The Encounter

“Stay here. Don’t move. I be back soon. You be ready,” commands Vladimir Yurovsky who, crouching in the back of a beat-up, gutted 1999 Ford van, double-checks the firmness of the rope he’s knotted around Mina’s hands and legs.Mina sits uncomfortably on a dirty mattress on the floor of the van, her back leaning against the ribs of its hard metal interior wall, hands and feet tightly bound. There is no escape. She feels no pain or fear. Fear left her long ago. She knows all too well what’s about to happen. She’s been here before, enough times to lose count. Hatred and repulsion surge through every synapse in her body. And hopelessness, though she always fights this emotion the hardest. “You need to take pee? If so, you pee now. I take you outside like doggie. You pee on sidewalk. When I come back from business, my Tsaritsa, I not want you to say” — in a squeaky woman’s voice — “’Vlad, I need go pee-pee now.’” “Don’t worry,” Mina responds, her voice a blend of insult and challenge tempered with surrender, born of a primal desire for survival. “But I always worry ‘bout you. You know that. You my princess. If I not worry ‘bout you, who else?” He reaches out to brush her hair in a show of affection, but she turns her head away. “Oh, don’t be like that. You hurt Vlad’s feeling.” Without moving her head, Mina looks back at him defiantly from the corner of her eyes. “Okay then. I like it better when you angry anyway.” With both hands, he firmly takes hold of her head, as if grabbing a large melon from the supermarket shelf. Leaving no doubt who’s in charge, he jerks her head toward his. He moves to within inches of her face, close enough that she can smell the putrid blend of vodka and cocaine on his breath. He lifts his right index finger to his lips. “Shhhh…be good girl. I go now.” He grins playfully, pinches her cheek, crawls to the back of the van, and steps onto the street. Before closing the van’s back doors, he looks back toward Mina, admiring her contemptuous beauty, aroused at the sight of her vulnerable, bound body, and blows her a kiss. “Au revoir, my love.” He grabs the keys from his hip pocket, then closes and locks the back doors. Standing on the side of the street Vladimir surveys the surroundings of the quiet Denver inner-city neighborhood. It’s 3:30 a.m. on Monday morning. Curtains and shades are drawn across the windows of the small, identical, closely nestled, two-story semi-detached townhouses running up and down the street, behind which, at this late hour, darkness is a welcome guest to its sleeping inhabitants. Overhead, fluorescent streetlights illuminate everything in mesmerizing high definition, creating the impression of a movie set. A motley assortment of parked cars lines the treeless street; empty sidewalks littered with neglected garbage cans; small patches of un-mown grass and weeds glistening with moisture from the cool, night-air. Vladimir loves this time of night. It’s his time, in his city, when he imagines everything belongs to him. Vladimir prepares himself for the evening’s festivities. He checks the contents of a small travelers day pack strapped around his waist, then lifts his right pants leg to reveal a sheathed bowie knife strapped to his calf. He then grabs a comb from his back pocket and pulls it though his long, oily, jet black hair, styling first the top of his head, then the sides. He’s worn his hair slicked-back ever since he saw the movie Thelma and Louise. He loved the movie, loved Thelma and Louise’s lawlessness and chutzpa as they rampaged across the county brashly averting the law. They reminded him of strong, resilient Russian women, women he remembers from his home town outside of Moscow; not weak, spoiled American girls. But most of all he loved Brad Pitt’s beautiful, long, full bodied, slicked-back hair. That’s what he remembered most about the movie. And that’s what he himself was determined to look like ever since. Especially on special occasions, like tonight. Trouble was, despite having a full head of hair like Brad Pitt, Vladimir was 6’4’’ and weighed 300 pounds. And unlike Brad Pitt, people didn’t’ think of him so much as sexy, as scary. Vladimir “The Genuflector” Yurovsky left Russia in 1973 at the age of 18, part of a mass Jewish migration of persecuted Soviet Jews in the early years of détente. At that time, the American Jewish Establishment lobbied Congress to bring Soviet Jews to the West. Under pressure from the lobbyists, Congress threatened to limit trade with the Soviets if they continued to restrict Jewish immigration. The Russians responded by releasing tens of thousands of Jews to the US between 1972 and 1973. The KGB was only too happy to use it as an opportunity to purge its gulags of hardened, professional murderers, hooligans and thieves, who, some falsely, claimed to have Jewish roots. Vladimir was one of its happy beneficiaries. He arrived in Brighton Beach, NY, Little Odessa, the capital of Russian immigrants in the US, with an assortment of prominent tattoos displaying his elite criminal pedigree: an eagle with sharp talons across his chest, proud symbol of the vor, Cyrillic letters on each finger, identifying him as a made man, and snarling wolf heads covering both knees, signifying that he bowed to no one. Vladimir tried hard to find himself a position of prominence in the Russian criminal ranks in Brighton Beach, but was unable to break into the over-crowded, well-entrenched, Russian mob establishment, unable to move beyond a meager foot soldier’s livelihood of petty theft, hooliganism and contract killings. So he decided to do what many immigrants before him had done seeking new horizons and better opportunities: he headed west. After bouncing around a few cities for a year plying his illicit trade, he ended up in Denver, with a small but thriving Russian émigré community and a burgeoning independent group of Russian mobsters. In Denver, Vladimir, moved quickly to establish himself as a local kingpin, eventually forming his own small syndicate. His “empire” as he proudly refers to it, consists of the usual arsenal of mob services: strip clubs, prostitution, narcotics, embezzlement, weapons trafficking, extortion, truck kidnappings, auto theft, robberies and contract killings. But over the years Vladimir has evolved his business to a much higher and more lucrative tier of criminal activity, as well. Relying on rogue Russian PhDs in encryption and computer sciences, he has created complex and untraceable online financial hacking systems for propagating insurance, medical, stock, and bank account fraud and theft, making him a very rich man, indeed. Yet despite all of this success in the upper echelons of high-tech crime, where one never need to dirty one’s hands, Vladimir is never happier than when he’s back in the nitty-gritty of the streets, where he still feels most at home. Finished coiffing his hair, Vladimir turns toward the house directly across the street and slowly, purposefully, strides toward it. He continues along a narrow paved walkway skirting the side of the house, until he reaches the backyard. He finds and kneels before a small cellar window. He pulls his tools from his travel pack. He first puts on a pair of surgeon’s gloves. He then attaches a glass suction cup to the center of the windowpane, traces its parameter with a carpenter’s glass cutter, and pulls the window pane outward without a struggle. After he slips through the window — moving with speed and agility not ordinarily associated with such a large man — and lands on the cellar floor, he straps a small, lightweight camper’s headlight on his forehead and begins silently winding his way up the cellar stairs, through the kitchen, across the downstairs hallway, and up the main staircase to the master bedroom.