Chapter 3
Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trikhovitch Family the early 1981 Common Era. That was not a hey-day for New York City as some newly arrived hip individuals have come to believe. Heretics. In the 1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down.
Crack is wack, they say. The CIA brought it here in 1980 to help kill all the black people, get them hooked on that vile addictive substance; then arrest loosely 1 in 8 of them. The book about this phenomena is called the New Jim Crow.
Located on 95th and Riverside it is now one of the Z.O.B.s most luxurious and safest of safe houses. It is rent controlled and guarded by Albanians. They are warlike these Albanians. Good at moving people and things, also safe guarding things for others. They do not practice Cannibalism. There are two garden terraces that look out over the Hudson River to the North and Midtown to the south. The place has wall to wall books and a rather large aquarium filled with amphibious turtles. The building has gone coop and they are the last holdout sitting on a highly choice property paying $850.00 American a month for it. A good number of Jewish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully.
It was once a little more of zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs.
“The most striking thing about her is the murder in her eyes which beg a man closer with the promise of bliss then deny him everything,” utters Sebastian Adon looking out north toward the palisades and George Washington Bridge.
This is the place to jump when you really want no mistakes made on the outcome.
Fleetingly he thinks of the Fort Washington district, the highest point on the isle of Manhattan. He thinks of all the times he’s wandered Fort Tryton Park with a lover holding hands. One lover in particular for after her none of the other previous ones had mattered.
But, then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination with the fairer of the species.
All previous lessons are lost.
On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblisse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner Nikholai Trikhovitch.
Nikholai was briefly a police officer for a short period, and is now working for the Red Cross in a vast housing and logistics Ponzi scheme, he is also one eight the leadership of the Z.O.B. and the editor of its newspaper, “the Banshee”.
From time to time he picks up work as an unlicensed private detective helping cheating wives get their proofs of infidelity or parents find their dead kids in Newark, New Jersey.
Rudely we have introduced Nikholai without introducing the Z.O.B.; the clandestine organization of ambulance workers and West Indian entrepreneurs that bind many of our characters into a pact of lawless mutual aid. The group is best known by its clandestine newspaper and this is often called the Banshee Association, but these three letters better indicate the club’s inner circle, and its place in the international human rights movement.
“It’s a human rights version of the Westies, that’s all I can tell you for now,” says Sebastian often.
“What’s the Westies,” people ask.
“Um, a small but ultra-violent Irish gang from the 1980’s,” he often adds then distracts.
“What’s that stand for?” people ask Adon.
“If I told you….” and then he orders a round of water shots.
So many people just call them the Banshee Association, some kind of emergency medical service proto-union alluded a recent write up about them in the blog DNA info.
Regardless. They all just called it “the club”.
Nicholai has heard all about, literally all about “the Russian Girl” as he calls her.
“This one, despite all your most base prejudices is actually Russian. Not Jewish Ukrainian like Yelizaveta or Maria,” remarks Sebastian.
Does that matter slightly? Neither can decide.
They are not Russian speakers though they are the mutt descendants of them, Sebastian and Nikh are four generations made American. Their mothers are 8th generation Americans. Their fathers are third generation Ukrainian Jews.
Like Maria Parsheva and Yelizaveta Perechenova.
“In Russia we were Jews, outside of Russia we are finally called Russians. We are treated the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father.
Not that these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Those were the two other Post-Soviet lovers Sebastian had taken as his closest partners in the past four years. It would be incorrect to say he dated “Russian Women exclusively”; as later inferred by the Russian photographer and Israeli gangster Oleg Medved; he had simply intimately engaged only just two, one right after the other. And that was enough for him to suspect there was something remarkable about the character of a “Russian woman”. The first, Maria who was ever calm but he did not love, and the second Yelizaveta who was headstrong and wild whom he could never forget.
Nicholai remembers red headed Maria as something of a submissive Soviet Jessica Rabbit, complete with a cute little mole, slightly husky voice and marked non-fascination with much that wasn’t Russian in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody mess in 2008.
Sebastian would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justin Thomas described her; a strong woman who stands behind her larger than life man. Nikh just thought of her a Russian geisha, until he watched her do the train job, which we’ll have to consider the details of later. In that moment under fire her realness did come out.
