Blood Hound

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Before I left, I spent some time in front of the mirror practicing. Nic told me soon after Vassily had gone in that sometimes, the prison wouldn’t admit you if you looked potentially violent. I’d never been refused a visit, but this was a release, and I wasn’t completely certain it was the same sort of occasion. I tried to appear more pleasant and less severe for several minutes, but no mirror in the world could bring a warm light to my eyes or soften my mouth. No matter what I do, I look like a street shark, the kind of guy who kills other men. It was Vassily who taught me how to socialize outside the confines of a hit. Thanks to his patience, certain kinds of interactions are manageable. Hellos, goodbyes. Business. Intimidation. Dealing with people like Moni is easy: I have those men down to a science. But being likeable, attractive, relaxed? They were Vassily's skills.

  I fiddled with my face and clothes until my cheeks ached. Frustrated, restless, I stood back, gut tight, and breathed deeply of the clean vacuum smell of the house. Overriding it was the faint perfume of frankincense and myrrh. My altar took up one wall of my bedroom, a plain table laid out with a well-organized, eclectic clutter of Judaica and Occult paraphernalia from no particular country or point in history: a knife and chalice, a statuette of Santa Muerte, the Mexican cartel saint who protected those who worked by night, and an effigy of Veles, ancient god of magic, in honor of my Slavic heritage. A tarot deck wrapped in a scarf sat in front, the card for the week propped up against the rest, and a hundred other items of curiosity, awe, and personal significance were arranged in concentric rings from the central point. The Colt Wardbreaker lived there, resting next to a gold ankh I’d given to Vassily on his twentieth birthday. He had pressed it into my hand just before he was led out of the courtroom during the first hearing, his fingers hot against my palm.

  I took up the ankh, folded my fingers around it, and squeezed. It was time to go and see what remained of my best friend.

  Fishkill was located just off Route 84, a former New York State Psychiatric Center that looked more like a castle than a prison. My gut was sour with tension by the time I cleared security. Dry-mouthed, I waited in reception with my hands twisted on my lap, staring down at them in stony silence while I tried to think of things other than the dangers and vices of cellblock life. Jaundice. Drugs. Alcohol. Especially alcohol.

  A buzz preceded the opening of the inmate release doors, and each time, the sound jerked me from my reverie. Three ex-convicts went by, one after the other. One of them, a black man with the hollow eyes of a serial jailbird, was picked up by a stoic woman with big hair and big teeth. Next out was a bald, fit hardcase with an underbite and piercing blue eyes. He marched out the door alone without a backward glance. The third was a bewildered little rabbit who lingered around the reception desk. I watched him with slow eyes. He had the wire-strung build of a junkie and the quick, jerky manner of prey. Men like that were fun to quarry, and I almost let the pleasant mask I’d worked on so hard slip as I mentally stalked him across the floor.

  The buzzer blared a fourth time, and my gaze shifted from Rabbit to the door. My eyes lit on a familiar pair of hands—long, fine-boned philosopher’s hands, lettered and tattooed over the knuckles: the tattoos of a Vor v Zakone. Vassily and I were both too young to actually be considered Vor v Zakone, the oath-taking sworn thieves of Nic and Lev’s generation. Vassily’s tattoos were well deserved in many other ways, but they were really a memorial to the father he’d never known.

  I stood up in alarm as my sworn brother—thinner, harder, and more wolfish than I remembered—let his mouth stretch in a chagrined smile as he was led to the desk for processing. His black hair was shorter, and his old suit strained visibly across his shoulders and hung loose around his waist, but he was just as lean and tall and handsome as I remembered. I stared at his back in shock as he signed the release, pulse hammering under my tongue. Finally, I heard the final stab of the pen from across the room, and Vassily nearly threw it down as he broke apart from his escort in a rush. We collided as I stepped into his long-limbed embrace, wrapping my arms around his chest as he swore and laughed and squeezed his whole upper body around my head. Under the weird clinical smell of institutional air, without cologne or aftershave, he still smelled the way he always had. He smelled right, like fur and blue and spice on my palate. For a long moment, I found my mouth full and cottony, unable to speak from a place of perfect stillness.

