St. Petersburg Noir Read online

  Shurka was hiccupping and fighting off waves of bile, but she listened and consented. Why should she be so surprised? This was better than shooting up junk ... The sounds in the living room made sense now and for that reason she could hear them better. Her imagination obligingly brought up a picture: her former classmate (they’d dropped out at approximately the same time, only Svetka had mysteriously come into money right away) down on all fours under the Doberman Voldemar ... Voldemar was an aristocrat, of course, but he jerked on her just as ridiculously and clumsily as any guy, and he was also grinning and whimpering.

  Shurka quickly made her peace with Kolyan’s secret and even decided it was good, creative work, not like sitting in some shop or at some construction site. But something changed imperceptibly in Kolyan himself. His demeanor became even heavier and more intent, and sometimes at supper he would put his good hand on her knee. Under the table, naturally, so Zoyenka wouldn’t see. At first he just let it lie there, then he started stroking, pushing between her knees. This scared the shit out of Shurka.

  Then Kolyan lost it. He got ripped with his faithful comrades Arif and Roman on cheap swill from the nearest bar. They howled songs and smashed furniture. Shurka slept in her own room, Zoyenka either in Roman’s or Kolyan’s—they both liked her, though Kolyan was cooler, of course. Kolyan barged into Shurka’s room and started confessing. Still barely awake and not understanding a thing, she huddled at the corner of her bed, pulling her blanket up and trying to hide behind it. Kolyan grabbed her by the feet and started stroking her ankles and begging her for something. Then Zoyenka ran in and she and Roman led him out into the living room. Shurka heard Arif give Kolyan a serious and stern talking-to about Allah. Soon after, Zoyenka returned and hugged Shurka around the shoulders, rocking her.

  The next day the house turned into a besieged fortress. Kolyan drove Arif out, Roman left on his own volition, and Zoyenka and Shurka were locked up in the half of the house where they used to eat pastries at night. They sat there like scared little mice, but in the evening he came to them and with a wave of his arm ordered Zoyenka: “Get out.” She shook her head, locked gazes with him, and stayed put. Then he simply grabbed her around her body with his good arm and flung her out the door, slamming it behind her.

  “Look, child,” he said, perching on the edge of the table. “No one but them knows that you ... that we ... well, you understand. Without me, who are you? Homeless, the spawn of a lush. Before you know it they’ll be carting you off to an orphanage, assuming you don’t fuck yourself up first and start getting handed around. I’m suggesting that we live together. And I won’t rush you ... I’ll wait... a little while. You’ll live here as always. You’ll be in charge of the house. I’ll give you a fur coat. I’ll buy you a car. Ask for anything you want. Then, when you’re of age, we’ll register. Cross my heart! The Uzbek says Allah ordered us not to ... but what’s Allah to me? I sent him fucking packing. Who does he think he is? But me—I’m king here, and I’ll throw out anyone I want. If people love each other, what’s the difference? ... You do love me, right? Do you love me ... ?”

  He leaned toward her abruptly and grabbed her face, drew it closer, and stared at her, crazed. Shurka got blasted in the face by the reek of alcohol.

  “Anything you want, all you have to do is ask, child, dear child, my little sunshine ... Do you love me ... ?”

  The door swung open and Zoyenka appeared on the threshold holding an electric drill. Tear-stained. “All right, back off, you goat! You horny shit!”

  Nikolai started laughing and cleared out, landing a good swing at Zoyenka as he left. She went flying into the room, and the drill fell from her hands.

  ~ * ~

  Shurka was sucking a hard candy and listening to Zoyenka, whose eye was gradually swelling shut. Zoyenka wrapped ice from the refrigerator in a napkin and pressed it to her face.

  “You said it yourself—he’s going to buy me a car,” Shurka objected soberly. “And later we’ll get registered. That means he’ll buy me a dress too. He said anything I want.”

  Zoyenka looked at her as if she were a space alien. “Fool! You haven’t even started your period. He’ll rip you in half. And he’s your papa, for god’s sake!”

  She started crying again.