Nikh remembers Yelizaveta emerging into the club picture, and Sebastian’s bedroom sometime in 2009. He remembers her at meetings and social functions as a highly mouthy Americanized blonde know it all little bitch who walked all over Sebastian publicly and privately, emptied out his pockets, put wild eyed ideas in his head, and reduced him to bawling tears when she eventually left him over her mother’s total lack of approval. She may or may not have helped them sketch out the entirety of “the Haiti job” though. And probably pushed Sebastian into joining the original ground crew that three years prior took over the Port-Au-Prince general hospital triggering the uprising there.
“Your women are never far from the very center of your goriest war stories,” Nikh notes.
The two comrades Sebastian and Nikolai had been partners in human rights defense and general thought crime since 1999. The year they did their first “job”.
There had been a lot of great and mediocre women and a lot of “jobs” since then. But not for nothing, since Sebastian Adon entered his “Postsoviet amorous period”, as Nikh liked to call it, well the jobs had gotten quite a lot more ambitious. The man needed an iron clad muse all assumed. In reality he simply needed to be loved so that the love he put on the world could find a singular dedication, another soul to whom he could do all his work for.
The Human Rights Westies did some wild work in Russian amorous period.
Their associate; a proud Fenian named Hubert O’Domhnaill had coined that phrase. “Human Rights Westies”, and also his “Russian Amorous Period”.
That was the Z.O.B. in a witty little simplified nugget of Irish witticism. The club now had a larger than life presence in certain regards or perhaps it should be said; circles.
Back to the task at hand.
“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly love making? The full blown Russianness of her” asks Nikh.
“Referring back to this new lady being a full blown Slav?”
“Certainly. Slav is only one letter from you being a slave after all. And you and I know full fucking well that it isn’t the female who’s the slave in these flings. Those woman walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”
Sebastian had come to believe that Nicholai harbored some rather bas prejudices against Russian but had never determined why. Nicholai had come to believe that Sebastian unable to love himself at all found himself enslaved by a series of party damaged dangerous women, Russia and non-Russian alike.
Sebastian had not previously thought of how Dasha acted in bed. It was as if he had known that already from first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to try a cocktail. She could fuck a man into pieces.
But this was not the immediate attraction. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Postsoviet partners.
“I bet she is most ferocious,” remarks Nikh.
An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop.
“I can’t stop thinking about her. She’s made more remarkable not by her sheer dangerousness, but by some feeling I have of having seen her before in another time. A true predator not even posing as a house pet! And the things she confessed to under torture.”
“Tortured her did you?”
“I did. With my words.”
“This is your main instrument of torture tovarish.”
Tovarish is former Soviet for, comrade-brother-worker. Nikholai is a Russian-Jewish-Irish-German mutt just like Sebastian. Neither of their mothers is a Jew, so the black hats would of course disavow them and they can’t marry lawfully in Israel neither. They both look like “the Russians” but they speak and they think like children of the American intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals; Nicholai’s father is a neurologist and Sebastian’s a puller of teeth. Both fathers being Jewish Atheists and both gentile mothers being American sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to “communism” as they’d be denounced as over and over. But they were not communists. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much trampled masses. They were only about as Jewish as their value for education.
Until the “Russian Amorous Period” they had been concerned with propaganda and human rights, but their jobs had not been ambitious.
It was the end of Nicholai’s marriage and Sebastian’s deportation from the State of Israel that got them working together again on the cause.
And it was perhaps Nicholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied a homeland he’d imagined was his destiny; that put them back together; left them open to suggestion.
And let us all be frank that women can give men any number of tremendous suggestions and wield a power that shapes a man’s deeds. Perhaps you could say women, with more love for the world and more investment in its future can direct the violent ego driven nature of men.
And in the past four years the Z.O.B. accomplished things no one had though possible. Like organize a newspaper, which organized a general billing strike in EMS, which lead to a trade union of all the cities EMS, which build an ambulance guerrilla movement on the island of Haiti; and developed a training blueprint for international medical guerrillas. All was poised to smash the trafficking and prostitution infrastructure of the biggest Apple on Earth.
“She didn’t tell me everything, but enough to conclude she is a victim of sorts. Another dark Post Soviet past to unravel all of her callous behaviors and the smile she hides behind.”
They had toppled backwards together toward the precipice and in the free fall he had pulled her with him to death only averted because of certain laws of physics. Well it was impossible to truly know, Yelizaveta the scientist could have explained it but she was long gone these days.
Rather than fall into a pit of death, his grabbing on to her altered the trajectory of plummet. She had made every effort to follow his deadly command and rather than go through with it honorably he had tried to take her with him.
How American.
“So what the fuck happened on that roof?” Trickovitch asks.
