Kingmakers, Year One

2. Dean

2

DEAN

T he underground fight club of Moscow is literally underground, in what was once an abandoned metro station. Now it functions as a spot for raves, drug deals, and bare-knuckle boxing tournaments run by the Bratva.

The shouts of the crowd echo down the tunnel where the train tracks are overgrown with weeds and clogged with discarded hypodermic needles. You can still see the remains of faded billboards plastered on the curved walls, advertising products that haven’t been sold since the fall of the Soviet Union. Over that, layer upon layer of graffiti in dripping spray paint.

It’s chilly down here, at least ten degrees colder than at street level. I keep my hoodie on until the last moment, so my muscles stay warm.

“Who are you fighting?” Armen asks me.

He’s smoking a cigarette, even though he’s supposed to fight in a minute himself.

“Chelovek,” I say.

“He’s pretty big,” Armen remarks.

“Pretty fuckin’ slow, too.”

Armen takes a long drag, exhaling the blue smoke up to the vaulted ceilings, then crushes the butt under his heel.

“I’ll bet on you,” he says, as if he’s doing me a favor.

“I’m not betting on you,” I tell him.

Armen laughs. “That’s why you’re rich and I’m broke.”

“Dmitry!” Boris shouts. “You’re up.”

I’m the first fight of the night. When I’m fighting, I use my Russian name. I use it for most everything when I’m in Moscow.

I strip off my hoodie, baring my body to the cold. The chill feels like an electric current against my skin. I can smell the scent of Armen’s cheap cigarette and the damp mold of the subway tunnel. Also the sweat of the fifty or so men crowded on the platform, and the tang of alcohol from the flasks in their jackets.

There’s no ring. We fight in a chalk circle. If we step outside the circle, the spectators will shove us back in again.

Boris is the event organizer. He’s not Bratva himself, though he works for them. He’s skinny with a shaved head and spacers in both ears, wearing a long coat with a fur collar. His best attribute is his loud, raspy voice that cuts over the noise of the crowd, no microphone required.

I step into the circle, bouncing lightly on my toes. I’m wearing only a pair of trunks now, and flat sneakers. My hands are taped.

Chelovek strolls into the other side of the circle. I haven’t fought him before, but I know who he is. He’s got a thatch of ginger hair shaved into a Mohawk, and a tattoo of a snake-ridden skull sprawled across his chest. He goes by Ryzhiy Chelovek, which basically means Copper-Top.

We’re about the same height, a little over 6’2. While I’m lean and wiry, he’s beefy to the point of softness. In real boxing he’d be way outside my weight class. In the underground fights, they just call this a “Thick and Thin.”

We face off against each other. He raises his fists up under his chin, shoulders hunched. I stand exactly as I am, with my arms at my sides.

I haven’t fought Chelovek before. I’ve seen how he moves, though. In fact, I can tell what sort of fighter he’ll be just by the way he walked into the ring: brash, swaggering, and overconfident.

Sure enough, as soon as Boris blows his whistle Chelovek comes at me with both fists flying, thinking that if he can land a solid punch I’ll go down hard.

I duck the blows easily. Left, right, left, left, right, right.

Jesus, he’s so predictable. I can see each punch coming from a mile away.

He’s already breathing hard. Either he smokes like Armen or he’s been neglecting his cardio. Probably the latter. That’s why he’s so soft around the middle.

I duck down and give him a sharp punch to the gut, testing his muscle tone. He grunts and exhales hard. He’s neglected his crunches too, apparently.

I can hear the spectators shouting their bets. Those who bet on Chelovek initially are now trying to hedge. But the numbers aren’t as much in his favor anymore.

I can see my father’s friend Danyl standing at the edge of the ring. He’s got his hands tucked in his pockets, smiling toothily. I’m sure he knew better than to bet against me.

Of course my father isn’t here himself to watch me win. He never comes to my fights. It takes a lot more than that to get him to leave the house.