  The next day Nikolai came.

  “Well,” he said to Shurka, “what have you come up with?”

  The girl was sitting on the sofa with her legs folded under her. She clicked the remote. The channels changed on the screen—MTV, cartoons, all kinds of news in Russian and other languages. “A fur coat,” she said. “I want one.”

  Kolyan positively glowed. He rubbed his palms and pressed them between his knees. “A fur coat! What kind of fur coat? My little girl... ”

  “From Voldemar. His fur is so ... nice to touch.”

  And she shot her blue eyes at him, the bitch.

  Kolyan gritted his teeth. “Well, all right.”

  To be honest, she thought he would just drown her now. Under the bridge. Because she hadn’t seen Zoyenka since yesterday, and instead a new guy had come—another Azeri, only with lackluster eyes and swollen veins. She recognized the expression right away. A druggie, a goon. He grabbed her by the arm, just the way she was, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, not letting her take her hoodie, or skirt, or jeans, and led her into a small, windowless cell with a mattress on the floor and locked her in.

  She lost track of time, but several days passed for sure. There was a cooler in the room and she drank water. Then the lock clicked, the door opened, and Kolyan was standing on the threshold. He was swaying. Shurka backed up toward the wall. Kolyan grinned and threw something at her that smelled of beast and blood. Voldemar’s hide fell heavily on the mattress.

  “Tomorrow,” he shook his finger at her. “I’m coming for you tomorrow.”

  ~ * ~

  Zoyenka returned to her that night. She had been thoroughly abused, beaten, and she was missing some teeth. But she had the key.

  As she spirited Shurka out of the house under the Vantovy Bridge, she lisped slightly: “You can’t rithk Rybathkoye. I don’t have any money. Go to town on foot ... or … there’th a boat in the th-thed. Ith really thkinny … it’ll cut right through!

  Zoyenka’s thoughts were confused. “Write me a letter when you get there,” she said. “My name’th Rybina, to Rybathkoye, general delivery. Or find me on v-Kontakte, I’ve got a page there.”

  Together they dragged the boat out of the shed, an old Pella. They even found oars. They waited for a barge, and Zoya went into the river up to her knees and gave her a push. Shurka sat in the boat until she was carried off, and then she started rowing. She was strong, little Shurka. The long barge’s sidelights lay on the water and trembled in it. The poplars’ crowns and Catherine’s stela were reflected in the river. Jaguar cans and other trash floated with the current.

  On the morning of the second day they made out something stirring in the load of coal. The captain sent Styopa to investigate.

  “What is it? Some kind of hide ... A dog’s, looks like.”

  Styopa gave the hide a kick, and a grimy little towhead crawled out from under it.

  ~ * ~

  Hi, my deer byuteeful Zoinka. Our barge arrived at the port in Vysotsk. It’s on the Finland gulf, not very far from Vyborg. You remember, I temed foreteen in August and got my passport. But I rote down I was sixteen. So now I have a rezidence permit, for the provins. Styopa sez he’ll marry me too, but I like him more than Kolyan. They lode cole and oil here, and I werk in the caféteria. There’s the sea here, and pine trees, and even more ships than in Rybatskoye. I like it heer. Sending kisses and wishing you luck. So dos my Styopa.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  DRUNK HARBOR

  by Lena Eltang

  Drunk Harbor

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  T he money ran out before I knew it, as if I hadn’t stolen anything. I kept it in a heavy, striped model lighthouse somebody I knew gave me—
back in the old days, when decent people still came over. One morning I stuck my hand in the lighthouse hoping to pull out a few bills and came up with nothing but greasy dust and my old stash—a joint that had lost even the smell of pot.

