Charlie’s plan of attack called for experienced soldiers. To recruit them, he descended from the rickety elevated subway station in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa. Had he not been to Little Odessa before, he might have believed he’d arrived at the neighborhood’s namesake in Russia. Cabbage, onions, and potatoes boiled in pots at sidewalk kiosks. Caviar vendors were as prevalent as Starbucks were in other parts of town. The street signs, the restaurant names and menus, and even the listings on the theater marquees were in Cyrillic. The impassioned chatter on the sidewalks was in Russian. There were bearded old men in Cossack hats and wrinkled women in babushkas out of the pages of Tolstoy.
To blend in, Charlie bought a fake fur Cossack hat from a street vendor. Then he waited in a dark doorway down the block from Pozharsky, the celebrated blintz joint named after a seventeenth-century Rurikid prince-the place was so old and run-down, though, the joke was the prince had been named after it. Pozharsky’s kitchen ran at full steam until four in the morning, catering to two distinct groups, Kingsborough Community College students requiring second dinners and Russian gangsters kicking back after a night’s work.
Charlie’s vigil was rewarded when a red Cadillac Eldorado bombed into a handicapped parking space in front of Pozharsky and six men poured out. Leading the way was the menacing Karpenko, Grudzev’s muscle. The way things had been the past two days, Charlie now thought of Karpenko’s as a friendly face.
Behind Karpenko, Grudzev and four other Russians bobbed into the eatery. Sticking to shadows and lagging far enough behind to avoid notice, Charlie followed.
The thugs converged on a big, wooden corner table covered with decades worth of knife and fork carvings. The eight undergrads seated there had just been served steaming blintzes and pierogi. At the sight of the new arrivals, they grabbed their plates and vacated, going to the end of the line to wait for another table.
Paying the students no notice, Grudzev and his cronies heaved themselves onto the chairs. Grudzev corralled a plate left behind by a panicked coed and took up a gooey cheese blintz as if it were a candy bar. To the waitress, something of a Ukrainian Dolly Parton, he said, “Tatiana, I want your melons.”
“The restaurant have no fruit, Leo,” she replied in earnest.
Karpenko laughed, pounding the tabletop with such force that a water glass flew off and shattered against the faded harlequin floor tiles. He didn’t stop laughing until Charlie slid into the vacant seat beside him.
The Russians all glared at Charlie. Activity and conversation at surrounding tables lulled. Charlie saw a young couple drop a twenty on their table and hurry off, their egg creams not even half finished.
“You here to pay up or you fucking suicidal?” Karpenko asked. His English was slightly better and less accented than Grudzev’s.
“Yes to the first part, maybe to the second part,” Charlie said.
Karpenko’s hand dipped under the table, to a gun tucked into his shiny tracksuit pants no doubt. Two days ago, fear would have frozen Charlie. He still felt fear, but it was relegated to the background by his sense of mission.
Looking past Karpenko, he said to Grudzev, “I have your money. I also have a business proposition for you.”