I block another haymaker from Chelovek, and he hits me in the side with a left hook. I feel an unpleasant bending of the ribs, and I hunch over enough that his next blow catches me in the ear, making my head ring.

That pisses me off, but I don’t let my anger get the better of me. I shove it down, like coal in a furnace. I want the rage to fuel me, without letting the fire run wild.

I watch for my opening.

Left, right, left, left ? —

This time I interrupt Chelovek’s sequence with an uppercut to the jaw. His teeth click together hard and his head snaps back. He stumbles back on his heels, dazed and pained.

I pursue the advantage, hitting him twice in the body and again in the head. Now I know his ears are ringing, worse than mine.

Chelovek spits a little blood onto the platform, raising his fists once more, steadying himself.

He comes at me slower now, more carefully. He learned his lesson. Or at least, he thinks he did.

I could wear him down like this. Let him tire himself out while I duck his blows. He doesn’t have the stamina to keep it up for long.

But I made my own bet on the fight. I’ve got to knock him out in the first round.

Only twenty-two seconds left, according to the count I’m keeping in my head.

If I want the KO, I’ll have to set a trap.

Chelovek is annoyed and embarrassed. He wants to hit me. If I offer a tempting bait, he’ll jump at it.

I send a couple quick jabs at his face, popping him lightly on the nose to piss him off even more. Then I hold my fists high, exposing that same right side to his left hook.

Sure enough, Chelovek swings hard for my ribs. He hits me in the same place as before, and this time I hear a pop and I feel the sickening hot burn of a rib cracking.

It doesn’t matter. I’ve already sent a right cross rocketing down toward his jaw. I hit him in the exact spot where the jawbone meets the skull. I can feel the bone separating. I watch the whole bottom half of his face pop out of alignment.

Chelovek doesn’t feel it. He’s already unconscious before he hits the ground. He goes down like a tree, straight and wooden, unable to even put his hands up.

The winners shout in triumph, and even those who lost their bets can’t help howling.

I stand tall in the ring, refusing to acknowledge the pain in my side.

Boris grabs my fist and hoists it aloft.

“Once again, Dmitry Yenin takes the win! That’s six matches now, still undefeated!”

Boris stuffs a wad of bills in my hand, my winnings from the fight.

I don’t care about forty thousand rubles. I won ten times that amount betting on myself. I’ll collect it from Danyl later.

Still, I stuff the money in the pocket of my shorts.

I wince a little as I bend down to pick my hoodie up off the concrete.

Armen is smoking again, while bouncing lightly on his toes to warm up. He’s taken off his hoodie and sweatpants, revealing a truly stunning pair of silk shorts emblazoned with a gold tiger across the crotch.

“Not bad,” he says to me. “Glad I put a whole two thousand on you.”

“Bet Chelovek wishes he did, too.”

“I think Chelovek wishes he never crawled out of his mother’s cunt.” Armen leaks his wheezy laughter.

“Good luck,” I tell him.

“You’re not staying to watch me fight?”

“Nah. You got everything you need to win.”

“Really?” Armen says.

“Yeah. Except speed, stamina, and technique.”

Armen stares at me for a second, then bursts out laughing again.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he snorts.

“You got those shorts at least…”

Armen grins. “That I do.”

I head back down the tunnel, walking along the deserted tracks. I hear Boris’s whistle signaling the start of Armen’s match, and the shouts as his backers cheer him on. The noise fades away as I round a curve in the tunnel.

I pass the staircase that would take me back up to street level. I prefer to walk down to the old Park Kul’tury station and go up from there. This is a more direct route, cutting under the Moskva River. Plus, I like it down in the tunnels. It’s dark and quiet. At some points you can hear the vibration and rushing sounds of the trains passing by on parallel tracks that are still operational. Other spots you can hear the river itself running overhead.

I’ve got my phone out so the screen casts just enough light to see the tracks ahead of me. “Major Tom” plays quietly on my earbuds, my steps falling in time to the beat.

I shut the music off when I hear a scuffling sound up ahead. Not a rat. Something worse than that.

