Inside, Igor was surprised to see two men in the room. He'd expected to see his "Uncle Yvgeny" Karchovski, the muscular middle-aged man with the pewter-colored crew cut and a black eye-patch who sat behind the desk. But he was surprised by the presence of the old man who was sitting on a couch off to the side. Vladimir Karchovski, he thought, the big boss himself.
A deep, commanding voice brought him back from his surprise. "Igor Kaminsky," Yvgeny said. "I'd heard you were out of prison. What is it that brings you to me?"
Igor didn't bother to ask how Yvgeny, the de facto head of the crime family now that his father, Vladimir, had supposedly retired, knew so quickly that he was out of prison. He'd suspected all along that Vladimir had had something to do with the apparent confusion about the INS, as well as the protection in prison.
Suddenly tears and rage boiled to the surface of his face. "My brother is murdered!"
There was no reaction on Yvgeny's face, though Igor thought he saw a flicker of something that could have been interpreted as sadness or anger in the man's one good eye. "Explain this. Who would murder your brother?"
6
After Igor Kaminsky was shown from the office, Yvgeny Karchovski leaned back in his chair without speaking. He was tall and his face looked as much Eurasian, with its high cheekbones and curiously slanted eyes, as it did Slavic. He would have been movie-star handsome, except that the right side of his face was disfigured as though by a fire. The black patch covered a missing eye, but it did not hide the waxy, melted appearance of his skin.
Beneath the thick, blue wool sweater and the shirt he wore, the right side of his body was also scarred from his waist up. A soft, black leather glove covered his right hand.
When he looked in the mirror, he felt repulsed by his appearance. Yet, women still found themselves drawn to him when he entered a room. It was something about the way he carried himself, as well as the combination of intelligence, humor, and a romantic sadness stored in his remaining gray-and-gold-flecked eye. Instead of being repulsed, as he was, women seemed to want to touch his scars, as if they might be the one to heal old wounds. But he'd remained a bachelor, even after arriving in the United States some ten years earlier from Russia.
Yvgeny's thoughts were interrupted by the sound of his father, Vladimir, clearing his throat. He looked over at the old man, who, although bent with age and arthritis, was gazing at him with the same appraising frankness that seemed as much a part of the family's inherited features as the color of their eyes. That the look could in an instant turn into a glare so fierce that most men could not withstand it comfortably seemed appropriate for a family whose history had rarely been peaceful.
Although Yvgeny was now a vigorous sixty-two years, very little of that time had been spent in the company of his father. The old man had left Russia in 1942, first captured by the invading German army, then unable to return to his native country after the war because of the political climate. So he'd immigrated to America, leaving behind his wife and two-year-old son, Yvgeny.
Like many other Russian immigrants, his father had settled in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn. While much of the rest of the country enjoyed a postwar boom, refugees from war-ravaged Europe endured the prejudices that came with being on the bottom of the barrel. It had been impossible to make a living without paying off the cops, city officials, and the bureaucracy that could withhold business licenses or close a shop for any one of a number of minor infractions. He'd saved his money from working as a laborer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and opened the St. Petersburg Tea Room to cater to the growing Russian population in Brighton Beach.
The cops, the officials, the bureaucrats-all got their hands greased but he finally had had enough when none of that protected him from being billed by the Russian mob for "fire insurance" to protect his restaurant. He'd not survived the fighting on the Eastern front, nor the Russian winters, nor the German slave labor camp to be robbed of every bit of profit. At the same time, he knew that he couldn't simply say nyet to the mob and expect to be left alone. He needed to make a statement.
Gathering other survivors from the killing grounds of Leningrad and Moscow-tough, hard men who were so acquainted with violent death that they no longer feared it-he set in motion the rest of his life. Feigning obeisance, he'd invited three of the more important mob bosses and their top lieutenants to a "Christmas party" at the tearoom.
