Gabriel Fuller is ready in mind, if not in heart.
Gabriel Fuller is not Gabriel Fuller’s real name.
He still doesn’t know who he works for, even after all this time, even after nearly seven years.
That was a different life ago, and a far different world from one where places like WilsonVille could even be imagined. At that time, his world was what he had been able to make of it, mostly through cunning and to a lesser extent through strength, and it had been those two traits that had brought him, before he was Gabriel Fuller and still called Matias, to the Uzbek’s attention.
They’d met at a party Matias was throwing for his crew, back in Odessa. He and his boys had brought over half a ton of raw heroin from Afghanistan the previous week, and already most of it had made its way to Moscow. Even after the bribes, the cuts, all the hands that had reached out for their share, it had been a dynamic haul, and there was reason to celebrate. Normally, Matias ran a tight ship, but this time he’d let loose the reins for one night, thrown the party himself. There was booze and cigarettes, some pot, and a lot of girls, all of them pretty and most of them young.
The Uzbek’s appearance came as a surprise; he was uninvited but not unknown. Matias had seen him a handful of times before, had heard some stories, had asked some discreet questions. The stories were broad-stroke myth, about how the Uzbek had done this thing or that thing, like how he’d cut the balls off some UN guy and fed them to him, or how he’d taken the ringleader of a gang moving black market gasoline and made him drink a gallon of the stuff, then cut him open and thrown a match. The stories backed the answers to Matias’s questions, even if the stories weren’t true; in no uncertain terms, the Uzbek was Not to Be Fucked With. Connected, he’d been told, and Matias had said something about the big players in Russia, gotten a head shake in return. Not just Moscow, no, bigger than that. Connected, you understand?
Matias didn’t, couldn’t conceive of something bigger than the power in Moscow, but he got the message, and he passed the word: his boys, they stayed the fuck out of the Uzbek’s way, out of the Uzbek’s business. Twice already, Matias had killed jobs that could’ve been lucrative, just to stay on the safe side.
So Matias’s first thought on seeing the Uzbek walk through the door in his tailored suit and his long hair and those wire-rim round-frame glasses with the tinted lenses was pretty much, Oh, fuck me running, we cut into his score. And his second thought was to wonder how quickly he could get out of the country, and how much of his money he might be able to take with him. If the Uzbek was as connected as all that, then killing him wasn’t going to help; killing him would only make things worse, and would mean Matias would be that much longer for the dying. Although he had done some dark things in his short life already, he didn’t fancy being turned into a flambe.
It was Vladimir, the biggest of his boys and not the nicest by a long shot, who came to him.
“This guy, he says he wants to talk to you.”
Matias hadn’t taken his eyes from the Uzbek since the man had arrived, watching where he stood perfectly still just inside the door to the condo, letting the pretty girls and tough boys party around him. The Uzbek watching Matias the same way Matias was watching him.
“He say what about?”
“No. He’s that guy, the one you told us-”
“I fucking know who he is.” Matias ran fingers through his hair, shot the vodka he’d been drinking down his throat, made his way over. The Uzbek didn’t move, didn’t seem to blink, and for all there was to read in his expression, Matias might as well have been illiterate. Fleetingly, Matias wondered if the Uzbek would just shoot him then and there.
But the Uzbek smiled. “Matias. We haven’t met.”
“No.”
“We should talk. There a place we can talk, without all this noise?”
“You mean alone?”
“I’m not chasing your ass cherry, Matias, you can relax.”
Maybe not literally, Matias thought, but he shrugged and led the way out of the room, through the master bedroom, where two of his boys and three of the girls were contorting themselves without clothes. Matias didn’t care, and from what he caught of the Uzbek’s reflection in the glass doors, neither did the other man. Slid the doors back, stepped out onto the balcony, into the nighttime view of Odessa, down to the Black Sea. You could see lights of the ships moving about the port, life on the waterfront. It was late spring, not cold, but not quite warm enough.
“You a trusting man, Matias?” The Uzbek indicated the drop.
“You want me dead, I’m dead.” Matias shrugged, much as he had before, but he liked the fact that the Uzbek had called him a man. That was something he normally had to fight for.
But the Uzbek undercut it immediately. “How old are you?”
Matias felt the tension race up his back, felt the fleeting satisfaction vanishing. “Twenty.”
The Uzbek shook his head, leaned forward on the railing, and knocked a cigarette from its pack into his hand. He made fire from a lighter, paused before touching it to the tobacco. “You don’t have to lie.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Then that’s a pity.”
“Why?”
A plume of smoke. “We thought you were younger. You look younger. We thought maybe sixteen, seventeen.”
“You like boys.”
The Uzbek exhaled, watched his smoke disappear into the night air. If Matias’s implication had offended or annoyed or even registered, he couldn’t tell.
“We like potential,” the Uzbek said. “But twenty, Matias…that’s too old, I’m afraid.”
“So maybe I’m not twenty.”
“Ah.”
“Maybe sixteen, that’s true.”
“Sure. And you’ve been running your crew, what, four years?”
Matias nodded, thinking that the Uzbek already knew the answers to the questions he was asking; thinking that the Uzbek maybe wasn’t here to kill him, and if not, now wondering just what the fuck this player wanted. He was sensitive about his age with good reason, had needed to fight, even kill people who thought his youth meant he was unworthy of their respect. It was how he’d started, smuggling cigarettes, and Old Grigori had come to him and told him to cut him in or he’d get cut, cut and left to bleed out. Grigori, fifty years old, who hadn’t caught up to the times, and the next day Matias had gone to him under the pretense of bringing tribute, and instead used a tire iron to modify their arrangement. When that was done, Grigori had more gray matter outside than in, and what had been his now belonged to Matias, including his crew, including his customers.
He’d been twelve then.
So now, sixteen-or maybe seventeen, he really wasn’t sure-and he didn’t know what he was feeling. Felt his brow furrowing as he searched out the emotion, and all the while the Uzbek kept his silence, smoking his cigarette and apparently in no hurry to explain himself. It took some digging before Matias found the name to what he was feeling, realized he was curious. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that.
“So sixteen is good?”
The Uzbek nodded.
“What is sixteen good for?”
Flicking the cigarette away, watching the ember spark orange in the sky until it vanished. “Because we can make something out of you.”
Then the Uzbek explained what that meant.
Still no names, no explanations beyond the most basic. Yes, this meant Matias was part of the same organization, the same machine, that the Uzbek served. Yes, that meant the same protections, the same benefits. Money, sure; comfort, absolutely; respect, that would be earned, but already Matias had respect, enough respect that they would come to him with this offer.
There is a man, the Uzbek told Matias, a man who lives in shadow, a man whose name you will never know. But this man has noticed you, Matias. He likes what he’s seen of you, what he’s heard. He likes that you’re not some brat who thinks a pistol makes him a king, who thinks God is a bullet. Too many fucking kids, they work their muscle, not their mind, and thugs, hell, thugs are cheap, thugs are easy. Thugs are a dime a dozen, right? But this man, Matias, he likes that you can move a half ton of heroin a thousand miles and do it right, without fucking it up, without getting greedy or turning stupid. He likes that you’ve been smart enough to stay out of our way, and he likes that you’re not some broken psycho fuck. You’re not a broken psycho fuck, are you, Matias? We’re not going to find some dog bones under your bed and DVDs of you fucking their entrails, nothing like that?