Fomin just nodded and said loudly, changing his tone with druzhiniki nearby: “Don’t bother with it, police will do their job, concentrate on more important matters. Since he was a foreigner, police will do everything it should do. Poor Sergey, what a pity! Our poet arrived in this country just a month ago… Because you will work with us you should know – in a few days very important events will take place in Moscow. Those will be great opportunities for our party and the people of this country. Do not waste your time in vain, Nicholas. See you tomorrow in our office.”
When I stepped down from the entrance to my Harley, a white van with red sanitary crosses just parked nearby. Two huge men, with traces of frequent use of alcohol on their faces, got out of it. Sanitary ambulance, called in Moscow trupovozka, dead man’s carriage, arrived to take our Sergey to the morgue. I got on my motorcycle, and heard behind my back the telephone rang in the van. The driver briefly discussed something, and then he stuck his head out of window and shouted to his men entering the building, “Hey, hurry up there! Manager just called, said one more to take on the way. Just found, laid for weeks in apartment. Rotten through, they say.”
3. The Killer Rebrov
Ivan Rebrov woke up, as always too early, it was not yet six. Whenever he went to bed, sober or more often drunk, he woke up at this time and did not know where to put himself, especially recent years. He slid down from the wide bed and stepping over thick carpet went to the door. Passing by the high mirror, he glanced with no particular interest at his bare thirty-five-year lean and sinewy body. Without closing the door behind him in the toilet, he began to urinate, carefully examining the brown puddle in a toilet bowl. This morning it was almost of brick color, whether from the drugs or from the disease itself. Then for the first time in a day he cautiously, as if it was a child, touched his chubby and sore liver.
On the way back, before reaching his door, he grasped the door handle of the adjacent second of his bedrooms and jerked it open. On the wide bed lay a sleeping girl, scattered among the crumpled sheets. Last night his driver brought this night-butterfly for him. Rebrov did not even ask her name: she would have lied anyway. He called her Masha then as all of them before.
Yesterday Rebrov could not do anything with this girl. His right side ached badly after the dinner. He tried to fondle her, but immediately was overcome with nausea. So two of them just sat in silence and watched TV till midnight. When he paid and ushered her to the doors she started to beg him pitifully to stay till morning: she had no place to sleep. He did not like it, but thought maybe he will get stronger in the morning, could try again, and maybe that was the better time for him to have sex. So she stayed.
He entered the door, silently walked to the bed, stopped beside it and gently pulled off the sheet from her body. Asleep, she lay on her back, slightly bent at the knees, tanned, and with a sharp white strip where her panties should have been. Looking up and down at her beautiful naked body, he attentively listened to his own desire. There was none. He felt only that familiar big and cold, whining but not yet really aching, in his right side of the belly – the liver.
The rage silently aroused inside of him. His hand grabbed the edge of the sheet to tear it away, to wake her up, and then to give her more money, to get her away from his house, out to the highway to get herself a taxi and beat off to her Moscow. But it came to him that it will raise her crying, screams, noise, and it will destroy the soothing silence of his morning house. He gritted his teeth, then threw the bed sheet back over her body and went back to his room.
Rebrov sat down in a chair in front of the TV set, but didn't turn it on, and just stared out the window. From the second floor of his mansion he could see the far woods turning yellow, the milky clouds running in the dim morning sky. It distracted somehow his mind from the troubles, and he recalled yesterday's telephone conversation. His telephone rang late at night when he was sitting with the girl at TV set. That was Leonid Levko, the President of the bank, and his partner, though formally Rebrov was his subordinate. After some standard polite words Levko asked, “Can you drop to me around one o’clock? We can lunch together.”
Such a long time they didn’t lunch together – why all of a sudden tomorrow? They met this morning, and nothing important was said, they just shook their hands. So this late call could mean that something happened, good or bad. Rebrov didn’t expect good news from anywhere, so that will be bad news anyway.
“I’ll come,” he said curtly.
“Good. What cuisine do you prefer, French or Chinese?”
Levko had two personal chefs: Frenchman and Chinese, and they cooked lunches for him in turns. This question made Rebrov’s nausea to arise again in his stomach, and he almost banged the phone at the wall, but restrained himself and said quietly,
“It’s same to me, Leo. Bye.”
Rebrov owned half of their bank, more precisely forty-nine percent; the remaining percentages were Levko’s. Levko was the President, and Rebrov was a Chief of the bank’s security service. He didn’t care about more prestigious or sonorous positions, and has been bank’s head watchdog already for ten years.
