The Unpossessed City

JIM TURNED HIS COLLAR UP and walked quickly into his courtyard. It was snowing harder now; by tomorrow morning a few inches would have piled up. The city looked silent, monochrome, almost neolithic in size and architectural uniformity. The unnatural immensity of Moscow’s apartments, the violent crenellations of the Stalinist sky-scrapers, and the fairy-tale onions atop gaudily colored churches, all beneath a thickening blanket of snow, gave Moscow the improvised, inchoate air of a dream.

Jim’s pace across the courtyard quickened as he anticipated a good half-hand of bourbon—it wouldn’t do to leave that behind—to make the packing easier. Just outside his entryway door, he slid on what he assumed was a patch of ice. He braced himself against the snowy handrail as his toe snagged on a package on the front step. Looking down, he saw this wasn’t a package: it was a person sprawled facedown in front of the doorway. Jim thought it might have been a drunk who fell asleep looking for someplace warm, but then he noticed the person’s coat—a dark wool coat, the same length and color as Jim’s—was covered in a thin layer of snow, as was his hair, and the bluish-gray skin on the back of his neck. Jim recognized him; he lived in the building, and they knew each other by sight, just to nod to as they passed in the courtyard. Leading away from his head, like a final, unfinished thought, was a comma of blood and brain.

Jim staggered back with horror, and immediately slunk into the courtyard’s shadows, the sounds of his breathing and his heartbeat pounding, deafening. He shifted positions and the whoosh of his coat against his jeans sounded like a jet soaring across the courtyard. Still, he was alone, thank God. The quartet of drinkers who spent their evenings sitting on the hood of a rusted-out old Lada Samara across the courtyard had gone inside to escape the snow. He looked up at the seven stories of apartment windows that surrounded him and saw lights, drawn curtains, but no faces.

He was about to turn around and head back to the car—there was nothing he really needed anyway—when he heard footsteps trudging through the archway, echoing as they drew closer. He drew farther back into the shadows, flush against the building, crouching behind a haphazardly parked blue Peugeot. The archway was the only escape route. He would either have to sprint past whoever was coming or knock him over; opening the apartment door required too much key-fiddling on the steps. He grabbed a jagged-edged length of rebar lying next to him on the asphalt. It already had what looked like dried blood and hair on one end. As the man’s shadow fell forward into the courtyard, Jim tensed and prepared to spring.

Whoever it was came into the courtyard and made a hard right, turning in the opposite direction from Jim and his dead doppelgänger. Even from the back, he didn’t look like a killer: he wore a long tan overcoat and a fur hat. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder, and he walked with a distracted gait, his head tilted upward, as if contemplating higher things than a corpse in a courtyard. A scientist, Jim guessed, or maybe a music teacher, but hardly an assassin. He entered the building without even a backward glance, and Jim stood up, unclenched his jaw, fists, shoulders, abdomen, thighs, calves, feet, and even his toes.

He had just turned around when the door burst open, sending Jim reeling backward in shock. Again, he tripped over the body, and righted himself into fighting position, when he saw he was preparing to batter Murat’s mother, standing in the doorway holding two bags of garbage.

She looked at Jim in a fighting stance and gave the merest hint of an impression that she might have been thinking about smiling. She then looked down at the body, and hunched up her shoulders slightly, then let them drop. Whether that gesture connoted resignation, or indifference, or was a token of respect, Jim had no idea. She nodded at Jim, holding out the two bags of garbage and pointing toward the Dumpster in the center of the courtyard. When Jim hesitated, she clicked her tongue disapprovingly and thrust the bags at him again, this time betraying a hint of a fearsome scowl. He took the bags from her with a respectful nod of the head, which won him the slightest glint of gold tooth and a bemused crinkle at the corners of her eyes. No event in the world held the power to surprise her, or make her more than momentarily happy or glum. Jim thought she would get along swimmingly with Rosie and the Dooley matriarchs.

When he threw the trash into the bin, she clicked her tongue again and beckoned him over. Jim waited for her to speak, but she just stood, still and watchful, giving away absolutely nothing.

