A Plague on Both Your Houses, page 1
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PRAISE FOR
A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES
“Star-crossed lovers and warring gangs: methinks the Bard would love it.”
KIRKUS REVIEWS
PRAISE FOR ROBERT LITTELL
“Littell’s is one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today.”
WASHINGTON POST
“If Robert Littell didn’t invent the American spy novel, he should have.”
TOM CLANCY
BOOKS BY ROBERT LITTELL
novels
The Defection of A. J. Lewinter
Sweet Reason
The October Circle
Mother Russia
The Debriefing
The Amateur
The Sisters
The Once and Future Spy
An Agent in Place
The Visiting Professor
Walking Back the Cat
The Revolutionist
The Company
Legends
Vicious Circle
The Stalin Epigram
Young Philby
A Nasty Piece of Work
The Mayakovsky Tapes
Comrade Koba
A Plague on Both Your Houses
nonfiction
For the Future of Israel (with Shimon Peres)
A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES
ROBERT LITTELL
Copyright © 2024 by Robert Littell
E-book published in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Bookfly Design
All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner
whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-212-22773-5
Library e-book ISBN 979-8-212-22772-8
Fiction / Thrillers / Historical
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
Again and always, for Victoria
Absent a sister revolution—somewhere, anywhere, fuck, everywhere!—your bloody Bolsheviks have a lot in common with lemmings asking directions to the nearest cliff.
—The British bird Ophelia,
nostalgic for Leon Trotsky
and Willy Shake Shaft
A plague o’ both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me.
—Mercutio’s dying words
in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
CONTENTS
1. Timur the Lame:
The stool pigeon swallowed his pillow . . .
2. Roman:
Your sabbatical ends here . . .
3. Roman:
Travel safely, but travel . . .
4. Roman:
We are on the wrong side of history . . .
5. Rosalyn:
What the hell did you say to make her angry . . .
6. Rasputin:
Yo, Tzuf, here we are . . .
7. Roman:
Hoping for a second chance to make a good first impression . . .
8. Osip Axelrod:
So long as the violence appears random—a corpse here, a corpse here . . .
9. Yulia:
When I fuck, I stop time dead in its tracks . . .
10. Naum Caplan:
When you pay someone back, add interest . . .
11. Timur the Lame:
If word spreads that Caplan got away with killing one of ours, others will smell blood . . .
12. Timur the Lame:
The penal anthill so glacial even sunshine felt cold against the skin . . .
13. Roman:
Trying to dream his way out of a nightmare . . .
14. Rasputin:
Smelling blood, the bees cover his eyelids, clog his nostrils . . .
15. Roman:
I’m going to scratch my various little itches . . .
16. Roman and Yulia:
A few weeks ago I was older than I am now . . .
17. Spider:
I rigged the fireworks not to start until the engine heats up from driving . . .
18. Timur the Lame:
Ossete sons need to stand with their fathers in time of war . . .
19. Timur the Lame:
The Greek predicted sweet tooth would k-k-kill me . . .
20. Roman:
After I bury my father I will bury the person who murdered him . . .
21. Roman:
A lot will be riding on how well we coordinate the raid . . .
22. Roman and Yulia:
The dénouement, from the French unknot . . .
23. Postscriptum:
Bullets are cheaper than vasectomies . . .
About the Author
1
TIMUR THE LAME:
THE STOOL PIGEON SWALLOWED HIS PILLOW . . .
strict regime corrective labor colony no. 40,
kungur, perm region
Saturday, December 25, 1971
When the Ossete boy was born with one leg half a hand shorter than the other he was given the name Timur, after Shuja-ud-din Timur, the brutal Mongol conqueror of Persia known to the world by his Tartar name, Tamerlane—Timur the Lame. At fourteen Timur fled the backwater Georgian village of Areshperani and made his way to Moscow, where, days after he landed in the capital, he was arrested while picking pockets in a metro station when he couldn’t outrun two plainclothes detectives. Worried that the lady judge would consider him too young and too lame to send to prison, the Chekists broke three fingers of his right hand and his nose. The fingers eventually healed; the aquiline nose, badly set in a neighborhood clinic, didn’t; one nostril produced a slight whistle when he talked excitedly.
Forty years later Timur is the pakhan—the godfather, or capo dei capi—of the thirty-eight Ossete vory v zakone, literally thieves-in-law. Professional thieves who pride themselves on living by a strict code of honor, they are billeted in the windowless attic of a barrack, one of two dozen wind-sanded wooden buildings planted in neat rows on an ice-crusted steppe so bleak no wall is needed to keep prisoners from escaping. The rings tattooed onto the middle fingers of his left hand—three tiny onion-shaped domes draped in barbed wire—signify his status as a vory vozhd, or guide. He is, as the senior vor in Labor Colony No. 40, the shadow camp commandant who maintains order—or provokes disorder when it suits him. Nothing happens in the zona—not the murder of a vor by other vory, not the stabbing of a Muslim guard by Orthodox guards, not the gang rape of a new female prisoner by other zeks, male or female—without the consent of the pakhan.
