“If God had anything better, He kept it for Himself.”
—Russian President Mikhail Putilov
President J. T. Tower sat in his private New York office at the top of the Excelsior Hotel. The furniture was all polished oak, the couches and armchairs upholstered in burgundy-hued raw silk. Portraits of the world’s great warlords, Alexander and Caesar, Washington and Napoléon, MacArthur and Patton, hung on the walls.
But Tower was oblivious to all of it.
The only thing he could do was stare at his 96-inch wall-mounted flat-screen monitor and scowl. The damn UN bill was going to pass.
Suddenly, miraculously, Putilov returned the call that Tower had placed less than ten minutes prior. It usually took days for Tower to reach him, but Putilov must have been nervous about the vote as well.
“What the fuck is happening, Comrade?” Tower shouted into the phone.
Putilov hated it when Tower addressed him as “Comrade.” He’d had men flogged, incarcerated, even killed for less offensive remarks. Still he had to humor this imbecile—for at least a while longer.
“Never fear, old friend,” Putilov said unctuously. “This was all to be expected, and I shall soon extirpate the UN expropriation movement, root and branch.”
“You can still stop them?” Tower asked, astonished.
Tower had been clearly unnerved by the UN speech and the enthusiastic reaction it was receiving across the globe.
“As you Americans sometimes say: ‘I might have been born at night but not last night.’ Of course I can.”
“But people are agitating around the world to seize our offshore revenues,” Tower said, “and this is just the beginning.”
“So?” Putilov asked, his tone mocking.
“But how can you stop them?” Tower asked, his voice trembling with panic and terror.
Putilov suddenly lost it. Consumed with rage at the imbecile at the other end of the Skype call, he roared:
“By turning UN Plaza into a levitating nuclear fireball and annihilating every living soul in it! That’s how we deal with our enemies over here. Understand me now, you pathetic fucking moron???”
Putilov was thundering at the top of his lungs, his face working in rage, his anger at Tower all but blinding him. Utterly beside himself, Putilov was no longer capable of placating or finessing or bullshitting the ridiculous born-rich fool any longer. Pulling a 9mm Makarov semi-automatic pistol from out of his middle desk drawer, he racked the slide in full view of Tower’s hysterically screaming, jaw-gaping face and emptied the entire magazine into the Skype camera, his computer screen and Tower’s confused face, which was staring back at him, bawling and sobbing in twitching, pissing horror.
His chief bodyguard entered the room instantly, his gun drawn.
“What’s wrong?” the tall strapping uniformed Captain of the Guard, Dmitri Pavlov, asked, clearly distraught.
“Nothing, old friend,” Putilov said, suddenly smiling for the first time in weeks. “Just something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I first spoke to the guy on the other end of the phone.”
Putilov raised the smoking gun and studied it for a long moment.
“Can I help you in any way, Mr. President?” Dmitri asked.
“Everything’s fine,” the smiling Putilov said, motioning the man toward the leather and mahogany chair in front of his desk. “Here, sit down. Goddamn, I feel good. In fact, for the first time in years, I really feel really … at peace.”
“I couldn’t be more pleased for you, sir,” the captain said, hesitantly, uncertain how to respond.
“Reminds me of the early ’90s, Captain,” Putilov said, “when we were just coming into our own, when we were getting our first taste of power. Damn, we killed a lot of people back then. I just plain lost count.”
“You had men killed, Mr. President?” Captain Dmitri asked—still not sure what else to say.
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” Putilov shouted, slapping his thighs and laughing like a lunatic.
Christ, Putilov must have lost fifty pounds, Dmitri thought in stunned horror. He had been on vacation, hadn’t gotten a good look at the president in several weeks, and now saw Putilov was a mess. His white shirt fit him like a loose sack. His cheeks were drawn and sunken; his parchment-skin hung on him like a shroud. He was utterly emaciated, and his face was twitching uncontrollably.
“Those sound like wild times, Mr. President,” the captain said uneasily.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Putilov muttered. “Wyatt Earp and Bill Hickok had nothing on us.”
Putilov slowly began to scratch his arms, then his face and neck, then his thighs and ankles. Taking the krok syringe out of his right-hand desk drawer, he at last stopped scratching and began to rub the syringe with an almost sensual intimacy.
“Most of all, I loved the fliers,” Putilov said in a low whisper, as if imparting a discreet secret.
“Fliers, sir?” the captain asked.
