About this time, Kuzin called him into a meeting, told him he was doing so well he wanted to increase his partnership stake with Arkadin.
“Of course, I’ll need you to play a more active role,” Kuzin said in his semi-intelligible voice. “Business is so good that what I need most now is more girls. That’s where you come in.”
Kuzin made Arkadin the head of a crew whose sole purpose was to solicit teenage girls from the populace of Nizhny Tagil. This Arkadin did with his usual frightening efficiency. His visits to Yelena’s bed were as plentiful but not as idyllic. She had grown afraid, she told him, of the disappearances of some of the girls. One day she saw them; the next they had vanished as if they’d never existed. No one spoke of them, no one answered her questions when she asked where they’d gone. In the main, Arkadin dismissed her fears-after all, the girls were young, weren’t they leaving all the time? But Yelena was certain the girls’ disappearances had nothing to do with them and everything to do with Stas Kuzin. No matter what he said, her fears did not subside until he promised to protect her, to make sure nothing happened to her.
After six months Kuzin took him aside.
“You’re doing a great job.” A mixture of vodka and cocaine slurred Kuzin’s voice even further. “But I need more.”
They were in one of the brothels, which to Arkadin’s practiced eye looked oddly underpopulated. “Where are all the girls?” he asked.
Kuzin waved an arm. “Gone, run away, who the fuck knows where? These bitches get a bit of money in their pocket, they’re off like rabbits.”
Ever the pragmatist, Arkadin said, “I’ll take my crew and go find them.”
“A waste of time.” Kuzin’s little head bobbled on his shoulders. “Just find me more.”
“It’s getting difficult,” Arkadin pointed out. “Some of the girls are scared; they don’t want to come with us.”
“Take them anyway.”
Arkadin frowned. “I don’t follow you.”
“Okay, moron, I’ll lay it out for you. Take your fucking crew in the fucking van and snatch the bitches off the street.”
“You’re talking about kidnapping.”
Kuzin laughed. “Fuck me, he gets it!”
“What about the cops.”
Kuzin laughed even harder. “The cops are in my pocket. And even if they weren’t, d’you think they get paid to work? They don’t give a rat’s ass.”
For the next three weeks Arkadin and his crew worked the night shift, delivering girls to the brothel, whether or not they wanted to come. These girls were sullen, often belligerent, until Kuzin took them into a back room, where none of them ever wanted to go a second time. Kuzin didn’t mess with their faces, as that would be bad for business; only their arms and legs were bruised.
Arkadin watched this controlled violence as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He knew it was happening, but he pretended it had nothing to do with him. He continued to count his money, which was now piling up at a more rapid clip. It was his money and Yelena that kept him warm at night. Each time he was with her, he checked her arms and legs for bruises. When he made her promise not to take drugs, she laughed, “Leonid Danilovich, who has money for drugs?”
He smiled at this, knowing what she meant. In fact, she had more money than all the other girls in the brothel combined. He knew this because he was the one who gave it to her.
“Get yourself a new dress, a new pair of shoes,” he’d tell her, but frugal girl that she was, she’d merely smile and kiss him on the cheek with great affection. She was right, he realized, not to do anything to call attention to herself.
One night, not long after, Kuzin accosted him as he was leaving Yelena’s room.
“I have an urgent problem and I need your help,” the freak said.
Arkadin went with him out of the apartment building. A large van was waiting on the street, its engine running. Kuzin climbed into the back, and Arkadin followed. Two of the brothel girls were being guarded by Kuzin’s pair of personal ghouls.
“They tried to escape,” Kuzin said. “We just caught them.”
“They need to be taught a lesson,” Arkadin said, because he assumed that was what his partner wanted him to say.
“Too fucking late for that.” Kuzin signaled to the driver, and the van took off.
Arkadin settled back on the seat, wondering where they were going. He kept his mouth shut, knowing that if he asked questions now he’d look like a fool. Thirty minutes later the van slowed, turned off onto an unpaved road. For the next several minutes they jounced along a rutted track that must have been very narrow because branches kept scraping against the sides of the van.
At length, they stopped, the doors opened, and everyone clambered out. The night was very dark, illuminated only by the headlights of the van, but in the distance the fire of the smelters was like blood in the sky or, rather, on the undersides of the belching miasma churned out by hundreds of smokestacks. No one saw the sky in Nizhny Tagil, and when it snowed the flakes turned gray or even sometimes black as they passed through the industrial murk.
Arkadin followed along with Kuzin as the two ghouls pushed the girls through the thick, weedy underbrush. The resiny scent of pine perfumed the air so strongly, it almost masked the appalling stench of decomposition.
A hundred yards in the ghouls pulled back on the collars of the girls’s coats, reining them in. Kuzin took out his gun and shot one of the girls in the back of the head. She pitched forward into a bed of dead leaves. The other girl screamed, squirming within the ghoul’s grasp, desperate to run.
Then Kuzin turned to Arkadin, placed the gun in his hand. “When you pull the trigger,” he said, “we become equal partners.”
There was something in Kuzin’s eyes that at this close range gave Arkadin the shivers. It seemed to him that Kuzin’s eyes were smiling in the way the devil smiled, without warmth, without humanity, because the pleasure that animated the smile was of an evil and perverted nature. It was at this precise moment that Arkadin thought of the prisons ringing Nizhny Tagil, because he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was locked within his own private prison, with no idea if there was a key, let alone how to use it.
The gun-an old Luger with the Nazi swastika imprinted on it-was greasy with Kuzin’s excitement. Arkadin raised it to the height of the girl’s head. She was whimpering and crying. Arkadin had done many things in his young life, some of them unforgivable, but he’d never shot a girl in cold blood. And yet now, in order to prosper, in order to survive the prison of Nizhny Tagil, this was what he had to do.
He was aware of Kuzin’s avid eyes boring into him, red as the fire of Nizhny Tagil’s foundries themselves, and then he felt the muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and knew that the driver was standing behind him, no doubt on Kuzin’s orders.
“Do it,” Kuzin said softly, “because one way or another in the next ten seconds someone’s going to fire his gun.”
Arkadin aimed the Luger. The shout of the report echoed on and on through the deep and forbidding forest, and the girl slid along the leaves, into the pit with her friend.
Thirty-Five
THE SOUND of the bolt being thrown on the 8mm Mauser K98 rifle echoed through the Dachau air raid bunker. That was the end of it, however.
“Damn!” Old Pelz groaned. “I forgot to load the thing!”
Petra took out her handgun, pointed it in the air, and squeezed the trigger. Because the result was the same as what had happened to him, Old Pelz threw down the K98.