The Freshman (Kingmakers)

by Sophie Lark

  Apple Music → geni.us/freshman-apple

  I shut the music off when I hear a scuffling sound up ahead. Not a rat. Something worse than that.

  Fucking junkies.

  There’s three of them, two men and a woman. If you can even call them that. They look scraggly and feral, and I can smell them from twenty feet away.

  Who knows what the fuck they’re doing down here. They’ve got a duffle bag on the ground in the middle of their little huddle, and it looks like they’re pulling things out of it. Probably stolen from somebody on the subway, or on a crowded street up above.

  If they’re smart, they’ll let me pass by.

  Two of them have the right idea.

  But the third stands up, twitchy and bright-eyed.

  “Hey,” he says. “Where you goin’?”

  I ignore him, continuing to walk past.

  “Hey!” he shouts a little louder in his raspy voice. “I’m talkin’ to you!”

  His lank, unwashed hair hangs around his shoulders. He’s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath, so his skinny chest is bare. He’s got scabs on his face and body, and I can tell from the stiff way he walks that his feet are swollen. The effects of Krokodil.

  The government has tried to stamp it out a dozen times, but it always pops up again. It’s just so cheap to make. You can cook it in your kitchen with shit bought from pharmacies and hardware stores: hydrochloric acid, paint thinner, and phosphorous scraped off the side of a matchbox.

  It’s an imitation of heroin, just as addictive. The only downside is the way your flesh rots away from the injection site, and your brain starts to atrophy inside your skull. Which doesn’t lead to the best decision-making.

  Which is why this fucker thinks it’s a good idea to talk to me.

  “That a new iPhone?” he demands, eying my phone greedily.

  I stop walking, turning to face him slowly.

  “You want to fuck off now,” I tell him. I slip the phone into my pocket, so my hands are free. While I’m doing that, I close my fingers around the smooth handle of my switchblade instead.

  Without that faint blue light, the tunnel is even dimmer. It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I can see better than the three junkies.

  They’re all standing now, fanning out silently so the woman is in front of me, the two men trying to flank me.

  “Give us the phone,” the second man hisses.

  The problem with fighting these three is that I have no idea what diseases they might be carrying. One scratch from an uncut fingernail and I could get hepatitis.

  So as they close in around me, I plan to end it quick.

  The guy on the right charges first. I send him right back again with a kick to the chest. The second guy isn’t as lucky. I press the button to flick out my blade while it’s already whistling through the air toward his torso. I stab him right in the liver with medical precision, then jerk the blade back before I get any blood on me. It still splashes down on the toe of my sneaker.

  He drops to his knees, groaning.

  That takes the steam out of the other two.

  The girl raises her hands, blubbering, “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “Then fuck off like I said,” I tell her coldly.

  She grabs the duffle bag and scrambles off down the tunnel, the opposite direction I was walking.

  The guy I kicked looks at his fallen friend, then at me. He runs off after the girl, abandoning the man I stabbed.

  I ignore him too, continuing on down the tunnel.

  He’ll probably bleed to death, but the thought doesn’t disturb me any more than the knowledge that every butterfly you see will be dead in a month’s time. That’s the cycle of life—junkies die young, from the drugs, the company they keep, or trying to rob the wrong person in a tunnel.

  I continue on my way, until I reach the staircase up to Krymskiy Proyezd.

  Spring in Moscow is hell.

  There’s a word the Russians use to describe it: slyakot, which means “slush mud.” That’s partly why I stayed down in the tunnels—so I wouldn’t have to navigate the torrents of thick brown mud, stiff with ice crystals.

  The roads in Moscow are always shit. In the springtime you have to worry that you’re about to step through a slush drift into a pothole that will break your ankle. The sidewalks become crowded with shuffling, slipping pedestrians, and the traffic is worse than ever. The melting snowdrifts are black from a whole winter’s worth of car exhaust.

  Without any proper drainage system, the melted snow sits in stagnant puddles. It’s rasputitsa—the time of the year “when roads stop existing.”

  I hate Moscow.

  I’m an American. I was born in Chicago. My mother is American.

  And yet my father brought me here, back to the city he never liked himself. Back to the environment so miserable that it drove my mother to drink herself half to death, until the only way to save herself was to leave.

  I’ll be leaving soon myself.

  Going to the one place my father will support—the one thing he won’t view as abandonment.

  Finally I reach Korobeynikov Lane, where the slush has actually been painstakingly cleared from the street for the benefit of the elite residents of Noble Row. It’s a long, sandstone building divided into six luxury residences, worth about twenty-one million each in American dollars.

  That’s where I live with my father.

  I would assume that the other five houses on Noble Row are bright and clean inside, full of sparkling chandeliers and gleaming woodwork.

  That’s not how our house looks. Not on the inside.

  It’s dark, crowded, and filthy, because my father won’t allow any maids inside. He won’t let anyone in the house but me. Not since my mother left.

  He’s holed up in there like Howard Hughes, only leaving when he absolutely has to handle his business in person. And he’s barely managing that these days.

