The Family Hightower (6 page)

“He died before I was born,” Petey says.

Kosookyy's mouth shuts tight, and he nods.
Somebody didn't raise this kid right,
he thinks.
If they did, he would understand what I'm trying to do. They throw away their culture because they think they have so much money, they don't need it anymore. They never stop to think about whether their kids'll need it later, when they're out of the picture.
“I see,” he says. “Still. There's a lot you can do for us. The White Lady says I shouldn't get you involved,” he says, assuming Petey knows who the White Lady is. Petey doesn't. Kosookyy goes on. “But I'm not listening to her right now. What can we do for you?” Petey just smiles at them, and Kosookyy knows he's already lost him.

“You guys do international stuff?” Petey says. “I'm looking to go international.”

Kosookyy frowns. “No, no. There's plenty right here to keep us busy.”

“You been reading the paper, right?”

Kosookyy thinks about smacking him, thinks better of it. “Yeah,” he says. “I've been reading the paper.”

It's February
1990
, and the Ukrainians in America are already talking about what happens when Ukraine is its own country again, at last, at last. Goodbye and good riddance, Soviet Union. Independence is still almost two years away; it doesn't happen until December
1991
. But there are so many signs. There have been hunger strikes, the digging up of mass graves in Bykivnia, hundreds of thousands of bodies, atrocities beginning to be brought into the light. Older men crying over brown bones; they've always known something bad happened, always, no matter what their leaders told them. Now the first elections in a lifetime are coming in March and Rukh, the opposition, won't go away. They organize a rally to mark Ukraine's first independence in
1919
that draws enough people to make a chain from Kiev to Lviv. It's happening, it's all happening. Independence is coming. You can buy a typewriter in Kiev now that has the three characters on the keyboard that separate Ukrainian from Russian. You see the blue and yellow flags wherever you go. And so many people are so hopeful, over in Ukraine and in the United States. Though Kosookyy isn't one of them. He can smell chaos coming. People, people and money and everything, are going to move through Ukraine, across Western Europe, to the United States and Canada, like a dam bursting. There's a serious buck to be made in that, every time a box crosses another line on a map, every time someone takes a step, and Kosookyy knows that, for the men chasing that cash, the money's going to matter a lot more than the people. And the law isn't going to be able to keep up.

So in March
1994
, when Petey asks Kosookyy if he knows who the Wolf is, Kosookyy first takes a breath.
Peter and the Wolf, ha,
he thinks. Then shakes his head, nice and slow, as if by doing it, he can get Petey to see what he's thinking—
don't get involved—
and just walk out the door without a word. But Petey doesn't move.

“I don't know him,” Kosookyy says. “Maybe even better to say that I know enough not to know him.”

“I hear he's got a little racket going of some kind.”

“I don't know how little it is,” Kosookyy says.

“Do you know what it is?” Petey says.

“No,” Kosookyy says.

“Come on.”

“I don't, Petey.”

“Don't all you guys know each other?” Petey says. By
you guys
he means mobsters. Organized criminals. He's putting way too much weight on the word
organized,
Kosookyy thinks. As if they're all in one big speakeasy and everyone already knows everyone else who comes in. The kid thinks it's a world of secret handshakes and code words, a shared history no one else knows. One big dysfunctional family. The problem, Kosookyy thinks, is that Petey's only half right. The old crime organizations are like that, and they've been like that for so long that the police and the FBI know who everyone is. They know who's a mobster and who isn't. They know who's in and who's out, even have a sense of what kinds of crimes they're committing—the gambling, the extortion, the protection rackets, the money laundering, the loan-sharking. The feds can draw a map of the United States according to the turf each syndicate covers: the United States of Crime. Kosookyy likes to think that there's a folder with his name on it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the offices of the FBI's Cleveland division. He wonders how much they've got on him, how much they know, how far back it goes, because he's been involved for a long time. But he never doubts that the folder exists, along with hundreds of others, on him and his friends and acquaintances, all the little criminals. It's like that for every organization in town, the Italians, the Irish, whoever else. A hundred tiny, squabbling families, too busy with their own problems to have very much to do with one another. They're living side by side in the same city, but they've all got their heads down, working a million little hustles. It's small-time stuff, Kosookyy thinks. It has to be. If it's a bigger deal, then what's he doing still living in Parma, right? There's no great criminal conspiracy; the only time they ever come together is on paper, in the offices of the police and feds, the people trying to bring them in.

