AKULA, THE SHARK
“Whatever happened to Akula?” Nicholas asked Andriy as they were taking a cab to Andriy’s apartment.
“He’s dead. Dead and gone. Too much horilka, too many clogged arteries, too many enemies. But he supposedly died of natural causes.”
Akula, accent on the second syllable and pronounced as in the word “cool,” the shark, was a big man with a pot belly the size of three or four bowling balls. He used to like to wear a Nike jogging suit, light gray with a red stripe down the sides of his legs. He had been a fixture in Frankivsk till his demise.
On an earlier visit to Frankivsk Nicholas had made his acquaintance. Andriy Yurkevych and three of the local writers and artists stopped in with Nicholas at the old Soviet-style hotel restaurant at the center of town. It was 11 a.m.
