Nothing was said between the two. Before long, Danny heard Miasnikov snoring. How, he thought, can this man sleep so peacefully with all that’s going on? He must have no conscience at all.
Danny could not even close his eyes. He was exhausted from the wild rides he’d been taken on, yet he was also wired from fear and anxiety. Compulsively, he kept looking at his watch every few minutes. He couldn’t imagine what the next scene would be in this demented Lewis Carroll story.
The first thing that indicated to me that something different, something unexplained was happening came when I heard the front gate outside close with its normal clanging sound. The front door opened, and I could hear Oleg’s gravelly voice yammering in the kitchen with the babushka. I also heard Sascha and some of the other men plodding up and down the stairs.
It was well after 3am. Where was Danny?
What had transpired with the phone call to Ian? Why hadn’t he come back with the others? Was he even alive or had something gone horribly wrong and, in panic, had the gang rid themselves of the ‘evidence’—his body?
Naturally, I was practically banging off the walls of the bedroom, my mind playing tricks on me, imagining Danny lying in some ditch and me about to swing from the old hag’s noose. As much as I desperately hoped the commotion downstairs meant there may have been some sort of police action underway, at the same time on some level of my consciousness that was the last thing I wanted, as that would make me a liability to the gang.
The fears, the hallucinations, the sense and nonsense, had become absolutely unbearable. When Rae suddenly clomped in, wildly waving for me to pick up my things and go downstairs, I was relieved to be able to get out of that room before the walls closed in on me.
Even in the middle of the total confusion, I was able to think in a clear-headed fashion. While sweeping my clothes into my suitcase, I saw Danny’s address book and other business notes, folders, and documents on a table. Somehow, one part of my brain focused on a possible rescue—and that, if we were saved, we would need these items for our business to continue.
That was about as irrational as it gets, but they were ours; they represented our hard work. They could help prove why we’d been kidnapped. So I gathered them up and shoveled them into a white plastic bag I was going to use for my dirty clothes, then jammed it into my suitcase, leaving behind the damp clothes that were drying on the radiator under the window. Only then did I lug the suitcase out of the room.
It was the same kind of clear thinking that led me to expect the worst. About halfway down the stairs, I realised that I was being moved to a different location, not out of choice but necessity. Perhaps Oleg had decided there was no point in keeping Danny and me together any longer. If something had gone wrong and he wanted to do away with us, it could be that he wanted to scatter our bodies thousands of miles apart, tougher to be found.
Whatever would happen, wherever the wind would take me from here, my mind could not countenance that people were coming to rescue me. That was not reality. Dying was reality.
It was that reality I so desperately wanted to alter when Rae sent me back upstairs to get our other suitcase. I pulled the Valium from my makeup case and transferred them into my pants pocket.
The reality I believed I couldn’t alter was when that herd of thundering men in their military-style parkas rumbled through the door and the leader of the pack trained the barrel of his machine gun at my midsection.
Again, all I could do was wait for my last breath of life, stone cold and still as death on those stairs.
But he didn’t shoot me.
I didn’t die.
And when I didn’t, my voice returned.
‘Please, don’t shoot me,’ I was able to say, in little more than a trembling whisper.
He moved his gun away from me. Silently, he walked into the area behind the kitchen. Suddenly, incredulously, I was standing all alone as all hell was breaking loose around me, as men with machine guns chased people through the house.
In that crack of time, with seemingly no one aware of me, I thought only of taking the Valium from my pocket so that when the man with the gun came back and did shoot me, I wouldn’t know it.
Stepping from the staircase, I walked into a corner of the living room. Reaching into my pocket, I scooped up the six tablets and shoved them into my mouth—30 milligrams of Valium in one shot, quite a heavy load for a five-foot-four-inch, one-hundred-and-ten-pound woman to absorb at once.
I figured it wouldn’t take long for me to be on the floor, unconscious. I hadn’t eaten much of anything for ten days. My stomach was empty. Nothing would stem the powerful sedative from knocking me out. I began to feel a little wobbly. Yet I didn’t faint. Adrenaline was rushing through my body; fear was fighting the drug.