But the new criminals are different. Kosookyy knows so little about them, has seen just glimpses of their operations. Enough to be worried, though. Enough to be scared. Which is why, when Curly calls to tell him that Petey's met a guy, that he's going to Kiev, and Curly's going with him, Kosookyy tells him not to go, even though he knows it won't make any difference.

The deal is pretty simple. Petey's got the money but can't speak the language, and Curly's the only person in the world Petey trusts to speak for him. Part of that trust involves blackmail: Each of them knows enough to put the other guy away for decades. But it's more than that. For each of them, so much has come and gone—the parties, the jobs, the girls, the dealers, the times they've both almost been arrested but weren't because they kept their mouths shut—but the truth is that their friendship sneaked up on them. Neither of them can remember when or how it was they got so tight. There was just some morning that they both knew. Each of them knows how the other likes his coffee, how stiff they like their cocktails. What brand of booze they drink. Curly knows that there's no point in discussing anything serious with Petey before eleven in the morning and that he's terrible at doing his laundry; he wears cologne to hide the fact that he's wearing dirty clothes. Petey knows that Curly doesn't sleep very well and has something close to a fetish about keeping his shoes polished. They've shared an apartment, three different apartments, for twenty-two months, have an easy silence between them you see in people who've been together longer than that.
Why don't you check with your wife to see if it's okay,
their other friends say when they ask one of them out. Petey hasn't seen his parents for over a year, his siblings for longer than that. His extended family is a fading memory. Curly's all he's got. And while Curly's still a family man, still goes to church on Sunday mornings and dinner on Sunday afternoons, he knows he wants more, and Petey's his only way out. They know that an associate of the Wolf runs a restaurant on the East Side, a little dinner place that doesn't look like much. The meeting is quick. They talk about how Petey's interested in investing.
Good,
the restaurant owner says, in a halting Ukrainian.
We are always looking for new sources of capital.
He eyes them, waiting for them to speak. They don't.

“Fine,” he says, as if they'd just agreed to something. “I can give you a good rate of return. Very high.”

“What's the nature of the investment?” Curly says.

“What do you care?”

Petey laughs. The restaurant owner doesn't.

“You won't know what you're investing in, you understand?” the owner says. “None of us know.”

“None of you know? Someone must know.”

“Someone must,” the owner says, and lets that hang in the air.

“All right,” Petey says, “all right. Though we would be interested in going to Ukraine.”

“Why? It's easier just to stay here.”

“We want to see what we're getting into.”

“You mean you want to meet the Wolf?”

“Well, yes.”

“There is almost no chance you'll meet the Wolf.”

“Have you ever met him?”

“Yes. Three times. It was a different person every time. You still want to go?”

Petey nods. The restaurant owner shakes his head.

“Fine,” he says.

They begin to go over details, of who Petey and Curly will be dealing with when they go, how to move money from place to place, from account to account. Indications of the restaurant owner's seriousness. Petey and Curly are expecting more somehow, more of a show of being let into something, of being made members. It doesn't come, and they should see that as their first warning that they don't understand what they're involving themselves in. But they don't. Instead they're off to Kiev within a month with a phone number the restaurant owner gives him.
They'll take care of you,
the owner says, without a trace of warmth; it's professionalism and nothing else.

