Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

“The claim tab. I’m going to need it,” was all he said.

I slipped it to him, quickly sensing that this was something that should be done discretely but unsure of what was going to happen.

We passed by the museum visitors and through the gallery halls quickly passing some of Russia’s most famous and most precious cultural treasures. After a number of turns and long walks down corridors and rooms painted in varying shades of dark and light greens lined with framed paintings both large and small, sculptures and antique furniture we came to a large open hall with white walls and a large skylight in the ceiling. The floor throughout was the classical white birch inlaid pattern found in most formal or official buildings in Russia. Tatyana ushered us into the room that Del had specifically requested and started to explain the significance and relationship of the paintings that hung here. On the three complete walls of the hall hung three very large framed paintings, all dramatic and highly detailed. Between them were rows of smaller studies and portraits and small antique display cases with fragile etchings or sketches on centuries’ old brittle paper. The room was full of visitors two or three rows deep in front of each of the paintings, all entranced with the sheer scale of the paintings as well as the emotional detail with which each had been rendered.

The painting of The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsiy is a dramatic scene of chaos and grief expressed as another mutineer is led away by a guard in a black dress uniform with a long shining sabre in his right hand to the gallows towering visibly behind the crowd of people gathered to say goodbye and mourn the loss of the mutinous regiment. All this is staged in front of St. Basil’s cathedral and the Moscow Kremlin walls with regents, boyars, and priests looking on haughtily from horseback and a royal carriage. I could feel the mud of Red Square under my feet, and hear the wailing of a grieving wife and son, widow and orphan to be. I couldn’t help but be moved by it even though my own fate could possibly be that of the mutineers if my own situation didn’t resolve itself soon. Del stood entranced as he listened to Tatyana and asked questions, completely detached from the reality that the dragnet was closing in around us quickly.

After a few minutes, the crowd in front of the painting thinned out and the three of us stood directly in front of this tragic rendering, Tatyana between me and Del, pretending that this painting was the reason for our visit to the gallery. In my feeling of impatience and vulnerability I looked about the room to see how easily trapped we would be should Sergey and his team close in on us. Over my right shoulder, I recognized one of the FSB team waiting by the wider of the two exits but couldn’t see another one directly. I put my attention back on the painting and held my breath.

Another small group came to stand with us in front of the scene of execution to the left of Del and began snapping photographs of each of them with the painting as a dramatic background. The last of the four to pose fumbled with his camera as he posed, dropping a number of items, sending them skidding across the floor in front of us. The man looked embarrassed and apologized in a language that I didn’t recognize as he bent down to collect this hotel room key, loose change, and his own red triangular claim tab. Del bent down to assist the man as a few of the items slid to lay directly at his shoe tips. Tatyana scolded them in Russian and they all looked sheepishly ashamed. In just the blink of an eye, I watched Del’s fingers deftly swap my claim tab with that of the clumsy tourist in a slight of hand that called to it absolutely no attention. Adrenaline flooded my blood stream and I felt the pupils in my eyes expand. My body tensed up, my heart began to race and my stomach and throat synched up ready for the threat that I felt closing in on us. I was ready to fight or flee.

From over my right shoulder a commotion rose that I didn’t comprehend quickly enough nor did I anticipate. With my back to the room and my attention theatrically fixed on the painting and Del’s switch of claim tags with the clumsy tourist, I couldn’t find the presence of mind to break my act to turn to see what it was tens of others in the room were moving quickly away from. Just as I was able to shake myself out of my adrenaline-induced paralysis and turned my head to see what was happening behind me, I was struck with a force that spun me around and into Tatyana who let out a scream just as I toppled over on top of her to the hardwood floor. I couldn’t breathe. Each second was a struggle to live. As my lungs finally filled again it felt as if my whole right side had been sheared off. It felt as if the endings of all the nerves in my right side were being rubbed with sand paper. I couldn’t even scream the pain was so overwhelming. I wretched and gasped face down on the floor

As Tatyana struggled to get out from under the deadweight of my body more gunshots rang out from the left and the right. In the immediate shock and haze of my own pain it seemed that everybody at the museum had opened fire on the person next to them. I tried hard to stay oriented. I rolled over onto my back with my neck propped up against the wall under the frame of the painting. My right shoulder felt as if it was on fire! Confusion reigned. Next to Tatyana, who was now laying on her side, curled up in a ball screaming in horror with her hands and arms over her head and ears, I saw the bulging eyes of the clumsy tourist to whom Del had given my claim tab with blood running out of the corner of his mouth. The dead man’s friends had, out of thin air, produced hand held sub-machine guns and were spraying the room with bullets. I could see Del hiding behind an overturned red velvet bench. I couldn’t see if he had a gun or not. I couldn’t imagine how he had gotten over there so fast.

As the gunmen in the corner stopped to reload their weapons, two single shots from different guns flashed at the other end of the hall and hit their marks, dropping two men efficiently to the ground. Just as the second of the shots had been loosed the third machine gunner opened another volley at the FSB agents in a sweeping motion from left to right, piercing the walls and splintering the moldings of the door frames penetrating through the walls on both sides of the doorway. The thud of bodies was heard dropping to the floor on the other side of the wall. A pistol slid across the floor and came to rest in the door way just out of reach of the hand of the dead FSB agent sprawled face down on the floor. Around the corner of the second exit, a pistol and the right side of Sergey’s face appeared to take aim at the last machine gunner. I saw Sergey at the same moment as the gunman. As quickly as my eyes could move right to left again, he tugged again on the uzi’s trigger again and spat out a burst of twenty bullets, splintering the woodwork along the door frame that Sergey was sheltering behind, just as Sergey’s bullet found the forehead of his own assassin. Both men flopped violently, simultaneously to the floor.

Del sprang from his flimsy cover behind the overturned bench and snatched up one of the miniature machine guns and covered the room. He kicked the other uzis out of the reach from the other dead shooters, a habit of professional precaution.

“Kid, kid! You awake? You alive?” Del called out to me.

I moaned an answer that was not quite a word, yet just enough to acknowledge I was alive. Tatyana was still screaming in terror but was otherwise uninjured. Del moved quickly to help Tatyana to her feet and pulled her behind him and pushed her out of the hall through an external fire exit. Bodies of tourists lay scattered across the floor. Some obviously dead, others crying for help. Sirens of the museum’s emergency alarm echoed through the still halls around us. Instructions to calmly leave the gallery blared from intercom speakers. Nobody else around me moved.