The liquor had flowed freely, especially for the bodyguards, who were feted in their own room. When the guests were all good and drunk, and distracted by strippers who'd suddenly disappeared as if given a sign, Vladimir nodded for the climax of his plan to begin.
The waiters in both rooms suddenly produced baseball bats and tire irons. The bodyguards were quickly beaten to death. Then, while Vladimir held a gun on the bosses, who pleaded and threatened, his men broke their legs and arms with dozens of blows. Two he ordered be left alive "as examples." The third he had thrown from the pier at Coney Island during high tide, where, without the use of his legs or arms, he drowned. The body had rolled up on the shore the next morning, where it was discovered by beachcombers and photographed for the Times.
While the suddenness and viciousness of the attacks were still fresh in the minds of the other crime bosses, Vladimir sent his emissaries to deliver a message. They were free to divide the territory now vacated by the demise of their former competitors. He wanted no part of the vice market, the protection racket, or the growing drug trade. They had nothing to fear from him, so long as they left him alone.
However, he did want a little piece of the pie. Nothing much, he assured them. Just a little sideline smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States-specifically those from what was then the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellites-and on the other end, smuggling goods into the Russian black market. The gangsters shrugged and said he had a deal. He'd proved that he wasn't a man to take lightly, and they saw no reason to quibble over his little enterprise when there were many other things easier and more lucrative to smuggle into the United States than human beings.
Vladimir's reasons for wanting to occupy that particular criminal niche wasn't just good business sense to avoid confrontations with other gangs. His own experiences as a refugee desperately trying to reach America and begin a new life had a profound impact on his decision even as he plotted the murder of "evil" men. He regretted that it had proved too difficult for him to survive in his new country except as a criminal, but he liked to think that he dealt in freedom, which was certainly a lighter shade of gray than dealing in the burgeoning heroin trade.
Occasionally over the years, he'd been forced to resort to violence to protect his assets and his turf. It always came as a surprise and with a swiftness and brutality that was stunning, a lesson he'd learned from the German blitzkrieg tactics.
One of the last "lessons" had been administered shortly after Yvgeny arrived. It was the first time the two had seen each other since Yvgeny was two years old. They were strangers and yet had immediately felt a bond. The irony of Vladimir's business had been that for all the thousands of people he'd brought to America, he'd been unable to secure the freedom of his family. First, it had been more than ten years after the war ended that he learned his wife and son were even alive. She had given him up for dead and remarried a professor at the University of Moscow who'd fathered Yvgeny's half brother.
Yvgeny had never blamed his father for his absence. As a child, he'd been told that his father was missing in action and presumed dead, another one of the millions of heroes who'd died to defend Mother Russia. When as a teenager he learned that his father was alive and living in the United States, he found the idea of someday joining him exciting to contemplate. He'd hated his stepfather, a mean drunk who beat his mother and the two boys but fortunately died of alcohol poisoning from a batch of homemade vodka before he killed any of them.
When Vladimir heard about the death of his former wife's husband, he'd tried to have her smuggled out of the country along with the boy
s. But they'd been caught and the consequences had been harsh. She'd been sent to a gulag in Siberia, where she'd died of a combination of pneumonia and starvation. Her youngest son had been raised by her father, also a professor at the university, who, to his regret, had introduced her to her second husband.
Yvgeny had been raised by his paternal grandfather, Yacov Karchovski, a retired general who'd fought as a Bolshevik and then again at Stalingrad. Impressed by his grandfather's war stories, Yvgeny had joined the Soviet Army and followed in the old man's footsteps.
As a Jew, Yvgeny had experienced discrimination all of his life. It was no different at the military academy where he'd had to establish his toughness with his fists. But he'd also worked harder and shown more aptitude for military life than his classmates, and even the most prejudiced of his instructors had not been able to deny that he was a superior soldier and leader. He'd served with distinction in numerous far-off lands from Africa to North Vietnam.
