James Baldwin - Burn Artist

I rolled my eyes, and abruptly reversed the car onto the road. Vassily pitched forward with a yelp, fumbling for his seatbelt, and then laughed uproariously as the momentum threw him back against the headrest.

‘Home’ for me was a small third-floor apartment on Banner Avenue, a red-brick building that looked like a meatlocker with balconies. It was small, neat, and Spartan, insofar as an occult library crammed with exotic magical tomes could ever be said to be ‘Spartan’. I sacrificed furniture and aesthetics for floor to ceiling shelves of fiction, non-fiction and esoterica in every room. My collection focused on the Jewish ritual magic dating back to King Solomon’s court, which along with John Dee’s Enochian ceremony, was the backbone of my craft as the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya’s [2] Organization. Along with ‘Bratva’ and ‘Brigada’, Organizatsiya is the self-identifying term for the ‘Russian Mafia’. only hitmage.

“So… wait, I’ve got it.” Vassily waved his hands up ahead of me on the stairs as we climbed. “He likes sweet stuff, right? What about a box of Forrey & Galland?”

“What are those?”

“Really fancy chocolate. About five hundred for a box of ninety.”

I grimaced. “You buy women chocolates. Rodion is too old-fashioned.”

“Caviar?”

“The party is at The Russian Tea House. There’ll be more caviar than we can stand. What about a horse? As in, a racehorse? It’s less grandiose than a car.”

“He really prefers cars to horses,” Vassily replied. “I dunno. I know he likes jewelry. Maybe something with diamonds, but it’s hard to find manly shit with diamonds on it. The Rolex thing is looking better and better.”

We reached the blank concrete corridor that led to my door, and I spun my keys around my thumb as I brooded. “Like you said, we’ll think of something. But given that his birthday is in three days…”

I trailed off as I heard a tinny sound through the door. The phone.

“Goddammit…” I unlocked the house, and turned to find Vassily with his hands cupped and ready. I threw him the keys, hurriedly shucked my shoes outside, and ran for the office, where I snatched up the phone and jammed it against my shoulder. A burst of sound crackled out of the receiver: men yelling, arguing with raised, angry voices.

“Sokolsky speaking?” I groped around for the chain to my desk light.

“Alexi. Rod wants to see you.” Nicolai Chiernenko, senior captain of Brighton Beach and one of the hardest men in the Organizatsiya, was a weathered man with a scratchy, flat voice as dry as straw. If he was bothered by the violent racket behind him, it was not apparent. “Can you make it to the office?”

My stomach dropped. “Of course. Should I bring my paraphernalia?”

“Yeah. Rod’s really pissed. Bring some holy water and whatever you’ve got for the evil eye.” And then he hung up.

The evil eye? Holy water wasn’t really my style, but it at least gave me some inclination of what to expect. I stood back from my desk for a moment, thinking, and then stalked out of the office.

Vassily was waiting for me on a sofa in the den. He technically had his own apartment, but Vassily stayed here so often that it was practically his house, too. Had his own bedroom, and had even brought his pet to live here. Sir Purrs-A-Lot, his obese tuxedo cat, was sprawled across his knees like a baby seal.

“What was all that about?” Vassily quirked a dark eyebrow.

“We have to go to Sirens,” I replied, walking on past. “By the sounds of it, someone has been cursed.”

It was a Saturday night, which meant that the Budweiser-scented hellhole that was Sirens was well and truly open for business. It had been murderously hot during the day – 92 degrees – and a late afternoon thunderstorm earlier in the night had turned Coney Island into a swamp. The cinema and car had been cool, but my hands were sweating under the wrist when we got out at the club and ran into a wall of hot, humid air.

Sirens was a two-story building that was longer and wider than it was tall. The wall facing the street had been painted white, with a roped off cattle chute for guests and a large purple canopy with the club’s name on it. The staff lot was unobtrusive by comparison, playing host to an array of scooters, convertibles, and numerous black BMW jeeps. The smaller vehicles almost universally belonged to the strippers. The army of jeeps belonged to the other men of the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya, New York City’s largest and oldest ‘Russian’ mafia.

The term ‘Russian Mafia’ is a poor analogue for the many unallied brigadi [3] Brigade. A slang term for a gang, especially a small, violent clique within a larger Russian mafia. that make up Slavic organized crime. For one thing, any given Organizatsiya has members from all corners of the Eastern Bloc, as well as Turkey, Israel, and Chechnya. For another, the term ‘mafia’ conveys a certain sense of conservative, orderly unity, evoking images of hereditary Families led by a single Don. Every one of the organizations that could be described as ‘Russian mafia’ do things their own way. If the Italian Mob is a family business, then the Russian Mafia is a fast-food franchise: a cluster of para-military cells unified around a team of managers, with each cell branching out further into a web of patsies, fall-men, bookies, dealers and common street thugs. Vassily and I occupied a strange position within our own brigada. We were both immigrant children born in America to long-time Thieves in Law. Our hereditary position conveyed a certain hollow prestige, in that the senior authorities invested more time into us, but they also expected more.

“Ugh,” Vassily said. “Jesus Christ. I almost forgot how hot it was out here. It feels like something is wiping its dick all over my face.”

I blinked a few times, trying to digest the metaphor as I pulled my briefcase from the back seat of the car. “I’m mildly alarmed that you have a reference for that sensation, Vasya.”

“I don’t.” Scowling, he plucked at his shirt, trying to stop it from sticking to his chest. “I just watch a lot of porn and I know I’m making the same face that the chick does when the guy jacks off on her.”

“You’re very single-minded tonight, aren’t you?”

“Hey, don’t give me any shit. Daddy didn’t get his bathroom time, and now we have to be back at work.”

The security post out the back of Sirens was usually the cruisiest place to work on any night. You stood at the door, smoked, read the newspaper, talked to your friends, and – if you were so inclined – hit on the strippers as they went in and out for shifts and smoke breaks. There were two guards out here tonight, and they looked anything but relaxed.

“Alexi, Vasya, thank Mary and all her little saints.” Roman was the taller of the two: a large man with a small face and big ears. He would have been handsome if he’d been crafted to be more proportionate. “You need to get in there, man. Someone’s hit Slava with the evil eye.”

Vassily arched an eyebrow. “The evil eye? Like, the curse? Did he piss off some gypsy’s grandma?

“It’s not funny. Someone’s cursed him, I swear to God.” The other man at the door, a guy I’d always known as Ottarik the Turk, looked deeply unsettled. He had a hand-shaped hamsa [4] The hand of Fatima or Hamsa is a hand-shaped pendant with an eye in the center of the palm. A common good-luck or protective charm in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, India and among the Roma. pendant hanging outside of his collar on a thick silver chain. “I was standing right next to him on the floor, and then this mark appeared. I felt it like the Devil passed me, then he started screaming and tearing off his clothes. No one could keep him calm.”