Burn Artist

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Everyone seemed to be yelling at everyone else. Vyacheslav Nazrenko – Slava for short – was a skinny, heavily tattooed, hairy man, currently sitting on a wooden chair in a circle of salt. He was shirtless and rigid with fear, both hands theatrically clamped over his heart. Papers and shed clothing were scattered everywhere on the ground. An ashtray had been overturned. Petro sat at the round staff table, putting down a double shot of vodka as he watched Rodion, our Avtoritet, drunkenly chew out his Advokat, Lev, and Lev’s friend Semyon. Clouds of cigarette and marijuana smoke billowed out of the security manager’s office.

  “Fucking Christ, what the fuck took you cocksucking fucks so long?” Rodion turned on Vassily and I as we reached the table. He was big bear of a man with a big voice, big sideburns, and a pompadour that would have taken pride of place at any Greaser convention. By contrast, Lev was a dead ringer for Bill Gates: slim, a little soft in the arms, but his sea-green eyes were always flinty and calculating. His best friend and companion Semyon was a white-collar gangster as well, but considerably less attractive than Lev. He had sandy hair and a high forehead, his features seemingly squashed down near the bottom of his face.

  “Good evening, Avtoritet.” I replied, setting my case down. “You’re looking well.”

  Rodion seemed to swell another half foot in size. “Don’t be a smartass. Did I tell you fuckwits to crawl here?”

  “Fuck off, Rodya. We got here as fast as could.” Vassily laughed him off and plopped down in a chair across from Petro. “Hey beautiful, is that bottle of Khortytsa for me?”

  “Knock yourself out,” Petro mumbled.

  “This is that bitch piece of shit pindos’ fault!” Rodion snarled. He pointed at Slava with a sausage-sized finger, and the skinny man paled even further. “All that happened was that Slava and Mo went to go remind somebody to go pay up, and now this stupid Yankee is putting the evil eye on MY men!”

  “Am I gonna die?” Slava squeaked.

  “Could everyone please calm down?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. The noise was causing my vision to swim with bursts of light and color.

  “I don’t know what to say to you, Rodya.” Lev pushed his glasses up along his nose, his face a mask of displeasure. “This is what happens when you try to solve these kinds of problems with violence as first resort, when we could have–”

  “You can go fuck off with your patronizing bullshit, is what you can do,” Rodion snapped. “I’ve been twisting wrists since before your mother spread her legs for your daddy, you cumstain. And YOU.” He turned on Petro, who shrank into his chair. “What did you do to the guy, Petro? Did you murder his fucking dog in front of him and steal his favorite car or something?”

  “We put him against the wall with a razor and told him he needed to pay up.” Petro was usually a tall, strikingly handsome man with a deep tan and tragically fashionable hair. He currently looked like a whipped puppy. “How many fucking times-”

  “Could someone please help me?” Slava added.

  “WILL YOU ALL JUST SHUT! UP!” I finally raised my voice.

  As my shout reverberated off the walls, everyone fell silent. Every one of them stared at me in shock.

  “If you want ANYTHING done tonight, then everybody except for Slava and Rodion needs to get out,” I said, pointing at the door. “NOW.”

  “I’ll leave when I want to.” Petro sat up in his chair, suddenly possessed of something resembling a spine. “You don’t get order me around, you spooky piece of shit.”

  Vassily’s long, handsome face froze into hawkish lines as he got to his feet. “Yeah, well I do. Calm your tits, and get the fuck out.”

  Petro’s expression soured. “Hey, just because you’re working with Rodya doesn’t mean-”

  “What the hell? You brats are trying to order my soldiers around now?” A very deep voice, whiskey-hoarse and as dry and black as old tar, spoke from the other side of the room. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  Chapter 3

  My back stiffened painfully as I turned to square off with the speaker. “I’m the only person capable of dealing with this particular problem, father.”