“Those were the suspects,” Putilov said, “that we’d take to a high window, maybe to the twenty-fifth floor or, say, to the top of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower on Red Square. A couple of us would hang the man upside down by the ankles. I’d say to the fellow, often a man we’d been close to for years, even decades, a man who thought we were his friends: ‘You think you’re so smart. You think you’re better than us. You think you can do anything, don’t you? I’ll bet you think you can … fly? Here, show us.’ Then we’d let go. But none of them could fly. Instead, they dropped, like lead bricks—except these lead bricks screamed and thrashed their arms all the way down, as if their limbs were wings.”
Sitting down, Putilov threw his head back and laughed like a loon.
“You did this a lot?” the shocked captain asked.
“More times than I can count,” Putilov said, wiping his eyes and smiling happily as he reflected on his past. “But those were hard times. Anyone who even looked like they could double-cross us had to go. We did give them a chance, of course, to prove their innocence. Nikolay Kruchina, Georgy Palov and Dmitriy Lisovolik—none of them had to die. They all had their chance … to fly—or die.”
Again, Putilov exploded with hilarity.
“Then there was Mikhail Khodorkovsky,” Putilov said, struggling hard to pull himself together but having to wait for his laughs to subside. “He got rich like the rest of us, but then he decided he was a reformer! So I seized his oil company and gave him a chance to reform our Gulag Archipelago from the inside. For nine years—in two of the toughest and coldest of our hard-labor camps—he learned what happens to those who turn ‘reformer’ on me!” Putilov then whispered conspiratorially to the captain. “I paid guards and inmates to ‘reform’ Khodorkovsky—that is, to beat the piss out of him and freeze him half to death in ice-cold isolation cells every day and night of those nine years. ‘Reform those guys, bitch!’ I always wanted to howl at him!”
Once more, Putilov’s laughter rang and reverberated like the very bells of hell. In fact, Putilov was now laughing so loud and so hard that, once again, tears came to his eyes.
Reaching into his side drawer, Putilov pulled out a huge diamond-studded gold ring. Waving at at Dmitri, he slipped it onto his wedding finger.
“Did I ever tell you how I got this U.S. Super Bowl ring?” Putilov asked. “George Abbott, owner of the St. Petersburg Pythons NFL football team, came to visit me. He showed me the ring, and I said I wanted to look at it more closely. He took it off, handed it to me, I put it on my finger and walked away. I then refused to speak to him or any of his people for the rest of the night. Nor did I respond to any of his requests to return it, saying only that ‘a gift was gift.’ Sorry, buddy. No returns, no refunds. He even went to his old friend, for whom he’d raised scores of millions in campaign donations, George W. ‘I-Saw-Putilov’s-Soul’ Bush, and had him call me to ask for it back. I told Georgie: ‘I’ll only give him the ring if you let me sell Iran a nuclear weapons manufacturing plant!’”
Putilov’s whole body was racked so hard by convulsive guffaws that he almost fell off his chair. It took him a full minute to compose himself and continue the story.
“That nitwit Bush,” Putilov said, “actually told his friend that his ring had become a national security issue and that Abbott should say publicly that he wanted me to have it.”
Putilov then stared at the captain, his grin now twitching uncontrollably.
“So the man hadn’t given you the ring?” Dmitri asked, still not knowing what to say or think.
“Of course not,” Putilov said. “If the man had given me the trinket, it wouldn’t have meant anything to me. I’d have thrown it in the Moscow River. I have baubles a thousand times more precious than his fucking ring. What makes it priceless to me is that I stole it from him. Abbott loves that ring more than his children, more than his testicles, more than life itself, and every time he glances at his ring finger, he remembers me, my superior smile, my utter contempt for him and how I robbed him of the thing he held most dear in his life, how I humiliated him on the world stage, and how, when he sent George W. Bush to me to get it back, I humiliated him, too, the President of the United States. I manipulated the U.S. president—the man who claimed to see into “my soul”—into making that NFL owner apologize to me in public for asking me for ‘the gift’s’ return. I love that ring because I took it off its rightful owner and now he shakes with rage, fear and pain every time he thinks of me.”
Again, Putilov exploded in an orgy of racketing laughter that shook his office and frightened Dmitri to his soul.
“Thank God,” Putilov said, choking back his maniacal mirth, “I discovered polonium-210. The problem with ‘fly or die’ was it was over too fast, and so it really didn’t hurt all that much. With polonium-210 poisoning though, the people experienced pure agony. They took days, even weeks to die, and all the time their guts felt like they were in flames. And now, I have something even more horrifying, as Benjamin Jowett learned the hard way. That’s a pun, Captain—‘hard way.’ Get it? I killed that bastard Jowett with a hard-on that wouldn’t go down!”
