James Baldwin - Blood Hound

“Jesus,” Vassily said hoarsely. His Ukrainian was rusty. “Alexi. Jesus.”

“You’re back where you belong,” I replied in the same language, clapping Vassily’s back. “Here.”

Vassily did not let go. I felt his fingers clench the skin of my shoulders through my shirt. When he spoke again, it was quiet, lips beside my ear. “Get me the fuck out of this place. Food. Sun. Coffee. Please.”

I peeled back enough to look up at him, gripping his arms. Intensity hummed like a weight in the back of my throat, and white heat burned behind my eyes as I leaned forward, my gaze locked with Vassily’s. “We will go to Gletchik’s. I’m certain they’ll be glad to see you again.”

Hesitantly, he nodded. Behind him, the guards were waiting impatiently by the door, their lips drawn into disapproving lines. I fought the urge to stare back and pulled him away, and neither of us said another word on our way outside. I was light-headed. The fears tumbling around in my imagination during the drive were lost to the wind.

We listened to the radio on and off, but after a while, our need for music petered out and we spent the rest of the drive in comfortable silence. I watched Vassily out of the corner of my eye and sometimes caught the glance of the hot summer sun over his cheekbones or the shadows of his throat. Vassily let his elbow rest outside the threshold of the car window, drinking in the sight of the sky. He couldn’t keep his eyes from it, and as the clouds rolled in, a massive front from over the mountains, he grinned broadly with delight. It made me smile, too.

“Space, man,” Vassily finally said. “Nothing but wide open space.”

I relished the pleasant mouthfeel of his voice for a moment and then spoke. “These years must have been hard.”

“Meh. No different to how it was out of prison really. You eat your peas, you roll some jackass every other day, you shave and shit. Nothing to it.” Vassily snorted, rolled his eyes, and tipped his head back against the seat. “The only thing… man. No women. THAT sucked.”

Being a virgin, I had no idea what to say by way of reply. We drove in silence for nearly five minutes, and this time, it was slightly awkward.

“So, uh… tell me what’s happening. I heard what I could from you or Nic, but he said a lot of shit’s changed.”

“It has.” Goodness, where to begin? “Sergei still has not returned from the continent, and as you know, Lev is now Avtoritet.”

“Feh,” Vassily chuffed.

“Nicolai is now Kommandant of Brighton Beach. He absorbed Rodion’s old team when Rod was gunned down last year. No one knows if it was Lev who had him killed, but my theory is that he did. We also lost Mo, and my father, of course.” I recited the changes and deaths perfunctorily. They were little more than statistics: movements of the grand chessboard which Vassily and I had played on since we were teens. I mulled my next words, considering what Lev had said. We weren’t to talk about Nacari, and I wasn’t to divulge the intimate details of Semyon’s death… but everything else was kosher. “I dealt with Sem Vochin last night.”

“Sem? Sem the Jeweler?” Vassily’s surprise was audible. “Lev’s—”

“He went to the Manelli family and sold out all of the details of Lev’s new cocaine operation. Naturally, the Manellis took his information and fed it to one of their pet cops so he had a juicy chunk of news to take back to his handlers.” My lips thinned. “As you can imagine, Lev was not pleased.”

“ I’m not pleased. The little rat was probably the one that landed me out here.” Vassily scowled, drumming his fingers on the dash. “But that was Lev’s mistake. He should have kept his cards close and his mouth shut. This is the problem with the old guys, Lexi. They can’t keep their metaphorical dicks in their metaphorical pants. Sergei was the only one with any real wit, you know?”

Sergei Yaroshenko, our grand old patriarch, was the man who had established the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya in the 1950s. He ruled Brighton Beach for thirty years and put Vassily and me through school, priming Vassily for the leadership and me to be his Advokat , [11] ‘Advocate’. A senior advisor to the Avtoritet. Somewhat like a Consigliere in the Italian mafia. his advisor. When we turned twenty, Sergei left America to take care of business in Ukraine, vanishing into whatever bureaucratic spiderweb he’d spun in Kiev. The leadership had passed to Rodion Brukov, an old-school captain with a pompadour, a vodka and gin habit, and the uncanny ability to make good decisions while drunk. He had been about to make Vassily Kommandant just before he went to jail on trumped up credit card fraud charges, which we now knew was Semyon’s fault, as was Rod’s death. Rodion’s passing left a power vacuum, and Lev was the man who conveniently stepped in to fill the void. He was an attorney and trust fund guy, a real white-collar intellectual, and even though he averted an internal war and built the Organizatsiya into an immensely profitable force, he was not popular with the rough-and-tumble men who had willingly worked for Sergei and Rodion.

I made a noncommittal motion of head and shoulders. “Sergei is apparently securing our place in the new system, now that the USSR is collapsing around our ears. The continent is in chaos.”

“ Perestroika .” [12] The political reforms that broke down the Iron Curtain and opened up the USSR to the rest of the world, courtesy of President Boris Yeltsin. Vassily made a face.

“Indeed. The system is crumbling, jobs are dropping, and every louse with more muscles than brains is looking to get rich. Mikhail has been hiring rogue players from Bulgaria, Georgia… Nic’s been feeding them to the dragon, so to speak, to keep the numbers in check. I dealt with another one just last night.”

“I heard it was getting rainy out there. Lots of guys dying.” Vassily sat back, hands restless in his lap. “I just hope I can get back into the game.”

“You will.” The USSR might have been changing, but things in Brighton Beach rarely did. We worked the same trades our fathers had done before us: fake fuel and guns, contraband, and policing the krysha , the protection racket. Before cocaine, the krysha had been a big part of my life. I collected the rent, pressured the guys who didn’t pay, and protected the ones who did. “Lev, to his credit, has been a good leader, but he is not well loved. They think he is changing too much too fast.”

“Well, yeah. Because Rodion was a great Avtoritet. Lev’s nothing but a white-collar jerk-off.”

“You shouldn’t challenge him yet, Vassily. Lev is still Sergei’s Advokat. You shouldn’t even look at him askance until Sergei has returned and confirms you.”

“If he ever does. It’s been nearly ten years. He’s just about forfeited his claim to the Beach, and I don’t care how many million fucktons of money he has. This is where you and I grew up. It’s our turf, Lexi, and Lev and Sergei treat us like serfs on their land. We’re the ones who collect the cash and do all the work. My brothers all died for this place, and for him. And for what?”

His words had some truth. I ran my tongue over my teeth as we turned off the highway, barely slowing for the exit. Most traffic was moving in the other direction, away from New York. Cars full of families and fishermen, heading for the Hudson and its promise of slow days and cleanish air.

As suddenly as it had come over us, the grim mood began to ebb in the lull of conversation. Vassily made a thoughtful sound and drummed his long fingers on his thigh. “Anyway… I was wondering if—”

“Your room is as you left it.” I cut him off, anticipating what he was about to ask, and merged onto the busier lane that would take us into the city. “I sorted your washing and vacuum-sealed it. It’s as good as new.”