Madam Ivana Soshnikov’s 400 pounds of Russian borscht-fed blubber swallowed the small table and chair. She squatted behind her glass fortune-teller storefront. It didn’t help that the humidity of the day crept into the small shop and gave her an unattractive glaze, like one might find on a cooked ham. She sat amongst piles of sequins and an array of mystical crap. Of course, I mean ‘mystical crap’ in the nicest way. However, Ivana had about as much talent telling fortunes as I did staying sober. If the weather was right, and a bolt of lightning hit in the right part of the city, Mother Nature gave her a 25 percent uptick in business.
She chain-smoked like most people chewed gum, smelling of nicotine and ash. Her yellow fingers neither complimented nor accented the yards of red, navy, silver, and gold silk that swathed her from her thin gray clump of short hair to her nine toes. The tenth lost after falling from her bike as a child in the Ukraine. Admittedly, I learned that little fact after two bottles of vodka and a fortune-telling session of my own.
I surprised her when she opened the door. She leaned over the table, stared and looked as though she’d seen a ghost. I knew better. I was no ghost. Besides, I spotted a half-empty highball in her fat left hand filled halfway vodka and ice. Just drunk on a weekday, waiting for someone to come along and give her easy money. With a good push, she might pass out, her massive frame flopping across the tiny table, thick ribbons of fat and excess exposed to the world. She seemed a lot like me.
“Privet, Ivana. Kak tebyah zavut?” I asked, speaking Russian I hadn’t used in about seven years.
She continued to stare. Ivana didn’t remember me. Just my face. Her eyebrows folded downward. She sat the highball on the table and reached for a hardscrabble pair of glasses hanging from a thin cord around her neck.
“Shto eta … Kto eta?” she mumbled, examining me.
I smiled and moved toward her. “You remember me, Babushka. You almost had your throat cut by that fat old boss of yours when you were just a measly old hooker turning tricks on my beat. The one with the cut across his hand. You ran screaming into the street. You cried on my sleeve. You begged. I came in on my ‘flat feet’ and blue uniform. I took care of that for you. You do remember, don’t you?”
Her eyebrows rose, and she gasped for a breath, her chubby hand flung to her mouth. “You shot him in the face. You nearly shot me in the face! I almost died! Then, you let me stay with you. In your apartment. A long time.”
I nodded.
“Dratch. You are Dratch.”
I nodded again.
Ivana looked awful. Several years and about 300 pounds away from her heroin and amphetamine use, we were familiar. Through those circumstances, we’d come to know each other. Her pimp, a big Russian named Borshovsky, went crazy one day. Just flipped. He got hopped up on something that made him speed along like a race car. First, he killed a couple of his primary moneymakers. Then he stomped in to blast young Ivana. he would have done it had I not wandered by.
In addition to his hookers, Borshovsky ran a little book in the village and had connections in the local court. He paid his vig to the Anatolya family. They were a Ukrainian bunch who controlled about 40 percent of the area’s Russian businesses. However, the Superanaskaia family owned most of the other 60 percent. They didn’t like Borshovsky because he kept trying to claim Yonkers Raceway as his own and, in effect, an Anatolya property. The last time he showed up, a friend of the Superanaskaia family gave me a call. When Borshovsky drugged himself into stupidity for God knows why, the opportunity to endear myself to the Superanaskaia clan jumped up. Best shot I ever made.
When the smoke cleared, however, I’d shot Ivana out of an income. At the time, I liked her a little. So, as I moved in with the Superanaskaia family, I let a much thinner, more supple, and certainly more delicate Ivana move in with me. We traded favors. She learned English, how to make scrambled eggs, some baseball, and the best butchers in Brooklyn. I learned Russian and crushing, good sex. After 15 months, we parted ways but kept in touch through my dealings with the Superanaskaias. Soon after, she turned to drugs.
Not much had changed since then, save her weight. She knew people. People knew her. They’d probably remember me putting a bullet in Borshovsky, too.
Seeing her now, bigger than three tin garbage cans and looking older than ever, three things occurred to me: she smelled, she’s drunk, and she probably lost favor with every family save her own. We spoke to one another in both English and Russian, like the old days.
“What are you busy doing?”
“I do this. I do fortune telling. You know that. I will tell your future.”
“How is your health?”
“I weigh 400 pounds. How do you think my health is? I’m like a cow swelled with milk about to burst open.”
“I don’t think you are swelled with milk. Smells more like vodka. And whiskey. And …”
“Come. I’ll read your palm.”
“Later. You can do that later. You should stop your drinking. You would look and smell prettier.”
She titled her head for a moment.
“You look much older than a man who is supposed to be your age. Time has worn on you.”
I looked around the room. “Everything has worn on me.”
“You were much cuter when we lived together. Much more … virile. Stronger.”
“Many things have happened since then.”
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“Korea. And Russia. For a while. I think.”
“What did you do in Russia?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Not even for a fortune teller?”
I shook my head.
“Not even,” she whispered in Russian, opening her arms, “to an old girlfriend?”
“Especially not to an old girlfriend.”
“Are you in trouble for this?”
I shook my head. “It’s nothing you should worry about.”
“Why not? I just started worrying about you again a few moments ago. You’re still adorable.”
“Just stop. You’re letting the liquor eat at your brain,” I said and looked around the room. “Who’s using this? What’s it for? What are you fronting?”
She waved her hand, all her flesh shaking as she did. “All mine.”
“Nothing in this town belongs to anyone alone. You know that. I know that.”
She drank again.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m here for something else. I need your help like you needed mine.”
She smiled and for a moment looked like she’d cry. “You were such a beautiful young boy then. Such a clean, handsome young boy. Then, after we parted, all those terrible Anatolya men wanted you dead. Come to think, that is when you went away. Right?”
“Those men only came after we separated. You didn’t see them before, did you?”
“No.”
“I protected you, yes?”
“Yes. And then you were gone. You disappeared.”
“Yes. I did. I had to go, but, I came back to Brooklyn today to talk to you, Ivana,” I said. I reached across and grabbed her hand. “I need your help.”
She smiled again. She was more doting grandmother than dangerous vixen now. “You are still a charmer. And I need money to keep the heat on.”
I handed her twenty bucks. “That’s all you get for now, hooker. Now, you’ll talk to me, yes?”
She nodded.
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