Kingmakers, Graduation

20. Adrik

20

ADRIK

S abrina emerges from our room an hour later, wearing tight leather pants and a silky top I could crumple in one hand. Her hair, freshly washed and waved, floats around her like smoke. She’s lined her eyes with so much kohl that she looks like an Egyptian princess, or maybe something more sinister—a vengeful goddess demanding sacrifice.

Having Sabrina here in my house is so fucking satisfying, I can’t stop grinning.

I saw her and I knew that I needed her—like a good-luck talisman, or the Aquila carried by the Roman legions. Not because Sabrina is a token, but because she fills me with energy, she gives me power. I’m stronger with her here.

I’m determined to make her love Moscow. I want to show her its beauty and its potential.

I was never worried that she’d fit in at the house. Her introduction was exactly what I expected—Sabrina can handle herself. Like a cat surrou nded by dogs, she knows how to give Vlad a slap on the nose if he growls at her.

In time she’ll come to know them all and respect them as I do. I haven’t brought anyone into the Wolfpack without good reason—including Sabrina herself. They’ll see her talent, and she’ll see theirs.

My bigger concern is acclimating her to Russia in general. Moscow is a jungle with just as many hidden dangers as the Amazon.

“Are we gonna take the bikes?” Sabrina asks, looking eagerly out into the yard.

“Sure,” I say. “You can take Jasper’s old bike. Until we get you your own.”

Sabrina makes no argument about taking the smaller, older Gold Wing. She knows we won’t be racing through Moscow’s congested streets.

We mount the bikes beneath the stone archway partially covering the parking pad.

I toss her a helmet.

“I don’t need that.”

Sabrina sets it down on the seat of Chief’s bike.

“You don’t wear a helmet?”

“The point of riding a bike is being out in the open. Feeling the air. Seeing what’s around you.”

“Until you crack your skull open on a curb. Don’t you think that’s kind of a stupid risk? ”

Sabrina shrugs. “Everything we do is reckless. Everything’s a risk.”

Sabrina reminds me of a gambler intent on putting their entire stack on the line, just for the thrill of it.

Still, I set my own helmet down. It seems ungentlemanly to protect myself more than her.

The Ducati fires up with a low purr. I see Sabrina’s eyes gleam. She remembers how that engine feels pressed up against her.

“Keep your mitts to yourself,” I warn her.

She grins. “I will if you keep your keys in your pocket.”

I pull out through the gates, leaning hard to take the corner. Sabrina follows after me, light, easy, relaxed. We swoop through the dark streets in tandem, two bats released into the night. I like riding with Sabrina close behind me, floating in and out of my peripheral with each curve in the road.

The night air feels cool and liquid, ruffling through my hair like fingers. Sabrina’s right that it feels good to ride like this, unprotected and unbound. It’s easy to call out to her at the lights, to point out Tagansky Park and the Novospassky Monastery as we pass by.

I take her to the Soho Rooms, one of the most exclusive nightclubs in Moscow, located right on the Moskva river so the purplish light pouring out from its windows wriggles across the dark water below.

A long line of guests wait outside the door. I don’t have to pass a bribe to the “face master” before he waves Sabrina inside. He glances at the Vacheron on my wrist and allows me to pass along with her.

“Did you know him?” Sabrina asks me .

“It’s feyskontrol’— face control,” I tell her. “Beauty is everything here. If you look wealthy, cultured, and gorgeous, you get in the club. If you don’t, you won’t.”

The evidence is clear all around us—a mass of disproportionately stunning club-goers, decked out in glittering mini-dresses and tight button-ups and slacks. Those who aren’t young and beautiful are clearly wealthy, the older men in bespoke suits and enough gold chains, watches, and rings to attract their pick of the stunning young women flocking around them.

I brought Sabrina here because it’s where the models and celebrities go. I thought she’d enjoy the glitz and glamour.

Dozens of disco balls reflect a flurry of purple speckles over the throng of drunken dancers. Once we’ve ordered our drinks, I take her up to the Summer Terrace, where a girl in a transparent bodysuit performs an aerial silks show. She floats through the air, twisted up in a long white swath, heedless of the fifty-foot drop to the dance floor below.

We take a seat at a small table with a good view of the room. Sabrina looks around at the stylish crowd, unsmiling.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her.

“It’s a tourist place.”

“Not just for tourists.”

She frowns. “This isn’t where you would go—if it was just you or the Wolfpack.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I want you to show me what you do, how you live. I want to see the real Russia. ”

“It’s not as posh.”

She fixes me with that blazing stare, stubborn and demanding. “Take me where the Bratva go.”

I smile, not displeased. “Alright. Come on.”

