lose consciousness, but the man slapped him twice so that his eyes focused on his tormentor.
The man leaned in so that Wayan could smell his sour odor, knew that he must have just flown in without having showered or changed his clothes.
Do not fuck with me, you little prick. He already had a grip on the middle finger of Wayans right hand. You have five seconds.
Please, youre wrong about this!
He gave a little yelp as the man snapped his middle finger. All the blood seemed to have left his head. As before, the man slapped his jowls several times.
Two down, eight to go, the man said, trapping Wayans right thumb.
Wayans mouth opened wide, like a fish gasping for air. All right, all right. I told him where to find Don Fernando Hererra.
The man sat back on his haunches and let out a short breath. You are so fucking unreliable. Then he turned, picked up a length of bamboo pole, and without the slightest expression drove it through Wayans right eye.
13
FOR THE NEXT eighteen hours Arkadin did nothing but train his recruits. He did not allow them to eat, to sleep, or to do more than take breaks to urinate. Thirty seconds, thats all they had to empty their bladders into the red Azerbaijani dust. The first man who took longer received a solid whack from Arkadins baton behind his knee; the first man became the only man to disobey that or any other order, for that matter.
As Triton had warned him, he had five days to turn these killers into a platoon of shock troops. Easier said than done, true, but Arkadin had plenty of experience to draw from, because something similar had been done to him when he was a young man in Nizhny Tagil and on the run from having killed Stas Kuzin and a third of his gang.
Nizhny Tagil was more or less founded on iron ore so rich that an enormous quarry was immediately dug. This was in 1698. By 1722 the first copper-smelting plant was established and a town began to stretch its bones, groaning around the plant and the quarry, a vice- and crime-ridden machine to service and house exhausted workers. A hundred thirteen years later the first Russian steam locomotive was constructed there. Like most frontier towns ruled by industry and its money-hungry barons, there was a raw and lawless nature about the place that the semi-civilizing influence of the modern-day city never was able to tame, let alone eradicate. Possibly that was why the federal government had ringed the toxic site with high-security penitentiaries, blinding spotlights bleaching the night.
There were only lonely sounds in Nizhny Tagil, or else frightening, like the faraway hoot of the train whistle echoing off the Ural Mountains or the sudden shriek of one of the prison sirens; like the wail of a child lost in the filthy streets or the wet snap of bones breaking during a drunken brawl.
As Arkadin sought to evade the armada of gang members fanning out through the streets and slums of the city, he learned to follow the yellow curs slinking through shadowed alleyways, their tails curled between their legs. Then quite suddenly he ran across two men canvassing the very same network of exhausted backwaters that a moment before had seemed safe enough. Turning, he let them believe they were running him down. As he turned a corner, he snatched up a piece of splintered wood, part of a discarded bed set, and, crouching down, slammed it across the lead mans legs. The man shouted, toppling forward. Arkadin was prepared, grabbing hold of him, pitching him down so that his face slammed into the filthy concrete. The second man was on him, but Arkadin drove a cocked elbow into his Adams apple. As the man began to choke, Arkadin wrested the pistol from his hand and shot him point-blank. Then he turned the gun on the first man and put a bullet through the back of his head.
From that moment on he knew the streets were too dangerous for him; he needed to find a sanctuary. He thought of getting himself arrested and thrown into one of the nearby prisons as a way of protecting himself, but quickly discarded the notion. What might have worked in another part of the country was out of the question in Nizhny Tagil, where the cops were so corrupt it was often impossible to distinguish them from the citys criminals. Not that he was out