“What do we do about it?”
Kriztina and her cell exchanged looks, then muttered phrases in Boris that I couldn’t follow. This turned into an argument that got quieter—not louder— as it intensified, dropping to hisses and whispers that were every bit as attention-grabbing as any shouting match. It was lucky for them that the Danube Bar Resto’s other customers weren’t snitches (I was pretty sure, anyway).
“Pawel says we should back out when they show up. Oksana says we should go to the other side of the square, and move if they go where we are.”
“What do you think?”
Kriztina made a face. “I hear that they’re going to go in hard tonight. Maybe the big one. It’s bad. If we’re in the background when they go over the barricades—”
I nodded. “You don’t want everyone in the world to associate you with a bunch of thugs who crack heads with the cops.”
“Yes, but also, we don’t want to sit by and let cops bust our heads to prove we’re not with them.”
“That’s sensible.”
Oksana shook her head. “We must protect ourselves,” she said. “Helmets, masks.”
“Masks don’t stop bullets,” Pawel said.
“I agree. Masks don’t stop bullets. If they start shooting, you’ll have to shelter or run. Nothing’s going to change that.”
He made a sour face.
The tension was palpable. Kriztina’s pretty face looked sad. Her little cell had been good friends before they’d been “dangerous radicals.” I didn’t have that problem because I didn’t have friends.
“It’s true that you can’t survive bullets and it’s true that the pinheads are going to try to provoke something terrible if they can. It’s true that the cops on the other side are scared shitless and haven’t been paid in a month. There are some factors you can control, and some you can’t. Wishing things were different won’t make them different. It’s okay to call it a night and try again later. Maybe the cops and the Nazis will cancel each other out.”
All of them shook their heads in unison and started talking. Even the bystander vegans couldn’t ignore the racket. Kriztina flushed and waved her hands like a conductor and they quieted down. The staring vegans pretended to stop staring.
“Maybe we can win them over,” Kriztina said, quietly. Everyone groaned. This was Kriztina’s go-to fantasy. None of us had even been alive in 1991 when the tanks rolled in Moscow to put down Yeltsin’s ragtag band of radicals, but of course they all knew the story of how his young, idealistic supporters had spoken to the soldiers about the justice of their cause and then the tank drivers had refused to roll over the revolutionaries. Then there had been borscht and vodka for all the Borises, and the big Boris, Boris Yeltsin, had led the USSR to a peaceful transition.
Pawel broke the tension. “You first.” We all laughed.
I knew what to say next. “It’s been an honor to serve for you. We will drink together tomorrow, here or in Valhalla.” Wrong mythos, but there isn’t a Boris alive who can resist a good Viking benediction.
We paid the bill and I chugged down my wheatgrass margarita, and Oksana linked arms with me as we left the Bar Resto, while Kriztina expertly relieved me of the bag of doners and handed them around. We ate as we walked. I pulled out my phone at a red light, one last slot-machine pull at my social- media feeds, and saw Marcus and his girlie, smiling radiantly as they got on a tandem recumbent bike to ride off to their honeymoon, looking so sweetly in love I nearly tossed my kebab.
Kriztina saw something in my face, and let her hand touch mine. She gave me one of her pretty, youthful sisterly smiles and I smiled back. Once, I’d had female friends who’d been there when some stupid boy did some stupid thing, and even though I didn’t have that anymore, Kriztina let me pretend I did, sometimes.
As we got closer to the main square, we ran into other groups heading the same way. A month ago, the nightly demonstrations had been the exclusive purview of hard-core street fighters in his-’n’-hers Black Bloc/Pussy Riot masks. But after an initial rush of head-beating that rose, briefly, to the notice of people outside of this corner of the world, the police had fallen back and the numbers of babushkas and families with kids went up. There were even theme nights, like the potluck night where everyone had brought a covered dish and shared it with the other protesters and some of the cops and soldiers.
Then the neo-Nazis started crashing the police lines and the cops stopped accepting free chow from the likes of us. Now, nightly skirmishes were standard issue and the families were staying home in growing numbers. But the night was a relatively warm one—warm enough to walk without gloves, at least for a few hundred meters—and there were more kids than I’d seen in at least a week. The older ones bounced alongside their parents, the younger ones were in their arms, dozing or watching videos on phones. Of course the idents of those phones were being sucked out of them by the fake cell towers cutting right through their defenseless devices’ perimeters.
The square buzzed with good energy. There was a line of grannies who had brought out pots and wooden spoons and were whanging away at them, chanting something in Boris that made everyone understand. Kriztina tried to translate but it was all tangled up with some Baba Yaga story that every Slovstakian learned with their mother’s borscht recipe.
We stopped by a barrel fire and distributed the last couple kebabs to the people there. A girl I’d seen around emerged from the crowd and stole Kriztina away to hold a muttered conference that I followed by watching the body language out of the corner of my eye. I decided some of Kriztina’s contacts had someone on the inside of the neo-Nazi camp, and judging from her reaction, the news was very bad.
“What?” I asked. She shook her head. “What?”
“Ten p.m.,” she said, “they charge. Supposedly some of the cops will go over to their side. There’s been money changing hands.”
That was one of the problems with putting your cops on half pay: someone might pay the other half. The Slovstakian police had developed a keen instinct for staying one jump ahead of purges and turnovers—the ones that didn’t develop that instinct ended up in their own cells, or dead at their own colleagues’ hands.
“How many?”
Borises are world-class shruggers, even adorable pixies like Kriztina. If the English have two hundred words for “passive aggressive” and the Inuit have two hundred words for “snow,” then Borises can convey two hundred gradations of emotions with their shoulders. I read this one as “Some, enough, too many—we’re fucked.”
“No martyrs, Kriztina. If it’s that bad, we can come back another night.”
“If it’s that bad, there may not be another night.”
That fatalism.
“Fine,” I said. “Then we do something about it.”
“Like what?”
“Like you get me a place to sit and keep everyone else away from me for an hour.”
The crash barricades around the square had been long colonized by tarps and turned into shelters where protesters could get away from the lines when they needed a break. Kriztina returned after a few minutes to lead me to an empty corner of the warren. It smelled of BO and cabbage farts, but was in the lee of the wind and private enough. Doubling my long coat’s tails under my butt for insulation, I sat down cross-legged and tethered my laptop. A few minutes later, I was staring at Litvinchuk’s email spool. I had remote desktop on his computer and could have used his own webmail interface, but it was faster to just slither into his mail server itself. Thankfully, one of his first edicts on taking over the ministry had been to migrate everyone off Gmail—which was secured by 24/7 ninja hackers who’d eat me for breakfast—and onto a hosted mail server in the same data-center I’d spent sixteen hours in, which was secured by wishful thinking, bubblegum, and spit. That meant that if the US State Department wanted to pwn the Slovstakian government, it would have to engage in a trivial hack against that machine, rather than facing Google’s notoriously vicious lawyers.