Kotik

Chapter 40 Dues

Dues

Amonth after Elena’s death, Vitali received the fake passports and visa documents for Mama and Maxim. They came through a German heritage integration program, complete with birth certificates and church records from some small town in the southeast.

I brought Vitali when I told Mama about my plan, and she outright refused to entertain the idea, but my words had instilled a seed of fear in her eyes.

It killed me to do it, but I made decisions that put my family at risk, and it was too late to back out.

I failed her as a daughter, but I would do whatever I could to do better by them now.

“I don’t think we should tell Maxim,” I said. We were all gathered in her kitchen, and Mama sat pale-faced across the table from me. “This doesn’t mean you have to leave just… that you can.”

Mama sighed deeply, not looking up, and shook her head. “Katushka…”

“They provide language courses that are included with the program,” Vitali assured her. “There are Russian speakers there. They have whole communities; every sign and street name is written in Russian.”

She covered her face, palms pressed tightly against her eyes. For a long time, she said nothing.

Vitali slid into the chair beside her. At first, he put one arm around her shoulders, and when she didn’t move, he pulled her into a full hug. “I’ll make sure you have everything you need.”

She kept shaking her head no, but did lean into the embrace.

Pieces of my heart lay broken across the checkered pattern of the tablecloth, holding it together because there was no other way.

A poor time for self-pity, and I had to remind myself that there was no food before Vitali.

No money for the apartment. No money for Maxim’s school or Mama’s medicines.

They would have all that and more, even in Germany.

But I wouldn’t have them… and neither would Vitali.

When I looked up, Mama was crying, and he had shifted in his chair so she could do so in the privacy of his chest. It would be easier for her to hate me, and I appreciated that he could be there to comfort her instead.

They sat on the couch and watched Mama’s favorite show, Santa Barbara, while I made dinner.

I’d never heard Vitali mention it once, but he knew enough to argue with her over Julia being justified in blowing up at Mason.

Funny how Vitali took the stance that she should have already left, since Mason was keeping secrets and shouldn’t have let his father get in the middle of the relationship.

Maxim came home sporting a black eye. He’d been off somewhere with the friends he met over the past few months.

Vitali got him a bike, so when the weather was nice he was gone a lot.

My brother immediately sensed something in the way Mama acted.

He kept himself casual, like a bored teenager, when he asked what was going on—but panic wrote itself all over his features.

“You might get to visit some cool places,” Vitali told him. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Where?”

Mama turned away. Her steps were wide as she hurried to the kitchen.

“Do you like fishing?” Vitali asked.

Maxim nodded, growing increasingly paler. He wasn’t dumb, I’d give him that. He had no wish to look past things like his older sister. Kids talked—boys talked.

“I’ll take you fishing in a few days, closer to the weekend,” Vitali continued.

“Alright…” My brother scrunched his nose and looked down the hallway where pots and pans clattered in the sink. “But I don’t have a fishing rod.”

“I’ll get you one. We’ll take the Jeep. Maybe I’ll let you drive.”

Maxim’s face lit up with a grin, but he nervously glanced at me, waiting to be told he couldn’t drive at the ripe age of nine. I pretended I didn’t hear the exchange, but made a mental note to ask Vitali if he was serious, because that wasn’t guaranteed to be a joke.

Mama and I did not part on a good note, but she didn’t kick us out either. The best I could hope for after the day we had.

The drive back was a melancholy one. Vitali’s gaze never left the road, and now and then he’d bite his nails—a habit I had never seen before.

“You know how to fish?” I asked when the silence grew to be too much.

“No. But I’ll learn.”

I nodded absently.

“You know it’s not a guarantee that they’ll have to go,” he said. “I can make sure. That nothing happens to make them go.”

“Vitali…”

“I can put another man on the apartment.”

“Vitali.”

He gave me an irritated glance before returning to the road.

I lowered my eyes. “Something is going to happen. Things never stop happening. Reacting to it isn’t enough; it has to be prevented. I don’t know how else to do that.”

“What do you want me to do, Katya?” he muttered.

“I want you to understand I can’t live like this and do nothing. I don’t want things to keep happening to me.”

“Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“You don’t get it.” I sighed. It wasn’t his fault. The thoughts had been bouncing around in my head ever since… ever since everything. It had to start with Mama and Maxim, but it couldn’t end there. “How much money do you have access to?”

“Enough. How much do you need?”

No ‘what for?’ Just like that.

“Enough to offset where it’s coming from. I want to do something for boys like Maxim. Give them something to do so they don’t end up…”

“Like me.”

“…Mixed up with the wrong company. I’m sorry.”

His finger tapped on the steering wheel, and he rubbed his chin, but said nothing.

“They have sports, but the programs are underfunded and the spots limited. He was lucky to get on a swim team last year, and no one was taking new students when he transferred.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have gotten him in.”

“That’s not the point. Every kid can’t get ‘in’ because their—” I choked, because I almost said brother-in-law.

“Family has connections,” he finished for me.

“Right.”

“This is Russia. It’s just the way it is, Kotik.”

“But wouldn’t it be nice if it weren’t? And you’re right—I do mean like you, Vitali. Because a young boy should have a place to go. I wish you had a place to go.”

“Then I wouldn’t have met you,” he said flatly. “What do you want to do? I’ll find the funds, within reason, but I can’t guarantee what happens once it’s in motion. Things have a way of serving someone else’s purpose eventually.”

“I’ll think on it,” I said.

I had no answers, maybe no one did, but knowing he would make it happen meant everything.

“Thank you, Vitali.”

* * *

The next day, I received the call.

Vitali was already gone. It was early enough in the day that nothing good could possibly be happening on the other end of the line, but I’d grown used to ‘nothing good’ and picked up anyway.

It was Boris, not someone I was accustomed to having around. He never called me before, but the guys watching Mama’s apartment always switched off and he could have been on duty. My stomach immediately dropped when I heard his voice.

“You’d better come here,” he said. There was no background noise. “I can pick you up in thirty.”

“I’ll take a taxi.” I was already wrapping the scarf around my neck with one foot in a shoe.

“I’m going to insist I pick you up.”

I didn’t fight. I did call Vitali immediately upon hanging up, but he didn’t answer. Not even on the second ring.

Boris arrived earlier than he said, but wouldn’t give me any information when I began questioning him about Mama and Maxim. Eventually, he told me to ‘shut the fuck up,’ and it was no longer a friendly car ride. Misha spoke to me that way, and he was the only one I’d tolerate it from.

It didn’t take long to figure out we weren’t going to Mama’s.

Forty minutes in, I began looking for stoplights where I could open the door and make a run for it, but he noticed and casually locked the doors.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

“No,” he huffed. “Calm down. Sergei wants to see you, that’s all.”

“Where is Vitali?”

“Working. He doesn’t need to be there. It won’t take long.”

That turned out to be a lie, but I knew that right away. No one who has ever been kidnapped would describe it as ‘not taking long.’

We pulled up to the same offices where I’d originally met Sergei, but there were more cars up front and far more people in the hallways. Some I recognized, but most of them were unsmiling strangers who paid me no mind.

Sergei was back behind the desk with an air-thickening cigar hanging at the corner of his mouth.

“How are you, Katya?” he asked. I would not be offered juice this time.

“Fine, thank you,” I said, sitting down at Boris’s insistent glare.

“Sorry to hear about your blond friend,” Sergei said, “but I said I’d find her—didn’t I?”

“Vitali found her…” I muttered.

He chuckled and took his glasses off. “Is that so? I don’t think so. But I did give him a call when I did. Should I have called you, Katya? Well my apologies. Our business was our own, wasn’t it? That’s why I wanted you to stop by. I have something you can do to repay me.”

What could I say? The last time I saw Sergei wasn’t a pleasant one, and whatever he was going to suggest would hopefully get me out of his office. Could put me in a much worse place, but arguing with him would accomplish nothing either.

“Alright.”

“Now, nothing big. Don’t make that face,” he said, waving a hand to presumably shoo away my attitude.

“You just happen to be a good candidate for a small delivery job. It’s at your old work in the Administrative Building.

Just pick something up from the Senator’s office, then drop it off at one of my businesses.

Boris will go with you, but he can’t go into a government building—or I’d have him do the damn thing. ”

“Alright,” I repeated. “What is it?”