  “Jesus,” Vassily said hoarsely. His Ukrainian was rusty. “Alexi. Jesus.”

  “You’re back where you belong,” I replied in the same language, clapping Vassily’s back. “Here.”

  Vassily did not let go. I felt his fingers clench the skin of my shoulders through my shirt. When he spoke again, it was quiet, lips beside my ear. “Get me the fuck out of this place. Food. Sun. Coffee. Please.”

  I peeled back enough to look up at him, gripping his arms. Intensity hummed like a weight in the back of my throat, and white heat burned behind my eyes as I leaned forward, my gaze locked with Vassily’s. “We will go to Gletchik’s. I’m certain they’ll be glad to see you again.”

  Hesitantly, he nodded. Behind him, the guards were waiting impatiently by the door, their lips drawn into disapproving lines. I fought the urge to stare back and pulled him away, and neither of us said another word on our way outside. I was light-headed. The fears tumbling around in my imagination during the drive were lost to the wind.

  We listened to the radio on and off, but after a while, our need for music petered out and we spent the rest of the drive in comfortable silence. I watched Vassily out of the corner of my eye and sometimes caught the glance of the hot summer sun over his cheekbones or the shadows of his throat. Vassily let his elbow rest outside the threshold of the car window, drinking in the sight of the sky. He couldn’t keep his eyes from it, and as the clouds rolled in, a massive front from over the mountains, he grinned broadly with delight. It made me smile, too.

  “Space, man,” Vassily finally said. “Nothing but wide open space.”

  I relished the pleasant mouthfeel of his voice for a moment and then spoke. “These years must have been hard.”

  “Meh. No different to how it was out of prison really. You eat your peas, you roll some jackass every other day, you shave and shit. Nothing to it.” Vassily snorted, rolled his eyes, and tipped his head back against the seat. “The only thing... man. No women. THAT sucked.”

  Being a virgin, I had no idea what to say by way of reply. We drove in silence for nearly five minutes, and this time, it was slightly awkward.

  “So, uh... tell me what’s happening. I heard what I could from you or Nic, but he said a lot of shit’s changed.”

  “It has.” Goodness, where to begin? “Sergei still has not returned from the continent, and as you know, Lev is now Avtoritet.”

  “Feh,” Vassily chuffed.

  “Nicolai is now Kommandant of Brighton Beach. He absorbed Rodion’s old team when Rod was gunned down last year. No one knows if it was Lev who had him killed, but my theory is that he did. We also lost Mo, and my father, of course.” I recited the changes and deaths perfunctorily. They were little more than statistics: movements of the grand chessboard which Vassily and I had played on since we were teens. I mulled my next words, considering what Lev had said. We weren’t to talk about Nacari, and I wasn’t to divulge the intimate details of Semyon’s death... but everything else was kosher. “I dealt with Sem Vochin last night.”

  “Sem? Sem the Jeweler?” Vassily’s surprise was audible. “Lev’s—”

  “He went to the Manelli family and sold out all of the details of Lev’s new cocaine operation. Naturally, the Manellis took his information and fed it to one of their pet cops so he had a juicy chunk of news to take back to his handlers.” My lips thinned. “As you can imagine, Lev was not pleased.”

  “I’m not pleased. The little rat was probably the one that landed me out here.” Vassily scowled, drumming his fingers on the dash. “But that was Lev’s mistake. He should have kept his cards cl
ose and his mouth shut. This is the problem with the old guys, Lexi. They can’t keep their metaphorical dicks in their metaphorical pants. Sergei was the only one with any real wit, you know?”

  Sergei Yaroshenko, our grand old patriarch, was the man who had established the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya in the 1950s. He ruled Brighton Beach for thirty years and put Vassily and me through school, priming Vassily for the leadership and me to be his Advokat, his advisor. When we turned twenty, Sergei left America to take care of business in Ukraine, vanishing into whatever bureaucratic spiderweb he’d spun in Kiev. The leadership had passed to Rodion Brukov, an old-school captain with a pompadour, a vodka and gin habit, and the uncanny ability to make good decisions while drunk. He had been about to make Vassily Kommandant just before he went to jail on trumped up credit card fraud charges, which we now knew was Semyon’s fault, as was Rod’s death. Rodion's passing left a power vacuum, and Lev was the man who conveniently stepped in to fill the void. He was an attorney and trust fund guy, a real white-collar intellectual, and even though he averted an internal war and built the Organizatsiya into an immensely profitable force, he was not popular with the rough-and-tumble men who had willingly worked for Sergei and Rodion.

