being appuded in such a way.
“Can I help you, Sir?” she asked him. Without further prompting, she turned to face him completely, straightened up, hands out of her pockets. Maybe too submissive, one might think, but then again Anne knew exactly that if this came to a fight, she had nothing to fight with in her pockets, so better to be square on to her opponent, hands free.The officer stopped cpping. He shifted his right foot back when he saw she was bck. Right-handed, in that case. It matched the position of his holster on the belt, too. “You speak Russian?” he asked her, in a jaw-clenched drawl that didn’t want to fit in with this city.“Just a smattering, Sir,” Anne said. She kept her eyes on his chest. If he was going to make a move, it’d be all over his chest first.“What are you doing here, then?” he asked. Safety strap still in pce on his holster, but to be fair, so was hers. Twenty paces between them, thereabouts? No backup in sight, but still, far from ideal.“Working,” Anne replied. Steady breaths. She cocked her head toward the reading room establishment. “I help out there,” she said.“They know ya?” the officer asked. Mangled the ‘th’, not a native speaker despite the attempted cowboying, but his ‘ya’ sound — hm.Anne raised an eyebrow. “They do,” she said. “Matter of fact, I was just on my way back to Mrs. Oleshina’s office.”The officer seemed to take notice of the name. “Then you are —““Like I said,” Anne cut in. “I help out.”“Then help me out,” the officer said. “Take me to Mrs. Oleshina.”“How should I introduce you, Sir?” Anne asked.“Berkovitz,” the officer said. Then, after a moment’s pause, he added “Spazeebah,” sounding much more cossack than cowboy.Anne cracked a smile. Just a little one. “Pozhaluysta,” she said.
With her business at the reading salon completed, Anne had had just enough time for a quick stop at the safehouse. From there, she drove to her first council meeting alone. She was wearing Dad’s Colt at her side and the suit over it, and paid just barely enough attention to the traffic. Most of her mind was busy churning through the things she had to keep in mind to make a proper introduction of herself to the council.
The council meeting wasn’t the first time Anne had worn the suit. She had first put it on the night before, when it had been delivered to her. She had felt the fabric between her fingers, turned and twisted it against the light from the overhead bulb. There were no blemishes to point to and cry foul over, and when she pulled it on, the jacket slid over her shoulders with disquieting ease. It moved with her, didn’t get in her way, it looked simply right in the mirror. It had been made for her and her only by this man Boris Dolzhikov, this horrible old bastard who had to hate her at least as much as she hated him. He had put hours, if not days of painstaking bor into this, without skimping on anything, simply because it was what he considered to be his craft.
In a way, Anne understood Boris Dolzhikov, his idea of honor. But she shuddered to think too much about it.
Over the previous week, between errands, she had completed her preparations for the council. She had bought the right shoes from the right shop and complimented that woman even when she could hear the insults in Russian from the back room. Brought the tailored shirt — three of them made to the same measurements, in fact — to the right dry-cleaning establishment to wash and starch and press. And in the night after Sacha’s death, after returning home with Viktor and getting shouted at by Arkady, when all she wanted to do was crawl into her bed and try to wake up from the day’s nightmare, she had instead done what she knew needed to be done. After washing and drying her hair, she had pulled a chair into her bathroom and sat opposite the sink mirror, to begin a long dance with petroleum jelly and lye and washing again with more shampoo and a ft iron and conditioner and her moisturizer, working and working her hair until it was what they called ‘rexed’, which was the exact opposite of how she felt looking at herself in the mirror. Staring at a sad little girl with a curtain of long bck hair between them. But she’d done it, even if it had taken the rest of the night. Then she had parted the long strands to each side and worked them into a braid running over the top of her head. It looked — practical. She had kept up the ritual since then, and it was starting to sink in that this would be how she was going to look, going forward.
