The Survivor

by Gregg Hurwitz

  She leaned forward and kissed him. “Now the illness is going to your brain.”

  His cell phone chirped across on the kitchen table. Text message.

  On the couch Jason groaned and sat up.

  Nate said, “Abara,” and tried to rise, but his leg complained and he winced and sat back down.

  She moved toward the phone. “I’ll get it. Maybe Nastya already got a confession from her old man. Maybe Abara’s calling to say the whole gang’s in jail and we won the Powerball, too, and NIH is announcing a cure for ALS—”

  She stared at the LED screen, her words sticking in her throat. Her mouth came slightly ajar.

  “What?” Nate said. “What?”

  Jason stood and cracked his back, the sound loud in the quiet house. Cielle turned over and mumbled, “Gross.”

  Nate’s focus stayed on Janie. Speechless, she crossed to him and held out the phone. “We gotta leave,” she said.

  Reading the screen, he felt a dull pain start up in his stomach, a beating drum. The words didn’t fully compute, and he had to back up and read them again. ANASTASIA KILLED SELF. PVLO’S GONNA GO SCORCHED EARTH. I NVR SAID THIS, BUT FRGT THE TERRORISM CHRGES AGNST U + GET THE FUCK OUT OF DODGE. NOW.

  A flood of guilt washed over him, leaving him shell-shocked, his ears ringing. She was a troubled girl in an impossible predicament. He pictured her in the booth, the weight of her denial melting away, her fierce words about her father—He is the only thing I have ever had.

  Vaguely, through the haze in his head, he became aware of surging lights at the periphery of his vision. Blue and red, peaceful, almost angelic. And Jason by the front window saying something, his words fuzzed and shapeless.

  Jason repeated himself, sharper, snapping Nate from his trance. “Cops. The cops are here. Right outside.”

  Indeed, those were patrol lights flickering through the gauzy curtains and rolling across the ceiling. Nate leaped to his feet, and then Cielle flew up from the couch, the blanket fluttering like a cape, Casper startling at her side.

  Reaching to snap off the reading lamp, Janie nearly knocked it off the table. “They can’t possibly know we’re us,” she said.

  “Right,” Cielle said. “Just break-in artists.”

  “Back door,” Nate whispered.

  “No,” Jason hissed. “Two guys already headed through the side gates.” He withdrew his finger from the curtain and flattened himself to the wall. “And two more are coming up the walk. Right now.”

  They were frozen in place. Any move toward the kitchen or garage would put them in view through the beveled-glass panels bookending the front door. Fleeing down the hall would force them to cross a series of windows draped merely with silhouette curtains. Casper emitted a faint growl, and Nate snapped his fingers. “Hush.”

  Jason straightened himself. “I’ll go out, make a run for it.”

  “They’ll catch you,” Cielle said.

  “Yeah, up the block, though. It’ll distract ’em, give you guys time to slip out. I’ll just tell ’ em I broke in as a prank.”

  Cielle said, “No way, Jason. Don’t be lame—”

  “It was my idea coming here. I don’t care. I’ll just get arrested, but you guys could get killed.” He took a step toward the door, almost in sight of the glass panel.

  “Stop, Jason,” Cielle said. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “They know you, too, Jason,” Nate said, in as loud a whisper as he could risk. “Yuri saw you.”

  Jason paused, glanced back at Nate, and shrugged. “Then let it be me. Not Cielle.”

  Looking at the husky kid with his slouched shoulders and baggy hoodie, his hair swirled up in the back from sleep, Nate felt an undeniable pang of affection. Even regard.

  They could hear the policemen’s boots now and see flashlights strobing up the walk, rocking with each step. As Jason braced himself to step into view, Nate realized he was too far away to reach him in time.

  But then Janie said, “Wait.” She bounced on her feet, flipping off her shoes, then stepped out of her jeans. Beneath, she was wearing a pair of Nate’s boxers. Then she tugged off her sweater, revealing a stretched T-shirt that showed the points of her nipples.

  “Uh, Mrs. O?” Jason said.

  Cielle had sagged back onto the couch, watching her mother, her mouth slightly agape. Nate had yet to formulate an appropriate question to ask Janie when the doorbell rang, the sound pronounced off the hard surfaces. A flashlight knocked wood a few times, hard.