Rebrov began to turn over in his mind what else could happen so suddenly, bad or dangerous, to their bank, or rather to his money. From the recent world financial crisis their bank got out plucked of thousands of unreturned credits, with great losses by depreciated shares in their portfolio, and with huge debts in dollars to foreign banks. Moreover, they were recently caught by Central bank authorities with factual criminal money-laundering business. If they will take away the banking license, it will be finishing smash for the bank and Rebrov’s own millions. He always kept all his money in this single bank, twenty million dollars in the beginning, ten years ago. But how much of it was still there? He never understood the bank’s mechanics, and reckoned it should be there in some vaults, but always felt with dread, it was not so. “And where’s Levko’s money?” Rebrov pondered. “Out in off-shores, and in Switzerland. Scoundrel!”
When Rebrov killed his first man he was sixteen. He ran away from the boarding school and began to work with a team of lumberjacks. It was in the early nineties. With perestroika, all state farms collapsed in their Novgorod remote villages. Half-broken tractors, rusty equipment, and hungry calves were then distributed among dumbfounded peasants, and everybody was invited to free-enterprising Capitalist world. With a great pump the land was distributed among them, though in the form of vouchers, pieces of paper with seals, nobody knew what to do with, and would gladly swap it away for a bottle of vodka if anybody then offered. Nobody of them became farmers after that, because one should be born a master to be one, or to be skilled enough, or hard-working. Seventy years of Communism wiped all of that, and there was only devastation and mess in their heads now. The only thing, that could support the families of these men, and supply them with vodka they depended on from their adolescence, was timber.
The most brave and cool of them bought old or stolen equipment, and hammered together teams of crazed from the lack of money men, alcohol-hungry and ruthless. Bribing or intimidating corrupt and defenseless foresters, getting permits from them, these predators chopped down twice or thrice as much, leaving only bald hills that have been once thick with beautiful north-Russian woods. In the nights, with the hysterical roaring, groans, and squeaks overloaded trucks hauled their lumber through long back roads to the Baltic ports. Reaching the pierces, trucks with no delay drew near to cargo ships with Scandinavian flags, and a sharp-clawed paw of the crane hurriedly grabbed northern fir-trees and carried them down to the deep holds. This hard men’s lumber was paid on the spot, immediately, with cash from the cheap canvas bags. Packs of the money, tied up by rope bands, were hurriedly counted by the truck’s head lights on its hot and steaming radiators. No one ever tried to cheat here, for these neat Europeans were really afraid of the wild men from the woods.
Ivan Rebrov worked in the team of arrogant and impudent guy, Stepan, who was just born to do this murky timber business. Everybody, who had any power on these long roads to the port, was well bribed by him, and his trucks with lumber roared to the sea almost every night. But he was always late paying his hardworking men, and that day their pay was badly delayed, too. His men, used to vodka from almost childhood, and now weeks from their last drinks, could only stealthily curse their boss: they wouldn’t get a job anywhere else here. Probably, their boss delayed money deliberately: less vodka, more timber to the port.
Ivan Rebrov, as young as he was, also couldn’t live and work in the frozen woods without vodka. Even in the boarding-school he frequently got drunk not only with his gang, but also with their “educators”. Those were local village guys that couldn’t get any other job before army enlistment. Sometimes they even drank together, or loaned money for a bottle when their pupils were out of money they usually got for cranberries or mushrooms sold to a girl at mobile shop.
In February once, late in the dark, Rebrov and the driver returned with a load of lumber from remote allotment; a severe frost in the woods, in their stomachs nothing but hunger, and both in great need of a drink. Their truck struggled forward over the narrow bumpy log-path in the snows, its headlights pushing aside crowded at the road black timber. Suddenly, behind the turn down the hill, where they worked all last week, two rubies of tail lights flared up under truck’s headlights. It was plain whose jeep stood there in this midst of dense forest: Stepan, the boss, arrived to inspect with master’s eye the stacks of his ready to howl timber.
