“Russians are better off dead.”
“That was an interesting article you ran.”
“That one last week, you mean? ‘The Chechen Train of Death’? Ha ha ha! Yes, indeed—that drew quite a response.”
“Yes. It was truly…truly masterfully done.”
“Of course. It was the truth.”
“The truth of the situation.”
“Those Chechens have been springing one surprise after another on us, since before the establishment of the Soviet system. Such ardent separatists! Such fierce anti-Russian sentiment! Yes—that, in short, is the situation. The North Caucasus is in turmoil. Our dear president has cut off all funding from the Russian Federation, recalled the engineers who were teaching them to drill and refine their oil. They’ve been left with no means of preserving their identity as a so-called ‘independent state’—apart, that is, from illegitimate business activities. And, voilà! The bloody Train of Death, set upon out of the blue by a band of robbers! Ha ha ha!”
“You seem pleased.”
“I’m just a regular Russian, same as everyone else.”
“Hence your popular appeal. I see…just what an editor needs.”
“You said it!”
“It’s a glorious age we live in.”
“Yes, a glorious age—for me, at least. I’m flabbergasted by these heretical Chechens, with their unyielding moral vision. And our readers love it when I’m flabbergasted! They love how ‘true’ it is!”
“So it seems.”
“It’s astonishing. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. The numbers talk. Yes, this, my friend, is what capitalism is all about! And liberalism, the market economy! Numbers!”
“Anticommunism.”
“Precisely. And anti-‘red totalitarianism’ too. While we’re on the topic of heretics, though…You’ve heard about the Islamic prophet being killed? Guy with tattoos, quite high up?”
“Is that true?”
“It’s true.”
“Then I guess I’ve just heard about it.”
“He was part of the inner circle of the Chechen mafia’s boss in the Far East. The boss’s right-hand man. What I wouldn’t give to run a photo of the scene…ideally with the body.”
“In your paper?”
“That’s right.”
“In Freedom Daily? The tabloid?”
“Right smack on the front page.”
“In place of the usual satirical cartoon, occult scoop, or alien corpse?”
“Our new readership doesn’t go for that stuff.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Isn’t it?”
“A photo would boost sales,” the old man said.
“On another note, this restaurant…rather loud, isn’t it?”
“Very. I like it loud.”
“Salted herring in oil! Smoked eel! Cow tongue in sea salt! These appetizers are as good as it gets. You like it…because there’s no fear of being overheard?”
“Not, at any rate, so long as we’re just talking. Take a look at us, my friend. We look like an elderly uncle and his nephew, dining together for the first time in ages. The nephew has made it big in the great capitalist city. And here I am, straight out of the forest, being treated to a magnificent meal.”
“Straight out of the forest?”
“Yes. Your old uncle used to be…a hunter, shall we say. Deep in the forest.”
“Splendid. A hunter! Cheers, then! Once again—to us!”
“Cheers.”
“Mmmnnmm. Paper-thin slices of salted fatback! Exquisite!”
“A nephew I can be proud of. Taking me to such a classy restaurant.”
“Ha ha ha! Hats off to the restaurant! But to continue just talking…last month, a guy with an eagle tattoo was murdered. The month before, someone else. A cat tattoo. A nasty cat.”
“Russians.”
“Yes, the Russian mafia. Members of the Vor. For seven months now, the tension has been escalating, the fighting growing steadily worse and worse.”
“Tension sparked by a certain newspaper. A scoop.”
“Yes, indeed! A tabloid exposé. It must be said, however, that no lies were printed in that article. Speculation, yes, but the evidence itself, advanced in support of the conclusion—that was pure truth! How else could it have been so persuasive?”
“No doubt.”
“None whatsoever. Hence the public’s enthusiasm for our current investigative series on the Chechens. It’s been like this from the start, you know. From the first installment.”
“It was that immediate?”
“How can gangsters emerge as ‘hometown heroes’—or rather, as they’d put it, ‘homeland heroes’? How can one account for this peculiarly Chechen structure? See here, just look at me. I get all flabbergasted just thinking about it. Glorious, glorious! Another glass!”
“Here, drink up.”
