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CHAPTER 1
THE MERCY BUS by Anna StarobinetsKursk Station
Translated by Mary C. Gannon
I'm waiting for mercy. It should be here any minute now. There it is, turning the corner. Soon it will stop and open up its doors to me and others like me. Just a few more minutes and we'll be warm.
Right now it's cold, though. It's real cold. Especially for me. At least they get to lie on the sewage grates, or sit nearby on the bare asphalt, their backs up against the gray panels of the train station. They get the choice spots. Hot steam rises up from under the ground, saturating their stinking rags and bodies, their hair and their skin. The steam is so hot that it even melts the icicles hanging down from the roof of the building. Droplets run down the icicles like pus. It's warm there, beneath the overhang.
On the other hand, I don't envy them. When they get up they're going to feel ten times worse, with their clothes soaking wet and all — it's minus thirty degrees. True, they'll be getting right onto the bus, but who wants to be soaking wet in a bus?
A shapless old hag in sagging purple tights is asleep, breathing gently. The rest are awake. They watch with no expression as the bus approaches. The cripple shuffled off, the hem of his soft leather overcoat trailing behind him on the frozen ground, his shiny black dress shoes worth a thousand dollars each. Unbelievable, he hadn't even wanted them! Foxy Lee had it all figured out. "At the station you can just trade with one of them," she'd said, but she hadn't considered that these retards might turn down such a good deal, clutching their rags with iron grips.
I had to force the trade on him. I can be pretty convincing sometimes, particularly when I'm right.
By the way, never pick a fight with a bum at Kursk station. It's like trying to battle with a giant rotten apple, or a bag of garbage.
True, they were too small for him, the shoes. But that's no big deal, he can break them in. Or sell them. The rest of the duds were too big for him. But that's how they wear them around here.
None of his friends went after him. No one tried to stop me while I was slugging him either. The expressions on their swollen steamy faces were hard for me to make out, even under the streetlight, but I think they were looking kind of hostile.
So just in case, I keep to the edge of the group. I'm safer here, near the entrance gates and the cops. Because, first of all, they're afraid of the cops. Second, they're too lazy — no, lazy's not the right word, they're too comatose to cover the fifty-meter distance to where I'm standing.
Of course, the cops tried to shoo me away. There were two of them. I gave them each a hundred bucks (I didn't have any smaller bills on me). They stared at me, and then at the bills, with their blank fish eyes, and finally they laid off. Understandable, I guess. It's not every day you see a piss-covered bum around Kursk station with a wad of greenbacks in his pocket. A minute later one of them came back. He sniffed back his snot, his nose violet from the frost, and stared hungrily at the bridge of my nose.
"Got any ID?"
I gave him another hundred. Breathing hard, he examined it under the yellow light of the streetlamp, then stuffed it inside his jacket. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. His gaze slid like sewage water down my unshaven face, broken nose, lip soaked in blood, and my dirty rags covered in brownish-yellow stains, before slithering back up to my face, where it paused for a moment on my misshapen gray hat with earflaps. Something caught his attention there, either the cut of the hat or the locks of hair that were left uncovered, too shiny and clean for the likes of me. I pulled my hat down over my forehead to reassure him. He had already forgotten about it, and his eyes shifted over me mechanically, until he focused on the bridge of my nose again.
"Where'd you steal the money?"
Now that was going too far.
"I earned it," I told him. But my voice came out sounding choked and hoarse, like a crow cawing.
"I'm taking you down," the cop said colorlessly, and suddenly — I swear — his teeth started chattering, maybe from the cold or, most likely, from hunger, the greedy bastard.
I gave him another hundred bucks, promising myself that this was the last time. I really didn't want any problems with law-enforcement officers, but arrogance has its limits, even from a cop. And four hundred is definitely the limit. If he tried to get any more out of me, I'd kill him.
Again, he studied my contribution, then hid it away. He sniffed. Coughed uncertainly.
"Any more questions, officer?" I croaked, pulling the mitten off my frozen hand so that it would be easier to shoot if he said yes, and cursing myself for the servile "officer," which had rolled off my lips like a token rolling out of the broken turnstile at the john in Kursk station.
By the way, don't ever take a piss at Kursk. Unless, of course, you like pissing into a reeking hole in the cold in front of other people for fifteen rubles.
A passenger train pulled into the station with a shriek and a groan. The cop squinted lazily at the train and then stole a glance at my bare fingers — too clean, too smooth, and my nails were too manicured. He was thinking hard about something, which was obviously not easy for him. He wrinkled his low forehead, and his eyebrows twitched like cockroaches. Finally the twitching stopped.
"Who are you?" he asked, and looked me in the eye for the first time, intently and with some degree of intelligence. He was obviously on the brink of some kind of realization.
I felt the icy handle of the gun in my pocket. To be honest, I don't like guns. I'm a bad shot, anyway. On the other hand, even a fool can shoot. Right. First you just cock it back ...
