The Survivor

Chapter 13

Pavlo Shevchenko woke with a knot in his throat and his lungs clutching for air. He drew in a screech of breath and rose, slapping off the sheets. He sat up, basted in sweat, eyes darting, making sure the walls were far away.

Space. There was space here.

His California king mattress sat centered in the two-thousand-square-foot bedroom that was the second floor. When he’d bought the mansion in the bombastically titled Mount Olympus community in the Hollywood Hills, the first thing he’d done was knock out all the upstairs walls to give himself more breathing room. He would’ve taken out the pillars, too, if they weren’t needed to hold up the roof.

Floor-to-ceiling glass looked out at a steep stretch of canyon and the boulevard below, alive with light and movement. He rose and paced the vast room to show himself that he could, that he had the freedom to roam.

His history was defined by cages. His great-great-grandfather was a Cossack highwayman who’d died in the prison camps of Peter the Great, where the vory v zakonye, “thieves-in-law,” first rose to power. Populating the sparse branches of Pavlo’s family tree were more sworn criminals with allegiance to nothing but the thieves’ world, the vorovskoi mir. A grandfather who survived the NKVD torture chambers only to succumb to the terrors of Babi Yar. An uncle who sliced off his finger in a corrective-labor camp in the Urals to show defiance to the conventions of the world outside the bars.

Pavlo was born on the day of Stalin’s death in Donetsk, an industrial city in a bleak corner of Ukraine. At the time his father, who had taken the thief’s vow-to turn his back on all family except for his fellow criminals-was busy dying of dysentery in the Omsk Colony, where he’d been sentenced to six decades of hard labor. By his thirteenth year, Pavlo had made his way to the black markets of Odessa, where he came up among the syndicate, rising to the prestigious position of pickpocket by the age of fifteen. He did the bidding of the old-school vory, growing skilled with a blade. For his first execution, he cut off a man’s fingers, locked him in a car, and set it on fire. He never forgot how the man stared at him through the windows, never crying out. An early lesson taught by that hollow gaze: There are those who are meat and those who are fed.

By his seventeenth birthday, Pavlo was so feared that when he entered a room, grown men would put out their cigarettes and rise in respect. He did multiple stints in the Zone, coming out each time with more skills and more decoration, his service record tattooed into his flesh.

The Zone mocked the very conditions of existence. Cells built for sixteen prisoners were filled with sixty. Not enough room for everyone to stand at once, so they took shifts on their feet, rotating by the slot of the window where they drew in a few precious lungfuls of oxygen. They slept in stacks on the bunk beds. One toilet for sixty men-a hole in the earth, no paper. Men died of the heat in the summers and of cold in the winters. They suffocated in plain sight. When Pavlo was punished for asserting order, he lived for months at a time in a cement-walled standing cell little bigger than a coffin. One hour a week, for exercise, he was allowed into a belowground pen with a mesh ceiling that looked up into cells, the caged run of a jaguar. Like everywhere else, it smelled of rot and death and the insides of other men.

Air. There was never enough air.

In the Zone he learned the truth of humanity, saw people as they really were. Downcasts, the lowest of the low, lived beneath cots, where they washed foot wrappings and ate crumbs. Their bodies existed only for the others; they were used until they were no more than living remains. Prisoners were trampled. Kicked to death. Beaten with dirt-filled socks until they urinated blood. The grumbling in their stomachs underscored the emptiness within. There was one rule only: survive.

And yet in the midst of all this, there was tradition. Honor. When there was an interruption in the order of things, Pavlo oversaw one of the pravilki, the thieves’ courts. A man who had stolen from a vor above his rank was held on the floor, and the others took turns jumping from the top bunk until they’d shattered his rib cage. There was that potted plant in a prison in Perm that lived on the lip of the window grate. Each morning they would move it hand over hand through the room, each man allotted one sniff. There were chess games played with pieces of saliva-moistened bread and about once every season a ladle of fish stew poured over the kasha to make it edible.

Naked, Pavlo ran his fingers along the glass, staring down at Hollywood below. Notes from a rock concert at the Roxy climbed the hill, the thrumming of a bass guitar. He counted his steps. Two hundred eighty-three around the bedroom’s perimeter. Just like last night. Just like the night before.

