The Siberia Job by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Penzler Publishers

Petr woke up in a state room, somewhere in the boat’s mahogany interior. There were three girls scattered around the bed, at various acute angles. His head throbbed. Above him, somewhere, the giant stereo was still playing Weezer . . . some song he’d heard eighty times the night before, as the album played over and over and over, and everyone was much too drunk to care.

Petr pawed a bedside table looking for his watch; it wasn’t there. After a short search of the room, he discovered one of the sleeping girls was wearing it as an anklet. He held up her leg to check the time. It was the middle of the afternoon. He dropped the leg back onto the bed and went to his en suite bathroom in search of a razor, didn’t find one, and settled instead for washing his face with brain-shocking splashes of cold water.

Which is when he spun around and dashed back into the bedroom, looking for his duffle bag. A short, panicked search and he found it safely tucked under the bed, its contents undisturbed. He pushed it back under the bed, woke each girl with a smack to her bottom, left them stirring, and exited the room to head on deck.

The sailboat turned motor-yacht was puttering gracefully down the Volga; the open sea of the Caspian was already visible ahead. The Boss was sitting just where Petr last remembered seeing him, on his backward-facing couch near the boat’s rear. He saw Petr and smiled—and held up a bottle of vodka he had apparently just opened.

“Good morning, Petya! How did you sleep?”

“Well, thanks.”

“I bet you did. Some of the men are annoyed that you monopolized the girls. My idiot son had to sleep alone.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Petr, picking up a pack of cigarettes off a table. Finding it empty, he picked up another one, and pulled out a square. As he lit it, the Boss asked, “How many did you have?”

“Three,” said Petr. “When I woke up.”

The Boss laughed. “Good! Good, I knew I judged you well. I like Czechs; they’re men. They have good Hun blood. Not like these fucking Volga peasants.”

He whistled a few bars of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” and threw the freshly opened bottle of vodka to Petr.

“Drink,” he said. “To Good King Wenceslas.”

Petr shrugged—hair of the dog, and all that—and took a long swig, before tossing the bottle back and plopping himself down on an adjacent couch.

“So, what are we fishing?”

“Are you joking?”

“No. Do I look like a fisherman? Czechoslovakia was landlocked.”

“We’re fishing dinosaurs.”

“What?”

“Sturgeon! Two meters long. True dinosaurs, unchanged from the late Cretaceous epoch of the Mesozoic.”

Petr’s head hurt a bit. “What?”

“Didn’t you study dinosaurs at school?”

“Not fucking . . . caviar fish dinosaurs.”

“Prague must have had shit schools.”

“And where did you go to primary school. The Sorbonne?”

“No, but there are many good fossil sites in Eastern Siberia; Magadan has a fine museum of bones.”

“Huh,” said Petr, turning to throw his down-to-the-filter cigarette overboard, then back to the table to find another.

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