“Well we landed on top of each other half off the edge panting and realizing that she had almost just killed me and I had almost just taken her with me.”
“That’s hot. And by hot, I mean real fucking stupid.”
“Well, anyway. So panting and looking down into seventeen stories of death she grabs my hand and bites down into my right shooter.”
Sebastian shows the wound.
There were a literal ring of red bite marks around his right index finger.
“I think I know her from before,” he finally admits.
“You’ve always been a sick fuck. And you need to not let fourth dimensional things interfere with the growing war effort.”
“Well then she calms down and we do this kind of half swoon, half reevaluation of an enemy and she tells me that she paid 25,000 dollars to come to America and have an arranged marriage set up. She said she had to work the debt off and the work was highly unpleasant. And she told me she will help me identify the biggest trafficker targets in the city. ”
“Don’t project and don’t believe her lies. You always seem to tell a tale always darker than is. The world is evil enough on its own comrade story teller. As for her offer to help? Why? What’s in it for her? I think you should ask where this woman came from, ask why she ended up meeting you at this stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation.”
“She told and made most illicit references to what she did to come here. Perhaps she wants out of who holds her paperwork. Or maybe something else.”
“I’m not sure she did anything but prove you’re easier to kill than the rumors suggest, you’d both been drinking and we all know just about anything can come out of a Postsoviet woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie.”
“Just about anything true, but given the entirety of the encounter, it seemed she was alluding to her own imprisonments and debts. Whatever their current state might be.”
“But are they true? All women lie and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were story telling as art or parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You’ve done so time and again. Remember your truest partner Ms. Hali Vik, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in endless succession you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”
“Nikholai. I had two partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was Maria and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple short stands in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun.”
“Hali Vik was the kind of woman you need to find, not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you and they’ll never join this cause,” says Nikholai.
He’s referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well suited partner for Sebastian Adon. He’s also referring to the “Lowell Job”. Which had been a messy over exertion of well-intentioned violence due to the fact that Hali Vik, had gotten herself in a lot of trouble, but Sebastian may well have made up stories in his head too.
Well anyway, Hali was safe in Italy now and while there may have been a little bit of torture utilized to get her there, well nobody was dead and buried in Lowell that didn’t deserve somewhat to be dead, burned and buried in Lowell.
Nikholai and Sebastian being best friends talked a lot about their women. But there was one woman that Nikholai new precious little about and that was Emma Solomon, but he was correct that Hali Vik the only American was in fact the only person he might well have married in a normative sense of what that word means. For in the State of Israel, he was in paper work still quite married to Emma Solomon.
But bigamy of paperwork is not the same as bigamy taken to heart.
It was these four women that had made him believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and fine perhaps also Yelizaveta in a completely separate way. There had many lovers. He had well ripped the heart out of young Polish comrade Joanna who loved him as no other woman had or perhaps could but to whom he felt youthful nothing. But that was decade ago.
Nikholai had been married to a Syrian-Italian-Puerto Rican modal for seven years named Krissy. They divorced and then she completely disappeared. He had been fucking and drinking his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where.
“I am only suggesting slowness and loads of needed caution is required are you to obsess, I repeat the word obsess! Further about another woman you meet by the brink of your crazy pursuit of wild partly damaged women. Joanna was great to you but you never felt anything and that destroyed her and perhaps forever cursed you if you believe in the dealings of Erzuli Danto. Hali Vik was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to you to being unadulterated happy for a brief fuck of time. But let’s not forget just how much we had to burn down and knock around over that little lady, and that you may have saved her life but she well near killed you. Maria Parsheva was a loyal little Russian geisha, but between various factors that we need not rehash, that too was doomed. Though, on the train, what a little gangster she was! Perhaps you did faster more far reaching organizing so moved as you were by Ms. Yelizaveta Perechenova, but you have such a way of making women into these wild muses and then yourself into tragic fucking art. And to be frank, all the women you take as your serious partners, well none of them have fathers and all of them of dark pasts. Except Joanna who you destroyed. Poor noble woman. Which was rather sad because none of them loved you as fearlessly as she.”
Yelizaveta had a brilliant father. But he was highly bipolar and the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. So it went to reason “that the daughter of a bipolar man carried away by ambulance men should perhaps not marry a bipolar ambulance man.”
Sounded logical now, but not in 2010. Her mother forbid them to see each other and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end.