It is minus twenty-eight degrees Celsius outside, minus four inside thanks to the wood-burning stove in the attic; Timur’s Ossete zeks have piles of broken wooden chairs, broken wooden bunk beds, and broken benches, along with a heap of split birch logs, that they feed into the potbelly stove. The Ossetes, who are forbidden by their vory code to do prison work, spend their waking hours playing backgammon or doing push-ups or daydreaming of life before prison—or, if they manage to survive the strict regime of Corrective Labor Colony No. 40, life after prison. The zeks who have had some schooling read; the ones who can’t read are read to. Like the camp guards, the Ossetes sleep on double-deck bunks fitted with thick army mattresses and pillows (unlike the common zeks below, who sleep on wooden planks covered with straw, or the floor). The pakhan wears a woolen turtleneck sweater under a washed-out blue jumpsuit with his prisoner ID Ф7532319Ж stenciled over the breast pocket, a quilted knee-length coat, leather galoshes (one of which is fitted with an unusually thick sole and heel) two sizes too large so he can stuff them with rags to prevent frostbite, and a knitted sailor’s cap pulled over his ears. Like all his Ossete vory, he has a telltale tattoo on his right breast: a small but perfect portrait of Vladimir Lenin. The tattoo conceals a coded message: Vladimir Organizer of Revolution, or VOR—the Russian word for thief. Not thief-in-law, like Timur and his Ossetes, but just plain thief: The vory v zakone loathe Vladimir Lenin, Iosif Stalin (even though the late unlamented despot was said to have had Ossete blood from his father’s father in his veins), and Communists in general. The bastards didn’t change Russia, Timur has been heard to say, a few still have more than they need, most still need more than they have. The vory also disesteem Jews—“strange animals reeking of the ghetto, jabbering a weird Yiddish”—in the belief that an international Jewish conspiracy was behind the Bolshevik Revolution that brought Lenin and Stalin and the Communists to power.
Two guards can be heard climbing the ladder to the attic. The one carrying a wooden crate filled with liter bottles of Soviet beer shoulders open the trapdoor, then holds it up for the second guard carrying a big soot-black stockpot of steaming goulash. Setting it down, he retrieves the carton of Bulgarian cigarettes from the deep leg pocket of his paratrooper khakis, along with the packet of mint chocolates for Timur. The thing the pakhan misses most in the zona isn’t cigarettes or vodka but chocolates. They remind him of his lost youth back in Areshperani on the Caspian steppe, when his mother would reward him wit
Stashing the chocolates in the kit under his bunk, the pakhan nods to Cephalus Papachristodoulopoulos, known as “the Greek” because the Ossetes have trouble remembering his name and the very few who remember it have difficulty pronouncing it. The offspring of an Ossete wet nurse and a Greek mineralogist trapped in Georgia during the Great Patriotic War, the Greek is the keeper of the vory obshchak, the thieves’ common fund. Like all of Timur’s vory, he has rings tattooed on the fingers of his left hand. The rings represent a kind of passport to the thieves’ world, recounting how many times he’s been sentenced to prison (twice), how many years he has served (twelve), and for what crimes (extortion and illegal foreign exchange dealings under Article 88 of the Soviet Criminal Code). The Greek retrieves an iron box from under his bunk, opens the combination lock, and counts out rubles to pay off the guards.
Moistening his thumb with his tongue, the guard in the paratrooper khakis double-checks the sum. “You are ten rubles shy, Greek,” he complains. “Chocolate is more expensive than gold in this Perm wasteland. The packet costs eighty rubles now.”
“It was seventy last month,” the Greek remembers.
The guard shrugs. “We are all of us prisoners of inflation.”
Slipping a ten-ruble bill onto the pile in the guard’s palm, the Greek glances at Timur. “You eat too much chocolate, pakhan,” he calls over to him with a barely suppressed laugh. “Your sweet tooth will be the death of you one day.”
“Good a way to croak as any,” Timur snaps back.
Spare Rib starts to ladle goulash onto mess tins set out on the long wooden table.
“Bring the poet up,” Timur instructs the Greek.
The poet, gaunt, unshaven, with a filthy blanket draped over his shoulder like a shawl, slowly climbs the ladder to the attic. One sole of his city shoes flaps loose as he walks. Timur nods for the poet to take a seat on the bench around the table, and a plate of steaming goulash is set in front of him. He eats with a metal spoon, chewing delicately because of his bleeding gums. Timur and the other zeks slide onto the benches around the table, pry off the metal caps on the beers, press their thumbs over the necks of the bottles, and shake them to get some bubbles into the flat Soviet brew. The poet, his eyes bloodshot with fear, pushes away his plate, pulls a tattered book from his pocket, and begins to read in an almost inaudible voice that the zeks must strain to hear.
