The White Van

by Patrick Hoffman

  “Give me your wallet,” said Sophia, standing and holding her hand out.

  “Why?”

  “Give me your wallet,” she repeated in English.

  “Look,” said Benya, standing and backing toward the door. “I owe you the money, I will pay you the money, but this—this is unacceptable. I have not even met you yet.”

  The room fell silent.

  Sophia moved her hand and the young man stepped toward Benya, who stepped back against the wall. Benya raised his hands in surrender. The young man gave a tiny smile and then faked at Benya’s face. Benya hadn’t fought since he was a boy in Moscow. He flinched up hard and the young man came back with his left hand and punched him square in the balls. Benya fell to the ground, and unable to breathe or yell, curled into the fetal position.

  The young man produced an extendable baton from somewhere and whipped it open. Benya heard it snap and clenched his body and covered as the thing was raised up.

  “No,” said Sophia. “Please.”

  The young man stepped back.

  “Give me the wallet,” said Sophia.

  Benya could not straighten up, even to grab his wallet. He felt sick, his head hurt, his stomach hurt, he could not breathe, fucking Radionovich.

  The young man stepped into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and drank it. Except for Benya’s breathing, they were all silent.

  After half a minute, Benya pushed himself up onto his knees. He tried to grab his wallet, but he couldn’t. He got all the way up and nearly fainted. He pulled out his wallet and limped to the table and set it down.

  Benya could smell the leather of the wallet. Sophia looked through it. She took out the different business cards of his associates and examined each one. She took out his credit cards, looked them over, and put them back. She took out his driver’s license and handed it to the young man, who put it with the passport in his back pocket. She pulled out his cash and counted forty-two dollars; she arranged the bills faceup and then snapped her fingers and the young man handed her five one-hundred-dollar bills, which she added to Benya’s cash before depositing it all back into his wallet. “It’s not a great quality wallet,” she said in English, setting it down on the table.

  She stood up and put Benya’s laptop and power cord into one of the legal boxes and put his cell phone from the table on top of that and said, “Listen to me, my dear, you owe us one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. This is a remarkable sum of money. You know, I know, we all know that people get killed for much less. People like say, for instance, your aunt Galina in Petrovka? Or your friend David in Miami? Your ex-wife, the American, in Fresno?” She looked to the young man, who nodded. Benya’s mind reeled; how did she know about his aunt Galina? She wasn’t even on Facebook. Sophia continued, “Maybe she can pay, this ex-wife? I don’t know. I do know this makes me sick to think about it in these terms—but this is where we find ourselves. I have given you a gift of five hundred dollars to hold you over for the next few days. Consider it a signing bonus. You’re not alone. It’s a little problem. Just wait here for the time being. We will tell you when we are ready. But please, please, dear heart, do not worry about a single little thing.”

  She pointed at the boxes and Benya watched as the young man stacked the two of them up with the computer at the top and walked out the door with it all in his arms.

  Sophia looked at Benya for a short moment and then turned and left, closing the door gently behind her as she went.

  Benya spent the next three days close to home. If he went out it was only to buy cigarettes or wine. He didn’t spend any of the five hundred dollars, but the bills, crisp and new, were there each time he took out his wallet.

  He was feeling guilty. He had a core of guilt in his chest and it was growing by the day. It felt like an actual physical presence in there, like if he reached into his insides he would be able to grab on to a black, wet tumor of guilt. Guilt and shame.

  What did Sophia mean when she said, We will tell you when we are ready? What were they looking for in his room? Why did they take his papers and his passport? Should he call his family and warn them about this woman?

  He attempted to call Yakov Radionovich at least ten times from a pay phone in a Laundromat on Hyde Street. Each time it would go to an answering machine, and each time Benya would not leave a message. What could he say?

  He played with the idea of going to the police, but because of the threats to his family he decided he couldn’t. He didn’t trust the police. American police were unintelligible. He felt friendless. The few friends he had wouldn’t understand. He would have to go over all the embarrassing details.

