Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“Call him. Tell him we need a lift. We’ll pay him,” he told Iryna.

“Probachte! Pryvit!” Excuse me! Hello! she called out, waving to the man, who just looked at her.

“Anything else, your highness?” she whispered to Scorpion.

“Smile,” he said.

For a hundred hryvnia the man agreed to take them to Tolstoho Square. Within minutes they were driving across the bridge Scorpion had looked down on from the apartment window. A pale sun, pale as the moon, cast a cold light on the frozen river. The man tried to talk to Iryna, but she answered in monosyllables. They drove through traffic. The man dropped them off near the Metro entrance on the museum side of the square. They waited till he drove off, then began walking.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“We need a car. I looked it up before. There’s a car rental agency on vulytsya Pushkinska.”

“I can’t keep doing this,” she said. For a moment she stood there, trembling.

“No,” he said.

T hey spotted the car agency on the ground floor of an office building. Scorpion used his South African passport and driver’s license in the name Peter Reinert to rent a four-wheel-drive Volkswagen Touareg SUV.

While they waited for the car, Iryna took off her Ushanka hat and he saw she was in her pixie cut; she hadn’t had time to put on the blond wig. Scorpion was instantly on guard, but no one seemed to recognize her. After the rental agent programmed the GPS, they drove the Volkswagen into traffic.

“What’s the best way to Bila Tserkva?” he asked.

“Go left, there,” she said, pointing. “We need to get to the M5 going south.”

“How far?”

“Eighty kilometers, give or take,” she said.

A few minutes later she had input the town into the GPS and they were getting directions from it in Russian. Scorpion turned onto a wide street that had been cleared of snow.

“Feel better?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She stared straight ahead. They were driving on a boulevard with a broad divider lined with bare trees and with trees along both sides. Not for the first time, it occurred to Scorpion that in summer, Ukraine would be beautiful. He glanced at the rearview mirror. So far there was no sign of a tail.

“Are you sure Danylo’s dead?” she asked.

“Pretty sure,” he nodded. It was next to impossible that the Syndikat blatnoi knew about the apartment and not about the van. He hadn’t wanted to go near it not only because they needed to get away, but also because he didn’t want Iryna to see would likely be left of Danylo inside the van.

“I don’t understand,” she said, looking at him. “Who were they?”

“Mogilenko is a sociopath,” he said.

“Mogilenko?”

“Head of the Syndikat, the mafia. His shpana did it. They were the ones after us.”

“Tell me, do you always make everyone so angry with you?”

“It’s a gift,” he said, and in spite of herself, she almost laughed.

“Impossible man,” she muttered.

“Besides Danylo, who else knew about us and that apartment?” he asked.

“Viktor, of course.” She turned to him. “You don’t think…?”

“What does Viktor gain if you die?”

“Nothing. He loses the support of women-and also those who remember my father. Without my father and the Rukh, this country would have never achieved independence. Not Viktor,” she said.

“Well, I’m not buying two landlords in a row. Who else?”

“My aide, Slavo. You don’t think…?”

He didn’t answer.

“It can’t be! Not Slavo!”

“Why not? You have a mole in Svoboda. Why shouldn’t they?”

“You said this was mafia, not politics,” she said, glaring at him.

“Didn’t you say Cherkesov and Gorobets were corrupt? With ties to the mafia?”

“You mean use them as hatchetmen? No dirt on them or their Chorni Povyazky? It almost makes sense. But Slavo?”

“You better call Kozhanovskiy. Let him know. He needs to get rid of Slavo. After you call, get rid of your cell phone. Wipe off your fingerprints and toss the phone and the SIM card out the window separately, about a minute apart.”

Iryna called and spoke rapidly, intensely, in Ukrainian. Afterward she threw the cell phone away and took out another of the prepaid cells Scorpion had given her. As they drove out of the city, they began to see trees and fields of snow. She started to light a cigarette, then stopped and instead tried to find news on the radio. A commentator was arguing with someone on a Russian language talk show. She translated for Scorpion. One man said that if Ukraine was invaded, Ukrainians would have to fight. Not to fight would mean the end of Ukraine as an independent country. The other man wondered if the country was ready for war. They agreed that everything depended upon what NATO and the Americans decided. After a while she shut the radio off and they rode in silence through farmlands on the outskirts of the city.

They passed a long convoy of Ukraine Army trucks filled with soldiers, coming in the opposite direction. Many of the trucks were flying the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.

They passed truck after truck, all heading toward Kyiv.

Bila Tserkva

Ukraine

The coffin lay in front of the altar. There were candles and the smell of incense, but no other mourners except for a middle-aged woman with a plain face and a withered leg, limping up the aisle toward them. The church was near a park, its gold-painted spires covered with snow. During the warmer months the park would be green, but now there were only naked trees, the branches heavy with ice and snow, creaking in the cold wind. They had found the church by a note taped to the front door of Alyona’s mother’s apartment.

“Laskavo prosymo.” Welcome. “Are you members of the family?” the woman asked in Ukrainian. Her name was Pani Shulhaska, and Iryna translated for Scorpion.

“We’re friends of her daughter, Alyona,” Iryna said.

“Is she coming, slava Bohu?” Glory to God.

“We don’t know,” Iryna said, glancing at Scorpion. “I don’t think so.”

“Would you like to look at her?”

Iryna translated, and Scorpion nodded, then walked up to the open coffin. It was the face of an older woman, white as plaster and made gaunt by disease. If Alyona had gotten any of her prettiness from this woman, he couldn’t see it. He returned to the pew, where Iryna sat with Pani Shulhaska.

“It’s sad no one came,” the woman said. “Most of her friends had already passed or moved away.”

“What did she die of?” Iryna asked.

“The breast cancer. It was terrible. I’m her neighbor. I did what I could to help,” she said, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap. “I don’t understand. It’s so strange about Alyona. The son, we understood, of course.”

“She had a son?” Iryna asked.

“Her boy, Stepan. He was a few years older than Alyona,” Pani Shulhaska said, glancing at the coffin. “So sad.”

“I didn’t know Alyona had a brother,” Iryna said.

“They didn’t talk about him. He is in likarni.” She lowered her voice. “Ivan Pavlov Hospital.”

“Pavlovka, the mental hospital in Kyiv. The worst cases,” Iryna explained to Scorpion.

“What was the strange thing about Alyona?” Scorpion asked, Iryna translating.

“Four nights ago she called me. I told her she should come. The doctor said her maty,” her mama, “did not have long. She had to come home at once.”

“What did she say?” Iryna asked.

“She said a strange thing. She said she wasn’t sure she could come. She begged me to stay with her maty and not let her die alone. She said she would send money.”