The Conflict Algorithm, Chapter 10
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Leo sat in Uncle Sal’s looking at Beth and her friend. His body tightened up, recognizing the guy as one of the goons who’d chased him months earlier. He forced himself to breathe and wait to see what unfolded. Things were starting to make sense.
Beth smiled, clearly aware that she had the upper-hand. Leo knew she must either want something or want him dead. She sat down. The man stood by the front entrance. Leo imagined that the other goon would be covering the rear exit through the kitchen.
“Hi, Leo.”
“Hi, Beth.”
“I think you’ve met my friend before.”
“Yes, I have.” Leo felt his leg start to bounce and focused on his breathing, “I ordered mozzarella sticks.”
“Yum, Leo, I must say, you’re a lot braver than I thought you were.”
“Necessity.”
“Yup. Yup, yup, yup. Okay, so I’m here because our algorithms are clashing, as we knew they would. My friends here tried to arrange to get it from you to avoid this problem several months ago, but it seems you were a little too determined to hold on to it. You wouldn’t have been harmed, of course, but how could you know that.
So anyway, here we are, I know your new people won’t be happy and my people certainly aren’t. I need you to shut it down.”
“I get paid a grand a day, why would I do that, Beth?”
“Because if you don’t, they’ll make your life really, really tough.”
“So you get me fired by lying on me, attacked by goons, and now you’re extorting me into quitting my new job?” Leo laughed. “I’m not even surprised.”
“You don’t know what’s going on, Leo.” Beth bit the end off of a mozzarella stick, “I’m trying to save you.”
Leo shook his head. He tried to estimate his ability to leave. He tried to figure out the optimal solution here. There was still way too much he didn’t know.
He figured a direct route would work, “Okay, well, who are your friends and how long have you been working with them?”
The waiter came over to take their order. Beth said, “I’ll have the white pizza and he’ll have pepperoni and extra cheese.” The waiter glanced over at Leo, who did the slightest nod.
Beth turned to Leo, “So did you know I was, like, in love with you?”
“No.”
“Well, I was. I mean, out of you, Jarett and Mike, who else was I going to go for?”
“I was the lesser of 3 evils? Ha.” Leo almost forgot about the leather clad goon standing where a hostess would if Sal’s had a hostess. “But you know I liked you, too, but we had to be professional.”
“See, there you go, working me over even now. That’s how you always did it. ‘Oh, Beth, can I help you on your code, let’s brainstorm, let’s all hang out.’”
“Um.”
“And then it’s like, no clue that somebody might be into you. And you never asked me anything, about my background, about my past, about where I lived. Nothing.”
“Beth, it’s like… really, we’re not supposed to get personal.”
“Not personal. All right. Well, when I’m getting fucked by some fucking eastern european mafioso pricks…”
Leo glanced up at the silent sentinel 15 feet away. No motion. “What do they have on you, anyway?”
“You really don’t know shit. One, they’ll kill me, and two, they’ll kill my family. And this isn’t one of those rhetorical statements, I mean, I’ll be found chopped up and ooh, big mystery.
But the fact is, I’d be helping them anyway. What does the lab pay us? Shit. What are they making leasing out our work? Millions.”
“So this is about money?”
“Would I be here, having a cozy fucking romantic meal with you if this was about money? No, Leo, listen, you and I together could corner the whole market. We could start our own thing. We’d be goddamn unstoppable.”
“What about them?”
“They’re the bankroll.”
Leo leaned forward and lowered his voice, “Ukranians? Russians? Do we even know who they are?”
“Of course I know who they are you dumbass. They’re the reason I’m here. They fucking paid for me to go to coding school. They whored me out to pay off my goddamn debt. Of course I fucking know them, you stupid American shit.”
“Beth, I have such a hard time with the way you talk to me.”
“Hard time, are you flirting with me?”
“Beth…” This was so weird for Leo because he had thought about having sex with Beth many many times in this very same restaurant, and now he felt thoroughly stuck in a brain loop.
“Come on, let’s go to the bathroom.” Beth stood up.
“I have a girlfriend,” Leo said weakly.
“Grow some balls, Leo,” Beth said, and playfully slapped his cheek.
