Kings of Brighton Beach Bundle

by D. B. Shuster

  Leaving today. Leaving today. Leaving today. His heart beat hard in his chest. In just a few hours, she would be outside the Soviet Union. Safe.

  Why hadn’t she come to meet him?

  He pushed the button to call the elevator, but it didn’t light up. Out again. The damn thing never worked.

  He jogged seven flights up the stairway, taking the stairs two at a time. He was panting when he reached the dim hallway on her floor.

  Her door was slightly ajar. He imagined her behind it, urging Kolya into his jacket and buckling the baby into the stroller. But there was no sound, no voices.

  He pushed open the door to the apartment. The room was unusually dark, the shades drawn.

  And then he saw her.

  Artur awoke with a start. There were tears in his eyes. He dashed them away. He stood and stretched, trying to shake off the haunting dream of the past, of the worst day of his life.

  He didn’t remember falling asleep at his desk. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed. Three o’clock in the morning.

  He padded to the kitchen, slid open the glass door to the deck and stood by the rail, staring out to the ocean. The waves were foamy and gray in the moonlight. They reminded him of a black and white film, and the rolling motion of the tide pulled his thoughts to the past and then back to the present. To Sofia. To Inna.

  He couldn’t lose Inna, too.

  It was only a matter of time before the Georgians lashed out in retribution over the dead man. They may have already tried to take their wrath out on Vlad. No matter how many Artur stopped or killed, there would only be more to take their place. A never-ending cycle of violence.

  Artur was only one man. He would willingly fight the world for his daughter, but he knew he couldn’t win. Not with brute force.

  There had to be another way. There was always another way.

  The Georgians weren’t the only ones he needed to consider. Someone else had hurt Inna, had set her up to be raped and then blamed for a murder she most likely hadn’t committed. Who? Why?

  Victor had been quick to absolve the Directorate of any wrongdoing, but Artur wasn’t so sure. The new deal they had in play was audacious and sat uneasily with Artur’s conscience, despite the crimes he had committed for them in the past.

  He had voiced his reservations and then had stalled and delayed. Could the Directorate now be sending him a warning? We see. We know. We own you. We will hurt the people you care about if you defy us or try to escape. Was it the same message yet again?

  The prepaid cell phone he used to receive Ivan’s calls rang in his pocket. In prison, a cell phone was contraband, but with the right connections and enough money, anything could be smuggled in. Ivan risked calling only when he had an important matter for Artur to handle and the expectation of a few stolen moments of privacy. His favorite time to call was the middle of the night, when he could slide the cell phone into his pillow case and, if necessary, pretend he was talking in his sleep.

  Ivan crowed in Russian. “Malchick xorosho zdelal.” The boy did well. “The boy” was how Ivan referred to Vlad.

  “On ubil tree cheloveka dlya menya.” He killed three men for me. “Vasya and his cousins. Singlehandedly! Nice and neat. You’ll arrange payment.”

  “Konechno.” Of course. Artur’s throat constricted with anger—at himself, at Ivan, at Vlad.

  Artur had pulled Vlad into his schemes for his own purposes. Tonight Artur had relied on him to investigate the murder at Troika and, most immediately, the threat to Inna. Instead, Vlad had been playing Ivan’s assassin, reporting trouble at Troika to cover up his other assignment and explain his temporary absence.

  Artur had made a gross miscalculation at a time when he couldn’t afford mistakes. Vlad’s relationship with Ivan had initially been a blessing: No one questioned why Artur would overlook Vlad’s past in law enforcement and elevate him so quickly upon discovering him in Miami when he was the son of Artur’s former partner, a vor still active in organized crime even from prison. Now it was also a curse.

  “I’m telling you, Artur, he will make an excellent addition to the bratva. We will make him a brigadier.”

  This was a new side of Ivan. Twenty years in prison had made him sentimental. Although Ivan never said so, Artur supposed the vor now regretted the family he had never built with Nadia. The son Ivan had refused to claim as blood, he now hoped to claim in brotherhood. By making him a murderer.