  Looking at Grigori Sokolsky was like looking at my own reflection in a funhouse mirror. I was short, muscular and compact. My father was simply enormous, with the paunchy muscle gut, thick arms, and extremely broad shoulders of a lapsed bodybuilder. We shared the same hard, square features, and most characteristically, the same piercing white-gray eyes. From that point onward, we shared little in common. I was polished, pale and polite, well-educated through a combination of merit and good luck, and intentionally well-spoken. Grigori was not. He was a thuggish alcoholic gorilla with a seaman’s tan and oily hair the color of coal. The sight of him was enough to turn my stomach.

  He chuckled. “What was that? I can’t hear you up here, short stuff.”

  “Wonderful, yes. Very funny. Now please leave.” I fought the urge to snap at him. “I need to work.”

  “What kind of hello is that for your old man?” Grigori grinned. He had several gold teeth, several black teeth, and a couple missing. “Do you see this, Rodya? You just gonna stand there and let him order around his Kommandant?”

  “I’m going to stand around and wait for everyone to clear out so that something can be done about Slava,” Rodion said. Rodion was a big guy who’d done his time in the Red Army and in prison camps, but even he was nervous around my father. Among the rough and tumble of the Organizatsiya, Grigori went beyond the pale. He’d killed his own father as a teenager, become a wrestler for the State, was sent to the GULAG for nearly a decade, then had gone on to beat, strangle, knife and rape his way from Siberia to New York.

  “I knew I should have stuck with jerking off,” Grisha said, gesturing to me. “After all those years spent feeding this ungrateful son of a bitch, this is what I end up with.”

  “Get out,” I repeated.

  “Or what?” He leered at me. “You feeling froggy, kid?”

  Just those three words were enough to send a flush of adrenaline through my head and chest. I heard a creak: my gloves, as my fists tightened beside my thighs. If I backed down, no one would respect me. If I stood up to him, I was defying the law of the hierarchy. My father outranked me in social capital and by title.

  “The Kommandant would let me help his cursed soldier,” I said, trying to keep the shake out of my voice. “I have a job to do. Leave.”

  Finally, my father’s eyes narrowed to smoldering white slits. “Now you listen to me, you little faggot–”

  “Grisha, don’t worry about it.” Nicolai came up on his right and clapped him on the arm, halting him as he began to advance. He was a dry, thin man who looked like a corn stalk beside my father’s bulk, but Grigori stopped all the same. “Leave it. Let’s go get a drink.”

  “Suits me.” Petro glanced uncomfortably at me, then Vassily, and then stood back from the table.

  I regarded Grigori with arrogant disapproval as shivers tried to spread through my limbs. He sneered knowingly, and then he, Vassily, Nic, Petro, Lev and Semyon left the room as one. I stared at their backs until the door slammed shut.

  When I was sure they were gone, I turned on Rodion. “You knew this would happen. Why was he here?”

  “Hey, don’t you give me any shit. Grisha came in with Slava.” Rodion shuffled his shoulders back under his leather jacket, his heavy features set and unreadable. “I know you and he have some personal beef with one another, but he’s got as much right to be here as you do. And he’s right. Don’t show up your Kommandant in front of the others again.”

  I wanted to scream at him. He didn’t understand. My father was like a sleeping bear. When it was out of sight, it was out of mind. When you poked it – when he was reminded of something he was supposed to hate – he didn’t go back to sleep. A single personal encounter with my father led to weeks of continual abuse. He’d turn up at my apartment and shout at me from the street or outside my door and pick fights, which he still often wo
n. He’d shit-talk me to everyone in the Organizatsiya, and tell lies about me that I would be forced to defend. Once, he’d taken a dump on my car and wiped his ass over the windshield. Eventually, he’d get bored of tormenting me, succumbing once more to the memory-wiping comfort of the bottle and the pill, but my life was going to be hell until he was over being shown up in front of his friends.

  I couldn’t find the words to reply. My face felt hot, my stomach cold.

  “Are you gonna help me or what?” Slava’s whining broke the ice that had frozen over the room.

  Magic. Magic was the panacea. Besides Vassily and Mariya, magic was the one constantly empowering, pleasant thing in my life. Shuddering, I turned away and broke the circle of salt around Slava's chair with a toe. It was useless – salt was a good enough focus for protective magic, but it hadn't been spread around by a mage. A salt circle cast by a frightened superstitious gangster wasn't going to stop anything except slugs. “Uncover your chest.”

