Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  As cloddish as Rae was refined, Oleg—like most of the dozen or so men who at some point or other had joined in holding Danny and me prisoner in the house—stood around six feet tall and had dark olive skin, black thinning hair, and a bushy black mustache that covered his jowly face. Given to outbursts of quick temper, he was dressed as ever in black from head to toe and bulky work boots. And a moment later, he began arguing vehemently with the most unforgettable character of all: an old hag of a woman who was his mother. I didn’t know her name—everyone in the house called her babushka, or ‘grandmother’—but she was straight out of a Hollywood movie about gypsies.

  She was at most times my warden. And she was by far the angriest woman I’ve ever encountered in my life. One minute she would be demanding that everyone eat, the next she would be screaming at anyone who was not complying with her rules. ‘Coosheet, coosheet,’ (‘eat! eat!’) she would order in a high-pitched squeal that made my ears hurt. She was a small but strong woman, and she had the will of an ox. I often imagined she was probably quite pretty in her youth. She had piercing blue eyes and a vibrant smile, which displayed a full mouth of gold teeth—a dead giveaway that she had some money, as in Russia only the wealthy can afford to sport these ‘jewels,’ which were a status symbol.

  Her one overriding feature, however, was her snarling temper that could flare at a moment’s notice, a quality she clearly had handed down to her son. Together now in the kitchen, they were going at each other as if they expected the sky to fall in. For me, any such dissonance was foreboding. And if I amused myself at times by telling myself one could see the babushka’s kind in any gypsy fortune-teller’s storefront, the last thing I wanted to do right at this moment was ask her about my future. I was all too sure she knew. During ten days of torture, both physical and psychological, hour upon hour had passed, taunting me to the point of implosion. The single most spine-chilling symbol of those ten days in hell was the nail-encrusted wooden club with which I was frequently beaten or threatened; and it turned my body into a black-and-blue totem pole. It’s no exaggeration to say that the dogs in the house were treated more humanely. Indeed, Danny and I had to share the dogs’ toilet facilities—the backyard—and we were permitted to use it only when the dogs had finished their business. Other heinous acts that I endured were so degrading and demeaning that I never even told Danny that they had happened.

  Now, on this ominous morning, I sensed that the game of torture was over. Whatever it was the people in this house from hell wanted to do to me was going to happen, right now.

  Outside, I could hear the tinny squeal of the iron gate opening once again, a sound that had come to send waves of terror up my spine, and the sound of a great commotion, voices shouting in anger, booted feet stomping.

  Again, my first reflex was to think of Danny. He had been taken from the house, as he frequently was, around five hours before, and my worst fear kept streaming into my head: Was he dead? Had they killed him? Would I ever see him again? Would I be next?

  Looking at Oleg, I plucked up the courage—don’t ask me where it came from—to confront him.

  ‘Gdye moi moozh?’ (‘Where is my husband?’) I sputtered, fighting back the temptation to spit in his hideous face.

  For a moment, he stared back at me, anger swelling his veins, but just then, two more men came in who had not only been part of the gang of junkyard dogs but had at times seemed to be calling the shots for them. I knew them only as Robert and Kuzin, but I thought I knew exactly who and what they were, by their refined, sophisticated manners and use of subtly nuanced threats.

  They bore, in every respect, the earmarks of KGB agents trained in the old order of Soviet tyranny, only to be cast adrift in the new order of uneasy Russian democracy to hook up with low-level underworld elements.

  They began engaging Oleg and the babushka in heated, animated conversation. All of them were babbling wildly and shouting for everyone in the house to come to the foyer area. People began emptying out of various rooms, pulling on their clothes and their boots as they ran, some nearly tripping over each other. All of them had guns tucked into their belts.

  Women scrambled not out of the rooms but back into them, where their children were sleeping.

  Amid this maelstrom of confusion and chaos, I clutched my suitcase, standing rooted to the floor, knowing not what to do or say or think. But I did know that if this was when I was going to die at the hands of this pack of rats, it would not be on their terms; it would not be with fear in my eyes, begging for my life. Nor would it be with those eyes staring at my captors’ faces. It would be in a state of unconsciousness.

