A left turn took me to a squalid living room. The couch and end tables were the kind of stuff most folks put out on the sidewalk, next to a cardboard sign that says FREE. There was a bong made out of a two-liter Coke Zero bottle, five inches of brown slop that looked like diarrhea water in it.
He had an iPod jacked into a Mophie Powerstation, next to a big Bluetooth speaker. Twitchy synth loops played over a steady whop-whop beat. I jerked the power cable out of his sound deck, and that killed his St. Petersburg electronica. But the apartment was still filled with bellowing noise. Somewhere in the rear of the apartment, Hugh Grant was shouting over a background soundtrack of swelling violins. Beneath that came a stream of angry, muffled cries.
I stumbled in the short, dim hall between the living room and the bedroom. An enormous hot-pink vibrator in the shape of a horse’s phallus rolled under my foot. I lurched and put a hand out against a door to my right, and it swung open to show the dingy little bathroom I’d glimpsed before.
He had arranged a lab for himself in there. I wasn’t any chemist, but it for sure looked like he had a sinkful of crystal, glassy yellowish-white shards. Several big brown jugs labeled as brake fluid—brake fluid?—sat in the bathtub. Rubber tubing ran between flasks of amber liquid. The whole place had the sharp stink of nail polish.
The muffled cries were closer now. I backed out of the bathroom and went on to the bedroom.
Martina was on the big brass bed, handcuffs on her wrists, hands behind her back. A black leather bracelet had been buckled around her right ankle. One end of an extension cable was clipped to it. The other end had been elaborately knotted around one of the shiny brass bedposts.
The bedsheets were a tangle under her bony, light frame. She peered out from beneath the twisted Debbie Harry coils of her golden hair, like a bright-eyed fox peering out from a heap of briars. Andropov had strapped a piece of duct tape across her mouth. A laptop was open on a nearby dresser, playing what looked like Notting Hill at top volume.
She glared at me and kicked the wall with her free foot, same as she’d been doing the day before—the only way she could let anyone know she needed help. She struggled to rise to her knees, writhing from side to side and lifting the sharp edges of her hip bones into the air. It just about looked like porno: a twenty-two-year-old alabaster-skinned stripper in cheap white underwear and a tight little Ramones T-shirt that was so threadbare and thin it barely looked fit for use as a dishrag. What made me hold up, though, wasn’t my surprise to find her a prisoner in Andropov’s bedroom. It was the sight of a glass pipe, on the end table, with more yellowish chunks of crystal in it—crystal that was looking less and less like lethal rain and more and more like you-know-what.
I was taking it all in, waiting for my brain to catch up to my eyes, when the mad Russian crashed in. He stumbled past me—it was dark, and the floor was carpeted in sour-smelling unwashed laundry—then turned and stood between me and her. The lower half of his face was sticky with blood, and his broken left hand twitched against his chest. Tears crawled down his bristly cheeks.
“You stay away from her, lesbeen! She not go away with you!”
The way he called me a lesbian, like it was the dirtiest word he knew, got the better of me. I slapped him with an open hand. I didn’t have any words, just an overwhelming desire to smack his fat, foolish, tragic face. The instant I did it, he erupted into sobs that shook his whole body.
I moved around him and snatched the duct tape off Martina’s mouth. If I wrote down all the four-letter words that came pouring out of her, this page would catch fire in your hands.
When she finally started to make sense, what she said was “I try to leave, and crazy asshole lock me here, two days now! Crazy fucking piece of turd!” And she stretched toward him, getting as close as she could, and spit on his head. “Two days he run Notting Hill over and over, only unlock me to piss! He smoke too much his own shitty drugs!”
Andropov turned to face her, holding his head in his hands and sobbing wretchedly. “You said you run away with thees lesbeen! You said you have me arrest and live with girls who have the pussy to eat, leave me for women at end of world!”
“I said it, and I meant it! You go to jail a meelion years!”
He looked at me with pleading, miserable, lunatic eyes. “Every day, all the time, she parade herself almost naked to you lesbeens. Always she is calling to tell me she plan to sleep with you both! She say only women make her cum, and she laugh at me—”
“Yes, I laugh at you, I laugh at your penis, always soft—”
And then they were screaming at each other in Russian and she was spitting at him again and my head was about to split from the way the both of them were carrying on. He drew back one arm like he was going to backhand her, and I thumped him in the stomach with the wrench—not hard but hard enough to drive the air out of him and bend him double. He swayed, sank to his knees, and curled up on his side, crying his guts out. You never saw a more pitiful sight.
I stepped around Andropov and paused Notting Hill. I spotted a chrome key by the laptop and figured I’d try it on the handcuffs. I sat on the edge of the bed with Martina, and her bracelets popped off with a snick! She rubbed her bruised wrists.
“Filthy, horrible, soft-dick man,” she said, but her voice was lower now, and she was shaking.
I picked up the glass pipe with the crystals in it. “What’s this?”
“Drug he make me take to shut me up,” she said. “I try to leave him before, and he hit me, choke me. He use what he sell, is like mad killer. He punch me because he can’t fuck me anymore!” Throwing this last at him.
“What kind of drug?”
“Crystal meth.” She bit her lower lip and began to wrestle with the buckle around her ankle.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me something else. He isn’t from the area around Georgia, is he?”
Her brow furrowed. “What? No. Moscow.”
“And I guess he doesn’t know how to make the kind of crystals that are falling from the sky?”
“What you mean? No. No.” She barked—a harsh, ugly laugh. “He is washed-up pharmacist, not geeenius.”
“I love you,” he said to her from where he was curled up on the floor. “If you leave, I shoot myself.”
By now she had freed her ankle from the strap around it. She leapt up and began to kick him.
“Good! I hope so! I buy you the bullets myself!”
He did not attempt to escape from his place on the floor. Her foot found his ass again and again.
I’d heard about all I could stand. I dropped the wrench on the bed and left the two of them to the pleasure of each other’s company.