Fury

5

Several hours before he nearly trampled Marlene Ciampi and Helena Michalik, Igor Kaminsky had hurried down the steps at Grand Central Station to catch the number 4 subway train to the Bronx. His brother was supposed to meet him on the platform and together they planned to celebrate his release from prison. First, they'd score some Ecstasy and then hook up with a couple of sisters they knew who lived near Yankee Stadium.

Igor could hardly wait for the sexual pleasure of the drug and its impact on whatever morals the girls might possess. He was barely five hours from his release from Auburn State Prison, where he'd served two years of a seven-year sentence for armed robbery, and was ready to start enjoying life again.

However, at the moment he was on edge. Part of it was the bus ride back to Brooklyn; he worried that at any moment the bus would be pulled over by the cops and he'd be taken into custody again. He thought he was supposed to have been released to an agent with the INS for deportation back to Russia, but God-or the Russian mob in Brighton Beach for which he'd done a few odd jobs-had smiled on him and he'd been given a bus ticket and set free.

Yet it wasn't just the specter of the INS that had him looking over his shoulder. Igor wasn't the most brilliant of thieves. He'd lost one arm as an adolescent trying to break into a butcher shop in the Moscow suburb where he'd been raised. The butcher was home and had let him have it with a cleaver when he stuck his arm through the broken pane of glass in the front door to let himself in.

However, thanks to a generous benefactor who owed his father a favor, Igor and his brother had been smuggled into the United States aboard a freighter. He'd promptly resumed his life of petty crime but again proved that he wasn't cut out for the job. One night he'd tried to rob a Korean grocer and decided that the man was moving too slowly, so he put his gun down on the counter to help empty the cash register.

The store's owner, Mr. Kim Tysu Jung, quickly grabbed the gun, pointed it, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. This time Igor got lucky; the bullet whizzed past his shocked face and blew out the window behind him. Igor fainted, which may have saved his life, as the store owner couldn't bring himself to shoot an unconscious man and instead called the police.

Igor might not have survived prison, either, except that his benefactor on the outside was able to arrange for his protection by the mob behind the walls. He made himself useful as a sort of courier, but he was definitely not part of the inner circle and was merely tolerated. His benefits did not include getting to choose his cellmate, and so it was that he found himself bunking that past spring with Enrique Villalobos.

Igor didn't like Villalobos. Just looking at Enrique's oily, pockmarked complexion and protruding yellow teeth made Igor queasy. And he hated that the man bragged about raping old women and young girls and was, in fact, serving a life sentence for raping and killing an eighty-seven-year-old grandmother.

About the only prisoner who seemed to like Villalobos was his "chicken," a twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican transvestite named Roberto Flores, who called himself "Little Rosa." Flores could pass for a reasonably attractive girl when he wore his makeup, and normally his favors would have been claimed by someone bigger, tougher, and meaner than Villalobos. However, Flores was HIV positive and already had some of the telltale purple blotches of Kaposi's sarcoma-a type of skin cancer associated with AIDS. As a result, the rest of the prison population steered clear but Villalobos didn't care. He was HIV positive, too, and already facing life in prison.

Roberto became even less desirable that spring when he had a nasty accident in the prison laundry. Somehow his head got caught in the massive steam press used to iron prison uniforms and sheets. He was horribly burned on the sides of his face-his ears looked like puddles of melted wax with holes-and from that point forward, his formerly well-formed head had a sort of pressed look to it, accentuated by a bug-eyed stare.

Igor had seen Flores when he finally got out of the prison hospital and the bandages were removed. He'd barely been able to keep his lunch down when he got a glimpse of the deformed ears and protruding eyes, but Villalobos had just shrugged and said, "I don't screw his face so who cares? He can wear a bag over his head." Roberto had wept at the cruel words, but with no one else willing to protect him and buy him the little things he required-like lipsticks and rouge-he stayed with Villalobos. At least while Villalobos remained at Auburn, which wasn't much longer after the "accident."