Fucking junkies.

There’s three of them, two men and a woman. If you can even call them that. They look scraggly and feral, and I can smell them from twenty feet away.

Who knows what the fuck they’re doing down here. They’ve got a duffle bag on the ground in the middle of their little huddle, and it looks like they’re pulling things out of it. Probably stolen from somebody on the subway, or on a crowded street up above.

If they’re smart, they’ll let me pass by.

Two of them have the right idea.

But the third stands up, twitchy and bright-eyed.

“Hey,” he says. “Where you goin’?”

I ignore him, continuing to walk past.

“Hey!” he shouts a little louder in his raspy voice. “I’m talkin’ to you!”

His lank, unwashed hair hangs around his shoulders. He’s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath, his skinny chest bare. He’s got scabs on his face and body, and I can tell from the stiff way he walks that his feet are swollen. The effects of Krokodil.

The government has tried to stamp it out a dozen times, but it always pops up again. It’s just so cheap to make. You can cook it in your kitchen with shit bought from pharmacies and hardware stores: hydrochloric acid, paint thinner, and phosphorous scraped off the side of a matchbox.

It’s an imitation of heroin, just as addictive. The only downside is the way your flesh rots away from the injection site, and your brain starts to atrophy inside your skull. Which doesn’t lead to the best decision-making.

Which is why this fucker thinks it’s a good idea to talk to me.

“That a new iPhone?” he demands, eying my phone greedily.

I stop walking, turning to face him slowly.

“You want to fuck off now,” I tell him. I slip the phone into my pocket, so my hands are free. While I’m doing that, I close my fingers around the smooth handle of my switchblade instead.

Without that faint blue light, the tunnel is even dimmer. It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I can see better than the three junkies.

They’re all standing now, fanning out silently so the woman is in front of me, the two men trying to flank me.

“Give us the phone,” the second man hisses.

The problem with fighting these three is that I have no idea what diseases they might be carrying. One scratch from an uncut fingernail and I could get hepatitis.

As they close in around me, I plan to end it quick.

The guy on the right charges first. I send him stumbling backward with a kick to the chest. The second guy isn’t as lucky. I press the button to flick out my blade while it’s already whistling through the air toward his torso. I stab him in the liver with medical precision, then jerk the blade back before I get any blood on me. It still splashes down on the toe of my sneaker.

He drops to his knees, groaning.

That takes the steam out of the other two.

The girl raises her hands, blubbering, “We don’t want any trouble.”

I tell her, coldly, “Then fuck off like I said.”

She grabs the duffle bag and scrambles off down the tunnel, the opposite direction I was walking.

The guy I kicked looks at his fallen friend, then at me. He runs after the girl, abandoning the man I stabbed.

I ignore him too, continuing on down the tunnel.

He’ll probably bleed to death, but the thought doesn’t disturb me any more than the knowledge that every butterfly you see will be dead in a month’s time. That’s the cycle of life—junkies die young, from the drugs, the company they keep, or trying to rob the wrong person in a tunnel.

I continue on my way, until I reach the staircase up to Krymskiy Proyezd.

Spring in Moscow is hell.

There’s a word the Russians use to describe it: slyakot, which means “slush mud.” That’s partly why I stayed down in the tunnels—so I wouldn’t have to navigate the torrents of thick brown mud, stiff with ice crystals.

The roads in Moscow are always shit. But in the springtime you have to worry that you’re about to step through a slush drift into a pothole that will break your ankle. The sidewalks become crowded with shuffling, slipping pedestrians, and the traffic is worse than ever. The melting snowdrifts are black from a whole winter’s worth of car exhaust.

Without any proper drainage system, the melted snow sits in stagnant puddles. It’s rasputitsa— the time of the year “when roads stop existing.”

I hate Moscow.

I’m an American. I was born in Chicago. My mother is American.

And yet my father brought me here, back to the city he never loved. Back to the environment so miserable that it drove my mother to drink herself half to death, until the only way to save herself was to leave.

