Stones

I didn’t even remember what I came here to run away from

I had been sitting almost all day watching the shadows as they moved across the square, then start to fall and stretch out.  The heat of the day gave no sign of abating in the faded light.   Surrounded by thick old stone towers and walkways.  They bathed in the sun and cheerfully radiated the heat they had gathered in the daylight.   The place felt like it had been sitting there doing that for a long time and meant to keep doing it.    Possibly, forever.   Time in that old place did not follow the rules.  When a place is thousands of years old, trifles like hours and days make no sense.


Forty-eight yards left of me sat the two Russians.   They sipped their coffee and tried to look as though they were not waiting for something.    We had not looked at each other.   I knew them both.  Boris, the larger one, weighed 20 stone – even at that weight, he could run 2 miles flat out barely breaking a sweat.  Like a lot of big guys, he was a man of gentle disposition.  Viktor, his boss, was half the man Boris was.  Viktor, had never once shown any kind emotion at all.  If Viktor had the strength of Boris, he could have made real trouble in the world.  I guess god protects the dumb animals.  Or a helpless world.

I finished off the last of my latte, they made some damn good creamy latte.   I set my cup upside down on the saucer.  That was the signal.  I had promised myself as I did every time that this would be the last time, that I would never do something like this again.  I knew that was a lie when I said it – it is a bad idea to lie to yourself.

Boris stood up and straightened his jacket, a totally pointless effort.  After fiddling and tugging, he still looked like,  sausage in a sports coat.  Yeah, just keep working that, you Russian slab.    I sat up just a little in my chair; watched Boris walk away about 15 yards, then disappear between two buildings.  So far so good,  everything was as planned.  But what in this world goes off as planned?

I was sweating. Boris had been gone maybe 2 minutes, it seemed longer.   Like I said, in that place, time just breaks down.  Viktor sat as well, looking in my general direction, but not at me.

He looked his part.  Viktor looked evil, but we are not evil guys.  Sometimes we get good people out of a tight spot, if the money is right.  Most times we get good money out of a tight spot, if the people are right.   On the menu this evening, diamonds – to my mind, the most universally liquid form of currency on the planet -- don’t leave home without them.  Finally, after 4 minutes Boris reappeared around the corner. His gun hand was in his jacket his other hand hung free. 

No bag.  No merchandise.

I know Boris – he is a “right hand: gun; left hand: items” kind of guy.    Guys like Boris are mechanical – they pee at the same hour every day; they chew their food 34 times.   They put their socks and shoes on in the same order each time.  One second, then two seconds passed and a girl – maybe 13 years old – walked into view behind Boris.   She looked very small next to him.  She had dark hair and darker eyes.


I thought.  Was there some change in the plan? 

In my business you stay calm.   Still in my head, the alarm bells were ringing out the “Holy What the Fuck” chorus.   In 3-part harmony.  But I did, stay calm.  I was watching Boris.  I saw his dropped hand fly apart – I mean I saw his pinky and forefinger come loose and turn to mist: as sound bounced around the square.   The shot spun him to his left he staggered sideways in front of the girl.  A second shot struck Boris in the back of the neck and he fell forward.  No doubt, saving the kid’s life.

I was on my feet, without thinking.   I didn’t hear the direction of the shot – too many echoes.            A quick scan showed no open windows, but my ass was in the open where it oughtn’t naught to be.  Behind me was the shortest route to cover but I was not under fire at the moment.  In front of me, twice the distance away, was the reason I was there, lying under 300 pounds of dead Russian.   So, god-bless rock-n-roll I started to run.  Viktor stood facing me and drew down.  I ran full speed, pointing my weapon, focused and ready.   Running hard, my finger just tightening to fire.   Viktor rose and aimed at me and another shot  cracked in the air and he fell right into my path blood leaking from a hole in his head.   I grabbed at him as he fell, hoping to drag him and use him as a shield, but I was going too fast Viktor fell dead to the ground six feet from the place Boris had died.  I just dove. into the alcove where Boris lay.   The girl looked fine considering that her feet were pinned under a very dead Boris.  I rolled my friend away and she freed her self.  She picked up Boris’s gun and handed it to me with out a word.   No emotion on her face.   My heart was pounding in my ears and she look like she was sitting in the library at school.

I pulled us both a few feet further into the cover of the buildings.   She looked right at me and said, “ I have zee items you seek”.  Snapping off well-rehearsed words through a thick accent.  No smile, no break.  

I tried hard not to laugh.  I am a huge Rocky & Bullwinkle fan.  I couldn’t stop it and the more she turned her head in that quizzical – “vas that not right?” way -  the harder it was to stop. 

