The Jew and the Crow

At nine o'clock that evening, a thin fog shrouded the streets of Brighton Beach.

The neon sign for the Black Sea Seafood Restaurant was dark. Its metal shutter was half down, and the parking spaces in front stood empty.

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Under normal business hours, the restaurant should have stayed open for another two hours, but Sergei had closed it early tonight.

From the outside, only one window on the second floor of the four-story building glowed with dim yellow light, like a half-closed eye.

Sergei Kuzmin sat in a high-backed leather chair in his second-floor office, facing a heavy oak desk.

On the desk sat a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, a third of it gone; a heavy glass tumbler; an ashtray holding half a stubbed-out cigar; and a Motorola flip phone lying face down.

He had returned from the 60th Precinct less than an hour ago.

In theory, he had been "released."

Lieutenant De Luca's men had taken him from the restaurant a few days earlier and held him until now on suspicion of "participating in organized criminal activity."

But in reality, he had spent less than forty minutes in the interrogation room over the past few days. The rest of the time, he had stayed comfortably and undisturbed in a luxurious private cell.

If Sergei had wanted to leave, it would have been easy. He only needed to have his lawyer visit the 60th Precinct, and he could have walked out twenty-four hours later.

But Sergei hadn't wanted to leave. He had even paid Lieutenant De Luca five thousand dollars to keep him locked up illegally for a month.

He had no choice. Although he was confined at the police station, he could avoid the storm brewing outside and give certain people an explanation, leaving himself room to maneuver.

As it turned out, De Luca took the money but didn't deliver. Sergei had spent only a few days at the 60th Precinct before the police threw him out.

That alone was enough to make Sergei irritable.

What made him even more irritable was that, as the detective escorted him out the precinct doors, he had patted Sergei on the shoulder and said in an almost friendly tone:

"Sergei, I'll be honest with you. The reason I had you brought in was that someone asked me to question you... about that time you kidnapped a Columbia University professor..."

De Luca hadn't said anything more.

But the question itself was a knife hanging over Sergei's head.

It meant two things. First, someone had their eye on him. Second, whoever it was had enough influence to get a detective from the 60th Precinct to ask questions on their behalf.

That wasn't good news. Sergei, who made his living in New York's underworld, knew all too well whose dogs the New York City police were.

Sergei poured himself a glass of vodka and tossed it back.

The alcohol seared a fiery trail down his throat, temporarily suppressing the churning irritation in his stomach. He cursed under his breath in Russian, then slammed the empty glass onto the desk.

Two problems. No, three, to be precise.

But only one of them had him sitting here drinking tonight.

The first problem was that the job for the New Jersey pharmaceutical company Traplex Bio had gone unfinished.

The experiment at the abandoned factory in Brooklyn had gone disastrously wrong. The FBI had also raided Sergei's other safe houses, seizing more than thirty guns and a batch of medical equipment of unknown purpose, and arresting seven of his men.

The company was now busy dealing with the FBI investigation, completely overwhelmed and with no time to come after him.

Besides, the main responsibility for what had happened wasn't his... Their experiment had gone wrong. His men had only been responsible for security and transportation.

So that could wait.

The second problem was that Jew.

Sergei poured himself another drink but didn't take it right away. He stared at the clear liquid in the glass, as if he might find an answer in it.

David Goldstein.

When Sergei heard himself say the name, his vodka-filled stomach twisted, and nausea rose in him.

He had known Goldstein for three years and done five or six jobs for him. Each one had only strengthened his conviction: don't do business with Jews.

For one thing, it was about money. Goldstein was always stingy with payment. When it was time to pay, he dragged his feet and found excuses to withhold part of the fee beyond the deposit.

On top of that, the man had an unbearable kind of arrogance common to certain businessmen... He thought money could solve every problem, even the ones money couldn't solve.

He thought that once he paid, the whole world should revolve around him.

He thought that after hiring Sergei, Sergei should act like a dog and carry out every order without question, without a single mistake or unexpected complication.

And whenever anything went wrong, he flew into a rage.

If the economic crisis last year hadn't hit everyone, including Sergei in the underworld, and sent his income plummeting, he would never have wanted to deal with that Jewish pig or take his jobs.

