The Survivor

the first thing he’d done was knock out all the upstairs walls to give himself more breathing room. He would’ve taken out the pillars, too, if they weren’t needed to hold up the roof.

Floor-to-ceiling glass looked out at a steep stretch of canyon and the boulevard below, alive with light and movement. He rose and paced the vast room to show himself that he could, that he had the freedom to roam.

His history was defined by cages. His great-great-grandfather was a Cossack highwayman who’d died in the prison camps of Peter the Great, where the vory v zakonye, “thieves-in-law,” first rose to power. Populating the sparse branches of Pavlo’s family tree were more sworn criminals with allegiance to nothing but the thieves’ world, the vorovskoi mir. A grandfather who survived the NKVD torture chambers only to succumb to the terrors of Babi Yar. An uncle who sliced off his finger in a corrective-labor camp in the Urals to show defiance to the conventions of the world outside the bars.

Pavlo was born on the day of Stalin’s death in Donetsk, an industrial city in a bleak corner of Ukraine. At the time his father, who had taken the thief’s vow-to turn his back on all family except for his fellow criminals-was busy dying of dysentery in the Omsk Colony, where he’d been sentenced to six decades of hard labor. By his thirteenth year, Pavlo had made his way to the black markets of Odessa, where he came up among the syndicate, rising to the prestigious position of pickpocket by the age of fifteen. He did the bidding of the old-school vory, growing skilled with a blade. For his first execution, he cut off a man’s fingers, locked him in a car, and set it on fire. He never forgot how the man stared at him through the windows, never crying out. An early lesson taught by that hollow gaze: There are those who are meat and those who are fed.

By his seventeenth birthday, Pavlo was so feared that when he entered a room, grown men would put out their cigarettes and rise in respect. He did multiple stints in the Zone, coming out each time with more skills and more decoration, his service record tattooed into his flesh.

The Zone mocked the very conditions of existence. Cells built for sixteen prisoners were filled with sixty. Not enough room for everyone to stand at once, so they took shifts on their feet, rotating by the slot of the window where they drew in a few precious lungfuls of oxygen. They slept in stacks on the bunk beds. One toilet for sixty men-a hole in the earth, no paper. Men died of the heat in the summers and of cold in the winters. They suffocated in plain sight. When Pavlo was punished for asserting order, he lived for months at a time in a cement-walled standing cell little bigger than a coffin. One hour a week, for exercise, he was allowed into a belowground pen with a mesh ceiling that looked up into cells, the caged run of a jaguar. Like everywhere else, it smelled of rot and death and the insides of other men.

Air. There was never enough air.

In the Zone he learned the truth of humanity, saw people as they really were. Downcasts, the lowest of the low, lived beneath cots, where they washed foot wrappings and ate crumbs. Their bodies existed only for the others; they were used until they were no more than living remains. Prisoners were trampled. Kicked to death. Beaten with dirt-filled socks until they urinated blood. The grumbling in their stomachs underscored the emptiness within. There was one rule only: survive.

And yet in the midst of all this, there was tradition. Honor. When there was an interruption in the order of things, Pavlo oversaw one of the pravilki, the thieves’ courts. A man who had stolen from a vor above his rank was held on the floor, and the others took turns jumping from the top bunk until they’d shattered his rib cage. There was that potted plant in a prison in Perm that lived on the lip of the window grate. Each morning they would move it hand over hand through the room, each man allotted one sniff. There were chess games played with pieces of saliva-moistened bread and about once every season a ladle of fish stew poured over the kasha to make it edible.

Naked, Pavlo ran his fingers along the glass, staring down at Hollywood below. Notes from a rock concert at the Roxy climbed the hill, the thrumming of a bass guitar. He counted his steps. Two hundred eighty-three around the bedroom’s perimeter. Just like last night. Just like the night before.

Pulling on a silk bathrobe, he walked up the floating staircase and emerged onto the concrete plain of the roof. Drew the nighttime air into his lungs. Free to walk, free to breathe. He was indestructible, as resilient as a cockroach. When the apocalypse came and the bombs fell, he would scuttle up from ground zero and turn his antennae to the toxic winds. He spread his arms in the darkness, reaching as far as his body allowed and touching only air.

