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  The stout square body of the man in the leather jacket stood hidden in the shadows of an armoire—shadows that were as dark as his hair. He’d been there two hours already. He would wait another twelve if he had to. Cleaver in hand, he ignored the dull cramps in his arms and legs.

  A board creaked in the hallway. A second one strained under a person’s weight. The intruder’s ears tensed; perked. Behind the door, he raised the cleaver, and his thick muscles and chest tightened into a solid mass.

  Finally the footsteps stopped just outside the door…

  BLOOD RUSSIAN

  “A blood-chilling surprise… Unique and entertaining.”

  —Minneapolis Star & Tribune

  “A truly Hitchcockian suspense story … highly recommended.”

  —Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

  ALSO BY R.D. ZIMMERMAN

  Closet

  Innuendo

  Outburst

  Hostage

  Tribe

  Red Trance

  Blood Trance

  Death Trance

  Mindscream

  The Red Encounter

  The Cross and the Sickle

  And by R.D. Zimmerman writing as Robert Alexander

  When Dad Came Back As My Dog

  The Romanov Bride

  Rasputin's Daughter

  The Kitchen Boy

  Deadfall in Berlin

  Blood Russian

  A Novel by

  R.D. Zimmerman

  ScribblePub

  Minneapolis, MN

  the most original of the original™

  Blood Russian

  Copyright © 1987 by R.D. Zimmerman

  MOBI ISBN: 978-1-61-446019-0

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-61-446018-3

  Published in the United States of America

  All rights reserved

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the authors or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  I love you, child of Peter,

  I love you, calm and stern

  The Neva’s mighty current

  Running in banks of stone.

  Your traceries of iron,

  Your meditative night,

  Clear dusk and moonless glimmer

  When in my room I write

  And read without a lamp,

  And in the empty streets

  The huge buildings doze,

  The Admiralty spire gleams bright

  And day on day runs close…

  —Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, 1833

  Russians are just ordinary people.

  They love and they hate …

  sometimes enough to kill.

  Blood Russian

  PROLOGUE

  Late April, Central Russia

  The old babushka was easy to kill because the intruder, the man in the leather jacket, was a good butcher and his cleaver very fresh. Her husband, Iosif, would fall just as easily the moment he returned to the old wooden house nestled at the village’s edge.

  The leather-jacketed one flicked back his dark hair, set the cleaver down on the table, and studied his hands, which were covered with a fine spray of red dots. The hands were wide and strong, swollen like his peasant’s body, from chopping sides of beef. His knuckles, he thought, were like those belonging to the hogs he butchered, coarse and oversized. Yet the hands themselves were bright white. Throughout the workday he scrubbed them, the harsh soap washing away not only the blood and slime, but layer after layer of skin until his hands gleamed. Except for their swollen size, they could have belonged to a doctor.

  When he heard rustling outside, the intruder resisted the urge to wash away the babushka’s blood. He left the stolen roll of rubles on the table, scooped up the cleaver, and cut across the house’s wide plank floor. Stepping over the old woman’s body, he made his way past the small kitchen and the single bedroom. He parted the red lace curtain and peered out.

  The village of Vishnyovka, in the region of Orlovsky, lay covered in the depth of a winter night. Twenty or so one-story houses, resting in the center of square plots along dirt lanes, made up the village. Brightly painted in reds, blues, and yellows, the squat houses were adorned with window frames of wood carved like lace. The only touches of modernity were the towering television aerials stuck into every house. Yes, this was a prosperous village. Even the gray snow on the tin roofs could not disguise it.

  The dark-haired man knew that on these small, private plots the peasants grew more food than they could haul to market, cheating the kolxhoz—the communal farm—out of thousands of rubles. Tomatoes, potatoes, onions, and cucumbers would grow this summer beneath door stoops, along fences, and over paths, threatening to gobble up the wooden houses themselves.

  Even though they didn’t look it, Iosif and the dead babushka were among the richest. They appeared a quiet peasant couple; she a tall woman in plain dress, he shorter, unshaven, the stubbles on his chin the color of a dirty brush. But they were great hoarders of money. The man in the leather jacket had seen it. Whenever there was meat for sale, the tall woman and the short man would walk the ten kilometers to the village of Zelonoye and buy as much meat as they could carry from the shop where the dark-haired man worked. Each time, too, he watched as the old woman peeled a skin of rubles from her money roll that was the size of an enormous onion and had just as many layers. The old couple had produced no children, it was known, and so each year their wad of savings grew fatter from their pensions and their vegetables.

  The man in the leather jacket was going to change that, though. He needed their money to escape from the countryside. They were twice his age and dying. He was young with a great opportunity before him. It was a simple problem with a logical solution.

  The man heard steps slopping through the muddy snow, and his fingers tightened on the cleaver’s handle. Outside he saw moonlight reflected off the snow, the metal roofs, and finally off the bald head. Pleased, he watched Iosif stumble and grab hold of the fence. He knew the old man had joined his comrades in a troika—three friends and a litre of vodka—and that meant he’d hardly put up a fight.