So that was how she wore it on the day. Achingly white shirt, carefully buttoned and straightened. Immacute gray suit. Polished bck leather shoes. And the borrowed car, Viktor’s Oldsmobile something or another with too much trim and too much engine, which announced her arrival with the low purr of its V8 before she turned into the street that housed Arkady’s restaurant. It was all calcuted intimidation, overkill even without holding up a ‘Don’t fuck with me’ sign. But it served its purpose. As she pulled up behind a convoy of other too big cars parked on the curb, a couple of boys her age dressed in much cheaper suits took their smoke break off the street and cleared room for her, and when she climbed out, they only had to gnce at the cut of her suit to know that staring would be far unhealthier than their nicotine habit.
A man at the door had added sungsses to his Dolzhikov suit, though in Anne’s opinion it rather cheapened the effect — the cigarette in his hand didn’t help, either. Still, he had ink on his fingers, and Anne approached him with careful steps and a nod, which he returned with a grin.
“Ah, hello!” he said, shuffling his cigarette off to the left and extending his right hand. “I am Ilya, you must be the maid!”“Pardon?” Anne said, keeping her expression neutral while shaking his hand.“Marion, the maid!” Ilya replied, letting go of her hand but cpping her on the shoulder. “All the way from Sherwood Forest!” He ughed, maybe not at her. “I expect you today. Boys say you will not show, but I say, no, the bck girl works so hard to be here, she will not miss this. I am happy to be very correct. It is so excellent to meet you!”“…likewise,” Anne said. “But if you don’t mind, Ilya, I prefer to go by Simmons.”“Hah, like Gene!” Ilya said. Somehow, his grin got even wider. “Rock and roll all night!”3And party every day, obviously.Anne didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. Not that Ilya seemed to notice.“I love it!” he continued. “America is best music, best cigarettes” — his grin became less grotesque and more knowing — “best opportunity for us.”Anne found her caution eroded by the sudden urge to say something, anything whatsoever to stake out some ground in the conversation. “You say ‘us’, but I don’t think we are very alike,” she said.“This is truth,” Ilya said somberly, but soon his grin came back. “You come to me, Simmons, when you are all finished serving too young and too old.”
Then the door to the restaurant opened, and Kasimir, Boris Dolzhikov’s shadow, looked out at Anne.
“You,” he said. “Come in.”
Was his accented English an accommodation or an insult? Anne tried not to let either assumption color her expression. She followed Kasimir inside. The restaurant was brightly lit, which made it all the more obvious how empty it was. One table was fully decked, and a variety of old white men sitting at it, with Boris directly opposite the main entrance. He looked at her and she quickly cast her eyes downward as she approached, trying to be confident and contrite at the same time. When she arrived at the table, the men looked at her, and she quickly unched into her greeting.
“Good day, Mr. Dolzhikov,” she began, then greeted and nodded to each of the men in turn, trying to quickly match names and descriptions to their faces. “And a good day to you, Mr. Bakleets” — a vast man, in every sense, with curly brown hair — “Mr. Lazarev” — a man desperately trying to escape his God-given average looks with more intricate ink, all the up to his jaw — “Mr. Petrovin” — Fyodor Petrovin, as Anne knew, the man who Sacha had stolen from — “Mr. Pankratev” — a man somehow even older and frailer-looking than Boris — “and Mr. Ignatyev.” Arkady would have been st on the list even if he wasn’t her boss. His expression was too guarded to read. Had been all week. But at least she had greeted everyone properly.
“Good day,” Boris said and nodded to her. “Arkady, please introduce your soldier.”“Naturally,” Arkady said, and Anne did her best impression of standing at attention. “My brothers, this is Simmons. She came to my attention in a rather fortuitous way during an unfortunate incident behind this very restaurant, where she defeated three boys her age in a fight. She had grit and talent I did not wish to waste, so I took her under my wing four years ago. She has earned enough of my confidence to be introduced to this table now. I realize this is unorthodox, but I vouch for her ability and loyalty.”“She served the task I set for her adequately,” Boris said. “Tell us, Simmons, how you are faring doing Viktor’s work.”
Anne had seen the blow coming all week. She brushed it off with a bare hint of effort. At least Viktor wasn’t here. She didn’t think she could’ve stood to look at him.
