AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jasper and I are waiting for another shipment in the asscrack of nowhere. This time the product is coming up the Moskva river. We’re waiting in a shack two hours east of the city so we can waylay the goods before they fall under the purview of the port authority.
This wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s cold as hell in our little hidey-hole—no heating whatsoever, and cracks in the walls as wide as a finger. The wind blows through in whistling gusts, stirring the old newspaper scattered across the floorboards.
More incessant than the wind is Zigor’s endless chatter. He can’t stand a two-minute stretch without anyone talking. Since his companions are the perpetually silent Bookends, the sulky skeleton Jasper, and me—currently wondering if I could stuff my ears with bits of newspaper without Zigor noticing—he’s got an uphill battle keeping conversation going.
He keeps disappearing to answer the “call of nature,” returning a few minutes later sniffing and rubbing his nose, twice as talkative as ever. I assume he’s taking bumps in private not for Jasper’s and my benefit, but to avoid the Bookends whose job is surely to report on him to his father as much as to protect him.
It must enrage Lev Zakharov having a son this stupid. Adrik told me that Lev clawed his way up from abject poverty, selling stolen goods out of a briefcase in Rostov-on-Don, eventually opening his own pawn shop, then a whole chain of them, and finally expanding into the world of black-market goods.
Lev is notoriously cheap, a ferocious bargainer, ancient and wrinkled as a grasshopper. When he was sixty-two, he made the one frivolous decision of his life and married a nineteen-year-old waitress. Zigor was the result. According to Adrik, the waitress soon realized she had not secured the life of luxury she hoped—Lev was so stingy that he counted the squares of toilet paper she used and forced her to run hot water through the same coffee grounds three times in a row before she could grind more. The waitress fled to Azov, leaving Zakharov with a chubby toddler to raise.
Of course, this is all legend and rumor, so who knows how much of it is true. I could ask Zigor, but then I’d have to talk to him.
Jasper has commandeered one of the only chairs in the shack. Zigor has the other, but he keeps hopping up to pace around the room, or take another stroll down to the empty dock to “look for the boatman.”
The two Bookends have seated themselves on upturned buckets. The buckets are so low that their knees jut up around their chests. They look like a pair of crouching spiders, especially with those ridiculous sunglasses they refuse to take off even indoors.
I’m sitting on a rickety three-legged table. As long as I sit cross-legged right in the middle, I don’t tumble off.
“We should have waited in the car,” Jasper complains, blowing on his hands. “It’d be warmer.”
“You need eat more!” Zigor tells him, slapping his own stomach. “I never cold.”
“Yeah, but then I’d look like you,” Jasper says.
“Is good for man to be big. Bigger the better, yes?” Zigor waggles his eyebrows at me suggestively.
“Yeah,” I say, in a bored tone. “Whenever I enter a room, I look at who’s tallest and then I fuck that person immediately.”
I pretend to scan the room, squinting at each of the men in turn.
“Looks like Tweedledee wins,” I say, nodding to the left Bookend. “Better luck next time, Zigor.”
“Ho ho! Time to get busy, Georgiy!” Zigor chortles.
The left Bookend, apparently named Georgiy, turns his head toward me, scowling behind his sunglasses. “Who this Tweedledee?” he demands.
“He’s a famous rockstar,” I say. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him.”
I could swear Jasper almost smiles before remembering to be miserable.
He’s in a worse mood than usual. Adrik pulled me aside before we left, asking me to take it easy on Jasper.
“How come?”
“It’s a bad time of year for him,” Adrik said.
I assume he means this is when Jasper’s family died—the kind of anniversary no one wants to celebrate, but you can never forget. That would make sense, because for the last week Jasper has barely left his room. He looks so fucked up that even I feel sorry for him—hair not combed, face unshaven, shadows under his eyes dark as bruises. So thin and pale that he truly does seem determined to starve himself down to the bone.
He obviously hasn’t been sleeping. He’s keyed up and twitchy. Every time Zigor makes a loud or abrupt noise—about every two minutes—Jasper jerks in his chair. If glares could kill, Zigor would be on his twenty-eighth resurrection. I’d be on my sixth or seventh.
“How much longer?” Jasper demands of Zigor.
“How I should know?” Zigor shrugs. “No cell service.”
“He was supposed to be here an hour ago,” Jasper says, checking the time on his phone.
“You know boats …” Zigor says, making a vague gesture in the air.
