the flow.
She began tugging on her dress sleeve, trying to rip it, until I finally reached over and gave her a hand. I yanked too hard, because I nearly tore off the whole top of her blouse.
She tied the cloth around my leg. Three or four minutes had passed, and while I was still too deaf to hear any sirens, no police had shown up yet. I worked my way around the side of the car and ducked in long enough to drag out Mel’s body. I tugged his corpse around to the front of the car, flipped him over, and found his cell phone. I didn’t know the number to the embassy, but it was one of those fancy Motorola models where you push a few buttons on the side and pretty soon his favorite numbers pop onto the screen.
I handed it to Katrina. “Call the embassy.”
Or that’s what I think I said. It might’ve been “order a pizza” for all I know, because it’s damned hard to speak when you can’t hear your own voice. She studied the screen and punched in some numbers, and I could see her lips moving, so she was obviously talking to somebody.
We waited some more. I was fuming. I couldn’t believe that in a major metropolitan area like Moscow, the police wouldn’t be alerted to a major firefight right in the middle of the town and wouldn’t respond right away. Russian inefficiency has to have its limits, right?
Perhaps another three minutes passed before the first police car arrived. The dicey part was the moment the first two cops came around the side of the shooter’s car with pistols in their hands. I could see Katrina’s lips moving, and I presumed she was yelling something in Russian, like, “Hey, we’re the good guys, so please don’t shoot.”
They didn’t shoot. That, however, was the limit to their kindness. They kicked the M16 out of my hands. Katrina started to stand up, but one of the cops quickly flung her against the car, and before I could do anything, the other cop grabbed me by my shirtfront, lifted me off my feet, and threw me against the car, too. They roughly patted us down, and then had our arms trapped behind our backs as they slapped handcuffs around our wrists.
More cops arrived-lots more cops-and people streaming out of their apartments, coming to investigate the aftermath of the street battle. I watched them walking around, surveying the damage, and then Katrina was jammed into the back of one police car, as I was roughly shoehorned into another. Some three minutes later, my car screeched to a halt in front of a police station that looked like something out of any ordinary American slum.
I was shoved and dragged inside and led to a dirty room in the back, where I was literally tossed into a chair. I still couldn’t hear a sound and my eardrums ached, which was really inconvenient, as I couldn’t massage them. Funny, the little things that bother you in the worst nightmares.
A few minutes later, two guys wearing civilian suits came in. They stood and studied me like I was an interesting new specimen brought to their laboratory for dissection. If this were America, I’d be doing the big lawyer war dance, threatening them with police brutality charges and just generally making a horse’s ass out of myself.
I bit my tongue. It’s always dangerous to put your mouth in gear when you can’t even hear what you’re saying, not to mention we were in a foreign land where lawyers are perhaps not as warmly loved and admired as they are in America.
One of them tried saying something, and I thought I heard a bit of noise. I shook my head to let them know I didn’t understand-a doubly ambiguous signal, as they were probably speaking Russian, which I couldn’t comprehend anyway, so how the hell did I expect them to realize I was deaf?
The guy kept talking, and I kept shrugging my shoulders and making silly faces. I suppose to any outside observer the whole scene looked nothing short of comical.
Then the door burst open behind them and in walked two more guys in suits. The two detectives stiffened, an indication that the new visitors were important men. They yammered back and forth very briefly, before a detective walked around behind me and unlocked my cuffs. I instantly reached up and massaged my ears, which was what you’d call a really happy moment.
The door opened again and in walked Ambassador Allan D. Riser and an aide. I guessed they’d uncuffed me before he arrived so it wouldn’t look like they’d mistreated me.
Riser had an appropriately concerned look on his face, and he said something to me, to which I intelligently replied, “I’m deaf.”
He nodded, then said something to the detectives. I was then led out of the room, placed in the back of another police car, and then driven straight to a Russian hospital. I was led into a cramped, messy operating room and plunked down on a steel gurney.
The hospital was filthy and run-down and lacked that antiseptic smell that lets you know that germs aren’t welcome there. Soon a harried-looking doctor and two remarkably hefty nurses came roiling in. The nurses laid me out on the gurney and then the doctor began cleaning my leg, spilling a clear liquid on the wound, then roughly wiping it off with a white rag. He pulled out something that looked like calipers and began digging around inside my leg, apparently searching for the piece of shrapnel embedded inside.
Did I mention that he failed to administer any kind of painkiller whatsoever? I sure as hell mentioned it to him and the two sorry-ass nurses fighting to hold my leg steady. I begged them to stop and called them the filthiest names you could imagine. The only remotely good part about this was that I could finally hear my own voice. It made no difference, however. The doctor was ferociously pitiless. It took him nearly three minutes of digging brutishly around, another few minutes to stitch it up, and when he was done, tears were streaming down my face and I was sweating like a drafthorse.
They walked out and left me, moaning and shaking and staring at all the blood on the table. Then the door opened and Katrina came in with the two very important-looking guys I’d seen earlier. There were bandages on her knees and elbows, and somebody had given her a shawl to throw over her torn blouse.
She and the two important-looking men were jabbering in Russian, and although it sounded like people talking underwater, I distinctly heard the sounds of their voices.
I said, “Katrina, what are these two assholes doing here?”
She looked over at me. “Bad move, Sean. They speak English.”
The two men were also staring at me, without what you’d call friendly expressions. I grinned. “Hi guys.”
The suit on the left said, “I am Igor Strodonov, Moscow chief of detectives, and you will meet my assistant, Chief Inspector Felix Azendinski.”
This explained why the two detectives back at the station had suddenly stiffened. The Moscow chief of detectives is like the second biggest wig in the whole city police hierarchy. I said, “Nice to meet you.”
From his expression that was a one-way sentiment. “Miss Mazorski has informed us of what has happened at the site of the very serious accident.”
“You mean ambush.”
“Yes, this was so,” he said, trying to sound like a master of the English language, which he clearly wasn’t. “This is most unfortunate thing. Is great embarrassment for Russian people. The driver captain is dead with bullets in head and American lawyers are injured.”
It was impossible to tell whether he was sincere or not. Most cops don’t mind at all when defense lawyers get gunned down in the streets. They think it’s a charming irony. I asked, “Do you have any idea who the shooters were?”
“All are unfortunately dead.”
I personally didn’t think it was the least bit unfortunate. “So you don’t know?” I persevered.
“We have theory. We are checking out now. They are Chechens, which is not good thing. You understand?”
“No, I don’t understand.”
“Chechens very bad… what? Outlaws, yes? They kill Americans to make protest. Was terrorist thing.”
I nodded as if this made sense-actually it made no sense. Not to me. But then I’m no expert on the Russian political scene. I glanced at Katrina, who stood perfectly still, an enigmatic expression on her face.
The chief of detectives said, “You very lucky to live. These Chechens, they kill good.”
Leaving us with that thought, he and his assistant departed. Katrina came over and helped me get off the bloody gurney. Having no idea what to do next, she walked and I limped out of the ward, me swearing that if I got so much as a bellyache before I left Moscow, I’d make them fly me out on a medevac plane.
A black sedan with American diplomatic plates was outside, and the driver climbed out as we exited. We
