mid-thigh, shook indignantly when he reminded them of his prophecy. No one had listened when he predicted the fast-coming day when the sky would split open and God would fall upon the indecencies of man. Natasha remembered passing the madman each evening as she returned from the oil ministry, and he remembered the coins she had given him. “I told you I would remember you,” he said when she first moved into the park; soon she realized that all of the City Park Prophet’s flock had been daily alms-givers the Prophet now felt obligated to protect. He taught them to camouflage their tents and to scavenge for pinecones buried in the frost; to hunt feral dogs with cudgels and bait pigeon traps with the viscera; to pray five times a day and perform the proper ablutions, and Natasha, who had never stepped in a church, let alone a mosque, praised Allah because she knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse. In fourteen years those accountants and lawyers would collectively purchase for the City Park Prophet a studio apartment in a newly rebuilt apartment block. They would search for Natasha, hoping she would contribute to the considerable down payment, or at least be there when they led the Prophet into his new home, but the combined brainpower of six lawyers, three accountants, and eight PhDs couldn’t solve the mystery of the former secretary’s whereabouts.
By spring, when the Feds took the city, the bombing ceased and the siege settled into occupation. The City Park refugees dispersed to ancestral villages and auls scattered throughout the highlands, where they could count on the hospitality of distant family and clan. But Natasha had no family left. Her apartment block still stood, now the tallest building on the street. The windows had blown out but the bathroom mirror was still intact. She hadn’t seen herself in months. Her options dwindled to subsistence and scavenging. Her reflection said she wouldn’t last long in a city of drunken, vengeful, sex-starved soldiers. But avenues of escape still existed for women who could make themselves attractive without the benefit of running water.
Against the ringing of her last two kopeks of common sense, she found Sulim. He lived in the open now, in business with both Feds and rebels, and occasionally with the smuggler Sonja would later know as Alu’s brother. They met in a bar that served nothing. No door, no liquor, no employees, no windows, but the regulars still returned each afternoon. Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid.
In comparison to them, Sulim looked well. His eyes, unclouded by exhaustion, scanned her approvingly. The Parkinson’s that would turn him into a quivering jelly mold in eleven years was already fermenting in his midbrain, but his hands didn’t shake when he went to light his cigarette. War served him well. From mountain hideaways Dudayev’s economic and police chiefs issued statements praising an economy and a police force that no longer existed, and in the vacuum of legitimate authority, organized crime provided the only meaningful order. He offered her a cigarette.
“You want to get out,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”
“I can do well in the West.”
“Anyone can do well when they aren’t dodging bullets.” He scanned the ghost drinkers; those with the bluest lips had gone blind, and they reached out, touching the faces of their drinking partners. Sulim reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a vodka bottle. “I don’t know how they got it in their heads that we smuggle it in barrels of windshield wiper fluid.”
“I’ll work off the debt.”
“Will you?” he asked.
“You know how hard I worked at Grozneft. I’m productive.”
“Are you?” he asked.
“Please.” He took a small sip from the bottle, savoring it as he watched her. He hadn’t forgotten how she had denied him at her door, his skin sallow in the daylight. He crossed his legs, leaned back, waiting for her to beg. “I know there are trafficking routes,” she said. “I know you can get me out. Please, Sulim.”
“Under the Soviets, women who disappeared had to reappear on the other side of the world to make money. Now women can turn a profit simply by vanishing. Reappearance has too high an overhead. Chechen families will pay a higher ransom for the body of their daughter than they will for her alive. I’ve looked at the numbers.”
She stood to leave.
“But you aren’t Chechen,” he continued. “You have no family to pay for your corpse.