Confessions of a pawn
I must say, American airports beats the hell out of Russia’s finest airports, but capitalist sardine-cans-in-the-sky blow. My name is Krisoff Velicovitz and I work for the Russian mob. However, chasing down the Russian mob’s "misplaced" heroine shipment was the lowest level job for a new recruit. Similar to doing the obituaries in a newspaper, but instead of writing them, you frequently appeared in them. That’s what I get for asking for favor from the mob. Sure, they’ll bail my beloved wife out of jail, but I’m in line to do them a "little" favor. In case you’re a foreigner and you don’t know, Russians don’t know the meaning of little, but I say ok anyway. I was just a meaty pawn currently following a slightly attractive lady who was easy to trial because of her fiery red hair. She didn’t look like the kind of person who would be smuggling heroin, and she didn’t seem very good at what she was doing, but whatever makes my job easier is good for me.
I had booked the same flight she did, but the black telcotm travel bag she had carelessly stashed the heroin in was not a carry-on. She was either super-organized with connections in customs, or stupid. I’m leaning toward stupid at this point, which probably means she probably stepped into this puddle without knowing its depth, so I can connect with her. We might have gotten along in a perfect world, but in real life I was supposed to take the heroin back and kill her, preferably gutting her, as a warning not to mess with the Russian mob. To think, last Thursday I was coordinating fishing boats to help feed starving people and now I have to turn someone into vulture entree. Ha-ha God, I get the joke, but it’s not funny when its happening to you.
I was sitting next to a man in a business suit who was returning from a business trip. He was disturbingly happy to meet and converse endlessly with me. His name was Howard and he had been gone for a while, 2 weeks or something, at a pharmaceutical conference. He had to meet his wife and kids and return to his perfect life. Well, great for you. He elbows me in the side and points out the window
"Look, theres the airport!" he says happily.
"Ah yes… well, nice to be home" I say, my Russian accent sneaking past the fake Californian accent I had started cleverly and unconvincingly faking.
"Yes, ah, I can’t wait to see my wife and kids, and I’m…"
The second I got away from his constant mindless, empty chatting I would probably be nearly orgasmic from joy. The plane touches down and the red-haired lady departs from the plane hurriedly, and I don’t blame her, though she might not know the size of the manure pile she stepped in, she probably knows that her foot is in there pretty deep. I shove my way through the crowds from the departing plane. She was moving through the crowds like greased laxatives though an anorexic supermodel, whereas I was running into everyone, putting me behind her even more. I step up my pace to follow her, I hate to say that it was a sea of people, but it was. Not a happy sea either, the Americans would rather see you crushed under the sacred American grindstone than inconvenience themselves any little bit in their endless toil for ugly American money. I knocked a cell phone from a man’s hand completely by mistake and he punched me in the gut an enlightened me on the newest American slang. I didn’t understand a word he said, my main worry is that I lost the red-haired lady somewhere in the chaos. I stop, which was a bad idea, and I am knocked around by the surging crowd.
Like a vision of hell, the surging mire of the people around me batters me with no order, and no reason. I catch a glimpse of the man who sat next to me on the plane and struggle to move into speaking range.
"Crowded, eh?" No shit American genius, you must be Einstein.
"Erm, yes, it is quite crowded, where…where might I find my luggage?"
"Oh, I was just heading that way now, I have a nice new telcotm travel bag, its black and it has a real red luggage tag on it, could you help me look for it?"
Why in the world he was asking me where it was, was unknown, I was a complete stranger, however, the America’s trustfulness could be useful.
"Oh sure, I’ll help" I had no idea what his bag looked like. There was one bag I was looking for, "if you’d help me find the one I’m looking for, it is black and has 4 outside pockets and it has two zippers on top" I left out the part about it not being mine and having heroin in it.
"Oh, alright, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours" I’m not letting that American anywhere near my back. We battle our way through the surging airport beast to the baggage claim conveyor belt. Bags move around and I scan every one of them, checking to see if it THE bag. Finally, I see the bag produced from the gaping void of the baggage claim. It rolls down the incline and settles on the conveyor belt. I scan the area, several men are just standing around putting their finger to their ear as if they are listening. Great, thanks to the red-haired lady, I will now have to deal with customs. Probably here to get the heroin. The Russian mob would break all my fingers if U.S. customs were to get it, probably worse. I can’t let them get it.
