by Greg Wilson
The Lowered Downs had their own separate places and kept to themselves, shunned as though they bore some deadly communicable disease. These were the untouchables, the dregs of the prison world: cheats, the prison thieves, passive homosexuals and those who committed crimes that even the members of the Thieves’ World – the Vorovskoy Mir – regarded as abhorrent. There were seven Lowered Downs in Nikolai’s cell. Eight if this was where they decided to place him, since that was the usual fate of any former security officer who stumbled into this parallel world. There would be no rush to judgment, however. The Blatnyie would take their time and watch him, weigh his character and value first before making their decision.
The incident in the bathhouse occurred on the evening of the twelfth day. It was the first time Nikolai had taken another life and on reflection he was surprised at how very easy it had been.
They were taken there once a week, the entire population of the cell led in a herd by four armed guards to the separate gray cinder block building that stood alone at the center of the courtyard and given ten minutes to scrub their bodies and wash their clothes before being led back again, across the empty yard and along the bleak corridors, to their cell. It was the second time that Nikolai had made the trip and only later did it occur to him how precariously the volatile dynamics of prison chemistry were balanced. Despite individual capacities for violence, under the supervision of their guards thirty men from one cell became a single inert mass. But place them in a confined space with an equivalent sized tribe from another cell and the two individually quite passive elements combined to form a single deadly, explosive compound. Remove the guards and the charge would inevitably detonate.
They approached the bathhouse as they had the previous week, three abreast, in a line ten places long with the cell’s three Blatnyie at the head and a guard at each corner. With his position in the hierarchy of the cell still undetermined Nikolai found himself mid-rank, in a place that put him on the outside right edge of the line. It was late afternoon yet the summer sun still hung high overhead as they stepped from the corridor into the glare and stifling heat of the central courtyard. Inexperienced though he still was in prison routine it immediately struck Nikolai that this was different to last week. Last week they had been made to wait inside while the cell-group before them had been returned to the building through another door, but this time there were no other prisoners visible. Just four more guards loitering at the bathhouse entry, smoking and joking, grinning at the approaching column with sly amusement.
Why was that?
If there was another group of prisoners inside the bathhouse, why weren’t the guards inside with them as their own guards had been the previous week? And if the bathhouse hadn’t been cleared, if there was another group still inside, why was their group being led there now? Nikolai’s own instincts fired an instant before the ripple of apprehension began to run through the line ahead of him.
They were only a few meters away from the building now. Three of the four guards waiting outside started to fall away while the last man reached for the timber door and began to haul it open. It had three heavy steel bolts, Nikolai noticed. Once they were closed there was no way out.
Ahead of him the line stalled. The three Blatnyie at the lead knew what was coming now. Perhaps it was a dispute over money or territory, or a franchise, or the settling of a score. What did it matter? In the end the reason was irrelevant. It was a set-up. Behind the door of the bathhouse another group of prisoners was waiting and the guards had been bribed to look the other way.
They were being herded inside now, their own guards closing up and passing them on, handling them forward into the concrete block shed, like cattle being counted into a slaughterhouse. Nikolai’s row was the sixth to cross the threshold and still there was no sign or sound of trouble, just an eerie vacuum of silence. The rows behind him pressed in and the column spread sideways as if compressed by some invisible barrier ahead. It was dusky inside, surprisingly cool, the damp mustiness of the place in a way strangely refreshing. Nikolai blinked, struggling to adjust to the sudden gloom, then it deepened further as the door behind him swung shut, closing off the last arc of sunlight and he heard the bolts being rammed into their latches, like three gunshots fired in rapid succession.
What happened next seemed, to begin with, as if it might have been a strangely choreographed game.
On some invisible cue the Goats and Lowered Downs broke away, falling aside to the edge of the room, joining their equals from the opposite side to form a loose ring of spectators at the perimeter. That left the field in the center – an expanse of damp concrete between the sunken shower stall on one side and a row of a dozen benches at the other – across which a more or less equal number of Blatnyie and Men from the opposing cells now faced one another, holding still for now, as if separated by some imaginary line scribed on the floor. It occurred to Nikolai that there was a single fundamental difference between the two factions: those on the other side had come here ready and armed while his own group had only their bare hands with which to defend themselves. His eyes travelled warily across the opposite front row taking in the crudely brutal array of makeshift weapons – steel bars, knives fashioned from metal cans, fists wrapped and spiked with sharpened wire. In retrospect he realized that it was partly shock that had caused him to remain where he stood but it had proven to be a defining decision. At that moment the prisoner beside him – a tall, quiet man who read Tolstoy and otherwise kept to himself – turned to regard him with a grim smile.
“So welcome to our club, my friend,” he had said. “Now you have five minutes to stay alive.”
And that was when all hell broke out.
There were twelve injured that day, four seriously: the tall man among them, his left eye gouged from its socket on a spike of sharpened wire. When it ended, two were dead: a Blatnoy from Nikolai’s cell and one of the Men from the other, his throat slit ear to ear by a strip of sharpened tin. Nikolai was still unable to recall how he had managed to wrestle the weapon away from his attacker but his hand was still clamped around it, palm and fingers sliced to the bone, when the bolts were thrown back, the door to the bathhouse was flung open and the eight guards poured inside. And then everything fell quiet and the mayhem ended as suddenly as it had begun.