“If God had willed you to die, you would have.” She shrugged. “And if your enemies are mortal, then they are also our enemies, and we will fight them together. Come. Upstairs. We can talk there. You will be our guest.”

“DEAD?” ASKED A SWEATY, balding little man in a suit. Jim sat at Murat’s table, in his overheated, overcrowded apartment, as the mother proceeded to bury him beneath mountains of food and Murat tried to drown him in vodka. The room smelled like a Russian apartment on Sunday night, awash in clouds of garlic, roasted meat, wet coats, tightly packed humanity, and cigarette smoke.

Inside the room sat Murat and eight of his cousins. All except the dapper little man filled the room with a brooding, minatory presence: aside from Murat, who kept Jim company at the small wooden dining table, and the bald little man in the suit, perched on the edge of a wooden chair, the men sat on pillows on the floor and against the wall, smoking, drinking, occasionally breaking the silence with a word or two unintelligible to Jim, and watching the American eat. Murat had introduced none of them to Jim by name, and none of them seemed inclined to introduce themselves.

The dapper little man peeled himself off the wall next to Murat’s plasma TV and walked over to the window. As he reached for the curtain, Murat’s mother, waddling over from the kitchen to ladle some more stewed rabbit onto Jim’s already overflowing plate, hissed and clicked her tongue. Though she kept her head covered and eyes lowered, nobody doubted who ruled the room. She glanced subtly toward the cousin sitting closest to the window. He put a firm hand on the man’s shoulders and led him away.

“Our doctor,” explained Murat, exhaling vodka as his eyes kindled with pride. The doctor returned to his seat on the wooden chair. He appeared discomfited by the idea of a corpse on his aunt’s doorstep; the other men in the room retained a lean, regal wildness, and an unsurprised intimacy with how the world ends.

He nodded smugly, inclining his head in showy modesty. “Yes. And I shall tell you that by the end of the spring, I may have the honor of becoming the head of veterinary medicine at the Swedish Feline and Canine Clinic. We see to the safety and well-being of pets belonging to all of the most important diplomats and dignitaries resident in Moscow.”

“The pervert sticks his fingers up kitten asses!” blurted one of the older cousins from the other end of the couch. He was wreathed in blankets, vodka fumes, and good spirits. Murat hissed for his silence, but he did so with his face turned toward Jim so the cousin couldn’t see him smiling.

Jim obediently slipped some onto his plate and, under Murat’s watchful eye, shoved a piece in his mouth. It tasted strong, gamy, peppery: not disagreeable, but it filmed his mouth unpleasantly as it went down.

“Yes,” Murat agreed. From the way he nodded Jim understood he was asking not to find out the answers himself but to see what Jim knew. “He had a wife, and two young children. One of the Old Families.”

Murat poured more vodka and shrugged. “Brezhnev, I would guess. His father’s friend lived in this apartment before we inherited it,” he said, putting a bright-eyed irony on the word. Inherited, in this case, likely meant wheedled or connived or won or accepted as payment on a debt. It did not mean bought, because Murat took great pride in telling Jim the price of everything he bought—the higher the better—and it self-evidently did not mean rented or swapped or anything so above-board. “His miserable father spat on us. Hated us. Dogs, blackasses, capitalists, he called us. Always wore a Party pin. The son I don’t know. He did not seem, and I say seem, like his father. And his children were just children. But such people . . .” He exhaled sharply with his teeth set against his lip and waved his hand.

“So.” He bore down further on Jim, as behind him two of the cousins took up a game involving playing cards, knives, and a length of muslin. “You do know why he was killed, Mother said.”

Jim saw the knives come out and he swallowed hard. It hadn’t occurred to him until now to consider as a whole the mother’s calm, her invitation, Murat’s intense interest, the cousins unsheathing their knives, the complete absence of anybody else from the courtyard, stair-well, or hallways of the building, and, of course, Murat’s reputation. Without meaning to, he flitted his eyes around the room and behind him: Murat’s mother blocked the door, and four more of the cousins drew their knives and cloths. For the second time that night, he tensed and prepared to run: he knew his chances were small against eight armed men, but he wouldn’t sit still for the slaughter.

