At last, a year later, Alexei received a summons to the Grushnensky Syndicate headquarters, on the thirty-seventh floor of the Taft Building on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, two blocks from the neoclassical edifice of Borough Hall. The Russian Mafia in Brooklyn was not run as a family like the Italian Mafia — with all the arcane loyalties and heated betrayals of family life — but as a cold corporate entity. The three men at the top, known as the Directors of the Central Committee, based all decisions on sound business principles: on statistics and market share and profit and loss. These men were not gangsters but businessmen in sober three-piece suits with M.B.A.’s, wives, children, summer homes in the Hamptons.
Alexei presented himself at the appointed time and was ushered into a plush conference room by a polite middle-aged woman with a stenographer’s pad. She sat in a chair in the corner and prepared to take notes. The Directors of the Central Committee were seated at the far end of the conference table, going through sales figures from the previous quarter over a quick lunch of roast beef sandwiches and borscht, ordered from a nearby Russian deli. The floor-to-ceiling window behind them showed the tall buildings of downtown: behind these, in the distance, the graceful brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and the buttresses and black cables of the great bridge.
The directors were surprised. They had expected the Bulgarian, and they studied Alexei with some suspicion. For his part he recognized their weakness immediately: these were men who had never gotten blood on their hands. They had never shot someone point-blank between the eyes before breakfast, never bludgeoned a woman to death and gone happily into the next room and raped her thirteen-year-old daughter.
The first director cleared his throat. “Where’s the Bulgarian?” he said.
“The Bulgarian is dead,” Alexei said.
“What happened to him?” the second director said.
“I killed him.” Alexei drew a hand across his throat to indicate how.
The third director said nothing.
“Syndicate associates can only be terminated under direct orders from the Central Committee,” the second director said. “You had no such orders. Since—”
“And just who the hell are you anyway?” the first director interrupted angrily. “We’ve never even seen you before!”
“They call me Aba Sid,” Alexei said. “I came over from Vladivostok last year.”
The first director leaned both elbows on the table. “We can have you sent back there in a box, you know. Just like that,” and he snapped his fingers.
“Give us one reason we shouldn’t put a bullet in your brain right now,” the second director said.
Alexei shrugged. “Take a look at the books. I’ve doubled your profit in six months. You’re making twice as much with me as with the Bulgarian.”
There followed some fumbling with papers; then the appropriate sale charts were produced. The directors put their heads together and muttered to one another in low tones. Alexei heard the faint tap of the calculator, the scratch of pencil on paper. At last the first director raised his head.
“You’ve done quite well, it’s true,” he said. “But what guarantees do we have that you will continue to produce?”
“Trust me,” Alexei said, and he grinned ferociously, showing his square, healthy teeth.
The directors decided to trust him, and Alexei went back to the SurfSide with their blessing. This was a fatal mistake. They had forgotten that the first business of crime is crime, not business. And the weapon of crime is violence, not bottom-line economics. Within two months all three of the directors were dead, along with their wives and children, and the Grushnensky Syndicate was left with a vacuum at the top.
In the yearlong gang war that followed, nearly two hundred people were shot, burned, stabbed, or garroted, a quiet massacre barely reported in the media. Only one grisly case made the cover of the New York Post, when parts of a young woman’s dismembered body turned up in three states. The woman was later identified as a Russian prostitute named Tatiana Ostronsky, also known as Lomi. She had been the mistress of the man who eventually emerged victorious in the struggle for control of the Grushnensky Syndicate, Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov.
Martin fired McGuin the day after their unscheduled visit to the FBI and hired an independent investigator out of the department’s discretionary fund. The new investigator, a hip, articulate young man, no older than thirty, worked part-time for Hilbrandt and Harding out of Bethesda, Maryland. With the other part of his time, he was finishing up a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy and religion of the ancient world at Catholic University.
He showed up for the preliminary interview at Martin’s cubicle on Thursday morning, wearing a black wool suit with narrow lapels, a black turtleneck, and round, green-lensed sunglasses. A shock of white hair stood straight up from his scalp. He looked more like a rock star from the New Wave era than either an investigator or a philosopher. He introduced himself as André Drelincourt and offered a damp handshake as pale as his skin.
“Is that French?” Marlin asked.
Drelincourt smiled. “French Canadian,” he said. “My father was from Quebec.”
Martin had his doubts at first, but Drelincourt proved a quick study. He reviewed the PD case file and the police report overnight and called Martin in the morning with a plan.
“The first thing we do,” he said, “is go down to that club and talk to some witnesses. I want you to come with me. Is that all right with you?”
“Sure,” Martin said, relieved that the investigation seemed to be moving forward at last.
“I’ll tell you why I want you along,” Drelincourt said. “Are these witnesses credible? I can tell you from experience that club people rarely are. Since their grand jury testimony, they’ve had a chance to mull over their statements to the police. Talk to them now, and you’ll get a good idea of what’s going to happen on the witness stand.”
Drelincourt picked Martin up in front of the Moultrie Center in a vintage black Mercedes 280 SE convertible with the top down. It was a bit battered, but the red leather of the seats and the walnut dash gleamed with a rich patina only the years can give.
“Nice ride,” Martin said.
Drelincourt brushed his finger against the ivory knobs of the Blaupunkt shortwave.
“Fifty percent of investigation work is image,” he said. “You’ve got to make an impression, intimidate people a little bit. I can’t tell you the confessions I’ve heard from people sitting right there, where you’re silting, in the front seat. Get them in the car, close the door, drive around the block, and boom, they start spilling their guts.”
Club Naked Party occupied a Victorian building on a decrepit block slated for demolition sometime in the early 2000s. Once it had been the national headquarters of the Young Christian Woman’s Temperance League. A granite crane gripping a cross in one claw and an oak leaf in the other, the ancient symbols of the movement, still decorated the facade, but this teetotaling bird was grimed over with the dirt of a century and half obscured by a marquee that announced two words, NAKED PARTY, in giant neon script.
Martin and Drelincourt went up the front steps and passed beneath both the marquee and the motto of the YCWTL, carved into the keystone — Sobriety, Chastity, Honor — and entered a place where these virtues had no meaning. Aziz and Munzi Jehassi, the Lebanese brothers who owned the club, had gutted the period interior to expose the beams and brick and ductwork. The dance floor was tiled in patterned vagina-pink rubber blocks; over the bar hung huge Technicolor paintings of naked men and women fingering their genitals. Now empty, the place smelled of spilled beer and last night’s cigarettes. A young woman in a torn white T-shirt cleaned up behind the bar.