Yet it wasn't just the specter of the INS that had him looking over his shoulder. Igor wasn't the most brilliant of thieves. He'd lost one arm as an adolescent trying to break into a butcher shop in the Moscow suburb where he'd been raised. The butcher was home and had let him have it with a cleaver when he stuck his arm through the broken pane of glass in the front door to let himself in.
However, thanks to a generous benefactor who owed his father a favor, Igor and his brother had been smuggled into the United States aboard a freighter. He'd promptly resumed his life of petty crime but again proved that he wasn't cut out for the job. One night he'd tried to rob a Korean grocer and decided that the man was moving too slowly, so he put his gun down on the counter to help empty the cash register.
The store's owner, Mr. Kim Tysu Jung, quickly grabbed the gun, pointed it, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. This time Igor got lucky; the bullet whizzed past his shocked face and blew out the window behind him. Igor fainted, which may have saved his life, as the store owner couldn't bring himself to shoot an unconscious man and instead called the police.
Igor might not have survived prison, either, except that his benefactor on the outside was able to arrange for his protection by the mob behind the walls. He made himself useful as a sort of courier, but he was definitely not part of the inner circle and was merely tolerated. His benefits did not include getting to choose his cellmate, and so it was that he found himself bunking that past spring with Enrique Villalobos.
Igor didn't like Villalobos. Just looking at Enrique's oily, pockmarked complexion and protruding yellow teeth made Igor queasy. And he hated that the man bragged about raping old women and young girls and was, in fact, serving a life sentence for raping and killing an eighty-seven-year-old grandmother.
About the only prisoner who seemed to like Villalobos was his "chicken," a twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican transvestite named Roberto Flores, who called himself "Little Rosa." Flores could pass for a reasonably attractive girl when he wore his makeup, and normally his favors would have been claimed by someone bigger, tougher, and meaner than Villalobos. However, Flores was HIV positive and already had some of the telltale purple blotches of Kaposi's sarcoma-a type of skin cancer associated with AIDS. As a result, the rest of the prison population steered clear but Villalobos didn't care. He was HIV positive, too, and already facing life in prison.
Roberto became even less desirable that spring when he had a nasty accident in the prison laundry. Somehow his head got caught in the massive steam press used to iron prison uniforms and sheets. He was horribly burned on the sides of his face-his ears looked like puddles of melted wax with holes-and from that point forward, his formerly well-formed head had a sort of pressed look to it, accentuated by a bug-eyed stare.
Igor had seen Flores when he finally got out of the prison hospital and the bandages were removed. He'd barely been able to keep his lunch down when he got a glimpse of the deformed ears and protruding eyes, but Villalobos had just shrugged and said, "I don't screw his face so who cares? He can wear a bag over his head." Roberto had wept at the cruel words, but with no one else willing to protect him and buy him the little things he required-like lipsticks and rouge-he stayed with Villalobos. At least while Villalobos remained at Auburn, which wasn't much longer after the "accident."
Only a few days following Roberto's mishap, Villalobos, who'd acted real nervous whenever large, hard-faced black men walked past the cell, asked to see the warden. Soon, a rumor swept through the prison: Villalobos had "come to Jesus" and confessed to the rape of a woman twelve years earlier beneath the pier on Coney Island. If true, the information-according to all the jailhouse lawyers-would exonerate four black men, all members of the notorious Bloods gang, currently incarcerated in that very prison.
The news struck Igor in a way he hadn't expected. The pier at Coney Island was just about his favorite place in the world. The American dream to him was riding the amusement park roller coaster with his brother and a couple of girls, getting high on pot or Ecstasy, and wolfing down as many hot dogs at Nathan's as his stomach could hold. He didn't like the idea that such an ugly crime occurred where he'd once made love to a willing girl from Buffalo.
Igor noted that the four black men were among those who'd been walking past the cell, frightening Villalobos. But he figured it was none of his business. If Villalobos said he did the crime, who was he to say different? In fact, the situation in the cell grew much less stressful, as now Villalobos seemed to be on great terms with the young black men, as well as the other members of the Bloods gang in the prison.
One benefit to Villalobos's having new friends was that one night he came back to the cell with a quart milk carton filled with prison moonshine, made by the kitchen crew using rotten, fermented fruit and sugar. Villalobos didn't offer to share any and was soon bragging to Igor, who had no choice but to listen, about his sexual exploits. He eventually got around to raping the woman at Coney Island, but it wasn't quite the story he'd told the authorities. "Sure, I got me some of that white bitch's ass, but those niggers got there before me, them's the ones that messed her up. I just got the leftovers."
The next morning, Villalobos-his beady eyes more bloodshot than usual and nursing a savage headache from the moonshine-had regretted what he told Igor. "You forget that shit I told you," he warned. "If the wrong people hear you been talking out of turn, somebody's gonna put a blade in your stinkin' guts. And it ain't me you're gonna have to worry about, if you know who I mean."
Igor didn't necessarily have all his tools in the shed, but he understood who Villalobos referred to: Jayshon Sykes, the ringleader of the Coney Island Four, as the television newscasts were calling him and his buddies. Igor had no intention of crossing that man's path. The other three of the four were tough guys, even killers, but Sykes was something else again.
He reminded Igor of a large shark he'd seen in the New York Aquarium at Surf Avenue and West Eighth Street in Brooklyn shortly after his arrival in the United States. As the beast swam past, one of its large, featureless black eyes had fixed on him for a moment, and Igor knew that it was sizing him up as potential prey. There was no conscience in that gaze, only a desire to kill and consume. Sykes had once looked at him that way, and he didn't want any encores.
Several weeks after his "confession," Villalobos was transferred out of Auburn. The prison rumor mill had it that he'd been rewarded with a cushy setup on one of the prison farms. Igor didn't care; he was just happy to be rid of the disgusting man and his dirty little secret. He was even happier when Sykes amp; Co. were exonerated and left the prison.
By October, he'd pretty much forgotten about the Coney Island case. His chief concern was that in two months he was due to be released from prison, but then he was going to be handed over to the INS for deportation to Russia. And that would have meant more prison time, as he was still wanted by the Moscow police for a few of his youthful transgressions. He definitely did not want to return to his native country, where the prison cells made even Attica look like Club Med.
He was worrying about his release one afternoon while in the prison exercise yard when he uncharacteristically allowed himself to wander away from the safety of the Russian mob bosses, who held court in one corner. Most of the prison gangs had staked out territory that the other gangs respected, except when warring. However, outside of these islands, there was a sort of no-man's-land where the loners and lunatics, and the predators who fed on them, walked or huddled.