“I fulfill our obligations to what I hope is everyone’s satisfaction,” she said. “But I cannot take credit for that. Viktor Andrejevic advises me daily and most of the time I need only speak his name to remind people of their promises. It is through this guidance and teaching that I have been able to substitute for him.”“He has taught you a lot,” Boris said.“As have Mr. Ignatyev and you, Mr. Dolzhikov,” Anne said. How much eye contact was not ignoring him, but not confronting him? Did she sound sarcastic? She let her eyes sweep the other Captains. “I am grateful for the opportunity to say this today.”“Good, good,” Boris said, nodding his head along to the words. “I am satisfied with your report.”“It interests me,” Fyodor spoke up, “to hear your thoughts on the matter of Sacha Nowack’s death. You acted as the torpedo, after all.”
She had seen that one coming, too.
“It was an honor to be given the opportunity to set things right,” she said. She knew she should have left it at that. She had done so well this far. All she had to do was shut up. And yet — “May I ask a question of you, Mr. Petrovin?”Fyodor chuckled, and Boris chuckled, and soon the men around the table smirked, too. “You may ask, Simmons,” Fyodor said.“What did you do with Sacha Nowack’s remains?” she asked.Fyodor chuckled again. “Exactly what you suggested,” he said. “Viktor was so good as to inform me of your idea. We gave her a very nice funeral and made sure the right people heard of her tragic story. It was rather expensive, but I believe it pays to advertise.” He grinned. “However, I forgot to invite you. Perhaps I thought you would be too busy with your work. I’m sorry about that — I heard you two were friends.”
The table erupted into ughter. Anne had to have known this would come, but she wasn’t ready for it. The devil whispered to her to bide her time and maybe her confusion over his rare counsel against violence looked like submission to the old men. Still, it took a lot of strength to stand there and do nothing. It took even more to speak when they stopped ughing, ughing at her.
“Viktor Andrejevic served her up on a silver ptter,” Anne said. “The outcome was never in doubt. I may have come across a…a bit too friendly with her. But I merely took the time to feed my curiosity and practice my manners.”“Manners, indeed,” Boris said. He looked at her and she looked down. He let her off the hook by raising his gss, a gesture suggesting almost boundless magnanimity. “Brothers, let us all remember Viktor Andrejevic’s tireless work and contribution to our cause.” That got a round of nods from the table. “To Viktor!” Boris toasted, and everyone drank with him. Anne used the distraction to dab her eyes with her sleeve. If Boris noticed, he didn’t mention it, only speaking up when she was back to just standing there, waiting. “There is a thing we need you to handle, Simmons,” Boris said. “I expect you are familiar with these men from the isnd of Jamaica, specifically one of their gangs calling themselves the Four Paths Boys.”“Not in person, but I have heard of them,” Anne said. “Tell me what has to happen and I will see it done.” She knew this would not end to her liking, but what could she do other than be on her best behavior now?“It seems they are unclear on what is ours and what is theirs,” Boris said. “For some time now, they have gone around intimidating our friends and disrupting our businesses. I believe it is not time for war yet, however…there is money to be made here and an opportunity for peace, maybe, especially since you have dropped into our p.” He nodded to Arkady. “My thanks to Arkady for his shrewd analysis of the situation and the suggestion of using you as a go-between.”“My pleasure, Mr. Dolzhikov,” Arkady said.“…thank you, Mr. Dolzhikov,” Anne said, not sure what else to say. Was that why she was here? Was this the only reason she’d gotten this far, that she’d spent four years living in a Thief’s mansion, that everything seemed almost-but-not-quite forgiven now? “What are your orders?”“As long as you wear this suit, you speak with our voice,” Boris said, “but perhaps it will sound better to their ears when they see a face like their own. Your first task will be arranging a meeting with their leader, Sebastian Reid. Make no promises to him, but tell him that if he ceases the provocations, we are open to a discussion about mutual…respect. I trust you can handle the matter.”“Of course, Mr. Dolzhikov,” Anne said. “I will see to it right away.”“Excellent,” Boris said. “Now leave us, Simmons. And send in Ilya when you pass him. He has waited long enough.”“Yes, Mr. Dolzhikov,” she said. “Farewell, gentlemen,” she told everyone else, then waited for them to nod or grunt. But they were already talking amongst themselves, and only Arkady favored her with a quick nod.
She turned around and walked away.