I’ll be leaving soon myself.

Going to the one place my father will support—the one thing he won’t view as abandonment.

Finally I reach Korobeynikov Lane, where the slush has been painstakingly cleared from the street for the benefit of the elite residents of Noble Row. It’s a long, sandstone building divided into six luxury residences, worth about twenty-one million each in American dollars.

That’s where I live with my father.

I would assume that the other five houses on Noble Row are bright and clean inside, full of sparkling chandeliers and gleaming woodwork.

That’s not how our house looks. Not on the inside.

It’s dark, crowded, and filthy, because my father won’t allow any maids. He won’t let anyone in the house but me. Not since my mother left.

He’s holed up in there like Howard Hughes, only leaving when he absolutely has to handle his business in person. And he’s barely managing that these days.

I open our front door, struck in the face by a waft of stale and dusty air. It smells like the carpets haven’t been vacuumed in six years, which they haven’t. It smells like the windows are never opened, and the walls are full of mice.

It’s dark inside, almost as dark as the train tunnel. The heavy drapes that hang floor to ceiling are all pulled shut. It’s as quiet as a tomb.

You can still see the remnants of my mother’s decorating from the time when we first moved here, when I was a toddler and she still had the motivation for projects.

I don’t actually remember that time, other than a few snippets—a few bright flashes nestled in my memory like jewels. My mother with paint streaks on her face, laughing and telling me not to ride my tricycle in the house. My father coming home dressed nicely in a suit, bringing me a little bag of Tula gingerbread, asking me to guess in which pocket it was hiding.

I can see the work she did—the blue floral wallpaper in the dining room. The gold chandelier shaped like elkhorn. The soapstone fireplace with its pile of white birch logs, never burned, never touched since.

All those rooms are filled with shit now. Piles of books stacked taller than I stand. Piles of newspapers, too. Magazines, old bills, and receipts. And then the boxes: things my father ordered and never even opened.

So many boxes. Telescopes and globes. Toasters and binoculars. Stationery, photography equipment, power tools, and shoes. I couldn’t guess what’s in half of them. I don’t know why my father started ordering all this crap. And I don’t know why he piles it up on tables and chairs, never even bothering to look at most of it.

I climb the long, curving staircase up to his office. He expects me to check in when I get home at night.

I knock on the door, waiting for him to say, “Enter,” before I turn the knob.

He’s seated behind his vast walnut desk, dressed neatly in a dark suit with a cleric collar. His ash-blond hair is combed back. He has carefully shaved the side of his face that grows hair.

His hands are folded on the desktop in front of him—one smooth and pale, one red and scarred. That hand doesn’t work as well as the other. The tissue is so tough and knotted that he can’t even grip a pen.

My father is jarring to look at.

He’s so handsome and so ugly at the same time.

The left side of his face is beautiful almost to the point of femininity—his eye a particular shade of blue that almost looks violet, striking against his fair skin and white-blond hair.

The right side is a mass of blistered, discolored flesh, like a dry river bottom baked and cracked by the sun. His hair is burned back to show a patch of shiny skull, with no eyebrow on that side. Even the eye itself is milky and pale. He can’t see out of it. His mouth twists up at the corner as if he’s smirking, though he never actually is.

The scars run all the way down the right side of his body. Down his arm and leg.

He looks like a strange kind of cyborg—part human, part something else. Not robot—monster, instead.

I’ve only ever seen him without a shirt on one time. He hates to be viewed that way. He hates to be viewed any way, really.

He’s only become more sensitive about his appearance over time.

When I was small, he would let me sit on his lap and touch the roughly wrinkled skin on his right hand.

By the time my mother left, he wouldn’t let her near him. They slept in separate rooms so she wouldn’t even see him changing.

My father is a powerful man. He holds a high position within the Bratva—the derzhatel obschaka , the bookkeeper. The head accountant for all illegal dealings within the city of Moscow.

He has a team of men who work under him. He’s subservient to only two men at the Moscow high table.