We leave the club and wind through the darker, dingier roads leading into Danilovsky. Here the luxury cars pulled up to the curb look much more out of place, but no one would dare touch them, even if they were left unlocked.

There’s no line outside Apothecary and no sign above the plain brick entryway, other than a painted wooden board, the sort that might hang at an English pub, depicting a shot glass with an eerie green brew within.

I tell Sabrina, “It’s neutral ground of sorts. No business here—just networking.”

She nods, understanding.

We pass inside, through a dark and undecorated hallway, raw brick like the exterior.

Apothecary is smaller than the Soho Rooms, and less crowded. It resembles an old speakeasy, with ancient plasterwork on the walls, stained by cigar smoke, and a dark wood bar, carved and scrolled, in which dusty, unlabeled bottles line the shelves. The wrought-iron lamps let out a dim golden glow, casting pools of light distinct from the impenetrable gloom .

The tables are set far enough apart that conversations are unlikely to be overheard, especially under the steady thud of music pumped into the room.

The mostly male patrons are accompanied by women too tarty to leave any doubt of their profession. Sabrina—the only woman in pants, and clearly foreign—draws plenty of eyes.

If the Soho Rooms differentiate on beauty and wealth, an entirely different principle operates here. Age and ethnicity are diverse, as well as apparel: while some wear suits, jeans, trainers, and tracksuits are just as common. The real unifying characteristic is the sense that every person here has been battered by time and circumstance. Scars and injuries are common, the indelible marks of experience even more so. Even the youngest whores look old before their time, bearing the hollow expressions of those who have seen too much.

We order our drinks at the bar.

“Mykah,” I say to the bartender, “this is Sabrina.”

Mykah has the build of an enforcer—body like a refrigerator, hands like catcher’s mitts—but his voice is soft and gentle. Whenever he’s working he wears a cloth beanie and an oilskin apron, a pair of spectacles perched low on his nose like a babushka.

“ Zdravstvuyte ,” he says, taking down the vodka for our drinks.

“ Dobryy vecher ,” Sabrina replies, trying out one of her newly learned greetings.

“Very good.” Mykah nods his approval.

“It’s shit,” Sabrina sighs, “but I’ll learn. ”

“Russian is very easy language,” Mykah agrees. “It only take me three years to learn, and I was baby at time.”

He roars with laughter, Sabrina laughing too, though more at Mykah himself than at his witticisms.

“What you do here with this one?” Mykah points his bar towel at me. “You know he is very bad guy.”

“Adrik?” Sabrina says, eyebrows raised in mock surprise. “He told me he was an Elvis impersonator.”

“Elvis!” Mykah chortles, spraying my arm with a little bit of spit. “Get me comb, I see it now.”

He holds up his hands, framing my hair, squinting and picturing me with a pompadour. With his fingers spread, I can easily see the missing fingers on his right hand.

“Buy your own comb,” I say, throwing down some cash and picking up our drinks.

“ Privet ,” Mykah says, leaning in before I can leave. “Krystiyan zdes’ .” Krystiyan is here. He jerks his head in the appropriate direction without looking or pointing.

I glance the same way, without letting my eyes rest on the group crammed into the far corner table.

“Blagadoryu,” I murmur, turning away and leading Sabrina to our own table.

“What did he say to you?” she demands once we’re seated.

“He was letting me know we’ve got an old friend in the house.”

“The table in the corner? ”

She doesn’t miss a thing.

“Yeah. The pretty boy in the too-tight suit.”

Sabrina laughs softly. “How do you know him?”

“From school. ‘Friend’ was an exaggeration—I fucking loathe him.”

Sabrina looks at me with curiosity.

“What does it take to get on your bad side?”

“I told him something in confidence. When it got out, I knew he couldn’t be trusted. That was the first reason … I’ve had plenty since.”

“Well, don’t worry,” Sabrina says, giving me a sly smile. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

“What secrets do you know?”

“Plenty. You talk in your sleep …”

“What do I say?”

“I just promised not to tell anyone.”

I take a sip of my drink. “That’s probably for the best.”

“Is everyone here Bratva?” Sabrina asks, letting her gaze shift around the room, the tables obscured by cigar and hookah smoke, and the low light.

“Most of them.”

She examines one table after another from under her lashes, before pronouncing, “They don’t look how I expected.”

“What did you expect? ”

She shrugs. “More tattoos.”

“The old ways are dying out. You’ve got to blend in nowadays, it’s better for business. If they have the marks, they keep them where a suit can cover.”

“Not everyone,” Sabrina says, looking at the man nursing a pint at the table next to ours, his shaved skull covered with a sprawling black widow spider.

“The first vory v zakone covered themselves in tattoos as a rejection of society. You know the history of the vory ?” I ask Sabrina.

She shakes her head. “We don’t study the Bratva till third year. In first year we only did the ‘Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra.”