In the silence that followed Nikolai had found himself staring down at the body sprawled at his feet, mesmerized by the way the thick river of blood glided from the gaping slash in the man’s throat, across the concrete floor to the shower drain. Then he realized that he was the only one left standing with a weapon in his hand, and the guards were shouting and screaming, ordering him to drop it or they would shoot, then something crashed against the side of his head and everything turned numb.
The weeks that followed were his first experience of solitary confinement. ShiZO as it was known.
They had taken him to the infirmary first where the wounds to his hand had been cleaned and stitched without anesthetic, then from there they had led him to a basement cell in the old building and left him there for what he had calculated must have been three weeks. Then for no apparent reason they had taken him back to the common cell, his hand still throbbing with pain and swathed in bandages.
The greeting was different this time. The card game stopped and the two remaining Blatnyie and the men around them acknowledged him with silent deference. Then the little man, who had first shown him the place for his mattress on the floor, stepped forward and steered him across the room to one of the steel-frame bunks on the upper tier, dipped his head compliantly and backed away.
In the months leading up to the second trial, it was the tall man who assumed responsibility for furthering Nikolai’s prison education. His name was Zalisko and, in all, he had spent more than twelve of his thirty-eight years behind bars.
Zalisko, as it turned out, was a paradox. An intelligent man who had become as hardened and ruthless as he was naturally perceptive. He had joined the Vorovskoy Mir by choice after analyzing his limited
career opportunities and reaching the conclusion that a life of crime offered him the best overall chance of being able to provide adequately and consistently for both himself and his family. Over the years he had graduated from petty larceny to armed robbery, smuggling, black-marketeering and most recently extortion. Acceptable crimes, as he defined them. Crimes where no victim needed to get hurt unless they resisted or did something completely foolish. Rather than aligning himself with any one syndicate he had chosen to work on his own, remaining respectful of the criminal assembly yet effectively operating as an independent franchisee, making arrangements with various gangs for insurance and krysha from time to time, as the need arose, in exchange for a percentage of his earnings.
By all accounts his career strategy had proven successful, since on the outside he had a family living in relative comfort: a wife who sent him money and luxuries and visited when she could and three apparently quite normal teenage children, the two youngest attending private schools in the city while their older brother now studied law at Moscow State University.
It was through Zalisko that Nikolai had acquired his first tattoo.
He had seen the marks countless times on men and women outside: emblems stained onto fingers clamped around the hand grips in the Metro; the edge of intricate patterns on bare arms and necks, disappearing beneath sleeves and collars or the shoulder strap of a summer dress. The vague awareness that there was meaning behind them never seemed important before but things were different now. Here in Samara each body told its own story: each tattoo, he had learned, was a symbol of status and experience that defined an individual existence.
Some were clumsy and ugly, amateur, disfiguring attempts at acceptance by those who would never rise above the lower castes. Others were masterpieces. Breathtaking montages that drew on the tradition of the icon and popular art to convey a secret dialect that only other prisoners could read and understand.
Tattoos had become Zalisko’s obsession. Where someone in the outside world may have discovered an aptitude for music or drawing, he had developed an unexpected and remarkable talent for their design and execution.
“You see, here?”
Zalisko wore a cardboard patch over his blinded eye now, fixed with string across his forehead and tied neatly in a bow at the back of his closely cropped head. He had rolled up his sleeve to display the grinning cat on his forearm.
“This shows that I work alone. If I belonged to a gang there would be not just one cat, but many, you understand? And here…” He opened his shirt, revealing two elaborate stars radiating from either nipple. “Each point, you see, is a year in prison. And as the years go by,” he grinned, ‘so my stars get bigger.”
The tradition had begun in the gulags, in the days that followed the Revolution. Tossed into prison and stripped of their uniforms, the tsar’s White Guards had tattooed their insignia in the form of epaulets on their bare shoulders. With this gesture the prison tattoo became a badge of honor and defiance that had evolved over time into a complex array of images, each with its own symbolic meaning within the Thieves’ Code. Over the years Zalisko had made a study of the subject, compiling his own portfolio of sketches through which he led Nikolai with enthusiastic zeal.
“You see, here?”
His long fingers traced across a collection of familiar profiles… Lenin… Marx… Engels. “They say that in the old days the smart ones would have themselves marked with their images so the guards would be afraid to shoot them.” He winked at Nikolai with his good eye. “But maybe not so smart at all. Most of the guards ended up hating our heroes more than they hated their prisoners.” He flicked to the next page of his book, smoothing it out on a series of classical sketches, his voice lowering with respect.
“Now these are traditional. From the icons. You see the saints, the crucifixion, cathedrals. Towers on a cathedral stand for convictions. A skull stands for a life taken, and here,” his forefinger stabbed at a gaunt portrait, eyes downcast, the forehead wrapped in a twisted band of barbed wire. How close it seemed, Nikolai thought, to the image of Christ with his crown of thorns. Zalisko drew a breath. “The worst. Life sentence without the possibility of parole.” He paused a second then turned the page to another cluster of images.