Murat must have seen and sized up Jim’s reaction: just as he coiled, Murat banged his fist against the table and shouted something to his cousins in an unfamiliar language. They sheathed their knives and looked abashed, shuffling and staring down. “I told them they frightened our guest,” Murat said, laying a giant meat-hook hand on Jim’s forearm. “And here you are our guest, and I ask you these questions as a guest. Do you understand?”

Jim, figuring he was giving either his last words or (he hoped) a plea for help, spoke less than fully and more ardently than freely. He omitted the meeting with Trudy and referred to Mina only as “an American friend,” figuring their antistatist paranoia would fill in the rest. When he mentioned the Interior Ministry car, derisive snorts, murmurs, and tongue-clicks echoed around the room.

The youngest of the cousins, with a linty little mustache only accentuating the baby fat still left on his cheeks and chin, pulled his face into an exaggerated scowl and barked something at Murat. When Murat turned to glare at the kid, though, the scowl melted, and he sank back into his seat, his eyes wide and almost liquid, pleading apology.

“Rekhmat said we should kill someone from the ministry in return. And this I would very much wish to do,” he said, placing a hand on his heart to express his sincerity, “but this would be no good. We would lose. You, maybe not. You have a passport to America. We do not. You can go home, and poof! Nobody bothers you.”

Jim laughed along with Murat’s teasing, until something struck him. “Anatoly Vorov,” he said out loud, silencing their laughter. It was a shot in the dim light, but not entirely dark: both Murat’s clan and Vorov appeared to be smugglers in Moscow. It wasn’t entirely inconceivable that they knew each other. Murat glanced over Jim at a lean older man propped against the wall. “Do you know Anatoly Vorov?” Jim asked again.

Just then Jim heard a banging across the hall as his cell phone started ringing. He quickly turned it to vibrate and looked through the peephole: Mina was pounding on his door with an open hand. She must have followed him home. Even from this view, he could see her glare, the set of her jaw, her animal tenseness. She stopped pounding and her hand shot up to her face. Was she crying? Jim opened his mouth to say her name as he reached for the doorknob, but something kept him from turning it.

It occurred to him that he was, in this apartment, as safe as he had ever been—and would ever be—in Moscow. Nobody knew where he was. He was the guest of eight armed men who took their hosting responsibilities seriously. He had no doubt that if he asked them to, they would take him to the embassy.

He also—at last and for once—had the opportunity to put things right instead of—again—running away. They knew Anatoly Vorov; he and Mina did not. This was his choice: open the door now and go home, leaving everything he had been chasing unresolved and letting other people clean up after him. This would leave him at their mercy, and, even worse, leave him constantly looking over his shoulder for Vorov, who was on his way to becoming every bit as American as he was. Or he could talk with Murat and the cousins a little longer, and see if there wasn’t something else he could do.

He knew what he wanted to do: he wanted to go home, forget all of this, ask Vivek for money to pay off the Sjindices, and start again. But he also remembered what Rosie’s father, Ulm Dooley, a five-foot-three-inch fire hydrant of a man who owned and tended his bar in Hamden for almost fifty years, used to tell him. Ulm lost fights every now and then, but he never ran from them. One afternoon when Jim ran into Vilatzer’s full steam because a few kids in his fourth-grade class played “Chase the Commie,” Ulm sat him on the stool next to him and asked why he didn’t stand up to them. Jim said there were three of them; he didn’t think he was that brave. Ulm fixed him with his clear green eyes and drained his glass. “There’s no need to be a brave man, you know. You only need to act like one.”

“I will tell you what I mean,” Murat said, pouring Jim more vodka and serving him a long, curved bone of lamb that looked suspiciously like a mandible. “Us, here, in this room, we are a family. We are also in bizniss”—he made an ironic face when he used the English word, lest Jim think he was talking about something legitimate—“and of course we work with other people, other people work with us, but everyone knows, because we take care of our family, all of us, that we will take care of them, too. Everything, you understand, is family, and family is everything. This is completely normal: you will find it with the Mukhtandov Boys, Baumanskaya Circus, Perekop Industries: all of them have at their center brothers, cousins, fathers, sons. A connection.

