“I was Artur’s right-hand man,” Mikhail said. “I used to get the key assignments, have a seat at the table, have access to all of the important information. And then Vlad came along. There was no warning. Artur didn’t even make Vlad prove himself. He just brought him in as my replacement.”
Sympathy pulled Maya closer to Mikhail. She had felt the scarring burn of betrayal, the internal poison of her own jealousy. Even though she had won Artur back, she had lost him irrevocably to another woman. As if that weren’t hurt enough, the other woman was gone, but Maya was still second in Artur’s affections, which he reserved entirely for Inna.
Daringly, she placed both of her hands on Mikhail’s chest. She caressed her palm over his pecks, taut and firm under his button-down shirt. Emboldened when he neither laughed nor pulled away, she closed the small gap between them. “I know how that feels,” she said. “And I know how to get revenge.”
She bunched her hands in his shirt and pulled him toward her. His arms came around her in implied welcome, and the small spark from his embrace filled an empty space inside her, not enough to slake the gnawing hunger, but enough to abate it. If she could have more, then maybe she could forget the pain she constantly carried. She leaned into him, needing his kiss.
Their lips met for the briefest moment. Mikhail cast a wild glance around the waiting room and released her.
He sat down, as if feeling unsteady on his feet, and pulled her into the chair beside him. He didn’t let go of her hand as he tilted his head toward hers. “Oh, Maya,” he said. “If Artur finds out what we’re doing, he’ll kill me.”
“Let’s make sure he never finds out,” she said.
“He might suspect,” Mikhail said, but she silenced any further worry or protest with a finger to his lips.
“I know my husband. If he knew, you wouldn’t be here right now standing watch over Inna and me,” she said. Mikhail visibly relaxed. She ran the pad of her finger over his bottom lip, so full and ripe she wanted to take a little nibble. “Trust me,” she said.
His blue eyes met hers, full of promise and a silent agreement.
VICTOR
EVEN WITH A hospital security guard and one of their own men babysitting the doors to the emergency room, Victor practically had to drag Artur away from the waiting area. They couldn’t talk openly in front of Maya, who managed to regard Victor with a potent mix of beauty and venom.
She still hadn’t forgiven Victor for his blackmail twenty-six years ago, even if it had given them both exactly what they wanted—Artur. Or maybe she had forgiven him but still guarded Artur jealously, as if she wanted to tell the world Artur belonged to her and her alone. Victor almost felt sorry for her. The only person Artur truly cared for was Inna, the great hero’s Achilles’ heel.
“I’m not waiting for Dato’s crew to strike,” Artur said. Victor sat across from Artur in the nearly empty hospital cafeteria with Styrofoam cups of coffee Victor had purchased from a vending machine. “It’s time to be proactive.”
“I agree about being proactive,” Victor said in an attempt at diplomacy, “but, Artur, you can’t just go in and kill them all.” Right now was not the time to let his partner go renegade.
“Why not?” Artur challenged.
Victor took a moment to assess Artur before answering. Artur hadn’t washed or slept. He had spent the night in vigil at the hospital. He was merely edgy now with adrenaline, Victor told himself. All Artur needed was a firm reminder about what was at stake to make him fall back into line.
“Why not? I’ll tell you why not,” Victor said. He leaned toward Artur, resting both hands on the gray Formica tabletop. “Because of the Directorate,” he whispered.
“I don’t give a damn about the Directorate,” Artur confessed.
Victor choked on the sip of coffee in his mouth. Artur hadn’t even bothered to lower his voice. The name of the secret organization that had cowed Artur in the past seemed to hold no special power for him now.
Not good. Not good at all.
“For all we know, they’re behind what happened tonight. It’s the kind of thing they would do. Isn’t it? To keep us in line. To make us do the next deal,” Artur said, his voice filled with disgust.
Victor had known Artur a long time. He’d had a front row seat to the dramas in the man’s life. Losing Sofia had dampened the man’s rebellious streak, had given Artur a taste of what could happen. “No, Artur. It’s not what they would do. It’s not their style. You know that. They don’t play like this. If you defy them, they kill.”