  Rae gave me the chance to carry out my way of dying. At that moment, she began making motions again at me, bringing her index finger up to her mouth, as if she was saying I shouldn’t ask Oleg anything else. Then she directed me to go back up the stairs to get my other suitcase and the bright purple overcoat I had bought expressly for this trip to Russia. Clearly, I was going to be taken somewhere, God only knew where.

  I climbed back upstairs to the bedroom, where my handbag lay on the floor next to the bed and the other suitcase. I opened it and took out my makeup case. In one of the inside pockets, tucked out of sight, was a packet of Valium tablets, six in all, each five milligrams, individually encased in tinfoil wrapping. I normally kept the Valium for what I liked to call ‘insurance’ on airplane flights. I had such a terrible fear of flying that I always told myself that if the plane took a nosedive, I was going to swallow all that Valium so I wouldn’t feel the sting of death. Not once had I actually slipped any in my mouth. How ironic was it, then, that the first time I ever had reason to do it I was standing firmly on the ground?

  There comes a time in many people’s lives when they are utterly convinced that they are staring right into the mouth of death. For me, that time was at hand. I could see no way around it. And so I popped out the Valium and funneled the loose tablets into my pants pocket, then put the makeup case back into the suitcase. Forgetting about my coat, I began to haul the other suitcase out of the room and down the stairs.

  I was halfway down the staircase when a thundering herd of booted footsteps burst through the front door, which was knocked off its hinges. A man in a green, dubon-style, army parka was holding a machine gun—which I recognised as what I thought looked like an Uzi—with two hands, a baton hanging from his side. My eyes met his.

  Behind him, a dozen of other similarly dressed men carrying Uzis flooded into the house. They ran around me up the stairs and into rooms, screaming and waving their guns at men, women, and children, who were running all about in panic. Irrationally—the only way my mind could work after ten days of being conditioned to think I would die—I assumed this was a death squad hired by Oleg to kill me.

  Indeed, that first soldier was still looking right in my eyes. Seeming not to blink, he moved toward me. With his front foot planted on the bottom step, he lifted his Uzi and pointed it at my stomach. I dropped the suitcase. It fell onto the first step where his foot was. Reflexively, I put my hands out in front of me, expecting to feel a bullet tearing through my body. I wanted to plead, ‘No! No! Don’t shoot!’ but my body refused to move and no sound escaped from my mouth.

  I waited, cursing the fact that I couldn’t reach for my Valium. Damn, I thought, I should have inhaled them upstairs. I’d feel the full force of a horribly painful death.

  I waited, with thoughts racing around in my head about Danny, about my children, about the things I hadn’t been able to do in my life.

  I waited.

  I was ready to die.

  In many ways, I believed I already had.

  2

  MOSCOW, EARLY MORNING

  JANUARY 16, 1992

  THE NOOSE TIGHTENS

  On that Wednesday night, the 15th, Danny had been taken from the dacha at about 10pm. He was put into the back seat of a Fiat Tipor. Oleg was at the wheel, and in the back of the car with Danny sat a dark and sullen-eyed gangster named Boris. In
the front passenger seat was another of the mongrels, a man for whom Yvonne had personal reasons for despising, a smirking, always-unwashed creature called Sascha, whom the Weinstocks merely called ‘the Snake.’

  The black car tore down icy, treacherous roads for a good hour until Danny could see brilliantly lit office towers, mosques, and spires rising in the night. He knew he was in Moscow now, in the middle of the city, and the car rolled to a stop on Chekhova Street, in front of where the Weinstocks kept the Moscow office of their lucrative but unregulated—and thus very risky, both economically and personally—Australian-based barter trade business. Oleg and Boris climbed out, leaving Danny alone with the Snake, who lit up a cigarette and rolled down the window a crack to let out a pungent cloud of smoke. Not knowing if he’d been left alone with Sascha so that the murderous clod could kill him and dump his body in the closest underbrush, a shivering Danny pulled his coat collars up and the flaps of his hat down over his ears to shield himself against the minus-20-degree cold.

