The Survivor

Chapter 46

The slate-colored sky signaled either the birth or the death of the day, but Pavlo did not know which. He’d lost time, simply dropped out of it as if plunging through a sheet of ice into cryogenic waters. The first dot of sun nosed over the skyline to the east, casting straws of light through the grain and grit of early morning. Hastening along the fractured downtown sidewalk, he stared at the solitary point of light and thought, So that’s it. A new day.

The venerable marble steps, worn by a million footfalls, stood out from the surrounding concrete and rotting wood. He mounted the brief flight of stairs and pushed through the imposing oak door. Contrasted with the gray morning chill, the humidity of the banya was startling, pressing itself into his pores.

He did not know what had drawn him here.

The memory returned, less a thought than a primal impulse, a fury of clawed impressions scratching at his spinal cord. Around midnight he’d entered her room to check on her. Those pale thin legs, the swaying feet-a familiar prison tableau. He’d stood breathless in the doorway, all the wrong details coming into painful focus. The dusting of drywall across her shoulders from where the fan had been wrenched from the ceiling. The rasp of the pull chain, still swaying. Those perfect teeth, gleaming above her slack jaw. The next he recalled, he had her down and across his lap. One of his hands rested beneath her slender, bruised neck, the other clutching his heart as if to hold it together. His chest convulsed, a silent shaking. He thought he might be dying. Choking on his own air, he felt the moisture on his cheeks. He had not cried since his boyhood and had forgotten the sensation. He made not a sound.

After the parade of paramedics and firemen, the cops with their endless questions and looks of thinly veiled suspicion, that spic Abara had arrived with another agent to sit on the couch-his couch-and make phone calls. The house was no longer his own; medics and officers stomped about and used the toilet and left the hand towels on the counter. Nastya was conveyed out finally in a white body bag, strapped to a gurney, and Pavlo was given a phone number to call in the morning.

He’d closed the door on the last intruder, listening to it click shut, the dividing line between the present and the rest of his life. He walked back into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and drank it down. For seventeen years, every glass of water he’d had, each piece of bread, every bit of nourishment, he’d taken as a father. No more.

He rinsed the glass, dried it carefully with a towel, and set it back in the cupboard. When he turned, his men had materialized behind him. It was safe now that the officials were gone.

With its seams and bulges, Yuri’s face looked like a rotted piece of fruit. Dima and Valerik remained behind the big man, as was their habit. But Misha, Misha stood to the side, clear-eyed and well rested. His round, boyish face held a quiet contentment. He’d waited his turn, and now the bell was about to ring.

Pavlo walked over to him and brought his face close to Misha’s. Misha did not flinch, didn’t so much as blink.

“There is no trial now,” Pavlo said. “No witness list. There is one thing only, one thing left in this world.”

“I understand,” Misha said.

“My daughter is gone. And his daughter lives.” The skin of Pavlo’s face tightened like a stretched hide, bringing a dull ache to his temples. “You take from him what he has taken from me. And then you keep taking, piece by piece.”

“That is what you brought me here for,” Misha said.

“There is no more here,” Pavlo said. “No more America. There is only vorovskoi mir.”

Misha nodded, keeping his head bowed an extra beat, a show of respect. With both hands Pavlo cradled his chin and lifted his head. He kissed him on one full cheek, then the other. Still he did not release Misha’s face. Not until he’d leaned in and hissed, “Let them hate as long as they fear.”

Now, sweating in the dense air of the banya, he passed several valets gathering plates and mugs from the night and preparing for the new day. All of them stepped aside and lowered their eyes as Pavlo walked by. Word had spread.

He entered the rows of lockers and stood before his own, removing one loafer, then the other. He laid his suit jacket beside them on the wide bench. A door banged open, and drunken voices echoed around the tile-club revelers, here to detoxify after an all-night drunk. They stumbled around the corner, unshaven and reeking of alcohol. Pavlo stood, facing his locker, pushing the buttons of his dress shirt through the holes.

