Chapter 26 Little Bitch
Little Bitch
The conversation got very tiresome, and it happened more and more often.
“Allo?”
“Irina Ivanovna, is Elena home?” I twirled the phone cord around my finger.
It’d been weeks since I left my number for Elena, and I still hadn’t heard from her.
She was mad—I could understand that—but I’d never gone this long without talking to my best friend.
It was a week before my birthday, and we always spent it together.
Besides, she hadn’t truly met Vitali, and I had been more nervous about that than having him meet Mama.
“No, Katenka, I haven’t seen her. Please try back later,” her mama said, voice worn. There were things left unsaid, but I heard my phone ringing in the other room and hurried to get the words out.
“Could you please let her know I called?”
“I will.”
Having both phones was still strange, and I kept forgetting about the mobile one until it rang.
“Allo?” I said, fully expecting it to be Vitali. Instead, I heard Misha’s strained voice.
“Katya. I need you to make soup.”
“What?”
“I need you to go fill a pot right now. Put it on maximum heat. Throw whatever you want in there, I don’t care. Just make sure you chop it on the table. Leave the knife dirty.”
A chill ran through me, and I stood very still in that sliver of time before his words made sense—and they didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Only that something was happening, and it wasn’t good.
“Katya, I need you not to panic.”
No other words in the Russian language could make one panic more.
I scrambled to the kitchen, and Mama yelled something from the other room, but I didn’t slow because when a man of Misha’s reputation tells you not to panic, you don’t pause.
“You get that on there, and you take Mama and your brother to the neighbors.”
“We don’t know the neighbors yet—Misha what is happening?”
“It doesn’t matter if you know the neighbors. Take them, and do it fast.”
“Where is Vitali—”
“BLYAD KATYA!”
I yanked the phone away from my ear as he screamed something else, and dropped it on the table, then retrieved the pot and stuck it under the faucet.
“Mama!” I hollered.
It took a lot of yelling for me to convince her to go, but something clicked, and she said nothing else, just hurried.
He was still on the line.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I hissed, crushing the phone between my shoulder and ear as my hands worked to dice potatoes. “Right now, Misha!”
“Listen to me as you move your ass because you don’t have time, Katya,” he warned.
My stomach was already one big knot. The knife slipped in my shaking hands and nearly took off my thumb. “Alright—alright!”
“Some bad men are on their way up. They’re about to come to the door and ask you to search the apartment. You’re going to let them. One of them is a cop—don’t say a fucking word to him, but comply as any citizen would. Are you done with the soup?”
I threw the last bit of celery into the pot. “Yeah…”
“Good. Go put on a loose sweater, but tight pants. Be certain the gun is loaded, and tuck it in the band where the sweater will conceal it. Make sure you can reach it.”
“Oh my God—”
“You don’t have time for God. If you have stacks of dollars, hide them on your person. They shouldn’t touch you, but they’ll search everything else. Katya, stay calm. You’ll be fine.”
“I can’t do this… Misha I can’t do this…”
“I’m on my way, but don’t stall them. The faster they leave, the better.”
“I’ve never dealt with the police!”
The pause drove a knife through me because I already knew what he was going to say.
“They aren’t police.”
Breathe in—breathe out. I hung up carefully, because sudden movements might break me, and pulled on those damned leather pants. The ghost echoes of steps shuffling up the stairs were all I could hear, even though they probably took the elevator.
I only had one stack of banknotes (wasn’t that weird to say) and stuck it snugly at the back, thanking God I hadn’t lost weight since the summer. Before I could pull the sweater down, the knock came.
Like Misha said—stay calm. At that moment, no memory remained of how normal people answered the door, but I tried anyway.
Two men in long winter coats stood outside.
I studied them through the peephole, bracing for the worst. Preparing for the ‘fun’ guns to be drawn and already pointed.
But instead, one held a clipboard, while the other breathed on his hands.
I could do this. They were only human. Misha was more intimidating than this.
Vitali was too…
I opened the door, but only a two-finger width. “Hello?”
“Forgive us, we are looking for Vitali Konstantinov. Is he home?” the man in the large fur hat asked. He would be my papa’s age if Papa were still alive. The other man, with heavy, dark bags under his eyes and the clipboard, tried to look past me.
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” I said, and on instinct shifted to block the view into the apartment.