"Ahh, here’s my bag!" the American said gleefully, as the grabbed THE bag,
"hmmm, luggage handlers probably tore off my tag" He turned and shot off into the crowd. I turned to watch him go and saw the red-haired lady dodge a customs officer as they went after the man with the bag. The lady grabbed the bag with the bright red tag and ran for the door, trying unsuccessfully to look as though she was not in a dire hurry.
I stop, trying to piece together what had just transpired as the customs officers assaulted the man I had been talking too, who was trying to explain that the bag couldn’t have been his bag, and there must be a mistake. Hell yes, I think to myself, there had been a huge mistake, but, just who’s was it? A woman standing near the businessman looks at him with a look of pure rage as she sees the woman’s underwear in the bag. That back was certainly the red-haired lady’s bag. The businessman’s wife grabs the 2 kids swarming around her and plowed out the door. She collided with the red-haired lady on her way out. People materialize from the crowd to form a thick wall around the incident, their minds absorbing the narcotic pleasure of seeing another of their kind is torn away from all it loved and worked for in a brilliantly scripted show.
A car peeled away outside, no doubt the red-haired lady’s getaway plan, and she was busily running to find out she failed and that probably meant a great deal of agony for her. Chaos is everywhere, and my structured plan had shattered across the cruel kitchen floor of life like so many dropped glasses. Its time for me now to disappear and hope the Russian mob would…
"Greetings comrade Krisoff, leaving the party early are we?" I had backed into a large man in a large KGB style fieldcoat. The man locked a vicegrip on my shoulder with a hand missing its little finger. My wife may have been freed from jail for her charge of drug trafficking, but I might not see her for a long time, maybe forever.
"I think we should have a little talk friend" He commanded me as he dragged me toward the grass doors of the airport ad into the parking lot. Dragged forcefully outside into the sun temporarily blinded me, incapacitating me for the moment until my eyes adjusted. However more blinding was the realization that I was drowning in the deepest pool of hot water I had ever been near in my life.
"All we ask is a…" the man started and my life flashed before my eyes as a prelude to oblivion. Looking back at my life before it ended in a naked parking wasteland, I saw that probably shouldn’t have lied to my mother about the stolen food, and had the strange realization that I slept too much. Then it came, something anyway, and I was lifted off my feet and heard dry snapping sounds as bones broke. I landed on the warm asphalt and amazingly I could still feel my body as I opened my eyes. An off-white-but-not-quite-beige car had driven into the thug and in the car were the red-haired lady and a tall, psychotic looking man. He opened the door and tore the red-haired lady out, she was obviously afraid of him.
"I don’t fucking care about the fucking guy, go the fuck back in there and fucking find the fucking heroin bitch, I’m not fucking dying for your fucking fuck-up!" he orders her and makes the mistake of pulling a gun on her as the police officers that had arrested the man who had grabbed the bag were walking out of the airport. The officers forget about their innocent prisoner and drop into defensive mode and pull their guns. I leap to my feet between the cops and their guns and the tall man and his gun.
"RUN!!!" one of the officers yell at me. You don’t have to tell me twice. Like a recurring nightmare, my feet are encased in cement, like I was about to be shoved into the river by the mob, but decided to run. I force my way through space as time slows, and grab the red-haired lady abound the waist, I say something to her that makes perfect sense, that let her know we were in the same sinking beat. I don’t know what it was, the primitive section of my brain responsible for making sure that I lived had taken over and auto-pilot had been engaged.
I picked a random direction and flew toward a section of the parking lot that was near a highway overpass as an encore of gunshots rag out behind me. They were playing my song, but not for me. I didn’t dare look back, but I would expect the businessman I had been talking to on the plane took business into his own hands and cut a beeline to his minivan or family car or whatever he could use to leave in. Time gradually returned to its normal pace, and my heart finally stopped banging around in my chest, but that was after I passed out, 5 miles from the airport on foot carrying the red-haired lady over my shoulder. I think she may have dragged me to the Motel 6 I woke up in.
Maybe I’ll look back at this and laugh, but hopefully by then I’ll be so old and senile I’ll be laughing at everything or dead, so…here’s to the future.