I notice the thick red locks peering out from beneath her wig.
“But you weren’t wearing a disguise …”
“I put one on so Stary wouldn’t recognize me.”
“Why do you want to hide from him?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?” asked Foxy. “So that I can dance with you.”
“You took that costume with you just so you could dance with me?”
“Yes,” said Foxy. “Yes, yes!”
And then she lifted her mask up, just a little, and she kissed me. Very gently. She tasted of cheap apricot- flavored chewing gum. She made my head spin. I lost my voice.
Stary’s guys were nearby. Some of them were even looking at us funny.
“They see us!” I gasped, leading her to the center of the hall.
“Not us. They saw you,” said Foxy calmly. “You, dancing with Death. They couldn’t have recognized
And she kissed me again, and I thought it was a good thing I was wearing loose trousers. At first I was thinking of wearing those tight black ones …
Then she asked me: “How are you going to spend your five hundred grand?”
And at that moment the size of my pants didn’t matter, because all of that blood poured right back to my brain and temples. My head stopped spinning, and for a moment I let go of Foxy, but then hugged her and pulled her toward me again. I shook her to the music and asked her the stupidest question that I could, given the situation. “How do you know? How?”
And Foxy Lee said it was hidden mics. She said there were tapes. She said that Stary recorded all my telephone conversations. “Don’t be afraid, no one heard them but me. I took them with me, and Stary doesn’t know … I was the only one who heard them, only me, only me …”
Listening to her hot apricot whisper I understood for the first time in my life that it was possible to kill for money.
But maybe killing her wouldn’t be necessary. After all, she is very beautiful, and I’m no stranger to mercy. Besides, killing her wouldn’t be that easy, the little snake!
“Is 50 percent enough for you?” I asked, feeling like a gentleman.
She suddenly pulled her hand out of my grasp. She pulled her hand away and shook it as though it had been burned.
“You want more?” I asked, dumbstruck.
She stepped back. Then again. Then she removed her mask.
Her face was pale, so pale that her golden freckles seemed brown. There were tears in her eyes, though maybe they were just shining with anger. Her lips were trembling like a child moments away from wailing out loud.
“I don’t need your money,” said Foxy Lee. “I just wanted to give you all the tapes. Just in case.”
She pulled out a parcel from underneath her gown and handed it to me.
If only I hadn’t hurt Foxy Lee’s feelings. If only she hadn’t taken off that mask.
The merciful in masks are giving the bums grub—instant ramen noodles. I also grab the noodles, so as not to stick out from the rest of them, but I can’t eat the stuff. I can’t get it down my throat.
Don’t ever trying eating ramen noodles in a bus packed full of bums, even if you’re really hungry.
To be clear, I hadn’t eaten in more than a day. But I gave away my portion to the guys at the back of the bus (incidentally, no one sat down next to me, which is typical—as though
At Paveletskaya station we pick up three more bums. They stink worse than the seven from Savelovskaya. They are seated in the only remaining free seats, right next to me.
If I hadn’t offended Foxy Lee, if she hadn’t taken off her mask, everything might have been different. Stary wouldn’t have realized that Death, the disgusting old lady with a scythe I’d been feeling up, was his woman, his redheaded little fox. He wouldn’t have sicced his bald assholes on me, and I wouldn’t have dropped the parcel with the tapes onto the floor when the fuckers bent my hand behind my back. And Stary wouldn’t have heard the tapes, and would never have known where the charity money went, and he wouldn’t have ripped up my airplane ticket, and he wouldn’t have taken my golden bank card, and I wouldn’t have ended up tied to a chair in a secret room in his mansion on the bank of the Yauza River … if only I hadn’t offended Foxy.
Though it must be said that things didn’t end so bad after all. Really, everything turned out great, and apart from the stench I have to put up with now, I’m actually happy.
My gold card is with me again, and my half-million is still on it—I checked. Early in the morning I’ll get off this shit-wagon and take in a lungful of clean, cold air at Kursk station. One of our guys will meet me there with new documents and tickets for the Moscow-Odessa train in a third-class car. “We can’t have the documents done before the morning,” said Foxy. “The main thing is that they don’t find you during the night, and in the morning you get on the train. No one in his right mind will look for you in a third-class car.” In Odessa I’ll meet Foxy Lee and we’ll board a ferry for Istanbul. (“No one in his right mind will look for us on that lousy raft full of cheap whores and Ukrainian profiteers sleeping on their striped bags.”)
“Does the ferry operate in the winter?” I asked.
“Of course it does!” said Foxy “How do you know?”
“Cause I’ve been on it.”
“With the cheap whores?”
She looked at me sadly, with mild surprise. Like a stray dog being punished for a puddle of urine from yesterday that had already seeped into the floor.
“The cots were hard,” Foxy said thoughtfully. “And sometimes the boat tossed and heaved like mad. Do you get seasick?”
I don’t get seasick. And no one will spoil the moment for me. We’ll be on a Turkish ferry, and I’ll be drinking whiskey and Foxy will have liqueur, and we’ll walk around on the deck and enjoy the waves. And all night we’ll roll around on one of those hard cots, then sleep awhile, and then I’ll fuck her again.
I’ll fuck her at dawn when we’re coming into the Bosphorus.
We’ll spend the day in Istanbul and have Turks shine our shoes and fill us up with tea. They’ll pour our coffee for us, and stare at Foxy and call her Guzel, and then in the evening we’ll fly away to the other side of the world. We’ll buy ourselves hats and sunscreen, and we’ll eat fruit and play tennis and snort coke. We’ll fly on a glider and swim in the ocean every day.
And every day, every single day, I am going to thank her. Because if it wasn’t for Foxy, I would be swimming in the Yauza River right now underneath a layer of ice. I’d be blue, swollen, and dead.
Foxy saved me.
It happened when I no longer had any hope at all. I was sitting naked, tied to the chair in the middle of the room. Stary stood opposite me, looking at me with an expression of boredom in the face.
“You used to work out?” he asked finally, nodding at my six-pack abdomen.
Stary himself was heavy—not too overweight, about twenty pounds, but he hated sports.
“I work out,” I said. I didn’t want to use the past tense.
“You did,” Stary corrected me. “You used to work out.”
Again, a pause hung in the air.
“Are you gonna beat me up?” I asked, just to break the silence.
He shook his head. No, he wasn’t going to beat me. He was just waiting for the guys to bring him a bucket.
Not only was Stary fascinated with the world of film, he was also interested in literature. His favorite book was
An ice hole in the Yauza River was much more effective than the ocean. They could drill a hole in no time. But cement mix and a bucket were harder to come by, even in Stary’s mansion. So he had to send his thugs out to buy both. They’d been gone more than thirty minutes, and it was getting late. (They got the bucket right away, at the Atrium, as a matter of fact. They’d hit some snags with the cement mix, though.) They called Stary every few