Flames of anger rode up Leo’s face. He popped out of the chair. The wait staff brought over their personal pizzas but didn’t say anything to either of them.
Leo and Beth slammed into the tiny bathroom bouncing off the one sink and commode. He locked the door behind them. Beth grabbed his head and forcefully kissed him. Leo got the intense urge to bend her over the sink and aggressively fuck her from the back.
She dug her nails into his cheek as she cupped his chin. He pushed his hand forward and grabbed her chin the same way.
“I can’t do this, Beth.”
She dropped her hand to his crotch, rubbed down the length of him, took a handful and then squeezed.
“AAAAAArrrgh!” Leo screamed as he pushed her back.
Beth stumbled, gripping the walls as her knees pressed against the toilet.
Leo fumbled with the door lock.
“You’ve gotten strong.”
Leo gripped the door with two hands, anticipating his exit and the tussle with the goons. “Beth, we don’t have to be enemies.”
Beth jumped on him from the side. He caught her in a bear hug. They made tiny micro-bounces off the narrow walls.
Leo’s heart exploded in a million pieces. He got a feel for the desperation she must have felt as he celebrated victory a few months ago. He felt her imprisonment while he had freedom. He couldn’t help but feel a raw, overpowering sympathy for her.
He held her tight and felt himself cry from the mental strain. There was no way out of this. He couldn’t hurt Beth and he couldn’t let her hurt him.
For the last two months he’d practiced choke holds with Chickie. He wrestled Beth into a rear hold. He cried as he squeezed. He thought of the laughs they’d had, the comforting sight of her across from his desk all those years. His fantasies also popped in his mind. He was embarrassed that he was still aroused. It was just too much emotion.
Still, he held her tight. He kept up the pressure until he was sure she passed out. Gently, he sat her on the toilet and leaned her body against the wall. He wiped his eyes roughly with his sleeve.
He took her phone out her pocket. He used her thumb to unlock it. He went through the reset process to set it up for his thumb. He needed to use her hand two more times stopping to wipe his eyes in between. A sob squeezed out of his burning throat. He was pretty sure he was out of time, and he was not looking forward to fighting his way out with the goons.
After this, he would never be able to think of himself as a good guy. He slid the phone into his other pocket and opened the door.
One of the interesting results of research was the discovery that random acts of violence are rarely as random as they seem. There was often an unseen trigger, a moment off-camera, so to speak. He’d watched footage of Burger King employees ‘snap’ and attacking co-workers, officers ‘snap’ and bludgeon suspects or bystanders or protesters. He’d seen footage of people push other people onto the subway tracks.
The subway track stats were quite intriguing, it turns out that 98% of the time someone pushed someone onto the tracks there was over 3 minutes before a train’s arrival. The other 2% could be explained as accidental. Overall, it was a very rare occurrence as well, making .05% of all crime in the city.
Even stabbings, shootings, assaults found a rhythm. Essentially, there was an element of ego attack, a sense that the insult could not ever be rectified, a series of ultimatums, either articulated or implied, and finally, a physical attack.
Professional fighters work very hard to eliminate the ego part and thus reduce the predictability of attack. It’s the reason that most of the battle is to draw the opponent into an exposed, emotional state, where a short-term gain seems more important than a long-term winning strategy. One fighter pisses off the other so much that all the aggrieved can see is the pleasure he’ll get when he hail-mary knocks the other out and puts them in their place.
Dmitry didn’t mind his job. He saw himself as a peacekeeper and as a sort-of analog, in-person influencer. Maybe due to his inexpressive face and intimidating physique, he rarely had to use any force. He was given lots of autonomy in his role, he had large objectives and he had lots of free time. For fun he swam with the Sheepshead Bay open water swimming club.
Life was good. It wasn’t often he got to work near the Metropolitan Opera. They’d get this kid to cut his thing, and all would be well. He looked at his watch, a Poljot. 15 years in the coal mines, a public presentation of the gift watch in 2014 he was forced to participate in for Miner’s Day, a reward for pulling 3 people out barehandedly after a suspicious fire.
The boy came out the bathroom. It was clear this boy and the girl had some serious chemistry. He missed passion like that. The closest he came was a good match on badoo and a dinner date in Brighton Beach.