  This wasn’t the first time he had experienced something like this. In Russia, after the collapse, he had helped open a clothing store in Moscow. It hadn’t been a big shop; he and his older cousin Dmitri ran it together, selling knockoff sporting clothes. The shop was in the Strogino district, one stop away from their apartment. They had hired their neighborhood krysha to protect them and things had gone fine for a month, until one evening before they closed, three men came in, closed the front door, and locked it. The men were giants. They each weighed over 250 pounds. They wore the warm-up suits and the kind of gold chains that were fashionable for thugs during that time. The largest of the three men, mustached and oily, walked up to Dmitri and introduced himself in a friendly way. The man explained that times were dangerous and that every small business on Ulitsa Kulkova Street needed to pay for protection. Dmitri told the man that he already was paying, that Ilya from the Towers was their krysha. The man smiled at Dmitri, looked around the store, and asked where Ilya was. He asked if he could please speak to Ilya. The other two men laughed. The man then told Dmitri that their terms of protection equaled 10,000 rubles a month. Dmitri was already paying Ilya 3,000 rubles a month, and that was eating into their profits. Dmitri told the man it was bullshit, and that if he wanted money he would have to go to Ilya. The men left the store, saying they would come back for payment in one week, and if Ilya from the Towers had anything to say about it he should be there, too.

  Dmitri and Benya had gone to Ilya and told him about the men. They described the men and Ilya had seemed to think it was funny. Ilya told Dmitri that the bigger man was his cousin; that he was a police officer, and that the type of protection he was selling was different than Ilya’s; it was state protection.

  Dmitri stopped paying Ilya. He refused to pay the new men. On the two-month anniversary, right after they opened the shop, the new men came back in. Dmitri told Benya to run out the back and get the police. Benya ran to the police. He tried to get them to come back to the store with him, but the officer, a kid who looked like he couldn’t grow a beard, had told him that he was not allowed to leave his post. The officer told Benya he would call it in, and Benya watched as he turned away and spoke into his walkie-talkie.

  Benya ran back to the store. He came in from the back and found Dmitri on the ground with his head smashed in. Benya drove Dmitri to the hospital, where he died three days later. Benya left Russia the next week, first for Finland, then Paris, New York, and finally, San Francisco.

  On the third day after he was visited by Sophia he decided he couldn’t wait around his apartment any longer. He went to the main library and sat on a bench and watched homeless people. The Tenderloin was filled with addicts—people with their faces deformed by drugs, asking him if he was all right. Look at this place. Look at that woman, she doesn’t have a chin.

  That night, after hours of tossing and turning in his bed, he dreamed of a six-headed snake: all of the heads extended out from the center, like a wheel, six tongues hissing and the thing’s skin oily and green. He woke up covered in sweat and began his fourth day of waiting before the sun arose.

  Eighteen hours later, for the first time in his life, he found himself smoking crack in a hotel with Emily. Sophia and the man had come for him earlier that morning and searched the Tenderloin for, as Sophia phrased it, “the right girl.” They had dri
ven in circles for what felt like hours until they had settled on Emily. Nobody had told him anything. He didn’t know what they were doing; he had no idea what the plan was. He sat silently in the back of the white van until they told him he had to meet that girl. They followed Emily as she walked around the Tenderloin. They watched her talk to some teenage Asians on Leavenworth and they followed her to a bar. “Show her these drugs and make her come back to the hotel, room 214,” Sophia said, handing him a card for a hotel in South San Francisco, a key with number 214 printed on it, and a bag filled with drugs. “Show her money, show her drugs; get her to go with you.”

  Benya protested that he couldn’t, that he didn’t know how to do these kinds of things.

  “Use your fucking face,” Sophia said in English, “and know her. Get to know her.” He didn’t know what this meant, and he felt fear in his belly. “Show her the drugs,” Sophia repeated. “She will go with you.” They told him they would be in the hotel room directly next to his.

