Die for Me Read online

  “Ty kto?”

  I stare back at skull-face, and he issues a series of directives. I am yanked to my feet, my rucksack is lifted from my back, and two of the women support me as I half-walk, half-hop back to the warehouse. The young man with the neck tattoo, meanwhile, speaks with quiet urgency into a mobile phone. Now that I’m helpless, and wholly unable to control events, I discover that I’m no longer afraid.

  The two women help me over the step and through the judas gate, and I’m immediately assaulted by a stomach-turning stench. It’s everywhere, filling my nostrils, throat and lungs, and it gets worse the further we proceed into the building.

  “Zdes vonyayet,” says one of the women, holding a headscarf over her nose, and I can’t help but agree. It stinks.

  In front of one of the fan heaters, everything has been sprayed with a fine mist of shit. The floor is slippery with it, as are the ceiling and light fittings, and a dozen of the most elaborate wedding dresses, formerly shell-pink, pearly white or ivory, are unromantically flecked with brown.

  Villanelle’s improvised diversion has proved shockingly effective. When she was setting it up I was too tense to pay much attention, but I now see what she was up to. Having anticipated that one of the first things that the Prekrasnaya Nevesta workforce would do on arrival at the warehouse was to get the place warmed up, she packed the interior of one of the heating units with a week’s worth of her own shit, neatly knotted into six biodegradable bags. The bags would have melted fast, and the fans would have done the rest. The heater in question has been turned off, but it’s still steaming and dripping.

  Disgusting, but classic Villanelle. A signature piece, you might say, charged with the brilliance and horror that she brings to her finest work. Even as I gag at the stench, I recognize the flair that drew me to pursue her in the first place. I also can’t help reading the scene as a personal message. If you’re hoping for happy-ever-after, she’s saying, then forget it, that’s all shit. She clearly meant it, because she’s gone. Given the choice between rescuing me and saving herself, she legged it.

  Of course she did. She’s a psychopath.

  The two women lead me to the center of the warehouse floor, where skullhead is waiting, and a chair has been pulled up for me. My rucksack is placed at my side. All things considered, I’m amazed at their civility and consideration.

  “Ty kto?” I’m asked again, and again I stare back vacantly.

  “Kto ona takaya?” Who is she? Skullhead points in the direction that Villanelle went, and I frown as if I don’t understand the question, or who he’s referring to.

  “Ona bolnaya na golovu,” says the woman with the headscarf, and at her suggestion that I have mental health problems I gaze at her piteously and, to my surprise, discover that I’m weeping.

  Once I’ve started, I can’t stop. I lean forward in the chair, bury my face in my hands, and sob. I feel my shoulders shake, and the tears run through my fingers. I’ve lost my husband, my home, and to all intents and purposes, my life. I’m trapped in a country I barely know, forced to use a language I speak poorly, fleeing an enemy I can’t begin to identify. Niko thinks I’m dead, but the Twelve will not be so easily deceived. The only person who could have kept me safe was Villanelle, and now I’ve lost her too.

  How long I remain in this self-pitying state, I don’t know, but when I finally raise my head, the guy with the neck tattoo is lowering his phone. “Dasha Kvariani’s coming,” he announces grimly. “She’ll be here any minute.”

  Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I look at the faces surrounding me. Whoever this Dasha is, her arrival is clearly not good news.

  There are five of them. The four men are young, thuggish, and sharply dressed. They stop dead when they enter, pinch their noses, and glance at each other with disbelief. The woman ignores the smell and the milling employees, strides to the center of the warehouse floor, and looks about her. In these surroundings, she’s a vision. Black shearling jacket zipped to the throat, cool green eyes, lustrous chestnut hair cut in a chin-length bob.

  She beckons to the men. Two of them approach me, preceded by a dizzying gust of cologne. The first pulls me to my feet and subjects me to a disdainful body search, the second empties my rucksack on the floor and separates the Glock and the magazines from the crumpled sweaters and dirty socks and panties. The woman glances at the handgun. Placing her hands on her knees, she leans forward and stares at me thoughtfully. Then she slaps me, really hard.

