Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  In the wake of the kidnapping, Grigory had to ‘explain’ things to Markson. Fortunately for Grigory, Richard was utterly petrified of him, and Miasnikov exercised his Svengali-like power over him by ordering him to follow the two cars to the dacha in Noginsk. Then, he told Richard to unload the Weinstocks’ luggage, go to his apartment in Moscow, remain there and not come out until further notice. Richard of course obeyed, though Grigory had to wonder if even Markson would do as he was told forever. At least for the next few days, Grigory arranged for some goons to sit outside Richard’s apartment around the clock. If they saw him step outside, they would do some ‘explaining’ as well.

  Danny, meanwhile, like Yvonne, was undergoing the kind of physical and psychological torture that was more suited to serious criminal and political prisoners. At one point during that first evening, Yvonne and Danny noticed the ‘babushka’ perched on a stepladder, nailing a piece of rope that looked like a noose above a doorway at the rear of the kitchen. They couldn’t help but notice that the old lady was working slowly, meticulously, steadily, as though she’d hung up a few nooses in her day.

  Another time, sitting in the upstairs lounge, Danny observed that the walls were bare except for a religious icon. He was told that if someone sits under that icon, no harm would come to him. For what possible reason would he be told this? He wondered. Were there some people in this haunted house populated by both sleazy-looking thugs and respectable-looking women with young children who were sympathetic to him and Yvonne, and who might help them escape? Or was that what he was supposed to think? He didn’t know, but in succeeding days, he would gravitate to the spot under the icon. Why not? Anything that might help …

  The thug known as Oleg, though, was anything but sympathetic. After Yvonne had been taken to the cellar, Oleg approached Danny in the lounge and ordered, ‘Stayat’ (‘Stand up’). When he did, Oleg grabbed him by his hair while another thug chopped with his hand, karate-style, at the back of his neck. While Danny instinctively reached for his neck, the captor viciously kneed him in the groin. Danny crumpled to the floor, grabbing for his genitals and doubling over as if he had been cut in half.

  Danny was wearing jeans, thick black socks, sneakers, and a business shirt over a Surfer’s Paradise T-shirt. When he had recovered from the knee in the groin, he was told to take off his shoes, whereupon Oleg kicked them through a wooden railing atop the stairway and down to the ground floor. He was then taken downstairs and in his stocking feet passed a group of men—including Grigory—sitting at the kitchen table, fully laden with meat, vodka, soft drinks, and expensive crystal glasses. Two men held his elbows tightly and dragged him into another of the endless rooms in the house, one with a dirty wooden floor. Here, Oleg began beating him with a hollow metal tube that appeared to be the hose of a vacuum cleaner. Others joined in, kicking at his midsection. Oleg continued battering him so hard that the top part of the tube flew into the air.

  Danny, his body now almost completely covered with bruises, curled up on the ground, holding his glasses into his stomach, hoping and praying for the punishment to end. When it finally abated, he was dragged to the crawlspace. Oleg lifted the trapdoor in the floor and pushed him down the rickety ladder. Yvonne, already in the cellar, was hopeful when she saw light enter the dark hole, but after Danny slid in, Oleg kicked the door shut again. The two of them could barely fit in the cold space. They huddled together for warmth, trembling, shuddering, saying nothing.

  Danny, feeling around in the dark with his hands, found the empty potato sack and laid it on the concrete floor under them. He also found a piece of cardboard, also laying it on the floor. Yvonne positioned herself partly against Danny and partly against the ladder. Without shoes, Danny’s toes began to feel numb. He could not move his left arm. Both of them were shivering, hungry, and tired. Would they make it through the night?

  Danny and I didn’t say anything to each other. We couldn’t. We were too disconnected from reality to even know what to say. The shock of it all had shut us both down. So for three hours, we lay in this makeshift freezer, barefooted, our arms around each other, trying to create warmth. I thought about our children, how they would be worried sick when we didn’t call them tonight, and about survival. I considered myself a tough-edged person, as had many others, but survival as an abused wife or a high-powered businesswoman was one thing; survival in a freezing Russian cellar with killers only feet away was quite another.