 

 

Chapter 3

Pete
y
and Curly fly into the airport outside of Kiev in the early morning. It's a gray building, smaller than Petey thought it would be. Half the lightbulbs in the ceiling are out. Someone's done up the signs for the customs lines in rainbow colors. Petey and Curly have to fill out a lot of forms for their belongings to get them into the country; if not for Curly, Petey's not sure how he would have managed it. They pay a bribe. Then Curly calls the number the restaurant owner gave him from a pay phone, and they get picked up in a spiffy new black SUV with tinted windows. The driver looks and talks as if he's been awake all night. They glide out of the airport parking lot and onto the highway. All around them are sedans with dull colors that rust has faded even more, minibuses with stained curtains hanging in the windows, their mufflers coughing out exhaust. They reach a stretch of road that shoots straight through forest, and the driver puts his foot on the gas, leaves it there until the car is going about a hundred miles an hour. Through the rearview mirror, Petey can tell the driver's nodding off. Nobody says a word for a few minutes. They fly by the bus stations the Soviets built on both sides of the highway; it's easy to think that whoever in the Politburo built them wanted to build villages and towns around them, too, but never got around to it. So there they sit, monuments to the insanity of central planning—or, I guess, if you're a diehard Marxist, its unrealized potential, though there aren't many of those left. The truth confounds both lessons anyway; sure enough, there are a couple people waiting at every other station, three men walking along a trail in the woods to reach another one. Where those people are coming from, where they're going, what they're doing getting on a bus on a highway in the middle of the woods, Petey can't begin to guess. He'll never get a grip on this place. Which is why, when it decides to take him out, he won't see it coming.

They're still going a hundred miles an hour when they reach the giant sign welcoming them to the outskirts of Kiev. There's a little more woods. What looks like a tiny village by the side of the highway, all white plaster walls and tile roofs. A man in a black leather jacket strolling down the dirt streets between them, waving to a woman with a headscarf and a brown coat. Then there's a long, open field, and the city begins, the things the Soviet Union built. They pass by the outermost ring of apartment towers for what feels like miles of cold neon in the gray early morning while thousands of people wait for buses, walk to the entrances to train stations. The impossible apartment buildings rise behind them like an army of giants. The concrete's streaked with stains and every corner seems to be chipped. The tiles glued to the outside walls are coming off, the geometric designs, the modernist blocks of color put on them for decoration. All those clean, simple lines are getting more crooked every year, as if the buildings were sending a message, that the dream that all could be equal and all could be planned couldn't last. You can't make people all move in the same direction for long, no matter what you give them for a reward, no matter how bad the punishment is. It's one of the beautiful and maddening things about us, isn't it? The simple shapes are a crime against nature, an unstable state. The broken pieces lying on the ground are the natural outcome, the bodies at rest.

Then the SUV they're riding in breaks free and they're on a giant metal bridge crossing over the Dneiper, and the city spreads out all around them. The factories and refineries stick out over the low rooftops. More apartment blocks on the horizon. The river and its islands curve underneath them and away, far to the north. For Curly, it's all a little too much to handle for a minute.
You are going to Kiev?
his aunt in Parma said, when he told him what he was doing. So many emotions rolling around in her voice. A surface concern, because they all knew that the fourth wave of immigration had to have started for a reason.
What are you going over there for, when most people seem to be leaving?
But a much deeper, stronger current of something else, the pull of the mother country, even though nobody in the family has been back to Ukraine for a hundred years.
Say hello to the place for us. Tell everyone we're all right, at least for now.
Curly wishes now that he'd talked to his aunt more when he had the chance.
I'm back, I've come back. Is it like you heard?