  The scrawny man finally dropped his hands, uncovering his left pectoral. My eyebrows nearly reached my hairline when I saw what he'd been concealing. It was a kolovrat, a sun wheel, an ancient Indo-Slavic symbol related to the swastika. It was burned into his flesh like a new brand, and as I watched, the weeping wound crawled with a tiny spark of bright orange energy.

  “This isn't the evil eye.” I went to one knee on the ground before him, studying the mark from half a foot away. It had a prickling resonance to it… the emanation of strong magic. “What on Earth were you doing to end up with something like this?”

  “I wasn't doing nothin',” Slava replied. “I didn't see nobody, no one came near me, nothin'. I was on shift and my chest started hurting like someone stabbed me, man.”

  “But you went and roughed someone up,” I said, flatly. “Who?”

  Slava looked up past me, to Rodion.

  “No one who can do magic, if I'm even right at all. I'll tell you about it later in the office,” he grunted.

  I refocused on the injury. “Can you think of anyone else you might have ticked off over the last week or two? Anyone’s girlfriend cheat with you? Debts? Did you sell bad dope to anyone…?”

  “No man. No way.” Slava shook his head emphatically. “Only thing I did was the job on Maslak.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rodion frown. His eyes darkened and went distant. You could almost hear the gears grinding inside of his skull. He had been shouting about someone before… something about Slava and Petro laying the thumbscrews on some Yankee.

  “When did this mark appear?” I glanced back at the door, making sure that my father was no longer there, and pulled one of my gloves off. I kept my hands covered at all times, including during the heat of summer. Waking, sleeping... there were only three reasons I ever took my gloves off. Two of those reasons involved the bathroom; the other instance was when I needed maximum contact with fields of arcane energy.

  Slava sniffed. “Tonight, about forty-five minutes ago. I was out on the floor, just walking around on the railing. Then this hit. It hurt like getting shot… and now I feel really fucking weird. Like something’s wrapped around my heart.”

  “Did you notice anyone acting strangely? Staring at you, following you around the room?”

  Slava shook his head again.

  Closing my eyes, I held my hand out a couple of inches from Slava's chest, and relaxed my body along the straight rail of my spine. As my hand got closer to the mark, the hairs on his chest prickled with a tiny sound, like embers crawling through paper. The sound - and the energy - was orange, bittersweet and sharp. You could tell a lot about a static enchantment just by those first sensory impressions. It was hot, fiery, and the energy had a bated, unpleasant feeling about it. The spook behind this curse was waiting for a trigger, perhaps, or simply the right time to finish the spell. Whoever was behind this, they were using the mark to maintain a line of connection between themselves and Slava.

  I knelt back, pursing my lips, and stood. Both men in the room watched me in uncomfortable silence as I went to my briefcase and popped the lid. Immersed in the white-noise trance of magic, I could feel their stares playing over my exposed skin. I drew a small knapped obsidian knife, a flat, blank piece of human bone on a red cord, a metallic silver Sharpie, and a tiny hooked graver with a fine, sharp point.

  “So. What’s the verdict?” Rodion had his arms folded loosely across his chest.

  “It’s a curse,” I said. “The more serious kind. I’ve heard of mages who are capable of affixing hex marks to someone from a distance, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it in person.”

  Rodion winced, clicking his tongue. “So, what? Does this mean his dick is gonna fall off or something?”

  Slava’s hands gripped the sides of the chair. He made a weird, strangled sound in his throat.

  “It’s impossible to know exactly what it’s intended for. My first inclination is to say that it’s a warning and possibly a surveillance tool… magic that feeds information back to the spook who cast the spell.” I knelt back down in front of Slava, this time on both knees, and spread my tools out.

  “What’s it going to do to me?” Slava watched me, his eyes rolling like a spooked horse. It was hard to say what frightened him more: me or the curse.

  “I literally just explained that I don’t know.” I couldn’t keep the irritation from my voice as I considered what we needed to do. “I’m going to draw on your skin around the symbol. It will work something like a tracking device… if the Spook tries anything on you, the ward will trigger and I will be able to find the mage performing the spell. I need you to make sure that you don't shower. No showering, no bathing until we find the guy that did this. Do you understand?”

