The Reapers

by John Connolly

  The St. Daniil remained, though. It endured. The St. Daniil was a club, although it was strictly private and had little in common with its glitzier counterparts on the avenue. Accessed through a steel-caged door, it occupied the basement of an old brownstone building surrounded by other brownstones of similar vintage although, while its neighbors had been cleaned up, the edifice occupied by the St. Daniil had not. It had once formed the main entrance to a larger complex, but changes to the internal structure of the buildings had isolated the St. Daniil between two significantly more attractive apartment blocks. The club’s home now squatted in the middle of them like some poor relation that had muscled in on a family photo, unashamed of its ignominy.

  Above the St. Daniil was a warren of small apartments, some big enough to be occupied by entire families, others small enough to accommodate only an individual, and one, at that, for whom space mattered less than privacy and anonymity. Nobody lived in those apartments now, not willingly. Some were used for storage: booze, cigarettes, electrical goods, assorted contraband. The rest acted as temporary quarters for young-sometimes very young-prostitutes and, when required, their clients. One or two of the rooms were marginally better furnished and maintained than others, and contained video cameras and recording equipment for the making of pornographic films.

  Although it was known as the St. Daniil, the club did not have an official name. A plate beside the door read “Private Members Social Club” in English and Cyrillic, but it was not the kind of place where anyone went to be sociable. There was a bar there, but few lingered at it, and those who did stuck mostly to coffee and killed time while waiting for errands to run, vig to collect, bones to break. A TV above the bar showed pirated DVDs, old hockey games, sometimes porn or, late at night, when all business had been conducted, film of Russian troops in Chechnya engaging in reprisals against their enemies, real or perceived. Worn hemispherical vinyl booths lined the walls, with scuffed tables at their center, relics of a time when this really was a social club, a place where men could talk of the old country and share the newspapers that had arrived in the mail or in the suitcases of visitors and immigrants. The decor consisted mainly of framed copies of Soviet posters from the 1940s, bought for five bucks at RBC Video on Brighton Beach Avenue.

  For a time, the police had kept watch on the club, but they had been unable to access it in order to plant a bug, and a wiretap on the phones had expired without anything useful being learned. Any business of consequence was, they suspected, now conducted on throwaway cellphones, the phones replaced religiously at the end of every week. Two raids by vice on the building through the doorway above the club had scored only a couple of johns and a handful of weary whores, few of whom had English and fewer of whom had papers. No pimps were ever apprehended, and the women, the cops knew, were easily replaced.

  On those nights, the door to the St. Daniil had remained firmly closed, and when the cops finally gained entry to it they had found only a bored bartender and a pair of ancient, toothless Russians playing poker for matchsticks.

  It was a mid-October evening. The light outside had long faded and only a single booth in the club was occupied. The man seated there was a Ukrainian known as the Priest. He had studied in an Orthodox seminary for three years before discovering his true vocation, which lay primarily in providing the kinds of services for which priests were usually required to offer forgiveness. The club’s unofficial name was a testament to the Priest’s brief flirtation with the religious life. The St. Daniil monastery was Moscow’s oldest cloister, a stronghold of the Orthodox faith even during the worst excesses of the Communist era, when many of its priests had become martyrs and the remains of St. Daniil himself had been smuggled to America in order to save them from harm.

  Unlike many of those who worked for him, the Priest spoke English with hardly a trace of an accent. He had been part of the first influx of immigrants from the Soviet Union, working hard to learn the ways of this new world, and he could still recall a time when Brighton Beach had been nothing but old people living in rent-controlled apartments surrounded by little vacant houses falling into decay, a far cry from the days when this area was a beacon for immigrants and New Yorkers alike anxious to leave the crowded neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side for space in which to live and the feel of sea air in their lungs. He prided himself on his sophistication. He read the Times, not the Post. He went to the theater. When he was in his realm, there was no porn on the TV, no poorly copied DVDs. Instead, it was tuned to BBC World, or sometimes CNN. He did not like Fox News. It looked inward, and he was a man who was always looking at the greater world outside. He drank tea during the day, and only compote, a fruit punch that tasted of plums, at night. He was an ambitious man, a prince who wished to become a king. He paid obeisance to the old men, the ones who had been imprisoned under Stalin, the ones whose fathers had created the criminal enterprise that had now reached its zenith in a land far from their own. But even as he bowed before them, the Priest looked for ways in which they might be undermined. He calculated the strength of potential rivals among his own generation and prepared his people for the inevitable bloodshed, sanctioned or unsanctioned, that would come. Recently, there had been some reversals. The mistakes might have been avoided, but he was not entirely to blame for them. Unfortunately, there were others who did not see it that way. Perhaps, he thought, the bloodshed would have to begin sooner than expected.

