“Do you know her?” I asked Jesse.
“Hell yeah, I know her.” He fumbled a wad of bills out of his pocket. “Her name’s Sondra Belov. Russian chick. She started here a few months ago. But before that, she used to turn tricks. Maybe she still does.”
“What?”
“You know Lou Myers? Works out in the yard? The cab jockey?”
I nodded.
“He told me that she used to work at that massage parlor in York. The one on Princess Street. Turned tricks in there. Twenty bucks a pop. I ain’t bullshitting you, man. She’s a ho. He banged her a couple of times.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Can’t. I haven’t gotten a lap dance yet.”
As if on cue, a strawberry blonde approached our table. She smiled at Jesse and jiggled her hips. Her body sparkled with glitter. She was short, but well-proportioned and really, really cute.
“Hey there, player.” She slid alongside Jesse and ran her fingers through his hair. “I see you brought along some friends.”
“Sure did. This is Yul, Larry, and Darryl. We work together. Boys, this is Tonya.”
I nodded, barely acknowledging her. It was hard to take my eyes off Sondra.
Jesse slipped a ten dollar bill into Tonya’s g-string. “My friend Yul would like a lap dance.”
“H-hey,” Yul stammered. “I d-didn’t…”
I glanced away from the stage. Darryl and Jesse were laughing. Grinning, Tonya began to gyrate in front of Yul. Her hands slid over her breasts, then down to her flat stomach. Yul’s mouth hung open.
“T-that’s okay. You really don’t have to—”
Tonya put a finger to his lips and then sat on his lap, slowly grinding against him. Yul closed his eyes and sighed. Darryl and Jesse slapped each other the high five.
Funny as it was, I turned my attention back to the stage, studying Sondra. Her belly button was pierced and a small diamond glittered in the spotlight. Her stomach was flat and flawless. Jesse was full of shit. Nobody that perfect could have worked as a whore. Especially not for a measly twenty bucks. I’d seen hookers. You could find them in downtown York and Harrisburg, or you could watch them on episodes of
The number of guys around the railing had noticeably increased as soon as Sondra began her performance. They crowded around the stage, waving money and calling out to her. Sondra complied, noticing each and every one of them. I noticed the looks on their faces as she’d move on to the next guy. They all looked satisfied, as if she’d danced for them and them only. Halfway through the song, she shed her thong and teasingly draped it over a customer’s head before tossing it aside. She was partially shaved. Had a nice little landing strip of dark pubic hair and nothing more. Her lips were as full and perfect as the ones on her face. Crouching, she arched her back and spread her legs. Even from where I sat, I had a clear view. It was like glimpsing Heaven.
I melted.
The club seemed to grow silent, like somebody had hit the mute button. The music, the crowd noise, Darryl and Jesse’s laughter—all of it vanished. There was just Sondra and me. We were the only two people in the club and she was dancing just for me, showing me all of her secrets.
And then the sound came rushing back in and my illusion was shattered as some drunken fat guy in a t-shirt and jeans clambered onto the stage and grabbed Sondra’s wrist. The crowd hollered in anger. Sondra tried to pull away but the guy yanked her closer. His other hand cupped her ass.
“Yo,” the DJ shouted. “Yo, yo, yo! Cut that shit out. Security!”
“Here we go again,” Tonya muttered.
“This happens a lot?” Darryl asked.
“Every time Sondra dances,” Jesse said. “Or at least it seems that way sometimes. Fucking guys can’t keep their hands off her.”
The bouncers swarmed, rushing the stage. The fat guy let go of Sondra and held his hands up, pleading with them. Not that it did him any good. Four of them jumped his ass and shoved him offstage. The patrons around the stage scattered. There would be no crowd-surfing tonight. The fat man bounced off some chairs and a table, and then belly-flopped onto the floor. The bouncers leaped off the stage and pinned him. Two of them grabbed his arms. Another seized his hair. The fourth shouted something in Russian. Then they dragged him to the door. I noticed that his nose and lip were bleeding. The bouncers didn’t seem to give a shit. Otar opened the door and they threw him outside.