Only a few days following Roberto's mishap, Villalobos, who'd acted real nervous whenever large, hard-faced black men walked past the cell, asked to see the warden. Soon, a rumor swept through the prison: Villalobos had "come to Jesus" and confessed to the rape of a woman twelve years earlier beneath the pier on Coney Island. If true, the information-according to all the jailhouse lawyers-would exonerate four black men, all members of the notorious Bloods gang, currently incarcerated in that very prison.

The news struck Igor in a way he hadn't expected. The pier at Coney Island was just about his favorite place in the world. The American dream to him was riding the amusement park roller coaster with his brother and a couple of girls, getting high on pot or Ecstasy, and wolfing down as many hot dogs at Nathan's as his stomach could hold. He didn't like the idea that such an ugly crime occurred where he'd once made love to a willing girl from Buffalo.

Igor noted that the four black men were among those who'd been walking past the cell, frightening Villalobos. But he figured it was none of his business. If Villalobos said he did the crime, who was he to say different? In fact, the situation in the cell grew much less stressful, as now Villalobos seemed to be on great terms with the young black men, as well as the other members of the Bloods gang in the prison.

One benefit to Villalobos's having new friends was that one night he came back to the cell with a quart milk carton filled with prison moonshine, made by the kitchen crew using rotten, fermented fruit and sugar. Villalobos didn't offer to share any and was soon bragging to Igor, who had no choice but to listen, about his sexual exploits. He eventually got around to raping the woman at Coney Island, but it wasn't quite the story he'd told the authorities. "Sure, I got me some of that white bitch's ass, but those niggers got there before me, them's the ones that messed her up. I just got the leftovers."

The next morning, Villalobos-his beady eyes more bloodshot than usual and nursing a savage headache from the moonshine-had regretted what he told Igor. "You forget that shit I told you," he warned. "If the wrong people hear you been talking out of turn, somebody's gonna put a blade in your stinkin' guts. And it ain't me you're gonna have to worry about, if you know who I mean."

Igor didn't necessarily have all his tools in the shed, but he understood who Villalobos referred to: Jayshon Sykes, the ringleader of the Coney Island Four, as the television newscasts were calling him and his buddies. Igor had no intention of crossing that man's path. The other three of the four were tough guys, even killers, but Sykes was something else again.

He reminded Igor of a large shark he'd seen in the New York Aquarium at Surf Avenue and West Eighth Street in Brooklyn shortly after his arrival in the United States. As the beast swam past, one of its large, featureless black eyes had fixed on him for a moment, and Igor knew that it was sizing him up as potential prey. There was no conscience in that gaze, only a desire to kill and consume. Sykes had once looked at him that way, and he didn't want any encores.

Several weeks after his "confession," Villalobos was transferred out of Auburn. The prison rumor mill had it that he'd been rewarded with a cushy setup on one of the prison farms. Igor didn't care; he was just happy to be rid of the disgusting man and his dirty little secret. He was even happier when Sykes amp; Co. were exonerated and left the prison.

By October, he'd pretty much forgotten about the Coney Island case. His chief concern was that in two months he was due to be released from prison, but then he was going to be handed over to the INS for deportation to Russia. And that would have meant more prison time, as he was still wanted by the Moscow police for a few of his youthful transgressions. He definitely did not want to return to his native country, where the prison cells made even Attica look like Club Med.

He was worrying about his release one afternoon while in the prison exercise yard when he uncharacteristically allowed himself to wander away from the safety of the Russian mob bosses, who held court in one corner. Most of the prison gangs had staked out territory that the other gangs respected, except when warring. However, outside of these islands, there was a sort of no-man's-land where the loners and lunatics, and the predators who fed on them, walked or huddled.

Igor was considering what to do about his problem that afternoon when a large, dark menace stepped in front of him and poked him in the chest with a finger the size of a Robusto cigar. Rubbing his bruised chest, Igor looked up, and up…into the huge, scowling face of Lonnie "Monster" Lynd.

A six-foot-three, 250-pound member of the Bloods gang and a bona fide sociopath, Lynd was reputed to have killed three men in prison, but no one had ever been able to prove it so he remained in the general population. Two other black men, nearly as large, remained a couple of feet behind Lynd with their eyes fixed on Igor's trembling face.

