Burn Artist

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Burn Artist

  Hound of Eden: A Prelude

  By James Osiris Baldwin

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  Books in the Alexi Sokolsky series

  Available now from Amazon and Kindle Unlimited

  Burn Artist | Book 0

  Blood Hound | Book 1

  Stained Glass | Book 2

  “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” ― C.G. Jung

  Chapter 1

  Two nights before Vyacheslav Nazrenko burned to death, Vassily and I were at the movies. It was a week after the premier of Aliens, and we were watching it together for the third time.

  “Ohh… ohhh… here it comes.” Vassily, mumbling around a mouthful of popcorn, pointed at the screen with the straw of his soda. “The screaming cock of doom, Alexi. Right out of her fucking chest.”

  I didn’t reply, eating popcorn one kernel at a time. I flicked one into my mouth and caught it with a crunch.

  “This is why you never let anything over five inches near your mouth, man. Bananas, squids, nothing. Before you know it, BAM, something’s rammed its dick right down your throat and is pumping you full of alien spooge.”

  “Shhhhh.” Someone behind us hissed.

  “Vassily.” I stared fixedly at the screen, keeping my voice down. “They’re eggs.”

  “Yeah, eggs. Which is basically just spooge in a shell.” He made a face. “Worst M&Ms flavor ever.”

  “SHHH.” The hissing behind us was louder, this time. A man’s voice. It was lost in the sudden shriek of the chestburster exploding, the cocooned woman screeching, the Marines on screen yelling, and the whoosh of a flamethrower.

  “YEAH! Barbecue that sucker!” Vassily called out in Ukrainian, bouncing in his seat.

  The man behind us reached forward to shove at Vassily’s head. He flinched away as I dropped my popcorn and snatched the stranger’s wrist, catching it before he made contact. I cranked it back, and he yelped.

  “You. Don’t touch my friend,” I rumbled.

  “Then tell him to shut the fuck up!” The stranger – a red-faced, stocky Brooklynite of indeterminate European ancestry – tried to pull his wrist back. He had a can of beer in his other hand. “Leggo my arm!”

  “You know, it’s really rude to touch people’s heads in some cultures.” Vassily turned in his seat, blinking with wide, innocent eyes. “So how about you go fuck yourself in the ass with that can and let me enjoy my goddamn movie?”

  The guy turned a nasty shade of purple. All at the same time, he threw his beer into my face, I lunged forward and punched him, and Vassily reflexively dumped popcorn over the both of us.

  The screaming and screeching on the screen drowned out the sounds of our fistfight as the guy pulled me over the seat and into the next row. He’d made a mistake in dragging me to him. I’m nearly always shorter than every other man in the room, but I’m also often the strongest. And Sokolsky men know how to brawl.

  It was 1986 in Brooklyn, and summoning an usher was the last thing on anyone’s mind as I took the guy down to the floor. Confined between the rows of red padded seats, there wasn’t much room to wrestle on the sticky carpet. I got on top of him and beat him until he stopped trying to knock my teeth out and began to fight for escape instead. The people who’d noticed the fiasco in the aisles around us cheered us on.

  The man crawled out from under me and under the legs of our fellow moviegoers, stumbling up at the end of the row as I did my best to stalk toward him. Difficult, when you have to turn and sidle like a crab past the knees of laughing, bewildered, and irritated people. Eying me like a wild deer, our assailant turned tail and ran.

  I gave up and rejoined Vassily, glaring at him in the gloom as I took my seat and used paper towel to wipe beer out of my hair. In the spirit of brotherhood, he offered me his soda. I accepted a mouthful, sweet as it was.

  We lasted another fifteen minutes before the staff came in. Vassily nudged me, and then motioned to the door at the corner of the theater. “Hey, check it out. Time to make our daring escape.”

  Ugly and a few of the cinema staff were congregating at one of the exit doors. They were waiting, which meant they were probably hanging on the police. I nodded, and together we picked our way stealthily down the aisle in the opposite direction, headed up the back of the theater, and vanished into the tacky Art Deco hallway outside.