  The Snake then moved into the driver’s seat and invited Danny up front. Would this merely make it easier for him to put a bullet in his temple and drive off without delay? Danny’s long legs were stiff from the long drive, so he was relieved to get out and stretch them. He then asked if he could relieve himself outside. Sascha readily agreed, and he too got out, whereupon the two men urinated in the snow.

  ‘Do you do this in Australia?’ the Snake asked with a laugh in pidgin English.

  Danny, not half as amused as the lumbering assassin, replied, ‘There’s no snow in Australia.’

  Both men then returned to the car, sharing the front seat. But the car just sat there, the motor off, the lights doused. Finally, after half an hour in what seemed like an ice box, a black Volga drove up next to them, and a man motioned for Sascha to follow. They weren’t going to the Weinstocks’ office, after all. Instead, within minutes, they were in front of a dilapidated billiard parlour.

  Danny was led inside, past worn pool tables at which there were maybe two or three men who barely looked up. He was taken through a maze of rooms until they came to a back office. Here, around a big table, were some faces Danny had come to recognise from their regular visitations to the dacha. One barked at the parlour’s manager, ‘Chai pazhalesta’—meaning, ‘Tea, please.’ After a tray with ten cups was brought out, Danny caught sight of another figure in a long, black overcoat entering the room.

  His lip curled in disgust when he recognised the man whom he now knew had betrayed him and Yvonne with lies and sold them out, the man whose tawdry instincts and possible KGB methods of entrapment had led them into an unending nightmare—Grigory Miasnikov, the ‘business partner’ who had urged the Weinstocks to come to Russia and even arranged the trip for them.

  Pulling up a chair across the table from Danny, Grigory spoke, barely above a whisper, ‘The money has not arrived.’

  For Danny, these words produced a feeling not unlike Yvonne’s when the machine gun was pointed at her stomach. It meant time was running out on them to stay alive.

  Having taken advantage of the Weinstocks’ goodwill and their naiveté, Grigory Miasnikov had wormed his way into the Weinstocks’ business affairs as part of a conspiracy carved from diverse Russian underworld factions alloyed for the purpose of squeezing a $1.6 million ransom out of their hides. Although Miasnikov insisted this money was really a ‘debt’ owed to one of their Russian joint-venture partners based in Vladivostok from a recent deal gone bad, Yvonne and Danny knew better; it was extortion, pure and simple. And their lives depended upon meeting the demand.

  The quick-witted Weinstocks had succeeded in buying themselves ten days of life by insisting they had a relative in the United States who could pay the ransom, a pediatrician and former brother-in-law of Danny named Israel, or ‘Ian,’ Rayman, who with his wife were expatriate Australians living in Wayne, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. On Wednesday, January 8th, the gang—which also included two always-well-dressed men who bore all the ominous earmarks of former KGB interrogators—had taken Danny from the dacha to the Chekhova Street office to place a call to Ian Rayman.

  ‘The money must be paid,’ Danny told the incredulous Ian. ‘We cannot leave until it’s received.’

  Two more calls had ensued over the following week. The money would be forthcoming, Ian promised, if he was just given time.

  And time, it turned out, not only kept the Weinstocks alive; unbeknownst to Yvonne or Danny—and the kidnappers—an astonishing and unprecedented operation was now in motion, joining two countries whose entire existence for nearly half a century was based on stockpiling more nuclear weapons than the other. For the first time, they now worked together toward one goal: saving the lives of two Australian citizens being held captive in Moscow.

  The roadblocks to any potential rescue mission had been many. The Weinstocks were not American citizens, and there was no hard proof they had really been kidnapped or were in mortal danger. The FBI had no connections to law enforcement authorities in Russia and no legal standing to direct any sort of rescue operation. The Russian police were known to be corrupt and infested with underworld influences. And hanging over the case was the air of mutual distrust between America and Russia; never before had they worked hand in hand in a criminal investigation, and mutual, arched eyebrows and age-old suspicions still abounded.