“Thank you, dear Uncle! Ha ha ha! The point is, it was their homeland, you see. As long as the funds furthered the movement—independence, separation from the Russian Federation!—no one cared where they came from. Kill the outsiders, take their wealth! That was good, that was heroism. Anyone in the Chechen mafia was a righteous bandit struggling to liberate his people. It didn’t matter where—in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg. Flawless ‘homeland heroes’ of the North Caucasus, one and all! What a moral sense! What a vision!”
“Flabbergasted again?”
“Stunned. Absolutely. These people…leaping, just like that, beyond our comprehension. That’s what made them such a potent force, here in our Russia—that’s how they made waves in the criminal world. And in just a decade! The Chechen mafia enters Moscow, they set up in…damn, it’s on the tip of my tongue. That port, on the Moscow River. Yuzhny Port, that’s it. They come in, and in a decade they’ve captured the market for stolen cars in Yuzhny Port. Just ten short years! Even less!”
“It’s impressive. I give them that.”
“Do you?”
“I do,” says the old man.
“They brought down the old system, after all. The Soviet underworld. Impressive indeed. Not only to me, but to you—even you, Uncle. The old system was very solid, of course. It had lasted since the 1930s. Vors running everything from the slammer. There they were in prison, in camps. Precisely where all the political criminals wind up. The state used them to keep an eye on anti-Soviet elements, it actually relied on the mafia’s organizational capabilities!”
“On the traditional Russian criminal organizations, that is.”
“Precisely! From then on, the Communist Party and the Russian mafia became subtly and inextricably entwined. And that’s how the Soviet social structure was preserved. Front and back. Witness the birth of a bureaucratic mafia rife with corruption. Ha ha ha! Sturdy as a prison—no exit! Naturally, back then—I was young then, working as a reporter for Trud, the labor union newspaper—I assumed that the Russian mafia would control the underground economy forever.”
“As did I.”
“You too? Well, then! Another drink! Na zdorovye!”
“Cheers.”
“Ah, the rich flavor of aged liquor! Delicious! But…where was I? Don’t tell me, I know! The emergence of the Chechen mafia. With extraordinary speed—no more than a decade or so. They were a veritable army with all that equipment. Right from the beginning. Marching into Moscow with grenades, bazookas. And armed, moreover, with the ferocity of their loathing for Russia! How do you deal with that? How, that is to say, were the Vors supposed to deal with that? Shock waves ran through the old mafia world. Conventional underworld ways, notions of benevolence and justice, meant nothing to them! The headaches they caused, these fighters! And then…Act II. In Moscow, in St. Petersburg—Leningrad, just given its old name back—the Vors started hunting down the Chechen mafia bosses. Just like that, they drove the Chechens from their turf. But wait! It’s not over! Not yet! Because the Chechens have their ways. Their customs. Krovnaya mest—blood revenge. Oh, the horror! One by one, the leaders of the Russian mafia began to be assassinated…sprayed full of holes with machine guns, blown to bits with bombs…and then, at last—the incident.”
“The incident?”
“Twelve dead, in one fell swoop.”
“Twelve…?”
“Twelve Vors, all prominent figures in the current Russian Federation, had gathered for a conference. When the Soviet system collapsed, the Federation was split up into twelve regions. The mafia divvied up its turf. Each of these twelve Vors controlled a region. They’d gathered to brainstorm strategies for dealing with the Chechens. Someone attacked the conference, and all twelve Vors were killed. Ha ha ha! A remarkably efficient massacre! The attacker was a professional, obviously. And of course the Chechens must have hired him. I wasn’t much of a reporter at the time, just a kid with a pen and a pad of paper, but I managed to learn, not his name, no—but his nickname. They called him the Archbishop.”
“The…Archbishop?”
“Yes. Somehow just hearing that makes you sober up a bit, doesn’t it? I don’t know why. I wonder why. Ha ha ha! What next? Things get interesting—as soon as he killed the twelve Vors, he immediately betrayed the Chechens. The two groups were decapitated, and their struggle, this feud between the Russian and the Chechen mafia, grew messier, more ferocious. All these little Vors trying to fight their way to the top, all sorts of people like that—and to make it worse, you’ve got these ethnic groups, Ukrainians and Kazakhs and so on, now they’re joining the fray too. They’ve turned the western regions of our great Russia into a bloodbath. It’s gone on this way for years, groups competing for profits that swell day by day, week after week, month after month. And now, at last, this year, the struggle between the two main forces has spread, leaping like a spark, to the Far East.”