“Who lives here?” Clipboard asked.
“Me, my mama, and my brother,” I said. “No Konstantinovs here.”
“And what is your name?” the large hat man inquired as he reached into his coat. I flinched, but he pulled out a metal badge with a clearly marked service number and his last name.
Baranov, it read. The policeman.
“Katya Petrovna.”
“Please, young woman,” Baranov said, tucking the badge into his pocket. “We have a sanction to search the apartment. We won’t be long, if you could let us in.”
I listened to Misha against every instinct and stepped aside, opening the door. Clipboard nodded at me in thanks, and they walked right past me without taking off their shoes.
I don’t know why that irked me so much, or why I thought of it later, after everything changed.
To their credit, they weren’t completely destroying everything. Drawers came flying open, rattled and left hanging on their tracks. Couch cushions flew about, but they only slashed the seats, so that was okay. We could put a nice rug over them to hide the cuts bleeding stuffing.
The walls were stripped of paintings. I cringed when they took the only photo I’d hung up since we moved in—the picture of all of us.
Papa, Mama, Maxim and I. We were at the Black Sea, on vacation.
They ripped it apart, and they didn’t have to.
The cruelty of that one act washed over me like a wave and took my faith in humanity out to sea in its retreat.
I followed them room to room, but always stayed in the doorway. Because that’s what a lawful citizen would do.
They talked amongst themselves and pointed and threw Mama’s dresses on the ground. The atrocious, but innocent, porcelain dolls’ heads cracked like eggs as they were shoved off the shelves.
A calm had settled over me by the time they got to the kitchen. If I found the guns that easily, who was to say there weren’t more here? They were certain to be better at finding them.
Would they just take them? Arrest me?
They aren’t the police.
…Kill me?
I should have been hysterical; anyone else would be in my position.
Should I pretend? I had never been able to cry on command, a fact that cost me a prestigious role in a fourth-grade school play.
Maybe I could summon some tears if I thought of a childhood cat, but that’d be hard too, because two men were throwing silverware out of the drawers and feeling for false bottoms. That’s no time for cats.
The pot was boiling, and I went to turn the heat down as if it were a normal Tuesday afternoon. So much water had already evaporated that a ring of carrot-potato remains formed above the waterline.
“What are you making?” Clipboard asked.
“Soup.”
“Doesn’t smell like any soup I’ve ever had,” Baranov said. “What is it?”
“Just soup,” I said. “My mama’s recipe. For when we can’t afford meat.” I paused, the thick brick of dollars pressing against my lower back. “Can’t be buying meat in this economy.”
I prayed he didn’t look in the cooler cabinet beneath the window where frozen mutton lay wrapped up in parchment paper. I was going to make pilaf for Vitali, he just bought me fancy Turkish coriander. There would be no pilaf if I died, coriander or not.
He grunted affirmatively and tossed a pan on the ground with a loud clang and ring. Then another, and another. I took a step back as they rolled throughout the kitchen. One hit my foot, spun, and landed upside down.
“Look here,” Baranov said, his voice triumphant. My blood froze. “Knew this bitch was lying. Fake back panel.”
Just like that, any remnants of their civility disappeared.
“You lying to us, little bitch?” Clipboard laughed and craned his neck to examine the upper cabinet, the one with the flour and sunflower oil, next to the bag of sugar we hadn’t even opened yet.
The white cloud rose like an atom bomb in the middle of the kitchen as the sack of flour burst across the tile. Something scraped, and Baranov handed a piece of stiff vinyl to Clipboard as he pawed around the hollow space.
In a split-second decision, I took off.
One of them shouted for the other to go after me, and my vision shook as I slid around the corner to the exit. He slammed into me sooner than I hoped, smashing my body with a loud crack against the closed front door.
Hands everywhere—hands and my hair flying and tangling as I tried to scratch and fight him off.
I grunted, but didn’t scream. His wide palm struck me, my cheek bouncing off the door again before I buckled, curling into a tight ball as he took a fistful of hair and spewed angry words I didn’t understand because I was too drunk on fear.
“Empty,” Baranov said, coming up behind my captor as the man spat a wad of bloody saliva where I’d (accidentally) headbutted him in the mouth. “I’d say they cleaned it out before she moved in, but look at her—she knows something.”