James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“That’s a girl.” I dropped my voice, low and soothing. “Come here, Binah.”

Slowly, very slowly, Binah came forward, a skeleton held together with skin and tendon. Carefully, I scooped her up and held her to my chest.

“Alright, Rex. I take it back.” Zane’s voice rumbled out behind me. “We kill those fuckers. Every last one.”

“We need the bags.” The rage was starting up in me again. My face and hands were hot. “Search. Bags. We’ll leave. Go secure the front door.”

“Hey, guys?” Duke called from back in the house.

Zane looked back for a moment, then refocused on me. “Where are the bags?”

“Bedroom.” Every word pulled from my throat with hooks. I wanted to wait in here like a trapdoor spider for the miserable shitstains to return. They’d tortured my familiar. “Closet. Up top. Suitcases… a briefcase, silver. The medical kit. Get them all.”

I tried to put Binah inside my coat, but she immediately wriggled free. She clawed her way to my shoulder the way she always did, and her purr grew in intensity and power as she arched her body against the side of my head. I could feel her ribs through her skin as they pressed into my cheek.

“Hey! Rex!” Duke called from the kitchen a second time. “This door here is locked. Jenner wants to know if we should smash it open or what.”

There were only two doors in my house that had key locks: The front door and Vassily’s room. My chest tightened painfully. There were still things of his in there. The thought of Vanya using his room for anything made me sick to my stomach. “Wait. That’s my friend’s old bedroom. There’s a trick to the lock.”

The front door was open. Zane was out loading goods – Jenner and Duke were waiting for me by Vassily’s bedroom door, Kir sprawled out at their feet. Their expressions were grim.

“Here.” I passed Binah to Duke, and then braced myself in the threshold. I took a step back, twisted the knob, and rammed my shoulder into it. The lock clicked and gave way under the force, sending me stumbling in, where I stopped cold in confusion and horror.

The sheets were rumpled and… bloody. All of the photos had been swept off the dresser, replaced by bottles of vodka, bourbon and red pepper horilka . Vassily’s things had been carelessly thrown into the corner in a pile. There were handcuffs attached to the head of the bed… there was a video camera on a stand.

“What in the fuck…?” Duke trailed off as he and Jenner followed me, circling out and around.

“Was, uh… was this always like this, Rex?” Jenner drew up beside me, machete in one hand, Kir’s H&K slung over her shoulder.

“No.” Haltingly, I went to the camera and turned it on, swiveling the replay screen out from the side of the camcorder. I rewound the cassette tape back until it clicked, and then set it to play.

A young girl with a sprawl of waist-length, curly red hair was handcuffed to the bed. She was ten, if that. She was in her underwear, her face slathered in makeup, and she was crying.

“Jesus Christ.” Duke was watching over my shoulder. “That’s Josie. That’s one of the Wolf Grove kids.”

I wanted to switch the camera off and turn aside, but I forced my mind calm and waited. After a minute or so, an adult man walked onto the screen. I paused it on the clearest frame of his arms and back, trying to ignore the girl in the background. The man was hooded and masked, but he was also tattooed. I leaned in to examine the grimy picture. It took a few seconds before the image resolved: a five-point onion-domed cathedral set over a grinning leopard’s head. It was brandishing a knife in one paw, set below a banner that I knew read: “ Take out bitches, stool pigeons, and traitors!”

“That’s Kir. The guy Jenner knocked out in the hall.” I was sick to the pit of my stomach, my voice dull with shock.

“What the fuck was that?” Jenner came up beside me, her face drawn. The mischief was gone. Her eyes were hard and dark. “Who’d I knock out?”

“Kir was filmed with this little girl.” I rubbed my face. “Give me the machete and drag him in here. He’s going to answer some very pointed questions.”

Jenner bared her teeth, a double sneer that momentarily transformed her face into something bestial. “I can do it.”

“No.” I extended my hand to her. “These are my people. I’ll do this.”

Jenner’s eyes were black and hard with anger, but she handed the oiled blade to me and turned without a word. Duke gave Binah back, then went out and dragged the semi-conscious man into the room by his ankles. Zane followed behind, having returned from outside, and watched in confusion as Duke and Jenner threw Kir onto the bed. They cuffed his hands and locked the bracelets.

While he recovered, I got some of Vassily’s old clothing out of his wardrobe and lay them on the ground, setting Binah on top of the makeshift bed. She was so tired and weak that she simply lay down without any protest, her flanks heaving.

I went back to the bed. Kir moaned, writhing slowly on his back. I slapped his cheeks, then reached across for the bottle of horilka on the stand and tipped it over his face. The spicy liquor splashed him in the eyes and up his nose, and he came up gasping and spluttering, swallowing blood and booze. His eyes opened… and when they focused on my face, his pupils pinned.

“You,” he rasped. “How the fuck are you still alive?”

“They called me The Magician for a reason, Kir.” I spoke Russian, our shared language, while I tapped the blunt edge of the machete across my other palm. “How have things been? Raped any children lately?”

“Fuck you. Lousy bitch!” He spat at me.

I used the machete like a shield, caught the wad of mucus before it hit me, then bought it down broadside onto his nose. He yelped, rattling the bed. Blood burst from his nostrils like juice from a berry. I poured more of the pepper-infused spirits across his face, and he shouted in fresh pain.

“Speak when you’re spoken to,” I said. “Where are the kids you took from Yonkers?”

Kir strained up towards me, his face a mask of blood and fury. “How the fuck do you think I’d know that? The fuck you think I’d tell you anything, you fucking homo, you traitor-dog…”

I used the point of the big knife to press him back down by his Adam’s Apple. Then, I left off his throat, and leveled the point of it right against the crotch of his pants. He sucked in a sharp breath.

“Shut the fuck up before I cut this off and feed it to you so that you can taste cock one last time,” I said. “Where. Are. The children?”

He snarled and lunged at me, but stopped short when the point of the machete dug into the nerve bundle it was set against, a nexus of nerves just above his pubis. I looked back to Zane.

“See if you can find a blank tape, and set the camera to record,” I said in English. “Kir is going to tell us a little story.”

Zane nodded and began to mess with the camera. I looked across to see Duke frozen in the doorway. His jaw was clenched so hard that the muscles in his neck bulged.

“ Blyat’, pizda. ” Kir spat again, spraying his own chin and chest with spittle.

“Do you remember why they call me Molotchik , Kir? Do you remember what I did to my father?” I looked down at him, twisting the point of the machete until the tip worked through the weave of his sweatpants and dug into the delicate skin of his groin, right in the join of pubis and thigh. He jerked against the handcuffs and froze. “You have five seconds to tell me what operation Vanya is running here. For every second that goes by, I will push this knife in deeper.”