The laundromat hasn’t run a single laundry cycle in the two years I’ve owned it. Out front, the air is rich with the smell of rot and decay. Inside, the windows are dark and the mattress in the back of the room is in disarray, a stained sheet twisted in a heap on the floor. Empty bottles line the far end of the room. A moldy burrito lies on a paper late in the center of a flaking card table.
All surefire signs that my brother was here.
“He hasn’t been back in a couple of days,” Shura observes, wrinkling his nose against the stench.
“He’ll have left us some sort of message,” I say. “Slavik didn’t come back just to avoid me.”
As we step into the rear office, I come face to face with the “message” my father has left me.
It’s in the form of none other than Fyodor Navalny, my father’s righ