  I made a noncommittal motion of head and shoulders. “Sergei is apparently securing our place in the new system, now that the USSR is collapsing around our ears. The continent is in chaos.”

  “Perestroika.” Vassily made a face.

  “Indeed. The system is crumbling, jobs are dropping, and every louse with more muscles than brains is looking to get rich. Mikhail has been hiring rogue players from Bulgaria, Georgia... Nic’s been feeding them to the dragon, so to speak, to keep the numbers in check. I dealt with another one just last night.”

  “I heard it was getting rainy out there. Lots of guys dying.” Vassily sat back, hands restless in his lap. “I just hope I can get back into the game.”

  “You will.” The USSR might have been changing, but things in Brighton Beach rarely did. We worked the same trades our fathers had done before us: fake fuel and guns, contraband, and policing the krysha, the protection racket. Before cocaine, the krysha had been a big part of my life. I collected the rent, pressured the guys who didn’t pay, and protected the ones who did. “Lev, to his credit, has been a good leader, but he is not well loved. They think he is changing too much too fast.”

  “Well, yeah. Because Rodion was a great Avtoritet. Lev’s nothing but a white-collar jerk-off.”

  “You shouldn’t challenge him yet, Vassily. Lev is still Sergei’s Advokat. You shouldn’t even look at him askance until Sergei has returned and confirms you.”

  “If he ever does. It’s been nearly ten years. He’s just about forfeited his claim to the Beach, and I don’t care how many million fucktons of money he has. This is where you and I grew up. It’s our turf, Lexi, and Lev and Sergei treat us like serfs on their land. We’re the ones who collect the cash and do all the work. My brothers all died for this place, and for him. And for what?”

  His words had some truth. I ran my tongue over my teeth as we turned off the highway, barely slowing for the exit. Most traffic was moving in the other direction, away from New York. Cars full of families and fishermen, heading for the Hudson and its promise of slow days and cleanish air.

  As suddenly as it had come over us, the grim mood began to ebb in the lull of conversation. Vassily made a thoughtful sound and drummed his long fingers on his thigh. “Anyway... I was wondering if—”

  “Your room is as you left it.” I cut him off, anticipating what he was about to ask, and merged onto the busier lane that would take us into the city. “I sorted your washing and vacuum-sealed it. It’s as good as new.”

  “Of course you did.” Vassily rested his head against the back of the seat and snorted. “That wasn't what I was gonna ask, though. You still into the woo-woo?”

  Magic was the one part of my life he had never understood and I never shared. "Of course. Why?"

  “Maybe you can explain something for me, Mister Wizard. I thought about the sea a lot while I was in.” Vassily’s brow furrowed. “Dreamed about it. What do you make of that?”

  “Emotion. The sea is symbolic of ocean and the mystery.”

  “The mystery, huh? What mystery?”

  “The Mystery. Ocean is a powerful symbol for the subconscious mind, for the things we don’t know and can never know about ourselves,” I replied, gesturing to the road ahead. “We know it is the origin of life, but we cannot survive in it. It is full of oxygen we cannot breathe, animals we have never seen, forests we cannot walk through. It’s the mystery which represents the greater mystery of our existence.”

  “I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but I’ll think about it. ‘Mystery’ wasn’t ever much of a big deal for me, except for like... you know, ‘what’s in the fridge that I can still eat for breakfast?’ But I had a lot of time to learn how to think.”

  “That is probably the most profound thing I have ever heard emerge from the sphincter you pass off as your mouth,” I said.

  “Fuck you. I was the token white guy in prison. I got along by keeping my mouth shut.” Vassily jerked his shoulders back, rolling them, but there was laughter in his eyes. “So, did you ever get around to the Tao Te Ching?”