Foxy Lee hadn't wanted to give me the gun. That put me on my guard. She kept pushing me gently toward the door, shaking her red mane of hair and mumbling, "You won't be needing that. Come on! You don't need it." Then she caught my stare and her face crumpled up like she was hurt. "You don't believe me, do you? Just like before!"
I thought she was going to start bawling. But she didn't. She handed me the gun, barrel first, and frowned. That's not how you do it. Handgrip first, I said to myself automatically, and took the gun from her, feeling ashamed again.
"Just don't do anything stupid," said Foxy. "If anything happens, one of my guys will be at the station. He'll help you."
Suddenly I felt uncomfortable.
"One of your guys? What does that mean?"
"Ours," Foxy corrected herself playfully. "Our guy. A friend." She put her arms around my neck. Her hands were cool and her fingertips were slightly moist.
"I'll get along fine without your friends." I wanted to pull away, but she wouldn't let me.
"Don't be jealous," Foxy whispered into my ear. "It was a long time ago."
That made me even more mad. A long time ago, what the hell is that supposed to mean? When Stary picked you up at the train station you were seventeen, a filthy, skinny little redhead. You're twenty-one now. Only twenty-one, girl! So what the hell does that mean — a long time ago?
She stroked my cheek. Her fingers smelled sweetly of flower-scented hand cream and blood.
"I'll be with you," said Foxy. "If that's what you want."
I nodded and said I did. I was angry and I wanted her, and I kissed her red hair, and her thick blond eyelashes, her little palms and those fingers — cold, moist fingers that she hadn't managed to wash very well. I kissed them and inhaled their scent, animal-like and childish at the same time.
"Listen to me, buddy!" the cop said, his voice rising. "Who the fuck are you?"
"... two ... three ..." I whispered.
"What?!"
I decided to count to seven, my favorite number, and then shoot.
"... four ..."
People started filing out of the train that had just pulled in, making a wide semicircle around the spot where I stood with the cop. Some character in a leather jacket with a shaved head shuffled by, looking furtively at us. Then he stopped and stared.
"Keep moving!" the cop barked at him.
The guy walked straight toward us.
"Let me see your ID," the cop demanded, taken aback.
"Cn I've a wrd ith you, offcr?" mumbled the guy in leather, completely unfazed but slurring every sound. He gestured to the cop amiably.
The cop turned to me and then to the leather guy — and froze.
"C'mon, c'mon," the leather guy said, still slurring his words, but this time in a more commanding tone. "Git ovr here, offcr."
Suddenly, the eyes of the officer took on the expression of an animal, a mix of sharp sadness and surprise, and he silently strode over to the leather guy the way a dog goes to its trainer when it has mixed up its commands.
The fellow in leather whispered a few brief words into the cop's ear. The cop looked at me from under his brow, nodded dejectedly, and sauntered off into the darkness.
"Offcr!" the leather guy called after him quietly.
"Aren't you frgetting smethin?"
The cop's back slumped.
"Didn ya take smthin tht didn blong to ya?"
The back didn't so much as stir.
"Git outta here," the guy in leather said, softening, and the cop rushed off, his boots crunching on the frozen crust of snow.
"Watch it, buddy!" The guy in leather advised me good-naturedly, then winked and moved away.
"Thanks," I replied politely, but he didn't turn around.
Buddy. Uh-huh, right.
* * *
And so I'm waiting for mercy. It should be here soon.
Here it is now. It just came around the corner, stopped next to the train station, and opened its doors to me.
Mercy, as everyone knows, is blurry and abstract. It can assume many different forms: from a coin at the bottom of your pocket to a blank check, from a plastic doggie bag to a benefit concert, from a kiss to artificial respiration, from a Validol pill to a shot in the head, from the ability to love to the ability to kill.
The mercy granted me is concrete. It takes the form of a dirty white bus. It is given to me for one night — this cold, dark, terrible, final, happy, damned night — and I will accept it without hesitation.
On this cold night, when you can freeze to death in an hour.
On this dark night, when you can disappear without a trace in a minute.
On this terrible night, when they're looking for me high and low: in apartments and bars, in subways and airports, at hotels and movie theaters, in nightclubs and casinos, on the streets and in stairwells.
On this final night they are looking for me so they can kill me.
On this happy night, when they won't find me because no one will think to look for me here, on the Mercy Bus that saves the homeless from hunger and cold.
Mercy is what I need on this damned night.
That is why I fall before the open doors of the bus. I cough, I snort, and I wheeze. I crawl on all fours as though I don't have the strength to stand up, and I stretch my trembling hands toward them — toward three people in blue jackets, with red crosses on their sleeves and the word Mercy on their backs, and gauze masks pulled tight over their faces. I babble, my tongue tripping on the sounds.
I crawl at their feet, touching their shoes and begging: "... Help ... save me ..." I sniff, then grovel: "Save me ..."
Foxy taught me to do that. "There aren't many seats on the bus," she said. "They only take the ones who are in really bad shape. They drive you around the city all night, keep you warm, feed you, and in the morning bring you back."
