California Fire And Life

52

Daz is in the system for maybe ten minutes before a huge old zek called Old Tillanin jams him into the corner, shoves the sharp point of a shiv against his ribs, and by way of fore-play demands his blanket and his next meal.

Daz is in the system for maybe ten minutes and. 00025 seconds before he jams a finger strike into Old Tillanin's left eyeball, which hits the filthy concrete floor about one full second before Old Tillanin does.

He's rolling around, howling in pain, trying to reach out and grab his eyeball before someone in the crowded cell steps on it. As if they're going to send a team of crack surgeons to reattach it.

Daz is in the far corner of the cell before the guards can get over to see who performed the eyeballectomy, and most of the other zeks only get from hearsay that it's the new guy, Daz.

Two zeks actually witness the action, though. One is a barrel-shaped mugger from Moscow named Lev, the other a tall skinny extortionist from Odessa named Dani, and they're pretty impressed that a new zek is either brave enough or stupid enough to take on Old Tillanin, who is the King of the Heap in this cell.

The word on Lev is that he has a way with a chain saw that you don't want to see up close. Lev has a reputation for his skill at performing the "chicken chop," which is Organizatsiya's favored method of execution and is just what it sounds like: not to put too fine a point on it, they take a chain saw and cut you into parts. And this is Lev's hobby. He likes it.

The story on Dani is that back in Odessa his own brother ratted some guys out to the cops, and the local mob boss – the pakhan – wanted to job out the hit but Dani said no sweat, I'll do him myself.

Dani gutshot his own brother.

Dani is such a mean fucker he's doing guys in prison. The guards come in in the morning and one or two zeks are tapped out, their necks snapped or their intestines lying on the floor and Dani's standing there with his bowl waiting for his breakfast gruel.

Dani is cold.

When Lev and Dani see the new zek take out Old Tillanin like that, they mark him as a guy to, well, keep an eye on.

Anyway, one of the guards asks who did it. He's no more expecting an answer than he's expecting fucking Princess Anastasia to descend through the ceiling on a trapeze, and he's dead right about that because even Old Tillanin keeps his mouth shut.

So the guard grabs up Dani, figuring that mean little fuck had to have a hand in any piece of violent nastiness in the cell, and he's hauling him out into the corridor to give him a going-over with the baton when this new zek – a petty thief from Leningrad named Valeshin – yells, "I did."

"What?" the guard asks.

"I did it."

Which is just about the stupidest thing the guard ever saw any zek do in a population that is already subpar in the intelligence quotient. The guard is so annoyed by this honor-among-thieves bit that he takes a belt and straps this Valeshin moron to the top of the cell door and whales at him with a piece of rubber hose until the dumb-fuck dickhead passes out. The guard gives him a few more shots to the ribs for good measure, unties him, and kicks him back into the cell, there being no point in taking him to the infirmary because (a) they don't have any doctors there, and (b) Old Tillanin's comrades are just going to kill him anyway.

Which is true. Daz is lying unconscious in the cell, and what three of Old Tillanin's buddies are waiting for is a little decent cover of darkness so they can hack him to death before he can wake up and do that finger strike number on one of them.

Small chance of that. Even if he were conscious, Daz couldn't lift his hands past his bruised ribs, and even if he could it would have the force of a noodle, so Daz is pretty much on the short-stay program. If he doesn't die of the beating – a very real possibility – Old Tillanin's friends are going to kill him. And if they don't get him, prison life will, because he'll be too weak for the foreseeable future to fight for his food, or his blanket – which, in fact, has already been snatched up – or for his own body, for that matter.

He'll freeze, starve, and get raped to death, and that's only if he makes it through the night.

When he comes to, he's wrapped in two blankets, his head in Dani's lap. He can feel the tightness of bandages around his wounded ribs, and a few minutes later Dani, tender as a Madonna, coaxes some tea down his throat. Where he got the wrappings, tea, and hot water Daz will never know. What he does know is that Dani and Lev spend the next three weeks nursing him back to a condition where he has a chance to survive.

Which also means guarding him around the clock.

Daz doesn't know it at the time, but Old Tillanin's comrades make three attempts on him. Three stabs at it, if you will. The first comes as Dani and Lev drag Daz into their corner of the cell and wrap him up in Dani's blanket.

"If you want him, Jewboy," one of Old Tillanin's crew warns, "you take all of him."

Meaning the obligations that Daz has accrued in wounding Old Tillanin.

"That's fine," Lev says.

He head-butts the guy, smashing his nose, then shoves the guy's face down as he brings his own knee up. Which ends the first attack.