  We both assumed that the mobsters wanted to keep us alive, given that they needed us to get them their money. Clearly, these were professional criminals; they knew exactly what they were doing. They wanted to dispense ‘just enough pain’ without crossing the line to lethal punishment. For all the abuse we’d taken, no one drugged us, and no one had hit me hard enough to leave permanent marks. The bruises stung, but were of the type that would heal over a day or two.

  Still, how could we know for sure what their motives were? What if we couldn’t adapt to the cold in this subterranean pit? What if one of us went into shock, had a seizure or a heart attack? I remember thinking that in the movies people who get trapped in the extreme cold are wont to tell each other, ‘Let’s not fall asleep. Let’s try to stay awake.’ That was about as much survival training as I had, but it seemed a good idea. Danny and I kept our eyes open in the dark; if we fell asleep, we didn’t know if we would wake up or just freeze.

  At the same time, at least in here we couldn’t be beaten any more. It was obvious that these black-clad gorillas’ idea was to condition us to anticipate pain, to destroy any defenses we may have had. It was as much psychological as physical torture, and I could only wonder how far it would go. They hadn’t even gotten down to asking us how we could get them their $1.6 million. When they did, they would want us to practically be able to throw the money at them.

  After three hours in the ‘cooler,’ the door opened, and as we squinted as light from the kitchen washed over our eyes, three of the gangsters pulled only me out of the hole. They led me to another empty room on the ground floor. There, Oleg held a metal hose in one hand, beating it against his open hand. As one man pulled my coat off me, I instinctively recoiled—I had been trying to put out of my head and my fears the obvious possibility that these barbaric men who had not the slightest respect for women would assault me sexually, or even rape me. Now, I was petrified it was going to happen.

  Oleg slapped my face and then punched me in the stomach. The latter blow propelled me backwards, and I buckled to the floor. My head struck the hardwood, and I briefly lost consciousness. When I came to, four men were holding me down, securing my legs and arms. I was sure this was when they would molest me, so it was almost a relief when they lifted me up, even though they began to kick me all over my buttocks and my legs.

  In the midst of this brutality, I again caught sight of the squat, bespectacled man I thought I’d known so well—Grigory Miasnikov, who was leaning against a window sill, his arms characteristically folded at his chest, passively watching the entire brutal scene. While I had by now figured out that Grigory was a rat and a traitor, I could also discern that he was playing a con game, acting as if he too were a victim of the gang and being held along with us. In truth, he was a terrible actor. But I believed I could use that sham to my advantage, to deflect Oleg and his band from battering me.

  Squatting on the floor dodging kicks, I looked up at Oleg.

  ‘Why aren’t you punching Grigory, too?’ I asked. ‘Why are you only beating me?’

  The question seemed to catch Grigory off guard, and Oleg, as was his habit whenever I said anything in English, demanded that Grigory translate it. Dutifully, Grigory did. Oleg thought a minute, then woofed something in Russian to his men. Two of them then walked over to Grigory and began half-heartedly grabbing at him and making punching gestures. On his part, Grigory tried to look like he was in pain, completely unconvincingly.

  Oleg, as he had when I confronted Grigory upstairs on his role in the kidnapping, quickly tired of
this farce. Again he rained blows on my back and shoulders with the hose. Then, seemingly winded, he stopped. Finally, he was ready to get to the heart of the matter.

  With Grigory translating, he said, ‘Doomai! Doomai! [Think! Think!] Where can you get the money? We need to get the money.’

  Still writhing in pain on the floor, I could only blurt out, ‘We know some very wealthy people overseas, in America. Let us contact them; they will pay the money.’

  I thought it curious that these people—especially with Grigory’s knowledge of our business setup—wouldn’t at the outset bring up that we had bank accounts in Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Russia. Why hadn’t they simply demanded that Danny and I make a call to Alan, the accountant in Hong Kong? Could it have been that Grigory, possibly in consultation with that other sewer rat, Matthew Hurd, knew that our accounts had been looted so devastatingly that we actually had very little cash in them, and had learned since October what being leveraged and mortgaged meant? If so, trying to convince them that a large amount of money was under our control would have been counterproductive. Recalling that Grigory, while he visited us in Melbourne, had gotten us to talk about our ‘rich’ relatives in America, I decided I would go that route. It was evidently what Oleg wanted to hear. For now, it seemed he no longer had a desire to beat me. He motioned for me to stand up and for his men to take me back to the cellar. I reached for my coat.

