21

ON HIS FIFTY-TWO-FOOT HATTERAS in the marina at Tel Aviv, Misha Shulman is not happy. This Alon Peri is being stubborn. I could pick up his family, his wife, his children, Misha thinks. Or bomb his factory. Or drug him and have pictures taken that would ruin his life. None of these is appealing. Misha has given up this kind of thing, the way he has given up dealing in prostitutes. He sees himself these days as a legitimate businessman with the misfortune of having started out as a criminal. In Russia, what other choice did he have? He had no rich father—in fact, he had no father at all. His mother died when he was twelve. For three years he lived on the streets of Moscow like a feral dog, eating garbage, selling his body, dealing in drugs until he was able to buy himself shelter in an abandoned warehouse near the Promzona metro station, and then to acquire a car—a Moskvich: only sixty-eight horsepower, but not many seventeen-year-olds in Russia drove a car—all the while putting together a group of young thugs who like him had no place in the new Russia. In the old Russia, under the Communists, he would have been sent to an institute for wayward youth, forced to listen to endless lectures on the evils of capitalism, and in so doing at least avoided hunger. But the new Russia offered a different kind of education.

By the time he was twenty, Misha Shulman was known as Big Misha. He controlled dozens of street prostitutes and a handful of better-quality escorts who serviced the new capitalists of Moscow, along with diplomats and foreign visitors. He had connections with the Georgian mafia and the opium growers of Tashkent. In the power vacuum that was the new Russia, Misha Shulman was a power. Until the bureaucrats tracked him down and demanded a piece of the action.

When he refused, a smirking judge sent him to the same gulag that had existed since the time of the czars, a prison stockade in Siberia whose name was a number and whose infamy was legend. There, despite his reputation, or more properly because of it, the guards organized their favored trustees to teach him a lesson.

Instead Misha taught them. Within a month he was on top again, running the prison, and within a year was directing his Moscow operation via remote control, using the guards and their families to send and receive messages. In three years, through the influence of lawyers delivering bags of cash to the same bureaucrats who had imprisoned him, he was out.

On one condition. He would have to leave the country.

An unlikely Zionist, Misha found himself in a Tel Aviv that was not so different from Moscow. A million and a half Russians had emigrated to Israel during his years as Big Misha and his exile in Siberia. He did not know the names of these new Israelis, but they knew his.

“Alon Peri,” Misha says. “How would you like if I break your legs?” Before Peri has a chance to consider this offer, Misha sighs dramatically. “Ah,” he says. “That was the old Misha Shulman. Now and again he pops up and wants to beat the shit out of somebody.”

“Mr. Shulman,” Peri says from his chair. “You have no idea how—” When silence becomes a noise it can be very loud. The TV music has stopped, the screen blank. The four musclemen watching it look abruptly to Misha, but he is looking to the TV, as if in anticipation. The television issues three long beeps.

The angst-ridden face of a familiar news reader comes on. “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for the following public service announcements.” Then, reading from a list, he carefully enunciates: “Tired Toe; Blue Ears; Rusty Knees; White Eyes...”

Misha rises. “That’s me.”

One of his crew shakes his head. “Misha, it’s just a drill.”

“At 4 a.m.? They don’t do drills when everyone is sleeping.”

As the news reader continues to read code names for IDF units, a siren goes off.

“Ladies, go to your units.” Deftly, almost magically, a knife replaces the gun in Misha’s hand. He approaches the man tied in the chair. “Alon Peri, you too,” he says as he slices through the ropes. “Looks like we’re partners after all.”