Richard Montanari - The Devil_s Garden

The bartender excused himself, moved a few stools down, poured a refill to an older, bottle-blond woman who smoked unfiltered cigarettes and read a Russian newspaper. Her lipstick was the color of dried blood.

By the time the bartender returned, Aleks’s twenty had turned into a fifty, and the big man in the black leather coat was gone.

The liquor remained untouched.

The second place, a Russian restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, produced no results, other than to lead Aleks to a third place, a cafe in Bayview. It was a stand-alone brick building, dark and smoky, and when Aleks entered he was greeted by the hiss of the samovar, the sound of an old Journey song on the jukebox, and the shouts of men playing cards in a back room. He mind-catalogued the room: Four hard men around a pool table to the left, to the right, at the coffee bar sat a klatch of old-timers from the Ukraine. They nodded at Aleks, who returned the greeting.

He asked about Konstantine. The men claimed to not know him. They were lying. Aleks had two more places on his list to visit.

He turned, saw the REST ROOMS sign at the rear of the bar. He’d make a comfort stop first.

As he walked the length of the tavern, Aleks sensed a presence. When he turned, there was no one there, no one following him.

He continued, descending the steps. He found the men’s room at the end of a short basement hallway. He opened the door partially, flipped on the light. Nothing. The room remained dark. It smelled of dried urine and disinfectant. He opened the door fully, checked for the light fixture, and in that split second a shadow stole from the darkness like a spirit, a gleam of steel catching his eye.

In the moment before the blade plunged towards his back, Aleks stepped to the side. The blade crashed into the drywall. Aleks shifted his weight, pivoted, slamming his left knee into the groin of his assailant, bringing a forearm down onto the hand holding the knife. The man grunted, buckled, but instead of hitting the floor he too shifted weight, exposing a second knife, this one a long steel filet. It was headed for Aleks’s stomach. Aleks grabbed the man by his thick wrist, powering back the arm. He slipped a leg between the other man’s legs and brought him to the floor. Before he could get the Barhydt out of its sheath the attacker slammed a fist into his jaw, momentarily stunning him.

In a tangle of arms and legs, the two men crashed into the walls of the dark hallway, each seeking leverage. Moments later, Aleks brought a fist to his assailant’s jaw – three powerful blows that took away the fight. The man slumped to the floor.

Bleeding from both the nose and mouth, his hands sore from striking bone, Aleks stood, steadied himself against the rotted plaster wall. He turned the man over, took one of the man’s arms in a scissor lock. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he looked at the man’s face.

It was Konstantine. But it was not. The man had Konstantine’s broad forehead, his deep-set eyes, but somehow had not aged a day since he and Aleks had been in the federal army together.

“Who are you?” Aleks asked.

The young man wiped the blood from his nose. “Fuck your mother.”

Aleks almost laughed. If he was in Estonia, and knew that there would be no consequences to his actions, he would have drawn his blade and opened the man’s throat, just for the insult. “I think you are not understanding the question.” He tightened his grip on the young man’s arm, exerted more downward pressure. If he wanted, he could simply apply the leverage of his full body weight, and the arm would snap. Right now, he wanted to. “Who are you?”

The young man screamed once, a sharp growl, the muscles in his neck cording, his skin a bright crimson. “Fuck… you.”

And Aleks knew.

This was Konstantine’s son.

They sat in a back room on the first floor of the tavern. With a nod of his head, the young man who had tried to kill Aleks just moments earlier had cleared the room of card players. They sat among cardboard boxes of alcohol, napkins, bar food. The young man held a bag of ice to his face.

“You look just like him,” Aleks said. It was true. The young man had his father’s thick shoulders, broad chest, low center of gravity. He even had the crooked smile. Although Aleks had not known Konstantine at this young man’s age – perhaps twenty-two or three – the resemblance was nonetheless remarkable, almost unsettling.

“He was my father,” the young man said.

“Was.”

The young man nodded, looked away, perhaps masking his feelings. “He’s dead.”

Konstantine dead, Aleks thought. The man had survived the first wave in Chechnya. It was hard to believe. “How?”

“Wrong place, wrong time. He took twenty bullets from a Colombian’s AK,” he said. “Not for nothin’, but the Colombian joined my father in hell not long after. Believe it.”

Aleks remembered well Konstantine Udenko’s temper. He was not surprised.

“Many times he showed me pictures of his baby son,” Aleks said. “You are Nikolai?”

The kid smiled. He looked even younger, except for the pink sheen of blood coating his teeth. “They call me Kolya.”

Aleks sized up the kid. He had fully expected to see Konstantine again, to depend on his devotion to him, not to mention his animal strength and fox-like cunning. His son would have to do. He hoped the young man had inherited some of his father’s archness and strength.

“My name is Aleks,” he said. He pulled up the sleeves of his coat, revealing his tattoos. Kolya saw the marks and went pale. It was like a cardinal realizing he was standing in front of a pope.

“You are Savisaar! My father talked about you all the time, man. You are vennaskond.”

Aleks said nothing.

Kolya looked a little shaky for a moment, as if he might be ready to kiss Aleks’s ring. Instead he opened a nearby box, and extracted a bottle of vodka.

“We’ll have a drink,” Kolya said. “Then I’ll take you to my shop.”

Kolya ran a chop shop in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Two garages, side by side, fronting an alley behind a block of stores on North 10th Street. Both had steel corrugated roll doors. Two men stood at the end of the alley, smoking, watching, cellphones in hand. Inside, the smell of motor oil and Bondo permeated the air. Beneath it, the sweet smell of marijuana.

The crew inside the shop was five young men, black and Hispanic. The sound of hip hop droned from a cheap radio. Aleks saw no firearms displayed openly, but he recognized the tell-tale bulges in the waistbands of two of the men.

The garages were cluttered with half-stripped cars, engine blocks, exhaust systems, bumpers and fenders, truck caps. Most seemed to be the low end of the high side – BMW, Lexus, Mercedes.

They gathered in the last bay, one with a broken lift. Aleks, Kolya, and a young black man named Omar. Omar was tall, powerfully built. He wore his hair in short dreads. He also sported green camouflage trousers and shirt. In a city. For Aleks, this defined his dubious worth as a warrior.

“So what do you think?” Kolya asked, offering a proud hand to the space.

Aleks glanced around the garages, giving the question its due. “Not bad,” he replied. As much as he liked fine automobiles, he could never be involved in this end of the trade. Too dirty, too noisy, and the product took far too much space to conceal. “Do you make a living?”

Kolya mugged. “I do all right.”

The words came out a’ight, a pronunciation Aleks was beginning to hear more and more, a rasp on his sensibilities.

“Most of the business out of here is legit,” Kolya added. “Fuck, we even do work for AAA.” Kolya laughed, Omar joined in. They bumped fists. It was nervous laughter. They did not know what was coming, and had to establish the illusion of a united front. Whatever Aleks was bringing them could be good or bad. Kolya decided to jump in the fire. “So, what do you need?”