Moscow Noir

He lights up his third cigarette—he chain-smokes—in ten minutes, and through the poisonous haze of his Java Gold looks me right in the eye. His eyes are brown, but his look is icy, colder than the ocean. Our staring match has been going on for more than two months, ever since I came to work for him. That is, became the junior agent in the property crimes department of the Bogorodskoe Internal Affairs Department of the Eastern District Internal Affairs Department of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Department. It all happened so suddenly, it wasn’t my doing, but that’s beside the point today, the subject of a whole separate novel. I’ve been a bad boy. I’m twenty-four and my very smallest tattoo, a huge kraken devouring the world, starts at my right ankle and ends at my left ear. I spent all the money I made seven years ago—when me and the boys drowned this drug dealer, a guy in our class, holding him by the leg in the Yauza—on this tat. That was when I suddenly developed my acute sense of righteousness: I was able to convince everyone that selling drugs was very bad. We forced that monster to promise not to do it anymore and then took his money before finishing him off. To teach him a lesson. Then there were the ladies. We swept the district clean of pimps, small-time profiteers, and fences, but at some point the guys stopped me. Actually, it was too late. I’d turned myself into one big walking sign, a yakuza out of a Takeshi Kitano nightmare. Twigs, leaves, branches, Celtic knot, and Japanese dragons—all the world’s evil spirits battled it out on my body for the right to a free millimeter of skin. What was going on a little bit deeper inside me—well, best not to even try to understand that.

I had only two options left, and I chose the wrong one. Now I’m an agent, a puny sergeant with a regulation cannon, in puny Bogorodskoe Internal Affairs, where druggies steal drills from construction sites, and druggies rape druggies, sometimes without even being clear about their victim’s gender, and druggies kill druggies to get themselves a little heroin—drugs aren’t just born under tram tracks after all. And tracks are the only thing (if you don’t count druggies, of course) we have an abundance of in our district.

Nikolai Petrovich is sitting in his white shirt across from me smoking his fourth cigarette. Today’s kind of like a holiday for him. After the obligatory five years, they made him a major. He’s on duty, but there hasn’t been anyone at all on Boitsovaya Street, where our department is, for the last few hours. Even the lunatics are lying low. Pretty soon we’ll go out and celebrate his stars. Fuck every living thing.

I light up my second and look at Voronov. He’s relaxing. A meter and a half from us, behind the door, the perps and vics—all jumbled together—await their fate on the sagging vinyl bench in the corridor. Soon Nikolai Petrovich, a king in his white shirt, with two nonregulation guns in his tan underarm holster, will start seeing them. He’ll punish and pardon.

But for now he’s sprinkling some nasty Nescafé some broken Hindu brought him from the market early this morning into his cup. Voronov sprinkles in one spoonful. Two. Three. He pauses for a moment over the fourth and then throws that in too, with the decisiveness of Alexander the Great. Oh, and seven lumps of sugar. A stream of boiling water, a dirty spoon, the first noisy swallow. The agent lights up again and leans back in his chair, which is worn down to the veneer. He closes his eyes, takes a drag, and releases the smoke. Then—with just his eyelids—he gives me the order: Go. I open the door for the first time that night.

I cautiously slap the first petitioner on the cheeks. He’s been sitting there for a long time. Neighbors relieved him of the nice new TV in his room in a communal apartment on Otkrytoe Highway. Voronov has already warned me we’d be rejecting his appeal. This vic will never see a criminal case. He was born to suffer, to be a vic. I’m learning to be like Nikolai Petrovich. Why do you think the street our department’s located on is called Boitsovaya—Fight Street? Pretty strong people live and work here on Boitsovaya. To be blunt, they don’t have much choice.