  “Well, that was a fuck up.” Vassily rolled his eyes. “You head to the car. I’m going to the box office.”

  “What?” I brushed down my wet dress shirt, which smelled strongly of alcohol. “Why?”

  “Because I’m getting our money back, is why.” He slapped me on the shoulder, and gently steered me toward the front door of the cinema. As we were going out, the police were coming in. They passed us in the foyer with a brief glance at my disheveled hair.

  “Hey, Sir,” Vassily called out to them, lifting his voice above the small milling crowd. “Excuse me. Are you looking for the drunk guy?”

  “Yeah. What’s it to you?” The cop called back.

  Vassily pointed back down the hall. “They’re that way. The ushers are holding him by the door downstairs.”

  “No worries.” The other cop held up a hand to him, and they passed us on by.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I hissed.

  “Crazy as a snake on a hot road,” Vassily replied cheerfully.

  “You’re on remand!”

  “This whole case is stupid white collar shit. You know as well as I do that Marco will get me off. Go on, man. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  There was more than one reason Vassily insisted I leave, and more than one reason why I was happy to do so. I wasn’t great around cops. It was like they could smell the violence on me… the lingering ghosts of illegal magic, old blood, cold metal, and bleach.

  Due to the nature of my profession, I always kept a towel and spare clothes in the car, including a nicely pressed white shirt and black leather gloves. I also had a bottle of Dramamine in the glove box, which I was grateful for after the sensory assault of the cinema on my synesthesia. Aliens was worth every minute, but it was still hard going when every high-pitched sound burned like acid on my tongue.

  After fifteen minutes or so, Vassily strolled out of the building and popped the passenger side door, dropping into his seat. He had a shit-eating grin and a deep dancing light in his dark blue eyes.

  “VIP passes for our next film, my fine, prickly friend.” He winked and clicked his tongue. “They had the guy in handcuffs. He was ranting about some ‘Russkie dwarf that don’t speak American’ trying to punch his lights out, but he was pretty drunk.”

  “My goodness,” I said, tugging my clean gloves up along my wrists. “What is this city coming to, Vasya?”

  “Some people are just nuts, right?” Vassily stretched like a cat in his seat, and yawned. “Well, let’s get back home. I have to work out what the fuck I’m getting our mighty Avtoritet for his birthday party. I’m looking forward to it, don’t get me wrong, but everyone is going to get him a Rolex and I just… I mean, how many Rolexes does a man really need?”

  “We have the money if we get something together,” I said. “We could get him a car, maybe a Hot Rod or a Corvette. Some kind of 1950s showpiece.”

  “And show up Lev or Vanya in front of the boss? Are you kidding?” Vassily rubbed his thumb across his lips. “Nah, nothing quite that extravagant or obvious. Let me think about it some more. Besides, I want to go home and jerk off to the image of Ripley with a flamethrower while it’s still fresh in my mind.”

 
; I rolled my eyes, and abruptly reversed the car onto the road. Vassily pitched forward with a yelp, fumbling for his seatbelt, and then laughed uproariously as the momentum threw him back against the headrest.

  ‘Home’ for me was a small third-floor apartment on Banner Avenue, a red-brick building that looked like a meatlocker with balconies. It was small, neat, and Spartan, insofar as an occult library crammed with exotic magical tomes could ever be said to be ‘Spartan’. I sacrificed furniture and aesthetics for floor to ceiling shelves of fiction, non-fiction and esoterica in every room. My collection focused on the Jewish ritual magic dating back to King Solomon’s court, which along with John Dee’s Enochian ceremony, was the backbone of my craft as the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya’s only hitmage.

  “So… wait, I’ve got it.” Vassily waved his hands up ahead of me on the stairs as we climbed. “He likes sweet stuff, right? What about a box of Forrey & Galland?”

  “What are those?”

  “Really fancy chocolate. About five hundred for a box of ninety.”

  I grimaced. “You buy women chocolates. Rodion is too old-fashioned.”

  “Caviar?”

  “The party is at The Russian Tea House. There’ll be more caviar than we can stand. What about a horse? As in, a racehorse? It’s less grandiose than a car.”

