Page 2 of Brooklyn Bratva

Especially in an area speckled with other longstanding organizations with their own claim on each slice of the pie. The Italians needed careful handling, as did the Ukrainians who viewed themselves as the forefathers of our Little Odessa. And rightly so. But they didn’t have the connections the Bratva could supply. We could guarantee better profits, products and sales.

Long live free market capitalism. It was the only thing to drive us and to let us take off.

Even though I could still walk down the street and hear nothing but Russian, there was a difference between a Ukrainian and a Muscovite and all the new incomers who were looking for their own place in the world.

I hadn’t been around people who understood the distinction in a long time. But to me it was always clear.

There were no honest thieves left in this town. So, I had to be sheriff to them all.

Becca

The familiar grime of New York crept in mile by mile as the train got closer and closer to Grand Central Station. It shook me how unaccustomed I’d become to it after the past seven years living in sleepy suburbia and on campus.

There were so many people on the concourse. For a minute I was paralyzed, certain there was no way through for me with all my things. Anxiety tightened my chest as they bustled and shoved around each other, footfalls surging around me in a storm-cloud patter, cell phone conversations coming at me in loud snippets, coffees sloshing, and then I took a deep breath and hoisted my bulging bag higher on my shoulder and headed out onto the street.

The smell of the city hit me – pollution in the air, grime on the pavement from the overflowing dumpster around the side of the shops, the smell of food coagulating in the drizzle, steam hissing up from the vents.

You could take a girl out of the city, but you couldn’t take the city out of the girl. I wasn’t some small town kid who didn’t know how to hold her own on the sidewalk. I’d spent the first fifteen years of my life in Brooklyn. I wasn’t going to go to pieces because I’d hit Manhattan in the middle of rush hour.

It was a slog across the busy street to the Subway where I needed to pick up the B train.

The platform was heaving, but I squeezed myself on, ignoring the dirty looks I was getting because of the size of my bag.

There wasn’t another way for me to get to Brighton Beach and I was just as entitled as any of them to be here. I flashed a smile at everyone and nobody at all at the same time.

“What are you gonna do? Gotta get home somehow.”

Tuning out my fellow passengers, I plugged in my headphones and turned up the volume on my music player. I dropped my bag by my feet and pulled out a well worn copy of Eugene Onegin.

It was nearly twenty minutes before I got a seat. This time of year there weren’t so many people heading down to the coast, which was fine by me.

Right from when I was a little girl I knew I wanted to marry a Russian man. I guess it was a silly childhood fixation, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.

Dad taught English to the Russian speakers coming to live in Brighton Beach for the first fifteen years of my life, before we moved upstate to Albany. And my teenage fantasies were filled with a jumble of the Slavs who used to come to our house.

Some of them scared me. Others enthralled me.

One in particular. And he was my Dad’s best friend.

Ivan Danilovich Kovalenko, NYPD Detective with the 60th Precinct was my idea of the perfect man and he always had been.

It wasn’t just that he was tall and brooding – because, boy, did he brood – and it wasn’t just that he was a cop. It was everything, from the rumble of his laugh to the rough, weatheredness of his hands that told me he knew what real work was.

He immigrated when I was ten, and Dad helped him get his English up to speed for the police academy entrance exams. I guess they hit it off, because he kept coming around every week, even when he was practically fluent. By the time I was eleven, I had an obsession the size of New Jersey.

I made Dad take me down to Brighton Beach all the time, and we brought home every dish we could from Brighton Bazaar. I begged him to let me take piroshki to school for lunch – patties filled with meat and vegetables – and I didn’t care if I was the only kid in my class who didn’t have a PB&J sandwich. It was Russian, so it was better. Ivan might even be eating the same thing as I was at exactly the same time, and to me back then, that was practically kissing. It was the closest I ever got to swapping bodily fluids with the man anyhow.

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