and Picasso’s Guernica.
“And where’s the kitchen?”
“Through that archway,” she directed.
“Okay. Get the place cleared out,” Bolan ordered.
“But—”
He triggered three quick rounds into the floor. “No dawdling,” he advised her. “You’re about to have a fire.”
He left her to it, found the kitchen on his own and yanked the range’s gas line from the wall. It hissed and sputtered in his hand like an unhappy viper, until he laid it on the marble countertop, secured beneath a heavy skillet near the microwave. Next, Bolan shoved a small soup pot and two handfuls of silverware into the microwave, set it to cook for ten minutes and headed back for the salon.
An exodus was underway, including sleek women in lingerie and filmy robes, accompanied by men in sundry stages of undress whose forms and features weren’t the type to normally attract young beauties. Not, that was, unless they paid up front and very well for the attention they received.
This night, the johns were not going to get their money’s worth.
Approximately half the crowd had cleared the brothel’s doorway when the microwave exploded, touching off the broken gas line. Thunder rocked the place, a ball of flame erupting from the kitchen entryway lighting up the door frame, spreading quickly to the wallpaper and carpet. Newly motivated stragglers sprinted for the street, trailed by their host, with Bolan bringing up the rear.
The madam stopped to face him on the stoop. “What do you think you’re doing?” she inquired.
“Whatever Mr. Brusilov requires,” he said, and winked at her before he left her standing on the steps, backlit by fire.
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
The Brooklyn Bridge was free, but Bolan spent seven dollars and fifty cents of Stepan Melnyk’s money to leave Manhattan through the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, instead. It was North America’s longest continuous underwater vehicular tunnel, stretching for 9,117 feet under the East River at its mouth, emerging between Red Hook and Carroll Gardens. From there, he simply had to follow Interstate 478 to the Prospect Expressway, six lanes leading south to Brighton Beach.
The seaside neighborhood was wedged between Manhattan Beach and Coney Island. Russians began arriving in the 1940s from Ukraine’s third-largest city, giving the district its nickname of “Little Odessa,” changing over time to “Little Russia.” Known as a hotbed for the Russian mafia, Brighton Beach was first colonized by vor v zakone—“thieves-in-law”—during the early 1970s, and remained the outfit’s leading stronghold on the Eastern Seaboard.
Bolan had skirmished with vor v zakone before, several times, and he understood their mind-set. Anyone who kept them from a given goal was in for trouble, frequently extending to the target’s family without regard to age or gender. Any “code” imagined by romantic types who wrote about the underworld without inhabiting its sewer had no application in the real world, where the Russian heavies settled scores with blood and suffering.
A language Bolan understood.
Rackets in Brighton Beach were more or less the same as in any other New York City neighborhood—or any city nationwide, for that matter. Immigrant gangsters started out preying on fellow countrymen with loan-sharking, extortion, peddling drugs and luring young women into prostitution. When good boys went bad, the Mob helped them along, received their stolen goods and armed them to the teeth against their enemies, collecting “taxes” all the while from each illicit deal. When they were strong and rich enough, the syndicate expanded into smuggling contraband from other states and other continents, the latter commonly including weapons, human beings and narcotics. All of that was found in Brighton Beach, the only question for a one-man army being, where to start?
If Bolan had to pick one racket that he hated more than any other, he would cast his vote for human trafficking, a modern form of slavery. Any of the others could be rationalized to some extent: people loved to gamble and get high, they craved cheap merchandise, were fine with buying sex and hoarded guns they didn’t need because it was a grand American tradition. Human trafficking, meanwhile, involved abduction, rape and forced addiction, turning women and kids into hustlers with minimal shelf lives, spending their last years in abject sexual degradation.
Bolan had no feelings for the slavers, other than contempt.
They could expect no mercy from him in the end.
His first stop was an address on Brightwater Court. It was just another house, from all appearances, but this one was a house of horrors for its captive occupants. At any given time, as many as two dozen victims smuggled in from Russia, Eastern Europe and the Near East might be held within its walls while being “broken in,” a process that incorporated heroin and rape around the clock to weed out any stubborn vestige of humanity.
The vor v zakone considered it “schooling,” preparation for a foul career that, while short-lived for most, was still immensely profitable for its overlords.
Unfortunately for them, the scum who worked for Alexey Brusilov had no idea that Bolan was about to pull the plug and cancel “classes” in their “school” for good.
And any members of the “staff” he found on site were going down the hard way.
East Village, Manhattan
“IT’S ASHES,” DIMO LEVYTSKY SAID. “A total loss there.”
Stepan Melnyk ground his teeth to keep from screaming out his rage. He felt his temples pounding and wondered if a sudden stroke might free him from his misery. He managed, finally, to speak.
“One man?”
“That’s what Oksana says.”
The whorehouse madam. “What else did she say?”
“Not much. One guy, like I already told you, with some kind of rifle. She says M16, but what do women know?”
“Was he Russian?”
“That’s the funny thing.”
“Funny? Funny? You see me laughing here?”
“Funny unusual, I meant to say.”
“So, spit it out.”
“He didn’t have an accent, the way she tells it. Just a regular American, okay? But then she asked him something.”
Melnyk waited, then snapped, “Am I supposed to guess?”
“Sorry. She asked him what did he think he was doing there. And he said back to her, ‘Whatever Mr. Brusilov requires.’”
“That bastard! It was him!”
“Not him, but—”
“You know what I mean, idiot! He sent this guy. Maybe the same one who shot up the Flame and the restaurant.”
“Maybe. I guess.” Levytsky shrugged.
“Who does Alexey have hanging around who works like this?”
“No one I ever heard of,” Levytsky answered. “He’d have sent more guys, I think, except to snipe The Hungry Wolf.”
“Meaning he’s brought somebody in. A specialist,” Melnyk extrapolated from the meager evidence in hand.
“Could be.”
Most times, Melnyk enjoyed a yes-man, but Levytsky was getting on his nerves. “That’s it? ‘Could be’? You want to put some thought into this?”
Another shrug. “It’s obvious. We gotta hit him back. Hit hard.”
Melnyk