Their faces were expressionless throughout this. They barely broke a sweat. It was all very perfunctory.
And the music never stopped.
And Sondra started dancing again as if it had never happened. The crowd surged towards the stage again, the altercation already forgotten. I turned my attention back to her as well, but not before noticing another man standing in the rear of the club. He leaned against a door. I guess it led to an office or something. He was watching Sondra, too, but instead of looking lustful, he seemed angry. He was short and pudgy, but not fat; probably in his thirties or early forties. His thick mop of hair was just starting to thin on top. He had a long goatee and mustache. All of his hair—face, head, even his eyebrows, was snow white. Not gray or silver, but ivory colored. There were no strands of black or brunette. He wasn’t an albino. No pink eyes or any of that shit. But his white hair was striking— and somehow unsettling.
Tonya licked her index finger and then ran it down Yul’s neck, leaving a trail of saliva and glitter on his skin. She gyrated faster on his lap. Yul’s hands twitched. He licked his lips and closed his eyes.
“Remember,” she warned him, “no touching. Whitey’s watching.”
“O…okay.”
Darryl turned towards her. “Whitey? Who the fuck is Whitey?”
“The owner,” Jesse explained. “Dude in the back with the white hair. You don’t want to fuck with him. His real name is Zakhar Putin, but everybody calls him Whitey on account of his white hair.”
I continued staring at Sondra. “Putin? Like the Russian President?”
“Same name,” Tonya said, “but no relation. Although supposedly he is related to some famous Russian dead guy. Doesn’t need to be related to anyone, though. He’s hooked up. And Jesse is right. You definitely don’t want to know any more about him than that.”
I nodded. It made sense. All the bouncers at the Odessa spoke Russian, and a lot of the strippers had Russian accents, too (but not Tonya—judging by the sound, she was from Baltimore). ‘He’s hooked up’ Tonya had said. That meant Whitey was in the mob—as in the Russian Mob. I’d heard rumors they were moving into York. There had been a big thing about it in the newspaper recently. According to the police, they were trying to take over York’s organized crime. Our proximity to all of the East Coast’s major metropolitan areas made York desirable, same as it did for our employer. Like they say in real estate—location, location, location. Control York and you controlled a lot of flow. It had always been that way. Back in the day, the Greeks were in charge. They kept things pretty peaceful, and even helped squelch a race riot in the mid-Sixties. Then, in the Seventies, the Marano Family out of New Jersey seized power. But in the early Eighties, when the Italians started turning on each other or getting busted, their reign gave way to the drug gangs—offshoots of the Bloods and Crips and various Hispanic crews out of Philly and Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Things got violent. Bodies dropped. The Italians came back for a bit in the Nineties, long enough to chase the brothers out. The Marano Family took control of things again, but then old man Marano died and his top guy, Tony Genova, disappeared. After that, most of Marano’s crew went to prison or became informants for the Feds. York had been up for grabs since then. The drug gangs came back, squabbling with bikers and local drug dealers, but nobody had seized total control. Now the Russians were making a play.
I’d read that they were into everything. Money laundering, extortion, drug trafficking, weapon smuggling, auto theft, white slavery, prostitution, kidnapping, staging auto accidents for phony insurance claims, counterfeiting, credit card forgery, and of course, murder. I wondered how much of that was actually going on here, as opposed to larger cities. Many of the big bosses were ex-KGB officers who ended up out of work after the Cold War ended. They used ex-Spetsnaz members as their enforcers—Russian special forces. Some real scary, bad-ass motherfuckers. The paper said that they had even recruited an Olympic sharpshooter to carry out hits for them.
Not that any of those big fish were supposed to be around here, of course. This was the first time I’d actually encountered any Russians in York at all. First time I’d ever been close to anything like this—organized crime. Criminals in general, even. Sure, I had friends in York County Prison and one buddy up at Cresson doing three years
