Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

“No. I need to speak with you. About what happened tonight. At the house.”

Pavlo leaned back, crossed his arms. “Sit.” He gestured at the man beside him, who vacated his seat obediently. Nate slid down into the chair, the bouncer sidling behind him out of his line of sight. At the table’s center stood a slender bottle of vodka.

Pavlo gestured at the man at the other end of the table. “Best Ukrainian restaurant, it is owned by a Georgian. Can you believe?”

Nate took a closer look at the restaurant owner. His jaundiced fingers twiddled with a thick black lock pasted across his forehead, arranging and rearranging it with a vanity befitting neither the matted hair nor his slovenly demeanor. He’d missed a spot shaving, a few coarse black threads at one corner of his mouth. The skin under his eyes was dark and flecked with skin tags, textured pouches like oyster shells. It was a magnificent face. A Depression-era photographer would have turned cartwheels to find such a face on a breadline. He appraised Nate sullenly, silently. Perhaps he did not understand English.

“Eat,” Pavlo said. “Blini with red caviar. The Americans have with black caviar to spend more, but is better with red.” He gestured at a mound of small half-moon dumplings beneath a dollop of sour cream. “And varenyky. Small, not like big China potstickers. Eat. You work for me now. One of my associates.”

“I’m not hungry,” Nate said.

Pavlo remained perfectly still, hands frozen at the sides of his plate. “The Georgian will be insulted that you do not eat.”

“Then he’ll have to be insulted,” Nate said.

A chilled silence. The others set down their utensils.

“Your man came to my wife’s house,” Nate said. “He broke the hand of-”

Pavlo slid his plate to the side. “You did not make call to police. You did not break our arrangement. That is only reason your daughter still breathes.”

Nate’s gaze moved to a steak knife just beyond his elbow. Pavlo’s eyes followed his stare, then rose again to his face, unconcerned.

“This man who called police, next time we will kill him. We know where he called. We know who he spoke to. His protest, it has been misfiled by police. We own many police. You do not know which ones in which departments. Every time you make phone call, you play Russian roulette with your daughter. Is this clear?”

“I will do what you want me to do. I will get you what’s in that safe-deposit box. If you stay away from my family.”

A glint of sturdy Soviet dentistry. “It is not anymore your family.”

“Don’t fuck with them.”

Pavlo set his hands on the table’s edge. Pushed back, his chair chirping on the faux-marble floors. He stood.

The men at the table were on their feet swiftly, even the Georgian. Nate became aware of uniform movement in the space all around him, and when he turned, his skin prickled at the sight. Every diner in the restaurant had risen, even those in booths, bending with difficulty from the effort. Their gazes stayed carefully forward, not fully turned toward Pavlo. Napkins fell from laps. The strains of music drifting in from the banquet hall only underscored the abrupt silence in the restaurant proper.

Nate, the only person sitting.

He had never seen anything like this. A headache thrummed at his temples. Every sense heightened. A spoon clattered to the floor across the restaurant; to Nate it sounded like drumsticks beating a snare.

Pavlo made a slight gesture with his hand, and the diners somehow noted this and rumbled back into motion, sitting, pouring wine, resuming conversations. His focus swiveled to Nate.

“You come here for strelka. Meeting. As if you are my equal.” His voice, raised for the first time. Up until now he’d conveyed all his power and menace with little more than a whisper.

“I will teach you who I am.” He pulled at his thin dress shirt, buttons popping off one after another, skittering across the table. At first his skin seemed bizarrely dark, but as his shirt fell away, Nate realized: It was covered with blue, slightly blurred tattoos. Pavlo lifted a thumb to a rose needled into the base of his neck. “My initiation.” An eight-pointed star came next, just below his collarbone. “This says I am vor. Professional. I do not belong to myself. I belong to a code. To a world of thieves. I have no family but them.” Below the star, a church with multiple domes. “And here. Each dome a trip to the Zone.” He shed his jacket, his finger jabbing into a tattoo on his shoulder: a hand holding a tulip wrapped three times in barbed wire. “Convicted underage for robbery. Three years spent. Each barb on the wire one month. And this”-a cross and shackles with numbers and Cyrillic lettering-“second trip. Corrective Labor Colony Number Six. Here, isolation cell, Block Seven.”

Nate said, “Look-”

“Close your mouth.”

The sudden rage severed the words in Nate’s throat.

Pavlo indicated a tattoo of a wolf with a bare-toothed scowl. “My promise to avenge those who put me inside.” He tore his shirt off altogether, pointed to a gnarl of scar tissue in his side. “Derybasivska Street in Odessa. Stabbed.” He translated a Cyrillic scroll across his ribs. “‘Mother, do not cry for me any longer. Let me be dead to you.’” He turned around. Two eyes on his back required no explanation, but he indicated an eagle on his shoulder blade. “This shows escape from Vorkuta Camp. And this”-a quarter-size patch of shiny skin-“assassination try in Kiev.”

Nate risked a glance around the restaurant. Everyone eating and talking, dutifully ignoring what was happening in plain sight. Dozens of witnesses, none of whom would see a thing. He moved to rise, but a vise grip crushed his shoulders, sinking him back into the chair. The bouncer, breathing down on him.

Pavlo slammed his hands on the place mat in front of Nate, silverware and glasses jumping on the starched white tablecloth. Nate strained to lean back, but the pressure on his shoulders was unrelenting. Pavlo pointed at the fingers of one hand, ticking off each ring tattoo. An asterisk in a circle. “Fatherless. I become thief because of broken home.” A white cross on a dark rectangle. “I survive the crosses. Solitary.” A skull within a diamond, split by bars. “I serve in prison for violent criminals only.”

Leaning forward, he gave off a waft of spicy cologne and old-fashioned shaving cream, the smell of a man from another era. His face inches from Nate’s. His eyes fluttered closed. Words tattooed on his lids. “‘Do not rouse me.’ For this the pricker insert a spoon beneath eyelid to firm it for needle.” Pavlo straightened. One loafer hit the floor, then another. Shackle tattoos on his ankles, words on the insteps. He translated: “‘They drag me under armed guard.’” Pavlo tore at his belt violently. His pants fell, exposing boxer shorts of a blue that matched the ink decorating his flesh. His kneecaps sported stars. “I kneel before no man. And last.”

With dread, Nate watched Pavlo’s hands move to his boxers. Tattooed thumbs hooked the band and slid them down to midthigh. Nate shoved back violently in the chair, but the man whose seat he occupied stepped in to help the bouncer hold him in place.

He flushed, skin on fire. He felt like a child, utterly and comprehensively overpowered. The stink of the herring on the table was making him queasy. In the background he could hear the clink of silverware against plates, no one daring to stop eating.

Pavlo fisted Nate’s hair with both hands and forced his face toward his bare thighs, toward the private smells of musk and talcum powder. The swollen bud of his head nudged out from a nest of gray wire. Cyrillic lettering low beneath his belly button. Pavlo leaned over, teeth clenched as he hissed the translation: “‘Let them hate as long as they fear.’”