  And now he was so high, his eardrums were buzzing. He had never used any kind of drug before. He paused on the balcony outside and looked out at the courtyard of the hotel. There were trees he hadn’t noticed; their leaves shook with the wind. Everything was focused; he was focused. The walkway was vivid. Things were strangely good. He knocked softly on the next door, room 216. Sophia opened it and stepped aside, frowning at his obvious intoxication. He smelled like chemicals.

  “What you are going to do with her?” he said in Russian. He didn’t feel scared, he felt collegial. He felt in control.

  “I told you, nothing—tonight, nothing. I promise you, on my mother’s name, we are not going to harm this girl. It is just a little scam we will do—using her, mind you. Not on her. She is a partner, like you and me and him.” She pointed at the ugly man who was sitting there looking tired.

  The sound of the television playing next door was coming in through a laptop in their room; they were listening to everything. There was a video feed, too; he walked over to it and watched Emily sitting on a chair, holding the pipe, looking around the room.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” said Benya. The drugs were making him bold enough to voice his concern.

  “You don’t have a choice.” said Sophia. She walked over to the bathroom and rummaged through a bag until she found a small glass vial. She shook it and held it out for him. “Put this in her drink.”

  “What is it?”

  “It won’t hurt her.” She handed him the vial, and then pulled out ten twenty-dollar bills. “And this, to pay for her time. See, she’s happy, we’re happy, you’re happy.”

  “What am I going to tell her?”

  “Tell her what I’ve told you.” Sophia was starting to sound angry. She looked to the young man for assistance, but he merely shrugged. “Tell her we plan on making money,” she said. “Tell her, you know, I’m your wife and we are running a little scheme; tell her we will fill her in when the time comes. Use your imagination. No more baby talk. If she wants to leave, she can leave. She will not be at risk—but if she does leave—you”—she pointed her finger at Benya—“you will be at risk.”

  Benya held the vial in his hand and looked at it. What was he becoming? He turned to leave. The young man rattled a bottle of pills, and when Benya looked, tossed them over to him.

  “And give her those,” said Sophia. “Her medicine. She’ll be happy.”

  The next six days were strange ones for Benya Stavitsky. They were the strangest days of his life, but they were also very boring. He sat around. Sometimes he watched the girl, sometimes Sophia did, sometimes they both did. The young man (“Georgy,” Sophia called him) barely went into Emily’s room. He just watched Emily via the computer, or lay on one of the beds, or watched television. He never left the hotel.

  Benya tried to suss out what the relationship between Sophia and the young man, Georgy, was. They certainly didn’t seem to communicate very much. There was no bantering. Benya started to wonder if he could gain any traction with Georgy, but anytime he tried to talk with him (when Sophia was out of the room), he was rebuffed. He didn’t push the issue—he didn’t want to risk another beating, or worse.

  Benya observed Sophia reporting information about how the girl was doing to Georgy, who would sit there and nod passively. Occasionally, when Benya was in Emily’s room, he would try to listen for sounds coming through the wall; a difficult task, since he knew they might be watching him on their computer. He would take up a relaxed pose and strain his ears as hard as he could. On two occasions he thought he heard Sophia and Georgy arguing.

  Benya had no idea what they planned on doing with Emily. At first, he figured it must be some kind of sexual thing, some kind of prostitution, or pornography, but then it seemed that Sophia was grooming Emily for some type of bank fraud. Benya would listen to her telling Emily that she was just going to make a little transaction. It seemed too easy to be true. It had to be worse.

  And why did they keep drugging her? They were giving Emily different drugs, a liquid in her drink, the pills, the crack, and at night, most disturbingly, Sophia would pull back Emily’s blanket, pull down her pants, and inject shots from a small syringe to the inside of her thigh. Even this would not wake Emily. But to what end were they drugging her? Benya didn’t know, but he could see that Georgy, who only came in the room when Emily was unconscious, took a keen interest in these daily administrations.

  And they tested Emily. By the third day, Sophia was making her do strange little tasks. Emily was asked to walk here or there, to write down things, to clean things, to step outside and come back in, to memorize information. Benya tried to recognize a pattern, but he couldn’t.