“And now we have more modern times.”
His finger stabbed at a drawing of the German SS insignia. “The sign of the prisoner who has never confessed anything.” Below it Nikolai’s eyes fell to an incongruous collection of beautifully sketched female portraits. He recognized Madonna, Julia Roberts; pondered over another that looked familiar. Zalisko watched him for a moment before proudly providing the answer. “You know Cindy Crawford?” Beneath them was an intricate fan of American hundred-dollar bills. “Now these,” there was a profundity in the tall man’s voice, “these are the new icons.” He looked up at Nikolai with an enthusiastic grin. “You see, my friend, this is why my records are so important. Another generation and the old badges of honor will be gone forever. Thieves today are too busy. They have no time to earn respect and why should they, when they can buy it?” He tapped at the page with his forefinger to make his point. “This is what the new order is all about. You have the money, then you have whatever you want. This is the new Russia!”
The words echoed in Nikolai’s head. He looked up slowly from the page and stared at the man seated next to him
The new Russia. Perhaps even more insane, if that were possible, than the world it had replaced.
The bleakness of his expression seemed to have no impact on Zalisko’s enthusiasm. The tall man beamed at him, his wide mouth curving in a grin that spread his thin lips across gold- capped teeth.
“So, my friend,” he probed a finger beneath the patch and worried at the empty socket. “It is your choice. You are one of us. You have earned your right and if you are smart – if you want to survive in here – then this is how you make your statement. So,” he regarded Nikolai brightly, “what is it to be? The great artist, Zalisko, awaits your pleasure!”
Nikolai stared back at him trying to comprehend what had become of his life.
It was late September now, a Saturday. Summer was over and the temperature was beginning to turn. He and Natalia and Larisa would have spent a day like this shopping and laughing together, or perhaps, as a special treat for Larisa, taking her across the river to the rundown funfair at Gorky Park. He had a home then, a family, a career, prospects for the future, and now? Now there was no future.
Four weeks ago he had given Zalisko his address in Mira and Zalisko had passed it on to his wife on her next visit. Just that morning she had come to Samara again and Zalisko, after seeing her, had returned to the cell with a grim expression to deliver her report. She had gone to the building in Mira, trying to locate Natalia, but the apartment was empty, the other flats cleared out as well, the whole building deserted apart from the superintendent, who claimed to know nothing… only that the woman and her daughter had gone weeks before, leaving no forwarding address.
After that, Zalisko’s wife had tried the first of the telephone numbers he had given her for Vari but that had proven useless as well. As the wife of a man who had made a career outside the law, perhaps not surprisingly, she had hesitated for several days before calling the other. When she did she placed the call from a booth in the shopping center beneath Revolution Square and gave a fictitious name, but Mr Vlasenko was not there, she was told. He had left the service. No longer worked for the FSB. Could someone else help, perhaps?
She had rung off quickly and stood there for a moment wondering what else she could do to help her husband’s friend, since that seemed the Christian thing, then commonsense had prevailed and she had realized that there could be only trouble at the end of that path, so she had turned away and lost herself in the crowd and put the whole thing out of her mind once and for all.
So Nikolai had come to the end now.
Natalia’s parents, like his own, had both died years ago, before Larisa was born. He had no brothers o
r sisters, no other family that were in any way close. Natalia had a younger sister living in Latvia somewhere, but they had hardly ever communicated and he had no idea where to reach her. There were friends, of course, and perhaps some of them knew something of where Natalia and Larisa might be, but without any access to a telephone now, his only means of contact was by mail and so far all the letters he had written had gone unanswered. Most likely, he surmised, because they had never been allowed to reach their destinations. Perhaps there was something more Zalisko’s wife might be able to do. Perhaps if he gave her more names and numbers the next time she visited. Perhaps. That was all that was left now.
His former life was slipping away from him. He could almost feel it running through his fingers, its last threads becoming finer and more tenuous every day.
He had been sentenced to twenty years and now, after just a few months, he was already facing a second trial, for murder. The fact that it had been self-defense and never would have happened were it not for the guards’ implicit involvement in the episode was beside the point. Nikolai understood how things worked now. He would be found guilty and a second sentence would be layered on the first. And then, if he were to survive, in all probability it would happen again.
So there was no future other than survival, and Zalisko was right. In order to survive he needed to make his statement. To reinvent himself within this brutal new world.
It was with that realization that he drew the book of sketches from Zalisko’s hands and made his choice.
16
Perhaps it was the heat and the fumes, or the trauma of being bound there, together with Florinskiy, in that small dark space somewhere beneath hell on earth and whatever lay beyond, reliving the awful torment of memory. Whatever it was, something had finally caused Nikolai’s brain to turn off, making the shock so much greater when the sudden noise dragged him awake. For a moment he was lost; had no idea where he was, then someone outside switched on a light and the tiny incandescent seams filtered down again through the nail holes above his chest and everything came back to him.