  Vlad was supposed to be Artur’s man.

  Long after the call ended, Artur stood at the railing and pondered his options. The waves crashed onto the shore then receded, back and forth, attack and retreat. Artur had planned to keep a tight rein on Vlad. He hadn’t anticipated this opportunity for Vlad to climb so high so fast, this competition for the younger man’s loyalty.

  “You can’t sleep either.” Maya joined him on the porch and brushed his cheek with her hand. He supposed they appeared an idyllic picture, a handsome middle-aged couple, standing side by side and staring out at an ocean view in the gray light of morning.

  “I had a bad dream,” Maya said.

  Artur turned and paid close attention. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but there was something of the witch in his wife. Her dreams and pronouncements had an eerie level of prophetic accuracy. “It was about Inna.”

  “Tell me.” The air suddenly felt charged with danger.

  “I dreamed she was in trouble, but she didn’t want our help. She said she could take care of herself. Then she went home and locked her door and wouldn’t let anyone in, not even us. You yelled and screamed, and she wouldn’t answer, and so you knocked the door down. But when we went inside, she was dead.”

  Maya turned her body toward him. Her voice dropped as if the words pained her. “Artur, she had swallowed a bunch of pills and killed herself.”

  Artur couldn’t speak. The scene Maya described was too much like Sofia’s murder.

  The weight of his failures bore down on him. He wouldn’t let history repeat itself. A long game like this one was about strategy, not reactivity. This time, he had laid a careful plan to escape, more audacious and crafty than any of his life, a plan that had taken years to ripen. He would extricate himself and Inna—from the Directorate, from the mafia underworld, from Brighton Beach.

  Events forced him to accelerate his timeline. Artur no longer had the luxury of testing and priming. Ripe or not, perfect plan or not, the time had come to act.

  It was time to bring Vlad fully into play.

  INNA

  INNA’S CHEST TIGHTENED with a familiar and unwelcome anxiety, almost panic, but her limbs moved slowly, as if weighted. Her heart pounded, and still it was difficult to lever herself off of the bed. She was naked, but she had no memory of removing her clothes, or really of anything from last evening. When had everyone left?

  She had a sense of lost time, a new hole in her memory. Perhaps the residual effect of whatever drug her attacker had given her.

  The clothes from yesterday were in a pile at the bedside as if she had tossed them there, her lacy red bra on top. The sight of it made her slightly sick to her stomach as unpleasant memories rushed up to meet her. She’d had such high hopes for herself, and look what had happened.

  Standing by the edge of the bed, she noticed that both pillows had deep indentations, hers with a wet spot of drool. How could they both be indented? Had someone been there? She imagined she detected a musky scent in the air.

  Unsteady and frightened, heart beating wildly, she careened toward the closet and grabbed her robe. She wrapped the soft, bulky terrycloth around her, and cinched the belt tightly as if it were the only thing holding her together.

  She had felt this way once before. The medication was supposed to keep her from falling back into the hellish pit of her own anxiety.

  She headed toward the shower. She wanted to scrub away the dirt and grime of the last couple of days, wash herself clean. She turned the tap on, waited for the water to heat and the steam to rise, and st
epped into the shower stall.

  She had slept deeply, but she didn’t feel at all rested. Her body ached as if she had wrestled and tossed all night. She leaned her head against the cold white tiles and let the hot water pour over her and ease the tension.

  Strange images flashed behind her eyes, brilliantly clear, but also disconnected. They teased and tormented her.

  She couldn’t call the images at will, couldn’t quite catch them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. Would she recover if she truly knew what horrible thing had happened the other night at Troika?

  As it was, a growing sense of doom pressed down on her. She couldn’t remember the previous evening after her family left her apartment at all. Her instincts fired with a vague but urgent warning of imminent danger. A strong desire to bolt and hide—from what?—thrummed in her pulse.