He'd achieved the rank of colonel when he arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 in command of an armored division. Many of his peers used their rank to stay behind in the relative safety of the army base or Kabul to avoid becoming targets of the mujahideen, who went after officers. But Yvgeny was not the sort to ask his men to do what he would not, and they loved him for it.
On a blazing hot day in July of that year, he'd been standing in the turret of his tank, traveling in a column through yet another desolate valley, when the vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The blast had knocked him senseless and set the tank and his clothing on fire. He'd also suffered a broken leg and would have died along with the rest of his crew if a sergeant riding in the tank behind him had not jumped down and raced through the small-arms fire to haul him by his underarms from the turret. The sergeant was struck in the legs by machine gun bullets, and they'd both toppled to the ground.
The sergeant's name was Vasily Kaminsky, a grizzled campaigner who preferred the hardships of field life to living with a shrewish wife, though he enjoyed spending his leaves seeing his daughter, Ludmilla, and twin sons, Igor and Ivan.
Kaminsky's wounds left him crippled and unable to get around without canes. Yvgeny had not fared much better, even after his leg healed and his months of skin grafts in the burn unit of a Moscow hospital.
Both men had been pensioned off; Kaminsky to a life of poverty, his wife leaving him and their children for a better provider. Yvgeny was a little better off because his grandfather, who'd died during his tour in Afghanistan, had managed to put a little away. But it was a life without meaning, spent drinking vodka, often in the company of his old sergeant.
Vasily's life had gone from bad to worse. His daughter had fallen in with the refusenik crowd and suffered imprisonment and torture before she was released half insane. The ill treatment of Ludmilla had pushed the old sergeant into a constant state of drunkenness until the day Yvgeny found him lying on his threadbare couch, an empty bottle in one hand and the still-warm gun in the other. On the table next to him was a note with YVGENY printed in large Cyrillic letters on the outside; the note inside asked that he try to look out for his children.
Yvgeny had taken the request as a sacred duty. But he'd been unable to save Ludmilla. Shortly after her father's death, she'd been found dead of a heroin overdose in one of Moscow's seedier neighborhoods. Feeling that he'd already failed in his duty, Yvgeny tried to watch out for the twins, but they were already mixed up in petty crimes. Then Igor lost his arm to the butcher.
Yvgeny despaired of saving the twins from a life of crime and prison. But one night there'd been a knock on his apartment door. In the former Soviet Union, which had since collapsed, such a knock in the middle of the night might have conjured up fears of the KGB. But the times had changed, and standing on the landing when he answered was a well-dressed man. The stranger explained that he'd been sent by Vladimir Karchovski, "your father," who had made arrangements "should you wish to take advantage of them" for Yvgeny to leave Russia and emigrate to the United States, albeit illegally.
Yvgeny started to say yes. He was tired of the poverty, tired of the corruption that was as bad as it was in the days before glasnost. But, he explained to the man, he had responsibilities-the twins-and couldn't possibly leave without them. The man had simply nodded and gone back out into the night. But three days later, he'd appeared again; this time the offer was for Yvgeny and the boys.
For most of the trip, they'd had comfortable accommodations and even dined with the captain of the ship, who was apparently an old friend of Yvgeny's father. But on the day they were due to arrive in New York Harbor, Yvgeny and the boys had been secreted in a specially constructed wooden box hidden inside a shipment of Siberian lumber. The box was hot and cramped, but finally it was opened by an old man with a crowbar.
"My son!" Vladimir had shouted, tossing aside the tool and embracing him. A tough, battle-hardened soldier, Yvgeny was surprised that when the old man starting sobbing, he began to cry, too.
His father, Vladimir, had welcomed him into the "family business." He explained that his was not the biggest or most powerful of the Russian crime organizations-those that made the easy money from drugs and gun sales-and in recent years, some young hotheads who'd learned their trade in Moscow had been encroaching. But he'd lacked the energy to do much about it. "I'm getting old," he complained. "Running a business like this, with the police on one side and the young gangsters on the other, is not for an old man."