  “I did.” Books had kept our friendship alive while he was in prison, a point of connection when everything else had been taken away, and I smiled. “He who knows how to live can walk abroad without fear of rhinoceros or tiger. He will not be wounded in battle. Why is this so? Because he has no place for death to enter.”

  “Yeah, I knew you’d love it. Verse forty-four’s my fave. It helped a lot with these weird nightmares I had. I was always dreaming about falling up into a black hole. Black holes, or the sea, but it was always up. I felt like I was coming apart sometimes, you know?”

  Yes, I did know. You couldn’t work in my profession and not encounter it, that void of no-future. My father had fallen into it, and he had tried to drag everyone around down with him. “Indeed. Though bear in mind that black holes are often associated with feelings of guilt.”

  “Guilt? Yeah, right. Anyway, off topic. I held off asking for as long as I could, I swear, but I gotta know. Are you still single?” He switched topics so quickly I almost lost track of his voice. “Do I have to keep worrying about you never getting laid?”

  What I needed to say was technically a lie, albeit one with a kernel of truth. I had been preparing for this question for years. “Not entirely.”

  “I’m not trying to pry or anything, but like I said, I... wait.” Vassily paused mid-thought, hand raised. His mouth worked as he struggled to process what I’d just said. “Hold on. ‘Not entirely’? As in, ‘No, Vassily, I’m no longer single’?”

  “I know a woman.” Not knowing how to elaborate, I shrugged a second time.

  “Is she... uh... is she real?” Vassily’s brow furrowed in concern. “Like, alive, and not a magazine cutout with a hole for your dick?”

  I tch’d and rolled my eyes. “Don’t be a putz. Her name is Crina Juranovic. You met her a couple of days before you went to prison.”

  “I don’t remember a Juranovic. She Serbian? Croatian?”

  “Possibly. She speaks Ukrainian, but she grew up in Germany.”

  “Well, I... huh. Right.” Vassily trailed off and began to twitch, drumming his fingers on his thighs. He hesitated for a moment before speaking again, voice catching. “That’s good, because guys like you end up in the Weird Obituaries section of the papers, Alexi. I worry I’ll come in and find you’ve choked yourself out from the doorknob with a pair of dirty stockings someday, and—”

  “Vassily.” If I rolled my eyes any harder, they were going to burst out the back of my skull. "Please, give me some credit. The stockings would be clean."

  He busted up laughing. “Okay, fine, fine. Girl or no girl though, I’m glad you haven’t really changed much.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I gri
pped the steering wheel and fixed my eyes ahead. I was surprised at myself, how immediately defensive I sounded. “I’ve worked my way to independence. Nic trusts me, Lev trusts me... I have a lot of work from them. The money is excellent.”

  “I’m not talking about what you do, Lexi. I’m just talking about... you. Like the heart of you. It’s still the same.” Vassily looked back out towards the rush of gray and brown as we entered the gaping oven of New York City. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I mean, it’s good to get out and have at least one thing still be how it was, ’specially after all the hard news. You’re lucky you weren’t wasted when Lev took over.”

  “I’m more worried about the Manellis,” I replied. “Lev does a good enough job. His maneuvering has the best interests of the collective at heart. I’d rather have him as Avtoritet than, say, Vanya.”

  “Well, yeah. I’d rather see a dog turd as Avtoritet before Vanya.”

  “Indeed. The biggest test will be how we hold against one of the Five Families,” I said. “This new Colombian cartel arrangement has been incredibly successful. Every yuppie from Miami to Boston is buying at the moment. Now that John Manelli knows who’s in charge, I have no idea what we’ll do. Lev hasn’t really talked about it. Nic has only fears. Unfortunately, I am no seer.”

  I trailed off when I noticed Vassily had fallen uncomfortably silent, staring down at his hands. Unspoken was the same anxiety I had also nursed, off and on, for the past half a decade. His incarceration had driven us both to think about our friendship for the first time, how tenuous our freedom together really was. His release was already overshadowed by fresh violence, and both of us would have to be there when the shit hit the fan, parole officer or no parole officer.