The last stop we made on the drive home (home) was a large,unmarked concrete building with a heavy iron fence and bars over small, dark windows. This wasn’t a familiar part of town, and when Vitali opened the door for me, a wave of sulfurous smog and chemical waste assaulted my nostrils.
What a diva I’d become…
“We will only be a minute,” he promised.
It’d been so long, I had forgotten what he said about managing a warehouse—and it came as a surprise that he hadn’t lied. Cold and mostly empty aside from some pallets and metal crates, it was a stark contrast to the perfumed luxury we left behind.
He led me through another door where a couple of lamps flickered atop old desks crowded with paperwork and empty coffee cups. I almost didn’t notice Misha wedged into the corner. I had never seen him with glasses on, and the image was oddly disarming. He scrunched his nose at the sight of me.
“Ah,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Hello,” I said.
“What’s the best Sergei has down here?” Vitali asked.
Misha rubbed his shaved head and pushed the glasses up, then thumbed through the papers before him. “He just got the Benz S-Class, but he’ll shit himself if you take it.”
“Keys inside?”
“Vitali,” Misha very seriously folded his hands, like a teacher delivering bad news to a failing student’s parent. “You keep telling him‘no’ lately, and if you take that thing on top of that, he will lose his mind. You know what happens.”
“The keys in the car or not?”
Misha sighed, took the glasses off, and rubbed his eyes. “No, I have them.”
Vitali raised an eyebrow expectantly.
The big man pulled out a drawer and dug around for amoment before producing a set of keys attached to a black fob, but Vitali didn’t reach for them when offered.
“You can tell Sergei I took them, but you’re going to drive it. Pick us up at seven,” he said, then turned to me. “Want to see it, Kotik?”
I’d never seen anyone go from infinitely tired to life-ruiningly annoyed so fast, but Misha didn’t argue. Nor did they give me time to answer, because a moment later we were headed down a large set of metal stairs.
There were two floors below the warehouse, and each echoed with male voices going about their day. The bottom of the stairs emptied into another office, but this one looked closer to a prison cell. Most of the guys I knew were sitting around on couches, and the air was more cigarette smoke than oxygen.
Once my eyes stopped stinging, I saw the numerous girls quietly tucked away in the shadows. They looked unwell.
But what drew my attention the most was the overlarge, dry red stain in the middle of the room.
“What happened…” I muttered, and immediately decided I didn’t want to know.
“We killed a dog,” Boris said from somewhere in the Marlboro haze.
They laughed, and I didn’t ask any more questions.
Cold seeped from under the far door and created living swirls as it cut through the smoke. Through it was a vast, dark space, which flickered with sharp fluorescent light a few seconds after Misha flipped the switch.
I gasped. The warehouse was much larger underground, and every bit of it was full. Rows of canvas-covered cars stretched wall to wall, unmarked and giving off the aura of a filled-up morgue.
Vitali took my hand and we followed Misha, who counted off the metal bodies on his right. Close to the end, he stopped and unclipped the bottom of the cover, revealing the giant, glamorous black Mercedes-Benz.
This thing radiated money. Not a speck of dust sat atop the obsidian-like paint or the silver details. The headlights were so clear they could have been crystal. Even the president never rode about in anything like this.
Vitali ran his fingers across the hood as he circled it, then opened the back door. I peeked around to see the leather interior with polished walnut details. This was undoubtedly the nicest car I’ve ever been around.
“I should get one of these,” Vitali muttered, then shut the door. It didn’t slam, but eased closed on an inaudible mechanism. “Tonight is a special night, Misha. I’ll make sure to say thank you.”
Misha swore under his breath. “Thank you—nothing. I’m nobody’s chauff—”