  I open our front door, struck in the face by a waft of stale and dusty air. It smells like the carpets haven’t been vacuumed in six years, which they haven’t. It smells like the windows are never opened, and the walls are full of mice.

  It’s dark inside, almost as dark as the train tunnel. The heavy navy drapes that hang floor to ceiling are all pulled shut. It’s as quiet as a tomb.

  You can still see the remnants of my mother’s decorating from the time when we first moved here, when I was a toddler and she still had the focus and energy for projects.

  I don’t actually remember that time, other than a few snippets—a few bright flashes nestled in my memory like jewels. My mother with paint streaks on her face, laughing and telling me not to ride my tricycle in the house. My father coming home dressed nicely in a suit, bringing me a little bag of Tula gingerbread, telling me to guess in which pocket it was hiding.

  I can see the work she did—the blue floral wallpaper in the dining room. The gold chandelier shaped like elkhorn. The soapstone fireplace with its pile of white birch logs, never burned, never touched since.

  All those rooms are filled with shit now. Piles of books stacked taller than I stand. Piles of newspapers, too. Magazines, old bills, and receipts. And then the boxes: things my father ordered and never even opened.

  So many boxes. Telescopes and globes. Toasters and binoculars. Stationery, photography equipment, power tools, and shoes. I couldn’t guess what’s in half of them. I don’t know why my father started ordering all this crap. And I don’t know why he piles it up on tables and chairs, never even bothering to look at most of it.

  I climb the long, curving staircase up to his office. He expects me to check in when I get home at night.

  I knock on the door, waiting for him to say, “Enter,” before I turn the knob.

  He’s seated behind his vast walnut desk, dressed neatly in a dark suit with a cleric collar. His ash-blond hair is combed back. He has carefully shaved the side of his face that grows hair.

  His hands are folded on the desktop in front of him—o
ne smooth and pale, one red and scarred. That hand doesn’t work as well as the other. The tissue is so tough and knotted that he can’t even grip a pen.

  My father is jarring to look at.

  He’s so handsome and so ugly at the same time.

  The left side of his face is beautiful almost to the point of femininity—his eye a particular shade of blue that almost looks violet, striking against his fair skin and white-blond hair.

  The right side is a mass of blistered, discolored flesh, like a dry river bottom baked and cracked by the sun. His hair is burned back to show a patch of shiny skull, and he has no eyebrow on that side. Even the eye itself is milky and pale. He can’t see out of it. His mouth twists up at the corner as if he’s smirking, though he never actually is.

  The scars run all the way down the right side of his body. Down his arm and leg.

  He looks like a strange kind of cyborg—part human, part something else. Not a robot—a monster. Maybe “chimera” is the best term.

  I’ve only ever seen him without a shirt on one time. He hates to be viewed that way. He hates to be viewed any way, really.

  He’s only become more sensitive about his appearance over time.

  When I was small, he would let me sit on his lap and touch the roughly wrinkled skin on his right hand.

  By the time my mother left, he wouldn’t let her near him. They slept in separate rooms so she wouldn’t even see him changing.

  My father is a powerful man. He holds a high position within the Bratva—the derzhatel obschaka, the bookkeeper. The head accountant for all illegal dealings within the city of Moscow.

  He has a team of men who work under him. He is subservient to only two men at the Moscow high table.

  And of course, like any criminal, he has enemies.

  But it wasn’t his enemies who did this to him.

  It was family.

  All his deepest wounds have come from the people he loved.

  He loved my mother once. Maybe he even loved me.

  Not anymore.

  He looks at me with his one good eye and that milky orb.

  I used to think that my father’s dual appearance represented the good and evil inside of him. The days when he was kind and brought me gingerbread, and the days that he raged and threw my mother’s decorations against the wall, smashing everything inside the house.

  Now I think there is no devil and angel inside of people.

  There’s only the appearance of good, and then what people actually are: weak and flawed. Destined to hurt you in the end.

  My father looks at my boxing trunks.

  “You fought today?”

  I nod.

  “Did you win?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Of course,” my father mimics me. “You are arrogant.”

  “It’s not arrogance if it’s true. I’ve never been beaten.”

  My father snorts softly. “I sounded like you once,” he says. “Stupidity must be universal at that age.”

  His good eye flits down to the toe of my shoe, where the junkie’s blood makes a dark stain on the dingy canvas.

  “Your blood or his?” he says.

  “Neither. Someone tried to rob me on the way home.”

  My father nods without interest in hearing more. “They didn’t know who your father was,” he says.

  He’s not bragging, just making a simple statement of fact. No one would attack the son of a Bratva on purpose.

  He shoves something across the desk toward me. An envelope: heavy, expensive, and slate gray in color.

  “What’s that?” I say.

  “Open it.”

  I crack the wax seal keeping the flap closed. Then I slip out the dual sheets of stationery, skimming down the ornate script.

  “I was accepted,” I say.

  “Danyl Kuznetsov recommended you.”

  “I’ll call to thank him.”

  “You’ll do more than that. He expects two years of labor from you after you graduate.”