  Janie turned to Nate. A harsh whisper: “On the floor.”

  He dropped to the floorboards, the bottom two-thirds of the front door vanishing behind the half wall partitioning the foyer.

  Janie’s head swiveled to Cielle. “Lie down.”

  Cielle lowered herself stiffly on the cushions, disappearing behind the couch back, a vampire returning to its coffin. On the far side of the couch, Casper also lowered himself to the floor, following the same command.

  Janie looked at Jason, frozen in almost comical surprise at the hinge side of the front door. “Stay.”

  He flattened to the wall inches from the panel window.

  Janie mussed up her hair, blond spikes sticking out in all directions, and started for the door. “Coming.”

  Affecting a tired slump, she tugged the door open, stifling a fake yawn. “Yeah?”

  The fresh-faced cop peered past her into the house. “Mrs. Newell?”

  “You boys know what time it is?”

  The two patrol cars at the curb seemed to light the neighborhood, but no one was up and about on the dark street. The faintest rustle issued from the couch cushions. The hidden dog made a barely audible whine.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the cops said. “We had a call from your neighbor, Mr. Sullivan? I guess there’ve been lights in the house—”

  “Oh. Right. I forgot to tell Sully. I had to come back early from Maui. Family emergency. I must’ve left a light on out here.” She rubbed an eye theatrically. “Look, I’m wiped out. Do you think…?”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Newell. But it’s our responsibility to follow up—”

  “And I’m glad you did. It’s good to know you’re here when we need you.”

  “We can give a quick check, make sure you’re safe, and then we’ll be on our way.” His boot set down on the threshold, his knuckles pushing gently on the door.

  Janie shuffled back a bit, swinging the door open a few more degrees. Two feet from her elbow, Jason stayed so still he might as well have been inanimate, nailed to the wall, a piece of art.

  Janie halted, as if having second thoughts, the young cop moving forward, head down. Suddenly they were much too close.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I really need to get some sleep.”

  The cop hesitated, unsure, reluctant to retreat but not wanting to force his way forward. The slightest lean on his part would bring Jason into view.

  Janie looked into the young cop’s face, inches from hers. “Boys,” she said, summoning amusement and the slightest hint of scorn. “Really?” She gave him and his silent veteran counterpart the full-wattage smile, and both sets of eyes traveled briefly to her chest and then back up again.

  Suddenly tongue-tied, they nodded and mumbled a few words, already backing up. The veteran gave a whistle, and a cop emerged from either side gate, nodding at her as they headed off the property.

  Janie closed the door, lowered her head, and blew out a shaky breath. She stood there as one engine turned over, then another, and tires crackled slowly away.

  “Okay,” she called out, her voice tight with adrenaline. “We can go now.”

  Chapter 46

  The slate-colored sky signaled either the birth or the death of the day, but Pavlo did not know which. He’d lost time, simply dropped out of it as if plunging through a sheet of ice into cryogenic waters. The first dot of sun nosed over the skyline to the east, casting straws of light through the grain and grit of early morning. Hastening along the fractured downtown si
dewalk, he stared at the solitary point of light and thought, So that’s it. A new day.

  The venerable marble steps, worn by a million footfalls, stood out from the surrounding concrete and rotting wood. He mounted the brief flight of stairs and pushed through the imposing oak door. Contrasted with the gray morning chill, the humidity of the banya was startling, pressing itself into his pores.

  He did not know what had drawn him here.

  The memory returned, less a thought than a primal impulse, a fury of clawed impressions scratching at his spinal cord. Around midnight he’d entered her room to check on her. Those pale thin legs, the swaying feet—a familiar prison tableau. He’d stood breathless in the doorway, all the wrong details coming into painful focus. The dusting of drywall across her shoulders from where the fan had been wrenched from the ceiling. The rasp of the pull chain, still swaying. Those perfect teeth, gleaming above her slack jaw. The next he recalled, he had her down and across his lap. One of his hands rested beneath her slender, bruised neck, the other clutching his heart as if to hold it together. His chest convulsed, a silent shaking. He thought he might be dying. Choking on his own air, he felt the moisture on his cheeks. He had not cried since his boyhood and had forgotten the sensation. He made not a sound.