Timur, his elbows on the table, his head propped in the palm of one hand, eyes the poet. “Louder, if you please,” he gently instructs him.
I’m sitting behind bars in the dank, dark cell,
As a captive eagle, born and bred in the jail,
My crestfallen cage mate, with his wings widespread,
Pecks at scraps of food I set on the ledge.
He’s pecking and looking at me through the bars,
And sharing a thought as common as stars.
He summons me with a glance and a cry,
As if to say, “Come, let us fly!”
We prisoners are free as birds; it is time, birds of a feather,
To fly to haze-covered peaks together,
To fly where the blue of the sea bleeds into the blue of the sky,
To fly where the wind alone ventures . . . you and I!
The poet closes his book and looks up, blinking away unshed tears. “The poem was written by our Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin,” he murmurs. “He called it ‘Prisoner.’”
The zeks around the table tap their spoons on the tin plates by way of applause. The poet, who was celebrated in literary circles before his arrest as an enemy of the people, half rises to his feet and bows from the waist.
When the poet has managed to back down the ladder to his straw pallet, the Greek and his vory friend Mikhail “Mika” Rasputin set out the dominoes, fashioned from chips of bone-dry soap, for their nightly game. Rasputin, who is said to be the illegitimate grandson of the murdered monk Rasputin, wears a frayed woolen turtleneck sweater over his cream-colored shirt and has a long matted black beard and a foul temper. He is able to read with his lips sounding out the letters, but he can decipher the coded language of vory tattoos fluently. A playing card means the prisoner was sent up for gambling; a dollar sign signifies a safecracker; a dagger into the neck identifies the zek as a sex offender. Lice, one of Timur’s sixers, the lowest rank in the vory v zakone (named for the lowest card in Russian card games), is heating flatirons on the wood-burning stove. Like the other sixers in Timur’s band of Ossetes, Lice is assigned household chores when he isn’t running errands or providing sex or slitting the throat of someone the pakhan has condemned to death. Now he spits on one of the irons to see if it is sizzling hot, then spreads a blanket across the wooden table and begins to iron Timur’s long johns. After a bit a guard climbs the ladder to the attic. He glances around, spots Timur, and hands him a folded slip of paper.
Timur opens it, then looks up quickly. “You’re positive it’s him?”
The guard, offended, squints. “You pay me to be positive about the tips I bring to you.”
Timur turns away, conjuring the horizon, where the blue of the sea bleeds, at sunset, into the blue of the sky. The guard pockets the rubles the Greek slips him, and leaves. At a gesture from Timur, two vory sixers close the trapdoor behind him and shoulder a large wooden trunk, filled with cartons of canned food and a case of vodka, over it. Timur beckons to his enforcer, Mika Rasputin, who has three skulls tattooed on the backs of three fingers of his right hand, one for each stool pigeon he has strangled. Timur, his lips barely moving, murmurs something to Rasputin, who turns and snaps an order to two of the sixers—Lice and Spare Rib. The three men exchange grim looks. Rasputin makes the sign of the Orthodox cross (even though he is Iron Din, the Ossetes’ true faith, on his mother’s side), then threads his way between bunks to the far corner of the attic and hauls the prisoner known as Cross-Eyes off his mattress. Lice, an amateur sumo wrestler before he was sent to the penal colony, and Spare Rib, a lean weight lifter, drag him across the floor to Timur and peel his sweater and T-shirt off his back. Stalin’s face is tattooed over Cross-Eyes’ heart—something zeks do in the belief that if they ever face a firing squad the guards will refuse to shoot at the Genius of Humanity—alongside the tiny Ossete vory tattoo of Lenin on his right breast.
“Chukhan!” Timur hisses, wheezing through his bad nostril. Stool pigeon.
Around the attic zeks, anticipating theater, sit up in their bunks.
“Klyanus mamoi,” Cross-Eyes snivels. “I swear on my mother, it was not me.”
Timur nods to Rasputin. The condemned man begs for his life. “My wife’s in the women’s b-b-barrack . . . They threatened the guards would gang-rape her if I d-d-didn’t work for them.” His nose runs, mucus collects on his upper lip, his thick canvas trousers darken around the crotch.
Shaking his head angrily, Timur turns away. “Erase his vory tattoo,” he orders.
Grasping that he has been sentenced to death, Cross-Eyes blurts out defiantly, “Yob tvoyu mat’”—Fuck your mother.
Rasputin and the sixers drag Cross-Eyes back to his bunk and pin him down. Lice retrieves one of the steaming flatirons from the stove and starts to burn Lenin off the condemned man’s breast. Cross-Eyes manages a single excruciating scream before Rasputin presses a pillow onto his face. The condemned man thrashes wildly. After a while his elbows jerk spastically. Then his twitching limbs grow still.
