“Straight out of the forest?”
“Yes. Your old uncle used to be… a hunter, shall we say. Deep in the forest.”
“Splendid. A hunter! Cheers, then! Once again—to us!”
“Cheers.”
“Mmmnnmm. Paper-thin slices of salted fatback! Exquisite!”
“A nephew I can be proud of. Taking me to such a classy restaurant.”
“Ha ha ha! Hats off to the restaurant! But to continue just talking… last month, a guy with an eagle tattoo was murdered. The month before, someone else. A cat tattoo. A nasty cat.”
“Russians.”
“Yes, the Russian mafia. Members of the Vor. For seven months now, the tension has been escalating, the fighting growing steadily worse and worse.”
“Tension sparked by a certain newspaper. A scoop.”
“Yes, indeed! A tabloid exposé. It must be said, however, that no lies were printed in that article. Speculation, yes, but the evidence itself, advanced in support of the conclusion—that was pure truth! How else could it have been so persuasive?”
“No doubt.”
“None whatsoever. Hence the public’s enthusiasm for our current investigative series on the Chechens. It’s been like this from the start, you know. From the first installment.”
“It was that immediate?”
“How can gangsters emerge as ‘hometown heroes’—or rather, as they’d put it, ‘homeland heroes’? How can one account for this peculiarly Chechen structure? See here, just look at me. I get all flabbergasted just thinking about it. Glorious, glorious! Another glass!”
“Here, drink up.”
“Thank you, dear Uncle! Ha ha ha! The point is, it was their homeland, you see. As long as the funds furthered the movement—independence, separation from the Russian Federation!—no one cared where they came from. Kill the outsiders, take their wealth! That was good, that was heroism. Anyone in the Chechen mafia was a righteous bandit struggling to liberate his people. It didn’t matter where—in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg. Flawless ‘homeland heroes’ of the North Caucasus, one and all! What a moral sense! What a vision!”
“Flabbergasted again?”
“Stunned. Absolutely. These people… leaping, just like that, beyond our comprehension. That’s what made them such a potent force, here in our Russia—that’s how they made waves in the criminal world. And in just a decade! The Chechen mafia enters Moscow, they set up in… damn, it’s on the tip of my tongue. That port, on the Moscow River. Yuzhny Port, that’s it. They come in, and in a decade they’ve captured the market for stolen cars in Yuzhny Port. Just ten short years! Even less!”
“It’s impressive. I give them that.”
“Do you?”
“I do,” says the old man.
“They brought down the old system, after all. The Soviet underworld. Impressive indeed. Not only to me, but to you—even you, Uncle. The old system was very solid, of course. It had lasted since the 1930s. Vors running everything from the slammer. There they were in prison, in camps. Precisely where all the political criminals wind up. The state used them to keep an eye on anti-Soviet elements, it actually relied on the mafia’s organizational capabilities!”
“On the traditional Russian criminal organizations, that is.”
“Precisely! From then on, the Communist Party and the Russian mafia became subtly and inextricably entwined. And that’s how the Soviet social structure was preserved. Front and back. Witness the birth of a bureaucratic mafia rife with corruption. Ha ha ha! Sturdy as a prison—no exit! Naturally, back then—I was young then, working as a reporter for Trud, the labor union newspaper—I assumed that the Russian mafia would control the underground economy forever.”
“As did I.”
“You too? Well, then! Another drink! Na zdorovye!”
“Cheers.”
“Ah, the rich flavor of aged liquor! Delicious! But… where was I? Don’t tell me, I know! The emergence of the Chechen mafia. With extraordinary speed—no more than a decade or so. They were a veritable army with all that equipment. Right from the beginning. Marching into Moscow with grenades, bazookas. And armed, moreover, with the ferocity of their loathing for Russia! How do you deal with that? How, that is to say, were the Vors supposed to deal with that? Shock waves ran through the old mafia world. Conventional underworld ways, notions of benevolence and justice, meant nothing to them! The headaches they caused, these fighters! And then… Act II. In Moscow, in St. Petersburg—Leningrad, just given its old name back—the Vors started hunting down the Chechen mafia bosses. Just like that, they drove the Chechens from their turf. But wait! It’s not over! Not yet! Because the Chechens have their ways. Their customs. Krovnaya mest—blood revenge. Oh, the horror! One by one, the leaders of the Russian mafia began to be assassinated… sprayed full of holes with machine guns, blown to bits with bombs… and then, at last—the incident.”
“The incident?”
“Twelve dead, in one fell swoop.”
“Twelve…?”
“Twelve Vors, all prominent figures in the current Russian Federation, had gathered for a conference. When the Soviet system collapsed, the Federation was split up into twelve regions. The mafia divvied up its turf. Each of these twelve Vors controlled a region. They’d gathered to brainstorm strategies for dealing with the Chechens. Someone attacked the conference, and all twelve Vors were killed. Ha ha ha! A remarkably efficient massacre! The attacker was a professional, obviously. And of course the Chechens must have hired him. I wasn’t much of a reporter at the time, just a kid with a pen and a pad of paper, but I managed to learn, not his name, no—but his nickname. They called him the Archbishop.”
“The… Archbishop?”
“Yes. Somehow just hearing that makes you sober up a bit, doesn’t it? I don’t know why. I wonder why. Ha ha ha! What next? Things get interesting—as soon as he killed the twelve Vors, he immediately betrayed the Chechens. The two groups were decapitated, and their struggle, this feud between the Russian and the Chechen mafia, grew messier, more ferocious. All these little Vors trying to fight their way to the top, all sorts of people like that—and to make it worse, you’ve got these ethnic groups, Ukrainians and Kazakhs and so on, now they’re joining the fray too. They’ve turned the western regions of our great Russia into a bloodbath. It’s gone on this way for years, groups competing for profits that swell day by day, week after week, month after month. And now, at last, this year, the struggle between the two main forces has spread, leaping like a spark, to the Far East.”
“So the Freedom Daily reported. Seven months ago.”
“So we reported. It was a tremendous scoop. And what fun we’ve had since! Of course, it was unfortunate that a hundred blameless civilians had to get mixed up in it all. That was too bad. But it’s a fact—it is the truth—that the Chechen mafia has started moving into the Far East, hoping to further its business interests in used cars, gasoline, and firearms. They’re serving themselves nice fat pieces from the Russian mafia’s pie. That, too, is the truth. So you see, Uncle, I never wrote any lies! I never asked my reporters to lie! I don’t publish lies!”
“Just speculation,” the old man said.
“Yes, speculation. We do that.”
“And that created this situation. This world we’re in. Gangsters all over the place, riding around in heavily armored cars—not that this keeps the gangsters from being blown sky-high, along with their bodyguards.”