This time, Goldstein had hired him to kidnap a Columbia University professor. The job itself hadn't been complicated.

Sergei had taken the job and followed his usual procedure: he contacted the men doing the work through burner phones, arranged vehicles and lookouts, and set the time and place.

The target was a professor in his sixties, with no bodyguards and no weapons. His daily route was as regular as a subway timetable.

In Sergei's assessment, this was a "low-risk, low-difficulty, low-reward" job.

Then the four men he'd sent out never came back.

Suddenly, it was as if all four of them—and their phones—had been erased from the world by God.

Sergei still had no idea what had happened to the four men. It wasn't until the 60th Precinct arrested him that he realized something was wrong. From his luxury cell, he had contacted the outside world through his lawyer and ordered his men to investigate.

Even now, they hadn't found a single useful clue. He had sent men to search the house where the four had worked on the kidnapping, but they found it spotless... literally spotless. Aside from the floors and walls, everything useful in the place had disappeared.

It was downright bizarre. That wasn't how the underworld operated.

When someone was killed, the gang would hire cleaners or dispose of the body themselves. They didn't bother the police. But what the hell did it mean for every single thing in a house to disappear?

The sofa, the television, the toilet, the pots and pans—everything was gone. What kind of job was that?

Goldstein didn't care about any of that.

Ever since Sergei had returned to the Black Sea Seafood Restaurant, Goldstein had been calling nonstop. First came the questions, then the insults, and finally the ultimatum.

His demand was simple and absurd... a full refund of the fee, plus compensation equal to three times that amount.

A refund was fine.

By the rules, if a job failed, the fee was returned. Sergei accepted that principle.

But triple compensation? There was no such rule.

There never had been.

If every failed job meant paying back triple, Sergei would have been thrown into the Hudson River long ago.

Half an hour earlier, Goldstein had called again. Sergei hadn't answered. The phone rang, stopped, then rang again. It had happened three times in a row.

He looked at the Motorola lying face down on his desk. He knew every missed call had come from the same number.

But Goldstein's threats, when it came down to it, only irritated him.

Jews had money and connections, and tremendous influence in the United States. But that was true of the Jewish community as a whole; it didn't mean Goldstein was anyone important. He was just a small fry among the Jews.

And this was the Brighton Beach neighborhood, Russian territory. Any outsiders who came here were met with hostility and kept under watch.

If Goldstein was stupid enough to send someone here to cause trouble, Sergei wouldn't mind having Igor solve the problem with a single bullet in the dead of night. It would be worth three times the fee.

What truly worried him was the professor.

Sergei picked up his glass. This time he didn't drink; he simply held it, feeling the chill of the glass against his hand.

Robert Jero, a professor in Columbia University's Department of Mathematical Finance.

The name was easy to remember because Sergei had looked the man up before taking the job. When you were going after an academic, it paid to know what you were dealing with. Otherwise, things could go wrong.

Jero wasn't an ordinary university professor. He had deep connections on Wall Street. The mathematical models he taught were used by major investment banks and hedge funds to forecast markets, assess risk, and calculate profits.

His students could be found at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers.

His academic reputation had earned him a place in high society, and his connections meant he could pick up the phone at any moment and call people sitting in top-floor offices in Manhattan.

And those people could pick up the phone and call people in police stations, City Hall, or even the FBI.

That was what Sergei was truly afraid of.

He wasn't afraid of the underworld.

He knew its methods too well—well enough to anticipate them, defend against them, and fight back in kind.

But Robert Jero might not use those methods.

Jero might pick up the phone and call a friend who worked at City Hall, calmly describing the attack he'd suffered.

That friend might call someone they knew at some government agency—perhaps the Immigration Bureau, perhaps the FBI, or perhaps...

And then Sergei Kuzmin's name would appear in documents he didn't want it in, at meetings he didn't want it mentioned at, and on lists he didn't want to be on.

The darkness hidden deep within the United States concealed things so terrifying that just thinking about them filled Sergei with a fear no amount of vodka could suppress.

Sergei drained his glass and slammed it down on the desk.

"Suka blyat..."

