Griffin #4
I walk in, unhurried, pretending I have some right to exist there, and I’m immediately swallowed by the bad music from a crooked jukebox—the same one I broke—the hollow sound of pool balls, and the buzz of drunks.
The bartender, a bald guy with a scar running across his mouth, sees me. He stops cleaning a glass and his face closes up. A silent warning for types like me, who confuse bars with boxing rings.
“Look who’s back,” he spits out, full of disgust, his eyes taking a quick inventory of the things I could break. “Came to finish the job with the rest of the furniture?”
I sit at the bar, staring at the dirty mirror behind him. It reflects a dozen ghosts: patched-up people, ex-fighters, retired whores, and me, in the center of the frame, all twisted from bruises. “Just here for a drink,” I say, and toss a fifty on the counter. “Vodka. The cheap stuff.”
He looks at the bill, then at me. “Fixing the jukebox cost five hundred bucks. And the owner still wants your head.”
I laugh, but only on one side, because the other still hurts.
“Tell the owner I’m working for people who pay a lot more than five hundred bucks for a headache,” I say, making a point of showing the black card Alexei gave me just for this, waving it in the air. “Now, the drink.”
He doesn’t like it, but he likes talking to me even less, so he takes the money, turns his back, and grabs a bottle with no label. He serves the shot in a small glass. “Just don’t break my glass, for fuck’s sake.”
I take the shot. It burns like acid—the taste of cheap crime is always the same.
I swallow it down, scan the bar, and find the same extras as every other night: an old couple playing dominoes, a man with a dirty face lost in some slot machine game, a guy in a cap and leather jacket scribbling in a little yellow notebook.
With every sip, the conversation with Seraphim comes back. The way he looked at me, with no hope, but still with that stubborn undercurrent of faith from someone who’s seen me perform worse miracles. I did it: he’s going to cooperate.
The taste in my mouth isn’t victory. It’s a mix of pity, anger, and a little bit of stupid pride. He’ll survive. Maybe he’ll even reinvent himself, again.
The image of his sad smile, of the hesitant hug, repeats in my head. We were always idiots.
I think of Alexei. I feel a stupid urge to call, to tell him, to hear his voice, even if it’s just to receive another order.
But no. Not now. I’ll go back to the apartment, look him in the eye, and tell him I held up my end of the bargain.
That his investment was worth it. He deserves to hear the news that I succeeded, that Seraphim will cooperate, but he deserves to hear it from a whole man, not a drunken rag.
A bald guy with a barbed-wire tattoo on his neck challenges another guy to a best-of-three.
The bets fly: money, cigarettes, favors.
No one there bets on their own life because it’s worthless, yet everyone bets on anything that gives meaning to the now.
The bald guy misses the decisive shot and curses the cue, the table, the cue’s mother.
I laugh, and I feel peace. This is real life.
Simple, brutal, without angels or demons.
I get up, dragging my stiff joints. I decide to go home—the apartment—before the world collapses.
I check the street through the window before leaving. The rain is threatening to fall, holding off. The streetlights flicker.
That’s when they walk in.
They make no effort to hide; on the contrary, they parade toward the bar with pride.
The two biggest ones come first, broad shoulders and gloved hands, but it’s the third figure, slightly behind, who commands the show.
Vania.
The entire bar goes silent.
Vania enters, a short, cold smile already prepared for the audience.
He’s wearing a suit jacket that would cost everyone here a month’s rent, and it doesn’t hide his brutality.
The thin beard, the nose broken so many times it’s crooked, the bloodshot eyes of someone who can’t sleep without pills.
His gaze finds me before he even reaches the bar, and I know this circus is personal.
“Well, look at this,” Vania says, too loud for the place. “I didn’t know purebred dogs came to sniff their own asses so far from home.” He walks toward me. “I was told you owed an explanation, cripple. And I came to collect.”
I take a deep breath and rest my metal arm on the table.
“What do you want?” I say.
Vania doesn’t care about answers. He laughs and gestures to the two guys with him. They block the door, selecting the audience. The bar remains in absolute silence, except for an old man at the jukebox who is still trying, in vain, to make it play some seventies hit.
“My cousin may tolerate you, but I… I’ve never liked a traitor,” he says. “But you stepped into my territory and put your hands on my men… you steal Alexei’s wine, and he doesn’t give you a beating. So the next day you put your hands on what isn’t yours again.”
The audience—junkies, gamblers, whores, retirees—pretends not to see, but everyone is waiting for the show and can smell the blood coming.
His gesture is minimal, but the two goons move before my mind can process it.
The first one charges straight ahead. I use the table as a shield; the stool breaks against his shins.
The sound is ugly, the fall is worse. The second comes from the side, thinking he’ll catch me by surprise.
My elbow catches him right in the nose; I feel the cartilage give, a hot spray of blood hits my arm.
Vania waits until I’m busy with the second man before landing a punch that feels like a cannonball in my ribs. The air escapes my lungs.
I fall to my knees, trying to pull the world back in. Vania kicks me in the stomach, with the contempt of someone stepping on a dead animal in the street.
And that’s when—the universe has its cruelties—my phone starts to ring. It’s the burner phone I brought, and the only person who would call me on it is Alexei.
Vania stops for a couple of seconds, smiles crookedly, and says, “Is Daddy calling to put you to bed?”