  Last fall the lighthouse had been stuffed and the money’d been poking into the pointy roof with the mica window. They’d counted my cut honestly, in cash and stones, and I immediately started paying back my debts, even bought my ex-wife’s apartment, which I’d taken a mortgage on in ‘07.1 got myself a couple of suits and a belted cashmere coat, the kind I’d wanted for so long, light-colored, like Humphrey Bogart had in Casablanca; then I met this Latvian girl from the consulate and took her to the shore and rented a cottage for the summer so we could traipse around the Jurmala casino. I sent money to my creditors in small installments, but strictly and regularly, and so as not to raise any suspicions, I told my Latvian that I’d inherited money from a relative abroad and couldn’t spend it in Petersburg—I said I didn’t want to pay taxes to the Russian treasury. The Latvian’s name was Anta, which in the Incan language means copper, but she was a strawberry blonde, not a redhead, and blushed crimson at even the mildest swearing.

  But less than a year had passed and the money’d run out, the valuable stones dissolving in bills and interest-owed like a candy emerald in boiling water. I’d put the smaller stones in a fruit-drops box long before and left them with my wife along with the keys to her place; I’d stopped by when she was on duty. She was happy to work the nightshift because she was banging some surgeon from oncology, though it was up to me to support her. I had no desire to see my wife, who would have started harping on about other possibilities, which drives me nuts. I don’t have any other possibilities.

  Ever since I broke into the jewelry shop and killed the owner, who showed up out of nowhere, my possibilities have narrowed to the dark slit in the mailbox. My own mailbox, at 22 Lanskaya Street. I’d rented a room on Lanskaya before spring began, and the diamond tucked away for a rainy day lay there under a kitchen floorboard, in a piece of cork. Before I’d kept it in the model iron lighthouse I’d bought in Riga, then Anta zeroed in on my hiding place and I’d had to find somewhere else. Now that rainy day was near, and the time had come to sell off the ice, but my reliable fence wasn’t answering my calls and I was getting nervous.

  I knew that one day I’d find a subpoena there and I’d have to clear out of town; I thought about this every morning, waking up in my room with the mold drips on the north wall and the mirror broken out in a greenish mercury rash. There might not even be a subpoena, two guys from the slaughterhouse could just come, handcuff me, force my head down like a stallion at the veterinary, and shove me into a barred van.

  ~ * ~

  The day they came for me I was walking home and I just had a bad feeling; damp clouds were gathering over the roofs, and the January sun had rolled way up where it shone dully, like a czarist coin. I was walking from Kamenny Island, where I’d been to see this scam artist who’d been doing passports since the ‘90s and now lived behind a solid fence not far from the Kleinmichel dacha. I wanted to offer him my last stone—the purest, pear-cut— in exchange for a clean passport with a Schengen visa and twenty thousand cash. Not finding the owner at home, I gave his guard a note and started on my way back, thinking how I could’ve been living in a place like that, with a fountain and brass herons, if I hadn’t frittered away last year’s loot. A sparse snow was falling from the sky, like down from an old lady’s feather bed. It got into my eyes and mouth and even seemed warm to the touch.

  Right by my building I slipped on an iced-over manhole and barely kept my feet, almost dropping the paper bag with two bottles of sauvignon I’d bought for the Latvian—I don’t drink wine myself, diligent Jah not taking kindly to rivals. After the thaw the frosts had struck, and the ice in the untidy city turned into black rolled-out paths for sullen pedestrians to plod along, arms out to the sides like tightrope walkers. I didn’t notice the Toyota by the front door right away; it was so dirty it blended in with the sooty yellow facade. Sitting behind the wheel was some dummy in a knit cap who’d cracked the window to tap his ashes in the snow. I might not have recognized him if it hadn’t been for the familiar sleeve poking out the window, and it’s true, he was a dummy if he went on a job dressed in fiery-red nylon. There was no point trying to figure out who my guests were—police or former accomplices. The nastiness would be different in kind but identically leaden.

  I decided to wait it out at my neighbor the conductor’s place, hoping she’d be on a run. Once I’d crashed at her place for a few days, and since then I knew where she hid the extra key. Things had taken a bad turn. No matter who these people were, they could move into my attic and sit around drinking tea, waiting for the moment the apartment owner’s patience ran out. Picturing the Latvian sitting on a kitchen stool with tied hands, I could feel my throat smarting, like from cheap tobacco. If it’s cops, then Anta’s sitting on the stool, but if it’s my old friends, she’s lying down with her skirt pulled over her head. I pictured her legs in blue stockings, like the two blades of a split Ottoman saber, and my throat dried up.