  After the parade of paramedics and firemen, the cops with their endless questions and looks of thinly veiled suspicion, that spic Abara had arrived with another agent to sit on the couch—his couch—and make phone calls. The house was no longer his own; medics and officers stomped about and used the toilet and left the hand towels on the counter. Nastya was conveyed out finally in a white body bag, strapped to a gurney, and Pavlo was given a phone number to call in the morning.

  He’d closed the door on the last intruder, listening to it click shut, the dividing line between the present and the rest of his life. He walked back into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and drank it down. For seventeen years, every glass of water he’d had, each piece of bread, every bit of nourishment, he’d taken as a father. No more.

  He rinsed the glass, dried it carefully with a towel, and set it back in the cupboard. When he turned, his men had materialized behind him. It was safe now that the officials were gone.

  With its seams and bulges, Yuri’s face looked like a rotted piece of fruit. Dima and Valerik remained behind the big man, as was their habit. But Misha, Misha stood to the side, clear-eyed and well rested. His round, boyish face held a quiet contentment. He’d waited his turn, and now the bell was about to ring.

  Pavlo walked over to him and brought his face close to Misha’s. Misha did not flinch, didn’t so much as blink.

  “There is no trial now,” Pavlo said. “No witness list. There is one thing only, one thing left in this world.”

  “I understand,” Misha said.

  “My daughter is gone. And his daughter lives.” The skin of Pavlo’s face tightened like a stretched hide, bringing a dull ache to his temples. “You take from him what he has taken from me. And then you keep taking, piece by piece.”

  “That is what you brought me here for,” Misha said.

  “There is no more here,” Pavlo said. “No more America. There is only vorovskoi mir.”

  Misha nodded, keeping his head bowed an extra beat, a show of respect. With both hands Pavlo cradled his chin and lifted his head. He kissed him on one full cheek, then the other. Still he did not release Misha’s face. Not until he’d leaned in and hissed, “Let them hate as long as they fear.”

  Now, sweating in the dense air of the banya, he passed several valets gathering plates and mugs from the night and preparing for the new day. All of them stepped aside and lowered their eyes as Pavlo walked by. Word had spread.

  He entered the rows of lockers and stood before his own, removing one loafer, then the other. He laid his suit jacket beside them on the wide bench. A door banged open, and drunken voices echoed around the tile—club revelers, here to detoxify after an all-night drunk. They stumbled around the corner, unshaven and reeking of alcohol. Pavlo stood, facing his locker, pushing the buttons of his dress shirt through the holes.

  “Move your shit over,” one of the young men said in Russian. “You don’t own the whole bench.”

  Keeping his eyes forward, Pavlo pulled off his shirt, revealing his blue arms and chest. At the sight of his tattoos, the young man backpedaled so violently that he lost his footing on the slick tile and fell back into his friends, who propped him up. Kowtowing, they retreated, calling out apologies and expressions of remorse. Pavlo kept undressing, his eyes never leaving his locker, and a moment later the door boomed a second time and it was silent again.

  Once naked, Pavlo reached for a comb he kept on the top shelf of his locker and scraped back his hair, already wet from the humidity. He did it again and again, pressing the comb hard enough to bruise the scalp, feeling the plastic teeth scour his skull.

  Then he padded through the antechamber, past the claw-foot tubs and icy plunge pools. Beneath a dripping faucet, a heap of thin birchwood branches soaked in a wooden barrel. He chose one with especially dense foliage and shook it in assessment, cool drops dotting his cheeks. It would do.

  In the banya itself, the firebox glowed, the throat of a demon. A worker, half invisible in the steam, hurled logs in.

  “Hotter,” Pavlo said, and the mist-draped form nodded and fed the monster some more.

  Pavlo set down the branch and stretched, first his hamstrings, then his groin. Leaning into the burn, he emitted a deep open-mouthed exhalation, expunging the swamp gas from his belly up through the tube of his throat. On the hiss of his air, he could smell his own insides, cigarettes and mortality. His skin was aflame, the heat at him with its pitchfork and horns.

  “Hotter!” he roared.

  The form bent and rose, hurling more logs into the mouth of the firebox.