  The thought of escape was always on his mind. He thought of running nearly every hour. He wanted no part of what they were doing. But the obverse of this sentiment was the prospect of clearing his debt—to start fresh! And there was still the matter of the threats they had made in his apartment—credible threats—to his aunt, his ex-wife, and his friend. They had access to his Facebook account by now, and if they wanted, they could reach out and kill acquaintances barely even known to Benya. The fact of the matter was, leaving felt scarier than staying. His stomach was a knot of fear. What would they do to Emily if he left? He told himself he was staying to make sure nothing bad—nothing “untoward,” as Sophia innocuously put it—would happen to her. But in the end, it wasn’t altruism that was keeping him there; it was fear.

  After the first night, Benya would occasionally smoke crack with Emily. He did it because it seemed to lessen his fear. Sophia and the young man never objected—in fact, they seemed to encourage it. It wasn’t like he was getting out of control; he would just occasionally smoke from the pipe. It helped quiet his mind. They were giving him a constant supply to give to her, and he shared it.

  It didn’t help him sleep. He would spend the night in the room with Sophia and the young man. They would take shifts watching Emily, either in her room or on the computer. Benya slept on the carpeted floor in their room. He had a blanket and a pillow that he had stolen from Emily’s room on the third night. Georgy also slept on the floor (he snored gutturally); Sophia slept—fully dressed and over the covers—on the only bed in the room. When it was Benya’s turn to watch Emily, one of them would shake him awake and he would go into her room and sit on the reading chair and wait. If she stirred (she rarely did), he was supposed to wake the others up.

  Meanwhile, Benya, Sophia, and Georgy did the regular things that people do. They never seemed regular, though. When Benya brushed his teeth, he felt self-conscious. When he used the bathroom, he felt self-conscious (the noises!). When he ate food—always delivery—he felt strange and unhappy. Sophia ordered the food unenthusiastically. Georgy smacked his lips, ate with his head down, and swallowed loudly. Their trash overflowed from the bathroom trash can. After they ate, they would bring food over to Emily. Nothing made sense. At night, as Benya fell asleep, he would inexplicably have memories of reenacting B
rezhnev’s funeral as a child.

  Emily was clearly changing. When she was awake she walked around with a strange gait. She barely looked at him. She seemed to listen only to Sophia. Her face became dumb. The color in her skin was fading to a sickly gray. She had grown quiet. Sometimes she would fall into a daze and stare right at him with her mouth open. It scared him. Whenever he tried to start a conversation with her, Sophia would intervene and send him back to their room with a nod of her head.

  One day, Benya and Emily were alone in her room. Benya was perched on the chair and Emily lay in bed looking at the television. Benya said, “Emily.” Her head rolled toward him. Keeping his eyes forward, Benya asked, “How do you feel?” She stayed silent. “What’s happening to you?” he asked, quietly enough to blend in with the noise from the TV. “Do you want to leave?”

  He looked at her. She had turned back to the television.

  Always pay attention to the person who counts sunsets, his aunt Galina had once told him. It means they know they are dying.

  A day later, Benya found himself sitting in the white van, waiting for Emily to emerge from the bank. How did I end up here? His fear felt like nausea. His heart threatened to pop. How did I get here? The door of the bank swung open. Emily stepped outside. She was wearing the wig and glasses and carrying a big tan bag. She was walking unsteadily, weighed down to the side. “Go,” said Sophia. Benya felt his fear change into a panicked elation.

  He put the van in drive and released his foot from the brake; the van inched forward. They stopped in front of Emily, who appeared to be asleep on her feet. Sophia opened the side door. Benya stared. Emily wasn’t moving. What the hell was happening?

  “Get in the van,” said Sophia.

  “Get in,” said Benya, squeezing the steering wheel and staring over at her.

  Emily turned and stumbled back toward the bank like she had forgotten something. She retreated inside. They sat there in silence for a moment. Heat swelled from Benya’s stomach to his head. Sophia yelled into the phone, telling Emily to come back out. They waited. Benya looked across the street at Georgy. He was visibly upset. Benya rolled down the window and listened for sirens. He couldn’t stop his hand from shaking.