  I almost fall out of the chair. It’s not the stinging force of the blow, it’s the assumption that I’m someone who can and should be hit that really shocks me. I gape at her, and she slaps me again. “So what’s your name, you rancid whore?” she asks. Russian insults can be colorful.

  Something shifts in me and I remember Villanelle’s words. Her demand that I should be more like her. More like Oxana. She wouldn’t be slumped in a chair, tearfully waiting for the worst. She’d be ignoring the fear, sucking up the pain, and planning her next move.

  I’ve never hit anyone in my life. So when I propel myself from the chair and punch Dasha Kvariani smack on the tip of her pretty nose, I’m almost as surprised as she is. There’s a biscuity crunch, blood jets from her nostrils, and she turns sharply away, clutching her face.

  Everyone freezes, and the two men who searched me grab my arms. I’m so high on adrenaline I don’t feel a thing. Even my ankle is anesthetized. The Kvariani woman is swearing vengefully, in a voice thick with blood and mucus. I can’t follow all of it, but I catch the words “ogromnaya blyat oshibka,” which means “huge fucking mistake.” She issues a series of orders, and two of the warehouse employees slip away, one returning with a long coil of industrial twine, the other wheeling one of the tall, steel garment hangers.

  The two men stand me in front of the hanger and bind my wrists behind my back with the twine, knotting it with practiced fingers. My confidence wavers, and I’m not sure that my bad ankle is going to go on supporting me for much longer. As my knees start to shake, the two men lift me by the armpits and stand me on the horizontal bar at the hanger’s base, a foot off the ground. Then I feel my wrists wrenched forcefully upward and suspended from the upper bar. I slump forwards, my arms vertical, pain knifing jaggedly through my neck and shoulders. I fight to retain my balance, knowing that if my feet slip off the bar both of my shoulders will be wrenched out of their sockets, but my knees are gluey and my sprained ankle is on fire.

  The pain gets worse, and becomes inseparable from the sound of my gasping and sobbing. Dasha Kvariani steps in front of me, so that all I can see of her is her fur-lined ankle boots. Then a plastic bucket of water is placed beside one of the boots, her hands lift it, and a moment later I’m drenched, and gasping at the icy shock. I jerk and writhe so violently that the garment hanger tips toward the floor. I’m a split second from a smashed face when invisible hands catch the hanger and ease it back upright. There’s no feeling in my arms and shoulders now. I have to fight to breathe, dragging the air into my constricted lungs. I’m so cold I can’t think.

  There’s a gunshot, shockingly loud, followed by a dimming of the lights and a pattering of falling glass. Then there’s a meaty crack and a thump.

  “Dasha Kvariani. You’re looking good, suchka.” It’s Villanelle, her voice deadly calm. I’m so relieved I start to cry. She’s come back for me.

  “Vorontsova?” Kvariani’s voice is thick and unsteady. “Oxana Vorontsova? I thought you were dead.”

  “Wrong. Get her down from there right now, bitch, or you’ll be fucking dead.”

  Hands untie me, and assist me to a chair. I sit there for a moment, dripping and shaking with cold. Villanelle is standing, legs apart, over the unconscious body of one of the thugs that tied me to the garment rail. He’s bleeding from a serious head wound inflicted, I’m guessing, with the butt of Villanelle’s Sig Sauer. I’m not sympathetic, and I’m pleased to see that the weapon in question is pointed unwaveringly between Dasha Kvariani’s eyes.r />
  “Send someone to get her some dry clothes,” Villanelle orders, glancing at me, and Kvariani gestures to the pale woman, who hurries nervously away, glass from the shot-out ceiling light crunching and snapping beneath her boots.

  “Can you please explain to me what the fuck you’re doing here?” Kvariani asks Villanelle. “And put the Sig away. We’re both Dobryanka graduates, after all.”

  Slowly, Villanelle lowers the gun.

  Kvariani points at me. “Is she yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry if we were rough with her. But I have to ask you again, Vorontsova, what the fuck is going on? The owner of this business pays me to make sure there’s no trouble here, and I get a call saying that two crazy women have covered the place in human shit, damaged machinery and destroyed hundreds of thousands of rubles worth of stock. I mean, what am I supposed to do?”

