Igor was considering what to do about his problem that afternoon when a large, dark menace stepped in front of him and poked him in the chest with a finger the size of a Robusto cigar. Rubbing his bruised chest, Igor looked up, and up…into the huge, scowling face of Lonnie "Monster" Lynd.
A six-foot-three, 250-pound member of the Bloods gang and a bona fide sociopath, Lynd was reputed to have killed three men in prison, but no one had ever been able to prove it so he remained in the general population. Two other black men, nearly as large, remained a couple of feet behind Lynd with their eyes fixed on Igor's trembling face.
While Igor did not feel the pervasive sense of evil he had when near Jayshon Sykes, he was terrified of Lynd, whose bulging, prison-built arms looked as if they could crush his skull like a grape. His fear grew when Lynd bent over to speak face-to-face with him. "Yo, muthafucka," Lynd said quietly. "You was in the cell wit' Villalobos, right?"
Igor was so frightened that all he could do was nod. He didn't dare turn or try to flee, but he noticed that the other prisoners were moving away from him. If this turned ugly, no one else wanted to be in the vicinity where they might be considered a witness.
"Whatever that piece of shit might have told you 'bout that rape out at Coney Island you best be forgettin'," Lynd snarled.
Igor nodded again. He had to remind himself to quit holding his breath and got a whiff of foul breath when Lynd spoke to him again. "Just remember what happened to that little faggot Flores," the man said. "Only I'll keep pressin' till your head pops like a fuckin' pimple. You understand me, muthafucka?"
Grape or pimple, either sounded bad. Igor tried to say, "Yes," but no sound would come out of his mouth except a sort of moaning. He thought that fainting might be a good way out and was about to start holding his breath again, when he felt a huge hand grab his shoulder from behind.
"Is there problem here, comrade?" a voice he assumed belonged with the hand said. With relief, he recognized the voice of Sergei Svetlov, the chief enforcer for the Russian mob at Auburn and probably the only man in the prison who could have waded into the middle of three large Bloods without fear.
If Lynd was huge, Svetlov was immense. He'd been the Red Army heavyweight wrestling champion and had been considered a sure Gold Medal at the upcoming Olympic games. But he'd accidentally injured the son of an important Politburo member at a demonstration match, breaking the other man's neck, and instead of Olympic glory, he'd been sent to Afghanistan to fight fanatic Muslims. He was two inches taller than Lynd and outweighed him by twenty pounds, all of it lean muscle. He was also bald as a bowling ball; his forehead was crisscrossed with spidery white scars due to his favorite way of rendering opponents senseless, which was to butt them into submission.
Svetlov had never been particularly nice to Igor, so if he was there to help, it was because he'd been sent by someone higher up. Someone looking out for your Muscovite ass, Igor thought happily as he watched Lynd take two steps back.
Lynd wasn't afraid of many men, but neither was he willing to tangle with Svetlov, even with his two big friends to back him up. However, he couldn't afford to come off like he was scared or he'd lose face with his gang, which could turn on perceived weak members of the pack like wolves.
"Ain't nothin' but a pleasant little chitchat with your bitch," Lynd said, looking over his shoulder to make sure his comrades hadn't deserted him.
"Vatch vat you say, shits head," growled Svetlov, whose command of American epithets was limited. "Or I may pay you a visit. Perhaps, you would like to wrestle, no?"
"No, I don' wanna wrestle yo' gay ass," Lynd said, laughing with a bravado he did not feel. In truth, he was desperately wondering how he was going to get out of this without appearing to back down. He decided walking away while trash-talking was the best choice. "See you two bitches, later. Igor, 'member what I said," he warned.
Igor watched the Bloods melt into the population of the prison yard. "Thank you, Comrade Svetlov," he said to the big man next to him.
Svetlov looked down at the young man and grunted. He'd known this one's father, a brave soldier. Apparently courage and strength sometimes skipped generations. Still, he was under orders to watch out for Igor Kaminsky, and it had been dangerous to let him stray off. "You should stick with your own kind, and not hang out with these crap-in-their-pants," he said. He would have preferred to speak Russian, in which he was a noted user of profanity, but his boss had ordered him to speak only English to facilitate his assimilation into American society-not that he was going to get a chance to assimilate anytime soon.
"Believe me, comrade," Igor replied in kind, falling back into the speech patterns of the old Soviet regime. "I want nothing to do with them." He turned to smile at his protector, but the big man was already moving back toward the Russian corner of the yard. He noted enviously how other men parted in front of Svetlov like jackals when the lion approaches its kill.
Igor would have been only too happy to leave Enrique Villalobos, the Coney Island rape, and the Bloods out of his mind and his life. But fate would have it that he was in the prison library, where he went to read newspapers as part of an English as a Second Language class, and picked up a copy of the New York Times. His attention was caught by a story about the woman who'd been raped beneath the pier. His baser instincts told him to find another story to read, but he kept reading about the woman, Liz Tyler, and how her life had been taken from her by the assault. Not only had she been raped and nearly killed, she'd lost her husband and child.
By the time he reached the end of the story, Igor was fighting to keep tears from rolling down his cheeks. Not so much for Liz Tyler-though he felt a hatred for Villalobos, Sykes, and the others for what they had done-but for the memories it had dredged up of his own sister.
Except for his addiction to petty crimes, Igor wasn't a bad sort. He'd adored his mother, who'd died when he and his brother were five, and worshipped his father, a hero from the war in Afghanistan. He'd been close to his twin, Ivan, an exact replica except for the missing arm, and to his oldest sister, Ludmilla.
Ludmilla had been an otkaznik, from otkaz, the Russian word for "refusal." The otkazniks were known in the West as "refuseniks"-Soviet citizens, especially Jews like Ludmilla Kaminsky, who had been refused permission to emigrate and were often jailed on trumped-up sedition allegations.
One night Ludmilla had been taken from her apartment by the KGB and charged with anti-Soviet agitation. Even their father's war record had not protected her, and she was kept a prisoner for nearly two years, during which time she was systematically tortured, including being raped repeatedly. The bright, cheerful, and optimistic young woman he'd known returned to her family a dull, frightened creature who would shriek and run if a strange man entered the room. Igor had hated rapists ever since.
So Igor became something he would never have imagined. A hero. When no one was watching, he wrote a short, but to the point, letter to Kristine Breman, the district attorney of Brooklyn, and told her what Villalobos had said about the confession being a hoax. He considered sending it without a signature but realized that unless the authorities were able to question him, it would probably be ignored. So he signed and mailed it before he could change his mind or the letter could be discovered.
Igor thought there'd be a quick response. After all, Sykes and his crew were all over the television blasting the prosecutors and cops. He thought they'd be eager to clear their names. But when there was no reply after two weeks, he shrugged and decided to forget about it. If the law wasn't interested in the truth, he wasn't going to stick his neck out to give it.