Sergei Russianoff was an entrepreneurial Ukrainian who had helped Oksana out of the orphanage in Kiev, where she grew up. After she watched her stepfather and mother drink themselves to death, Oksana and her younger brother went to live with their grandmother, but the old woman could only afford to look after one child and for practical reasons she chose the little boy. That sent Oksana to the orphanage until she reached the age of seventeen, when all residents were booted out, sometimes into the arms of mobsters or predators.
Russianoff was neither. He recruited girls in Kiev to come to the U.S. to work in his various small businesses in Connecticut.
“I’d visited with a host family in Connecticut when I lived in the orphanage. American families would take us for three weeks. We would get off the plane with a plastic bag that held one change of underwear. For those three weeks we had everything… as much food as we wanted, television, toys. Some people bought us clothes or books. One time I stayed with a couple that had a dog. It was like a dream. Then we got shipped home and we woke up. Most of the time any gifts we were allowed to take home were stollen by the older kids. When Sergei said I could live in Connecticut, it was as if he told me I was going to Hollywood to be a movie star.”
She didn’t become a movie star. Sergei trained her to be a dog groomer. For the first time since I’d met her, she smiled, and it made her look like the young girl she still was.
Russianoff had a house in Bridgeport where they’d all lived. At times there were as many as twelve of them. Oksana said it was like the orphanage only they had better clothing and didn’t have to go outside to smoke.
“Another older girl, Sveta, and I would drive around and give dog baths in the back of a van.” Now I knew where Sveta had gotten her training. I must have felt like a big old Great Dane to her.
I’d seen other dog-grooming vehicles tooling around Springfield and thought the idea was ingenious. But Sergei’s company had had a few mishaps. The owner of a golden retriever that had gotten a particularly bad haircut sued. She didn’t win, but things went south after that.
“The dog’s coat grew back, she didn’t have to ruin him,” Oksana said.
We walked through the casino’s arcade, absentmindedly looking into shop windows, although most of the shops were closed.
“Did you get paid?” I asked.
“We got an allowance.”
What a guy. In addition to the mobile dog-grooming company, Sergei had a small bar, a housecleaning service, and an employment agency. But apparently his big dream was to open a skating rink. Not just a place where suburban kids would go to flirt and drink hot chocolate on a Friday night, but a full-scale facility where coaches and former champions would go to train.
Oksana lowered her voice. “He borrowed a lot of money. He thought he could get a famous skater like Viktor Petrenko to endorse it, but it didn’t work out. I think Petrenko opened his own place.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Now he has to pay the mortgage on a big empty building that he can’t sell, with a secondhand Zamboni that doesn’t work.”
That could be a problem-not much call for Zambonis on eBay. So Sergei got into other businesses. Oksana didn’t elaborate, but the other businesses sounded suspiciously like an escort service and small-scale loan-sharking. She said she didn’t want to work for him anymore and I wasn’t surprised. When some housecleaning clients started to miss items from their homes Sergei caught the attention of the local authorities. Nothing was ever proven, but now he was on their radar.
“I shouldn’t be talking about this. I would never do anything to hurt Sergei. But he is nervous that I will.” She looked pretty nervous herself.
She wrestled with how much more to tell me. Her tiny face screwed up until she looked like a toddler about to break into a tantrum, but she held back.
The roommate had dropped her off at the casino and had just started her shift, so Oksana asked for a lift home. It was nearing five and I had passed the point of being up late and was now up early, so I said sure. I was disappointed Oksana hadn’t seen Lucy at the hotel, but at least I could follow up on the Crawford brothers.
Surprisingly, there was still a decent-size crowd at the casino-stragglers, Ambien zombies, groups of guys that might have been bachelor parties, sleep-deprived vacationers, and more than a few manic souls still looking for that lucky slot machine with their name on it-more people than Titans probably had on a holiday weekend in the summer.
We made our way back to the lobby. Then Oksana spotted two men at the end of the long hallway and visibly stiffened. She pulled me into one of the Native American boutiques in the casino that was still open-turquoise jewelry 24/7.
One of the guys was skinny with long, greasy blond hair. I couldn’t see the other one that well because the resin Native Americans had gone into their timed routine again, handing out fake corn and receiving fake trinkets from the fake settlers. All I could make out was that he was a large man wearing a leather jacket.
Oksana was slim enough to hide behind a rack of oversize fringed bags while I pretended to be shopping for silver cuffs. She stood stock-still until the men passed.
“Are they gone?” she whispered, terrified.
I nodded. Now I was as paralyzed as she was. The heavy one was the Michelin Man.