For more than twenty-five years, veiled threats against Inna had been more than enough to keep Artur on the straight and narrow, never deviating from orders. He might think those decades of threats had finally taken form. But the worst hadn’t happened. Inna wasn’t dead.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Artur said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Directorate tonight. About what they want. About how they control us. Inna’s worth more to them alive than dead. If she dies, they have no way to make me do what they want. I’m out. Done. And they know it.”
Victor silently kicked himself for not arriving sooner, for giving Artur so much time to ruminate.
“I made the deal for her, Victor. I came to this country and did their bidding for her. So she could have a good life. But they’ll make her life hell. They’ll terrorize her. Just to control me.”
“So what are you saying?” Victor asked. Years of training kept the frisson of alarm from tightening his voice. Tonight’s events should have made Artur more pliable, more compliant. Instead, they had pushed the man past his edge, introduced a feral quality. Artur was a brilliant man, and Victor had spent the better part of his career harnessing that genius to their mutual benefit, but now Artur threatened to slip the yoke.
“You can’t go up against the Directorate. They’ll crush you,” Victor said.
Artur frowned down at his coffee cup, and Victor couldn’t tell whether the frown was one of concentration or disappointment—in him. Age had been kind to Artur, kinder than it had been to Victor, who had grayed and let himself go soft in the middle. Younger than Victor, Artur was distinguished and fit. Time had only deepened his charisma, made people want to please him, to trust him. Even now, after all of these years, Victor felt the pull, understood how easy it would be to fall into Artur’s orbit.
“Artur, step back from this. You’re upset tonight. Don’t let emotion push you to do something stupid,” Victor said quickly. “You’re my oldest friend. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“We’re all hurt,” Artur said. He took a breath as if he were about to say more, but stopped. “Vlad!” he called and waved his hand in the air.
The hulk Artur had recently hired to manage security strode toward them. Vlad was large and imposing, conspicuous, the type of man a person would remember meeting and wouldn’t want to cross.
“Artur. Victor.” Vlad gave them each a curt nod. He was a man of few words, and Victor liked that about him. He preferred the muscle to be big and silent, seen and not heard. Problems started when the help started thinking for themselves.
“What did you learn?” Artur asked.
Vlad cut a glance in Victor’s direction, as if he were asking Artur whether Victor could be trusted. Victor bristled. Artur and Victor were partners, but Victor suddenly saw how easily he could be marginalized, unimportant, replaced, the way he had been when Ivan was around—before Victor had managed to neutralize him.
It wouldn’t do for Artur to have his own secrets or sources of intelligence, his own men loyal to him.
“The information’s sensitive,” Vlad said.
“There’s no secrets between Artur and me,” Victor said. “We’re partners. And you work for both of us.”
Vlad again looked to Artur for confirmation, and Victor resolved to spend some one-on-one time with Vlad to make sure the big dog answered to him as master. Artur granted his permission with a nod.
Vlad sat down in the empty chair
at the square coffee table and bent his head in toward them. They both leaned forward. “Zviad wasn’t a real member of the Georgian crew. He was an undercover cop,” Vlad said.
Artur blew out a breath. “A cop? What was he doing with Inna?”
“And why at Troika, on the same night you were sure to be there?”
Artur tapped his fingers on the table. “You think it was a setup.”
“Get rid of the cop and cast suspicion on us,” Vlad said. “It’s a possibility.”
“But why would they do that to us? What about the… deal?” This time, Victor made the cutting glance toward Vlad, a reminder to Artur that their newest associate had not been fully briefed on their activities.
“The deal’s off,” Artur said with a decisive wave of his hand.
“You can’t do that!” Panic rose up, and Victor couldn’t stem the tide. A wave of protest spilled from his mouth unchecked. “What happened to Inna is nothing next to what they’ll do. They’ll kill us, Artur. Not just you. Both of us.”