  Last winter, when I put some of my loot in the mailbox, I did it not in a fit of generosity but as a reliable investment; whatever fell into my wife’s hands could only be wrested away along with her hands. That meant I was free of her letters, phone calls, and fits of insanity for a few years. Now she’d think twice before coming to look for me; she’d slip her take under her shirt and make herself scarce. I locked the mailbox with the key that had been lying in my coat pocket for six months, tossed the key through the slot, thought a second, and threw the apartment key in after it. Now I had one home, one woman, and one stolen crystal of carbon that I planned to sell so I could leave town. The home was someone else’s, the woman was a slut, and there was a wet job hanging over the stone—so if you thought about it, I didn’t have all that much. I had to get away as fast as possible. Some guy I didn’t know who wore a red quilted jacket had shown up more than once and hung around the courtyard trying to look nonchalant. At one time I’d thought he was visiting my neighbor the conductor, who sold a little grass on the side, but when I stopped by and asked her a couple of questions it turned out the guy wasn’t one of her clients, he was some stray wise guy. Or a cop.

  ~ * ~

  I turned into the courtyard, opened the boiler room door, went down the steel stairs quietly, nodded to Timur, the stoker, who was sitting there in a scorched quilted vest, and went out through the janitor’s door on the other side of the building. The conductor’s apartment was on the third floor. Climbing the stairs I peered at the gray Toyota, which was already sprinkled with crumbly snow, so it must have been there at least two hours. No one answered the bell, so I stood a little while on the landing, waiting, and then went to the railing by the elevator, twisted off the cap of a cast-iron snake, and stuck my hand in deep, all the way to the tail. The key was lying there, right where it was supposed to be.

  The apartment smelled of stagnant water and rotten stalks. I went on into the bedroom, found a vase of withered roses there, and threw them into the trash can. The roses were long so I had to bend them in half, and a stray thorn poked me in the palm; I saw a drop of blood, and I suddenly remembered how a year before I’d stood in a strange room watching the blood turn black in the small, beady holes on a dead man’s face.

  I hadn’t planned to kill the jeweler. I’m a burglar, not a killer. I’d been told the shop would be clean, no one in the apartment above—the owners had gone to their dacha in Pargolovo—and the security system was connected to the local station, Chinese junk, a plastic box with ten buttons. The shop entrance was protected by a corrugated iron curtain, but as often happens, the owner had arranged for one more entrance, from his apartment on the second floor, and one was simpler—a steel door, two rods, and a hole in the floor. The alarm didn’t take me long, and I’d noticed the camera’s dim crimson pupil back on the street when I unlocked the door. It
was easily taken off its hook and showed me the wire to the server.

  If I were a jeweler buying stolen goods, I’d install a German system with a satellite signal, but the dirty jeweler was a ballsy old man—he even kept his safe in view, under the counter, so he wouldn’t have to go so far. I searched for that safe for half an hour—took pictures off the wall and books off the shelves in the living room, poked my head under the bed, sneezed after getting a noseful of soft gray dust, and felt like a movie gendarme tossing a female student’s room in search of a hectograph and subversive proclamations.

  The safe was way under the counter, and I opened it in no time after playing with the last key. There weren’t that many options. The fence who’d cased the job was sure of the first nine numbers, only he hadn’t been able to get a good look at the tenth. I opened the little door and raked up two velvet sacks, a clear one with pale yellow stones, a long box with the necklace promised to the fence, and a fat stack of cash. I got on my knees and was starting to distribute the loot in my pockets when I heard heavy asthmatic breathing, like the creak of a floorboard, and turned around. The old man was standing right behind me holding something shiny high over his head. Whatever it was looked heavy, the size of a bucket, and I glimpsed a chesty shepherdess in a glade with high pointy grass. He was planning to hit me with it but didn’t get the chance.