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 boys. 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.