While Igor did not feel the pervasive sense of evil he had when near Jayshon Sykes, he was terrified of Lynd, whose bulging, prison-built arms looked as if they could crush his skull like a grape. His fear grew when Lynd bent over to speak face-to-face with him. "Yo, muthafucka," Lynd said quietly. "You was in the cell wit' Villalobos, right?"

Igor was so frightened that all he could do was nod. He didn't dare turn or try to flee, but he noticed that the other prisoners were moving away from him. If this turned ugly, no one else wanted to be in the vicinity where they might be considered a witness.

"Whatever that piece of shit might have told you 'bout that rape out at Coney Island you best be forgettin'," Lynd snarled.

Igor nodded again. He had to remind himself to quit holding his breath and got a whiff of foul breath when Lynd spoke to him again. "Just remember what happened to that little faggot Flores," the man said. "Only I'll keep pressin' till your head pops like a fuckin' pimple. You understand me, muthafucka?"

Grape or pimple, either sounded bad. Igor tried to say, "Yes," but no sound would come out of his mouth except a sort of moaning. He thought that fainting might be a good way out and was about to start holding his breath again, when he felt a huge hand grab his shoulder from behind.

"Is there problem here, comrade?" a voice he assumed belonged with the hand said. With relief, he recognized the voice of Sergei Svetlov, the chief enforcer for the Russian mob at Auburn and probably the only man in the prison who could have waded into the middle of three large Bloods without fear.

If Lynd was huge, Svetlov was immense. He'd been the Red Army heavyweight wrestling champion and had been considered a sure Gold Medal at the upcoming Olympic games. But he'd accidentally injured the son of an important Politburo member at a demonstration match, breaking the other man's neck, and instead of Olympic glory, he'd been sent to Afghanistan to fight fanatic Muslims. He was two inches taller than Lynd and outweighed him by twenty pounds, all of it lean muscle. He was also bald as a bowling ball; his forehead was crisscrossed with spidery white scars due to his favorite way of rendering opponents senseless, which was to butt them into submission.

Svetlov had never been particularly nice to Igor, so if he was there to help, it was because he'd been sent by someone higher up. Someone looking out for your Muscovite ass, Igor thought happily as he watched Lynd take two steps back.

Lynd wasn't afraid of many men, but neither was he willing to tangle with Svetlov, even with his two big friends to back him up. However, he couldn't afford to come off like he was scared or he'd lose face with his gang, which could turn on perceived weak members of the pack like wolves.

"Ain't nothin' but a pleasant little chitchat with your bitch," Lynd said, looking over his shoulder to make sure his comrades hadn't deserted him.

"Vatch vat you say, shits head," growled Svetlov, whose command of American epithets was limited. "Or I may pay you a visit. Perhaps, you would like to wrestle, no?"

"No, I don' wanna wrestle yo' gay ass," Lynd said, laughing with a bravado he did not feel. In truth, he was desperately wondering how he was going to get out of this without appearing to back down. He decided walking away while trash-talking was the best choice. "See you two bitches, later. Igor, 'member what I said," he warned.

Igor watched the Bloods melt into the population of the prison yard. "Thank you, Comrade Svetlov," he said to the big man next to him.

Svetlov looked down at the young man and grunted. He'd known this one's father, a brave soldier. Apparently courage and strength sometimes skipped generations. Still, he was under orders to watch out for Igor Kaminsky, and it had been dangerous to let him stray off. "You should stick with your own kind, and not hang out with these crap-in-their-pants," he said. He would have preferred to speak Russian, in which he was a noted user of profanity, but his boss had ordered him to speak only English to facilitate his assimilation into American society-not that he was going to get a chance to assimilate anytime soon.

"Believe me, comrade," Igor replied in kind, falling back into the speech patterns of the old Soviet regime. "I want nothing to do with them." He turned to smile at his protector, but the big man was already moving back toward the Russian corner of the yard. He noted enviously how other men parted in front of Svetlov like jackals when the lion approaches its kill.