Instead of blacking out, my eyes were sharp. All my senses were alive. What I felt most keenly was the sensation of cold. My whole body was shivering, not from the temperature in the house but from pure fear.
I realised then that I had forgotten my overcoat upstairs. When one of the gunmen, a tall and wiry type, came into the living room, I rubbed my shoulders and said, ‘Jacketa, poszalesta,’ and nodded my head in the direction of the second floor.
He understood. Taking me by the arm, he walked me up to the bedroom where my purple coat was draped over a chair. I wrapped it around me and pulled the hood over my head, then nearly collapsed onto the corner of the bed. I think I may have passed out at that point. Then a fattish man in distinctly non-military dress—instead, he was wearing a multicolored Ivy League-style sweater—came into the room looking for me.
‘Yvonna, dah?’ he said.
‘Dah.’ I asked, ‘Who are you?’
He didn’t answer, but the tall one with the gun reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a small red card with a yellow star on it. He flashed it so fast before my face that I barely saw it, much less read it, before he put it away again. If the card and whatever it said were supposed to put my mind at ease, it had the opposite effect. I was no less frightened. All I knew was that men with assault weapons were everywhere. In my agitated, confused state of mind, these were merely new and different kidnappers.
This again struck me as I saw Oleg, still wearing his coat, his hands cuffed behind his back, being led past my room and into his bedroom down the hall. Was this a turf war between gangs? Was the new gang part of a corrupt coterie of military or militia forces? Had Oleg been sold out by one of his gang? Had another Mob boss heard about the money and moved in?
If any of that were so, it wouldn’t change my situation. Moreover, this new turn of events hardly guaranteed that Oleg was out of the picture. Looking at Rae and the other women’s reaction to the incursion, it seemed to me they were not the slightest bit concerned. It was as if they’d been through this sort of thing before, be it a police raid or a show of force by a rival mob, and had no worries that Oleg would not be able to talk or buy his way out of trouble as usual.
His daughter, Nella, in fact, seemed to be taking in the whole scene with bemused detachment. Standing on the landing atop the stairway, she may as well have been in the balcony of a movie theatre, munching on popcorn.
The man in the sweater pointed to the several pieces of luggage that had been left behind, which were Danny’s. He asked in broken English if they were mine. I nodded. He then called in two more men and they carried all the bags as he ushered me by my very bruised arm downstairs. My two suitcases had been placed by the front door next to my boots, which had sat there, unworn, since the first day here when Oleg had decreed I couldn’t wear them. I was told to put them on, and the soft leather comforted my by-now blistered feet.
We were obviously going somewhere. While getting out of that horrific house was a blessing, I moved haltingly, knowing neither my destination nor my fate. Before leaving, I shot a quick glance backward. The gunmen, having surprised and overpowered the few gangsters that had been in the house, had taken them all into different rooms, while the women stood ar
ound meekly cradling their young children—not merely out of a maternal bond, I would learn, but in the knowledge that in Russia women cannot be arrested with children in their arms.
I could hear the babushka’s screeches pealing from upstairs, no doubt trying to get Oleg out of trouble. She was somebody else’s problem now, not mine. If she were in fact the Ma Barker of her son’s gang, then she would get hers, too.
I turned my head to the darkness outside. There must have been five cars on the driveway, mostly old gray Fiats, inside the forced-open gate. On the veranda was a sight I thought I’d never see: Robert, his hands also cuffed behind him, flanked by a pair of gunmen. Seeing me exit the dacha, he followed me with his eyes, his face burning red in anger as though I was responsible for the predicament he was in.
For a brief moment, I relished the role reversal. Now, it was the oh-so-cosmopolitan KGB man who was being held and humiliated. If I chose, I could have laughed at him for it.
But was I in a position to logically do so? Was I free?
