The man put the files on the table and came around to Martin’s chair. “Mr. Wexler?”
Martin stood up and they shook hands. The man introduced himself as Agent Walters and said he was acting deputy assistant chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division.
“That must be an interesting job,” Martin said, “but I don’t get why you wanted me to come in today.”
Agent Walters exchanged glances with the top of McGuin’s head.
“Please, sit down,” he said to Martin.
Martin sat down again as Agent Walters settled himself in the chair directly across the conference table. He removed the large rubber bands from the first file, opened the cardboard cover, shuffled through some papers.
“I’ll just take a case at random,” he said, and picked out a Xeroxed page covered with typescript. He glanced at it, then fixed his eyes on the acoustic tile of the ceiling. “Several years ago New Jersey police found the torso of a young woman in a storm drain in Secaucus, New Jersey. Her legs were later discovered in Westchester, New York, in some bushes beside a tennis court, and her head turned up in Connecticut in the men’s bathroom at a rest stop on 95 North. There it was, face up, staring out of the steel toilet bowl. Pretty public place to leave a head, don’t you think? A troop of Cub Scouts from Pennsylvania pulled in that morning in a bus. The kid who found—”
“Excuse me!” Martin interrupted. “Do you mind telling me what all that has to do with me?”
Agent Walters removed his gaze from the ceiling and fixed it on the vicinity of Martin’s chin. His eyes were red-rimmed and mistrustful, a dull, muddy brown. The eyes of a man who had seen far too much of the world.
“They found parts of the woman’s body in three different states,” he said. “So we were called in. We put her back together, did a little detective work, and dug up her rap sheet. Tatiana Ostronsky, former prostitute, originally from Minsk, in those days Soviet Union, now Belarus. Busted for solicitation and possession a few times in the eighties. Busted in ’91 in a NYPD raid on a Grushnensky Syndicate brothel in Brighton Beach and” — he paused for effect — “former mistress of our friend Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov.”
Martin pushed his chair back and stood up. “I thought we were heading in that direction,” he said. “Not interested.” He looked over at McGuin, who appeared to be studying the reflection of his face in the glossy finish of the table. “And thanks for all your help with the case, McGuin.”
McGuin didn’t respond to this sarcasm.
Agent Walters followed Martin to the door and out into the corridor. “Try to understand who you’re dealing with, please,” he said. “The man’s probably the most bloodthirsty Russian national since Ivan the Terrible.”
They arrived at the steel elevator, and Martin pressed the button marked DOWN. The elevator came; the steel doors parted. Agent Walters was still at his side.
“We’ve made a copy of the complete file for you,” he said, sounding a little desperate. “It took my assistant a whole day. That stuff we sent over last week was just a fraction of what we’ve got. I’ll messenger the new stuff this afternoon.”
Martin stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not going to read it.”
Agent Walters put his hand against the rubber bumper and opened his mouth to say something more, but Martin shook his head.
“Even the devil himself has got the right to a fair trial,” he said.
Agent Walters stepped back and the steel doors of the elevator closed and Martin began the slow descent alone.
Immediately following what became known as the Mah-Jongg Massacre, Alexei Smerdnakov decided to disappear. They had brought him over as a hired gun; hired guns are used once and thrown away. But he had hit them before they hit him, and now no one in America knew his face. There are worlds within worlds in New York City; Alexei chose one nearby. He left the Kiev by the back door, walked a mile down Brooklyn Avenue through the drizzling cold, and turned left on 227th Street. There, two blocks from the sea, he found a run-down motel called the SurfSide, done up in fading fifties turquoise and dirty sca-foam white stucco. A hand-lettered sign in the window in Cyrillic characters announced RUSSIAN SPOKEN HERE — MONTHLY RATES.
Behind the front desk a twelve-year-old Estonian girl with a missing tooth took his money. He paid in advance for the whole month, and she pretended not to notice the spattering of blood on his clothes. She had dirty blond hair and knowing eyes and was rather pretty in a prepubescent slut sort of way. One false tooth and one more year, and she’ll he ready to work for me, Alexei thought. He signed his name as Aba Sid, gave a fictitious address in Vladivostok, and went up to a room on the third floor. He took off his shoes and coat and lay on the bed and fell asleep.
The SurfSide was not the sort of establishment to bother a sleeping man who had paid for the month, and when Alexei awoke, it was nearly midnight three days later. He showered, put on clean clothes, and set about counting his money. He had gathered an additional fifteen thousand dollars from the wreckage of the mah-jongg parlor, bringing his fortunes in America up to thirty-five thousand. An unambitious man will squander such a sum all at once on expensive booze, gambling, cheap women, and cocaine or, worse, gradually on the necessities of living. Alexei was not one of these. His ambition was boundless. He was also very lucky, which in criminal matters is more important than skill or foresight.
As it turned out, a drunken Bulgarian pimp known as Mitya, loosely connected with the Grushnensky Syndicate, ran a string of whores out of the second floor of the SurfSide. The whores were more or less evenly divided among Chinese, Russian, and Dominican women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-eight. The Dominicans worked the side streets down by the promenade at 187th; the Chinese received customers in six rooms set aside for their use on the second floor; the Russians acted as high-priced call girls with beepers and knockoff designer clothes and rented out for fifteen hundred dollars for the evening, just like escorts in Manhattan.
Alexei only gradually discovered these details. The first six months of his residence at the SurfSide he spent quietly learning English in evening classes offered at the Brighton Beach YMCA. When he could speak well enough to be understood, he applied for his citizenship as a political refugee, which in that era of the Reagan presidency was swiftly granted. Meanwhile, he also became intimate with one of the Russian whores working for Mitya, a twenty-five-year-old former beautician who called herself Lomi. Alexei knew how to manipulate prostitutes the way other men know engineering or investment banking. Soon Lomi was spending all her spare hours on her back in his room, working his cock for nothing.
But Alexei had another agenda besides getting laid. Together one dark evening Lomi and Alexei planned Mitya’s murder. It was a simple enough matter. Lomi enticed the unsuspecting procurer to an empty room at the motel with some Colombian pink flake she said had been given her by a grateful client. They snorted the blow, and Lomi undid Mitya’s trousers and was performing fellatio on him as Alexei entered the room and drew the blade of a sharpened kitchen knife across the man’s jugular. Afterward they had to clean up the blood, using mops and buckets of hot water, and the indoor-outdoor carpeting was completely ruined. The Bulgarian’s death didn’t make any more of an impact than this. The operation at the SurfSide continued uninterrupted, now with Alexei and Lomi in charge. Lomi managed the girls gently and with tact, as only a woman can, and Alexei handled the muscle and the money. Business prospered.