"Best, Mark - Ceiling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Best Mark)

My last call was long distance to Chicago. It always struck me as ironic that
Jeremiah Olsen ended up in the Windy City. Not that a town that sired both Al
Capone and Boss Daley didn’t need the best crime reporter in the country. But
Jerry was the straightest person I knew. His Mormon upbringing prohibited
drinking, swearing, caffeine, gambling, and almost any other vice you can
name. I guess that’s why he has seven kids in ten years of marriage. It’s the
only thing he’s allowed to do that is any fun.
After some small talk and an update on my nine-year-old namesake’s first
little league game, I switched to business. A few years back, Jerry had
written a weeklong series about the Russian Mafia and their influence in
Chicago’s ethnic community. I remembered that one article discussed
ritualistic murder as threat. The eight articles had netted Jerry another
shelf full of awards.
“It’s not Russian Mafia,” he told me. “That was some of my best work, but I
was mistaken there. The hits weren’t Mafia. It was a penny-ante extortion
racket. The guy claimed to be Russian mob, used ceiling on a few Slovakian
business owners, and...”
I interrupted. “Did you say ‘ceiling’?”
“Well, that’s the literal translation. It doesn’t have a direct English
counterpart. It means having something important over someone else. Usually
it’s a relative back in the Motherland. Guy has a nice setup here, maybe a dry
cleaners, a convenience store, maybe a liquor store. Someone approaches him,
tells him that his sister back in the old country might get run over by a bus
unless he pays a few thousand dollars insurance on her. It’s the way the
Russian Mafia got their initial capital.
“But they don’t do that anymore. That would be like the Gambino family pushing
drugs on the street corner. They are too big for that now. They take a cut of
protection money, but they don’t get their own hands dirty.”
“So where do the killings come in?” I asked.
“There was a man, forgot his name, probably dead now, who tried the ceiling
racket on a few folks. He didn’t have the connections in the old country,
though, so he had a few people killed, signed the corpses by shooting their
eyes out. He made two mistakes, though. He claimed to be Russian Mafia, which
he wasn’t, and he never paid his own protection money. He fled town a few
hours ahead of the killers, and no one’s heard from him since then.”
I laughed. For some reason, I saw what Hoffman’s face was going to look like
when I gave her this story. It would either get me a raise or a transfer to
puff pieces.
“Listen, Jerry, do you have a source with the Russians that I could talk with?
I think you just solved my problem.”
The “CLOSED” sign on Radovic’s door didn’t deter several neighborhood barflies
from trying to enter. One kicked at the door and one even started to cry.
Radovic’s never closed, except on the Orthodox Christmas and Easter. Even
Sundays the dedicated could go to the restaurant part and order a beer with
their invisible sandwich. On Election Day the beers were free as long as you
allowed supporters of whichever candidate Radovic favored to drive you to the
polls. But today the blinds were drawn and the lights were out.
Word spread fast. No one had tried to get in for almost a half-hour before
Ivan Lermatov showed up. When he knocked a very haggard looking Leo Radovic
opened the door for him. No words were exchanged as the hockey player slipped