found me a T-shirt, a grimy pink sweater, and a faded pair of overalls like those worn by the Prekrasnaya Nevesta employees. A filthy hand towel hangs on the back of the door. Gesturing vaguely at the clothes, the woman disappears. By the time I’ve changed into the dry clothing and limped back to the others, Villanelle and Dasha Kvariani are talking and laughing together. Where the thug with the head wound was lying is now just a long blood smear. At my approach Villanelle and Dasha look up.
“You look cute,” Villanelle tells me in English. “Proletarian chic suits you.”
“Yeah, very funny. You did notice, just five minutes ago, that your new best friend was torturing me?”
“Hey, she apologizes, she’s really sorry about that. And she’s an old friend, not a new one. We know each other from prison.”
“Small world.”
“Yeah, well. Dasha was famous in Dobryanka, everyone called her ‘Necksnapper.’ Her father was a respected gang leader in the vorovskoy mir. He was so powerful in St. Petersburg the prosecutors didn’t dare try Dasha in a local court, they sent her fifteen hundred kilometers away to Perm. And her family still managed to fix everything.”
“Great.”
“Anglichanka?” asks Dasha, flashing her teeth at me. “You’re English?”
I ignore her. My shoulder muscles are still agony. “So why was she on trial?” I ask Villanelle in English. “What did she do?”
“She was on the Metro one evening, going home from college. The train was like super-crowded, and some guy started feeling her up.”
“On my bum,” says Dasha. “So I…” She mimes taking the guy’s head in her arms and violently twisting it. “His neck maked sound like… popkorn.”
“Jesus.”
“I know, right?”
“Weren’t there witnesses?”
“Yes, but my father speaked with them.” She switches to Russian.
“She says it was her Me Too moment,” Villanelle explains.
4
“I guess you should start calling me Oxana,” she says, a little regretfully.
“I guess I should. I liked Villanelle.”
“I know. Cool name. But too dangerous to use now.”
“Mmm. OK… Oxana.”
We’re lying at opposite ends of a huge old enamel bath in Dasha’s apartment. Tall windows overlook a broad highway from which the rumble and hiss of traffic and the clanking of trams are dimly audible. Oxana, needless to say, has taken the end of the bath without the taps, but the hot water is bliss after our confinement in the container.
The apartment is on the third floor of a massive neoclassical block in an area called Avtovo. The building must once have been very grand, the sort of property where senior Communist Party officials and their families lived, but it has clearly been in decline for decades. The fittings are worn, the lift creaks, the plumbing clanks and grumbles.
“Look at the color of this bath water,” Oxana says, playing with my toes.
“I know, gross. And you farting all the time doesn’t help.”
“It does help. It’s fun. Watch. Squeeze asshole, little bubbles. Relax asshole, bigger bubbles.”
“Awesome.”
“When you live alone, you get good at stuff like this.”
“I’m sure. So what’s the deal with Dasha?”
“How do you mean, what’s the deal?”
“I mean are we her guests, her prisoners…?”
“Dasha and I were in Dobryanka prison together, and under the criminal code, the vorovskoy zakon, we are sisters. Murder sisters. That means that she has to help me. I told her I was a torpedo, a shooter, for a powerful family in Europe, and that I had to get out fast. She doesn’t need to know more than that at this stage.”
“And me?”
“She didn’t ask about you.”
“I’m just the torpedo’s girlfriend?”
“You want me to say you worked for MI6? Seriously? I told her what I had to tell her to get her trust, because right now, we need her. We need new identities, new passports, all that shit, and she can fix it. Or at least she’s connected to people who can fix that. Basically, we can stay here as long as we need to, she’ll help us, and she won’t give us up. But she’ll also expect me to do something for her in return. Something big. So we have to wait and see what that something turns out to be.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Nothing. Can we have some more hot water? It’s getting cold at this end.”
“There isn’t any more hot water. What do you mean, nothing?”
“I mean you just, I don’t know, hang out or whatever. Dasha knows you’re my woman. She won’t involve you in any criminal stuff.”
“Wow. That sounds… Fuck, I don’t know what it sounds like.”
She takes an experimental bite of