Moskva (4 page)

"Take it down to the kitchen for tomorrow's dinner," he ordered, waving Alina away with his pen in hand. "I paid good money for that damned thing."

New York City - the past

Mishka expected Rodchenko to have his men in the library parking lot Saturday morning as the doors opened, with more of his thugs covering the emergency exits. Any other Saturday, the old man would have sent Alina with no better than two guards. If they were old, they would have snoozed in one of the overstuffed chairs in the sun on the first floor. If young, they would have ignored Alina in flavor of flirting with the petite redhead who served as the children's librarian on the weekends.

But this was the Saturday after half a dozen of Rodchenko's thugs had cornered him on the docks at the end of his shift, their fists and boots delivering a warning to leave the city and stay away from Dmitrey Rodchenko's property -- all of it.

With just the clothes on his back, a few dollars in his pocket and the bank where he kept a secret safety deposit box closed for the day, he spent the night in the park cradling his bruised ribs and thinking of Alina as a midnight storm blew through the city.

Friday afternoon, he bought two bus tickets for Chicago, one for him and the other for Alina. Then he entered the library an hour before closing and found a place to hide, his large frame compressed between the underside of a long conference table and the seats of the chairs he had pushed in.

When the security guard came in a few hours later and swept his flashlight, he saw nothing but empty floor and wooden chair legs. All night long Mishka stayed like that, the battered ribs screaming fresh agony with every breath he took.

Only once the library opened did he crawl out of his hiding place and pull a baseball cap over the yellow hair he had dyed black before buying the bus tickets.

Alina always came in the morning on Saturday, before the day got too busy and her father became as stingy with his men as he was with his money. Mishka knew where she would go in the library from the books she would always show him upon her return. Classic literature filled with love and war, longing and loss, always drew her. She favored English authors, but Tolstoy and his contemporaries could be found pressing cozily against one of the Bronte sisters on Alina's nightstand.

Hugging the side of a wall, the brim of the cap pulled down to hide his bright blue eyes, he made his way to the Russian section first, his ears alert to any familiar voices.

Using a small mirror, he looked down the aisle and found it empty. Moving two rows over, he waited against an end cap, his body turned sideways so that no one scanning the rows of books would see him.

Long minutes passed, each one promising a more brutal beating than what he had received at the docks if Rodchenko's guards found him.

How ironic and like the old man would it be to keep Alina at home but send his thugs to the library?

Stuck on the thought, he heard sound in the aisle at last. Checking with his mirror again, he confirmed that it was Alina and she was alone. Taking a book from the end cap, he placed it on the floor and eased it into her view, know that she would pick it up if she saw it.

He counted the seconds, not sure how long he could afford to wait for her to find it. She might have already selected a few books and moved on.

Edging the mirror out again, he stared at her reflection. She hadn't stirred since he last looked, not even a fraction of an inch. Her hands rested against the spines of several books, her fingers splayed, her face caving in on itself as she stared into nothing.

With a light clearing of his throat, he tried to draw her attention down the row. No sound answered the attempt, not even a rustling of clothes.

Sucking in a deep breath, he stepped into the center of the row and quickly closed the distance between them. Capturing her elbow, he drew her behind the end cap, her soft body compliant as he tugged and steered.

"Alina, it's me," he whispered, lifting the brim of his baseball cap.

She seemed out of it, drugged perhaps. Had Rodchenko given her some kind of medicine so she would be willing bait?

Cupping one of her round cheeks, he lightly tapped the other to rouse her senses.

"We're leaving now. Do you understand?"

Comprehension began to spread across her lovely face only to shut down an instant later as her gaze turned hard and cold.

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

This was not his Alina talking. It didn't even sound like her voice. There was an edge to it as thin and sharp as a razor blade.

"Leave before they find you."

Whatever her reason for ordering him away, he ignored it. She was afraid, that was all, afraid her father's men would hurt him.

"How many guards?"

"More than a boy like you can handle," she answered, the cadence of her words a perfect match for the Rodchenko men he had spent his teen years despising.

She brushed his hands away and pushed at his chest. Stunned, he let her open up a distance of a few inches between them. Her gaze swept over him, her lips curling with distaste as she took in his clothes wrinkled from a night spent in hiding.

"I have bus tickets for us. There's a window in the break room big enough to crawl through."

Her gaze was as dead as the fish he spent summers carting around in barrels at the docks.

