In the Red (14 page)

A
ndrei didn't like to talk about where he came from. He especially didn't want to talk about his father. “There's nothing to tell,” he'd say. “He was an itinerant. All I have of him is the brown skin that made me a dirty Gypsy. It is a wonder that my mother did not give her shame away to an orphanage. It must be some people like to keep their shame with them.”

He'd try to turn the conversation away, back toward Irina. He'd say, “It begs the question why your mother would give you away, darling. A lovely white baby like you. Where's the shame in that?”

“Maybe she was poor. Maybe she couldn't afford me.”

“Yes, well, most everybody is poor. Poor and desperate and hungry and can't do a damn thing about it.”

He said this in such a way that she suspected he didn't envision the poverty strictly in a physical sense. It wasn't just about drafty hovels and small portions of bad food, never enough to satisfy. Having to fight the elements every day to stay alive, to stay sane. Trying to remain convinced that what you did mattered at all, that you shouldn't let go and keep falling, keep falling forever. After all, perhaps it was hard to determine where physical poverty turned into whatever Andrei was getting at. Moral poverty? Even that phrase seemed too glib, too small to contain it. Whatever it was, it had to do with loneliness. Connections that were either severed or never formed with a world that didn't care.

Whoever Andrei's father was, wherever he was, he was old by now. Shriveled and toothless, probably. Dead, possibly. Certainly no longer a dashing vagabond who seduced village maidens and then careened off to other adventures, leaving the maidens unmaidened, suddenly weighed down with all the burdens of womanhood. A dark child with gray eyes. How can a woman so fiercely love what has ruined her? The body, the body has its ways. The body hates being discrete. It wants to impinge and be impinged upon. It wants to open up and adulterate itself. The swollen breast aches to nurture the bastard baby of the man who left. There's nothing to be done about it.

Dissolve—dissolve is the word. The day they met, Irina had told Andrei that the spent carcasses of dead cicadas
decomposed
into the earth to feed their brood, they did not
dissolve
. But
dissolve
is the right word after all for what the body wants to do. It wants to melt into another body until everything becomes indistinguishable, until the two bodies merging are gone, leaving in their place an amalgam. Something like a unity.

“Why are you so keen on knowing about my parents anyway?” Andrei asked. “You have two sets of your own: the ones that made you and didn't want you and the ones that didn't make you and wanted you. That ought to keep you philosophically occupied for the rest of your life!”

“You never talk about your family. Don't you ever write them?”

“Why would I do that? I became a lot less interesting after my mother managed to make some poor sot marry her and had some proper white children.”

“Come on. They'd want to know about you. Everywhere you've been. All the money you made.”

“Ha! As if that would make them forgive my impurity.”

“Your not being white, you mean.”

“That is a better way to put it. Purity is a bullshit idea for fairy tales. No, wait, that is an insult. No self-respecting fairy tale is simple enough to believe in purity.”

He laughed then, laughed the pointed way he always laughed at things that were dubiously funny. Dubious was his favorite brand of humor. How did a ramshackle device like Andrei manage to keep functioning in any way at all, and why did Irina stay to falter with him? He was the ultimate bad choice. He was a mockery of the rational. He was the gaping maw of the bad dream Irina didn't want to wake up from, because letting him eat her alive felt so much more vivid than being awake.

S
he liked to let him paint her face. She liked the feel of the plush brush against her skin; she liked the expectation in his eyes. She laid out her lipsticks for him in a neat row and asked, “What color do you want my mouth?” He picked a plum shade that would shortly be smeared all over him. She didn't know why doing this made him hard for her yet she helplessly responded, felt the blood rise to her cheeks to meet the powder blush he was applying there. Pink on pink, impossible to tell the real arousal apart from the cosmetic mimicking it.

She might have been disturbed by his predilection for making her up: the scene was reminiscent of an undertaker carefully making up a corpse. The thought of her own death sank into her flesh like the warmth from a bath. It was not frightening. There was even a strange sort of comfort in it. One day a man might paint her face with her no longer behind it—it would have ceased being her face, the features hollowed into a mask that looked like what had once been her.

For now, she was there, alive, stock-still, looking up at the man who was painting another woman's face on top of her bare face. He was doubling her. Or he was overwriting her. He was inscribing her into her own body. She was woman and woman was she.

