it is—” clinking my glass—“but I am hungry and you are waiting too long.”
“To our meeting, then.”
“To our meeting! And to fortune! For bringing us together again!”
As soon as we’d drunk, Boris fell immediately on the food. “And what exactly is it that you do?” I asked him.
“This, that.” He still ate with the innocent, gobbling hunger of a child. “Many things. Getting by, you know?”
“And where do you live? Stockholm?” I said, when he didn’t answer.
He waved an expansive hand. “All over.”
“Like—?”
“Oh, you know. Europe, Asia, North and South America…”
“That covers a lot of territory.”
“Well,” he said, mouth full of herring, wiping a glob of sour cream off his chin, “am also small business owner, if you understand me rightly.”
“Sorry?”
He washed down the herring with a big slug of beer. “You know how it is. My official business so called is housecleaning agency. Workers from Poland, mostly. Nice pun in title of business, too. ‘Polish Cleaning Service.’ Get it?” He bit into a pickled egg. “What’s our motto, can you guess? ‘We clean you out,’ ha!”
I chose to let that one lie. “So you’ve been in the States this whole time?”
“Oh no!” He had poured us each a new shot of vodka, was lifting his glass to me. “Travel a lot. I am here maybe six, eight weeks of the year. And the rest of the time—”
“Russia?” I said, downing my shot, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
“Not so much. Northern Europe. Sweden, Belgium. Germany sometimes.”
“I thought you went back.”
“Eh?”
“Because—well. I never heard from you.”
“Ah.” Boris rubbed his nose sheepishly. “It was a messed up time. Remember your house—that last night?”
“Of course.”
“Well. I’d never seen so much drugs in my life. Like half an ounce of coka and didn’t sell one stitch of it, not even one quarter gram. Gave a lot away, sure—was very popular at school, ha! Everyone loved me! But most of it—right up my nose. Then—the baggies we found—tablets of all assortments—remember? Those little greens? Some very serious cancer-patient-end-of-life pills—your dad must have been crazy addicted if he was taking that stuff.”
“Yeah, I wound up with some of those too.”
“Well then, you know! They don’t even make those good green oxys any more! Now they have the junkie-defeat so you can’t shoot them or snort! But your dad? Like—to go from drinking to that? Better a drunk in the street, any old day. First one I did—passed out before I hit my second line, if Kotku hadn’t been there—” he drew a finger across his throat—“pfft.”
“Yep,” I said, remembering my own stupid bliss, keeling face-down on my desk upstairs at Hobie’s.
“Anyway—” Boris downed his vodka in a gulp and poured us both another—“Xandra was selling it. Not that. That was your dad’s. For his own personal. But the other, she was dealing from where she worked. That couple Stewart and Lisa? Those like super straight real-estate looking people? They were bankrolling her.”
I put down my fork. “How do you know that?”
“Because she told me! And I guess they got ugly when she came up short, too. Like Mr. Lawyer Face and Miss Daisy Tote Bag all nice and kind at your house… petting her on the head… ‘what can we do’… ‘Poor Xandra…’ ‘we’re so sorry for you’… then their drugs are gone—phew. Different story! I felt really bad when she told me, for what we’d done! Big trouble for her! But, by then—” flicking his nose—“was all up here. Kaput.”
“Wait—Xandra told you this?”
“Yes. After you left. When I was living over there with her.”
“You need to back up a little bit.”
Boris sighed. “Well, okay. Is long story. But we have not seen each other in long while, right?”
“You lived with Xandra?”
“You know—in and out. Four-five months maybe. Before she moved back to Reno. I lost touch with her after that. My dad had gone back to Australia, see, and also Kotku and I were on the rocks—”
“That must have been really weird.”
“Well—sort of,” he said restlessly. “See—” leaning back, signalling to the waiter again—“I was in pretty bad shape. I’d been up for days. You know how it is when you crash hard off cocaine—terrible. I was alone and really frightened. You know that sickness in your soul—fast breaths, lots of fear, like Death will reach a hand out and take you? Thin—dirty—scared shivering. Like a little half-dead cat! And Christmas too—everyone away! Called a bunch of people, no one picking up—went by this guy Lee’s where I stayed in the