Igor would have been only too happy to leave Enrique Villalobos, the Coney Island rape, and the Bloods out of his mind and his life. But fate would have it that he was in the prison library, where he went to read newspapers as part of an English as a Second Language class, and picked up a copy of the New York Times. His attention was caught by a story about the woman who'd been raped beneath the pier. His baser instincts told him to find another story to read, but he kept reading about the woman, Liz Tyler, and how her life had been taken from her by the assault. Not only had she been raped and nearly killed, she'd lost her husband and child.

By the time he reached the end of the story, Igor was fighting to keep tears from rolling down his cheeks. Not so much for Liz Tyler-though he felt a hatred for Villalobos, Sykes, and the others for what they had done-but for the memories it had dredged up of his own sister.

Except for his addiction to petty crimes, Igor wasn't a bad sort. He'd adored his mother, who'd died when he and his brother were five, and worshipped his father, a hero from the war in Afghanistan. He'd been close to his twin, Ivan, an exact replica except for the missing arm, and to his oldest sister, Ludmilla.

Ludmilla had been an otkaznik, from otkaz, the Russian word for "refusal." The otkazniks were known in the West as "refuseniks"-Soviet citizens, especially Jews like Ludmilla Kaminsky, who had been refused permission to emigrate and were often jailed on trumped-up sedition allegations.

One night Ludmilla had been taken from her apartment by the KGB and charged with anti-Soviet agitation. Even their father's war record had not protected her, and she was kept a prisoner for nearly two years, during which time she was systematically tortured, including being raped repeatedly. The bright, cheerful, and optimistic young woman he'd known returned to her family a dull, frightened creature who would shriek and run if a strange man entered the room. Igor had hated rapists ever since.

So Igor became something he would never have imagined. A hero. When no one was watching, he wrote a short, but to the point, letter to Kristine Breman, the district attorney of Brooklyn, and told her what Villalobos had said about the confession being a hoax. He considered sending it without a signature but realized that unless the authorities were able to question him, it would probably be ignored. So he signed and mailed it before he could change his mind or the letter could be discovered.

Igor thought there'd be a quick response. After all, Sykes and his crew were all over the television blasting the prosecutors and cops. He thought they'd be eager to clear their names. But when there was no reply after two weeks, he shrugged and decided to forget about it. If the law wasn't interested in the truth, he wasn't going to stick his neck out to give it.

Ever since the run-in with Lynd, Igor had made it a point not to stray far from his protectors. But he thought it was okay one day to head down to the prison mail center when a friend told him that there was a package there from his brother. Hoping that his clever twin had discovered a new way to smuggle in drugs-a little marijuana or perhaps some Ecstasy-he wasn't paying attention when he arrived in the hallway outside the mail center. However, he knew something was wrong when the normally busy hall was empty except for Monster Lynd.

Igor tried to turn and flee, but he was suddenly grabbed from behind by two men he couldn't see. His eyes went to the blade that had appeared in Lynd's hand. He tried to yell for help but a large hand covered his mouth.

In a way he was thankful that it was over quickly. He felt three powerful punches, knocking the wind out of him. There really wasn't much pain, though when he looked down at his hands, which were holding his belly, he noted that they were covered with blood. Then he was lying on the floor.

Someone kicked him and then he saw feet quickly retreating. He gasped but couldn't quite seem to catch his breath, and wondered if that was how fish felt when hauled onto land. His mind wandered to a time when he was a child and his father took him and his brother fishing in the Volga River…a fish flopping on the deck of the boat, working its mouth…and passed out.

Svetlov may have thought that the toughness that made Igor's father a good soldier had skipped a generation, but maybe not entirely. Although it took the equivalent of six bodies' worth of blood transfusions, he held on, fortunate that the shiv had only nicked his liver and no major blood vessels. After a few days, when he began to feel up to looking around from his bed, he discovered that the big man in the hospital bed next to him was also Russian. The funny thing was that there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the man. And, in fact, when the orderlies left the ward at night and there was no one to see-or at least snitch-the man would get out of his bed and work out, doing push-ups and sit-ups. As soon as the man was done, he'd stand, wink at Igor, and get back into bed. It finally dawned on Igor that the man was his bodyguard, and he slept peacefully.