  Sweat beading on his skin, Pavlo snatched up the birchwood branch and slapped it against his legs. The sting was unearthly, divine, bringing up the toxins, releasing them through his skin.

  He flailed and whipped at the tattooed shackles clamped around his ankles, purging the poisons of his body. That was what the birchwood was for, of course, but he knew now, in the hot center of the pain, why he had come.

  In the Zone the worst sin a vor could commit was breaking the thieves’ code, disgracing the brotherhood. If he did not stand by his decorations, they were taken from him. With sandpaper. Shards of glass. A lump of brick. Sometimes the offender was held by five men, a red-hot frying pan pressed to the back of his hand to black out the pigment beneath. So this, then, was why Pavlo had been drawn to the inferno.

  With the branch he continued to strike at himself. His hands, the ring tattoos. Slapping at his chest, beating the eight-pointed star, the ornate church domes marking his internments, the scrolled lettering across his ribs—LET ME BE DEAD TO YOU. Sweat flew from his nose, his chin; it puddled at his feet. He flailed harder, slashed at the tulip thrice wrapped with barbed wire, tried to carve the bare-toothed scowl from the wolf capping his shoulder. And then, doubling over, whipping the branch over his shoulder, raking the leaves across the inked eyes on his back. His screams turned to animal roars, cords standing out on his neck, each blow intensifying the heat until it seemed his entire body glowed like an ember.

  “Hotter!” he cried, but the form was now lost entirely to the thickening steam.

  The leaves shushed and rattled, a primitive instrument beating an age-old rhythm. Bits of foliage broke off, sticking to his red flesh. His sinuses burned; his lungs pulsed. He gasped in the heady scent of released pain and fresh-peeled skin, intoxicated on the taste of his own agony, choking on the knife-sharp purity of the air. He lashed at the abrasions, the sharp leaf edges finding greater purchase, rending the ink from his flesh. Screaming, he battered at his grief, beating the imperfection from himself, blood weeping from his brands.

  Finally he paused in heart-arresting exhaustion, his chest heaving, his face awash with tears and sweat, and let the st
ained birchwood branch fall from his fist. Burgundy drops spattered the tile at his feet.

  He stared down at himself through the swirling steam. His decorations moved, alive with veins of blood. They drifted on his skin, rippling and breathing, and the revelation lit him from within: He hadn’t gouged the decorations from his body.

  He had reclaimed them.

  Chapter 47

  “Nevada?” Cielle offered.

  “Dude, the Grand Canyon is epic.”

  Janie rubbed her temples. “First of all, Jason, the Grand Canyon is in Arizona—”

  “Really?”

  “Last I checked. And second, we’re not really embarking on a sightseeing tour.”

  Leaving just before first light, they’d driven a short ways up State Route 2 toward Eagle Rock before pulling over to convene at a roadside diner. They required a game plan, but there was another reason Nate had opted for the early rest stop; his hands had grown loose and sloppy on the steering wheel, and he doubted his ability to hold the Jeep on the road. Forced to make a frank assessment, he had to concede that his body felt worse than it had yet, more in thrall to the illness. And not just the muscles, but dizziness, weakness, a dull throbbing in his stomach.

  On the way to the corner booth now, he lagged behind with Janie to tell her softly that he needed her to take over at the wheel, and she nodded her solemn consent.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t risk going on the road,” she said in a low voice. “We can’t be running around with you if—”

  “No way,” Nate said. “If it gets to that, leave me at a bus stop.”

  At this, Janie grimaced, unamused.

  “We have to get out of the state,” he continued quietly. “As far away as possible. Besides, where the hell would we stay around here? Breaking and entering is too dangerous, as we just learned.”

  Cielle and Jason reached the table ahead, Cielle watching the heated if hushed exchange across the restaurant, and so Nate and Janie cranked neutral expressions onto their faces, forged forward, and sat down to order breakfast.

  Sitting with his back to the wall, handgun in his jacket, and several thousand dollars in cash stuffed into his pockets, Nate kept watch of the truckers and postal officers at the counter, sipping their coffee and forking hotcakes. Cielle picked at her food. Jason stuffed another giant bite into his mouth; after asking if the eggs were organic (no) and if the biscuits were made with lard (yes), he had sanctimoniously settled on a salad. With bacon.