Yvgeny had used his military training to assess the situation and plan a course of action. When his father asked what he intended to do, he'd smiled and said, "There is a saying in the West that I heard once. It goes something like, 'Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.'"
Yvgeny knew that the young Turks from Moscow couldn't have cared less about the old guard they sought to replace. They'd never heard of-or if they had, paid attention to-the stories about how the Karchovski gang got its start. He planned his event with a delicious sense of irony.
As had their predecessors nearly thirty years earlier, the young Turks responded to invitations to a "conference" at the St. Petersburg Tea Room. Hints were dropped that the Karchovskis no longer had the stomach for defending their territory and were simply looking for a way out with their skin intact.
Once again the alcohol flowed like the Volga River. The bodyguards, who'd been treated to dinner, drinks, and half-naked women in the same room their counterparts of another generation had, suddenly found themselves staring down the barrels of 9-millimeter handguns outfitted with silencers. Their captors put fingers to their lips to indicate that the men should be silent if they wanted to live. Not one tried to be a hero and warn his employer.
Meanwhile, in the main dining area the young Turks were enjoying cigars and cognac when Yvgeny nodded his head to the immense waiter who stood behind the most violent and aggressive of them. Sergei Svetlov stepped forward and dropped a loop of piano wire around the man's neck, then placed a foot against the back of the chair and pulled with all his might. The gangster had grabbed at the wire but too late; it sliced deep into his neck, severing his windpipe as well as his carotid artery and jugular vein. Blood sprayed over the men on either side of the dying man. Then with a final yank, Svetlov took his head entirely off. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, the sightless eyes gazing down past trays of the finest Russian caviar, smoked herring, and loaves of black Russian rye.
The killing took all of twenty seconds, but those who witnessed it would remember it as seeming much longer for the rest of their lives. They were used to violence, but usually from guns or even a quick knife in the kidneys. None had ever seen a man have his head cut off with a piece of wire. Several vomited and one crapped in his pants.
Meanwhile, Yvgeny had used the distraction to pull a gun from his coat. "So, who would like to steal the house my father built? You, Boris?" he said, whirling to point his gun at a fat young man seated next to the headless body.
Svetlov st
epped toward the indicated man, who screamed and dived beneath the table, where he could be heard gibbering as though insane. A tougher member of the crowd stood, drawing his own gun. "You will never get away with this…" His threat died with him as the waiter behind him thrust an ice pick through his skull and into his brain. He fell forward onto the table, where his body continued to twitch as Yvgeny offered the survivors a choice.
"You can die now, or in the days ahead," he said. "Or we can all be smart businessmen. There is plenty for everyone. As you know, my family has no interest in drugs or prostitution or gun smuggling or extortion. We want only to be left alone to pursue our own small enterprise."
Yvgeny paused and looked at the faces around the table. Some were white with shock and fear, but a few were hard and angry. "I know that some of you are thinking, 'When this is over, I will kill this man, and take what is his family's,'" he said. "And it's true. You could kill me, and my father. But let me assure you that my men in this room, and those holding your men in the next room, are sworn to kill you if any member of this family or the people under our protection is harmed.
"From this moment, there is a one-million-dollar bounty on each and every one of your heads, as well as one hundred thousand dollars for each member of your family they kill. An attack on one of us will be their signal to begin collecting. It will not matter which of you commits this offense; all of you will be hunted. As you have seen, these men know how to kill-most were with me in Afghanistan and have certainly known tougher men to kill than you. I would suggest that it is vital to your interests that no member of my family or friends suffers an 'accident' as you will all pay the price."
Yvgeny paused to let his threat sink in. "Now, you are all free to leave in peace," he said.
When they were gone, Yvgeny slumped down onto the couch while his father, who'd watched the affair with admiration, sat behind the desk.
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