“Dasha is a continent on to herself. I ask you not compare and contrast my various past uses of love and longing. I can’t even truly say that I know her well enough to speak anything like love to her. I simply felt like I was in the presence of…”
He almost said, ‘his murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then really mock him.
“You love dangerously and inappropriately. Just remember that Ms. Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory to you being killed by another man over a woman. I suspect that is something you are secretly craving in some reminiscence of an older life.”
“Well maybe she hasn’t got a man. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past. I’m very hard to kill as you know. Dasha has already tried.”
“You might have easily both died. And truly this time for nothing!”
“She claimed to Raphael Ernesto she remembers nothing.”
“A black out as a reconciliation for your near arranged murder? Neat, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered.”
“A black out woman hides a dark past in my experience.”
“I fail to see what at all is attractive about her willingness to murder you.”
“I’ve always fighters, but this is something surreal. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under two years. Never pays, always leaves alone. Drinks like she needs to part the Red Sea via consumption. I’ve never seen her at the club before.”
“That my friend is only called the thing called too much trouble. She is not what you or we need right now.”
Sebastian would perhaps not have noticed her because for the past year and a half he had weaned himself off that den of Bulgarian sin and former Soviet misery by convincing himself no woman on earth could be as angelic and pure as his Yelizaveta, his last and most imperfect love. He pulls glasses on to make a mythology out of the world starring him and his overbearing sense of mission. Often with an unwitting female who tries to love him, but he’s from a house called trouble.
“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” says Nikh getting a second cigarette fired up, up off the first, “It’s far worse that you’re a real romantic. You usher in the 18th century for the coldest of post-Soviet hearts. Some of these poor girls have to learn how to protect themselves from whether you’re sure you’re serious or not. More precisely you need to protect yourself from your projections of love and the cowboy like way you shoot cupid’s arrows off in your artistic yet unpredictable shifting of moods.”
“I’m deadly serious with this one, and will not weigh its risks against the others.”
“All of them. It’s either a blessing or a curse you love early and love often as you do. I suspect a curse upon your own well-being. You seem to enjoy these unstable, untenable trysts as if pursuing the romantic ideal of poorly constructed epics might necessitate your own energies to live a more basic life. Not that anything you do is basic, but I suspect you’d always be happier as a wandering poet than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”
“I have no idea anymore. I haven’t written a truly good poem in many years. If quite a little good art was made under Yelizaveta it was because she asked for it and returned it. They are all quite different loves. One loves the struggle because one always thinks it noble, or heroic and the cause just and the suffering of our people, all people immense. One loves a woman because she emboldens him. Makes him a real man by showing love as something justifying of our human condition.”
“Different Sebastian’s have said differing things on the matter over this decade mind you. You must look yourself in the mirror more often or more deeply. For one thing you’re too lean for my liking and you hair is too short it means you aren’t eating. That is always a giveaway that you are about to do something reckless. Police and imprisonment tend to follow old friend.”
“You’re being a Jewish mother now. More praying is perhaps in order too?”
“I certainly don’t care what you pray to this week, but you do need to eat more, drink less and certainly not be chasing around a woman you hardly know. And for the love of god: You just got over Ms. Yelizaveta and were beginning to sleep around more casually, so please just don’t get drunk on any more roof tops. Just be cautious of what a wild woman you are dealing with. And please, whatever you do, just don’t tell her you love her until you can pronounce her last name. And have done the homework on the skeletons in her closet. This is a Russian fucking woman after all. They play no games, not with one damn thing.”
Nikholai then asks Sebastian quite specifically, “What really happened up on that roof?”
Sebastian blows out smoke.
“I died and was reborn, like the last few times,” quietly responds Adon puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. And miraculously awoke panting in the alley way my penis in hand. Walked out as if nothing happened. I put her in a cab.”
“And you think you see the soul of your dead wife in her, is that the story?”
“Nikholai please do not judge me.”
But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him because he too knows what it is like to bear forced separation from one you love. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adon is not because Sebastian is “sleeping” and Nikh is completely awake.
That a full blown uprising is but three weeks away. And that enemy knows that the Z.O.B. has helped organize it.
From which one could infer that the enemy will be moving in on any of the known leadership. And although security culture is tight as drum; Sebastian is a known operator no matter how many faces or deaths her passes through. And that there is no reason in the world why one of the leaders, albeit even one “put to sleep” for his own safety should be getting into a tryst with some dangerous Russian blondie.
Who in all likelihood, coming out of nowhere at this precise time; is undoubtedly an agent of the Mossad. The Mossad or even worse, the Oligarchy.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 