Because the center of Kiev is something to see. I mean, Curly and Petey are from Cleveland; they know what big buildings look like. They're just not used to seeing so many people out. The giant expanse of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square, is mobbed in the morning, people weaving in and out of each other's way, dodging the orange and brown electric trolleys that crackle along their sagging wires. In the afternoons, they're lounging on the steps of the plaza in front of the Hotel Ukraina, though they're not sleeping; they're waiting for the nighttime, when the long strip of walkways and benches and trees along Khreshchatyk Street is just packed with people in skinny jeans and jackets, screwing around, chasing each other. The girls are so cool it's almost impossible. They put on sweaters and jackets with very short skirts and long stockings, and put their arms around lucky boys, kissing, kissing again, still kissing. The Americans have never seen so many people kissing in public, for so long, while the guitarist in a busking surf band revs up a battery-powered amp and, fifty yards down the street, a bunch of thin blond kids break-dance on cardboard boxes like they did in New York ten years ago. The underground passages to get under intersections, or to the metro, are lined with dozens of tiny kiosks lit by naked bulbs, and there are people selling watches, alarm clocks, clothing, flowers, fried dough, sandwiches. A man in an old army uniform encrusted with medals, his hair gelled into a shape you don't see in nature, plays a harp and belts out folk songs. Another couple does duets for voice and accordion; he's on one side of the hallway, she's on the other, and they're staring into each other's eyes as they perform. A young man plays Depeche Mode songs on an acoustic guitar in front of the entrance to the metro. All those voices echo off the bricks and tile, a mash of Russian and Ukrainian—the language of the schools and street signs and the language everyone still knows how to speak—sprinkled with a little English. At night it gets frantic. The neon from the casinos comes on; people park their cars all over the sidewalk, drive down it to get back on the road. The music starts blaring, that pulsing, throbbing, four-on-the-floor beat you hear everywhere in the northern hemisphere. Someone closes the street and sets up a stage, and there's a giant crowd in front of it, dancing with their hands in the air. It goes until three in the morning; at four there are still people out, smoking and drinking coffee in a café. There's so much energy here, the same energy that got people to vote themselves out of the Soviet Union just before it dissolved; in less than a decade, even the West will know Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square—because it'll be jammed with hundreds of thousands of people, enough of them wearing orange to give the revolution its name. They'll be there because they're tired of it, because the government that comes in after the Soviet Union falls looks too much like the Soviet Union. Maybe because it looks worse. In
1995
, there's the hyperinflation, the obvious corruption. People moving to the black market just to make a living. The general breakdown in order; the creepy sense that the criminals own this place. People keep getting shaken down; people keep getting killed. At the birthday party of an oligarch on the banks of the Dneiper, there are seventy-two bodyguards, some of them water-skiing the perimeter with their Kalashnikovs in their hands. Years later, though, there'll still be the people kissing all along Khreshchatyk Street, and the musicians busking Western pop music of every era, as if they discovered it all at once when the walls came down and the country opened up, and now one beautiful note keeps getting played and the kiss goes on forever.

But again, Petey's disappointed. He expected more of a welcome from the criminals he's come to work with. Hugs, drinks, all that. A warm smile, showing their eagerness to be friends. They check into the Hotel Dnipro, a place that makes Curly think of nothing but James Bond movies from the
1970
s, from the clacking buttons for the elevator to the wood paneling in the hallways, the phone and TV lines running along the tops of the walls. The industrial tiling in the bathrooms, the giant heated towel rack. It's too easy to imagine the room being bugged. He remembers a friend of the family who made good a couple decades ago and went to Moscow just a few years ago. They got into the bathroom and checked out the amenities.
Gee, I wish these towels were a little bigger,
the wife said out loud. Three minutes later, there was a knock on their door, a friendly bellboy with linens in his arms.
You wanted larger towels, madame?

The first meeting is in a casino, where it's all about black. Windows tinted so black you can't see in. A row of black Mercedes-Benzes parked at a forty-five-degree angle on the sidewalk outside, their windows also tinted so black you wonder if the driver can see out. A huge man at the door at first won't let them in, no matter what Curly says, until a short buzz-cut man in a black leather jacket and designer jeans opens the door, gives the bouncer the nod.

“Sorry,” he says in Ukrainian. “We weren't sure it was you.”