  To crack the case and save the couple, historical conventions and a tangled tapestry of international jurisdictions had to be bypassed, precedents shattered. Yet for too long, that was a faint hope; though a small circle of diplomatic and law enforcement officials—led by a hard-bitten FBI man and an ambitious and vainglorious Russian police colonel who both worked tirelessly to end the crisis, a logjam of bureaucratic inertia which ate up critical hours of the clock.

  The missing link fell into place when a precocious and egocentric twenty-three-year-old Russian lawyer living temporarily in Philadelphia became immersed in the case, upstaging the bureaucrats by accomplishing what they could not or would not do. That is when the rescue operation moved off square one, in turn bringing belated vows of cooperation between American and Russian intelligence agencies.

  By now, fibres of a noose had been woven, and the noose was closing around the kidnappers. But would it close fast enough?

  At the billiard hall, Danny again pleaded to be allowed just one more call to Ian Rayman.

  ‘Nyet,’ he was told, ‘no more phone calls.’

  And then he heard words that sounded more sinister than any other words he had ever heard in his life.

  ‘Tomorrow, we will take you to Vladivostok.’

  His body coiled. If he were to be taken to Vladivostok—thousands of miles away on Russia’s southeast edge, cheek by jowl with Siberia, that most infamous Russian wasteland—he knew he would never see Yvonne again. He would die there, without a trace.

  Morning would be breaking soon in Moscow. By then, he knew, it would be too late.

  3

  PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

  In strict terms, I went to Russia on a business trip. If truth be told, however, I never would have made that perilous journey simply because there was money to be made. Certainly, dying wasn’t supposed to be in the script, but the seeds of such a journey were laid long before I had the faintest idea what business meant. When I look back into my past, for as far as I can see, I was always taking risks. I must have been born with a gene that made my pulse quicken when there was an element of danger involved in something, in anything, I did.

  I’m just as sure that that gene must have been handed down to me, since the limbs of my family tree are ripe with an adventurous spirit. My grandparents, on both sides, were swept up in the great immigration wave of the early 1900s, but instead of getting on the well-travelled boat routes to America, they cast their fate south to Australia. My father’s ancestors lived in a Russian hamlet called Vitepsk, my mother’s in Palestine, in a tiny town called Rosh Pina, in what is now Israel. Many Jews did, in fact, immi
grate to Australia, but most waited to get off at the second port of call, the cosmopolitan treasure trove of Melbourne. The more adventurous jumped off at the first port, Perth, the more prosaic and challenging capital of Western Australia. My grandparents were among the latter. Knowing what I do of them, they probably got tired of being penned up.

  Though I cannot quite remember, I’m sure I strained to get out of the womb decades later, ready to come out kicking, impatient to get my feet on the ground. On October 20, 1955, at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, they couldn’t hold me back any longer. I became the third daughter of Billie and Wally Shilkin.

  They say the best revenge is living well, and we did. We lived in a beach town in Perth called Floreat Park, where there were few Jews and a rumbling of anti-Semitism. When my sister Erica and I went to the Floreat Park Primary School—the only two Jewish kids in the place—they had a religion class, which really meant ‘Christian class’ because that’s the religion that was taught. We didn’t want to go into that classroom, so we would sit in the hallway while the other kids pelted us with insults, calling us ‘Jewfish,’ among other things.

  My grandmother had helped build our house years before, and it was one of the first homes put up in Floreat Park. We were quite comfortable living the middle-to-upper-class lifestyle. My father worked for forty-five years for the same company as manager of an electrical supply store. In the summertime, every other school vacation, and almost every weekend, my parents would allow me to go to a farm inland in Western Australia. Why they did this I never knew, since we lived near the beach and it was actually hotter and more stifling on the farm, which was owned by a friend’s dad named Mr Collard. The farm was in a country town called Gin Gin and offered precious few attractions for overactive kids. Mr Collard had a daughter about my age named Marilyn. We were close school friends, and we would become so bored and so desperately in need of a swim that we’d ride our bikes to a filthy creek to take a dip.