1
Dominik Petrov
St. Petersburg, Russia
Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.
Tom Robbins
I maneuver the speedboat up the Kuznechik river, keeping my pace slow and steady, so I don’t run into anything in the black water and so the motor stays relatively quiet.
Efrem and Maks are crouched at the back of the boat, rolling fresh cigarettes.
Efrem’s my cousin—he’s big and hairy and brutish-looking, but he fancies himself an intellectual. He likes to go on about the objectivity of reality and whether humans truly have free will.
Maks has no patience for any of this, because he’s what a philosopher would call an utter pragmatist—he couldn’t give two shits about ideology, as long as he gets what he wants.
And generally speaking, he does. Maks is as cunning as an arctic fox—skinny, ruthless, and charming when he wants to be. I’ve known him since he was fifteen years old—when he beat his step-father to death with a hammer and came to work for the Bratva instead.
Almost all the Bratva have a story that begins in this way: chaos, violence, a broken home. “Bratva” means “Brotherhood.” We create the family that nature failed to provide. The ones who will support you, protect you . . . and sometimes drive you up the fucking wall.
Like Maks and Efrem are currently doing to me, arguing over the last Avengers movie.
“It doesn’t make sense to kill half the people!” Efrem says. “He had the stones; he could have just doubled all the resources instead.”
Maks shrugs, carefully sprinkling tobacco on his paper and rolling it up, licking the edge to seal it.
“Maybe he wanted to make the survivors a little more grateful.”
“They weren’t grateful! They were panicked and grieving . . . think how that would fuck the economy . . .”
“Pfft, ‘the economy’—what do all these lazy shits do for the economy? I could get rid of half the people around. Eighty percent, even.”
“You don’t get to pick the people. It’s random.”
“I’d pick. If I had the stones.”
“That’s not how it—“
“Hey,” I hiss at them. “Shut it. We’re getting close.”
Maks lights his smoke in the hollow of his hand, the tip flaring briefly in the dark.
“Where is it?” he says.
It’s always tricky finding the barge. That is the point, after all, of a floating cannabis plantation—it moves around. When Bory knows we’re coming, he lights pot-lights on the edge of the barge. Even then, it’s hard to spot.
“There!” Efrem says at last, pointing to a faint, sulfurous smudge gleaming on the dark water.
I cut the engine, coasting up to the barge.
Bory is waiting for us.
I throw him the rope so he can secure our boat to his deck.
“Dobro pozhalovat, brat’ya,” he says. Good evening, brothers.
Bory’s hair is down to his shoulders now, held back with a dirty bandana. He’s extremely tanned and grease-stained. I don’t think he’s set foot on land in a while.
“How are you doing?” I ask him, grasping his hand to step up onto the deck.
“Good!” he says. “Low on peanut butter, but I’ve still got plenty of beer.”
“What kind of beer?” Efrem asks hopefully.
“We’re supposed to be restocking him, not drinking his supply,” I say to Efrem.
I nod to Maks, who drags out the box of goodies we’ve brought. Efrem helps him muscle it up onto the deck—canned goods, bottled water, vodka, and fertilizer—everything Bory requested.
“No peanut butter,” I tell him, “but I brought the sunflower seeds.”
“Yessss,” Bory hisses, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
“How’s the crop?” I ask him.
“Come see for yourself.”
He takes us inside the barge. The damp, pungent smell of fresh marijuana hits my nose as soon as he opens the door. We head down into the wood-paneled interior, where Bory has some 410 plants flourishing under the generator-powered lights.
Bory is the best botanist we’ve ever had. He’s bred strains of sornyak that are like nothing I’ve seen before—intense, mellow, hallucinogenic even. He’s a goddamn artist. An inventor. The Thomas Edison of the perfect buzz.
But he does need a shower.
“You kinda stink, Bory,” I tell him.
He shrugs. “I swim in the river sometimes.”
“You had any trouble lately?” I ask him.
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “A couple IA boats came cruising around a few days back, but I had warning from our guy, so I moved the barge.”
I nod. It’s too expensive to pay off the police not to do any sweeps at all, but getting a tip as to when those sweeps will be is absolutely affordable.
“How many times you jerking off every day?” Maks says.
“Why do you want to know?” Bory says in mild confusion.
“Just wondering how chafed you get,” Maks says. “I couldn’t last a week without a woman.”
“I don’t mind it,” Bory says. “Lots to do. Then at night I watch Game of Thrones.”
“What season are you in?” Efrem asks.
“The fifth one. So don’t—“
“The blonde chick gets eaten by her dragons and the midget guy takes the throne,” Maks interrupts.
Bory looks angrier than I’ve ever seen him.
“If that’s true, I’m gonna cut your fucking balls off Maks, I swear it.”
“Ah, keep your pants on, I was just kidding,” Maks says.
“Alright,” I say. “Let’s load up the boat.”
Bory has the processed product all ready for us, nicely packaged in one-kilo bricks wrapped in plastic. Since marijuana is still highly illegal in Russia, each of these blocks are worth about $2,500, or almost 200,000 rubles.
Under perfect conditions, Bory gets us about 500 grams of yield per plant. Which translates to 205 kilos per pickup, or 41,000,000 rubles worth of product.
Of course, the operation is expensive—each of the dealers takes their cut, then there’s bribes, pay-outs, and a generous salary to Bory himself. But, needless to say, the Petrovs have been doing very well for ourselves since we took over the supply for half of Russia.
My brother Ivan is at the head of it all. The Petrovs weren’t even the biggest name in St. Petersburg back when our father ran the family. Ivan is a different breed of boss. He’s brilliant, relentless, and meticulous. He’s got vision.
He was already consolidating power in our city. Then he met Sloane. She broke into our monastery, snuck all the way up to Ivan’s room, and tried to shove a syringe of poison in his throat. I guess Ivan admired her initiative, because he’s lost his mind over that girl.
I joke, but really, I’ve never seen a partnership like theirs. Since meeting her, Ivan has completely taken over the northwest side of the country. He decimated his biggest rival, and now he’s got every gangster in the city paying homage to him. Or to the two of them, I should say.