Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

Three of the men with armbands had come up to Scorpion and Iryna.

“Cherkesov abo Kozhanovskiy?” one of them asked.

Scorpion grabbed Iryna’s arm.

“My z Kanady,” Scorpion had said-We’re from Canada-meanwhile staring at the men savagely kicking the fallen man on the platform whose face was bleeding and who could no longer protect himself.

The man questioning Scorpion had followed his glance.

“Ne khvylyuy tesya,” he said. “Vin prosto Zhid. ” Don’t concern yourself, he’s just a Jew, waving it off. Scorpion felt Iryna start to move forward and tightened his grip on her arm.

“Remember why we’re here,” he whispered to her, turning them away from the beating.

I n the train, the female suputnikh brought them tea and biscuits. Iryna lit a Dunhill cigarette, her fingers trembling. For a long time neither of them spoke. It was warm inside the car, and Scorpion took off his heavy sweater.

“Maybe we’re on a fool’s errand. We should let him kill Cherkesov,” Iryna said finally, meaning Pyatov.

“Is war better?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking away. “He hasn’t been elected yet and look what he’s doing. I’m watching my country commit suicide.”

“It isn’t pretty,” he said.

They sipped tea and listened to the rhythm of the wheels on the track.

“What will you do when we get to Dnipropetrovsk?” she asked.

“I assume you have someone undercover with the Cherkesov campaign?”

She nodded. “You won’t tell me anything about yourself?”

“What about you? Are you married?”

She shook her head. “Not anymore. He was older. Like my father.”

“What happened?”

“He wanted a pretty ornament. I outgrew it-him. I’m nobody’s anything,” she said, tossing her hair. “Your father? What was he like?” she asked.

“I hardly knew him,” Scorpion said. “ We’d only been together about a week, then he died. I was four.” He was surprised to find himself telling her the truth. She had that effect on him, or perhaps it was the compartment, the intimacy of it: the one overhead light, the darkness outside, the rocking of the train detached from the rest of the world.

“What about your mother?” she asked.

“She was already dead. They’d been separated.”

“So who raised you?”

He thought about Arabia. The hot days and starry nights and Sheikh Zaid, the closest thing to a father he’d ever had. He thought about the Mutayr, the Bedouin tribe that saved him from the Saar and took him in, and his strange Arabian Huck Finn childhood and the paths it had taken had somehow brought him to Ukraine in the dead of winter.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“It’s four hundred kilometers to Dnipropetrovsk,” Iryna replied, folding her arms.

He looked at his watch. It was past one in the morning. The train would be arriving in five hours.

“We should sleep,” he said, pulling off his T-shirt.

Her eyes widened at the sight of his lean, muscled torso. The scars on his arms and ribs.

“How’d you get those?” she asked.

“I tripped,” he said. He got into the narrow bunk and put his forearm over his eyes to block the overhead light. He heard the swish of her clothes as she undressed. He couldn’t help thinking about that. She shut the light and he heard her get into her bunk. All he could see in the darkness was the glowing tip of her cigarette. For a time neither of them spoke.

“Whoever you are, I’m glad you’re on our side,” she said. It sounded like she had rolled on her side toward him. It was strange, talking like this in the darkness. He could almost feel the warmth of her body pulling at him from across the narrow space between them, and more viscerally, the tingle in his groin.

“I’m on no one’s side,” he said. “Our interests coincide, that’s all.”

“ Gospadi, you’re cold.”

“No,” he said after a moment.

“What then?”

“Honest. Or as honest as someone who lies for a living can be.”

“What’s going to happen when we get to Dnipropetrovsk?”

“Someone’s going to die.”

A few minutes later, “You’re not what I expected. Michael…?” she whispered.

There was no answer.

Scorpion was asleep.

Dnipropetrovsk

Ukraine

Dnipropetrovsk was hidden when they pulled in. A thick frost covered the window, and when they stepped off the train, a yellowish smog obscured the skyline. The platform was icy cold after the warmth of the train.

“It’s from the smokestacks,” Iryna explained as they pulled their luggage toward the station building, their breaths visible puffs in the icy air. “Dnipropetrovsk is a big industrial city.”

Scorpion’s stomach tightened at the sight of three militsiyu police standing by the entrance to the station. Nearby, he saw a half-dozen men wearing the black armbands they had seen at the station in Kyiv. These armbands had a yellow Ukrainian cross: a double crossbar on top and a slanted crossbar near the bottom, where Christ’s feet would have been nailed. It gave them the appearance of a religious order. They were passing out leaflets, shoving anyone who didn’t take one. The police did not appear concerned about the men with the armbands.

As they passed, Scorpion took one of the handouts, a crude leaflet that Iryna translated for him. It accused Kozhanovskiy of theft of the national treasury and of being a tool of the United States and the Zionists. The other side was an invitation to the Cherkesov rally that night at Stadion Dnipro, the soccer stadium. The eyes of the man who handed him the leaflet lingered on Iryna, and Scorpion felt a chill at the thought that he might have recognized her. He watched them as Scorpion hustled her through the station hall and into a taxi outside.

“Grand Hotel Ukraina,” she told the driver, and in response to Scorpion’s look, whispered to him in English, “I know. That Black Armband recognized me.”

The taxi made a turn into a broad avenue lined with trees, their limbs bare. The street snow had turned to slush from the traffic; the sidewalks were still under snow.

“Pyatov has only two choices,” Scorpion whispered back, his lips brushing her ear. “Either he’ll try to work his way into the campaign to get close, or use a Syndikat contact. Also, how is he going to kill him? Using a gun at close range is the equivalent of committing suicide. He doesn’t strike me as the type.”

“Me either.”

“So it’s either a long range rifle, which requires a certain preparation and expertise, or explosives, or something else. I’m betting something else.”

“What do we do?” she asked.

“You contact your campaign mole. I’ll work other angles. Here,” he said, handing her one of their new prepaid cell phones and turning his on. He had gotten rid of their previous phones and SIM cards on the train by flushing them down the filthy toilet at the end of the sleeping car, and put in contact numbers so they could call each other. “Only use once and then discard,” he cautioned.

“Look,” she whispered. They were passing an office building with a giant banner sign that announced: ЧЕРКЕСОВ ДЛЯ ПРЕЗИДЕНТА КАМПАНІI ОФІСУ. Scorpion laboriously spelled out the Cyrillic lettering: Cherkesov for President Campaign Office. Two men in the black armbands with the yellow crosses were passing out leaflets in the street.

“Chort bandytiv!” the taxi driver said, meaning the Black Armbands.

“What did he say?” Scorpion asked her.

“He called them filthy thugs! This has to stop,” she said, half to herself.

“Astanavityes,” he told the taxi driver in Russian. Stop here. The cab pulled over, double parking. Horns immediately started honking behind them.