he's bleeding inside.
Finally Lev drops guy number two and raises his own hands like a club above his own head and brings them down on the third guy's neck and Daz suddenly feels the life go out of the man.
Which it has, because his neck is broken when the guards find the body in the morning.
Anyway, the guy is dead and his blanket is now wrapped around Daz, and when Old Tillanin returns from the infirmary things have changed. He finds this out his first night back when his dreams are broken by a sharp pain in the chest which he at first attributes to a heart attack, which is not entirely mistaken, seeing as how there's a sharpened spoon buried in his chest.
Planted there by one of his own guys, because Old Tillanin isn't the King of the Heap anymore.
That would be Daziatnik Valeshin, but he doesn't get to ascend to the throne right away, because when the guards come in and find Old Tillanin prepped for the dirt nap, they reasonably conclude that Valeshin was just finishing the job he had started and haul him away. Old Tillanin, after all, had kicked in cash and goodies to the guards, so they at least have to make a pretense at investigating his death in case one of his henchmen becomes the new top dog.
So they strip Daz — still sick and hurting from his beating — and toss him naked into a cold isolation cell and he spends the next two weeks freezing and starving, sitting in his own shit and piss, but he doesn't talk. He'll freeze and starve to death but he's keeping his mouth shut.
About all that keeps him going is the fantasy.
America.
Specifically, California.
You're KGB, you're privy to a few things — television, movies, magazines — so Daz has seen images of California. Seen the beaches and the sunshine and the palm trees. The sailboats, the surfers, the beautiful girls all but naked, lying in the sun as if they wish to be taken right there and then. He's seen the sports cars, the highways, the homes, and it's these images that keep him going.
Two weeks later the guards decide that they've made their gesture and haul him out. Blind as a mole, naked, and shivering, he limps back to the cell.
Which is something of an improvement except his guard, a nasty piece of work from outside Gorky, tells him that he's just going to beat him to death anyway, slowly, on a daily basis.
'There is only one way to stop it,' Dani tells him. 'You must show him that you can endure more pain than he can give out.'
Dani tells him of the old days of Organizatsiya, back in Czarist days when it was known as Vorovskoy Mir — the World of Thieves. In those days, Dani tells him, the convicts were really tough. Knowing they had no recourse to revenge against the guards, their only choice was to intimidate them not through acts of aggression but through acts of endurance.
'They showed the guards that they could inflict more damage on themselves than the guards could inflict on them,' Dani says.
It makes a certain sense to Daz. In a country of such long and deep suffering, endurance is the ultimate power.
Dani tells him stories of convicts who ran knives down their own faces, who sewed their own eyelids shut, stitched their own lips together, to intimidate the guards out of beating them. There is even a story about one spectacularly tough convict who nailed his scrotum to a workbench and waited for the guard to arrive.
The guard was impressed.
Dani tells Daz these stories and then he and Lev sit back to watch.
Daz waits for the guard to come on shift. He borrows a nail and a cell-made 'hammer' and sits on the end of the bench by the cell door. When the guard comes to give him his beating, Daz stares at him, takes a deep breath and drives the nail through his hand between the index finger and thumb and into the bench.
Sits there sweating, jaws clenched, staring at the guard.
That night Lev and Dani initiate him into the Vory v Zakone.
The Brotherhood of Thieves.
53
Not that there's one Brotherhood of Thieves.
In Russia there are about five thousand — maybe three hundred of which are serious players — but the one that Lev and Dani belong to is as good as any, and they all subscribe to the same basic code of conduct — the Vorovskoy Zakon.
Vorovskoy Zakon — the Code of Thieves — makes most of the usual demands you'd expect of a criminal code. It has the Russian version of omerta — you keep your mouth shut, you never help the authorities, you never ever rat on another thief — and it has a Mafia-like provision that allows a panel of brothers to convene to settle disputes and punish, if need be, the transgressor.
But it also has a couple of unique features. One is a sort of Catholic priest deal because, strictly speaking, the code forbids marriage. You can have girlfriends, boyfriends, and pets. You can date barnyard animals if you want, but if it turns out to be a love connection, you can't marry one.
Then there's an almost Jesuit-like commandment that demands a purity of effort, a single-minded devotion to crime, because the Vorovskoy Zakon forbids a member from making an honest living.
These are the points that Dani and Lev instruct Daz in as they tend to his wounds and give him two new ones. One is a jailhouse tattoo behind the left knee. Using a pin, some ink and some smuggled grain alcohol, Lev carefully etches two attached crosses with Stars of David hanging from the cross-pieces.
The rationale of the Two Crosses gang being that while Christ was the headliner on that Friday in Jerusalem, there were two nameless zeks stuck up beside him, both Jewish thieves.
Then they cut his wrist, likewise open up old scars on their own wrists and touch them together as Daz recites, 'I will obey the demands of the Vorovskoy Zakon: I will help other thieves whenever possible. I will always come to the aid of my brothers, I will never betray my brothers, I will submit myself to the authority of my older brothers, I will submit all disputes to a convocation of my brothers and abide by its decision, I will carry out the punishment of transgressors if my brothers ask me to do so, I will never cooperate with authorities…'
Somewhat melodramatic, Daz thinks, but whatever it takes.
'I will forsake my own family,' Dani intones, 'I will have no family but the Two Crosses…'
Daz balks.
Dani repeats, 'I will forsake my own family. I will have no family but the Two Crosses…'
Forgive me, Mother, Daz says to himself. I will make it up to you someday.
'I will forsake my own family. I will have no family but the Two Crosses…'
'If I transgress against Vorovskoy Zakon, may I burn in hell.'
For the rest of his stretch no one lays a hand on him. Having kicked Old Tillanin off the top the heap, Daz is firmly entrenched in his place, especially with Dani and Lev as his bodyguards. There's not a zek in the cell that wants to take this trio on, knowing that (a) you are far less likely to kill than to be killed, and (b) even if you should incredibly luck out somehow and take out all three of them, you'll eventually have to deal with the three hundred Two Crosses gang members who will either find a way to whack you in prison or whack you the second you step out into the sweet, brief sunshine of freedom.
It's just not something that anyone with any brains wants to fuck with.
So Daz gets some breathing room.
A little living space.
And living large by Russian prison standards.
Gets himself a little extra gruel, an extra blanket, the odd cigarette, a little homemade vodka brewed from potato skins in a back room distillery. He's even offered the exclusive use of one of the prison fags, who with a little makeup in dim light bears a passing resemblance to something female.
Daz is like, Thanks but no thanks on this. Figures that for eighteen months he can keep his sexuality and self-respect inside and intact. Saves himself for one of his fantasy I-wish-they-all-could-be-California-girls. So he