“So the Freedom Daily reported. Seven months ago.”
“So we reported. It was a tremendous scoop. And what fun we’ve had since! Of course, it was unfortunate that a hundred blameless civilians had to get mixed up in it all. That was too bad. But it’s a fact—it is the truth—that the Chechen mafia has started moving into the Far East, hoping to further its business interests in used cars, gasoline, and firearms. They’re serving themselves nice fat pieces from the Russian mafia’s pie. That, too, is the truth. So you see, Uncle, I never wrote any lies! I never asked my reporters to lie! I don’t publish lies!”
“Just speculation,” the old man said.
“Yes, speculation. We do that.”
“And that created this situation. This world we’re in. Gangsters all over the place, riding around in heavily armored cars—not that this keeps the gangsters from being blown sky-high, along with their bodyguards.”
“We’ll keep the speculations coming. Ha ha ha!”
“Not long ago Freedom Daily reported that they’ve started targeting rigs?”
“The Chechen mafia? Trying to get control of the rigs? Hell yes! Of course! That seems to have irritated the Russians. Still, it’s not a lie. The information may not have come from you, Uncle, but even so. On another note…”
“What is it, Nephew?”
“You don’t belong to either side.”
“Let us drink a fourth time.”
“Na zdorovye!”
“Delicious.”
“Delicious indeed.”
“It’s best not to probe too deeply, wouldn’t you say? I’m helping you, yes, but only because you’re valuable to me. Those articles you print stir things up. I would advise you, for instance, not to call me inappropriate nicknames. That would be dangerous. You mustn’t ask me what sort of nickname I have in mind. You understand? Take care. I’m warning you. I’ve bought you. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“And why not?”
“Because I value my life.”
“And?”
“And?”
“It boosts sales.”
“It certainly does! Good ol’ capitalism! Ha ha ha!”
“You have a charming smile.”
“And this is a marvelous restaurant, isn’t it?”
“Nice and loud?”
“Conveniently loud. So conveniently.”
“Sometimes it’s quiet.”
“Quiet? Is it?”
“A rumor for you.”
“Yes?”
“People have seen yakuza here.”
“Yakuza? The Japanese mafia?”
“Yes. They’re here to foster international cooperation. The Russian mafia is stronger at the moment, right? This month they’re pushing back at the Chechens. What do you make of that? Balance is more important than anything, right? And then—this is simply a rumor, of course—the yakuza turn up. What happens next? Here’s a prophecy for you. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole Far East turns into an enormous powder keg.”
“If you’re right, we’ll change the name of our newspaper.”
“Change it? No more Freedom Daily?”
“That’s right…to Terror Daily. Na zdorovye!”
Three days later. Same restaurant. Unusual sounds mixed in with the Russian. A conversation in Japanese. Jeering, tongue-clicking, raucous laughter, a ribald exchange. Hey, dick, is this the best champagne they got? What the f*ck’s up with this sweet shit? It’s from Moldova, Boss. Mol…what? Where the f*ck is that? Whatever, forget it. Is it me or does this shit taste exactly the f*cking f*ck like those vitamin drinks back home? Am I right or what?
Everyone in the circle laughs.
Zoom in on the man at the head of the circle.
The Boss, they call him. Long black hair swept back over his head, a mustache, a double-breasted suit, pot belly. Can’t be more than forty. His eyes roam restlessly, like a reptile’s.
Boss, here’s something new.
Ah. Cognac?
From Armenia.
This is better. Get some caviar too. Good stuff, from the Caspian. Enough for everyone.
The Boss pauses, then continues. Not a bad place, huh? Officially recognized casino and everything. Not bad. Got one up on us in that respect, here. These Russians.
All at once, he gets a different sort of look in his eyes. He turns to the next table.
“So what’d you do today?” he asks.
The person sitting there looks completely out of place. She’s a Japanese girl, not yet in her teens. Eleven, maybe twelve. On the verge of puberty. “Rode the tram,” she says coldly.