  From behind the door, the intruder watched the latch jiggle, then jab up. Confident, he glanced down at the steel-white cleaver. In anticipation of this evening, he had honed the tool until it was as fresh as the sharpest Bulgarian razor.

  “Raya!” The old man plowed open the door.

  The intruder’s leather jacket squeaked as he closed the door and raised the cleaver. For a split second, he stood young and powerful above the drunken old man, studying the wrinkled forehead as if it were a slab of beef. He spotted a perpendicular crease between the white eyebrows and took aim. He was the best butcher at the meat market, powerful and accurate and sure of himself.

  The old man’s glassy red eyes pulsed about the room, saw his wife’s legs on the floor. He gasped, then stared up at the cleaver positioned above him like a guillotine’s blade. His body turned to a solid, rigid muscle. Air squeaked from his lungs, over his lips, hissing as if from a leaky tire.

  Meeting no resistance, the stranger sunk the fingers of his left hand into Iosif’s fatty shoulder and steadied him.
Then, like a spring-loaded instrument, the cleaver came slicing downward.

  Realizing his life would exist for only another flash of a second, the old man gasped, “Wha—”

  But it was too late for an explanation. The heavy force beneath the leather jacket was in motion, and the butcher could not have stopped his blade even if he’d wanted to. As always, too, he never missed his mark. The blade slit through the bald head, cracked the skull in two, cut easily between the eyes, and finally stopped at the bridge of the nose. The white face parted like a chopped beet, then flooded with its own juices.

  The intruder shook the cleaver free, and the body sunk down in a heap. Quickly, he dragged the old man across the cabin floor. He rounded the heavy table, passed the wood stove, and dropped Iosif close to his wife. Next, he dabbed some blood on his right thumb, then stamped the eyelids on the man and woman with it. Now, he thought, their deaths are sealed for eternity.

  Grinning with pride, the man pumped water from the sink, rinsed off the cleaver, then found some soap and lathered up his white hands. He held his fingers beneath the stream of cool water, then toweled himself dry. Once he’d patted dry the cleaver, too, he unbuttoned his leather jacket. Inside, just as Raskolnikov had done, he had sewn a loop out of old cloth. He slipped the cleaver into the noose, and its cold blade sucked the warmth from his body. Once the jacket was buttoned, the fine leather gave no hint of the cutting instrument.

  The stranger grabbed the wad of money from the table, the bills filling his thick grasp. It would be more than enough to start his new life. The money might even last several years. Not to overlook anything, though, he checked the babushka’s pockets for any money she had not confessed to. He found none, but did seize twenty rubles from Iosif’s pocket.

  He gazed momentarily at the couple’s gold wedding bands, but then reconsidered. Stolen possessions would have to be hidden, he knew, whereas stolen money could simply be spent. Now was not the time to be greedy, for that would lead to mistakes.

  Satisfied, at last, that he possessed all that he had come for, the dark-haired man took a kerosene lamp—used when the electricity failed—from a side table. He lifted off its glass globe, raised its wick, then sparked his West German electronic lighter. The lamp bloomed orange.

  The aged bodies were at his feet, their fluids soaking into the floorboards, dripping through to the dirt beneath. He scanned the room one last time, and when he was certain there would be no trace of him, backed toward the rear door. Then he lobed the kerosene lamp as if it were a Molotov cocktail. The glass shattered on the floor and liquid flames poured across the room.

  With the old couple’s life savings in his pocket, he hurried out the back. He trotted through the potato patch, out the gate, and into the snowy meadow beyond. As the wooden house was swallowed up by the yellow flames, the man’s heart surged with excitement. He was free at last. No more peasant life for him. In minutes his past would be nothing more than a pile of cinder, while ahead lay Leningrad, the very center of Russian culture. Soon he’d begin his new life and never again associate with the ignorant likes of this province.

  He pressed his hand to his chest and steadied the cleaver beneath his leather jacket. There were a few things left to be done—people to be rid of—but come autumn he was certain Leningrad would be his.

  Chapter 1

  September, the Environs of Leningrad

  Boris should never have gotten involved. He knew it now. He knew it as he neared the dropoff point. The militsiya could be bad, but this gang was much worse. Not Siberia, but death was their final solution.

  The cold mid-September rain beat down on the truck’s windshield like handfuls of gravel. The two-lane highway into Leningrad had melted into the black night, and the tenseness burned in his back. This could have been his ordinary run down to Riga and back. The bed of this GAZ truck could have been filled with his normal cargo, portable shortwave radios. He could still be a normal truck driver zipping back and forth across central Russia.

  But no. For the sake of rubles he had let his friend, Sergei, also a truck driver, talk him into this. And who knew what lay ahead—extra rubles or extra trouble, the militsiya or perhaps the gang?

