When you're destined to be the best,
The Gutter guarantees the hardest of falls.
The Gutter guarantees the hardest of falls.
Snowmen by Jay Butkowski
Vasily
popped two little white pills in his mouth and swallowed them with a swig of Moskovskaya
Vodka.
The
screaming in his head had started again.
The pills
didn’t make the screams go away. If they did anything at all – and Vasily had
his doubts – the pills only made him not care. For whatever brief effective
period that the pills worked, Vasily didn’t care about the dead: the slumped
over bodies, the pieces of skull and brain matter pink and red against freshly-painted
white walls, the wisps of blue-gray smoke dissipating in the air from where the
bullet had torn through the body. He didn’t care about the wails and whines of
the loved ones who found the corpses, their anguished sobs and hysterics.
With the
pills, Vasily was a stoic grim reaper: the efficient killing machine that the
MVD relied on to silence enemies of the state. Without them, his hand shook so
bad, he could barely aim downrange. Without the pills, the ghosts of the dead
and the living overwhelmed him.
The assassin
stepped out of his rented Honda Civic and walked to the trunk of the car. Inside
the trunk, his trusted rifle was broken down into its component pieces. He
opened the trunk and began putting the gun together like so many times before.
His mission
was simple: eliminate the traitor Grigori Bellakovich, world-famous Russian
ballet dancer and recent defector to the United States. Bellakovich was a bit
of a dandy, with no strategic importance to the United States government. His
value as an asset was pure propaganda, nothing more. He was such a low priority
that when he did warrant a security detail, it was usually a State department
cultural attaché that followed close behind.
Grigori
Bellakovich was nothing more than a nuisance, but his open defiance and
degradation of the Soviet way of life had to be answered. Vasily’s mission was
to silence the big mouth in such a way as to send an unambiguous message to
others who would consider defecting, but with just enough wiggle room to let
both countries continue their Cold War stalemate.
Luckily for
Vasily, an opportunity to quietly deal with Bellakovich had presented itself.
Perhaps
trying to overcompensate for those rumors that he had to stuff his ballet
tights just to make a good showing on-stage, Grigori Bellakovich was a red-meat-eating
macho man off-stage who liked to prove just how much of a man he was whenever
he had the chance. He’d bragged about this hunting trip for a long time, told
anyone who would listen how he was going to, “bring down a ten-point buck” in
his best Russian John Wayne impression. It had never occurred to him who might
be listening in on the conversation.
There were
times when Vasily had to pull off the impossible. This mission was something
other than impossible. This was going to be as easy as removing the head from a
child’s snowman. A slight breeze could do the job for you; minimal effort,
maximum reward.
Vasily
propped his rifle on the trunk lid of his rented vehicle and trained his sights
on a nearby brook.
Three figures were making their way across the small stream.
There was Bellakovich’s State Department liaison, Bellakovich himself, and…
Vasily
cursed in Russian under his breath.
The
intelligence reports out of Moscow had said nothing about Bellakovich’s son
accompanying him on this trip.
Vasily had
never known his own parents. They had been agitators, removed from their
home when he was just a child. Vasily had been raised by the State to be cold,
uncaring, calculated. Only one time in his life was someone able to penetrate
his icy armor.
Her name was
Marya.
They had
been expecting a son when she disappeared in the middle of the night.
His handlers
in the government had explained to him that Marya was a dissident who had
seduced Vasily to make an example of him. That she had lied about being
pregnant and fled before the government could catch her and expose the truth.
Vasily
didn’t know whether Marya had truly loved him, or if his government handlers
were telling the truth. Vasily knew only one thing with certainty: he would
have made a great father.
Vasily let
out a long slow breath. He aimed wide and let loose a round nowhere near his intended
target. He couldn’t kill Bellakovich with his son as a witness.
Down at the
brook, Grigori Bellakovich and his small party were crossing on wet rocks which
had been coated with wet, slippery leaves. In the distance, the ballet dancer
heard the crack and retort of Vasily’s intentionally-missed round ricochet off
a large tree in the woods. The distraction caused the sure-footed dancer to
lose his footing.
Grigori
Bellakovich fell hard, his temple glancing off a rock in the middle of the
stream. The water started to cloud over with crimson blood.
Vasily
looked on in horror at the scene unfolding before him.
Bellakovich’s
son screamed for help and tried to revive his father, who was unconscious, bleeding out from his head wound. They were too far away from civilization for
any help to come. Grigori Bellakovich would die in the woods, the victim of a
freak accident. Bellakovich’s son would live out the rest of his childhood
without a father.
Vasily wiped
a tear from his cheek. The pills were already wearing off. He silently packed
away his gun, got into his rental car, and drove off.
