At twilight every evening the branches of a large magnolia just outside the window adjacent to Martin’s cubicle filled up with thousands of dark birds. They squawked and chattered noisily for an hour before swirling off again in a great fluttering cloud as the light drained from the sky in the west. They were not as small as sparrows or as large as crows. Grackles perhaps or rooks; he had always meant to look them up in a bird book at the library. But it didn’t matter what they were called. He was amused by the thought that they seemed to be gossiping about each other, like idlers in a Parisian café. It gave him pleasure to pause from his work and watch them there, black feathery shadows hopping about in the green shadows of the thick leaves.
Now Martin leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and stared out the window in the last moments before the birds swept off to the horizon. He didn’t hear the portentous knocking on the metal edge of the burlap divider, didn’t realize that Tayloe stood at the threshold of his cubicle, waiting.
“You with us, Wex?” Tayloe said at last.
Martin started and almost fell out of his swivel chair. “Hey, Winston, I didn’t see you there!”
Tayloe advanced into the cubicle, frowning. He was a light-skinned black man originally from Trinidad, and the lilt of the islands lingered around his voice like fading perfume. He carried under his arm a large Pendaflex file, which he deposited with a heavy thump on Martin’s desk. As if in response to this, the birds in the magnolia tree took wing in a single instant and flew off into the descending night.
“There they go,” Martin said.
Tayloe raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Clear your desk,” he said. “I’ve reassigned all your other cases. This is what you’re working on next.”
Martin stared down at the Pendaflex file, which was long and black and thick and reminded him vaguely of a coffin. His heart sank. He’d been feeling tired lately, discouraged. His energies weren’t up to a challenge just now.
“You ever hear of Alexei Smerdnakov?” Tayloe said.
Martin shook his head.
“What about Aba Sid?”
“No.”
“What do you know about the Russian Mafia?”
Martin shrugged. “Not much.”
Tayloe tapped the file with his knuckle. “Then you’ve got some reading to do. And you better read carefully. This one’s a homicide.”
Martin blinked once. “You’re kidding.” He’d never done a homicide before, Tayloe had never let him. He’d only done small-time stuff: dognappings, prostitution, domestic battery. He didn’t blame anyone for these paltry assignments; his record in court was abysmal. He’d lost nearly 80 percent of the cases that made it to trial. He was on a particularly bad streak right now: the last six verdicts had gone to the prosecution. Anxiety rose to Martin’s throat, and he could hardly swallow.
Tayloe allowed himself a humorless smile. “It’s time you earn your keep, my friend.” He gave Martin a hard squeeze on the shoulder and disappeared around the burlap divider.
For long minutes afterward, Martin stared down at the bulging Pendaflex, loath to turn the brown cover and lay bare the sad and terrible history concealed within.
In the Soviet Union during the bad old days of the Communist regime, the most common method of birth control for women was abortion. Condoms, diaphragms, the pill, sponges, IUDs, spermicidal cream, and the rest all were products of the decadent West and available only on the black market. Anya Sobakevich, the woman who gave birth to Alexei Smerdnakov, underwent thirty abortions over a twenty-year period. Alexei, her third pregnancy (by a Captain Smerdnakov of the uniformed division of the KGB), was the only one she allowed to come to term, perhaps because she was under some illusion that the captain planned to marry her. When it became apparent that he had no such plans, she abandoned the child without a qualm on the doorstep of the Chermashyna People’s Orphanage in Moscow.
Captain Smerdnakov was purged from the ranks for ideological reasons shortly after this incident and finished his days on a gulag in Siberia; Anya Sobakevich died of alcohol poisoning many years later, a month after undergoing her final abortion. The fate that awaited little Alexei, though just as dire as either of these, was far more subtle:
In the nursery of the Chermashyna Orphanage, he was hardly ever touched by the nurses and only held for a minute or two at feeding time. Many less hardy infants died from this fundamental neglect, but not Alexei. He was tough from the beginning, a large baby with big hands and big feet and a thick head of black hair. As soon as his teeth came in, he began to bite. When he learned to walk, he also learned to kick and punch. At five years old he strangled a litter of kittens the headmistress was raising for the younger children to play with. When he was eight, for no reason at all, he pummeled an eight-year-old classmate senseless and hung him by the neck with a bit of rope from a pipe in the basement. The classmate was cut down just in time by the boiler engineer.
Alexei was then transferred to a juvenile correction facility in the Ukraine, where at ten he stabbed a teacher in the leg with a compass point Finally, as a teenager, for the brutal assault and robbery of a party member in good standing, he was sentenced to the same work camp in Siberia where his father had died years before. There his true education began. There his skin was gradually covered with a series of crude tattoos: a penis with wings; two women going down on each other; alligators; heroin poppies; detailed portraits of Lenin and Marx, one on each buttock respectively. There he learned to cheat at cards and use the weak for personal gain. There he killed his first man, with a shovel blow to the back of the head. This hapless victim was a fellow inmate whom Alexei rather liked. Their argument had flared up over nothing, the last two cigarettes in a stale pack of Sputniks.
In those days the Siberian gulags bore the same relationship to Russian organized crime syndicates that farm team baseball bears to the major leagues in the United States. At the age of twenty-one, Alexei was released and made his way to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, where a place already awaited him in the Grushnensky Syndicate. Vladivostok was a wide-open city then, a haven for the various corruptions of both East and West. Alexei started out as a bodyguard and common thug and quickly became known in the criminal underworld for his ability to kill a man with his bare hands. His favorite method was to seize the victim’s hair from behind, jam a knee in the small of the back, and jerk down with great force, snapping the spine as easily as popping the head off a shrimp.
Alexei was by now a large man, six feet three, 285 pounds. At twenty-five his black hair hung long and glossy to his shoulders; his eyes showed an utterly dark black, devoid of any light. He was not bad-looking in a thick-necked, brutal sort of way. And as it turned out, he possessed another valuable talent besides barehanded spine snapping: he was a natural at running whores.
Alexei’s bosses at the Grushnensky Syndicate recognized his potential and quickly put him in charge of a small stable of three young Korean whores. His character encompassed just the right combination of sensuality and utter cruelty needed for such work. The whores feared him for his sudden rages but loved him with equal fierceness in the way that such women love the men who exploit them. They did not cheat him, they were loyal, and with whores loyalty is the highest virtue. Four years later Alexei was the syndicate’s chief pimp in Vladivostok, controlling hundreds, mostly Korean girls under the age of seventeen. It was from one of his favorites that Alexei Smerdnakov acquired the nickname Aba Sid, though the reference — probably Russian sexual slang — is obscure.