  I nod. It’s a reasonable demand, considering the value of the favor.

  Most students accepted to Kingmakers are from legacy families—those where the father, the grandfather, and the great-grandfather all attended the school.

  My grandfather was part of a KGB task force, instructed to hunt down Bratva. He only rose through the ranks of the organization once he defected. The Bratva hated and distrusted him at first. He forced his way into their world. He advanced through violence and ruthlessness.

  Kingmakers is beyond exclusive. They’re scrupulous about who they allow through their doors. Only those who can be trusted with the secrets of mafia families from around the world are allowed to enter.

  I scan the letter once more.

  “They accepted me to the Heirs division,” I say.

  I wasn’t sure if they would. Moscow is divided into three territories with three separate bosses. Technically, my father isn’t one of them. But in our section of the city, the actual boss has no children, and neither does the next man down.

  If I do well at Kingmakers, there’s nothing stopping me from ascending to the position of Pakhan in time.

  I look at my father’s face, searching for some hint of emotion: pleasure, anticipation, pride.

  I see nothing.

  “I’m tired,” I tell him. “I’m going to bed early.”

  He nods and turns back to the papers spread across his desk.

  I go down the long, gloomy hallway to my bedroom.

  I strip off my clothes and stand under the boiling hot shower spray for as long as I can stand. I take my exfoliating sponge and I roughly scrape every millimeter of my skin, cleansing it of the sweat from my fight, the filth from the subway tunnels, and any possible hair or skin cells that might have touched me from those fucking junkies.

  I soap myself over and over, rinsing and then starting over once more.

  I always make sure that I’m perfectly clean, that I smell of nothing more offensive than soap. I do my own laundry, washing my clothes, my towels, and my sheets every time that I use them.

  I can’t stand the thought that I might accidentally smell as musty and unkempt as this house.

  The scent clings to everything I own.

  I hate that smell.

  I hate coming home.

  When I’m finally clean, I slip beneath the fresh sheets I put on the bed this morning.

  I take a book from my nightstand, the one I’ve been reading the last three nights: Midnight’s Children.

  I open it up and begin to read, till the physical exhaustion of the fight finally overtakes the frantic bustle of my brain.

  Then I set the book down and let my eyelids drop, trying to remember only the words on the page, and not let my mind wander.

  I don’t want to think about anything in my real life.

  That’s what books are for.

  To take you away . . .

  Anna

  3 Months Later

  It’s my last night sleeping in my own bed at home.

  Tomorrow I leave for Kingmakers for the entire school year.

  Once we’re at the school, we can’t come home again until the next summer. It’s part of the security measures necessary when you’re bringing in children of rival mafia families from all across the globe.

  There’s no cellphones allowed on the island. No laptops or iPads.

  You can use landlines to call out or you can write letters.

  It’s strange, and it’s old-fashioned—it makes me feel more like I’m going to another world, rather than simply to another country.

  I’ve never been away from my family before.

  We live in a mansion way out on the edge of the city. This house is already like our own secret world, away from everything else. The walls are so high, and the trees are so thick that you wouldn’t think there was anyone else within a hundred miles.

  I love our house intensely. It has everything I need.

  I’ve explored every inch
of it from the time I was small. It’s so old that it has dozens of tiny rooms and passageways. I used to climb into the dumbwaiter and lower myself down all the way to the kitchen. Or go through the secret hallway that runs from my father’s office out to the astronomy tower. There’s laundry chutes and a hidden staircase from the ballroom to the wine cellar.

  And then there’s the attic. It’s stuffed with items left behind from five previous generations of occupants: tarnished silver mirrors, old gowns, record albums, jewelry, photographs, crumbling letters, yellowed lace tablecloths, candles melted away and chewed by mice, ancient cribs, and dusty bottles of perfume that still carry the remnants of fragrance.

  I used to spend entire days up there, poking around in the moldy boxes, examining objects and putting them back again.

  My younger sister Cara loves it even more than I do. She likes to go up there with a lamp and bag of apples so she can write in her little notebook in the middle of two hundred years of history.

  Cara thinks she’s a poet or an author or something. She’s always scribbling away on some new project. She never lets us see it, though.

  Her work is probably pretty good, or as good as it can be, coming from a fourteen-year-old. Cara is brilliant, though most people don’t know it since she’s so quiet. She got all of our mother’s sweetness, but not her friendliness.

  Whelan is the opposite. He’s loud and outspoken and brash, and sometimes a little asshole. We all adore him regardless, ‘cause he’s the baby. But he can be sneaky and mischievous. His explorations of the house usually end with something broken, or him howling because he got his head stuck between the iron railings over by the old carriage house.

  My room looks down over the walled garden. It’s a dark room with high gothic windows, deep crimson walls, a massive fireplace, and ancient velvet canopies around the bed. It was the room my mother slept in when she first came to stay in this house.

  My father kidnapped her. Snatched her right off the street. Then locked her up in this house for months.

  Slowly, bit by bit, without realizing or wanting it, he fell in love with her, and she fell in love with him. Simultaneous Stockholm Syndrome.