“Tolya Vorov, who does he have?” Resting an elbow on the table, Murat held up his hand, fingertips together, then spread them apart in a gesture of release. “Nobody. Money, of course, and with money you can buy what you need. But he has no friends, no allies. And rumor is he can no longer do business in Russia.”

Murat scratched his beard and tilted his head philosophically. “Zavodsk is a village of coal and shit. But coal is under the ground, and there is less, always less, every year.” He moved his hand down closer to the table to illustrate consistently declining coal. A pedagogical streak was emerging, even if Murat commanded attention as much by the presence of knives and guns as by his lecturing skills. “Less coal means more people out of work; more people out of work means more people to employ in other ways. Guards. Couriers. Muscle. This helps a man like Vorov. Also it helps men like us,” he said with a wink and a modest incline of the head. “This is normal.”

Normalno: Normal. Fine. A very Russian answer: the world is irredeemably fallen and the natural tendency of everything is to go wrong, but only a fool ever expects anything else, and I am no fool. In this case it meant Murat had seen this pattern elsewhere: it was the pattern of post-Soviet Russia. Former factory workers who enjoyed good booze and brawl on the weekends became full-time brawlers, and, as often as not, full-time boozers, too. Murat took out his knife and sliced off a tender curve of meat and soft tissue from the bone on Jim’s plate, popping it in his mouth with relish.

“More important: Zavodsk is in Ukraine, but not really Ukraine. Most people in east Ukraine speak Russian, are Russian. This means Ukraine’s government has no power there, not really. Vorov, we can say, is generous with people in his town. They protect him. Ukraine would have to send in the army, and even then . . .” Murat made a light fist facing down toward the table and sent his fingers outward, mimicking the sounds of explosions as he moved his hands up the table. His eyes glittered with delight, imagining the battles. “Why would they go? As long as Vorov makes no moves against them, why?”

“Why should he? There he would always have to worry who to please, who to pay, who has power and who does not. No, from Zavodsk he can fly to Russia whenever he wants, without worrying. And perhaps Russia likes it better, too: if he does something that Europe, or your America, might complain about, they can say he lives in Ukraine. Do you want us to invade Ukraine? No? Then, pfft.” He raised a fist, a thumb wedged between his index and middle fingers. “You know, two of our security boys used to work for him. Kyrgyz, of course.”

“He never hires Russians in Russia. They say he hires only Russians in foreign countries, but here? Never. Why? Because we”—with his finger he drew an imaginary circle around the room, ensuring that everyone’s eyes were defiantly, proudly on Jim—“we are most expendable. If you have on the one hand a rich, Russian American businessman, and on the other some . . . I don’t know . . . some Uzbek thug, or some Bashkir roughneck . . .”

“Yes. Exactly.” Murat smiled. “Or a Tatar warrior. Who will be helped? In this society, if protecting him he has his friends in the Interior Ministry, he will always win. And of course, if he makes his price right, we will always go along. He does—you must excuse me for saying this, because I mean no offense to you or your family—but he lives like an American. He smiles too much, he throws out too much money, he takes what he wants to take, he makes the price whatever he wants. With foreigners—dark foreigners, low foreigners, not Europeans—he can do this.”

Murat’s mother waddled in from the kitchen with yet another plate: a bowl of chopped eggplant, tomatoes, and what smelled like several heads of garlic. “A man without a family,” she croaked, clicking her tongue disapprovingly as she walked back into the kitchen.

Lost neither on Jim nor, he feared, on anyone else in the room was Jim’s own lack of a family. In most parts of the world, he would have been a father for well over a decade by now, but here he was, rattling around the planet alone like a marble in a kettle drum. Just as the lethal combination of vodka and self-pity threatened to overwhelm him, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He figured Mina was trying to find him, and he took the phone out intending to send her to voice mail again.