  She turned off the water. As she toweled herself dry, she battled her body’s warning signals. She dressed quickly in jeans and a baggy sweater and pulled her hair back into a ponytail.

  She had worked hard in the past to control and override the fear, the rampant anxiety that seemed to be building in her now. She could feel a lump of it congealing in her chest and preventing her from breathing deeply. If the fear got too much bigger, it would overwhelm her.

  She needed help.

  She rifled through her drawer for the card with Dr. Shiffman’s number. Dr. Shiffman had precipitously left her Psychology practice in Brooklyn to retire to Florida, but Inna hoped the doctor she had been seeing for the past year would take an emergency call from her.

  She didn’t know how to process what had happened, and she didn’t want her life to take another detour through the dark place she had worked so hard to escape.

  It was still early for a Sunday morning, earlier than politeness allowed for a call of this nature, but she couldn’t wait any longer. She thought she might jump out of her skin. She dialed the number, only to find it was no longer in service. She vaguely remembered Dr. Shiffman mentioning a grandchild in Miami Beach.

  She pulled out her laptop and searched the web for a Marjorie Shiffman in Florida. She found several and decided to call each one.

  There was a slight tremor in her fingers as she dialed. This small sign of anxiety fed on itself. It was already happening. She was sliding back.

  The first three calls yielded nothing. On the fourth, a woman answered the phone. A baby cried in the background. Inna felt sure she must have the right house.

  “May I speak to Marjorie Shiffman?”

  “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested,” the woman said.

  “No, wait! I’m looking for Dr. Shiffman. I’m one of her patients.” Inna found herself pleading. “Please. I need to talk with her. Something terrible has happened.”

  There was a deep sigh on the other end. “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Haven’t you heard? My mom … She died a week ago.”

  “Oh. My um … my condolences,” Inna said, numb with shock.

  The call ended, and Inna sat dumbfounded. Over the past year, she had poured her heart out to Dr. Shiffman. She had laid all of the broken pieces of herself out and held nothing back. She had found healing and acceptance in the therapist’s office, where for the first time in her adult life she felt safe talking honestly about her life and family and the people around her. There had been no judgment or knee-jerk conclusion that her observations were clouded by paranoia, that she was mentally unstable, or that she needed a new or stronger dose of medication to erase her concerns.

  The sudden retirement had been an emotional blow, but this news was so final. The world wasn’t a safe place, and she had just lost her most stalwart ally. Permanently.

  The phone rang in Inna’s hand. The doorman informed her Detective Hersh was here to see her. Inna instructed him to send her visitor up. Why not? Her whole world was crashing down.

  She paced the floor in her entryway as she waited for the detective. Would she be arrested now? Would the detective handcuff her and take her to jail?

  Inna rubbed sweaty hands on her jeans, tucked her hair behind her ears, and opened the door to her apartment just as the detective was about to knock.

  “Are you here to arrest me?” Inna blurted. Her own impulsivity frightened her. She was losing control.

  “I’m here to ask you a few questions,” Detective Hersh said. His answer didn’t rule out an arrest. “May I come in?”

  The detective was taller than she, but on the short side for a man. He had gray hair, but a young face. His wire-rimmed glasses made him look scholarly rather than tough.

  Inna moved out of the doorway and let the detective enter. He walked a few steps into the apartment and stopped. His eyes scanned the open floor plan, and Inna caught a perplexed look on the detective’s face. He tapped a manilla folder against his thigh.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. This just isn’t what I expected.”

  “What do you mean? What did you expect?”

  He gave her an abashed look. “Something fancier. Full of Russian imports.”

  Inna supposed she knew what he meant. As an interior designer, she furnished houses and businesses in the area with matryoshka dolls, heavy oil paintings in gilded frames, and lacquered knickknacks that fed her clients’ nostalgia for all things Russian and that showcased their wealth and success. For herself, she preferred clean lines and little clutter, a controlled environment with as much sense of calm as she could create.

