Deep Cover (Part 2 of a Series)

Posted by AmericanJones on November 7th, 2007 filed in Uncategorized

“My name is Ilya. You know this?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I am Dmitri.”

“Yes.” He paused. “You have been working for us for some time?”

“About a month.”

“About a month,” he repeated back, “And in that time, you have had several opportunities to take money from us.”

“I have not taken a polushka,” I answered defensively.

“Yes, I know this,” Ilya said, shaking his hands as if to dismiss any tension. “You have taken nothing from us.  You know not to bite the hands that feeds you, no matter how little that is.  Much like a dog, I suppose?”

I looked back into his eyes.  “I am not a dog.”

Ilya laughed. “No, perhaps not.  But are you loyal like a dog?”  He placed a gun on the table, but I maintained eye contact.  “You know how to use this?” he mused.

I nodded, again without breaking eye contact.  The Russian looked at his watch, a cheap-looking, heavy piece of metal.

“In a moment, a man is going to walk through that door.  You will shoot this man.”

He spun the gun around so that the grip faced me.  I took a look at it, then paused for a moment.

“No,” I replied.  “Do it yourself.”

Ilya drew his last cigarette, then crushed the pack.  He put it to his lips, scratched at an invisible irritant by his nose, and then set to the business of lighting it, talking as he did so.

“You work for us, do you not?” he said.  “You work for me.   I tell you to do something, you do it.”  There was no anger in his speech; his tone of voice did not change.  He was saying what he was saying very matter-of-factly, as though he were reciting the train schedule, or telling me which meats he enjoyed in a sandwich.

“Yes, I work for you.  And generally speaking, I will do what you say.  But I’m not going to shoot someone I don’t know without understanding the reason why.  So if you want whoever this is dead, you shoot him yourself.”

As I was talking, and Ilya was smoking, the door swung open and a man came inside, just as promised.  It was Len, a man who had been hired around the same time as I had been, drenched from the rain pouring outside.  Ilya took a long drag off his cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nose.  Without turning his head, he picked up the gun and pulled the trigger twice.  One bullet hit Len in the chest, the other went through his neck, and even before he had slumped to the floor, two of Ilya’s henchmen had entered and dragged him out in into the alley.

“No,” Ilya smiled.  “You are not a dog.  A dog is loyal to fault; he does not think on his own.  We have no need for dogs in this organization.  What we have need for is men.”  He holstered the gun, stood up, and walked towards the door.

“And Len?  Was he a dog?” I asked.

“No.  He was a piece of shit.  He stole from us.  About ten thousand rubles.”  Ilya opened the door to leave, but stopped and turned around.  “I almost forgot,” he said, reaching into his pocket and producing a number of bills bound by a money clip.  “Your first paycheck.”  He flipped his hand and the clip spun through the air, landing almost perfectly in the center of the table in front of me.  With that Ilya walked out into the evening rain.  As the bartender began cleaning Len’s blood off the floor, I unfastened the clip and made a quick count of my “paycheck”.

It was about ten thousand rubles.