"Only the ones who are in really bad shape."
"Only the ones who are completely down-and-out."
"Only the ones who will die without them."
Well, at least I wasn't lying when I groveled. Without them, I really would die. Stary's men would kill me. They'd hunt me down and kill me like a witless animal.
Besides, the cops would be after me soon too.
"I'm fucked, man ..."
And the merciful guys in masks pick me up by the arms and haul me into the bus. Now I am safe. I will be safe all night long, until morning. In the morning I'll get on the 7:01 train.
The men in masks seat the swollen, dirty, frozen, decomposing half-people. The Mercy Bus drives off.
Foxy Lee, my girl, my little train-station slut, my sweet guardian angel, found me a safe lair to hide in. Safe and stinking.
God almighty, what a stench! I'd give every greenback in my possession for a mask — the kind those brothers of mercy have. Gimme a mask, man, gimme a mask!
The windows of the bus are draped in thin threads of frost, adorned in snowy cobwebs, covered from the inside with a frozen glaze. That thin glaze is all that separates the stinking, sticky warmth of our bus from the piercing cleanliness of the city. Out there it is easy and painful to breathe. With each breath, your nostrils seem to stick together. Out there my killers are looking for me, swearing and cursing, inhaling and exhaling the frozen air.
Here, inside, trying not to breathe through my nose, I scrape out an ugly peephole in the perfect pattern of the frosted window, and I look out.
We crawl along past the Atrium, and the engine roars and trembles in helpless convulsions. The mall glows with neon. Half-naked mannequins pose in shop windows, and others just like them, only dressed up in fur coats and winter jackets, surge through the glass doors to the twenty-four-hour cash registers. In the glare of headlights, streetlamps, and billboards, in a red snowstorm, the people, their faces rust-colored, look like frolicking devils. Their cars, parked seven rows deep, form the seven circles of hell — a honking Moscow hell, where traffic jams happen even at midnight.
Still, this place seemed by far the best location for the Merciful Monsters Charity Ball. The idea for the ChaBa (Charity Ball) belonged to me and me alone, though I had planned to rent a cushy theater like the MKhAT, or a concert hall, or at the very least a fancy nightclub.
Stary was the one who wanted to have the Charity Ball in the Atrium. Stary and Foxy Lee spent a lot of time in the Atrium. Foxy liked buying perfume, lotion, high heels, clothes, lingerie, bedding, shampoo, cookies, and sauces in nearly industrial quantities. Stary, I can't deny it, waited for her patiently, no matter how long it took. He even made excuses to his bleary-eyed bodyguards: "She had a tough frickin' childhood, so frickin' cool it! And cover your frickin' traps when you yawn, goddamnit!" While Foxy was shopping, he liked to kill time in a restaurant, eating sushi and washing it down with tequila, before going to a movie. He thought of himself as a film buff. From time to time, along with his lovers and security guards, Stary would take one of his subordinates to the Atrium. The invitation was the boss's seal of approval and guaranteed promotion, prosperity, and impunity to the recipient for some time to come.
This period usually lasted no more than two months. When his shelf life ran out, the favorite was thrown onto the garbage heap (that is to say, demoted to personal chauffeur of the second secretary's assistant, or fired, or wiped off the face of the earth, depending on Stary's mood).
From the beginning of November, I accompanied Foxy and Stary to the Atrium. Toward the end of December I was still the favorite, although I sensed that my time was running out. Late that month, Stary called me to the Atrium, sent Foxy off shopping, knocked back a double shot of tequila, and announced: "A friend of mine used to light a candle at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior if things were going good for him. I always thought that a candle wasn't enough. But I kept quiet because he was doing all right and I wasn't. Now my friend's in prison. It'll be a long, long time before he gets out. And now things are going good for me."
Stary was doing all right. He had found a cozy place for himself on the Pipeline. His perch was nonetheless precarious enough that he was ready to bail out any minute (the Pipeline didn't quite belong to him yet, at least not completely). He didn't experience any discomfort in his backside, however (because the Pipeline did not entirely belong to someone else). He sat placidly and listened to the faint gurgle of the black blood of Russia as it flowed abroad.
"I'm swimming in oil! She's black and she's mine!" Stary said this with carnivorous relish, as though he was talking about a naked and capricious African princess who gave herself to him at night with shrieks, tears, and moans. It tormented and affronted me in the most idiotic, awkward, and ridiculous way. When the boss used this expression, which he did very often, an ill-fated black princess appeared before my eyes: moist, nimble, shapely, and bearing a certain resemblance to Halle Berry. A second later, her image was replaced by that of a red-haired girl. The one Stary really did fuck. Foxy. Does Foxy moan when she comes? Does she close her whitish fox eyes, or do they go large and glassy, like those of a stuffed animal? These questions preoccupied me a great deal.
"Are you listening to me?"
"Yes, boss, of course!"
What does she smell like? What does she taste like?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Moscow Noir"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Akashic Books.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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