There was something strange about the boy’s face. It made Dmitry uncross his arms. The boy walked up to Dmitry.
“Hi, can we talk for a moment?”
Dmitry wondered if he should hit him or hear him out. Civility won. “Yes, where is Liza?”
“Liza? Oh, Elizabeth is in the bathroom. So here’s the thing. I don’t know your name, and I don’t think you’re about to give it to me. I’ll just call you Sir. I hope that’s okay, Sir.”
“This is okay.” Dmitry was honestly amused. This boy had proven to be quite a bit of fun. He also frustrated the shit out of their boss, Krushev, and that made Dmitry happy, even when he and his partner Vasyl were getting yelled at by that prick.
“So, I need to get out of here, and I know the other guy is waiting in the back, and you are here and you can’t let me leave until you hear from Beth that everything is okay.”
Dmitry started to become a bit less excited about the conversation.
Leo said, “Do you think there’s any way I could convince you to let me go? Or will we have to make a mess out of Sal’s. This is like my favorite restaurant ever. I know that probably doesn’t matter to you, but it does to me. I want to be able to come back here.”
“You want to go.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to let you go.”
“Yes, that would be awesome.”
Dmitry looked at the boy, remembered the several hours he spent running around Queens hunting him down, the berating he’d gotten from Krushev. “Okay”, he said, and turned to clear the path for Leo.
“Thank you, sir.” Leo said.
Leo couldn’t believe that worked. He slid less than a foot past Dmitry’s relaxed smile. Dmitry nodded gently.
Leo turned and sprinted for the door. He felt massive hands grab his shoulder and a fistful of the back of his shirt. Okay. He’d tried. Now he had to keep things quiet otherwise he’d be fighting two big Ukranians.
Dmitry twisted and slung the boy back into the room. In the air, Leo imagined a spider man style landing: all toes and fingertips. The landing was more like a graceless slide across his uneaten pizza, his side slurping up the tomato sauce and his elbow attempting to clear the table of everything solid. That was not quiet.
Leo popped up, trying to draw on Chickie’s training. Dmitry wasn’t angry at all, he looked like he was enjoying this.
Rush or not rush. Not rush. Play it cool. Leo wound around the chairs and walked back up to Dmitry. “I am going to beat your ass.”
Dmitry laughed, swung his thick arm in a forehand slap that would really hurt if it connected. Leo watched the arm swing by him. He was so stunned by his own swift reaction that he missed the easy opportunity to counter. It was okay, they were getting to know each other. Leo wasn’t sure if the wait staff had called the cops or whether they had all the time in the world.
After a couple of Dmitry’s wild swings and lunges, Leo still avoided throwing counterpunches. He wasn’t quite sure how Dmitry got a hold of him, but that put him in a position where he had to go on the offensive. Remembering Chickie’s jail-fighting dirty tricks, he stomped on the instep of Dmitry’s foot, spun and rotated, grabbing Dmitry’s arm and twisting it out to lock the elbow. For a moment, he thought about breaking his arm, just because he didn’t want to keep dealing with Dmitry. A split second passed.
Dmitry used brute strength and yanked his arm from Leo’s grasp. Leo parried a few more punches, and decided to make a run for it.
Leo heard the other goon burst into the kitchen behind him. Leo slid around and behind Dmitry, kicked him in the back of the knee and dropped him. He thought about sprinting, this would give him a decent lead.
Beth stumbled out the bathroom. Through the kitchen counter window, Leo watched the kitchen staff back away from the goon, now looking at him, holding a gun. Beth had followed Leo’s eyes and peeked through the bidirectional kitchen door to see her friend Vasyl.
He wasn’t her friend. He was one of the bastard sons of Krushev. It had created a weird dynamic when her patron had paid for her contract 10 years ago and moved her out of the group home on Ocean Ave in Brooklyn to his Upper West Side apartments. Vasyl was the same age as Beth, and always looked at her as if he owned her.
Vasyl stepped out of the kitchen, holding the gun low. He would have resented being called a goon. “I am Vasyl. Pleasure to meet again. Do not run.”
Leo wished he could get a couple of hours alone with Beth’s phone. He could still sprint out of Sal’s and probably get away. He also wanted to hear what they had to say.
Beth screamed, “Shoot him!”