"You don't have to be afraid of your father or Dima," Mishka coaxed, certain that it was fear fueling her resistance. "We are right by the station -- the bus leaves in thirty minutes. They won't be done looking for you in the stacks by the time..."

She tilted her head, the motion robotic.

"How many times did you ask your mother to leave?" she softly whispered, her voice dripping with a false sweetness. "I heard you once, that first month, crying and begging like a little bitch."

Mishka braced as if she'd hit his already battered body with all her force. His Alina never swore.

"If she couldn't love you enough, why should I?"

He grabbed her shoulders, his fingertips digging at her soft flesh.

"Did they threaten you? Did they tell you they would kill me? Is that why you're saying this?"

It had to be. His sweet Alina would never talk like this. He didn't care how much she looked and sounded like a true Rodchenko at that moment. She was incapable of such venom.

Then how come it flowed so easily off the tip of her tongue?

Her plump lips twisted into a sneer. "I don't care enough to lie to you, Mikhael. If you try to take me, they will kill you. But I don't care if you live or die."

She brought her hands up between their bodies, her palms open and poised for a sharp clap that would draw Rodchenko's thugs. "Shall I show you how much I don't care?"

Releasing her shoulders, he stepped back and shook his head, reality spearing its way through his chest.

Alina was lost to him -- if he'd ever really had her at all.

New York City - the past

Mishka lingered in the city, the few thousand dollars he had stashed in the security deposit box at the bank dwindling fast. For twenty bucks a night, he got a room in a flop house that was little more than a former closet walled off. No private bathroom, no window, one door, and a sliver of floor between the bed and the wall, was all his money afforded him. Located at one end of the first floor, his neighbor was a hooker whose thrashing and moaning plagued his attempts to sleep. Across from his room was the communal toilet that tenants visited throughout the night.

He stayed in New York because of Alina even though he knew he should have gone straight from the library to the bus station. Escaping the library, Mishka had spotted four cars in the parking lot that he knew by sight and six perimeter guards working in pairs at all the exits. Rodchenko was serious about his warning to stay away. The old man wanted a reason he could wave in front of the other families for why he "rightfully" killed his dead wife's son.

Listening to his neighbor and her customer finish their business, Mishka closed his eyes and tried to catch some sleep before she returned with another man to fuck.

His brain didn't want to settle. Should he make a second attempt at the library? If she showed up, did that mean she wanted to see him again? Should he try to get into the house -- or at least the yard?

There were two windows that looked out on the garden with its alleyway gate. One was Rodchenko's office window. The other was an alcove in the hall where she liked to read and could almost always be found when he was returning from his day at the dock.

Foolishly, he had fancied she chose the spot to see his arrival home and to have him pass her in the hall on his way into his room. Now he wasn't so sure.

Her barb about his mother had sunk deep.

Within days of his father's violent, unsolved death as an underling in Rodchenko's crime syndicate, the old man had swooped in to make sure the widow Nazarova's needs were being met. Even at thirteen, Mishka new Dmitrey's visit was unusual. There were other widows and mothers on the street whose husbands and sons had died doing his dirty work. Most were abandoned.

But none looked like Kata with her pale freckled skin, yellow gold hair and sky blue eyes.

She had a beauty that didn't belong in the slums of Moscow. Rodchenko pounced at the first opportunity and carried her away to America. Mishka had spent the rest of his childhood as unwanted baggage living under the withering gaze and iron thumb of a crime lord and his petty tyrant of a son.

The only thing that had kept him from running away that first year and all the years that followed was Alina. Even though he now knew those years had been wasted, he still couldn't leave, still clung to the edge of the city in a roach infested flophouse with walls so thin he could put a fist through them with a simple morning stretch of his massive arms.

Mishka maneuvered from laying on his left side facing the wall to his right side, his body too big to sleep on his back in the narrow bed. Finishing his turn, he reached to pull the thin sheet over his shoulders and caught his first whiff of danger.

Smoke -- in a five-story tinder box with no working fire alarms and no sprinklers.

He sat up immediately, his bare feet sliding into his work boots as he inhaled deeply. He smelled fuel. This was not somebody's hot plate left on too long, the contents turning to a hardened ash in the pan.

This was intentional.

Having gone to bed in jeans and a t-shirt, he raced to lace up his boots and then he slid on his jacket. He made a quick check of the pockets to ensure his wallet and an old Russian passport were in place. He shouldered the cheap backpack he had purchased at a re-sale shop to hold a few pieces of clothing. The contents didn't amount to much, but it would hurt to lose anything now that everything else had been taken from him.

