Randy White - Dead of Night

They’d looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Aleski said loud enough for the whole room to hear, “Raspizdyay kolhoznii! Pizdoon!”

Stupid redneck! Fucking liar!

They both laughed and laughed.

They’d worked as interrogation specialists, Russian military. Dasha had also been recruited and trained by national intelligency, the FSB, or Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. Made some money on the side feeding information to Chechen separatists before Dasha got sick of the gray winters, the gray architecture, the gray pasty faces of Russian men, and said fuck it. She was out of there.

Aleski was her operative partner. Played good cop to her badass cop, which wasn’t an act. He’d never put a move on her, never asked for anything, but was always there. Sexually, he had some kinks-the man liked being watched. Otherwise, Aleski was like a stray dog that followed the first person who walked by and didn’t try to kick him.

After Mr. Earl showed her the photos, he told Dasha about the unique security problems of owning isolated islands that, legally, were part of the Bahamas, but also had to interact with government con men from Cuba, only thirty miles away. The dried-up man asked how she’d handle certain situations.

“Create redundant cells to protect water, fuel, and mobility,” she told him. “Those are the necessities. All security problems can be reduced to those three things.”

“What about food supply? Water’s important, but people got to eat, too.”

Dasha replied, “Food is fuel. Water, fuel, and mobility-see how I compartmentalize them? If I make sure they’re secure, your islands will be secure.”

The man said, “Cool. Very cool.” His smile read: Impressive.

Mr. Earl the Pearl had a big brain behind that great big smile. The questions, she noticed, became more carefully couched.

“If your employer asked you to break the law, would you?”

A standard setup. Only an amateur would fall for it.

“No.”

“What if you were in a place where there was no law?”

“Is there such a place?”

“This is hypothetical.”

Dasha thought, Clever. Said, “In such a place, I would consider my employer the maker of laws.”

“You would carry out any order?”

“Reasonable orders. The man’s paying my salary.”

“Even murder? You wouldn’t kill a person if you were told to do it.”

Dasha had looked into Mr. Earl’s mean, judgmental eyes and nodded imperceptibly. Barely moved her head, in case this was a different sort of setup and she was being videoed. Waited for several seconds, sure the man knew her meaning, before saying, “Murder’s never legal.”

She got the job.

When unimportant people-people such as the young Cuban-asked where she lived, Dasha always said the same thing: “On the islands.”

A private place inside her was smiling. Where it’s warm.

In the first months, before Dasha asked to see his body, Solaris thought of her as the Snow Witch, and Dr. Stokes as Mr. Sweet. Everything about her was pale and distant-icy. Solaris, who’d only seen snow in photographs, liked the word. It fit.

Witch: A woman who could make magic.

Dr. Stokes had translucent skin like rice paper, or refined sugar. He wore white gloves, and a paper device over his mouth and nose because the man was afraid of germs-or so said the Snow Witch.

Months later, when he knew her better, the two of them naked in the tobacco barn, Solaris said what he felt the first time he’d heard about it. “The man’s afraid of germs, but he buys the kind of nasty shit he does? Sewage? Water with invisible bugs? He’s crazy. He looks like what the Santeria people call ‘the Walking Dead’”

The Cuban was imagining the man in zombie-white makeup, with pointed teeth and ears, like a bat. Not so different from the way he actually looked.

Dasha replied, “He’s afraid of anything unhealthy. An uneducated boy like you has never seen diseases under a microscope. He has. If he knew I’d touched your yieldak, had your sweat on my skin and didn’t wash? He’d never let me in the car.”

The Chinaman had already told Solaris why the man ordered such strange things. Research.

Maybe true; maybe the Chinaman was making it up.

He’d also told him the doctor had invented vitamin pills and become rich. Made good investments, owned many businesses even though he was socialista at heart. Loved the old Cuba during the days of the Bearded One, which had something to do with him buying sugarcane acreage in the Everglades, west of Miami, a city Solaris dreamed of visiting.

“Probably because of the trouble he had in Florida, he hates the U.S. government,” the Chinaman said. “That’s why I pretend to give him a discount.”

Why did the Yankees bother growing cane? Cuba had once produced enough to sweeten the world, yet the arrogant imperialists had nearly strangled the island to death.

The Chinaman didn’t say that. One of the old villagers had told him. Gave him a speech. Solaris wasn’t interested.

So it was “Senorita Bruja Naver,” and “Dr. Dulce,” until the woman asked to see his body in the dim light of a tobacco barn that smelled of sour pepper, like a whiskey keg. Now she was “Senorita Serpiente.”

On her next visit, Dasha allowed him to touch her breasts. Part of the reward system. The third trip, she behaved as if he were invisible until she stepped into the building and bolted the door. Then, step-by-step, she instructed him on how he could please her.

Her body was different than the prostitute he’d been with. Different than women described by older men in the village-all they talked about was sex and baseball. Solaris felt very strange when he did what she asked him to do, yet it was impossible to refuse her.

As their helicopter lifted over the mountains, he’d gargled with rum, hacked, and spit into the sand. But he still loved the thought of her body, the way her pale skin burned beneath his hands.

During a recent visit, she’d held up a rubber balloon shaped like a plantain.

“If he learns how to control himself,” she told him, “waits until I’m ready, I’ll let him use this one day. But don’t expect it every time.”

Solaris had tried to hold back. God he’d tried. He’d thought about baseball, then about old women stirring beans, even imagined dogs farting. Nothing could dull the voltage of her fingers on his skin.

She was livid. Went looking for a towel and didn’t come back.

His last performance, a month ago, was worse. When he bragged to his friends in the village about what the blond Russian did to him in the tobacco barn, they’d spit and whistled in scorn. Called him a crazy liar. To prove himself, he’d borrowed a camera from an old man who’d once been the village Party captain. Solaris had wedged the camera into the barn rafters, lens pointed downward, a long piece of fishing line tied to the shutter release.

Just being in the barn, the way it smelled, imagining being with her, made it difficult to breathe.

Their small helicopter landed five days later.

When Solaris was naked, and she had her bra off, he tried to position her in a way so that her face and body would be visible to the camera, all the while feeling blindly for the fishing line that his stupid fingers could not locate.

“What are you doing?”

“Doing?”

“Yes, doing?”

“Trying to find a more comfortable position against this wall.”

“No, I meant him. What’s wrong with him?”

“Wrong?”

“Are you blind? Idiot!”

Solaris looked. “Oh.” The pressure of making a photograph had affected him in a way that imagining old women stirring beans, and farting dogs, could not. “I think… he’s learning control.”