Then he aims for my pocket and smashes the phone with a precise kick, as if he wants to pin me to the floor. I feel the device turn to dust, the screen piercing my jeans and maybe even my skin. The ringing dies with a pathetic crackle. Alexei indeed knows the right time to call.
The goon with the broken nose groans in the corner, the other drags his leg, but Vania doesn’t need an audience. He lifts me by the collar, his hand like a bear’s claw, his breath of expensive whiskey and old hatred almost blinding me.
“I know your type,” he spits, and the hatred in his voice is personal. “A snitch. A rat who sold out his own brothers. You were one of the Volkovs’ dogs, and now you’re my cousin’s dog. You have no honor.”
I want to spit in his face. My jaw is locked.
“The guy…” I gasp, trying to catch my breath, “he was selling data… to Vasily.”
Vania laughs, a loud, incredulous laugh that echoes through the bar. Then he hits me with a punch that almost separates my head from the rest of my body. The taste of blood fills my mouth.
I grab his arm, but even as I squeeze it, he doesn’t flinch.
“You think I’m stupid? You think you can throw my cousin’s dirt on me, you worm? You attack one of my best men in public and think a cheap lie will save you?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He throws me to the floor, and my back hits the corner of a table. My spine makes a complaint that will last a week. The bar seems even more crowded somehow, and no one moves. They are all accomplices.
Vania pulls me up again, this time by my metal arm. He examines the prosthesis, as if trying to find out if it feels pain. “You’re not even real,” he mutters with repulsion. “Alexei’s little fucking robot.”
He twists the joint, looking for a weak spot, but I turn with him.
I wrench his forearm from its position and drive my flesh-and-blood fist into the exposed bone above his wrist. I feel the pressure, the bone wanting to give.
He screams, a sharp note of surprise and anger.
The scream is short-lived: the goons recover, and one of them hits me with a punch to the ear, throwing me back into limbo.
The bar spins, the sound of glasses growing more distant. I almost pass out. There’s something in me that refuses to die without taking someone with me.
Vania lifts me again, now with both hands. “I warned you: here, rats die.” And he hurls me against the nearest wall.
I feel my head crack, the lights flicker. The audience recoils, but not too much: no one wants to miss the finale. The bartender tries to pretend he’s cleaning glasses, shaking so much he almost becomes his own customer.
Vania pins me against the wall. “I’m going to teach you to never look the wrong way again.”
I want to answer. My throat closes up. Instead, I raise my knee and hit him in the groin. It’s not pretty, but it’s effective: he falters, grinds his teeth, and I get enough space to break free.
I push Vania back and use my own pain as momentum. With my metal arm, I aim a cross at his jaw. He stumbles back two steps but keeps his balance.
The next round begins. Vania advances, foaming with rage, and punches me in the pit of my stomach.
Again. I double over, but I don’t fall. He grabs me by the neck, pulls me onto the pool table.
The billiard balls roll across the felt, some falling to the floor.
The audience leans in, wanting to bet on who bleeds more.
“Why don’t you just give up?” he asks, pissed, and I don’t know if I’m hallucinating to think there’s something genuinely curious in the question.
I stop to breathe. Blood runs down my chin.
“You’ll never be better than Alexei,” I whisper.
That pisses him off more than anything else that has happened today.
He punches me hard in the face.
“Snitch,” he grunts with each punch. “Trash.” Punch. “Mutt.” Punch.
Each blow becomes a blur. I refuse to black out. I feel my scalp split open, my eyelids swell, my lips burst. The third punch makes my teeth grind against each other, creaking like old gears. My bionic arm locks up, but I use it as a shield, protecting what’s left of my head.
I find a little room to maneuver and, in a fit of pure rage, I break Vania’s nose with my own forehead. The sound is so delicious I laugh through the blood.
He roars, retreats. The goon from before comes at me again, and I smash his face with my metal forearm, and the sound of his crushed cheekbones is comical. But Vania doesn’t play fair.
From behind, he grabs me again, bends me over the table, and, using his own body, tries to crush me there. The impact shatters the pool table’s top.
My metal arm is trapped. I can’t get out.
Vania takes advantage: he pushes my prosthetic fist even deeper into the table’s torn felt, his other hand free to punch me in the face or crush my windpipe whenever he feels like it.
He hits with domestic anger, family hatred, with that sick talent for violence that you only learn from being beaten by your own relatives.
The audience doesn’t even breathe. In the entire bar, there are only the cracks of bone and Vania’s low laugh.
“You’re nothing,” Vania says softly. “A broken dog my cousin pulled from the trash. And it’s to the trash you’ll return.”
My left arm, the flesh one, isn’t responding right. All my joints creak. The right one, metal, only serves as a lever to pin me to the table. With each punch, my vision fades a little more.
For an instant, I see flashes of my childhood: the smell of the woods behind the orphanage, the nuns’ scoldings when I skipped mass with Seraphim, Seraphim teaching me to shoot at empty beer cans.
Then the smell of gunpowder, the smell of blood, the bloody rings, and Alexei’s gaze swearing loyalty to me.
The world spins, the faces become a blur, the bar’s light fades at the edges of my vision.
He whispers, “Only those who learn to like getting hit survive.”
I don’t have the strength to answer, but I laugh. Because it’s true.
And in the darkness that begins to swallow me, I think that I need to survive this shit, just so I can see Alexei’s son-of-a-bitch face when I tell him the joke.