  According to Sergei, Boris Arkadievich Volkov was now more normal than ever. It was true. All the drivers were doing this sort of thing, transporting black market goods. Especially those lucky enough to be selected to cross the international border, which Boris and Sergei were not. Those who did, though, visited Finland or West Germany or Switzerland and brought back scads of Western goods to sell at five and even ten times their original price. They built false flooring on the beds of their trucks, then stashed stereos from Holland and digital watches from Bonn. Once Boris had even seen an entire auxiliary gas tank drained and crammed full of Levi’s and Wrangler jeans.

  Everyone else exploited friends and jobs and Party connections, too. Even his own father, Arkady Yakovich, a Communist bigwig, had taken advantage of his position to procure such items as the almost-impossible-to-get Stolichnaya vodka and canned hams from Yugoslavia. Ai, thought Boris, his father’s considerable influence was the only way they had secured one of the largest apartments in the very center of Leningrad. Also, the dacha on the grounds of Zarekino—a deserted palace plundered during both the Revolution and the Great Fatherland war—had come into the family through the use of his father’s power and bribes. And what would Boris do without the cabin? He lived for the days he could escape from the city to the rustic tranquility of Zarekino, where he would pick mushrooms, read long novels, and write. Tyotya, the old caretaker there, had long ago become the grandmother he’d never had.

  Boris could go only so far, though, and this was too much. Back there with the carefully packed short-waves were crates of stolen car parts, over twenty thousand rubles’ worth. Forward to Communism! That’s what Sergei said he and everyone else wanted. But they weren’t there yet, Boris’ little friend explained, so in the meantime you did what everyone else did. You made up for the inadequacies of the system. You had to—everyone had to—or else there wouldn’t be any meat in the stores or fruit on the stands. Or parts to fix cars. It was like Lenin’s NEP—the New Economic Policy—a smattering of capitalism tolerated by the government. The reason was simple: it would maintain the Motherland until Communism was achieved. All of this dealing to help the country operate was a lot of work, explained Sergei, which is why the industrious deserved their small profits. This philosophy, Boris knew in his heart, was wrong, a step too great.

  He pinched his small lips together and leaned over the steering wheel. Extra rubles. So what. Yes, he probably would need the extra money but… He reached up and clenched a fistful of his curly blond hair and pulled until it hurt. He twisted his fist and yanked.

  “To hell with it!”

  His father had been right. He’d said it hundreds of times. Boris had no spine. Here he was in his mid-thirties still letting himself be pushed around.

  Why couldn’t he act the way he looked, big and powerful? At a meter and eighty-one centimeters tall and weighing eighty kilos, he stood out in any crowd. But once people came to know him, they realized Boris Volkov would do just about anything for anyone if asked long enough. His inability to refuse people was his particular weakness. His father—so well-known, so important—had always said that he would not go far in the socialist world because of this. His mother, who had died when Boris was not yet ten, always declared he’d simply inherited the artistic nature of one of his great-uncles.

  The GAZ truck sped through the deep night and along the narrow highway. By day, this road was full of dark green trucks, passenger busses, and a few cars. This late—almost midnight—the road was empty, especially during rainstorms. Usually he liked his route—down to Riga and back, four nights a week—because there was so little traffic. It worked well with his wife’s schedule, too. She was a nurse, and the two of them arrived home about the same time in the morning.

  The continual stream of rain across the wi
ndshield gave him a painful reminder. He had to take a leak, expel himself of almost as much liquid as the clouds. Two glasses of tea and he was as full as a tsar’s samovar. He had to wait, though. The dropoff was just a couple of kilometers up the road, and then he’d be free.

  His fingers clenched the wheel. He forced himself to focus not on the burning in his crotch but on how this would be the first and last time. He wasn’t going to let himself be shoved around anymore. This wasn’t just simple speculation, hoarding something and then reselling it at a profit. This whole operation was wrong because those car parts back there had been stolen from the automobile plant outside Riga. That was robbery. And this wasn’t America.

  The truck hit a bump and he felt his bladder bulge like a tire ready to explode. Soon the transaction would be over. The meeting place was just up the road. He squinted, trying to discern the heavy shape of the bridge ahead. His vision was instead filled with two blurred white lights that grew and grew on the rain-blackened road. The lights seemed so far away, but were suddenly upon him like a charging wolf. With a bolt of light, a bus shot past, hammering a hard wall of water on his windshield. In an instant, Boris was alone again in the early fall night.

  A cool sweat broke on his forehead, and he played Sergei’s instructions through his mind.

  “You don’t have to worry, Borinka. I’ve arranged it all. That’s why I’m receiving a commission,” Sergei had said, trying to reach up and put his arm around him. “Just take a smaller load of your radios than you usually do and leave as much space as possible. Then all you do for the rest of the night is drive to the right place at the right time and stop. That’s all. First, you go to the factory. Pull up at the dock at eight sharp. They’ll load you up. Don’t worry, the plant manager is in on the deal. You won’t have any problems or be asked any questions.