The second comes later in the night when it looks as if Dani and Lev are asleep. Turns out they're not, when Dani swipes his knife across the stomach of the lead attacker, giving him a deep wound that will get infected and turn fatal some six endless weeks down the line because he doesn't have the price of a simple antibiotic that is for cash only at the infirmary.

The third attack comes in that deadly hour before dawn (you can't say sunrise – the sun doesn't rise on this window-less basement hole), and this time it's four of Old Tillanin's gang at once. Lev and Dani shove Daz into the corner and just stand there and fight it out in front of him, using the corner walls to narrow the lane of attack that they have to defend.

The first attacker lunges with a knife, but he isn't quick enough and Dani grabs his arm and snaps it at the elbow, producing a sound like a tree branch breaking in the winter cold. Lev takes the second guy, who's rushing him, and smashes him into the wall, using his own huge right hand to keep banging the guy's head against the wall while with his left he jabs at the third attacker with his shiv. Dani drops down and shoves his knife upward into the fourth guy's crotch, but Lev's about to get done by number three, who's reaching down into his shoe for his own shiv and is about to swing it up into Lev's ribs, when somehow Daz grabs the guy's hand and holds on for dear life.

Or Lev's dear life, but anyway, Daz has crawled between Lev's legs and holds the shiv against the guy's ankle, then bites the guy's hand and won't let go with his hands or his teeth even though his ribs are screaming and he's bleeding inside.

Finally Lev drops guy number two and raises his own hands like a club above his own head and brings them down on the third guy's neck and Daz suddenly feels the life go out of the man.

Which it has, because his neck is broken when the guards find the body in the morning.

Anyway, the guy is dead and his blanket is now wrapped around Daz, and when Old Tillanin returns from the infirmary things have changed. He finds this out his first night back when his dreams are broken by a sharp pain in the chest which he at first attributes to a heart attack, which is not entirely mistaken, seeing as how there's a sharpened spoon buried in his chest.

Planted there by one of his own guys, because Old Tillanin isn't the King of the Heap anymore.

That would be Daziatnik Valeshin, but he doesn't get to ascend to the throne right away, because when the guards come in and find Old Tillanin prepped for the dirt nap, they reasonably conclude that Valeshin was just finishing the job he had started and haul him away. Old Tillanin, after all, had kicked in cash and goodies to the guards, so they at least have to make a pretense at investigating his death in case one of his henchmen becomes the new top dog.

So they strip Daz – still sick and hurting from his beating – and toss him naked into a cold isolation cell and he spends the next two weeks freezing and starving, sitting in his own shit and piss, but he doesn't talk. He'll freeze and starve to death but he's keeping his mouth shut.

About all that keeps him going is the fantasy.

America.

Specifically, California.

You're KGB, you're privy to a few things – television, movies, magazines – so Daz has seen images of California. Seen the beaches and the sunshine and the palm trees. The sailboats, the surfers, the beautiful girls all but naked, lying in the sun as if they wish to be taken right there and then. He's seen the sports cars, the highways, the homes, and it's these images that keep him going.

Two weeks later the guards decide that they've made their gesture and haul him out. Blind as a mole, naked, and shivering, he limps back to the cell.

Which is something of an improvement except his guard, a nasty piece of work from outside Gorky, tells him that he's just going to beat him to death anyway, slowly, on a daily basis.

"There is only one way to stop it," Dani tells him. "You must show him that you can endure more pain than he can give out."

Dani tells him of the old days of Organizatsiya, back in Czarist days when it was known as Vorovskoy Mir – the World of Thieves. In those days, Dani tells him, the convicts were really tough. Knowing they had no recourse to revenge against the guards, their only choice was to intimidate them not through acts of aggression but through acts of endurance.

"They showed the guards that they could inflict more damage on themselves than the guards could inflict on them," Dani says.

It makes a certain sense to Daz. In a country of such long and deep suffering, endurance is the ultimate power.

Dani tells him stories of convicts who ran knives down their own faces, who sewed their own eyelids shut, stitched their own lips together, to intimidate the guards out of beating them. There is even a story about one spectacularly tough convict who nailed his scrotum to a workbench and waited for the guard to arrive.

The guard was impressed.

Dani tells Daz these stories and then he and Lev sit back to watch.

Daz waits for the guard to come on shift. He borrows a nail and a cell-made "hammer" and sits on the end of the bench by the cell door. When the guard comes to give him his beating, Daz stares at him, takes a deep breath and drives the nail through his hand between the index finger and thumb and into the bench.

Sits there sweating, jaws clenched, staring at the guard.

That night Lev and Dani initiate him into the Vory v Zakone.

The Brotherhood of Thieves.