And of course, like any criminal, he has enemies.

But it wasn’t his enemies who did this to him.

It was family.

All his deepest wounds have come from the people he loved.

He loved my mother once. Maybe he even loved me.

Not anymore.

He looks at me with his one good eye and that milky orb.

I used to think that my father’s dual appearance represented the good and evil inside of him. The days when he was kind and brought me gingerbread, and the days that he raged and threw my mother’s decorations against the wall, smashing everything inside the house.

Now I think there is no devil and angel inside of people.

There’s only the appearance of good, and then what people actually are: weak and flawed. Destined to hurt you in the end.

My father looks at my boxing trunks.

“You fought today?”

I nod.

“Did you win?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” my father mimics me. “You are arrogant.”

“It’s not arrogance if it’s true. I’ve never been beaten.”

My father snorts softly. “I sounded like you once. Stupidity must be universal at that age.”

His good eye flits down to the toe of my shoe, where the junkie’s blood makes a dark stain on the dingy canvas.

“Your blood or his?” he says.

“Neither. Someone tried to rob me on the way home.”

My father nods without interest in hearing more. “They didn’t know who your father was.”

He’s not bragging, just making a simple statement of fact. No one would attack the son of a Bratva on purpose.

He shoves something across the desk toward me. An envelope: heavy, expensive, and slate gray in color.

“What’s that?”

“Open it.”

I crack the wax seal keeping the flap closed and slip out the dual sheets of stationery, skimming down the ornate script.

“I was accepted,” I say.

“Danyl Kuznetsov recommended you.”

“I’ll call to thank him.”

“You’ll do more than that. He expects two years of labor from you after you graduate.”

I nod. It’s a reasonable demand, considering the value of the favor.

Most students accepted to Kingmakers are from legacy families—those where the father, the grandfather, and the great-grandfather all attended the school.

My grandfather was part of a KGB task force, instructed to hunt down Bratva. He only rose through the ranks of the organization once he defected. The Bratva hated and distrusted him at first. He forced his way into their world. He advanced through violence and ruthlessness.

Kingmakers is beyond exclusive. They’re scrupulous about who they allow through their doors. Only those who can be trusted with the secrets of mafia families from around the world are allowed to enter.

I scan the letter once more.

“They accepted me to the Heirs division…”

I wasn’t sure if they would. Moscow is divided into three territories with three separate bosses. Technically, my father isn’t one of them. But in our section of the city, the actual boss has no children, and neither does the next man down.

If I do well at Kingmakers, there’s nothing stopping me from ascending to the position of Pakhan in time.

I look at my father’s face, searching for some hint of emotion: pleasure, anticipation, pride.

I see nothing.

“I’m tired,” I tell him. “I’m going to bed early.”

He nods and turns back to the papers spread across his desk.

I go down the long, gloomy hallway to my bedroom.

I strip off my clothes and stand under the boiling hot shower spray for as long as I can stand. Then I take my exfoliating sponge and roughly scrape every millimeter of my skin, cleansing the sweat from my fight, the filth from the subway tunnels, and any possible hair or skin cells that might have touched me from those fucking junkies.

I soap myself over and over, rinsing and then starting once more.

I always make sure that I’m perfectly clean, that I smell of nothing more offensive than soap. I do my own laundry, washing my clothes, my towels, and my sheets every time that I use them.

I can’t stand the thought that I might accidentally smell as musty and unkempt as this house.

The scent clings to everything I own.

I hate that smell.

I hate coming home.

When I’m finally clean, I slip beneath the fresh sheets I put on the bed this morning.

I take a book from my nightstand, the one I’ve been reading the last three nights: Midnight’s Children .

Cracking the spine, I read until the physical exhaustion of the fight finally overtakes the frantic bustle of my brain.

Then I set the book down and let my eyelids drop, trying to remember only the words on the page, without letting my mind wander.

I don’t want to think about anything in my real life.

That’s what books are for.

To take you away . . .