Natalia Smirnova - Moscow Noir

The contenders were told that a group of around twenty millionaires were behind the game. They were the ones at the bottom of the Forbes list, the ones with only a sorry twenty or thirty million to their names, which they had come by in the drug trade or illegal gambling. Maxim didn’t really give a damn about who, what, or where. There’s a lot of money sloshing around in this sweepstakes, where folks bet on people, not on horses, cutting each other up with great expertise. As long as they coughed up the prize money at the end of it.

There were only six days left, but he was already bone-tired. He had killed not only five of his opponents, but nine others as well. Collateral damage, it’s called. Three of them were merely the victims of a misunderstanding. A case of mistaken identity. But they had acted suspicious too. And it wasn’t like he had a lot of time to make sure. In that situation, it’s just a matter of who pulls the trigger first. None of them pointed a gun at him, but then, not one of those poor suckers had even had a gun on him to shoot with. Tough luck.

Six of them deserved to die. One of the players had hired them as informers for next to nothing. They shadowed his opponents and kept him notified of their whereabouts. Maxim didn’t feel sorry for them at all. Nope. He recalled how one of them, a nervous guy of around thirty, begged him to spare his life. Said he needed the cash because his five-year-old daughter had sarcoma and needed expensive treatment, or she’d die. And if he died, she wouldn’t make it. Maxim almost let him go, in exchange for the telephone number of the player who hired him. But when he found out it was the same guy who had killed Arkady, his old army buddy, he couldn’t restrain himself. He broke the kid’s neck so quick the guy didn’t even notice his own death. It’s different if you’re nailed to a hospital bed, but not many healthy people see it coming. Death is especially quick at the hands of people who make it their profession. Fast as a bullet that has already found a home inside a lifeless body by the time the shot rings out.

Maxim sure hadn’t expected to find Arkady’s name among the players. They had been close friends back in Kandahar, with ghosts firing mortars at their marine company. And there was Nikita too. They had been the only ones left alive in their platoon. They made a vow of eternal friendship. But a lot had changed since then. Things were different now. And they weren’t the same guys they had been either. Life’s a bitch.

“I really need the cash,” said Arkady, staring at Maxim over the bridge of his nose. “I don’t have a choice.”

“I have no choice either,” Maxim replied. “Although I could do without the cash. In fact, I could even help you out, I’ve got some savings. But it’s too late now to call it quits.”

It was true, the players were already in the game. They’d signed a contract with the devil in blood. Refusal to continue with the game carried a risk of the secret being leaked, so any such player would be liquidated. Everything was absolutely fair. And gentlemanly.

Obviously, Maxim and Arkady agreed that they would not kill each other under any circumstances. If, by the end of the month, only the two of them were left, then lots would be drawn to decide the answer of “to be or not to be,” a bullet shot out of the barrel of a gun in a game of Russian roulette. After all, they were army buddies and not some pussy bastards off the street.

The agonizing problem solved itself, really.

He walked on, scanning everything up ahead—to the left, to the right, behind him—calculating all the possibilities for how the present situation might develop. Two clerks, a mother and daughter, three rough-looking losers, a wino, a student, a bum, a prostitute, an old man, WHO’S THAT? An athlete? Yes, definitely an athlete. Three teenagers with snowboards, a spaced-out druggie, WHO IS HE? HE’S GOT HIS RIGHT HAND IN HIS POCKET! No, his wrist is straight, and the pocket’s too small, yeah, he’s just a jerk. And old woman trying to look younger than her age, a suicide case definitely a suicide, a workaholic, a cop, a guy looking down at the grou—NIKITA!

Yes, it was him. It wasn’t easy to recognize the handsome and easygoing buddy he had known from his army days in this unkempt person, slumped over on a bench with a one-liter plastic bottle of extra strong Ohota beer. Ripped sneakers, his big toes nearly poking out of them, threadbare jeans, a filthy coat. Gray hair speckled his five-day-old stubble and made its way up to his temples and into his once black hair. But most horrifying of all was the expression in his eyes: dull and lonely like an autumn swamp. His gaze wasn’t staring inward. It wasn’t staring outward either. It was unfocused and wandering somewhere in the direction of nonexistence.

Maxim paused, although in the present situation this wasn’t very safe. But he couldn’t just walk past a friend who looked like he needed help.

“Nikita!”

“Oh, it’s you,” Nikita said, as though he hardly recognized the person he was speaking to.

“What’s all that?” asked Maxim, nodding at the plastic bottle that seemed to be a primary attribute of all the downtrodden and hopeless.

“You sure got this life thing all figured out. Looks like you got it made,” Nikita said, his voice so shrill he was almost shouting.

“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Maxim scanned the hostile territory around him.

“What’s wrong with me ? Where were you three years ago? I wrote to you from St. Pete. Tried to get hold of you. And where were you a year ago, when I was all alone, up to my neck in shit? What’s wrong with me ?”

“Give me a break! I moved into a new place and got a new number. And I’m not in Moscow much anyway. Come on. What can I do to help you now? I mean it, right now.”

It was obvious the guy was in bad shape. He was angry at the whole world, and appeared comfortable that way. His body language was saying, Forgot about me, the bastards, stabbed me in the back! Not one single son of a bitch came around when I needed help. Well, I don’t need you assholes anymore. Scram! Guys like that never admit that it is they, and not the “bastards,” “sons of bitches,” or “assholes,” who are to blame for their misfortunes. Backed up by such sentiments, they enjoy not shaving and going for weeks without changing their underwear; guzzling Ohota or Baltika 9 as they go under, until they stop somewhere about six feet beneath the earth’s surface and worms start gnawing at what’s left of them. Even worse, Maxim once heard about a dog breeding company where bull terriers were fed a diet of homeless people, live homeless people, to turn the dogs into killers and cannibals.

“You should have helped me out back then when I needed it, before I ended up in Moscow,” said Nikita.

When, at last, he ran out of excuses to prop up his ego, Nikita told his story. It turned out that three years before, in St. Petersburg, he had made some big money and decided to move to Moscow. What’s the big deal, everybody’s going! It’s the city of unlimited possibilities. So he sold his Petersburg apartment and added that money to the bundle he’d received from Valya Matvienko for working on her election campaign, and bought a three-bedroom apartment at Pure Ponds, one that was big enough to house their whole damn platoon back in Kandahar. He partied for a month, spending dollars like they were five-kopek coins. After that, he settled in. Turned out that the easiest part was finding a mate. Or something like that. Whatever. She was beautiful, smart, sexy, and devoted. Or she seemed devoted back then. That was why, three months later, he awarded her the official status of wife, and a note was made of this both in his passport and in an official registry book.