  “He really prefers cars to horses,” Vassily replied. “I dunno. I know he likes jewelry. Maybe something with diamonds, but it’s hard to find manly shit with diamonds on it. The Rolex thing is looking better and better.”

  We reached the blank concrete corridor that led to my door, and I spun my keys around my thumb as I brooded. “Like you said, we’ll think of something. But given that his birthday is in three days…”

  I trailed off as I heard a tinny sound through the door. The phone.

  “Goddammit…” I unlocked the house, and turned to find Vassily with his hands cupped and ready. I threw him the keys, hurriedly shucked my shoes outside, and ran for the office, where I snatched up the phone and jammed it against my shoulder. A burst of sound crackled out of the receiver: men yelling, arguing with raised, angry voices.

  “Sokolsky speaking?” I groped around for the chain to my desk light.

  “Alexi. Rod wants to see you.” Nicolai Chiernenko, senior captain of Brighton Beach and one of the hardest men in the Organizatsiya, was a weathered man with a scratchy, flat voice as dry as straw. If he was bothered by the violent racket behind him, it was not apparent. “Can you make it to the office?”

  My stomach dropped. “Of course. Should I bring my paraphernalia?”

  “Yeah. Rod’s really pissed. Bring some holy water and whatever you’ve got for the evil eye.” And then he hung up.

  The evil eye? Holy water wasn’t really my style, but it at least gave me some inclination of what to expect. I stood back from my desk for a moment, thinking, and then stalked out of the office.

  Vassily was waiting for me on a sofa in the den. He technically had his own apartment, but Vassily stayed here so often that it was practically his house, too. Had his own bedroom, and had even brought his pet to live here. Sir Purrs-A-Lot, his obese tuxedo cat, was sprawled across his knees like a baby seal.

  “What was all that about?” Vassily quirked a dark eyebrow.

  “We have to go to Sirens,” I replied, walking on past. “By the sounds of it, someone has been cursed.”

  Chapter 2

  It was a Saturday night, which meant that the Budweiser-scented hellhole that was Sirens was well and truly open for business. It had been murderously hot during the day - 92 degrees - and a late afternoon thunderstorm earlier in the night had turned Coney Island into a swamp. The cinema and car had been cool, but my hands were sweating under the wrist when we got out at the club and ran into a wall of hot, humid air.

  Sirens was a two-story building that was longer and wider than it was tall. The wall facing the street had been painted white, with a roped off cattle chute for guests and a large purple canopy with the club’s name on it. The staff lot was unobtrusive by comparison, playing host to an array of scooters, convertibles, and numerous black BMW jeeps. The smaller vehicles almost universally belonged to the strippers. The army of jeeps belonged to the other men of the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya, New York City’s largest and oldest ‘Russian’ mafia.

  The term ‘Russian Mafia’ is a poor analogue for the many unallied brigadi that make up Slavic organized crime. For one thing, any given Organizatsiya has members from all corners of the Eastern Bloc, as well as Turkey, Israel, and Chechnya. For another, the term ‘mafia’ conveys a certain sense of conservative, orderly unity, evoking images of hereditary Families led by a single Don. Every one of the organizations that could be described as ‘Russian mafia’ do things their own way. If the Italian Mob is a family business, then the Russian Mafia is a fast-food franchise: a cluster of para-military cells unified around a team of managers, with each cell branching out further into a web of patsies, fall-men, bookies, dealers and common street thugs. Vassily and I occupied a strange position within our own brigada. We were both immigrant children born in America to long-time Thieves in Law. Our hereditary position conveyed a certain hollow prestige, in that the senior authorities invested more time into us, but they also expected more.

  “Ugh,” Vassily said. “Jesus Christ. I almost forgot how hot it was out here. It feels like something is wiping its dick all over my face.”

  I blinked a few times, trying to digest the metaphor as I pulled my briefcase from the back seat of the car. “I’m mildly alarmed that you have a reference for that sensation, Vasya.”

  “I don’t.” Scowling, he plucked at his shirt, trying to stop it from sticking to his chest. “I just watch a lot of porn and I know I’m making the same face that the chick does when the guy jacks off on her.”