“Stop here!” suddenly and unexpectedly for himself Rebrov said to the driver. The heavy truck groaned and stopped. In the dark Rebrov went by tractor trail to the timber stacks, and the anger as a cat with its claws tore on him. He was going just to get some money his boss owed them, because he badly needed a drink, and he was bored to death with potatoes’ meals of their team cook. But when he saw Stepan with a flashlight between the stacks he pulled out his knife. Rebrov thought that he would simply show this knife to Stepan, and the boss would understand: his hard workers are desperate, just on the edge without money. But boss, Stepan, had heard the roar of the truck, and now stood there looking cautiously at someone coming to him in the dark. In the forest a man senses a danger clearly, and Stepan sensed it immediately. When Rebrov was closer and he could make out in the dark his stony face, Stepan picked up two-yard long piece of timber and got ready. Closer, when they saw the eyes of each other, both men understood it was too late to talk. Stepan began to raise his timber, but Rebrov suddenly threw his fur-hat up and forward. Stepan glanced upwards, uncovering his bare neck under thick collar of sheepskin jacket, and immediately the knife entered his bare flesh under Adam’s apple.
Stepan still wheezed and spattered the snow with bloody foam out of his ripped throat, but Rebrov already threw open his jacket and fumbled through his pockets. From the wallet he threw everything out on the snow and picked up the money. There wasn’t much – who would go with money to the forest.
When they moved on, the driver asked, “Talked to him?”
“No.”
They drove in silence to the settlement, but nearing the store Rebrov said, “Stop here.”
With moans and groans heavy log transporter stopped. In the store Rebrov bought two bottles of vodka and a pair of pork stew cans, and he was out of money again. In the truck’s cab he handed one bottle and a can to the driver. Driver looked cautiously into Rebrov’s eyes and didn’t move to take it at first. But then took it all right, and shoved it under his seat.
“Utter a word that we stopped there, and I’ll saw your head off,” simply and softly said Rebrov.
The driver, huge middle-aged man, just looked into this youngster’s eyes, nodded and said nothing.
The jeep was soon found, and police came. They walked and looked over freshly and heavily snowbound allotment with high timber stacks and left it until spring. They found Stepan only at the end of April, when the snow melted in the clearings, and this snowdrop, as police call them, showed up.
“The lousy gambler!” Rebrov thought of the banker Levko, looking through the window. “It is my bank, mine. I beat all the money from the debtors ten years ago – they wouldn’t return you a cent!”
That was true. Indeed, after the default of a ninety-eighth, when even the state itself refused to repay its debts, the winged phrase emerged among shady businessmen, “Only cowards repay their debts”. Bankrupted Levko gave his new acquaintance a list with a dozen of names and multiple-digit sums against each one and said to bandit Rebrov, “Of the money you knock out of these gents half is yours. And then we’ll launch a new bank together.” Bandit Rebrov knocked the debts from almost all of these gentlemen. The only one who did not respond to his arguments was dead the next day. With this money they opened a new bank, which Levro proposed to name "Straight Credit". It sounded respectable, honest, but a banker and gambler Levko meant something different: a winning hand in a poker, Straight Flush.
Outside the window, down in the village, dogs barked, late roosters cried, and these simple homely sounds soothed Rebrov. Years ago this time in the mornings his mother returned home from the barn with a steaming bucket of milk. She kindled fire in the stove, and with the crackling of wood their dark morning hut turned bright and joyful.
When Rebrov by sheer chance came to Moscow, he could not really believe that one can permanently live in this city and stay normal and happy. When he pocketed his first millions, he immediately moved out of city. However, when the realtor took him to see a newly built house in the “elite” cottage settlement that sprang then around Moscow with mostly corrupt or criminal money, and when he saw these stone mansions with turrets, saw faces of this “elite”, that would become his neighbors, he didn't even bother to look what’s inside, and just turned and walked back to his car.
He told his realtor to find him better some land in a simple village, where he could build a house of his dream. Realtor found in a week this beautiful but crumbling village with four neighboring families dreaming to get out of here and become city dwellers. Rebrov bought them for a million greenbacks four apartments in the capital, burned all their huts, sheds, and started new construction. He built his house of the northern fir-trees, almost a yard thick. He hewed house frame himself beaming with pleasure, and the hired carpenters just smiled with amazement and clicked their tongues.
All of his land Rebrov planted with apple-trees. But then he made a mistake that he didn’t know so far how to set right. He fenced his land with a wall of pressed tin sheets. That was quite widespread way for newly rich to hide away from the peering eyes. Outside, such a brightly painted fence looked good. But inside, one’s look was obstructed everywhere by close and monotonous wall that immediately evoked a disturbing feeling of being confined to some penitentiary. Rebrov never had been in a jail being convicted, with God’s mercy. But he spent three months in Butyrka preliminary prison, waiting for a court, on charges of plunder. Nothing was proved, but Rebrov learned there to appreciate his freedom.