“Who’ll kill you?” Vlad asked.
“The Georgians,” Victor lied.
ARTUR
ACROSS THE CAFETERIA table from both men, Artur could tell Vlad sensed Victor’s lie, although Vlad still hadn’t sniffed out the truth. Victor and Artur both had too much sense of self-preservation to serve it up.
Artur was secretly glad of Vlad’s suspicion. The kid might not be a great mastermind. Still, he picked up important nuances and had the right instincts for survival. He could be very valuable and, yet, he would have to be carefully watched and managed.
“Take a walk, Victor,” Artur said in warning. Victor was too close to hysteria, too liable to slip up.
“No.” Victor pushed away his coffee and gave Artur an affronted look. With his beak nose and flashing dark eyes, he reminded Artur of a hawk with ruffled feathers. “I’m fine. Maybe I’m the only one who’s fine here. You’re the one jumping to conclusions and making bad decisions—to go after the Georgians, to cancel the deal.” Victor shifted in his chair, and tension vibrated off of him. “It’s not like you, Artur, to trust whatever people say.”
Artur himself was on the edge, but he was playing a deep game. Plots within plots. In light of what had happened tonight to Inna—or perhaps especially because of what had happened—he couldn’t afford to lose focus. Keeping his edge was essential.
Well before tonight’s events, he had realized he needed to outsmart and manipulate everyone, including his old friend, if he wanted to escape the Directorate’s tyranny. His resolve was strengthened now, his timeline accelerated, but the plan was already in motion.
“How do you know the dead guy was a cop?” Victor demanded of Vlad.
“It’s a long story,” Vlad said. Evasive. Artur could tell Victor didn’t like that. He could almost feel the brittle crackling of Victor’s resentment, the same as Mikhail’s. It couldn’t be helped. Neither man could know who Vlad really was or why Artur had gone to lengths to make a place for him. The secret was crucial to all of his plans. So was Ivan’s return.
“We have time,” Victor said, his voice acid.
“It doesn’t matter how he knows,” Artur said. “He’s right.”
Vlad had to be right. The information explained so many oddities about the evening—why the police had treated him and Inna the way they had, why they had asked so many goddamn questions about drugs and drug dealing.
“Now you’re going to tell me the Georgians set this all up. That’s crazy,” Victor said. “They wouldn’t dare take on the Russian mob like that.”
“They do whatever they damn well please. And now they’re going to try to kill Inna,” Artur said. He was heartily sick of Victor’s mistaken bureaucrat’s view of the Russian mob. Victor imagined that there was a big, cohesive group with a leader, a king in his mind, and treaties or agreements over turf and activities. Victor didn’t grasp the reality, or else he didn’t believe Artur whenever he tried to set Victor straight. At times Artur suspected Victor imagined him to be some kind of Mobster-in-Chief or mafia don, ruler over a kingdom of organized crime, capable of exacting hefty taxes or reaching into the kingdom’s coffers to feed the Directorate’s insatiable maw.
There was no umbrella organization, no distinguished crime families, only a bunch of people out for themselves, separate lawless crews that occasionally partnered for mutual profit.
“I’m not sure the Georgians knew Zviad was a cop,” Vlad said. “If they did, there were a thousand quiet ways to make him disappear. This way, all they did was rile up the police and call attention.”
“Someone else set this up,” Artur said, embracing Vlad’s logic. “Someone trying very hard to provoke me.” Or to get Inna out of the way.
“So maybe someone else wants a war between us and the Georgians. If we fight each other, who gains?” Vlad asked.
“Another very good question.”
With such a wide network of associations, even temporary ones, no one benefited if the authorities started taking a close look at anyone. There were only so many degrees of separation. A trail that led to one could easily lead to many.
Whoever had set Inna up was a novice or an outsider, someone who didn’t understand the way things worked, or else someone with a serious vendetta, immune to concerns about provoking the other crews.