I finish my Stoli and set it to the side, wanting both hands free while I explain.

“In imperial Russia, virtually everything belonged to the czar. The first group who formed the Vorovskoy Mir, the World of Thieves, were revolutionaries of a sort. They had a code of honor—they shared their plunder equally, and like Robin Hood, distributed it among the people as well.”

“How noble,” Sabrina says with a saucy grin.

She knows as well as I do that spreading wealth is more strategy than altruism, buying the loyalty of those who surround you. I do the same thing in my own neighborhood, ensuring the silence of those who could report me if fear were insufficient to keep them quiet.

“When the Bolsheviks rose, the vory v zakone helped control the streets of Moscow,” I continue. “That was when mafia and government first became intertwined in Russia. It worked with Lenin, but when S talin took control, he threw the vory into the gulags. There the underworld truly took shape.”

“Prison is the best recruiting ground,” Sabrina says.

“That’s right. The language and culture of the vory flourished in the gulags. Until the Germans marched on Moscow, and Stalin was forced to use prisoners to swell the Russian army. He promised freedom if they would fight for their country. Many agreed, though it was against the code of the thieves to work for those who had imprisoned them. They fought and died for Russia. When the war was over, Stalin reneged on his promise and threw them right back in the gulag.”

Sabrina gives a soft hiss of distaste, eyes narrowed. In our world, where there is no recourse to the courts, word is law and a promise a contract.

“The vory turned on each other. They called the ones who had fought suki, traitors, and they slaughtered everyone they could find. The prison guards did nothing—it meant less criminals to house and feed. In 1953 the prisons were finally emptied, eight million men turned out on the streets. The Bratva survived but the old code was destroyed.”

I indicate the man at the next table, every inch of visible skin decorated in tattoos.

“You see those crosses on his knuckles? The dagger on the back of his hand?”

Sabrina nods.

“There was a time when every tattoo had a meaning. If you put a mark on your body that you hadn’t earned, the Bratva would cut it off you with a razor blade. Now it’s decoration. ”

Sabrina’s eyes glint with interest. She takes a hasty gulp of her drink, saying, “Tell me more.”

Her face is bright and open, her attention intoxicating. I’d talk all night to amuse her.

“Then came the Soviet era. That was the age of corrupt Communist Party bosses and black-market millionaires. When the party fell, organized crime rose. The Bratva recruited from war veterans, the decimated police force, and even from desperate athletes and bodybuilders. You see that group over there?”

I jerk my head toward a table of kachki .

“They were bodybuilders?” Sabrina says.

It’s not really a question—even the oldest and most broken-down in the group still maintain enough of their mass to show that they were powerfully built men, filling out their oversized pullovers and zip-ups, acne scars on their cheeks and hair thin at the temples from rampant steroid use.

“That’s right—all part of the Soviet sports machine. The one on the left, that’s Boris Kominsky. He was a judo champion. The next one over, Nikolai Breznik, he was a wrestler, and Vladislav Aulov a Decorated Master of Sport. Then all the funding dried up and they went from hitting heavy bags to beating payments out of debtors. You see that one on the end, the ogre with the martini?”

The largest of a dozen big men is dressed in a Kelly-green Adidas zip-up, a vodka martini delicately pinched in one monstrous hand.

“Hard to miss him.”

“That’s Ira Angeloff, better known as Cujo. Most of the kachki run their own rackets now, but you can still rent Cujo for your own person al attack dog if you’ve got the cash. They say he hits harder than Mike Tyson.”

Sabrina casts a cool eye over Angeloff’s knuckles, swollen and distended, a roadmap of scars.

“He looks good at his job.”

“The best. His old boss got rich brokering bribes for oligarchs who wanted to buy the newly privatized state enterprises. The entire economy of Russia was up for grabs, and all the independent businesses popping up were ripe for extortion. Cujo made a lot of money for a lot of people, but I think most of it went up his nose. The house he lives in now is nothing special.”

“Who runs the protection rackets now?”

“Everyone. Krysha is half the economy of Russia. Everyone pays protection money, it’s part of business.”

“Are you taking krysha ?”

“Not yet. Most of the territory is already portioned out. We’ll have to move in on someone else to take ground.”

Sabrina scowls, trying to understand the current system.

“There’s a High Table,” she says, “but the Bratva aren’t one group.”

I shake my head. “They never have been. There’s no centralized authority, no head of the snake you can lop off. The High Table represents a half-dozen of the biggest bosses in Moscow, but it’s a loose alliance, and loyalties change all the time. It’s supposed to prevent the outright warfare we had in the nineties.”

“Chaos is bad for business,” Sabrina says .

