Moscow Noir

If I hadn’t offended Foxy Lee, if she hadn’t taken off her mask, everything might have been different. Stary wouldn’t have realized that Death, the disgusting old lady with a scythe I’d been feeling up, was his woman, his redheaded little fox. He wouldn’t have sicced his bald assholes on me, and I wouldn’t have dropped the parcel with the tapes onto the floor when the fuckers bent my hand behind my back. And Stary wouldn’t have heard the tapes, and would never have known where the charity money went, and he wouldn’t have ripped up my airplane ticket, and he wouldn’t have taken my golden bank card, and I wouldn’t have ended up tied to a chair in a secret room in his mansion on the bank of the Yauza River … if only I hadn’t offended Foxy.

Though it must be said that things didn’t end so bad after all. Really, everything turned out great, and apart from the stench I have to put up with now, I’m actually happy.

My gold card is with me again, and my half-million is still on it—I checked. Early in the morning I’ll get off this shit-wagon and take in a lungful of clean, cold air at Kursk station. One of our guys will meet me there with new documents and tickets for the Moscow-Odessa train in a third-class car. “We can’t have the documents done before the morning,” said Foxy. “The main thing is that they don’t find you during the night, and in the morning you get on the train. No one in his right mind will look for you in a third-class car.” In Odessa I’ll meet Foxy Lee and we’ll board a ferry for Istanbul. (“No one in his right mind will look for us on that lousy raft full of cheap whores and Ukrainian profiteers sleeping on their striped bags.”)

“Does the ferry operate in the winter?” I asked.

“Of course it does!” said Foxy “How do you know?”

“Cause I’ve been on it.”

“With the cheap whores?”

She looked at me sadly, with mild surprise. Like a stray dog being punished for a puddle of urine from yesterday that had already seeped into the floor.

“The cots were hard,” Foxy said thoughtfully. “And sometimes the boat tossed and heaved like mad. Do you get seasick?”

I don’t get seasick. And no one will spoil the moment for me. We’ll be on a Turkish ferry, and I’ll be drinking whiskey and Foxy will have liqueur, and we’ll walk around on the deck and enjoy the waves. And all night we’ll roll around on one of those hard cots, then sleep awhile, and then I’ll fuck her again.

I’ll fuck her at dawn when we’re coming into the Bosphorus.

We’ll spend the day in Istanbul and have Turks shine our shoes and fill us up with tea. They’ll pour our coffee for us, and stare at Foxy and call her Guzel, and then in the evening we’ll fly away to the other side of the world. We’ll buy ourselves hats and sunscreen, and we’ll eat fruit and play tennis and snort coke. We’ll fly on a glider and swim in the ocean every day.

And every day, every single day, I am going to thank her. Because if it wasn’t for Foxy, I would be swimming in the Yauza River right now underneath a layer of ice. I’d be blue, swollen, and dead.

Foxy saved me.

It happened when I no longer had any hope at all. I was sitting naked, tied to the chair in the middle of the room. Stary stood opposite me, looking at me with an expression of boredom in the face.

“You used to work out?” he asked finally, nodding at my six-pack abdomen.

Stary himself was heavy—not too overweight, about twenty pounds, but he hated sports.

“I work out,” I said. I didn’t want to use the past tense.

“You did,” Stary corrected me. “You used to work out.”

Again, a pause hung in the air.

“Are you gonna beat me up?” I asked, just to break the silence.

He shook his head. No, he wasn’t going to beat me. He was just waiting for the guys to bring him a bucket.

Not only was Stary fascinated with the world of film, he was also interested in literature. His favorite book was Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow. He especially liked the scene where Schultz the Mafia boss orders his men to put the “cement slippers” on the traitor, Bo Weinberg, and then throw him into the sea.

An ice hole in the Yauza River was much more effective than the ocean. They could drill a hole in no time. But cement mix and a bucket were harder to come by, even in Stary’s mansion. So he had to send his thugs out to buy both. They’d been gone more than thirty minutes, and it was getting late. (They got the bucket right away, at the Atrium, as a matter of fact. They’d hit some snags with the cement mix, though.) They called Stary every few minutes to relate their latest fiasco.

I was shaking.

“I’m cold,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

Stary’s cell phone rang once again, the theme song from the movie Boomer, and I gave a start. I began to shudder violently. Not because of the cold; it was just that I didn’t want to die.

“What do you mean you still haven’t gotten it?”

There are people like that—they look like teddy bears, with button eyes and a button nose. But when they get angry, they look like hawks.