  Today had been a bad day, another in a succession of bad days. There had been a problem with the restrooms that morning and the place still stank, even though the difficulty had apparently been solved once the drain people, from a firm trusted by the organization, got on the case. On another day, the Priest might well have left the club and gone elsewhere, but there was business to be conducted and loose ends to be tied, so he was prepared to put up with the lingering bad odor for as long as was necessary.

  He flicked through some photographs on the table before him: undercover policemen, some of them probably Russian speakers. They were determined, if nothing else. He would have them identified to see if there was some way of putting pressure on them through their families. The police were drawing ever closer to him. After years of ineffectual moves against him, they had been given a break. Two of his men had died in Maine the previous winter, along with two intermediaries. Their deaths had exposed a small but lucrative part of the Priest’s Boston operation: pornography and prostitution involving minors. He had been forced to cease providing both services, and the result had affected, in turn, the smuggling of women and children into the country, which meant that the inevitable attrition of his stable of whores, and the stables of others, could not be arrested. He was hemorrhaging money, and he did not like it. Others were suffering, too, and he knew that they blamed him. Now his club stank of excrement and it would only be a matter of time before the dead men were finally connected to him.

  But word had reached him that there might be a solution to at least one of his problems. All of this had started because a private detective in Maine could not mind his own business. Killing him would not get rid of the police-it might even increase the pressure upon him for a time-but it would at least serve as a warning to his persecutors and to those who might be tempted to testify against him, as well as giving the Priest a little personal satisfaction along the way.

  There was a shout from the doorway in Russian: “Boss, they are here.”

  One week earlier, a man had arrived at the offices of Big Earl’s Cleaning & Drain Services, Inc., on Nostrand Avenue. He had not entered through the brightly carpeted, fragrant-smelling lobby. Instead, he had walked around the side of the building to the maintenance yard and waste-treatment area.

  This area did not smell at all fragrant.

  He entered the garage and climbed a flight of steps to a glass booth. Inside was a desk, a range of mismatched filing cabinets, and two cork boards covered with invoices, letters, and a pair of out-of-date calendars featuri
ng women in a state of undress. Seated behind the desk was a tall, thin man in a white shirt offset by a green and yellow polyester tie. His hair was Grecian-formula brown, and he was fiddling compulsively with his pen, the sure sign of a smoker deprived, however temporarily, of his drug. He looked up as the door opened and the visitor entered. The new arrival was of below-average height, and dressed in a navy peacoat buttoned to the neck, a pair of torn, faded jeans, and bright red sneakers. He had a three-day growth of beard, but wore it in a manner that suggested he always had a three-day growth of beard. It looked almost cultivated, in an untidy way. “Shabby” was the word that came to mind.

  “You trying to quit?” asked the visitor.

  “Huh?”

  “You trying to give up cigarettes?”

  The man looked at the pen in his right hand as if almost surprised that there wasn’t a cigarette there.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Wife’s been at me to do it for years. The doc, too. Thought I’d give it a try.”

  “You should use those nicotine patches.”

  “Can’t get them to light. What can I do for you?”

  “Earl around?”

  “Earl’s dead.”

  The visitor looked shocked. “No way. When did he die?”

  “Two months ago. Cancer of the lung.” He coughed embarrasedly. “Kind of why I decided to give up. My name’s Jerry Marley, Earl’s brother. I came on board to help out when Earl got sick, and I’m still here. Earl a friend of yours?”

  “An acquaintance.”

  “Well, guess he’s gone to a better place now.”

  The visitor looked around the little office. Beyond the glass, two men in masks and coveralls were cleaning pipes and tools. He wrinkled his nose as the stink reached him.

  “Hard to believe,” said the visitor.

  “Ain’t it though. So, what can I do for you?”

  “You unclog drains?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So if you know how to unclog them, then you must know how to clog them as well.”

  Jerry Marley looked momentarily puzzled, and then anger replaced puzzlement. He stood up. “You get the hell out of here before I call the cops. This is a business, dammit. I got no time for people trying to cause other people trouble.”

  “I hear your brother wasn’t so particular about who he worked with.”

  “Hey, you keep your mouth shut about my brother.”

  “I don’t mean that in a bad way. It was one of the things I liked about him. It made him useful.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Get out of here, you-”

  “Maybe I should introduce myself,” said the visitor. “My name is Angel.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what-” Marley stopped talking as he realized that he did, in fact, give a good goddamn. He sat down again.

  “I guess Earl might have mentioned me.”

  Marley nodded. He looked a little paler than before. “You, and another fella.”

  “Oh, he’s around somewhere. He’s-” Angel searched for the right word. “-cleaner than I am. No offense meant, but his clothes cost more than mine. The smell, y’know, it gets in the fabric.”