“That’s right. Moscow was madness then—every day it was car bombs, drive-by shootings, boss after boss gunned down and then buried in monumental tombs that would cost a hundred year’s wages for a normal Russian.”

“I want to see them,” Sabrina says.

“The tombs?”

“Yes.”

I laugh. “If you’re imagining white marble, think again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Russian gangsters aren’t exactly known for subtlety. The headstones are massive, glossy black, with life-size portraits of the dons. Sometimes with their favorite cars or their favorite women. Dripping in gold chains, drinking wine, and eating lobster.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not even exaggerating. Whatever you’re imaging, picture bigger, uglier, and tackier.”

Sabrina laughs, delighted at the picture in her head.

“What stopped the wars?” she asks. “The cops cracked down?”

“They tried under Yeltsin, without much success. Putin is smarter.”

“How so?”

“He turns a blind eye to the Bratva, as long as we remember that the Kremlin is the biggest gang in town. He’ll even contract us from time to time.”

“You work with the government?” Sabrina frowns .

“It’s not a matter of choice. To use a term you Gallos would recognize, they make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

Sabrina considers this, fiddling with the straw in her drink.

“So you’re saying of all the people you don’t fuck with in Russia, the politicians are at the top of the heap.”

“It’s the underworld and the overworld. And all the normal people caught in the middle.”

“So what’s your angle?” she asks, her eyes fixed keenly on my face. “Where do you intend to stake your claim?”

I shrug. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Vice is a booming industry, competition everywhere you look. To expand in any particular area risks conflict with those already present.”

I incline my head toward each table in turn, rattling off the names of gangsters and the territory they control.

“There’s the Chechens over there. They’ve got a new boss, Ismaal Elbrus.”

Sabrina eyes the fleshy figure in the center of the group.

“Did he eat the old boss?”

I let out a soft snort. “Don’t let him hear you say that. Elbrus is vindictive as they come—all the Chechens are. Cross them and they’ll burn down your grandma’s house, and every house on her street.”

“What do they do?”

“Illegal oil deals, bank fraud, counterfeiting … They’ve got a massive obshak where they pool their funds, and they’re connected in gov ernment, especially the Regional Department of Organized Crime.”

Sabrina laughs at that little piece of irony.

“There’s the Slavs on the other side of the room. They despise the Chechens. They’re mostly arms dealers, and they’ve got as much heavy hardware as the Red Army—half of it stolen from the Red Army, actually. They’re in local drug production and they bring in cocaine from South America.”

Sabrina nods, eyes flicking from table to table as she memorizes each face and each piece of information.

“You probably know her.” I nod toward the table featuring the only other woman in the room not paid to be there. A beautiful brunette with a keen, intelligent face is speaking intently with a young man in an elegantly fitted suit. They look stylish enough that they would have easily breezed inside the Soho Rooms, had they chosen to go there instead of here.

“Neve Markov,” Sabrina says softly.

“See that rock on her finger? She just signed a marriage contract with Simon Severov, youngest son of Sanka Severov.”

“She’s engaged?”

“As of this week.”

Sabrina examines Simon with fresh interest, stirring her straw around in her ice.

“You’re wondering if Ilsa likes him?”

Sabrina smiles, unembarrassed by the mention of her ex. “I don’t think she expected her sister to get married any time soon. ”

I shrug. “They say it’s a love match.”

Sabrina is already back to the business at hand. “You’ve been dealing ARs and blow,” she says, remembering what Jasper reported.

“That’s right. We have an agreement with Eban Franko to sell in his strip clubs. But the price of coke has been all over the map, and the molly we get from Amsterdam has been shit. We need a new supplier.”

Sabrina frowns, thinking hard.

Her eyes flick around the room, table to table, understanding that each group represents a center of power with which we will have to contend.

At last she says, “What we need is a resource. They’re fighting over what already exists—we could make something new.”

“Make what?”

“The thing everyone wants …” Sabrina smiles. “A good time.”

“The Slavs already make their own molly. They can buy in higher volume than us and undercut our price.”

“If we can’t compete on price then we have to compete on quality. You said the stuff coming in from Amsterdam is shit?”

“Only one in three shipments tests pure.”

“But you can get the raw materials?”

“I can get anything once I know where to look.”

Sabrina bites the edge of her thumbnail. I see the wheels turning in her head as she sits across from me, scowling in concentration .

“We need something no one else can sell …” she says softly. “Something unique … that we cook ourselves …”

“You want to be in charge of it?” I ask her.

She looks up, eyes large and luminous in her tanned face. I see her excitement, but she plays it cool as always. “Could be fun.”

“You should bring Hakim on board. He took two years of biochemistry.”

“Oh yeah?”

“His parents wanted him to be a pharmacist like his sisters.”

Sabrina grins. “Then I guess it’s time to make his parents proud.”