“Never mind that. You’re a shit liar so you’re better off not knowing or you’ll attract attention with your owly eyes.”

My eyes weren’t owly… were they?

He wrote down some instructions and confiscated my cellphone. For safety.

Boris and I drove to a bus stop five blocks away from my old work. There, I got on the 12A bus, taking up a spot at the front while he stood at the back past the bellows.

Nothing felt right. I didn’t trust Sergei or his nonchalant description of what could very well be a drug deal… or worse. But if this made us even, I could survive a quick bus ride and an awkward exchange with old colleagues who would see me walk through the halls in a brand new fur-lined coat.

Vitali, where are you…

I wasn’t carrying anything yet, but the sight of the militiamen still tightened my chest. All I could do when they greeted me was give a polite wave. I got some stares, but most everyone went on with their miserable day. It wasn’t long ago that I was among them.

The only one to pay attention was Ira, who apparently got a demotion from the budget department into a secretary desk outside the Senator’s personal office.

“Haven’t seen you in a long time,” she said, eyeing my clothes. “You’ve been doing well since you quit.”

That amount of venom could have killed an elephant.

“I’ve been alright,” I said, and glanced around. “Is there a package for a Boris Gagarin? I’m supposed to pick it up.”

She hmm’d and swung some drawers open, then huffed getting out of her desk and began pulling things from the cubbies. None of this was done with any kind of urgency, but eventually she retrieved a tightly wrapped package the size of a TV remote and shoved it at me across the desk.

So small, yet so panic-inducing.

I thanked her, and when I exited the building, the rain was already pounding muddy sidewalks and colorful umbrellas floated above the crowds. Boris didn’t have one, and neither did I, so we were both fairly miserable by the time we got back to the car.

He didn’t ask to see it. Didn’t say anything at all as we drove through the city with nothing but the squeak of windshield wipers and tap-tap-taps on the roof.

He took us to the outskirts of the city, but stopped before we reached the factory district and turned onto a side street lined with neglected industrial dormitories.

He followed me as we entered a podyezd with crumbling concrete and exposed rebar.

I’d grown up with some questionable aromas in the stairwells, but this was far worse than that. A warm, organic smell mixed with that of sewage and sharp chemicals. It did not get better when we got to the long hallway on the third floor.

Dozens of doors lined each side, some wide open and some closed, although warped wood left a lot unable to properly seal. The floor consisted of a narrow path through swept garbage and rotting dirt. Much of it was syringes. Countless syringes.

I pulled my scarf over my nose.

No one should be living there, but as we walked, I glimpsed ghastly people sitting on mattresses and hunching over small electric stoves. The communal bathrooms couldn’t have been usable—they were completely clogged up with trash and feces from backed-up toilets, which were only holes in the floor.

He took me into a larger room at the end of the hall. There, walls had been knocked out to combine individual shared apartments into one large space—but I wouldn’t call it a home.

“Wait there,” Boris said, nodding to a ripped, oil-stained couch.

I didn’t argue, but I did not sit down either, just stood beside it with my hands clasped and stared at the fat little TV with a snapped antenna set atop a low, metal desk.

It was dark except for my vivid reflection framed by the mural of peeling wallpaper at my back.

Behind it, the discolored wall showed signs of animals scratching at what used to be the baseboards but were now just pieces of splintered wood concealing frayed wires.

A skeletal child ran by the doorway in nothing but his underpants.

I waited for a long time. Once in a while, someone would pass by the open door and peek inside with little interest. All skinny people with exposed sores. It was difficult to tell the women from men sometimes, but I could always make out the children.

The strong hospital-like smell seeped into the space behind my eyes, pounding. I fingered the small package clutched tightly in my hands and kept waiting.

And waiting.

The rain stopped, but it still smelled damp. I only knew that because an open apartment across the hall had a window that hadn’t been boarded up. There was no lamp, and no overhead light. Dark began setting in, and Boris wasn’t back.

I lifted the package to better examine the wrapping. The outside was secured with a single piece of tape beneath a rough plastic film.

My hands trembled as I peeled it back and shook the paper away.

A block of wood. I turned it over and over. Just a plain block of roughly hewn wood.

The numbing cold spread through my veins as I held it out. That wasn’t the delivery.

I was.