Other tenants were beginning to flee their apartments, the hall a mix of languages with voices ranging from the very old to the newly born.

Smoke started to pour under and around the edges of his door, the room's air growing painfully thick.

In partitioning the tenement into more units, the slum lord who owned the place had salvaged materials from other buildings. Mishka's door was metal, one of the sturdiest and the biggest reason why he had picked the room despite it being in a high traffic area because of the shared toilet and stairwell.

He placed his palm against the door's surface. He could feel the heat, hear the crackle of flames. The accelerant fueled fumes turned his stomach sick. He hiked the collar of his shirt up over his nose and used the edge his jacket as a mitt to turn the door knob.

Fire waited for him on the other side, but there was no window to crawl out of. Bracing for a blast of heat, he pulled on the door.

It wouldn't budge. The knob turned freely but the door wouldn't open inward. He jerked again, abandoning the jacket to grip the knob with his hand and twist as hard as he could.

Panic building in his chest, Mishka threw himself at the door. He heard the bounce of heavy metal chains and knew -- the fire was set for him. Rodchenko's thugs had warned him to leave the city and he had stayed. The old man was willing to burn down a five-story tenement filled with hundreds of people to carry out his threat against one man.

Backing up as far as the tight quarters would allow, he aimed a kick at the door knob, his eyes beginning to burn and water from the smoke.

The kick was fruitless, not even a groan of protest.

Outside his room, people were starting to panic as tenants from the higher floors streamed into the smoke-filled hall. He imagined all eyes focused on the nearest exist -- which was half a building away from his chained door.

There were no heroes in this building. The fire teams would be too slow to reach him. And his time to break through the door was over -- he could feel the heat of the fire on his threshold.

A grim laugh burnt its way up his throat. He had bitched and moaned inside his head about the paper thin walls between the units. He hoped like hell he was right about their consistency.

Flipping the bed and frame onto its side, he gained a little distance away from the wall then charged at it, his shoulder leading the way with his forearm up to guard his head. Plaster crumbled. A pipe no more round than his thumb broke at its joint, dousing him with water.

Stumbling against the prostitute's bed, he reached to his right hoping for a window but finding only the sturdier exterior wall. Looking to his left, he knew the door out was a last option, the wood already splintering from the heat. Shoving the whore's bed against the wall he had just demolished, he flipped it, threw his arm up again and charged at the next wall between units.

Pain sliced through his hip as another decaying pipe broke, the metal shearing and cutting through his jeans. Ignoring the wound, he turned to the room's single window, tearing down the curtain to find bars welded in place.

He coughed, choking on mucus as the acrid smoke scraped at his throat and lungs. Reaching the door, he touched its surface then seized the knob and yanked. Smoke billowed thick into the room. In the hall, a screaming woman ran past as she exited the stairwell.

Poking his head out, Mishka looked toward the exit. Blood froze in his veins. Kiril Lapin, one of Rodchenko's
Boyevik
warriors stood surrounded in a soft haze of smoke, a wet handkerchief to his face. With a gun in his hand, he waved the tenants out of the building.

With no more than a few seconds to decide before Lapin turned around and spotted him, Mishka hurled himself at the stairwell and began to push frantically against the wave of bodies that streamed downward.

By the time he reached the third floor landing, there was no one to push against. He took the fourth and fifth-floor stairs two steps at a time, reaching the roof out of breath and coughing up chunks of soot-filled snot.

Wheezing, he made his way to the edge of the roof and looked down to the narrow alley below. The flames on his corner of the building were about to overtake the fourth floor, the lower floors already beginning to crumble. With the support under his feet in danger of giving way, he dashed to the opposite end and stared down again.

Taking a deep breath, he eyeballed the distance between his rooftop and that of the building across the alley. Eight feet maybe, plus the three foot tall lip on each roof.

Looking down into the alley, he saw more of the building in flames. It wouldn't be long before the fire leapt across the alley and everything under his feet collapsed into rubble.

With no time to practice the distance, he went to the other side of the roof and started running. Two feet from the building's lip, he sprung upward, his long legs quickly tucking close to his ass as he went airborne over the alley.

A month after his desperate leap, he touched down in Moscow as Rodya Kalinin -- the newest recruit in a joint task force between the FBI and its Russian counterpart to stop organized crime.