  Slava swallowed, and glanced past me to the others. “Okay.”

  “The second thing I’m going to do is take a drop of your blood and create a protective talisman,” I said. “I’ll work on it tonight and bring it in tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow? Can’t you get it to him any sooner?” Rod said.

  “Tomorrow is pushing it as it is.” I shook my head. “Talismans require a great concentration of effort. The standard charging time is a full lunar cycle; we're doing one in less than twenty-four hours.”

  “Will it work at all, then?”

  “It's better than nothing,” I said. “A dustbin lid will work as a shield if you're in a hurry. It won't stop a bullet, but the bullet won't go as deep.”

  “Jeez. That's fucking reassuring.” Slava rubbed his hands over his face.

  I knelt back. “It's the difference between injury and fatality.”

  “Amen to that. If it’s the best we can do, it’s the best we can do, eh, Slava?” Rodion chuckled, but it sounded tense and reddish, too high-pitched to be a real laugh. “You'll be alright.”

  That remained to be seen. I took the knife in one hand, the talisman in the other, and drew the point through the air over my chest, then over Slava's. He went still as I worked through the words of power needed to bind the sigil. The man was frightened, energy that radiated out from him in invisible waves I felt as a pressure in my mouth and sinuses. Fortunately, fear was the perfect tether for a ward designed to monitor and track. Like bodies, magic needs energy to stay alive. As long as Slava had this mark, he would be afraid of it. As long he was afraid and focused on it, the gathering ward would have an energy source.

  I took his hand, exposed the pale skin of his wrist, and lay the point of the knife where his spider-and-web tattoo ended. He sucked in a sharp breath as I pushed it in and twisted the tiny wound open. Dark venous blood welled up slowly, and I used it to sketch first rendition of the ward around and over the curse mark. With the other hand, I pressed the bone flake over the small injury and held it there as I filled in the geometry for the ward with the silver Sharpie. The original cartridge was long gone: the replacement contained real colloidal silver.

  It went on faded, dulled by the drying lines of blood, until I finished th
e figure and carefully closed the seal. Then it rippled and flared briefly before settling into a bright, metallic glow on his chest.

  Both men were struck dumb. No matter how many times they saw it, magic was always startling for blanks. Their focus aided the spell, contributing force I didn't have to draw from myself.

  “There.” When I was sure the circle was integral, I pulled the talisman away. The smooth bone now had a fine film of dried blood, which I quickly sketched on with the graver. “I will take this home and work on the actual protection tonight.”

  “So what do I do now?” Slava said. “Go say my Hail Marys?”

  “What does any red-blooded man do when he's facing down death, Slava?” Rodion laughed and clapped him on the back, nearly knocking him off his seat. “You drink and fuck. You’re off for tonight and tomorrow. Go visit the bar. There’s a new girl doing her public audition for us out there tonight, this little bitty brunette. She’s easy to pick out… huge rack, dances in all of this fancy lingerie.”

  Slava perked up at the thought of lingerie, then turned to look at me with renewed concern. “This shit isn’t going to kill me, is it?”

  “It might,” I replied. “However, I doubt whatever curse has been placed on you is going to kill you tonight at the very least, so try to stay calm and keep up your usual routines. I’ll bring the talisman after sunset tomorrow.”

  “You fucking try to stay calm.” He rolled his eyes and got to his feet.

  “Don’t be a dickhead, Slava. Go join the others and have a drink. I have to speak to Alexi in private.” Our Avtoritet was smiling, but it was forced. “Come on, Lexi... we'll go to my office.”

  Slava shook my hand, and that was the extent of his gratitude. He and Rodion kissed cheeks, and I studied the larger man as they milled. Rodya was the kind of leader who appeared to wear his heart on his sleeve: down-to-earth, open, casual. In truth, he was a shrewd and intelligent man, but to my interrogator’s eyes he currently looked like someone under pressure. Someone was tightening the vice on my Avtoritet. There was something happening that Rodya wasn't talking about to his adviser or his commander, and it was bad. It was quite bad, and I didn't have to be a wizard to know that it was about to become my problem.