He leads them through the games, the bar, fast, to a quieter back room. It's small but screams money to blow: dark wood paneling, leather chairs. A glass coffee table with marble feet. Good booze, booze from all over the world. Espresso. Cigars. Curly can see from Petey's smile what he's thinking:
This is more like it.
But Curly's nervous.

“You speak Russian?” the buzz-cut man says, in Ukrainian.

“No. Just Ukrainian.”

The man smiles. “How charming,” he says. Now Curly's more nervous, and he knows the man can tell. “So,” the man says. “I hear you are interested in investing in Ukraine.”

“Yes,” Curly says.

“You didn't have to come here to do that.”

“It seems better this way.”

“Is it?” the man says. “I suppose it's easier in some ways. More complicated in others. But we are interested in your interest.”

“Are you the Wolf?”

“Of course.” Then he laughs. “No, of course not. Call me Dino.”

“That sounds Italian.”

“Do I sound Italian to you?”

“No,” Curly says.

“You didn't have to answer that. It was a joke.”

“Sorry.”

“You seem nervous,” Dino says. “You should be more like your friend here. He doesn't seem nervous at all. He must be the one with the money.”

“You shouldn't talk about him like he's not here,” Curly says. “He understands more than he lets on.”

“I don't believe you. But I'm impressed. He must really trust you. Which means he's not very bright. Would you say that? That he's not very bright? I'm not judging. I'm just trying to understand the man for the purposes of entering a business relationship.”

“He's not stupid, if that's what you're asking.”

“According to you.”

“Of course according to me. You're asking me, aren't you?”

“You're smarter than he is.”

“That's for you to judge, isn't it?”

Dino laughs, and it makes Petey want to talk, though Curly knows that when he does it'll blow his cover; Dino'll know he doesn't understand a word. Curly puts his hand on his friend's knee, says in English, “I'm glad that bullshit's over.” Then to Dino: “Mr. Hightower would prefer to do the rest of this in English.”

For the first time, Dino frowns. “I'm not as comfortable in English.”

Now it's Curly's chance to smile. He puts on his courage. “Well, isn't that too bad.”

The idea is pretty simple. The organization, Dino explains in Ukrainian, is involved in a very large number of enterprises, all of them designed to take advantage of what the man says are lowered barriers to free enterprise. A certain freedom of goods, people, and currency across borders. Like any business enterprise, however, it always needs capital—or could use more—to expand its reach, to strengthen its existing operations. To make what it does more efficient and effective at bringing higher returns to its investors. Dino makes an expansive gesture, as if all the world will benefit from the things he does.

“The free market is a wonderful thing,” he says. “But in our operation, there is”— he falters, then chuckles, because he's already seen enough American movies to know that what he's about to say is a serious cliché in English—“there is a
catch,
which I understand you may be uncomfortable with, because we do not operate as you do in the United States. There, buying into the organization gives you access to the organization. Here, it does not.”

Curly's been translating all this. “What does he mean?” Petey says.

“I mean,” Dino says, “that the way our organization works, the less you know about it—who is involved, what is being done—the better. The best scenario involves you never meeting anyone but me.”

Curly doesn't translate that just yet. “Are you sure you mean to say it that way?” he says. “It sounds like you don't want our money.”

“I mean every word,” Dino says. “Just tell him what I said.” Curly does.

“What if I want to know where my money is going?” Petey says.

“You can't. As in, we won't tell you, except perhaps in the most general terms. And I would advise you, in the strongest terms possible, not to try to figure it out yourself. It's for your own protection, in several different ways. I'm sure you understand from your dealings in the United States that certain of our operations are not, well, legal in the strictest sense. In the United States, your business associates respond to that by making a tight network, a family, where everyone knows everyone. Here, we are doing the opposite. No one knows anyone, let alone what anyone else is doing. That way, if something goes wrong and the police—or anyone else—come along asking questions, you do not know enough to implicate yourself, let alone anyone else.”