The way Leonids men treated me changed after the day he sat in front of my working desk at the bar.
It was not really dramatic, nobody acted weirder than usual. The three men who perambulated through the bar stopped watching me the way they were supposed to watch suspecting customers and began to watch the bar in the same manner I did. For the first time, it was like we were on the same side of something.
The evening supply deliveries began to arrive with a secondary invoice, which was already reviewed and itemized, with little handwritten corrections in a script that I kind of recognised.
It seemed like Leonid checked the books himself, not his accountant or his assistant, but him.
I noticed that but I said nothing about it.
What I talked about with him was the Wednesday delivery. The shipment came in a refrigerated truck, at 3 a.m., which was strange because our deliveries come in the morning, as early as 6 a.m., The delivery was also unmarked, with no shipper name or brand.
The two staff members who received them were shocked and told someone to ask me if I had made an early request for the bars' delivery. I told them someone to tell them that did not happen, I was going over the week's record when I heard the loading dock, I stepped out of the bar, and they had already dropped crates. I looked at the staff, and they were confused. I proceeded to check the crates, which were labelled as spirits, they seemed imported.
I inspected the crates again, and I noticed that the weight description was wrong.
I know weight description and even distribution. I had carried enough heavy loads, crates included, in enough underpaid jobs in cold warehouses across Moscow to know what a crate of bottled spirits felt like.
I said nothing and went back into the bar and sat at my desk wondering, then I remembered Leonids word, he said I should do nothing on my own, I was to inform him and leave it to him to handle, so I did exactly that, and sent a message to the number Leonids men gave me for operational problems and I texted the message plainly.
Date: Wednesday, March 2025.
Time: 3 a.m.
Strange delivery.
Wrong weight description.
After four minutes I got a response that said,
Noted.
Keep every staff member calm and quiet.
Continue business as normal.
I did exactly what the message said.
The day after the next day, I was called in, but this time not to the corporation but to another location entirely. It was in the south of the city, a district I barely knew, and it was in a building that looked abandoned but when I got inside the building I was led in by the men who worked for Leonid.
Inside the building, I saw a ton of men, more men gathered in one place than at any time. I recognised some men from the bar rotations but I did not think I had seen most of them in my entire life.
Most of the men looked dangerous, with coloured tattoos on their bodies, bandaged injuries, and visible scars, they were armed and looked like they were ready to cause havoc.
They surrounded a large table, the largest table I had seen in my life. I moved forward to see what could fill the entire space on the table, it had hand-drawn maps, documents, laptops, and surveillance pictures
Leonid was standing at the head of the table. He looked at me when I came in, his facial expression looked settled. I wondered what a beautiful, wealthy, perfect man was doing in this setting and I was a bit bothered because he seemed very comfortable here, like he was overly familiar with this, maybe violence, or soldiering and siring these rugged-looking men.
I was not introduced to anyone. Leonid did not even bother. I assumed that they did not even mind or that I had been spoken about to them, I guess news really does fly around.
Leonid simply gestured for me to stand beside him, at his right hand side and I immediately complied.
The conversations that followed were mostly in Russian, fast, not only in Moscow dialect that served as a central language, but also in the northern, southern, and Ural dialects. I understood most, if not all of it.
The delivery was not ours, the bars.
Someone had used his loading dock to move something without his permission and the person delivered it to the bar, knowing it was his. According to them, this was not really a business disagreement but using a man's establishment without his knowledge or consent was not careless behavior. It was like a declaration or a statement. They were testing the territories, his territories to see how far they could go without anybody noticing.
It seemed like the surveillance pictures were of a man called George Pvok. He looked like he was in his late forties, with a tattooed face, his eyelids exactly. According to them, he ran operations in a part of the northern district and had been expanding eastward and westward for three years, and had apparently assumed that Leonids acquisition of the bar seemed like a gap or maybe an opportunity, in ways one decides to look at it.
I listened to them with rapt attention with a neutral face, kept track of faces, their names, and maybe the relationships or the hierarchy between them, the ones who spoke and the others who just listened like me.
Then one of the men, the one out of the three men from the bar with the scar, I later learned that his name was Sacha, he said something that made the other men turn their attention to me. He said something about the loading dock, something about whoever was around at that time being an accomplice.
I looked at him dead in the eyes and said in Russian, "You are crazy to think that, what does that evenmean? I reported the strange delivery in less than three minutes it happened"
Everywhere went quiet and I knew, somewhere in my head, that I had done something I wasn't supposed to do. I had spoken, even angrily in a place where I was not given
the authority to speak, I was supposed to just listen and observe. I had acted emotionally.
Leo's eyes were on me. This time disappointed. I looked back at him, still hot from the words I spurted out. I was tired of being the invaluable thing in the room, the suspicious, discardable thing in the room, who was just allowed to pour drinks and answer yes to everybody. I know this wasn't my place but this was my first time in this place with strange men and I was being accused by someone who did not know me or anything I stand for.
Leo looked at two men in the back and said, "Escort him back to that damn bar." and I was dragged out.