“I took her around,” adds the handsome young Slavic woman seated beside her, speaking in Japanese.
“Have a nice time?”
“Yeah, great,” the girl tells her father, her tone even icier.
She is peculiarly plump. Certain areas of her body seem bloated out of proportion. She isn’t obese, but her face and her chin are flabby. Her hands too. She gives the impression, somehow, of an infant who was inflated, some days ago, to this enormous size.
The table where the girl and the Russian woman sit is littered with an odd chaos of dishes: pineapple cake, apple kudzu tea, reindeer steaks, piroshki…Everything, from the desserts to the meat dishes, has been picked at and left unfinished.
“Ah,” her father says. “Anyway, have Sonya take you around again tomorrow.”
With that, this Japanese mafioso, hefty like his daughter, turns his gaze toward the entrance, his eyes assuming their former steeliness. Two Georgian guards stand just inside. They’re built like professional athletes. The Russians furnished these two men as protection for the group of “businessmen.” Georgians had always blended perfectly into the Russian mafia, ever since the early days of the Russian Federation. They seemed perfectly at home in this world, with its peculiar customs and the Vors as its unquestioned leaders.
Nice outfits, huh? says the girl’s father, The Boss, as they call him. They’re raking it in, you can see that. Every one of those f*cking guys we saw today, they all had on Italian suits. You notice that?
Gold necklaces, gold rings. Gold bracelets.
No gold nose rings, though, huh? one of the men in the circle says.
The Boss erupts into laughter. Then he looks back at the table. So you got three kinds of caviar. The price depends on the size, see? Look at these f*ckers. F*cking big, aren’t they? You gotta love seafood. The treasures of the sea, right? The Caspian’s sort of a sea too, you know. And we’re gonna make a business out of this shit, these treasures of the sea. The Boss runs through it all again. Lectures them. They’ll import poached seafood from Russia—shrimp, crab, sea urchin—and export stolen cars from Japan. It’s a f*cking two-way Russo-Japanese venture! And we make it all look legal! Man, how f*cking lucky are we that Nippon and Russia are neighbors like this, f*cking linked up by the f*cking Japan Sea! We get a foothold here, and you know what? You know what, you dickheads? It’s not just the little tip of Siberia, is it!
No, because there’s Sakhalin too.
And don’t forget the Kamchatka Peninsula! Feel like I’m gonna bite my tongue every time I f*cking try to say that word. You know what I’m talking about, right? Kamchatka, huge peninsula sticking out into the Sea of Okhotsk. F*cking huge.
The Russians are there too?
They got organization. They got a boss. You know. A Vor.
It’s great, getting into this stuff. All in support of Japanese-Russian friendly relations.
The Boss laughs uproariously. He guffaws again. The future is f*cking rosy. Think big, you dicks! Think big! he says. He gives them another little lecture, this time about how easy it is to launder dirty money in the new Russia. Japanese-Russian friendship, he says a few times, borrowing the phrase from his underling. Russian mafia and Japanese yakuza unite! How about that, you dicks! Solidarity!
Once again he’s in stitches.
Anyway, he says, losing the grin, we’ve got our first f*cking deal.
The main house is gonna like that, huh? one of the men says.
Except, the Boss says, that from now on, this Russian link is ours.
His voice is lower now. Secretive.
He continues: We’re brothers, now, these Russians and us. So we can make this shit happen, we can go f*cking illegal all the way, go for the gold. This country’s the world’s armory! he says. You have any idea how cheap an old 9mm Tokarev pistol is? You know how incredibly f*cking easy it is to get your hands on a new model Kalashnikov machine gun with a folding butt? It all sells, he explains, for about a tenth of the going international rate. This shit is f*cking gold!
Absolute f*cking gold, the men say.
And sooner or later, we’re gonna use this to take over the Hokuriku group.
Nice, nice. The men are now whispering.