  “I know,” said Marley. He began to babble, but couldn’t stop himself. “I don’t notice it so much no more. My wife, she makes me take my clothes off in the garage before I come in the house. Have to shower straightaway. Even then, she says she can still smell it on me.”

  “Women,” said Angel. “They’re sensitive like that.”

  There was a brief silence. It was almost companionable, except that Jerry Marley’s desire for a cigarette had suddenly increased beyond the capacity of any mortal man to resist.

  “So,” said Angel. “About those drains…”

  Marley raised a hand to stop him. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  “I thought you were giving up,” said Angel.

  “So did I.”

  Angel shrugged. “I guess it must be a stressful job.”

  “Sometimes,” said Marley.

  “Well, I don’t want to add to it.”

  “God forbid.”

  “But I do need a favor, and I’ll do you a favor in return.”

  “Right. And what would that be?”

  “Well, if you do me my favor, I won’t come back again.”

  Jerry Marley thought about it for less than half a second.

  “That seems fair,” he said.

  For a moment, Angel looked a little sad. He was hurt that everyone seemed to leap at that deal when it was offered.

  Marley seemed to guess what he was thinking. “Nothing personal,” he added, apologetically.

  “No,” said Angel, and Marley got the sense that the visitor was thinking of something else entirely. “It never is.”

  The two men who entered the Priest’s den a week later were not what he had expected, but then the Priest had learned that nothing was ever quite as he might have expected it to be. The first was a black man dressed in a gray suit that looked as if it was being worn for the first time. His black patent leather shoes shone brightly, and a black silk tie was knotted perfectly at the collar of his spotlessly white shirt. He was clean shaven and exuded a faint scent of cloves and incense that was particularly appealing to the Priest under his current, excrementally tainted, circumstances.

  Behind him was a smaller man, possibly of Hispanic origin, wearing an amiable smile that briefly distracted from the fact that his clothes had seen better days: no-name denims, last year’s sneakers, and a padded jacket that was obviously of good quality but was more suited to someone two decades younger and two sizes larger.

  “They’re clean,” said Vassily, once the two men had submitted, with apparent good grace, to a frisking. Vassily was deceptively compact and his features were gentle and delicate. He moved with speed and grace, and was one of the Priest’s most trusted acolytes, another Ukrainian with brains and ambition, although not so much ambition that it might pose a threat to his employer.

  The Priest gestured at a pair of chairs facing him across the table. The two men sat.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked them.

  “Nothing for me,” said the black man.

  “I’ll have a soda,” said the other. “Coke. Make sure the glass isn’t dirty.”

  The smile never left his face. He looked over his shoulder at the bartender and winked. The bartender merely scowled.

  “Now, what can I do for you?” asked the Priest.

  “It’s more a matter of what we can do for you,” said the small man.

  The Priest shrugged. “Cleaning, maybe? Selling door-to-door?”

  There was an appreciative laugh from his soldiers. There were three of them in all, plus the bartender. Two were seated at the bar, the ubiquitous coffee cups before them. Vassily was behind the men and to their right. The Priest thought that he looked uneasy. But then, Vassily always looked uneasy. He was a pessimist, or perhaps a realist; the Priest was never entirely sure which. He supposed that it was all a matter of perspective.

  The small man’s grin faded slightly.

  “We’re here about the paper.”

  “Paper? Are you looking for a route?”

  There was more laughter.

  “The paper on the detective, Parker. We hear you want him taken out. We’d prefer it if that wasn’t the case.”

  The laughter stopped. The Priest had been informed that two men wanted to discuss the detective with him, so this opening gambit was not unexpected. Usually, the Priest would have left such discussions to Vassily, but this was not the usual situation, and these, he knew, were not usual men. He had been told that they merited a degree of respect, but this was the Priest’s place, and he enjoyed goading them. He respected those who respected him, and the mere fact of the men’s presence in his club irritated him. They were not pleading for the detective’s life; they were trying to tell him how to run his business.

  The bartender placed a Coke in front of the small man. He sippe
d it and scowled.

  “It’s warm,” he said.

  “Give him some ice,” said the Priest.

  The bartender nodded. One of the men seated at the bar leaned over and filled an empty glass with ice by scooping it through the ice bucket. He handed it to the bartender. The bartender dipped his fingers into the glass, retrieved two cubes, and dropped them into the Coke. The liquid splashed onto the small man’s jeans.

  “Hey,” he said. “That’s rude, man. And seriously fucking unhygienic, even in a place that smells as bad as this one.”

  “We know who you are,” said the Priest.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘We know who you are.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  The priest pointed at the small untidy man. “You are Angel.” The finger moved slightly to the left. “And you are named Louis. Your reputation precedes you, as I believe people say under these circumstances.”