Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

The night was absolutely freezing — stunningly beautiful, but deadly. I didn’t know if I could get another stairwell roof access open, but it was imperative to find out before frostbite set in. From nine stories below, car alarms still wailed, although the sirens and shouts had died away. “I’m impressed, Anna. You really got those car alarms going.”

“Yes, and it was not easy!” She shouted back over the wind. “The icicles were not heavy enough, so I pushed down that cement block and the flower pot.”

“What?” I was floored. “You could have killed someone!”

“What was I to do? The icicles didn’t work. You said we needed a diversion. The flower pot and its base was the only heavy thing.”

“Well shit, we’re criminals now,” I muttered. “Some poor sod, minding his own business when a cement block caves in his skull — or at least his car!”

Anna fumed at my unfair lack of gratitude.

I pulled off a mitt to get my phone. Luda’s eyebrow-pencil scrawled phone number was crumpled in my coat pocket with it. “Luda! I almost forgot about her. She said, ‘in an emergency,’ and this sure feels like an emergency to me.” Punching in her number with frozen fingers was a challenge.

We traversed the roof, skidding over wind polished ice and low drifts. I was limping badly. Eventually a stairwell access door yielded. Sheer luck or we’d have been climbing down our own stairwell, right into the arms of the police. They lingered in front of the Prokuratura and, having no idea who else lurked with them in blacked out sedans, we decided to split up. I sent Anna down the unfamiliar stairwell on her own. It opened onto an entirely different street, but two women skulking off together would be like shouting, “You-hoo, over here…”

Anna had the instructions I had just gotten from Luda on how to find her grandmother’s apartment. From the roof I watched her cross a busy street and disappear. I descended a few minutes later, fighting to ignore what I hoped was only a sprain. It wasn’t easy, less than an hour after kicking our way out of the apartment, my ankle was swollen to the constraints of my boot. Reaching the street, I stopped a taxi and asked the driver to pass by our former building’s entrance. Sure enough, there in the lot, favored for special business deals, was someone’s beloved Lada Samara, roof crushed, alarm still sounding. Turning my head, not wanting to see, I told the cabbie to drive on.

The brick building we pulled up to was incongruously attractive. Lacking Soviet, soul crushing architectural ugliness, meant it was built before the revolution. How it survived since then was a mystery. A sharp intake of super cold air and a Russian expletive got me up and kind of standing by the cab’s open door. The driver grunted something sardonic, reached over the passenger seat and snatched the cash I held out. The door slammed as he accelerated into a flawless execution of the change-making-avoidance maneuver. I was left somewhat awestruck in his wake.

“Why do you for so long stay outside? Waiting for snow to fall?” Luda waved me into the lobby.

The heavy, frost veneered entry door slammed. Anna, who had been hiding in a corner, emerged and embraced me. I felt her heart beating though our combined layers of insulation.

Luda interrupted with a briefing on the roles we were to play in front of her grandmother. “You are nothing more than a couple of visiting foreign acquaintances. American girlfriends traveling to see the world. Such a pity that you speak no Russian!”

“Ukrainian?” I asked.

“Nyet, not even Latin! You are not to speak with Grandmother in any language.” Luda was adamant. Inside the apartment, communication was to be strictly in English. Baba was never to learn of her granddaughter’s clandestine activities or pick up even a hint of who we really were.

By the time the glacially slow hydraulic elevator made the third floor, Luda had become her usual lighthearted social self. Her chameleon-like transformation was, to say the least, vaguely disturbing. Reaching the terminus of a convoluted passageway, she swung open one of the mismatched doors. “Welcome, friends of mine, to the flat of my grandmother!” She ushered us inside. “Please, make at home your selves in this, our modest flat.”

Baba, waiting up to meet us, innocently insisted on providing tea for her granddaughter’s weary friends. Luda’s body language told us, in no uncertain terms, that rejecting the offer was not an option.

“What a treat! A nice cup of tea would really hit the spot.” I said in English.

Anna rolled her eyes.

“Especially after that long flight from America. I dare say, the turbulence over Tuscany was more than a mere trifle.” I picked at the dried blood matted into my fake-fur collar. My face had probably bruised up like a prize-fighter’s.

Luda’s elbow drilled into my ribs. “With such a flight it is a miracle that you survived! Maybe you want to take off your coat and boots?”

“Coat okay, boots not.”

“I do not understand.”

“I might have broken my foot. If I take off the boot I’ll never get it back on. That will be a lot of turbulence to explain to…”

“I understand.” Luda cut me off, then in Russian, “My friends would love some tea, Grandmother. Thank you.”

Sighing and waving her gnarled hands, the old woman lamented having so little food to share. She tried speaking to Anna, and then to me in Russian, Ukrainian and even a bit of French. We pretended not to understand, smiled and spoke to her in English. Luda had actually managed to keep what she did to make ends meet, over and above teaching, from her baba.

Granny’s apartment might have been somebody’s dining room, a long, long time ago. Since then, hastily erected walls had divided it into two rooms. The building itself had been liberated from the bourgeois by the Bolsheviks, who then carved it into a multitude of ill-conceived rabbit hutches for the proletariat. An opening from one of Baba’s two tiny, high ceiling and impossible to heat rooms led to a communal toilet, basin, and kitchen shared by several other apartments of similar size and layout. One of the two rooms had, much later on, been provided with a sort-of kitchen: a counter, sink, and hotplate; but the single toilet and bathtub were still communal. I wondered if the later additions to the sitting room had been Luda’s. The other room contained their beds, a desk, TV, wardrobe and Luda’s enormous Great Pyrenees, their own personal bodyguard, asleep in a nest of moth-eaten blankets after curiously greeting and approving of us.

Luda had taken it upon herself to make some changes to our appearances. Following my desperate rooftop phone call, she’d run out for boxes of cheap hair dye and cosmetics. With Baba in the other room and down for the night, Luda went to work on us, me first. The wound on my scalp from Sergei’s pistol-whipping burned like crazy. What the hell? The ammonia, peroxide and other reagents in the super-cheap hair color not only turned my hair black, but disinfected and cauterized the wound.

“Hey, jet-black is better than gangrene.” I’d joked, getting punchy. My humor went unappreciated.

Anna’s light brown 1980’s perm was sacrificed for a short, bleached-blonde punk cut. It looked like something had gone terribly wrong at the salon, but without question, it changed her appearance. I, on the other hand, might as well have stuck my head in a bucket of printer’s ink. We found it uproarious, more so after being scolded by Luda for our bad behavior in Baba’s flat. Chastened, Anna was the first to give in to exhaustion. With what was left of her hair still damp, she stretched out on the kitchen floor, pulled up a ratty dog’s blanket, and was out like a light.