  The detective didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to know how much she had suffered with anxiety in the past or the lengths she had gone to gain control of herself, a control that now seemed to be slipping. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and tried not to fidget. She forced a smile and then retracted it.

  Detective Hersh wasn’t going to be won over with a strong dose of Koslovsky charm. He considered her a murder suspect.

  Maybe Inna was a murderer.

  “You were pretty distraught yesterday. I was hoping maybe now that you’re calmer, you could tell me something else about what happened the other night.”

  Calmer, ha!

  “I don’t remember.” She closed her eyes, shook her head with disgust.

  Detective Hersh slid a photograph from the folder. “Maybe this will jog your memory. The photo came from the security video at Troika. Do you remember dancing with this man?”

  The bushy-haired man in the picture looked slightly familiar. She couldn’t immediately place him, but she felt as if she had met him before. She had absolutely no recollection of seeing him at Troika.

  She released a frustrated sigh, and then the images teased her again. An ornate chandelier. The square face and thick dark hair of a man with a hungry gaze. His dark hand on her thigh.

  “She’s totally compliant. Willing. You can do anything to her. Any naughty, dirty fantasy. She won’t tell. She won’t even remember.” A voice and a snicker behind her.

  The man hesitated, and another voice behind her nudged him. “Look at her. She’s sex on a stick. What’s the matter? You a cop? A prude? Gay? Married?”

  “No.”

  “So sample the merchandise. Then we’ll talk business.”

  Inna opened her eyes and met the detective’s curious gaze.

  “You remember something.”

  “It’s hazy. And doesn’t make much sense to me.”

  “Tell me whatever you can.”

  “Men talking. I was sitting in one’s lap—not the man from the photo, the other one. The other one … who died.”

  “What else?”

  “I remember the chandelier; so maybe it was in the ballroom at Troika. There were two men behind me. They said something about ‘sampling the merchandise’ and ‘talking business.’”

  “So three men. And a deal,” the detective said.

  “I guess. Maybe,” Inna said. “But I think I was the merchandise.” She shuddered.

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  She closed her
eyes, reached for the memory, but it was gone now. “No. Nothing. What’s going to happen to me?” she asked.

  “My hope is that you’ll get past this and live a long and happy life,” Detective Hersh said. His words felt like a benediction.

  “Sooner or later we’re going to catch the guys who did this to you,” he said. “We usually do.” He handed her his card. “Call me if you remember anything else. No matter how trivial it seems.”

  VLAD

  CLEANING UP THE mess in the alley outside of Troika had taken a solid chunk of the night. Removing the bodies, collecting the bullet casings, washing away the blood. Vlad hadn’t tried to fix the shattered brick, but he’d erased the other signs of a skirmish, no easy task working in the near-dark with a stiff shoulder.

  Afterward, he returned to his shithole of an apartment, stripped away his bloodstained clothes and threw them in the incinerator, and then cleaned and reloaded his guns.

  He fell into a dead sleep on top of his bed, with his two dependable friends, Glock and Sig, within easy reach.

  He startled to a sound and awoke with both guns at the ready. Overkill for a ringing cell phone. He almost laughed at himself.

  The call was from Artur. The man didn’t sound happy. “Come to Koslovsky Imports right away.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “There’s something you failed to tell me.” Artur ended the call, leaving Vlad to wonder what Artur had discovered and how badly the information would set him back. Vlad was keeping so many secrets. Which one had been exposed?

  Vlad shuffled to the bathroom and showered, washing off the remaining grime from last night’s adventures. He didn’t wait for the water to heat. Under a lukewarm spray, he soaped, rinsed, and finished quickly. Afterward, he didn’t feel clean.

  He inspected himself in the mirror. The swelling near his shoulder had mostly dissipated, leaving him with a black and blue mark, roughly the same size and position of the Vory star tattoos on his father’s shoulders. His resemblance to his old man jolted him.