Moscow Noir

I nodded and said I did. I was angry and I wanted her, and I kissed her red hair, and her thick blond eyelashes, her little palms and those fingers—cold, moist fingers that she hadn’t managed to wash very well. I kissed them and inhaled their scent, animal-like and childish at the same time.

“Listen to me, buddy!” the cop said, his voice rising. “Who the fuck are you?”

“… two … three …” I whispered.

“What?!”

I decided to count to seven, my favorite number, and then shoot.

“… four …”

People started filing out of the train that had just pulled in, making a wide semicircle around the spot where I stood with the cop. Some character in a leather jacket with a shaved head shuffled by, looking furtively at us. Then he stopped and stared.

“Keep moving!” the cop barked at him.

The guy walked straight toward us.

“Let me see your ID,” the cop demanded, taken aback.

“Cn I’ve a wrd ith you, offcr?” mumbled the guy in leather, completely unfazed but slurring every sound. He gestured to the cop amiably.

The cop turned to me and then to the leather guy—and froze.

“C’mon, c’mon,” the leather guy said, still slurring his words, but this time in a more commanding tone. “Git ovr here, offcr.”

Suddenly, the eyes of the officer took on the expression of an animal, a mix of sharp sadness and surprise, and he silently strode over to the leather guy the way a dog goes to its trainer when it has mixed up its commands.

The fellow in leather whispered a few brief words into the cop’s ear. The cop looked at me from under his brow, nodded dejectedly, and sauntered off into the darkness.

“Offcr!” the leather guy called after him quietly.

“Aren’t you frgetting smethin?”

The cop’s back slumped.

“Didn ya take smthin tht didn blong to ya?”

The back didn’t so much as stir.

“Git outta here,” the guy in leather said, softening, and the cop rushed off, his boots crunching on the frozen crust of snow.

“Watch it, buddy!” The guy in leather advised me good-naturedly, then winked and moved away.

“Thanks,” I replied politely, but he didn’t turn around.

Buddy. Uh-huh, right.

* * *

And so I’m waiting for mercy. It should be here soon.

Here it is now. It just came around the corner, stopped next to the train station, and opened its doors to me.

Mercy, as everyone knows, is blurry and abstract. It can assume many different forms: from a coin at the bottom of your pocket to a blank check, from a plastic doggie bag to a benefit concert, from a kiss to artificial respiration, from a Validol pill to a shot in the head, from the ability to love to the ability to kill.

The mercy granted me is concrete. It takes the form of a dirty white bus. It is given to me for one night—this cold, dark, terrible, final, happy, damned night—and I will accept it without hesitation.

On this cold night, when you can freeze to death in an hour.

On this dark night, when you can disappear without a trace in a minute.

On this terrible night, when they’re looking for me high and low: in apartments and bars, in subways and airports, at hotels and movie theaters, in nightclubs and casinos, on the streets and in stairwells.

On this final night they are looking for me so they can kill me.

On this happy night, when they won’t find me because no one will think to look for me here, on the Mercy Bus that saves the homeless from hunger and cold.

Mercy is what I need on this damned night.

That is why I fall before the open doors of the bus. I cough, I snort, and I wheeze. I crawl on all fours as though I don’t have the strength to stand up, and I stretch my trembling hands toward them—toward three people in blue jackets, with red crosses on their sleeves and the word Mercy on their backs, and gauze masks pulled tight over their faces. I babble, my tongue tripping on the sounds.

I crawl at their feet, touching their shoes and begging: “… Help … save me …” I sniff, then grovel: “Save me …”

Foxy taught me to do that. “There aren’t many seats on the bus,” she said. “They only take the ones who are in really bad shape. They drive you around the city all night, keep you warm, feed you, and in the morning bring you back.”

“Only the ones who are in really bad shape.”

“Only the ones who are completely down-and-out.”

“Only the ones who will die without them.”

Well, at least I wasn’t lying when I groveled. Without them, I really would die. Stary’s men would kill me. They’d hunt me down and kill me like a witless animal.

Besides, the cops would be after me soon too.

“I’m fucked, man …”

And the merciful guys in masks pick me up by the arms and haul me into the bus. Now I am safe. I will be safe all night long, until morning. In the morning I’ll get on the 7:01 train.

The men in masks seat the swollen, dirty, frozen, decomposing half-people. The Mercy Bus drives off.

Foxy Lee, my girl, my little train-station slut, my sweet guardian angel, found me a safe lair to hide in. Safe and stinking.

God almighty, what a stench! I’d give every greenback in my possession for a mask—the kind those brothers of mercy have. Gimme a mask, man, gimme a mask!