of frame, with tiny eyes and narrow features; his eyeglasses seemed as fragile as the rest of him.
But he was younger than Gentry had imagined him to be. Maybe mid-forties, though he did not seem to be healthy. His thin face made him appear underfed, and his sunken cheeks were sallow even in the dim of the room.
Sid reached out a hand to Court. Court ignored it. He knew everything since Gdansk—the men, the plane, the limos, the guns, the attitude—was all orchestrated to demonstrate Sid’s authority and control over Gentry. Small men with big power sometimes exert this power disproportionately to compensate for what they consider to be their shortcomings. Nothing Gentry had not seen before, but he knew that he had to fight fire with fire, to exert his own dominance on the situation.
“We had an agreement. We were not to meet face-to-face. You violated this agreement. I am not like the others that you control. You can’t impress me with a third-rate crew of gold chains and poorly lubricated firearms. I only came along willingly to tell you this, and to tell you that I quit.”
The young minders around Court could not understand his English, but from the foreigner’s angry and aggressive tone they moved closer to him and looked to their master for guidance. He stayed them with a raised hand, then wiggled his fingertips at them, as if brushing them back into the corners of the room. They complied. Court could hear their retreating footsteps behind him.
Sidorenko did not take his eyes off of Court. Instead he slowly backed up behind the desk and sat down. He sipped purple tea from a gold-leaf glass. Court thought the man to be intimidated, but the next words out of the Russian mob boss’s mouth came forth calmly and with no discernible tremor.
“Have you ever seen a man boiled alive in a tub of acid?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“A colleague of mine.” Sid held out a hand as if to allay his guest’s fears. “I did not do it. It was shortly after the auctioning off of state-owned enterprise; ninety-three, I think it was. I was with a team of accountants and lawyers working for a mobster in Moscow. He was no oligarch, no great genius either. But he loved money above all, and he strong-armed his way into several department store chains and then scared off or killed off the co-owners. Anyway, he decided one of his employees had been siphoning funds from his legitimate holdings, and he brought us all to a meeting at his dacha in Odessa. There, waiting for us, were some very hard men: Spetsnaz paramilitaries moonlighting as henchmen for this cretin. We—there were nine of us—were all taken to a barn, stripped naked, and shackled to railroad ties. We were beaten and sprayed with cold water for two days. It was October. The oldest man, an attorney, died that first night. During the second night our employer entered the barn and told us that if one of us confessed, he would, by doing so, save the lives of the others. No one spoke. The beatings continued for another twelve hours.”
Court looked around the room while Sidorenko spoke.
“On day three another man was dead. I can’t remember his face, a regulatory affairs expert, if I’m not mistaken. Our employer returned again and made the same offer as before. Again, no one confessed. I was certain he would kill everyone, but fortunately for the rest of us, the oligarch had a deep-seated mistrust of Jews. He noticed, lying there in the muck and blood, that one of us was circumcised. Natan Bulichova. He took him for a Jew, decided he was the deceitful one, and had a wooden water trough brought in from outside. It was filled with a solvent used for stripping lead-based paint, powerful stuff, and Natan was thrown on the ground next to the trough. For nearly an hour our Spetsnaz tormentors used shovels to splash the acid on poor Natan as he writhed on the straw. He turned red, and then the skin began to bubble and pop off him, leaving him covered in the most brutal sores. The rest of us were forced to watch. Finally, because the men with the shovels grew tired of the work, they grabbed hooks used to lift bales of hay, and they pierced them into Natan’s arms and legs. They threw him right into the acid bath. The rest of us, Natan’s friends