The sergeant's name was Vasily Kaminsky, a grizzled campaigner who preferred the hardships of field life to living with a shrewish wife, though he enjoyed spending his leaves seeing his daughter, Ludmilla, and twin sons, Igor and Ivan.
Kaminsky's wounds left him crippled and unable to get around without canes. Yvgeny had not fared much better, even after his leg healed and his months of skin grafts in the burn unit of a Moscow hospital.
Both men had been pensioned off; Kaminsky to a life of poverty, his wife leaving him and their children for a better provider. Yvgeny was a little better off because his grandfather, who'd died during his tour in Afghanistan, had managed to put a little away. But it was a life without meaning, spent drinking vodka, often in the company of his old sergeant.
Vasily's life had gone from bad to worse. His daughter had fallen in with the refusenik crowd and suffered imprisonment and torture before she was released half insane. The ill treatment of Ludmilla had pushed the old sergeant into a constant state of drunkenness until the day Yvgeny found him lying on his threadbare couch, an empty bottle in one hand and the still-warm gun in the other. On the table next to him was a note with YVGENY printed in large Cyrillic letters on the outside; the note inside asked that he try to look out for his children.
Yvgeny had taken the request as a sacred duty. But he'd been unable to save Ludmilla. Shortly after her father's death, she'd been found dead of a heroin overdose in one of Moscow's seedier neighborhoods. Feeling that he'd already failed in his duty, Yvgeny tried to watch out for the twins, but they were already mixed up in petty crimes. Then Igor lost his arm to the butcher.
Yvgeny despaired of saving the twins from a life of crime and prison. But one night there'd been a knock on his apartment door. In the former Soviet Union, which had since collapsed, such a knock in the middle of the night might have conjured up fears of the KGB. But the times had changed, and standing on the landing when he answered was a well-dressed man. The stranger explained that he'd been sent by Vladimir Karchovski, "your father," who had made arrangements "should you wish to take advantage of them" for Yvgeny to leave Russia and emigrate to the United States, albeit illegally.
Yvgeny started to say yes. He was tired of the poverty, tired of the corruption that was as bad as it was in the days before glasnost. But, he explained to the man, he had responsibilities-the twins-and couldn't possibly leave without them. The man had simply nodded and gone back out into the night. But three days later, he'd appeared again; this time the offer was for Yvgeny and the boys.
For most of the trip, they'd had comfortable accommodations and even dined with the captain of the ship, who was apparently an old friend of Yvgeny's father. But on the day they were due to arrive in New York Harbor, Yvgeny and the boys had been secreted in a specially constructed wooden box hidden inside a shipment of Siberian lumber. The box was hot and cramped, but finally it was opened by an old man with a crowbar.
"My son!" Vladimir had shouted, tossing aside the tool and embracing him. A tough, battle-hardened soldier, Yvgeny was surprised that when the old man starting sobbing, he began to cry, too.
His father, Vladimir, had welcomed him into the "family business." He explained that his was not the biggest or most powerful of the Russian crime organizations-those that made the easy money from drugs and gun sales-and in recent years, some young hotheads who'd learned their trade in Moscow had been encroaching. But he'd lacked the energy to do much about it. "I'm getting old," he complained. "Running a business like this, with the police on one side and the young gangsters on the other, is not for an old man."
Yvgeny had used his military training to assess the situation and plan a course of action. When his father asked what he intended to do, he'd smiled and said, "There is a saying in the West that I heard once. It goes something like, 'Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.'"
Yvgeny knew that the young Turks from Moscow couldn't have cared less about the old guard they sought to replace. They'd never heard of-or if they had, paid attention to-the stories about how the Karchovski gang got its start. He planned his event with a delicious sense of irony.
As had their predecessors nearly thirty years earlier, the young Turks responded to invitations to a "conference" at the St. Petersburg Tea Room. Hints were dropped that the Karchovskis no longer had the stomach for defending their territory and were simply looking for a way out with their skin intact.
Once again the alcohol flowed like the Volga River. The bodyguards, who'd been treated to dinner, drinks, and half-naked women in the same room their counterparts of another generation had, suddenly found themselves staring down the barrels of 9-millimeter handguns outfitted with silencers. Their captors put fingers to their lips to indicate that the men should be silent if they wanted to live. Not one tried to be a hero and warn his employer.
Meanwhile, in the main dining area the young Turks were enjoying cigars and cognac when Yvgeny nodded his head to the immense waiter who stood behind the most violent and aggressive of them. Sergei Svetlov stepped forward and dropped a loop of piano wire around the man's neck, then placed a foot against the back of the chair and pulled with all his might. The gangster had grabbed at the wire but too late; it sliced deep into his neck, severing his windpipe as well as his carotid artery and jugular vein. Blood sprayed over the men on either side of the dying man. Then with a final yank, Svetlov took his head entirely off. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, the sightless eyes gazing down past trays of the finest Russian caviar, smoked herring, and loaves of black Russian rye.
The killing took all of twenty seconds, but those who witnessed it would remember it as seeming much longer for the rest of their lives. They were used to violence, but usually from guns or even a quick knife in the kidneys. None had ever seen a man have his head cut off with a piece of wire. Several vomited and one crapped in his pants.
Meanwhile, Yvgeny had used the distraction to pull a gun from his coat. "So, who would like to steal the house my father built? You, Boris?" he said, whirling to point his gun at a fat young man seated next to the headless body.
Svetlov stepped toward the indicated man, who screamed and dived beneath the table, where he could be heard gibbering as though insane. A tougher member of the crowd stood, drawing his own gun. "You will never get away with this…" His threat died with him as the waiter behind him thrust an ice pick through his skull and into his brain. He fell forward onto the table, where his body continued to twitch as Yvgeny offered the survivors a choice.
"You can die now, or in the days ahead," he said. "Or we can all be smart businessmen. There is plenty for everyone. As you know, my family has no interest in drugs or prostitution or gun smuggling or extortion. We want only to be left alone to pursue our own small enterprise."
Yvgeny paused and looked at the faces around the table. Some were white with shock and fear, but a few were hard and angry. "I know that some of you are thinking, 'When this is over, I will kill this man, and take what is his family's,'" he said. "And it's true. You could kill me, and my father. But let me assure you that my men in this room, and those holding your men in the next room, are sworn to kill you if any member of this family or the people under our protection is harmed.