James Baldwin - Blood Hound

“Ho, if it isn’t our star dancers!” he boomed in Russian over the lot as we trudged our way across. “My Zmechik and Charivchik, [14] Most Slavic people have several nicknames. Zmechik—Little Snake—and Charivchik—Little Wizard—belong to Vassily and Alexi respectively. look at you! Back together at last!”

“Ho-lee shit. Look who it is!” Vassily advanced, beaming. He clapped hands with Ovar, who pulled Vassily into a brief hug. “How you goin’, big guy?”

I chewed my candy and tried to look pleasant. The white-blueness of peppermint overrode the mashed odors of perfume, bleach, sweat, and sex I could smell from the door. One could only hope I’d brought enough to carry me through the night without a migraine.

“Good, good. Healthy and fat. But you, out of prison already and looking meaner than you ever did.” Ovar flashed a mouth of wet gold teeth. “Makes you a man, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does.” Something was missing in Vassily’s smile.

“Ha! Mind you, it’s soft here, in this country. Karaganda, now that was a prison.” Ovar was one of those relentlessly cheerful men whose voice, unfortunately, grated on my nerves. Words tumbled out of his mouth like black gravel, and I couldn’t shake the sensation or image as I shifted my weight uneasily on my feet. “But America? It’ll end up the same way, you watch. Land of the free, hah!” The huge Georgian hawked a gob of spittle onto the concrete. “Free to rot in jail.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but Lev is waiting for us.” I spoke up before Vassily could open his mouth and keep chattering. “We were called in with some urgency.”

Ovar’s eyes lit up, and the mustache bristled in excitement. “Oh-ho, fresh business. Well, he will wait. Go see Nicolai first. He has to be on the floor in twenty minutes. Lev can wait around in his fancy office, acting like he’s important. We have to make sure we remind him who really owns this city, eh?”

“Hey, he had big boots to fill. From everything I’ve heard, Lev’s doing a decent job of keeping the place clean,” Vassily said.

“Ha! He is half a man, at best. You’ll see. Sergei will come back someday and set this place right again. Go and deal with him, kids. I’ll stay here and hold the fortress against the horde of idiots.” Ovar aimed a clumsy, friendly slap towards my shoulder as I swept past, and I adroitly sidestepped his hand and pushed ahead into the corridor. The gauntlet cleared, I drew a deep, steadying breath.

“See what I mean, Lexi?” Vassily spoke when we were out of earshot, eyebrow arched. “Why’d you shrug him off like that? You hate people.”

I grimaced and fixed my eyes ahead. “I respect Ovar, but his voice sounds like a truck laying out bitumen on a new road. Also, he’s a little bit… grabby.”

My friend’s laughter rang out sharply against the concrete walls as we turned the corner. A pair of girls talking and laughing about the other dancers teetered down the hallway towards us. Vassily tipped an invisible hat to one of them as she pushed out her bubblegum-pink lips and winked. I gave them a wide berth. Their voices were yellow and jagged. I could barely relate to the men here, let alone most of the women. Morosely, I sucked on my mint. I could feel the club’s music in my teeth.

We found the security office and muster room nearly empty, with four of the nine radios already checked out for the night. Only two of the bouncers were in the room: Petro and Maxy. They were playing dominoes with their handsets turned off. Typical. If Ovar was a refugee from a harem romance, Petro was an escapee from an Armani fashion show: tall, strikingly handsome, always well-tanned and well dressed. Maxy was a small guy with a pinched face and a mullet, a mustache considerably less impressive than Ovar’s, and hard black eyes. On the way past, I glanced curiously at their tiles and rapidly calculated the odds. Petro was going to win.

“Oh my god. Look who the fuck just walked in like he owns the fucking place!” Petro rose up from his seat, his face alight. “Vassily! You look like a million bucks, man!”

“I feel like something a bear shat out. How’s it going?” Vassily went in for handshakes and shoulder-pounding, while I hung back and glanced at the corkboard, looking for the security roster. Unconsciously, my mind pieced together shapes made by the pieces of paper: they were arranged in a hexagonal pattern, alternating colors. I like patterns like that. Patterns didn’t move, unlike people, and they didn’t nauseate me in the way that human faces did.

Vassily’s dark blue voice and the pink-and-gray nattering of the other men ground on behind me as I stepped in to look over the roster. Six men were on shift, including Nic, but only four radios were missing. Idly, I left the table and went to the register, flicking back through the logbook to check the sign-ins. Mikhail, Petro, Nic, Maxy, Ovar, and Yuri were on shift, but Yuri’s sign-in was missing.

“Hey, shorty. Was it your body they found today?”

“Body? What body?” I replied absently and glanced over at the trio. They called me a few different names here. Men like Ovar stuck with the names I’d earned as titles of respect— Charivchik , Magician, or Molotchik , ‘Little Hammer.’ Not all of my nicknames are so flattering.

“I heard that one of Manelli’s boys turned up weird and dead on our turf this morning.” Petro crushed his cigarette into the tray.

“We was betting it was Vanya that called the hit. He’s been all kinds of happy the last couple of days since that last shipment of snow came in,” Maxy added.

I stiffened in place. Rather than lift my chin to look up at Petro’s face, I glared at him from under my brows. It was never good to look up at taller men, because that allowed them to look down on you. “No, it wasn’t, and that’s business that doesn’t have any place in the staff room.”

“Nic told us, jeez. Calm your tits.” Maxy grunted unhappily around his own cig as he swept the dominoes together and mixed them around. “Why don’t you try pulling the stick outta your ass for once, Alexi?”

My stomach twisted angrily, dropping like I was on a roller coaster: a roller coaster that would end with Maxy’s nose being smashed against the edge of the table if he didn’t shut up. I took in a slow breath, threw another mint in my mouth, and crunched down on it to feel it splinter under my jaws. “My ass, and the contents thereof, are none of your business.”

“That stick’s shoved up so far it ain’t ever coming out.” Petro wiggled his fingers at me as he dropped back into his seat. “But you gotta keep that hole nice and warmed up for your boyfriend, right?”

“Lexi’s right. Shut your cockholster, Petro.” Vassily stepped up to my side before I could retort. His shoulders were slightly hunched, defensive—but I didn’t need a guard dog. I needed respect.

“Come on, Vasya. Alexi can take a little shit.” Petro smirked around his next cigarette, cupping a hand around the end as he lit it. “We’re all grown-ups now, even if he ain’t exactly the man his daddy was.”

“Good. Because he was worthless.” I ground the words out bulldozer-flat, and stared at him until he met my eyes. “And putting him out of my misery was the best thing I ever did.”

A toxic silence descended over the room. Vassily’s head turned sharply, and he looked down at me in genuine surprise. Petro’s malice flickered like a candle, briefly flaring before he turned back. Maxy’s silent scorn faded, and he began to toy nervously with the dominoes in front of his fingers.

Well. That did it. There was one guiding social force within the Organizatsiya: respect. To be respected, you built a dual reputation as being both useful and dangerous. If you maintained a suitable ratio of competence and intimidation, people didn’t have to like you. They respected you. Being useful without being intimidating got you trampled; being a bully without being useful led to people getting a lethal grudge. Waver in either quality, and someone was always waiting to shove a pistol in through the chink in your armor. As usual, I was off the mark. My retorts were always either too slow or too sharp.