The Hunted

They whispered back and forth, while the men in the van, tired of the monotony of love and lust in the Konevitch place, squelched the volume and napped. One block away, the lady and two men stayed hunched inside the car and, through a pair of powerful binoculars, kept a close eye on the front entrance of the Watergate. The year of hunting for Alex in Chicago had not agreed with Katya.

Nicky had a modest, not overly prosperous operation in Chicago run by a half-crazy, doped-out boss who put up the hunter-killer team, along with five of his own people, in a cramped, run-down rowhouse in one of the most crime-infested sections of the South Side. He called it a safehouse. It was barely a house, and anything but safe. Black and Hispanic gangs roamed the surrounding streets at will. They did not particularly cater to these Russians who were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to muscle into the local action.

The rowhouse quickly became a prison, a quite miserable one. The gangs were large, mean, and tough. A tiny bodega was positioned on a corner across the street. They hung there, blacks and spics in variously colored bandanas, mixing freely together, never less than fifteen of them. They sipped from canned beers, rapped back and forth, shared menthols, and glowered at the rowhouse across the street. They seemed to be honoring a local cease-fire among themselves, a temporary alliance against a common foe. For decades, they had battled and scrapped with one another for these streets-every inch of concrete, every crackhouse and whore's corner was a victory, paid in blood. No way were they going to let these Ivan-come-latelys have a piece of the action. At night they sometimes sprayed the rowhouse with bullets. They scattered when the cops arrived, only to reappear the instant the last blue suit departed. Once, a pair of Molotov cocktails sailed through the windows.

The Russians slept on the floors, and crawled on their bellies every time they passed a window. A stack of portable fire extinguishers was stored in the kitchen. First aid kits were in every room in the house.

Katya and her crew ventured outside as infrequently as possible. Two left on a grocery run one night and never returned. They may have fled. Nobody blamed them.

A few weeks later, a box with four ears was left on the doorstep. They studied the shriveled things and debated at length, but nobody could be entirely certain they belonged to Dmitri and Josef. Dmitri did in fact have two earrings. And okay, yes, Josef's ears were sort of large and floppy; but no one knew for sure.

It constipated the search for the Konevitches terribly. The first few months, Katya and her comrades snuck out only in the wee hours of the morning, trying to elude the gangs. Their car had been shot at more than they could count as they sped down the street. Nicky's locals had a firm fix on the Russian immigrant pockets of the city; naturally, this was where the bulk of effort was placed. At some point, inevitably, the Konevitches would turn up.

Occasionally, they got word that Alex Konevitch had been seen cruising a few local Russian clubs, flashing a wad of bills and bragging about the flourishing real estate empire he was establishing in the city. It sounded like Mr. Big Shot. And after flashing photos at various witnesses, they were sure it was him. Queries to the local phone companies had revealed a cell service account, though the number was unlisted and the phone service stubbornly refused to provide the billing address. That was it. No matter how hard they dug, no matter how many cops they paid for information, this was all they had.

Additional pictures of the couple were plastered everywhere. Hundreds more were pressed into the hands of Russian expats with vile threats about what would happen should they fail to snitch on first sight.

After those first few months, the hunters became dispirited-and worse, seriously frightened. The party outside the bodega seemed to grow bigger by the day. The Russians took to cowering in the rowhouse, contriving false reports back to Moscow, manufacturing hopeful leads that never existed. The lies would never be caught, they were confident of this. Nobody would dare run the gauntlet and pay them a visit.

Massive quantities of food and beer and vodka were stockpiled. They watched the same tired porn flicks, ate and drank heavily, and bickered among themselves. The men outnumbered Katya, and they cruelly exploited this advantage against her. They pressed her into service as their cook, their laundry lady, their maid.

Even the long year of killing in the Congo, her previous record for unadulterated wretchedness, paled in comparison.

Oh, how she hated the Konevitches. The last iota of icy detachment had melted months before. Her pouched eyes now burned with a scary intensity. It was all their fault, that awful couple. Why couldn't they just let themselves be killed? It would've been so much easier for everybody. How could they be so selfish?