Pulling on a silk bathrobe, he walked up the floating staircase and emerged onto the concrete plain of the roof. Drew the nighttime air into his lungs. Free to walk, free to breathe. He was indestructible, as resilient as a cockroach. When the apocalypse came and the bombs fell, he would scuttle up from ground zero and turn his antennae to the toxic winds. He spread his arms in the darkness, reaching as far as his body allowed and touching only air.

After a six-year stint in Corrective Labor Colony No. 6, Pavlo had been released into a new age-post-Soviet Russia in the early nineties. The next generation of thieves didn’t tattoo the markings of their trade on their flesh, but they respected and feared Pavlo and were savvy about the new system. A leader in the powerful syndicate, he was now a businessman, dealing in bank schemes, Japanese electronics, stolen Volvos and BMWs from Europe. The spoils of a nation were there for the taking. He bought factories, razed them to the ground, and exported the scrap metal. Aluminum to Estonia, nickel to Latvia, titanium to Lithuania. He whored and gambled and ordered the deaths of judges who opposed his will. The time and his reach were bespredel-without limits.

He arrived at the edge of the roof, a sheer drop several hundred feet to the rocks of the canyon. The boulevard showed its full nighttime colors-the glitz of Ripley’s Museum, the bronze pagoda and copper-topped turrets of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the tall-wall billboard of the latest HBO star glowering over a Boeing-size pair of Ray-Bans. Commerce. Free trade. In the thawing of one empire, he had learned the rules and reaped the rewards of capitalism. He had come here, to the source, to enjoy them.

He walked the roof’s edge, paying no mind to the harrowing drop inches away. His steps were sure and steady, his muscles taut. The fall was nothing compared to the beauty of all that space around him. He stopped and leaned over, his bare toes gripping the edge. Shout and there would be no echo. Drop a stone and he would hear no impact. Space. He turned and kept on. One hundred twenty steps. His to take whenever he liked.

The house was built into the hill, so the roof came level with the sloped street. A neighbor passing on a late-night walk lifted a hand in greeting. Pavlo stared until the man lowered his arm and hurried on. Pavlo walked along the property line as he did most nights, picking through the large, fine-grained granite rocks he had imported from the Urals. Sixty-eight steps, measuring the expanse of what was his. He reached the thick double front doors and tapped. Yuri opened and stepped aside, replacing his pistol at the small of his back. Pavlo entered, moving past the neat line of flannel slippers for guests; shoes were forbidden inside.

The downstairs furnishings were decadent. Cabinets of rift-sawn oak with ebony finish. Marble countertops with quartz for the glint. Dripping chandeliers, imported gold-leafed fixtures, patterned parquet flooring. A different life.

He pattered down the brief hall and turned into the girl’s bedroom, opening the door quietly. The curtains were drawn, and it smelled of cigarettes and stale perfume. Nastya lay on her stomach across her bed, facing away, painting her nails, headphones on so loud he could hear the tinny echo of rock music. Tall and reed-thin, she wore a sleeveless T-shirt and jean shorts slightly bigger than bikini bottoms. Her legs were so smooth that it looked as though her skin had been spray-painted on. She was striking as only a Ukrainian girl could be. Expansive cheeks, pouting mouth, neck like a swan.

He remembered the first time he had seen her, a bundle of pink blanket delivered to his doorstep by a familiar whore, a girl herself. The infant’s sapphire eyes, the shape of them, too-there could be no question that she was his. He’d taken her in his arms, and by the time he’d looked up, the whore had vanished.

As a vor, he could hold allegiance only to the brotherhood of thieves. He had turned his back on his birth family and sworn to have no family of his own save the vory v zakonye.

And yet.

Anastasia. Nastya for short. A daughter. Arriving like Moses in the reeds. And him a weathered criminal aged by decades of crime and life in the Zone. When he’d held this infant, some part of him he’d long thought extinguished had flared to life inside his chest. She was pure. She was good. She was his last chance to be human.

He was revered enough that the brotherhood would honor this choice, but he could not be seen raising a girl in plain sight. To have her he’d have to leave the nation. Leave his life behind. And so he had, riding the wave of emigrants allowed out by Yeltsin in the late nineties. A stop in New York’s Brighton Beach to organize his money through wires and offshore accounts, then on to Los Angeles, where anyone could be reinvented as anything. For her. All for her.

She was seventeen now.

