The air high above is all dark. But blinding light takes hold over the boxing ring below. Wooden chairs crowd in around the roped-off square. White faces rise up in rows toward the dusk of dingy exits illuminated in dull yellow.
Stephan sits on a corner stool, pale and naked but for a pair of jet-black trunks, “The Saint” stitched along the seams. His cut man, a turtle-shaped fellow, assails him from every angle: a jab to the eye, an uppercut to the chin, stinging his bruised flesh with mitts of antiseptic-soaked cotton.
“Take it easy kid,” the cut man rasps, “keep up that guard. We’ll get you out of here alive,” he assures the fighter and then winks at the water boy standing behind them.
Stephan doesn’t look or listen but sees himself still crouched center ring, sucking up punches to the ribs and the sides of his head. ‘One more and I’ll drop,’ he thinks, then imagines himself in a fresh bed of sheets with a beautiful nurse holding up the back of his head in her supple palm. She tilts a chilled glass with gentle fingers to his cracked lips. It’s vodka.
Stephan awakens shortly thereafter in a twist of smelly linen. At the bottom of his bed protrude two black socks sprinkled in dry skin flakes. The wilted cover of a paperback novel is splayed on the floor near some clothes. His head hurts but he doesn’t want to look at his watch.
Hours later, somewhere in the center of town, Kyiv media matron Kate Mustard erupts into the law offices of Rico Soiree. His dark mustachio twitches from the force of her entry, but the rest of his tailored frame remains leant back from a large mahogany desk, an ornamental fountain pen barely raised from a document that he had apparently been in the process of signing.
“Have you seen what he’s written now?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure.”
“It’s perversion, not pleasure.”
“Little distinction there to my mind.”
“Little distinction, but plenty of stink – and you might find yourself not smelling so sweet.”
Soiree straightens up in his seat, but not fast, his eyes trained on this erratic but often deadly woman in a shapeless dress, high-heeled zip-up boots, leaning almost over his desk, ready to fight or get someone else into one for no other reason than a release of feminine bile, to squirt poison from her snake’s mouth, tear someone to pieces with her eyes and maybe her nails…
Soiree’s phone rings. It’s a big black job, almost clownish in proportions, and almost everything else on his desk seems to shake.
“Yes? Of course. Well now,” he starts to smile into the phone. “You can count on my discretion… that can be handled nicely… Same to you… Ciao for now.”
He puts the heavy receiver back in its place.
But before the man can reengage the woman, fix an attentive expression on his artful attorney’s face, Mustard slaps the front page of a newspaper down on his desk: “Who Done It to Saint Stephan?”
Filed by The Half Guinea, September 21, 2017