When he lined her eyes, her lids didn't even quiver. Not because she trusted him not to hurt her with the pencil—his hand was, after all, trembling slightly—but because a hurt inflicted by his hand was the best hurt of all.

T
he whole thing must have started with the fight with Andrei. Or something like a fight. It was impossible to goad that man into an earnest, straightforward confrontation. Their arguments were always couched in ridiculous hypotheticals, innuendo, shards of ironic philosophy. It was all in jest, until gradually it wasn't. Irina asked Andrei why he would make a joke about whoring her to Dragos. Andrei fixed her with his dark gray eyes and demanded to know, “Do you want to be whored to Dragos?”

“Why would you ask a thing like that?”

“Well, do you want to? It would be easy enough.”

“So what if I do? So what if I do—” She laughed the laugh he had taught her, the laugh that wasn't really a laugh.

Because neither one of them was willing to stop and be serious, here she was at last in Dragos's plush bed, still disbelieving her nakedness. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at her with an expression she did not recognize. She would have expected him to be smirking, maybe even glowing with victory, but that was not the look on his face.

“He was right,” Dragos said. “What a sweet, snug, friendly little cunt you have.”

Of course, they were both thinking of Andrei. Dragos's voice was strange and dreamy, like a man gazing into an oracular mirror. It was decidedly un-Dragos-like. The usual Dragos would have gotten out of bed with a hearty chuckle and fetched Irina a nice brick of tidy cash to pass on to her man. But at the moment, there was no question of bringing up the ten thousand dollars. There was no question of pantomiming the joke all the way to its conclusion. The transaction that had just taken place was not entirely unpleasant. Irina hadn't cried or cursed God. She had, somehow, even forgotten about Andrei while Dragos was inside her; she had been in the moment. She'd attempted to observe the intensity that was happening, but perhaps the intensity at hand was the intensity of her observation itself. It was all very circular. Or possibly expansive. Was she looking at Dragos? Or herself? Or something other? Or were they both turned toward this something other together?

“This is stupid,” Irina said.

“What? What, what we just did?”

“No.”

He looked relieved at the speed of her answer. She thought for a moment before speaking again. “I guess what I am feeling. What I am feeling is stupid. Oh, I don't know. Never mind me, really.”

Dragos looked her over as if evaluating her. “You will not stay with us long,” he said.

“Well, I have all afternoon.”

“No, with us three. With Andrei and me and Vasilii. At least, you should not stay with us much longer. Whatever it is we have to teach, I think you have already learned it.”

Irina looked at him. His cigarette smoke whorled lazily in the air between them, its acridity slightly stinging her eyes. Decidedly, people act in strange ways once you have sex with them. The image that you had of them peels back and reveals another image.

Dragos averted his eyes and cleared his throat. His voice was a little dimmed when he asked, “Did Andrei tell you what happened at the garage last week?”

“No, he seldom talks about work.”

“He should have told you. It's a funny story.”

“Well then go ahead and tell me instead of playing the demure girl,” she said, imitating his inflection and accent. There was a certain pleasure in mocking a man she suspected was a killer. Like putting her hand in a crocodile's mouth, daring it to leave her whole.

Dragos did not take offense; he merely told her about one night when he and Andrei were at the garage late, doing some accounting. Irina had never even seen the warehouse, but imagined it to be large, gray, and imposing. The shipment had just gone out, so the garage was not filled with the usual cars built from other cars. Dark emptiness, like the mind of a murderer. Except for one car. Dragos's vintage red sports coupe, a sleek, unreliable machine that he loved precisely because it cost him so much money to maintain, as if its mercurial temperament enhanced its beauty. A skinny young lad dressed all in black, his face scarred by acne, was attempting unsuccessfully to jimmy his way inside the roadster. So absorbed was he by his work that he did not even notice Andrei and Dragos until he was grabbed by the back of his hoodie.

“You know, even if you get in there, the bitch probably won't start up,” said Dragos pleasantly.

The lad screamed, dropping the twisted wire he was attempting to shove into the lock.