The only f*cking problem is the Chechens, the Boss says. The Chechen mafia. As far as the Russians are concerned, right, these Chechens are something else. Black eyes, black hair. Black as in blacks. And now these black guys are intruding on their territory. Selling cars in Moscow and out west, making overtures in the Japan Sea, right? You get what I’m f*cking saying? Just imagine what’d happen if these Chechen blackies got together with those idiot Chinese in the Triad and exchanged a f*cking toast to their joint future…Forget your f*cking Russian-Japanese friendship, we’re talking Chechen-Chinese lovefest. CheChi. And what happens to our business interests, huh? Bam. Out the window. You get what I’m saying? The point is, you gotta f*cking be prepared. Be ready to drive the f*cking Chechens out of this whole region—
Just then, the Japanese businessmen notice that something is wrong. That it’s too quiet. All of a sudden they realize that the kitchen is empty. All the other customers are gone, as are the waiters who have been serving them. A few of them glance simultaneously at the door. They’re looking for the two Georgian guards. One of them is stretched out on the ground. Blood. His larynx has been slashed, or maybe his jugular. The other guy is gone. Missing. Probably dead too, somewhere. Two or three of the younger yakuza spring to their feet, stunned. They’ve whipped out their guns, of course. Brand-new Makarovs, bought at great bargain prices. Suddenly they are distracted by a shrill, piercing noise in the kitchen—a timer has gone off. And now there’s a man in a ski mask standing right behind their table. In his left hand he holds a submachine gun with a silencer; in his right, a knife with a curved blade smeared with blood. In less than a second, the man has shot every man in the ring through the back of his head. The gun makes hardly any sound: pssssht, pssssht, pssssht. The massacre is over almost before it has begun; it’s so simple and quiet it’s beautiful. And now only the Boss—the man they called the Boss—is left at the table. And, at the next table, the girl and the young Russian woman who serves as her translator. The ski-masked attacker walks around, takes up a position directly in front of the Boss’s table. The tip of the silencer is pointed at the Boss’s forehead. It’s about three feet from the gun to the Boss’s head.
The Boss sits very still.
He can’t move.
The young woman, the Russian, is going to move. She’s rising from her chair.
The attacker does something with the knife in his right hand, gives it an odd sort of flick, sends it flying. It buries itself with a soft thud in the woman’s chest. It doesn’t hit her heart. So she doesn’t die—not yet. She is skewered, pinned to the back of her chair. Unh…unh…unh…she says. But she can’t even really say that much. Unh…unh…
Unh.
The submachine gun never wavers. The attacker turns his face—just his face—toward the woman. He looks her over.
And then his eyes land on the girl.
The Japanese girl.
The attacker has on a ski mask, but his eyes are clearly trained on her. The oddly plump girl, decked out from head to toe in famous brands, her hair cut in the very latest fashion, looking too expensively attired for her age, somehow unsettlingly wrong. He stares.
He keeps staring.
And then he turns back to the Boss and lays a card on the table.
A playing card with something written on it in Russian.
It says RUSSIANS ARE BETTER OFF DEAD.
The Boss can’t read it.
Obviously.
“Can’t read that, can you?” the ski-masked attacker says, speaking in Russian even though he knows the yakuza won’t understand. “You don’t even hear what I’m saying, do you? That’s fine. I can’t read Japanese, can’t speak it. We’re even. In a second, I’ll have that woman with the knife interpret for me. We’ve got a while yet before she bleeds to death. I can calculate that much.”
The Boss doesn’t know what to say.
Obviously.
The woman with the knife in her groans. Unh…unh…
“I have to tell you, though,” the attacker says. “You’re really stupid. You’re a yakuza boss, right? What the hell are you thinking, bringing family on a business trip? What the hell were you thinking even having a family? Don’t you consider the dangers that come with being yakuza? Are you Japanese that naïve? In Russia, it’s the rule in the underworld that Vors and combatants don’t take wives or have children. Because, obviously, they make you vulnerable. You understand what I’m saying? Do you not see that? As a yakuza boss, someone in the same business as the Vors? If you don’t get it now, you will. You’ll see what it means to have a hostage taken. You see what I’m saying? I’m not going to kill you, not now. Not ever, maybe. But this vulnerability of yours…your family. It’s gone. I’m taking it with me.”
The attacker turns his gaze once more to the next table. To the girl.
She stares straight back at him.
Ferociously.
“I’ll f*cking take one of your fingers, you dick,” she says.
To the man responsible for the noiseless massacre. In Japanese.
In the voice of an eleven- or twelve-year-old.