“So we’ll go reason with the Georgians,” Victor said with self-serving optimism. “We’ll tell them how Inna did them a favor, and we’ll salvage the deal.”
Artur took a sip of scalding black coffee and regarded Victor carefully over the rim of his cup. Victor enjoyed thinking he was the smartest man in the room. His arrogance left him vulnerable to manipulation and dislike, and his misconceptions set him up for worse, but he was a fixture in Artur’s life. They had been partners for a long time, practically since the beginning of Artur’s career.
They had been an odd pairing in the beginning. Artur had been idealistic, filled with naïve ideas about the Communist party and the difference he might make in the world. Victor, likely from birth, had been jaded, hungry for power and ways to wield it, yet lacking the charm that would make it flow easily into his hand.
In meeting Maya, the daughter of a high-ranking Soviet politician, Artur had stumbled onto the fast track to advancement, and Victor had pushed him along, a fact for which Artur could easily resent his old comrade. Every time he had sold his soul, Victor had been at his side to help broker the deal, not as a loyal friend, although Victor tried to present himself that way. Rather, he was something more akin to an agent intent on collecting his commission on a sale. The sale of Artur.
This last deal, the one with the Directorate, the one that had made it possible for Artur to leave the Soviet Union in 1986 with his family, had gotten the better of both of them. The Directorate was more greedy and vicious than Victor could ever aspire to be, constantly pushing Artur and Victor to take more risks and dirty their hands.
Victor had come to the United States in the mid-1990s. He had missed the all-out violence of the previous decade when the criminals and Jews, all released together as Refuseniks in an attempt to best the Americans, had descended on Brighton Beach to build their businesses and homes.
Back then, the Russian mob had been little better than street thugs determined, it seemed, to make their names in blood. Their brutality had been noted in the papers, and the community had rejoiced in the notoriety of being more violent, more ruthless, than the Italians or Colombians. In those days, an infraction as small as looking at someone the wrong way could mean a bullet to the brain, and the Directorate had saddled Artur with orders to find a way in, to make himself one of them, to find ways to make money.
Artur had been canny and quick, but he hadn’t known the rules of the street. His partnership with Ivan, a respected and high-ranking vor v zakone or Thief in Law, had made the difference between survival and death.
“What’s your plan, Victor? That we sit down and talk things out?” Artur asked. Resentment ch
urned in his gut.
“Yes, exactly. This deal’s too important,” Victor said. “We can’t let it fall apart.”
Artur and Ivan had fought Brighton Beach back to back. The man might have been a lousy father, but he had been a far better partner than Victor. Ivan understood loyalty and, in his own warped way, love. If he were here tonight, he would be plotting with Artur the best way to blow up the bastards who had hurt him and his, not cowering and whining about potential lost profits and the threat of the Directorate.
Ivan, with his tattoos and flash temper, would be an uneasy fit in this new age of quasi-legal enterprises, a liability when crime was committed with ledgers in boardrooms and not just guns and fists in back alleys, but Artur was nonetheless grateful Ivan would be back soon.
Victor was a bureaucrat and a businessman. He understood accounting in dollars and cents, not in blood and loyalty. What currency did Vlad understand?
“The only thing that’s important to me is Inna. If they threaten her, they die. If they so much as look wrong in her direction, they die. Ti ponymayesh?” Do you understand? He directed the question to Vlad, who nodded once, decisively, no hesitation. Perhaps he was his father’s son after all. Artur was counting on it.
EPISODE #2
INNA
WITH ALL OF the tests and the wait for a psychiatric evaluation and then the questions from the police, Inna’s stay at the hospital lasted well into the evening following her “incident.” So many people seemed to need to take a look at her that she was almost surprised when she was released—without a hospital admission or arrest.
When Inna was ready to leave the hospital, there were too many people waiting for her—her parents, her brother and sister-in-law, her father’s associate. Now they invaded her apartment, hovered over her, offered their sympathies, inspected her.
Kings of Brighton Beach Bundle Page 8