“You really ought to be more vigilant, in your line of work,” Andrei remarked helpfully. The lad was breathing fast, not yet trying to wrench free from Andrei's grasp but calculating how to do so. His filmy eyes darted wildly. Probably, he was on some kind of substance, something less mellow than what Dragos gave his women. It was to be hoped that his faculties were impaired, Dragos explained when he told Irina the story; the thought of his being naturally that stupid was too depressing. What the lad decided to do in order to extricate himself from the situation was puff himself up. He said he had connections, that Andrei and Dragos better let him go or they could get themselves killed. He was really important. They would regret this.

“This is adorable,” said Andrei to Dragos. “This is just precious.”

The lad said he was associated with Vasilii Grigoriev, and that Grigoriev would not like to hear about his unjust detainment. At least, that was what they could make out through his word salad. It was even harder to follow what he was getting at once they started to laugh at him.

“So, you received permission from Grigoriev himself to rob his warehouse?” Andrei smiled.

“Permission from—what?”

“You are in Grigoriev's warehouse right now, son.”

The lad blanched visibly. “No,” he said. “No, you lie.”

“I assure you we have no reason to.”

“You lie! He will peel the skin off your balls with a pocketknife and make you eat it. He is a good friend of mine—he is a cousin.”

“Well, we can sort this out with a single call,” said Andrei. He passed the lad to Dragos like a sack of potatoes and took his cell phone from his pocket.

“You shitheads,” the lad said, sneering. “The cops won't fuck with me. Grigoriev owns the cops.”

“I am not calling the police,” Andrei explained, “but our friend Vasilii himself.”

“You lie! You don't know him.
I
know him!”

When Vasilii picked up and was told of the situation, he seemed mildly amused. He asked to speak to the lad in question. Andrei held the phone up to his ear. The lad was trembling now, muttering his name almost inaudibly into the receiver. When he looked straight into Andrei's eyes with an imploring expression, Andrei took the phone back and heard Vasilii's neutral voice say, “I do not know this boy. He is not even a cousin of a friend of a cousin of a friend. You may dispose of him.”

“Dispose of him?”

“You have your gun, no?”

“It's not here.”

Dragos overheard and offered, “We could garrote him with his wire.”

“For fuck's sake, Dragos, you feel like staying here and scraping this idiot's DNA off the pavement for the next hour?” Andrei said tetchily. “It would be disgusting. And I'm fucking tired.”

“All right, I'll send someone,” Vasilii said agreeably, and hung up.

While they waited, the lad changed his escape strategy to abject groveling. He begged to be let go, cried like a little girl. A little mucus bubble burst out of his nostril while he sobbed. It was a sorry spectacle.

“What if we let him out?” Andrei asked.

“Ah no, if somebody shows up and we have no one to take away, Vasilii will not like it.”

It was not even five minutes before a silent black sedan crept into the warehouse. Which was a good thing because the hysterical crying was giving Dragos a headache and he was liable to punch the lad in the face. Two men exited the car and pushed a gun against the side of the lad's head. The tears ran fat and crooked over his ugly, scarred cheeks. That was the last Dragos and Andrei saw of him, being forced into the car Vasilii had sent, to be taken care of elsewhere.

“Where did they take him?” Irina asked when Dragos went silent.

“Who knows?” Dragos said. “Wherever Vasilii said.”

Irina was going to ask if the lad was dead, but what was the point when Dragos had not seen a body, didn't know for sure? In the face of such uncertainty, she could imagine whatever she liked. She could imagine they conked him over the head and left him on the outskirts of town, that he woke up the next morning with a wicked migraine and a small spot of dried blood on his brow. Just enough blood to signify injury but not enough to be worrisome; just the sort of cosmetic wound the hero would receive in an action movie. Which would turn into a tidy white scar to tell girlfriends about later, some sexy dangerous story in which he was not an idiot, did not cry, acquitted himself well.

Dragos watched Irina think for a bit, and then said musingly, “You know, at the root of human morality is empathy and the belief in meaning. Criminals suffer a lack of at least one of these two things. The likes of Andrei and I, we do not believe anything means anything, and so we are free.”

“What about the empathy part?” Irina wanted to know. “Do you have any of that?”

“Ha!” Dragos sneered. “If I answered that question, I would reveal a weakness, no matter what the answer. I cannot disclose that, darling, for security reasons.”

He'd called her “darling,” just like Andrei. Andrei was the one they had fucked. He might as well have been in the room, watching them. Maybe he had been. Maybe Andrei and Dragos were really just two pieces of the same person.