After a six-year stint in Corrective Labor Colony No. 6, Pavlo had been released into a new age-post-Soviet Russia in the early nineties. The next generation of thieves didn’t tattoo the markings of their trade on their flesh, but they respected and feared Pavlo and were savvy about the new system. A leader in the powerful syndicate, he was now a businessman, dealing in bank schemes, Japanese electronics, stolen Volvos and BMWs from Europe. The spoils of a nation were there for the taking. He bought factories, razed them to the ground, and exported the scrap metal. Aluminum to Estonia, nickel to Latvia, titanium to Lithuania. He whored and gambled and ordered the deaths of judges who opposed his will. The time and his reach were bespredel-without limits.

He arrived at the edge of the roof, a sheer drop several hundred feet to the rocks of the canyon. The boulevard showed its full nighttime colors-the glitz of Ripley’s Museum, the bronze pagoda and copper-topped turrets of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the tall-wall billboard of the latest HBO star glowering over a Boeing-size pair of Ray-Bans. Commerce. Free trade. In the thawing of one empire, he had learned the rules and reaped the rewards of capitalism. He had come here, to the source, to enjoy them.

He walked the roof’s edge, paying no mind to the harrowing drop inches away. His steps were sure and steady, his muscles taut. The fall was nothing compared to the beauty of all that space around him. He stopped and leaned over, his bare toes gripping the edge. Shout and there would be no echo. Drop a stone and he would hear no impact. Space. He turned and kept on. One hundred twenty steps. His to take whenever he liked.

The house was built into the hill, so the roof came level with the sloped street. A neighbor passing on a late-night walk lifted a hand in greeting. Pavlo stared until the man lowered his arm and hurried on. Pavlo walked along the property line as he did most nights, picking through the large, fine-grained granite rocks he had imported from the Urals. Sixty-eight steps, measuring the expanse of what was his. He reached the thick double front doors and tapped. Yuri opened and stepped aside, replacing his pistol at the small of his back. Pavlo entered, moving past the neat line of flannel slippers for guests; shoes were forbidden inside.

The downstairs furnishings were decadent. Cabinets of rift-sawn oak with ebony finish. Marble countertops with quartz for the glint. Dripping chandeliers, imported gold-leafed fixtures, patterned parquet flooring. A different life.

He pattered down the brief hall and turned into the girl’s bedroom, opening the door quietly. The curtains were drawn, and it smelled of cigarettes and stale perfume. Nastya lay on her stomach across her bed, facing away, painting her nails, headphones on so loud he could hear the tinny echo of rock music. Tall and reed-thin, she wore a sleeveless T-shirt and jean shorts slightly bigger than bikini bottoms. Her legs were so smooth that it looked as though her skin had been spray-painted on. She was striking as only a Ukrainian girl could be. Expansive cheeks, pouting mouth, neck like a swan.

He remembered the first time he had seen her, a bundle of pink blanket delivered to his doorstep by a familiar whore, a girl herself. The infant’s sapphire eyes, the shape of them, too-there could be no question that she was his. He’d taken her in his arms, and by the time he’d looked up, the whore had vanished.

As a vor, he could hold allegiance only to the brotherhood of thieves. He had turned his back on his birth family and sworn to have no family of his own save the vory v zakonye.

And yet.

Anastasia. Nastya for short. A daughter. Arriving like Moses in the reeds. And him a weathered criminal aged by decades of crime and life in the Zone. When he’d held this infant, some part of him he’d long thought extinguished had flared to life inside his chest. She was pure. She was good. She was his last chance to be human.

He was revered enough that the brotherhood would honor this choice, but he could not be seen raising a girl in plain sight. To have her he’d have to leave the nation. Leave his life behind. And so he had, riding the wave of emigrants allowed out by Yeltsin in the late nineties. A stop in New York’s Brighton Beach to organize his money through wires and offshore accounts, then on to Los Angeles, where anyone could be reinvented as anything. For her. All for her.