was far more likely she was already dead. And when he saw the barricades in front of the motel’s driveway, he just knew whatever slim hopes he had of finding Tatiyana alive were gone.
There was a black kid posted by the barricade, pacing back and forth in the freezing cold. As soon as he rolled down his window, Serpe got a sense of what had gone on. The smell of smoke and burned plastic still hung heavy in the air.
“They closed. Open back up Monday.”
“Fire?” Joe said to the kid.
“Man, you figure dat shit out all by youself?”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Nah, not too much damage neitha. Only a coupla rooms.”
“Let me guess, rooms 216, 217, and 218, right?” Now the kid stared at Joe with big eyes. “How you know dat shit?”
“They’re my lucky numbers, kid.”
As he pulled down Sunrise Highway, he dialed information on his cell phone. He needed to chat with Captain Kelly, Vinny’s old commanding officer.
Bob Healy was as guilty of stereotyping as the next guy. He had envisioned David Schwartz as a Hasid with a shield. But the man who stood up from the booth at the Sheepshead Bay Diner and offered his hand to Healy looked a lot like Mr. Clean. Schwartz stood a good six foot three with football pad shoulders and a thirty inch waist. He had a shaved head and a neat, reddish moustache. His jaw was square, his neck was thick, but he had a kind smile and gentle blue eyes.
“Detective Healy?” Schwartz asked as a matter of courtesy.
“You can give me my hand back now, Schwartz. Jesus, how did you ever find baseball gloves that fit?”
“Didn’t use one. Caught the ball with my teeth.”
They both had a laugh at that as they settled into their seats. Schwartz flagged down the waitress and Healy ordered coffee. The waitress rolled her eyes at him. “Cops!” she whispered to herself.
“So Skip Rodriguez tells me you need some information,” Schwartz said after the waitress delivered the coffee.
“Yeah, I’m helping out a friend that got into some shit and now he’s nipple deep in it. Another few days and it’ll be over his head.”
“I take it this shit your buddy stepped in has something to do with the Russians, or Skip wouldn’t have called me. That much I can figure on my own, but if you want my help, you’re gonna have to-”
“Black Sea Energy,” Healy blurted out.
Schwartz didn’t say a word, not immediately. The corners of his mouth and eyes, however, took a decided upturn.
“This friend of yours, he own a gas station?” the detective wondered.
“Close. He’s in the home heating oil business out in Suffolk County. How’d you know?”
“Black Sea Energy used to own a shitload of gas stations throughout the New York Metropolitan area. Now they basically do trucking and hauling and own a petroleum terminal.”
“They dirty?”
“Nope. If anything, they’re too fucking clean. They’re owned by two Ukranian Jews who emigrated here in the late 70s.”
“Connected?”
“It’s hard to tell. You’ve gotta understand, the Russian mob is organized crime, but it isn’t organized like the Mafia or the drug cartels. There really isn’t even a mob, per se, but a sort of loose conglomeration of different organizations. There’s no Carlo Gambino sitting at the head of the table or Pablo Escobar handing down orders from on high in Colombia. Although in this area many of the players are Jews, they’re not all Jews by a longshot. Many are from the former Soviet Republics like Georgia, the Ukraine, Kazakstan-places like that.
“Under the old Soviet system, the black market was a way of life. Everybody was involved in it one way or the other. Government officials were involved at every level, either looking the other way or getting their cut. Plus, it’s kind of difficult to get reliable police records from the Soviet era. Their justice system was so politicized, it’s difficult to know, even if we can obtain the files, whether they’ve been tainted, rewritten, faked…
“So you see, when two guys show up here in Brighton Beach one day and start opening up gas stations, it’s difficult to know exactly where their money came from. It’s not necessarily dirty money. Look, when my grandparents came over, they were part of a group that pooled monies from people from their old villages and made loans to start new businesses. That’s how the Pakistanis and Koreans do it now. It’s how the Turks and Arabs buy gas stations.”
“But sometimes the money is dirty,” Healy said. “Oh yeah. A load of it is dirty rubles getting scrubbed into nice clean dollar bills. The reason there’s always been suspicions about Black Sea is that one of the biggest scams the Russians used to pull was tax fraud on gasoline. Somehow, Black Sea Energy was never caught,” said Schwartz.
“There were suspicions?”
“Always, but that was really before my time. Most of the tax fraud stuff was over with by the late 80s. They’ve moved on.”
“Who are the two guys who own Black Sea?”
“Sergei Borofsky and Misha Levenshtein. Levenshtein pretty much runs the business these days. He still lives in the area, over in this hideously gaudy house in Manhattan Beach, off Oriental Boulevard. Borofsky’s in sort of semi-retirement out in your neck of the woods. I think he lives in some town called Seatuckit or something like that.”
“Setauket,” Healy corrected. “Pretty fancy addresses over there.”
“Really? Yeah, our intelligence says he’s helping his kids with their businesses.”
“Do you know what kind of businesses his kids are-”
“Limo services, motels… I think his daughter might own a few gentlemen’s clubs and I know one of the sons owns a string of gyms. Any of this helping you?”
Abso-fuckin’-lutely! “Maybe, but probably not.”
“You’re good. You’re really good,” Schwartz said. “Skip warned me about you.”
“What are you-”
“Come on, Healy. I may be built like a house, but I still got a Yiddisha kup.” “A what?”
“A Jewish head. It means I’m not half as dumb as I look or you think I am. So, you wanna just tell me what’s going on here?”
Firehouses are some of the cleanest places in the city of New York. Firefighters, much more so than cops, take extreme pride in their equipment, but Joe Serpe suspected that lurking beneath the surface was a darker, more powerful motive than simple human pride. Though it was true that vigilant maintenance of their equipment might someday help save their lives, there seemed to Joe to be an almost Lady Macbeth-like aspect to firefighters’ obsession with sparkling equipment. It was as if by scrubbing out the soot and washing away the stench of smoke, they could remove any reminders of the dangers they faced and the cruel facts of mortality.
Joe was shocked by the power of his reaction as he strolled through the open doors of the firehouse at 2929 West 8th Street in Coney Island. He had not set foot in a firehouse since before September 11th, 2001. It was the day Vinny got his permanent assignment at Engine Company 226 way over on the other side of Brooklyn. Those were very dark days for Joe, coming as they did, just after his expulsion from the force and during the disintegration of his marriage. Yet, for Vinny’s sake, he had made the effort. He hadn’t spent more than half an hour at the firehouse that day, staying just long enough to deliver the beers and six foot hero sandwiches he had brought to honor his brother. He couldn’t remember Vinny ever being that happy.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked as she slopped soap on a red truck. She was about thirty. She had a flat, plain face, short brown hair and an athletic build.
“Maybe you can. My name’s Joe Serpe. Captain Kelly from-”
“Serpe,” she repeated. “Any relation to Vincent?”
“Vinny was my little brother.”
“Mary Keegan.” She wiped her right hand against her uniform and held it out to Joe. “I went through the academy with Vincent. We had to put up with a lot of the same shit from the other assholes. I was real sorry to