No one told me I was. On the contrary, the grim looks on the faces of my ‘liberators’ only reinforced my fears. Put into the front passenger seat of one of the Fiats, I saw my luggage being roughly tossed into this and another Fiat. Within seconds, the two cars were out on the road barreling into the night. Next to me, the driver was talking nonstop into a two-way radio while in the back two men sat silently, in shadows, their guns pointed to the roof.
Although I was somewhat woozy and disoriented from the Valium, I was sentient enough to ask questions as he drove on. I kept repeating to no one in particular—not that it mattered since no one likely understood what I was saying—’Are you going to kill me?’ Trying Russian, I asked, as I had inside the house, ‘Gidye Moi Moozh?’ Again, no answers. The only thing close to a response was when a hand reached out from the back and tapped me gently on the shoulder.
‘Charasho,’ someone said. It was meant to comfort me, and yet it gave me another chill. Oleg had, after all, used the same word when we had spoken to Ian, and it just reminded me that Oleg had time and time again warned Danny and me not to say a word to any possible authorities about the abduction. They’d only put us in jail for extortion, he said. It was in my mind that if these men were actually police, they might not necessarily be friendly to me.
Danny was out there somewhere. If I said anything about being kidnapped, and fingered who had taken us, would Danny pay the price for it?
I wished I didn’t have to ponder such things. I just wanted to slip away into blackness.
Out the window, I saw the world moving by as if on a conveyor belt … railroad tracks … road signs … trucks going in the other direction … miles of empty space.
What happened next was almost as frightening as being kidnapped. After just ten minutes with snow and ice piling up on the Fiat, we rolled to a halt by a dense forest. The driver killed the engine, opened his door, and went back to the trunk. He had left the headlights on, creating an eerie corona around the car, and in the rear-view mirror I saw that he had removed a long, black, stick-like object. When I saw him carrying it as he walked back around the other side of the car, I emitted an involuntarily gasp. That stick looked to me to be uncomfortably similar to the makeshift wood, nail-studded stanchion that Oleg had beaten me with so unmercifully.
He walked slowly, ploddingly, toward my door.
Fear and a new rush of adrenaline bolted me upright in my seat. My stomach felt queasy. My heart raced. My eyes widened. It could be only one thing about to happen. He was going to take me out, shoot me, and dump my body in this forest.
I heard myself begin to whimper. The door would open any second. And then … nothing. He kept walking, past my door to the front of the car where he took the object and glided it over the windshield. It was nothing but an ice scraper.
My heart had nearly burst through my chest. Now, I began to breathe easier. I sat back in my seat. I started to feel woozy from the Valium again. If only I could have just gone to sleep.
No such luck. Before long, we were in Moscow, tooling along the main avenues instead of the usual back streets where Oleg and Robert had taken us. We passed the Bolshoi Theatre and squat, fortress-like government buildings near Red Square and the Kremlin. We pulled up to the huge arches and steel gate of an enormous building a city block long, black and sinister. A jail? The old KGB headquarters? There were no signs or engravings on the building. The car wound to a side gate that opened to let it through. The men helped me out. We went into the building, with two of the men toting my luggage.
The place was deserted, and our footsteps on the hard, tiled floor echoed through the cavernous hallways. The four of us got into an old elevator, which inched upward, maddeningly slowly. It must have taken a full five minutes to reach the fourth floor, where we walked out into the semi-darkness of a maze of grungy corridors. We trod past numerous darkened offices until we came to one that was lighted.
The door opened and inside, at a table, four men in civilian clothes sat, saying not a word as we came in. Scattered on the table were a number of passport photos. Even at a slight glance, two of the images in the pictures were immediately recognizable. They were Oleg and Robert. Should I tell them I know those two men? Should I plead for help? Or should I just say nothing and play dumb? If only someone would tell me something, anything.
At last, someone did. He was a tall, blond, and handsome man wearing a sporty beige leather jacket, green shirt, and khaki brown pants—looking more like a salesman than a cop. Entering from a side office, he approached me, looking as stern as the others. He began to speak.
