Moscow Noir

I am waiting for mercy. It should be here any minute now.

GOLD AND HEROIN

BY VYACHESLAV KURITSYN

Leningradsky Avenue

Translated by Mary C. Gannon

She was walking barefoot along Leningradsky Avenue. The occasional streetlight and moon hung in the puddles on the ground. She jumped from one puddle to the next, enjoying the warm splash. She held one red high heel in her hand by the strap. The other shoe she had lost while crossing the street around the Sovietsky Hotel.

His thoughts were steeped in gold, like the chest of a war hero buried in medals and crosses. Zemfira was singing about river ports. The highway was empty. The Sovietskaya Inn had recently metamorphosed into the Sovietsky Hotel. Prostitutes had become twice as expensive. Suddenly he saw a kitten on the road in front of the car. He stepped on the brakes, then got out. It wasn’t a kitten. He picked up a red high heel by its strap. The shoe was lying just next to the entrance of the Romany Gypsy theater.

For some reason he brought the red shoe into the car. A shoe without a girl. The clocked showed 2:55 a.m.

Once again he thought of shipments of Yakutst gold to jewelry factories in Smolensk. Stalls were scattered along the street like cheap bijouterie. Occasionally, a fat pearl of a foreign-made car would swim by.

Cheaper and flatter-chested girls loomed at the intersection with Stepan Suprun Road. They say that Suprun was a test pilot. The whole area was celestial. Across the street at Khodynka Field was the place Chkalov had crashed. The street itself ran all the way to Sheremetyevo Airport.

She’s nuts, he thought, nearing Airport subway station, when he saw her jumping along the sidewalk on one leg like she was playing hopscotch. He noticed a red high heel in her hand.

She watched intently as the door of a blue limousine opened on her left. Slowly, as though in a dream, so slowly that she was completely absorbed in it, she remembered her friend’s contorted face, a gold tooth in a ring of purple lipstick. Boney fingers shaking a wad of green bills that she had tried to steal from her friend earlier that day. It seemed to her it was a helicopter that had come for her, not a car. She thought she’d have to fly to take the ruby star off the Kremlin spire. She leaned toward the door. A man deep inside the car smiled at her and handed her the other high heel.

She hopped into the car and moved her lips. Inside it was warm, and she realized that she had been cold. She quickly fell asleep.

At home in the bright light he noticed heavy brown knots on her slim bare arms. He looked into her eyes and saw that her pupils were completely dilated, a shiny opaque red, and runny, like broken egg yolk.

“Hot … hot!” she yelled. Actually, she yelled the first word; the second she whispered. And fell silent, as though she had lost her voice.

“Hot tea?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“A hot bath, then?” he asked.

She nodded.

He pointed to the door. In one sharp movement she pulled off her short blue dress and was left wearing nothing but white panties adorned with an orange mushroom. And before he could focus his gaze on her small tits, she had already flown past him.

When he was young, he too could wander around the city aimlessly with no memories or money. In the beginning of his career he was a heroin dealer. He was a drug mule, moving bags of the stuff from Warsaw to Moscow. Once he got caught on the Polonez train at Belorussky station. By some miracle he’d been able to escape, fleeing underneath the cars and over the sidings. He’d probably still be in the slammer if they had caught him.

Through making counterfeit Adidas sneakers in an invalids’ cooperative, renting pirated videos, and running car dealerships in old movie theaters, he came to gold.

Gold is like heroin. It’s simple, homogenous, and omnivorous.

She had been in the bathroom for an alarmingly long time. He knocked at the door to tell her. And to give her a bathrobe. She didn’t answer, and he pushed the door open: she was leaning toward the mirror, staring into it, bent and skinny. Heavy black shadows seemed to pass over her face, although he couldn’t quite make it out. Maybe they were just reflections cast from the mirror. He called to her. She grabbed some small scissors from the shelf under the mirror and slipped her fragile body out of the bath. Her body was smooth, save for the overgrown shrubbery of her pubis—just the way he liked it.