After Igor had for the most part recovered from his wounds, he was placed in administrative segregation for his own safety until parole. He'd been told by the parole board that he was going to be released to the INS and then deported. However, on the day of his release from the prison, he was given a cheap suit and a bus ticket back to Brooklyn. Waiting for his ride in the station, he'd called his brother, Ivan, on a pay phone and told him to meet him at Grand Central station and "be ready to party like is no tomorrow."

Ivan laughed and said he'd be there. He was sure that his boss, Olav Radinskaya, the Brooklyn borough president and a middle man for the mob who used Ivan to pick up "insurance payments" from business owners, would let him off early.

As soon as he arrived at Grand Central Station, Igor had hurried to the number 4 train platform. He got to the bottom of the stairs and immediately spotted his brother standing at the other end of the platform. Ivan didn't see him, however, because he was bending over looking down the tunnel for the train.

Idiot, Igor thought. How many times do I have to tell him not to stand so close? Someday somebody is going to bump him onto the tracks. I'm going to have to talk to…

Igor's brotherly thoughts screeched to a halt when he noticed the four young black men who were closing rapidly on Ivan, just as the light from the train appeared in the tunnel. One of the men was Jayshon Sykes.

"IVAN!" he screamed but wasn't heard above the crowd noise and the approach of the train. He started for his brother, knowing he was already too late. "IVAN!" His brother finally heard him and turned with a smile. But his face melted to a look of concern and then fear as a tough-looking black man walked up to him and pushed him out onto the tracks just as the train arrived.

Ivan's scream was cut short but dozens of other people on the platform took it up as the conductor hit the brakes far too late to save him. Igor stopped and doubled over as if he'd been stabbed again.

He looked up just as Sykes turned toward him. The killer had a smile on his face, which changed to a puzzled look and then a mask of rage. His eyes darted to the empty sleeve of Igor's cheap jacket. He shouted something to his comrades and started to run toward Igor.

The anger in Sykes's face brought Igor to his senses-his sense of self-preservation. His brother was dead, and he would soon be, too, if he didn't run. He escaped only because the screaming, yelling crowd rushed in a half-dozen panicked directions, hindering Sykes and his gang. It had taken nearly three hours of staying to alleys and side streets-as well as a terrifying jog across the Brooklyn Bridge thinking that every car driven by a black man contained his brother's killer-but at last he'd arrived in the relative safety of Brighton Beach.

As he made his way to the tearoom of his benefactor, his fear was gradually replaced by anger. He had loved his brother, who was all the family he had left. And he was murdered because they thought he was me, he thought miserably. He entered the tearoom to beg for safety, but he was also blinded by a desire for revenge and hardly noticed the two women who had to jump out of his way to avoid being trampled.

He stumbled to the back of the room, where he declared to the bodyguards, "Please, I am Igor Kaminsky. I need to see my Uncle Yvgeny."

The two large men looked at each other. They didn't know this wild-eyed nobody with one arm and were about to throw him out on the street when the intercom on the wall buzzed. One of the men picked up the receiver as the other kept his hand on his gun in case the crazy man tried to make a sudden move for the office door.

The man listening to the receiver grunted, "Da." He approached Igor and did a quick pat-down for weapons, then motioned him toward the door.

Inside, Igor was surprised to see two men in the room. He'd expected to see his "Uncle Yvgeny" Karchovski, the muscular middle-aged man with the pewter-colored crew cut and a black eye-patch who sat behind the desk. But he was surprised by the presence of the old man who was sitting on a couch off to the side. Vladimir Karchovski, he thought, the big boss himself.

A deep, commanding voice brought him back from his surprise. "Igor Kaminsky," Yvgeny said. "I'd heard you were out of prison. What is it that brings you to me?"

Igor didn't bother to ask how Yvgeny, the de facto head of the crime family now that his father, Vladimir, had supposedly retired, knew so quickly that he was out of prison. He'd suspected all along that Vladimir had had something to do with the apparent confusion about the INS, as well as the protection in prison.

Suddenly tears and rage boiled to the surface of his face. "My brother is murdered!"

There was no reaction on Yvgeny's face, though Igor thought he saw a flicker of something that could have been interpreted as sadness or anger in the man's one good eye. "Explain this. Who would murder your brother?"