  The pale woman returns, and leads me by the hand to a dingy women’s toilet. She’s found me a T-shirt, a grimy pink sweater, and a faded pair of overalls like those worn by the Prekrasnaya Nevesta employees. A filthy hand towel hangs on the back of the door. Gesturing vaguely at the clothes, the woman disappears. By the time I’ve changed into the dry clothing and limped back to the others, Villanelle and Dasha Kvariani are talking and laughing together. Where the thug with the head wound was lying is now just a long blood smear. At my approach Villanelle and Dasha look up.

  “You look cute,” Villanelle tells me in English. “Proletarian chic suits you.”

  “Yeah, very funny. You did notice, just five minutes ago, that your new best friend was torturing me?”

  “Hey, she apologizes, she’s really sorry about that. And she’s an old friend, not a new one. We know each other from prison.”

  “Small world.”

  “Yeah, well. Dasha was famous in Dobryanka, everyone called her ‘Necksnapper.’ Her father was a respected gang leader in the vorovskoy mir. He was so powerful in St. Petersburg the prosecutors didn’t dare try Dasha in a local court, they sent her fifteen hundred kilometers away to Perm. And her family still managed to fix everything.”

  “Great.”

  “Anglichanka?” asks Dasha, flashing her teeth at me. “You’re English?”

  I ignore her. My shoulder muscles are still agony. “So why was she on trial?” I ask Villanelle in English. “What did she do?”

  “She was on the Metro one evening, going home from college. The train was like super-crowded, and some guy started feeling her up.”

  “On my bum,” says Dasha. “So I…” She mimes taking the guy’s head in her arms and violently twisting it. “His neck maked sound like… popkorn.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know, right?”

  “Weren’t there witnesses?”

  “Yes, but my father speaked with them.” She switches to Russian.

  “She says it was her Me Too moment,” Villanelle explains.

  4

  “I guess you should start calling me Oxana,” she says, a little regretfully.

  “I guess I should. I liked Villanelle.”

  “I know. Cool name. But too dangerous to use now.”

  “Mmm. OK… Oxana.”

  We’re lying at opposite ends of a huge old enamel bath in Dasha’s apartment. Tall windows overlook a broad highway from which the rumble and hiss of traffic and the clanking of trams are dimly audible. Oxana, needless to say, has taken the end of the bath without the taps, but the hot water is bliss after our confinement in the container.

  The apartment is on the third floor of a massive neoclassical block in an area called Avtovo. The building must once have been very grand, the sort of property where senior Communist Party officials and their families lived, but it has clearly been in decline for decades. The fittings are worn, the lift creaks, the plumbing clanks and grumbles.

  “Look at the color of this bath water,” Oxana says, playing with my toes.

  “I know, gross. And you farting all the time doesn’t help.”

  “It does help. It’s fun. Watch. Squeeze asshole, little bubbles. Relax asshole, bigger bubbles.”

  “Awesome.”

  “When you live alone, you get good at stuff like this.”

  “I’m sure. So what’s the deal with Dasha?”

  “How do you mean, what’s the deal?”

  “I mean are we her guests, her prisoners…?”

  “Dasha and I were in Dobryanka prison together, and under the criminal code, the vorovskoy zakon, we are sisters. Murder sisters. That means that she has to help me. I told her I was a torpedo, a shooter, for a powerful family in Europe, and that I had to get out fast. She doesn’t need to know more than that at this stage.”

  “And me?”

  “She didn’t ask about you.”

  “I’m just the torpedo’s girlfriend?”

  “You want me to say you worked for MI6? Seriously? I told her what I had to tell her to get her trust, because right now, we need her. We need new identities, new passports, all that shit, and she can fix it. Or at least she’s connected to people who can fix that. Basically, we can stay here as long as we need to, she’ll help us, and she won’t give us up. But she’ll also expect me to do something for her in return. Something big. So we have to wait and see what that something turns out to be.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Nothing. Can we have some more hot water? It’s getting cold at this end.”

  “There isn’t any more hot water. What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I mean you just, I don’t know, hang out or whatever. Dasha knows you’re my woman. She won’t involve you in any criminal stuff.”

