Chapter 2
Magda Kaprovna lay in her prison bunk until it was her turn to go for a shower.
She got up and walked to the showers, slipped the baby blue top and dark blue uniform pants off and hung them on an empty hook.
She was slender, just under six feet. If she had been born somewhere other than Russia, she might have been a model.
She wasn’t a model. The pale skin of her body had bluish tattoos done for her by a woman in her first Russian prison, a forger and counterfeiter.
There was a picture of Mary and baby Jesus on her back that was a good luck token among the vors.
Vor meant “thief,” the term professional criminals called themselves, regardless of their specialties.
There were two eight-pointed stars on the fronts of her shoulders, an emblem of the Bratva, or Brotherhood, she belonged to.
And just below her hip bones, equidistant from her groin, were two American hundred-dollar bills, so perfectly done that they looked as though they could be peeled off and spent.
Most of the California women who populated the prison had no idea what her tattoos meant.
Many of them had tattoos of their own, mostly hearts, flowers, butterflies, or the names of the boyfriends who had gotten them in there by talking them into holding drugs, guns, or merchandise, or driving cars.
Magda stepped onto the wet tile and ducked under a showerhead, letting the warm water rain down on her, soak her long black hair, and stream down her spine.
When a younger woman left one of the showers on the other wall, Magda spun, crouched, and had both fists up in an instant, although it was hard to know how she had even seen the woman behind her.
She saw the young woman’s light brown hair, her body with a Madonna on her stomach holding the baby up as though to let it suck on her left breast, and two small eight-pointed stars on her shoulders.
She relaxed and stepped back under the water.
The young woman moved close, their faces almost touching, and said in Russian, “They sent me to find you.”
Magda asked, “How did they get you to the right prison?”
“You had robbed a jewelry store in Modesto, so I robbed a jewelry store in Modesto.”
“Thank you. You could have been shot.”
“I wasn’t, and they’ll get me out—mistaken identity.”
“What do they want?” Magda said.
“There was a house where all the people died of smoke inhalation except you. There was a woman you had captured.”
“What about her? She died too.”
“Members of the Bratva watched for a long time—a couple years—and there was never a funeral for her. Never an obituary. They told me she’s not dead.”
“They’re sure?”
“They’re sure.” She took a step away and smiled. “Don’t you trust them?”
Magda was wearing the same uniform that she and all the other prisoners wore during the three years she had been locked up in the California Institute for Women in Chino—baby blue top and dark blue pants.
This time she had a chain around her waist with handcuffs attached to it so she couldn’t even bring her hand up to brush the hair out of her face.
She had to flip her head to swing the hair behind her like a horse with a mane.
She wasn’t dissatisfied. This place was a resort compared with the places where she’d been locked up in Russia.
But time was not about how she felt while it was passing.
It wasn’t about feeling at all. Time was a thing, solid and unchanging as a row of bricks—something that governments measured in midnights.
Magda had been sentenced to be deprived of 1,825 midnights.
Someone in the system had placed her name on a list of inmates who were foreign nationals and had served enough of their sentences to be deported right away.
She hoped that she was not really being sent back to Russia, but all she could do was what the Brotherhood wanted.
When the male guards had loaded her into the van to be driven to the airport, the short, bulky woman in a uniform she hadn’t seen before looked at some papers and said Magda Kaprovna was going to board a United flight from Los Angeles to New York, then another to Istanbul, and then a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow.
Magda could tell that the woman considered this to be a routine deportation, because her face was expressionless as a welder’s mask, so Magda remained silent and pretended to be unaffected too.
She remembered that her first flight to this country had been over ten hours.
This trip sounded much longer. She had spent most of her life as a thief, so she knew that a female thief could not succeed through aggression.
She had to be patient and watch and listen, to perceive openings and use them, not try to force things open.
At the airport, she was escorted to a small, featureless room with no designation on the door, and given street clothes to wear—a white pullover shirt, a sweater, and black jeans—probably to avoid drawing the attention of other passengers.
She was escorted to the plane by a pair of marshals, a man and a woman, and sat in the middle seat between them.
They stayed with her for the layover at JFK, and then the second flight.
She flew to Istanbul Airport sitting between the two, except when she went to the airplane bathroom and the woman went with her and stood leaning on the little door so Magda had to knock to get out.
At Istanbul they handed her over to two Russians, a woman and a man.
Those two walked her to a boarding gate where there were no airline people visible.
They opened the door, walked her along the twisting Jetway tunnel, unlocked her handcuffs and removed them, took her through the hatch, then down the aisle to the tail of the airplane, where there was another open hatch.
There was a staircase with wheels pushed up against the fuselage where workers were restocking the galley’s supplies.
The man and woman conducted her out through the hatch to the tarmac, walked her to a different plane parked three spaces farther, and up a similar set of steps to the rear hatch and into that plane.
The woman said to her in Russian, “The plane leaves in thirty-one minutes. The other passengers will begin boarding in one minute. This is your seat.” She pointed to one on the aisle beside her.
“Get in it and stay there.” Magda obeyed, and the woman handed her an airline ticket and the purse she’d been carrying.
Magda took them and waited. The woman said, “Have a safe trip,” and then she and the man walked to the rear of the plane and out through the open hatch.
In a moment a flight attendant walked from the nose of the airplane, past Magda to the tail hatch, swung it shut, sealed, and locked it.
No escort, no marshal, no police came onto the plane, only regular passengers—businessmen wearing suits, old women carrying cloth valises that were nearly bursting, younger women with children whose dark, shiny eyes viewed Magda with curiosity and suspicion.
This was clearly the leg of the trip that would bring her back to the United States. She sat back and relaxed.