Still, “out of there” was the order of the right-damn-now.   Fifty feet from us was the end of the little row of buildings sheltering us.  After that, was a street, an open crowded street.  I figured these people, who ever they were, couldn’t be crazy enough to drop a little kid on a busy street.   I couldn’t quite figure out what had pissed these guys off, but they were pissed.   I was pretty sure by then that I was not the one that made them like that, after all, I was still breathing.

“We can’t stay here.”  I told her.   

I got to my feet and moved fast as close to cover as I could find.  Then it struck me – “she is a kid, asshole” – she doesn’t know how to play this.   I looked back and there she was, right behind me back to the wall, eyes alert looking at me as if to ask what the hold up was.   “ I have zee items you seek.” She said again, staring dead at me.  Looking back on it, I should have known what she was saying.  At that moment, I just wanted some shade.
  

20 minutes later, we were in the worn lobby of a small hotel I know of that took walk-in boarders and never asked many questions.  I got two rooms on the second floor across from each other.  At least I could watch her door.  

When she held her hand out for her key, she grinned and looked up at me.   Smiled at me in a child’s version of being subtle.

“Ve don’t need separate rooms.”   She said. She pushed towards me a fraction of an inch.

“Don’t even try that shit on me, Honey”.  I said.  Putting my shoulder between us.

She looked put out.  Then she smiled, even relaxed maybe, a little. 

It was my turn to smile.  “Lets go upstairs, wash a little and I will knock on your door in 10 minutes.  I will need some answers – more than, ‘you have zee items I seek’.”  

Her turn to smile, nervous like her big scene was about to come on stage.  I got a nod.   She understood me.   Frankly the whole thing was beginning to spell out “BAD PLAN” in letters 100-feet tall.

So we walked to our rooms.  I watched her close her door and backed to my door.  I spent 10 minutes with one eye on the peephole.  I was not really afraid of her running – more of her being noticed by competitors.  Someone had trusted this kid with a good deal of money.  That meant they either had something big on her or had promiced something big for her.   That is the way the world was.  Still is.  Everyone is a businessperson and she seemed more than equal to the task. 
Whatever passed for childhood was long the stuff of memory,  for this one.

As I watched her door I began to ask myself questions.  I had been ready to transport a case, a small overnight bag at most, not a person.   What kind of fucked up god puts me in charge of a person?  A kid, no less, though I was starting to take the term more and more lightly.  Thinking back, she picked up Boris’s gun as her first thought and, come to think of it, picked it up correctly.  She could have seen that on T.V.   Odder still she then turned the gun around and handed it to me correctly.   Not her first gun? 

Maybe. 

BAD PLAN.  The letters grew larger.

  

Nine and one-half minutes were up and I could not take one more second of the squeal the broken fan in my room made.  I opened my door.  I stepped into the still sweltering hallway.   I would have to speak to someone in management about my fan.  I knocked on her door 5 times like I told her and she opened it.  We traded the heat of the hotel for the heat of a small café downstairs.  I had been drinking latte all day.   I was hungry.  We ordered.  I anticipated roast lamb.   Kids must be kids the world over, she ordered a burger.   Truthfully I hated the food there and couldn’t wait to be back home.  

I said,  “So tell me.”

She said her name was Nika. She was 14 – lost one parent to AID's when she was 5 and the other to drugs when she was 7.   Lived in the street for a year before being picked up by one of the many gangs running through the countryside, as a mule to carry items inside her.  I mean who was going to check a little girl.  So they used them.  Sad story – not my problem – so far, not my problem.  

“I go with da jewels,”  she flatly said. 

It took a second for my brain to process. I started sweating.  

“I am go with them and seeing of how I am 13…”

I was now being vaguely threatened by a miniature Russian cartoon character
Did she just suddenly lose a year on me for effect?  

“You will find yourself in uncomfortable position if you try to take them from me.”

 All I could think at that moment was that a flying squirrel was going to come save my sorry ass.   I am not a fan of flying,  but at that moment.  I had no idea how I was going to move us 5000 miles.  She let me chew on it for a bit, let me sweat.  I was at the point to thinking she could probably fit in the overhead bin – problem solved.   

“There is a ship, there have been made arrangement”.  She said.
  

I had the heavy feeling I was being played – very disconcerting.   In fact, I was about to lose everything.  So I asked her why, if she had a way to leave, did she need me?  I saw for the very first time a small crack in her – it happened, and was gone so fast, I might have imagined it. 

“Boris”  she said,  “He insisted it be done siz vay.”  

I was still trying to figure it out.  

“He wanted to make sure you to get paid.”  Any hint of emotion was gone, wiped away.

Ship turned out to be a bit of a stretch.     Floating cargo container-  was closer.   I have had worse.  Four walls ceiling and a floor all steel.  Two cots and no window.   It would do.  