He stood in the doorway and watched her. Long honey hair that reached the small of her back. Her legs were crossed at the ankles, one foot bobbing to the music. Fluorescent bands from various dance clubs encircled her wrists, each day of the week marked by a different stripe. He had spoiled her. He knew this and yet could not help himself.

He knocked gently on the open door. She turned, flinging the headphones down around her neck, her smile lighting the room. “Papa.”

“Open these curtains,” he said. “The view, it is free.”

He could barely make out the faint etchings of the scars, a spiderweb just past her cheek. The imperfection only highlighted her beauty. He watched her in the liquid glow of the lava lamp.

“I like it dark. All holed up safe, ya know?”

She knew little of his past.

“Very well, Nastya.” He discerned the faintest whiff of schnapps, that American syrup. “Have you been drinking?”

“Course not.” She stretched, curling her back, her face screwed to one side, childlike. “What’s with the new guy? Misha? He creeps me out.”

“He is friend from the old country.” The fan turned lazily overhead. “He makes you uncomfortable?”

“Yeah. He’s always fucking staring at me. Why can’t we just keep Valerik, Yuri, and Dima like we always have?”

“Misha, he does other things.”

“Fine.” She turned away and flicked her hair like a horse’s tail. “I’m thinking of getting a tattoo. A little butterfly. Right here.” She poked a finger at the base of her neck.

“We have discussed. You will not ever have your skin marked.”

His tone, harsher than he’d intended. He remembered the time one of his brodyagi had brought him a monogrammed shirt, how it had reminded him of the ID tag sewn onto his prison uniforms. He’d excused himself and burned it in the bathroom sink.

Nastya looked at him, a touch of fear showing in her eyes. But he didn’t mind if the fear kept her from marring her smooth skin. She covered with a pout and stretched languidly, rolling her shoulders, a great cat. “Okay, fine. But Jesus H. I mean, you’re a fine one to talk. Head to toe.”

“You are not me. And thank God you will never have to be.”

“You’re not so bad, old man.” That smile. “Can I have some money? It’s Tuesday night.”

“The club again?”

“Yeah. It’s Julie’s birthday and the girls want to-”

Already he was peeling hundreds from the wad he kept shoved in the pocket of his bathrobe. “You know I cannot say no to you.”

“Except about tattoos.”

“Yes. Except tattoos.” He set the money on her nightstand, next to an overflowing ashtray. “You will be driven. The Town Car.”

“You’re the best.” Tugging the headphones back on, she returned to her nails. It was three in the morning and a school night, but when he thought about what he was doing at seventeen, he closed his mouth and exited.

Dima, Yuri, and Valerik were playing cards at the kitchen table. Misha sat alone at the counter, cleaning his gun and wearing the faint grin of a contented boy. They rose when Pavlo entered. He strode across to Misha.

“Do not look at Nastya again,” he said quietly.

Misha nodded.

Pavlo moistened his lips. “I do not trust Nate Overbay. Watch him closely. And his daughter. At any sign…”

Yuri said, “What if he cannot deliver?”

“Any other plan will have a cost in lives and resources. We can afford to give him five days before we consider these.”

“Why do we not just take the daughter now and start mailing him pieces of her?” Misha asked.

Yuri snickered. Misha swiveled his dead stare over at him, and the smirk dropped from the big man’s face.

“This is not the old country,” Pavlo explained patiently. “It does not work that way here. We must be more … subtle.”

“I see no need,” Misha said. “If you would free me to handle matters in the fashion I am accustomed-”

Pavlo leaned forward, setting a hand on Misha’s shoulder, his stare making clear that the conversation had just ended.

Misha bit off his words, assembled his pistol with a deft twirl of the hands, and headed out.

Pavlo looked at Yuri. “I brought Misha because he is fearless. This is good but can also be bad. You are important. You understand how to play here.”

Yuri’s mouth moved around bunched lips, no doubt swallowing his objections.

Pavlo tilted his head toward the door. Yuri rose and followed. Valerik and Dima returned to their cards.

Pavlo walked upstairs. Fifty-seven steps. That empty second floor, room enough to breathe, to stretch. He walked the edges again, his shoulder rubbing the glass, counting and recounting his steps. Finally he lay on his mattress and stared through the skylight at the coal-black heavens, contemplating all that was at stake and what he was willing to do to protect it.