‘My name is Andrei Zharov,’ he began, in perfect English. ‘You are in the Department of Organised Crime of the Ministry of Interior Police. I am a captain in this department. You have been rescued, and the abductors are under arrest. We will do whatever we can to bring them to justice, but it is not easy to convict people in Russia. The system is very corrupt. We will need your help to put them away.’
There was something about his words, or rather the tone of them, the cadence, the faint British accent, the crisp diction. It hit me with a thump of familiarity. The only Russians I had heard speak in this manner were Grigory Miasnikov and Robert—both of whom I strongly suspected were bred by the KGB. This Andrei Zharov, could he too have been a KGB refugee who had infiltrated the Ministry of Police? There was a difference between him and the other two. He seemed genuinely sympathetic, not a soulless creep who had been programmed to say the right things. But did this merely prove how smart and canny he was? Could it be he was even more devious—and more dangerous?
I couldn’t help but to keep my emotions closed off to him. Conditioned as I was by Oleg’s browbeating indoctrination about what the police would do to me, all I could think to say was, ‘Are you going to put me in jail?’
A thin smile broke through his stony face.
‘In jail? For what?’
I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked where my husband was.
‘We haven’t found him yet,’ he said.
As I began to cry, dabbing at my eyes with a tissue I took from my purse, he added, ‘But we will. I promise you, Mrs Weinstock, we will find him.’
Left unsaid was whether that would be dead or alive. Also unsaid was anything about what had happened at the dacha—or, for that matter, anything that would have corroborated that this was in fact the Ministry of Interior. In my semi-dazed state of mind, my imagination and my fears were still running wild. I wasn’t ready by any means to believe what I was being told, or that I was in any way safe.
These people could have been anybody. They could have said anything to get me to reveal information they were after. Maybe they too were after the money. Indeed, when I asked if I could call the Australian Embassy, Andrei told me it was the middle of the night and that it wouldn’t be a good idea to wake someone up there. I thought that that was one of the most preposterous things I’d ever heard. His next request gave me a real jolt.
&nbs
p; ‘Could you please come with me to my apartment and write your story on paper?’ he said.
How would that be a part of police work? I said to myself. ‘Why do I have to go to your apartment?’ I said defensively. He assured me I would be safe and then took me by the arm and out the door. To my great relief, he led me not out of the building but through a long breezeway to an adjoining wing of the building. Evidently, he had meant to say ‘office’ but it came out ‘apartment.’ Once inside this office, he sat me at a desk and gave me a pencil and paper.
I sat as best I could on my very bruised rear end and began writing, though in my condition, it was mostly an incoherent jumble. I still felt nervous that it was just the two of us in this small space in an otherwise unoccupied building. While he offered no explanation of what was going on to rescue Danny, he did bring me tea and told me that when the cafeteria opened at 6:30am he would bring me breakfast.
Every once in a while, the phone would ring, the loud ring giving me start. Each time, I hoped it would be word about Danny, but it wasn’t, and I’d break down and cry again. As the Valium began to wear off, my normal tendency to babble when nervous surfaced, and I nattered on and on to Andrei about all sorts of things completely unrelated to why I was there. Amazingly, he listened to every word. He must be okay, I reasoned, to listen to all this rubbish.
I could now feel myself beginning to relax a bit, to trust him. Maybe, I really was rescued.
Maybe it was over. Maybe I was safe.
At about 6:45, another cop came in and handed me a slip of paper with the phone number for the first secretary at the Australian Embassy in Moscow, Bruce Scott. When I called, it felt good to hear an Australian accent—a real one, I could tell, not some Russian gangster faking it. He asked me if I felt safe where I was. I hesitated. I think he could read my mind.
‘I can assure you, Mrs Weinstock, that you are really at the Ministry of Interior. I will be over to see you at about 8:30, after I drop my kids off at their school.’
Eleven Days of Hell Page 22