I ran laps the perimeter of the top deck every morning of the trip.  The second morning Nika was dressed and waiting before I woke.  If she insisted on intruding on my private run time she would have to hear my “theory of breath”.    And so will you dear reader.  In a nutshell -an appropriate receptacle.   Your body responds to breath and it’s rhythm.  Every smoker knows this.  When Catholic grandmothers and Buddhist monks tell you saying the rosary or chanting brings them ease it is not the words they say alone but the cyclical nature their breathing takes on as they repeat the lines over and over.    The longer they chant the more time they spent with their breathing slow and eve, and the better they feel.   If you can get your breath to cycle you can do all things better.   Run with ease or live with ease.  Stay in your breath.  Try and make your in-breath blend into your out-breath.  Make that transition between in and out as soft and seamless as you can. 

To my utter shock she ran the next day with me also.   Everyday.  She asked me if I liked being a thief and a murderer.   I was half a sentence into my well rehearsed job description when she cut me off.
"You kill people and take sings zat do not belong to you, for money.  She said flatly.  

Jesus didn't this girl see any shades of gray?  She had in 48 hours ingratiated herself with the crew.  After one morning run she lead me to a beer a cold beer.   A cold beer, at sea.   Amazing.  I was faintly aware she was a minor but after a run a good morning beer buzz is a fine thing at any age for a smuggler.  For a little kid she was an impressive belcher.

   

Five months later, I was back in New York.  Nika was, wherever the hell she had gotten off to after we disembarked.  I was waiting.  In my work, you don’t send a friendly “8-months late” in your payment note.   You either blow their fucking house up,  or you wait.   I always chose the latter, whenever possible. 

Knock-knock – Fed-Ex.    A package at my door.  "Sign here".  "Thank you very much".   I set the box on my kitchen table.  No ticking, no leaking, no oders.  Sent from someplace in Virginia. 

Inside were the jewels and two photos of Nika and Boris together.  One of her, much younger, one taken just before the day Boris died.  The letter from Boris began “Here are the items you seek.” Russians make everything sound underhanded.   

I read on that when he was recruited, he was already married. They needed a cover story so he was taken to the hospital one night.  A story went out that he had AIDs.  It would ostracize the family and deter potential visitors.   The official records show he promptly died.   So his transition from citizen to Russian thug was achieved.   As he moved up through the ranks of the organization, as it were, he kept tabs on his daughter.  He watched his wife’s descent into despair and drugs.   He saw the effect it was having on his daughter, but could not really move to overtly help her, for fear of outing himself and the entire mob.   Blood in – blood out, was a real thing – like with all soldiers. 

He rigged this whole thing for her, thinking that if she carried the stones, they would keep her safe.  Even in his world, killing a kid was just not something done by professionals.   Still, Boris had to take the extra step of sending the jewels to me.  He didn’t want her to die in the street or in the world he knew.   As his punishment, he died right in front of her, right on top of her.   Someplace a therapist is sitting there, looking at an empty couch.  Will I be on it or will she be on it?  The guy died for his kid in front of her.  He kind of died for me too, and in front of me.   His original scheme would have worked.   I know Nika would have gotten the package across, but he spared her that experience and sent the stones to me so I could get paid.  That exposed him.

Tomorrow I will take the jewels to my guy.    I will have my money in 24 hours.  I have been kind of replaying all the crazy moments of the trip.  Boris, hand on his gun, but not drawn.  Why?   Because he thought taking it out would draw extra fire, no good for the kid.  He had to know what was going to happen.   That shot on Viktor was close enough to hit me.  I could hear the bullet and that kind of bugs me now because I hate those guys that sit in bars and talk about hearing bullets whizzing by – I mean so what!  You’re sitting here, aren’t you?   How bad could it have been?   Man, just crossing the ocean and I have all the parenting experience I ever want.  Amazing to me that more don’t end up serial killers.  But they are all we got.  Like it or not when you strip it all down, they will run the show.  We should take care of them better.  

I sat back in my chair and looked at the light play on the jewels.   They were lovely, still, just rocks.   Carbon cooled down fast enough and under enough pressure to become what it is now and not a hunk of worthless graphite, which is a perfectly acceptable end for carbon.  One we devalue, one we cherish.   The numbers were just made up and suddenly worth a fortune all because of trust or lack of trust. It made less and less sense to me.  So much wealth in the world shared equally could make life good for so many.   I closed my eyes and thought about the direction my life was taking.   It struck me that this was never really set up to move stones.  It was to move her.  To a better place.  I thought of that and about Boris, going fast like that, protecting his child.  I thought that was a lucky break if you’re going to have to go.  

“Once I have this cash, I swear I will never do something like this again.”

all images through google images

Copyright 2012 JVWilder