“We are doing that already, Dima, and on our own taxpayers’ money. But I dig your idea. It’s brilliant… and just reminds me what I love about you.”
“So, if opportunity comes, can I count on you?”
“Perhaps,” Verka replies with an enigmatic smile. Before Maksimenko can express his disappointment over such a display of typical female vagueness, she asks him something else. “What could Tarasov love about that girl?”
“Why do you care?”
“Tarasov’s got the Za Zaslughi… it sounds so much better in English: Chevalier of the Order of Merit. The highest reward, just for saving a low-life like Strelok. Guess she doesn’t even know she’s being fucked by a Chevalier.”
“Is that what’s on your mind while being with me?”
“Right now, I ask myself how a stinking tribal girl could have wrapped a man like Tarasov around her finger.” Vera shudders. “She must be irradiated, too.”
“That would just be a turn-on for a Zone freak like Tarasov.” Maksimenko stays and takes a big gulp from his wine glass. “Verka, could you please stop filing your nails? It makes me shudder.”
“I’m not finished yet.”
“Please.”
“You love me?”
“No.”
“You hate me?”
“Yes.”
“I hate you too.”
Vera laughs quietly and gives Maksimenko the finger. He walks over to the bed, takes her hand and sucks off the nail dust the file has left on her finger. He washes the fine dust down with a gulp of red wine.
“You could kill with that long file, you know that?”
“Of course. Will you light a candle and put it here, please?”
“No.”
“Yes you will.”
“No I won’t.”
“Yes you will… I keep them in that drawer, next to the TV set.”
Maksimenko ignites a long, thick candle, making sure that it burns with a big flame. Vera Fedorka chuckles while she watches him pushing the candle into a chandelier.
“Harder… deeper… Good so. Bring it here, please, Dima.”
Maksimenko carefully places the burning candle on the bed. Vera’s long red-brown hair glitters in the candlelight.
“Let’s assume that we put that girl into the washing machine, soak and disinfect her,” Maksimenko says. He steps back to the make-up table. Leaning against it, he lets his eyes feast on Vera Fedorka’s body. “What would you do with her?”
“First, you tell me whose turn is up first.”
“Mine.”
“No. Mine.”
“Yours.”
“Good,” Vera purrs. “So… I would let her stand naked where you stand.”
“In attention?”
“Your yalda is already standing in attention. Enough discipline.” Having finished her manicure session, she gracefully tosses the nail file to the make-up table. “I’d like to see what she has to offer. Come closer, Dima.”
She begins to run her hands over Maksimenko’s body, exploring it intimately.
“And after that?”
Vera Fedorka turns on her back, stretching out and playing with her manicured fingers like a cat opens and closes her claws.
“I would tie her hands and legs to the four corners of this bed.”
Maksimenko crushes his cigarillo in the ashtray. “And then?”
“Kiss her mouth.”
“And then?”
“That depends on… if she’s clean shaven, I’d put my tongue inside her to feel how she tastes… but I guess the women over there don’t even wash themselves.”
Watching his mirror reflection, Maksimenko moves the muscles on his shoulders and chest, as if warming himself up for a demanding physical exercise.
“Keep talking, Vera.”
Fedorka takes a small vial from the bed drawer, pours massage oil on her body, first applying it on her stiffened breasts, then her belly, inner thighs and sex.
“I would put some of this oil on my fists and penetrate her until she screams.”
“Would you?” Maksimenko opens the drawer of the make-up table and removes a pair of handcuffs.
“Yes I would.”
“Why?”
A handcuff closes on Vera Fedorka’s right hand, fixing it to an iron bar. She caresses her tied-up arm with her left hand, letting it slide over her immaculately shaven armpit to her breast and squeezes it.
“To punish her.”
With a soft click, the second handcuff closes on her left hand.
“Why?”
“For not being like me. For being ugly, probably. For being pathetic, surely. For being an irradiated, ugly, hideous little insect.”
Maksimenko lets his eye scan Vera’s body, her hands now shackled to the hand-forged iron bars, her body excitedly turning right and left, her legs spreading wide and closing. It takes all his self-control to stay in position, to stay in role and not throw her on the bed right now and fuck her till they were both spent.
“You lie,” he calmly says.
“Of course I do. Part of my job description, tovarishu kapitan.”
“And what’s the truth, Agent Fedorka?”
“To get all the intel from her that I cannot get from Chevalier Tarasov.”
“Not good enough.”
“All right, I confess. I would torture her because I envy her.”
“Envy for what, prisoner?”
“You know that very well, sir.”
Maksimenko has already regretted his question. He knows that Vera Fedorka can’t have children. She had her womb removed, probably out of irrational fear of giving birth to a child distorted by the aftereffects of the Chernobyl disaster, a misshapen like the thousands of barely human beings that vegetate in the orphanages and special care facilities in Ukraine and Belarus; though he never really fathomed how she dealt with this ultimate defect of her body that appears so perfect from outside. Although lovers for over a year now, he never asked about any regret she might have; even less so about guilt which would have been his other guess.
He decides to carry on with their game, hoping that his inconsiderate question appears to be just part of it.
“You bitch,” Maksimenko says climbing on the bed. “You bad and cruel bitch. It is you who should be punished.”
“Yes I should… I must,” she whispers. “What are you waiting for?”
“Suka,” Maksimenko whispers as he takes the candle and lets the hot wax splash all over her body. Vera moans with delight. He deeply penetrates her with one push, softly holding her neck with one hand and giving her a big slap with the other. It leaves her cheek blood red.
“More,” she moans.
His grip on her neck tightens. A drop of saliva falls from his grinning mouth to the trembling breasts beneath him. He slaps her face once more, this time much harder. Vera Fedorka’s low moaning grows into a lustful scream.
No matter how loud she screams, the sudden ringing of Maksimenko’s mobile phone is even louder. The couple freezes and look into each other’s eye, motionlessly. The penetrating ringtone from the TV show 24 is becoming louder with every repeated ring.
“I can’t believe this shit. Damn!”
“Don’t answer it, Dima!”
“I must take this one,” he says climbing off the bed and frantically searching for the phone in his uniform jacket hanging on the back of a chair next to the bed. “This is the hotline dispatcher.”