Now Putilov’s hideous horselaughs were approaching apocalyptic proportions, and they only began to subside when he started to rub his arms, legs and neck again. Muttering to himself and grinning maniacally—even as he struggled to catch his breath—he said:
“Did I ever tell you about how I hunted and killed apartment rats as a small boy? I was so obsessed with the little bastards that after I’d clubbed one to death, I’d dissect it. Flies too. When I captured one alive, I’d hold it down with a pair of tweezers and try to figure out what made it buzz. I’d grab a second pair of tweezers and study it in detail. I’d rip off one wing, then the other. Then I’d tear off its feelers, next its legs. I’d remove its eyes one at a time, then open up its belly, scrutinizing it as closely as I could, examining its remains under a magnifying glass.”
Then Putilov drifted off, humming some unidentifiable tune, his eyes distant and unfocused, a ghoulish grin twisting the left corner of his mouth upward.
“Did you ever find out where the buzzing noise came from?” Captain Dmitri asked, hoping to bring Putilov back to some semblance of reality.
“No, I never did,” Putilov said, suddenly grinning brightly and looking Captain Dmitri straight in the eye. “But, on the other hand, those flies … they didn’t get around so good anymore!”
Giggling like a deranged ape, he was, once more, rubbing his arms, legs, head and neck feverishly. The scratchings and ululations went on and on and on, and just when Dmitri thought they would never stop, to his surprise, they suddenly did. Putilov froze in place, sitting at his desk, still as a statue, staring fixedly, mindlessly at something unseeable and far away—something that seemed to be thousands of yards in the imperceivable distance. Spittle bubbled and burbled out of the right corner of his mouth. The froth oozed slowly down his jaw and after a long moment began to drip off his chin.
Oh, my God, Dmitri thought suddenly, Tower must be the incarnation of evil. Just conversing with him on the phone has turned Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov, the strongest, most disciplined man I’ve ever known, into a raving, mouth-foaming, drug-addled idiot.
Finally, Putilov stopped his staring, reached into his desk drawer and took out his aspirin bottle filled with krokodil tablets. Holding it close to his chest, he began rubbing it intently, almost orgiastically, rocking back and forth and softly humming and singing “The Volga Boatman.”
Yo, heave ho!
Yo, heave ho!
Volga, Volga is our pride,
Mighty stream so deep and wide …
Returning to his right-hand top desk drawer, Putilov took out a bottle of Everclear, a small squeeze can of ether, a flask of gasoline, two spoons and a razor blade.
“I’m going to celebrate,” Putilov said, smiling moronically at the captain, “with a little taste of the krok.”
Putilov began grinding and chopping up the pills. Dmitri noted that the Russian president’s desk was now crisscrossed with razor blade cuts and eroded from dried-up Everclear, ether and gasoline spills. Furthermore, as Putilov chopped away, he sliced his finger with the razor blade, and blood flowed heavily onto the whitish powder. Putilov, however, was oblivious to the bleeding. When he was done chopping, he poured the powder—blood and all—into the Pyrex bong, added Everclear, a long squirt of ether, a dash of gasoline, and applied heat. It quickly came to a boil. Turning off the lighter, Putilov hiked his sleeve all the way up to his armpit and tied it off just below the elbow with his belt. He drew the syringe-full of liquid out of the bong—without even waiting for it to cool—squirted out a few drops and then tapped the needle just to make sure there was no air in it.
“That stuff must be really good,” the captain said in an attempt to make small talk and not appear critical of Putilov’s drug habit. Still Dmitri could not help nervously eyeing the grotesque galaxy of needle tracks garishly scarring Putilov’s fish-white forearm.
“Good?” Putilov said, grinning. “If God had anything better, He kept it for Himself.” He gave the captain a wicked, conspiratorial wink.
Putilov smoothly, knowingly inserted the needle into a hard-used wrist vein—the only visible and viable conduit on the entire arm—and pushed the krokodil home. His hands instantly dropped to his lap, his right index finger continuing to pump blood, unabated, onto his leg. His head then snapped back. Eyes rolling into his head, his jaw fell wide open, hammering his sternum like a blackjack, and he pitched forward.
More spittle spumed and seethed out of the dictator’s mouth. Running down his chin, the translucent slaver relentlessly smacked and splattered Putilov’s desk. The large round globules slowly merged into a small, noxious but steadily expanding pool of drool.