  ‘No coat!’ Oleg yelled. ‘Leave coat here.’

  Clutching my handbag, still barefoot and now without a wrap, I once again was marched to that cold hole in the ground. There, reunited with Danny, my bruises throbbing, I lay flat, my head in his lap.

  After about an hour, they came again, for both of us. Again, there was relief as the warmth of the house spread through me. We were told to sit at the kitchen table, bare now except for a bowl of fruit. It seemed that business, not beating, was on the menu.

  Grigory was sitting in one chair, nibbling on an apple. Oleg sat in another, apparently much more amenable to our needs. When Marusia came in, I asked her to get my coat. She looked to Oleg. He nodded yes. Maybe now, I thought, he would be a human being and not a monster.

  Wasting no time, he got right to the $1.6 million. Through Grigory, he said, ‘When can we get it?’

  Danny answered first. ‘I know you want money,’ he said gruffly, ‘but we’ve been travelling for thirty hours. We’re exhausted. We need to rest.’

  I could tell this answer would not suit Oleg, so I quickly spoke up. ‘Let us contact as many people as possible. Again, we know wealthy people in America. We can get it done.’

  That was far more palatable. Oleg said a few quiet words in Russian to Grigory, who told us, ‘You will not be beaten any more tonight.’ He added, still weakly trying to keep to the pretense of being in trouble with us, ‘They have allowed me to go home for the night. You will sleep here, in a comfortable bed. Tomorrow I will come back, and we will talk more about the money.’

  It actually seemed like a civilised arrangement. But before he strode out of the house, Grigory put a chilling punctuation mark on the dreadful day.

  ‘You will remain here until the money is paid, or else we will hang you.’

  Undoubtedly, he realised instantly that using the word we ripped the pretense away from his act. For all intents and purposes, Miasnikov was them—the enemy. He didn’t really seem to care that we knew it.

  Danny and I spent the last hours of January 6th in an upstairs bedroom. Marusia walked us up and then took me into a bathroom to wash up. In the harsh bathroom light, the bruises on my arms were grotesque. The angry welts seemed like red checkers on a grid of black and blue track marks. Seeing them, Marusia gasped, then she gently swabbed the wounds with a wet washcloth.

  It was almost midnight on a day that was already longer than eternity. Though I was no less petrified, I was also weary to the bone. I got into the bed where Danny was already lying, fully clothed, as was I. Marusia had brought up two cups of black tea. Having eaten not a morsel of food since a snack on the plane an hour out of Belgrade—twelve hours ago—we should have been famished, but neither of us could have held down any solid food; terror had numbed our appetites. But we forced ourselves to drink the tea, which was sickly sweet and went down like tar.

  At least we were out of that blasted hole. With our luggage having been placed in the bedroom, we found socks to thaw our frozen feet. We also laid out our slippers—which would be all we would be allowed to wear from here on in.

  We kept the light on in the room, not wanting to be lost in darkness. If someone came in, we wanted to know who it was and what he might be carrying. We lay our heads on the pillows, but our eyes did not close. We stared at the ceiling, reliving the horrors of the past twelve hours. We knew we would never fall asleep.

  9

  DAY TWO:

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 7th,

  THE DACHA

  Even if we could have unwound enough to sleep, Oleg’s band of brigands made it impossible to do so. All night long, they loitered in the lounge next to the bedroom, sitting around smoking, swilling vodka, watching television at ear-splitting levels, and cackling like roosters. There were no doors to either room, only a flimsy split-cloth strip like one would see in a Japanese restaurant, and their sounds and smells seemed to be right in the room with us. They had taken quilts and cushions from the bedroom to sleep on the floor there, but mainly they were there to keep us under watch. Every few minutes, one of them would pull open the cloth to check on us, as if they believed we were super heroes who could somehow escape.