“Move your shit over,” one of the young men said in Russian. “You don’t own the whole bench.”

Keeping his eyes forward, Pavlo pulled off his shirt, revealing his blue arms and chest. At the sight of his tattoos, the young man backpedaled so violently that he lost his footing on the slick tile and fell back into his friends, who propped him up. Kowtowing, they retreated, calling out apologies and expressions of remorse. Pavlo kept undressing, his eyes never leaving his locker, and a moment later the door boomed a second time and it was silent again.

Once naked, Pavlo reached for a comb he kept on the top shelf of his locker and scraped back his hair, already wet from the humidity. He did it again and again, pressing the comb hard enough to bruise the scalp, feeling the plastic teeth scour his skull.

Then he padded through the antechamber, past the claw-foot tubs and icy plunge pools. Beneath a dripping faucet, a heap of thin birchwood branches soaked in a wooden barrel. He chose one with especially dense foliage and shook it in assessment, cool drops dotting his cheeks. It would do.

In the banya itself, the firebox glowed, the throat of a demon. A worker, half invisible in the steam, hurled logs in.

“Hotter,” Pavlo said, and the mist-draped form nodded and fed the monster some more.

Pavlo set down the branch and stretched, first his hamstrings, then his groin. Leaning into the burn, he emitted a deep open-mouthed exhalation, expunging the swamp gas from his belly up through the tube of his throat. On the hiss of his air, he could smell his own insides, cigarettes and mortality. His skin was aflame, the heat at him with its pitchfork and horns.

“Hotter!” he roared.

The form bent and rose, hurling more logs into the mouth of the firebox.

Sweat beading on his skin, Pavlo snatched up the birchwood branch and slapped it against his legs. The sting was unearthly, divine, bringing up the toxins, releasing them through his skin.

He flailed and whipped at the tattooed shackles clamped around his ankles, purging the poisons of his body. That was what the birchwood was for, of course, but he knew now, in the hot center of the pain, why he had come.

In the Zone the worst sin a vor could commit was breaking the thieves’ code, disgracing the brotherhood. If he did not stand by his decorations, they were taken from him. With sandpaper. Shards of glass. A lump of brick. Sometimes the offender was held by five men, a red-hot frying pan pressed to the back of his hand to black out the pigment beneath. So this, then, was why Pavlo had been drawn to the inferno.

With the branch he continued to strike at himself. His hands, the ring tattoos. Slapping at his chest, beating the eight-pointed star, the ornate church domes marking his internments, the scrolled lettering across his ribs-LET ME BE DEAD TO YOU. Sweat flew from his nose, his chin; it puddled at his feet. He flailed harder, slashed at the tulip thrice wrapped with barbed wire, tried to carve the bare-toothed scowl from the wolf capping his shoulder. And then, doubling over, whipping the branch over his shoulder, raking the leaves across the inked eyes on his back. His screams turned to animal roars, cords standing out on his neck, each blow intensifying the heat until it seemed his entire body glowed like an ember.

“Hotter!” he cried, but the form was now lost entirely to the thickening steam.

The leaves shushed and rattled, a primitive instrument beating an age-old rhythm. Bits of foliage broke off, sticking to his red flesh. His sinuses burned; his lungs pulsed. He gasped in the heady scent of released pain and fresh-peeled skin, intoxicated on the taste of his own agony, choking on the knife-sharp purity of the air. He lashed at the abrasions, the sharp leaf edges finding greater purchase, rending the ink from his flesh. Screaming, he battered at his grief, beating the imperfection from himself, blood weeping from his brands.

Finally he paused in heart-arresting exhaustion, his chest heaving, his face awash with tears and sweat, and let the stained birchwood branch fall from his fist. Burgundy drops spattered the tile at his feet.

He stared down at himself through the swirling steam. His decorations moved, alive with veins of blood. They drifted on his skin, rippling and breathing, and the revelation lit him from within: He hadn’t gouged the decorations from his body.

He had reclaimed them.