He began in Russian, then launched into a string of English curses.

He cursed David Goldstein for being greedy and stupid, and wondered why he couldn't do business like a normal person.

When he was done, he cursed himself... Why had he taken this job? Why had he worked with a Jew? Why hadn't he cut ties after their first job together?

The answer to all those questions was simple.

Money.

The financial crisis had hit hard, and Sergei needed to support fifteen elite gunmen to hold his ground in Brighton Beach, a neighborhood crawling with Russian gangs, and run his intelligence and security brokerage.

Without money, guns, or men, Sergei would be a stray dog on the street, driven out of Brighton Beach in a matter of minutes... No, he'd disappear.

So Sergei needed work. He needed money. So he'd compromised.

Now he was paying for it.

Sergei picked up the bottle, ready to pour another drink, but stopped halfway through tipping it.

A crow had called outside the window. A dark shape stood by the glass, looking in at him.

Crows did sometimes appear in the neighborhood where the Black Sea Seafood Restaurant was located.

Brighton Beach was close to the coast. Seagulls and pigeons were common, and crows were less so, but they weren't unheard of. Sergei had lived here for nearly ten years and seen crows plenty of times. He'd never paid them any mind.

But something felt wrong this time. When he saw the crow, he realized it was already nine at night.

It was March, in New York, and the sun had set nearly three hours ago. Crows were diurnal birds; they should have returned to their roosts before dusk.

Sergei slowly lowered the bottle, staring hard at the shadow beyond the window.

After a moment, he could make out the crow clearly.

It was a large crow, its head tilted slightly, one eye fixed on the inside of the window.

The eye was black, as dark as a polished piece of agate, and caught a pinprick of light from the streetlamp.

It was watching Sergei intently, calmly, as if assessing him. A cold sweat broke out across his back.

In Slavic folk beliefs, crows were "unclean birds." Some even said their black feathers were God's punishment for their evil deeds, or that they were creations of the devil.

They were believed to cross the boundary between life and death, serving as servants and embodiments of witches and evil spirits... Witches could transform into crows to do evil at night, steal people's souls, and bring disease and curses.

As a Ukrainian, Sergei had heard these stories, and he believed them... because he'd seen strange things with his own eyes, things science couldn't explain.

Terrified, Sergei slowly reached toward the drawer on the right side of his desk.

Inside was a Makarov PM with a full magazine and the safety off. His fingers touched the cold metal grip... but he didn't pull the gun out right away.

He stared at the crow.

The crow stared back.

About ten seconds passed, perhaps longer. Then the crow suddenly moved. It shook its wings, gave a short caw, and turned its head to look in the direction of something across the street.

The movement was far too human.

It seemed to have confirmed something, then shifted its gaze to the next thing that needed its attention.

Then, without warning, it spread its wings, dipped down, and disappeared from view beyond the window frame.

Sergei leaped to his feet, grabbed the Makarov, and rushed to the window. He flung it open.

The windowsill was empty. Streetlight fell across the small patch of concrete, gleaming faintly on its damp surface.

There was nothing there. No feathers, no claw marks, nothing to prove a bird had been standing there just seconds ago.

"Suka..."

He cursed, suddenly realizing that something was wrong tonight.

"Igor!"

A burly Russian man came through the door.

"Boss?"

"Get the men together. Something's happening tonight. Tell them to get their guns, and then..."

Sergei hesitated, then made up his mind.

"Send someone to open the basement cold-storage room and start the thawing process. We may need to use that Traplex Bio test subject tonight."

Igor's pupils contracted slightly.

"That thing's been frozen ever since it was delivered. The people at Traplex said it was unstable..."

"I know."

Sergei cut him off, his gaze returning to the empty windowsill outside.

"We don't have time to worry about that tonight."

Igor fell silent for a second, then nodded and turned to leave.

His footsteps receded down the hall, followed by the sound of him going downstairs, then brief orders in Russian and the clatter of metal.

Sergei stood by the window, gripping his gun and watching the night outside.

The feeling was still there.

Someone was watching him.

Not the crow, but whatever—or whoever—was behind it. The bird was only a pair of eyes sent to confirm something.

And now those eyes had confirmed it.