  The worst moment that long night was when one of them crept into the bedroom at about 3am and sidled up to my side of the bed, sticking his face inches from mine. I could smell the vodka on his breath, and his mustache was flicking my ear as he whispered something unintelligible but probably very disgusting in Russian. My heart began pounding furiously, in fear that this squat, hideous man seemed to be making a sexual advance. Danny, whom I’m sure heard it, likely had to strain to keep from tearing the guy’s throat out, knowing how powerless both of us were to stop anything these men wanted to do. But, fortunately, having gotten his jollies, the homunculus then stumbled out of the room.

  Danny and I looked at each other, saying nothing, aware that there were too many ears right outside the room eavesdropping on us—and perhaps looking for an excuse to come in and stomp us again. We just resumed our coffin-like pose of death, lying motionless, waiting for something unspeakable to happen.

  They both could hardly move, let alone think. It was as if a train had hit them. And if the men wouldn’t do them in, they were sure the bloody heat would. This bedroom surely was the hottest room in the house. The heating was not properly installed; heat was not evenly dispersed around the house. Some rooms felt as cold as a meat locker; others were hot enough for the wallpaper to peel. All the windows were closed tightly, as if sealed like a tomb. They could not get out of bed. They could not even speak to, look at, or touch each other. It was a good feeling that they were together and not being kept separately, but Danny felt guilty that such a thing could happen to a wife that he was supposed to protect from harm.

  In particular, as a woman, Yvonne was in the most immediate danger, as Russians do not respect women. Yet as Danny lay there, he kept thinking how remarkable a woman Yvonne was. He could not believe her courage. She was the reason he kept repeating the Hebrew phrase to himself ‘Chazak V’Ematz’ over and over during the entire ordeal. It was the motto of his old school, Mt. Scopus College in Burwood, Melbourne. It means: ‘Be strong and of good courage.’

  The women were not allowed into the lounge with the men. Besides the babushka and Marusia, I had seen several other women, as well as small and teenage children around the house. Whoever among them was still there had gone to bed. Indeed, the entire atmosphere of the dacha was as darkly surreal as any Fellini movie. Here were people going about their mundane business, carrying out normal family living, yet seemed not to blink twice that the
two strangers in their midst were being held and beaten. Such a happenstance barely seemed to distract the women from their cooking and cleaning. For the babushka, nailing up a noose was evidently just another of her chores, like ironing or sweeping.

  Even so, for a woman of her ‘eclectic’ tastes, the old hag could be pleasant and hospitable. After the sun came up that morning, and most of the men had finally gone to bed, she came into the bedroom bearing a tray with tea and fruit. ‘Cooshet. Cooshet,’ she said (‘Eat. Eat’).

  In the light, I could see that while she was old, this woman was hale and ruddy-skinned, and had beautiful piercing blue eyes and a vibrant smile that displayed a mouth full of gold teeth—which fed my curiosity about whom she and these other people were. In Russia, only the wealthy could afford gold teeth, so she was not a peasant. Her eyes offered clues, too. Very few Russians have blue eyes and dark skin.

  I didn’t know who they were. But I knew they weren’t common, garden-variety Russians.

  THE CHECHEN CONNECTION

  Such traits were common among the people of the old Soviet slave-states that interlock along the underbelly of South Asia from the Caspian Sea on the west to the Chinese border on the east. Some were well-known in their past incarnations, such as Georgia, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, and Lithuania, but others with nearly unpronounceable names such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Tadjikistan (Grigory Miasnikov’s birthplace) came out of the darkness when they were made independent republics in June 1991, when Russian president Boris Yeltsin broke apart the old Soviet Union and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Not all those satellite states were as fortunate. Another, Chechnya, also claimed sovereignty in 1991, but Yeltsin resisted and would send in Russian troops to quell the insurrection. That would lead to a twenty-month war that claimed 100,000 Chechen lives and thousands of Russian soldiers. It would also incubate some of the world’s most bloodthirsty terrorists.