  “You’re very single-minded tonight, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, don’t give me any shit. Daddy didn’t get his bathroom time, and now we have to be back at work.”

  The security post out the back of Sirens was usually the cruisiest place to work on any night. You stood at the door, smoked, read the newspaper, talked to your friends, and - if you were so inclined - hit on the strippers as they went in and out for shifts and smoke breaks. There were two guards out here tonight, and they looked anything but relaxed.

  “Alexi, Vasya, thank Mary and all her little saints.” Roman was the taller of the two: a large man with a small face and big ears. He would have been handsome if he’d been crafted to be more proportionate. “You need to get in there, man. Someone’s hit Slava with the evil eye.”

  Vassily arched an eyebrow. “The evil eye? Like, the curse? Did he piss off some gypsy’s grandma?

  “It’s not funny. Someone’s cursed him, I swear to God.” The other man at the door, a guy I’d always known as Ottarik the Turk, looked deeply unsettled. He had a hand-shaped hamsa pendant hanging outside of his collar on a thick silver chain. “I was standing right next to him on the floor, and then this mark appeared. I felt it like the Devil passed me, then he started screaming and tearing off his clothes. No one could keep him calm.”

  Ex-Soviet muzhiki are some of the toughest muscle in the world. Every one of them was a thief, a murderer, a jailbird, a current or former drug addict, and often ex-military. These were men who’d cut their own grandmother’s throat for a dram of good Chinese opium… but they couldn’t deal with the evil eye. The evil eye was one of those curses that led to financial and physical ruin followed by an unavoidable, lingering death. Your business would crash, someone would run over your puppy, your woman would die in childbirth. Then you’d get prostate cancer or some other similarly gruesome condition, and you would go mad in the months or years before you died alone in poverty and misery. Hexes like this probably did exist, but the description of events – burning, screaming, pain – didn’t sound like the usual superstitious hysteria to me.

  “I’m sure we’ll be able to do something for him.” The briefcase I carried co
ntained enough occult paraphernalia to give both Roman and Ottarik heart attacks if they ever had chance to look inside. Cards, knives, ritual spell components, powders and talismans, and glue gun for affixing permanent magical inscriptions to smooth surfaces. It was the 20th century, after all. “Are they in the manager’s office?”

  “No way. Security office. Lev and Rodya won’t let him into the upstairs, man. He’s cursed,” Ottarik said.

  Roman spat on the ground to banish the evil force gathering around the door at talk of curses and the Devil, and ruefully shook his head.

  The door to the security office was usually open. Tonight, the door was closed, and all three of the bouncers on duty were clustered around the entryway, gossiping to one another in hushed tones. When they noticed us, they stopped talking, watching me like a dangerous viper slithering down the hallway toward them. As far as the average tough guy muzhiki was concerned, the only thing more terrifying then the Evil Eye were those capable of cursing people with it. People like me, a Volkhv: a magus, able to affect magic through his will alone.

  “The Ghostbusters are here, never fear!” Vassily strolled ahead, breaking some of the tension, as I drew up alongside. “Who’s in there?”

  “Rodion,” Demyon replied. He was a rangy Ukrainian with a shaved head, his scalp marred by old chemical burn scars. “Nic. Slava, of course. Petro, Lev, Semyon and Grisha.”

  “Grisha? Oh jeez,” Vassily said. He knew what was coming.

  My skin tightened and my gut clenched with a nasty, cold sensation. The world withdrew; I was suddenly empty, ringing and numb. “What the hell is Grigori doing here?”

  “He IS the Kommandant,” Demyon said, sullenly. “Be pretty fucked if he wasn’t there for his man.”

  Whatever chill I had vanished in a cloud of angry steam. “Rodion knows I can’t work with him around. I need this like I need teeth in my ass.”

  One of the katsap, a Russian who didn’t speak Ukrainian, eyed me suspiciously and crossed himself as I barged on past the trio through the door, Vassily on my heels. We emerged into a scene that would have been hilarious to the point of absurdity on any other day.