  “Wow. That sounds… Fuck, I don’t know what it sounds like.”

  She takes an experimental bite of my big toe. “You want to be a gangster, pupsik?”

  “I want to be by your side. I didn’t come all this way just to go shopping.”

  “I did. I’m going to make you look so amazing.”

  “I’m serious, Oxana. I’m not just your babe.”

  “Yes, you are. You know your feet taste of Emmental cheese? The sort with the big holes in?”

  “You are seriously fucking weird, you know that?”

  “I’m weird? You’re the one in the bath with the psychopath.”

  I try to get my head comfortable against the taps. “What sort of criminal stuff is Dasha into?”

  “The usual. Smuggling, credit cards, protection, drugs… Probably mostly drugs. Her father Gennadi led a brigade for the Kupchino Bratva, which controls the St. Petersburg heroin trade, and when he retired he passed the leadership of the brigade to Dasha. It’s almost unknown for a woman to hold rank in the gangs, but she was already a fully initiated vor, and people respected her.”

  “I bet. She’s a fucking sadist.”

  “Eve, pupsik, you have to move on from this morning. See it from her point of view. That Prekrasnaya Nevesta warehouse pays her to protect them, and we did make quite a mess in there. Dasha had to be seen to be taking control of the situation.”

  “She didn’t have to torture me.”

  “She only tortured you a bit.”

  “She’d have tortured me a lot if you hadn’t turned up.”

  “She was just doing her job. Why is it that when a woman is assertive in the workplace she’s always seen as a bitch?”

  “Huge question.”

  “I’ll tell you. It’s because we expect men to torture and kill people, but when women do it it’s seen as violating gender stereotypes. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I know, sweetie, life’s unfair.”

  “It really is. And just for your information”—she kicks bathwater in my face—“I’d appreciate a thank-you for rescuing you this morning.”

  “Thank you to my protective, feminist girlfriend.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  Dasha, I have to admit, takes very good care of us. The apartment is impersonal, and the room she assigns to us has an unaired,
unused feel to it. The windows, which are locked shut, have the thick, greenish look of bulletproof glass. But the bed is comfortable enough, and after breakfast, which is brought to us by a young woman who introduces herself as Kristina, we both fall fast asleep again.

  When we wake it’s almost midday, and we’re ravenous again. The apartment appears to be empty except for Kristina, who has clearly been waiting for us to surface. Handing us each a warm down-filled jacket, she leads us out of the flat, and we descend to the street in the shuddering lift. My ankle is less swollen than it was, and although it’s still sore, I can walk.

  It’s good to be in direct sunlight. The sky is dark azure blue, and the morning’s snowfall has frozen, dusting the grimy, yellow-brown buildings with sparkling white. Lunch is a Big Mac and fries, and then Kristina walks us a short distance down Stachek Prospekt to a second-hand store in a converted cinema, the Kometa. The seats have been removed from the auditorium, which now holds rank after rank of clothing stalls. These offer everything from goth and punk fashions to old theater costumes, military and police regalia, fetish-wear and homemade jewelry. The place smells musty and cloying, as such places always do, and it’s oddly poignant to wander down the aisles beneath the art deco chandeliers, picking through the tattered residue of other people’s lives.

  “In these clothes, you’ll look as if you’ve lived in St. Petersburg forever, like subculture people,” Kristina says. Tall and long-legged, with hair the color of wheat and a gentle, hesitant manner, she’s an unlikely member of a gangster household. She doesn’t speak often, and when she does it’s so quietly that we strain to hear her.

  Oxana gives my waist a squeeze. “Reinvent yourself, pupsik. Go crazy.”

  In this spirit, I make a point of choosing things I’d never have considered in my former life. A midnight-blue velvet coat, its silk lining in tatters, its label identifying it as the property of the Mikhailovsky Theatre. A studded jacket painted with anarchist slogans. A mohair sweater striped in black and yellow like a bee. It occurs to me that I’m enjoying myself, something I’ve never felt while buying clothes before. Oxana seems to be having a pretty good time too. She’s as ruthless out shopping as she is in every other area of her life, not hesitating to rip a garment out of my hands if she wants it for herself.