Those were the good parts. The bad part was nobody cared what you thought. Nobody cared where you slept or whether you ate at all. You had no set place in the world. Living in Russia was like wearing a truss around your soul. It smothered the spirit, but when the truss was removed, you felt as though the spirit was now dangerously without support.
For the first time in his twenty-eight years of life Vladimir Rabinowitz had no place to go, no place to be, no one to have to talk to, and it was not exhilarating. It was terrifying. He looked over his shoulder for the police. He looked around for some official, and then with a deep sigh he told himself this was what he had wanted all his life and he should enjoy it.
He watched the people rush through Kennedy Airport until one glanced at his eyes. She was young, but apparently wealthy because she wore a fur coat. Her eyes were ice blue, and he caught them in his own gaze.
The trick was to get behind the eyes into the mind. Human eyes were really set like those of predators, not victims. Antelopes and deer had their eyes in the sides of their heads to spot anything sneaking up on them. They were runners for their lives. Lions and wolves had their eyes set in the front of their heads. They were hunters for their food.
When people glanced for the first time at anything, their eyes were really searching for weaknesses or strengths. If one knew the eyes, one knew that. The second glance was sexual. And only after these two stages were over did people get to talking. But it was in these stages that Vassily Rabinowitz worked.
The woman's eyes said no danger, and then said no to sexual partnership. But by that instant he had locked her pupils with his and smiled, and what he did here with people rushing around them and distracting them, with overhead speakers blaring in English, with the scent of harsh cleaners still on the floor and the air stuffy from so many people using it, was to let her eyes see through his that she was safe. The message was friendship. She no longer had to worry about safety.
"I am telling you what you know," said Vassily in his best English, "better than what you know."
His voice was not soft, but held that note of confidence beyond confidence. It was someone speaking the truth. The people never remembered he had said this afterward, in fact sometimes they didn't remember direct suggestions at all. As he had explained to the scientist who was assigned to him back at the village:
"Most of the decisions for immediate action and recognition are not decided in the conscious part of the brain. That's too slow. It's an instantaneous thing. It's there immediately. What I do is lock in at the first stage."
"But all hypnotism requires relaxation, comrade," the fellow scientist at the village had said.
"The mind is never relaxed. You're thinking of presleep," Vassily had said, and the scientist had liked that. He liked the description of the levels of the mind. He liked the stages of recognition through the eyes. He liked all of it, and Vassily, being rather creative, kept on expanding. Of course the scientists could never reproduce what Vassily Rabinowitz did, because Vassily didn't know how he did it. Never did. Nor did he know why everyone else in his village could do it to those born outside the village.
All he knew was that when he went to the outside world, which at the time was the special village in Siberia, he promised the elders of the village never to tell anyone about them.
And here in America the woman with the ice-blue eyes said:
"Darling, I didn't know you were in New York!"
"I'm here. Don't hang on me. I want something to eat already," said Vassily.
"You're always so thoughtful. Never thinking of yourself, Hal. Always me first. Of course we'll get something to eat."
"Right," said Vassily.
"I love you too, precious," said the woman. Her name was Liona. Her mind had taken over the job of telling herself what she wanted to believe. This Hal she was in love with apparently had a nice way with words.
Vassily never had a way with words, least of all English words. So he told her what he wanted, and she heard what she wanted, and they got along fine all the way into the biggest, busiest, dirtiest city he had ever seen. New York. And she bought him lunch. And took him to her apartment. And made violent love to him, screaming, "Hal, Hal. Hal."
"So long," said Vassily.
"You're wonderful, Hal."
"Sometimes. Sometimes I'm this guy Morris, who is awful," said Vassily, but he knew she didn't hear that. He had been three Morrises in his life; none of them had ever been good lovers. Once he was a Byron. Byron was terrific. He liked being Byron.
Vassily, untrained in war and the strategies of war, could not imagine he would ever be a danger to anyone. When you had the powers of his home village of Dulsk you really didn't have to worry about dangers from the outside.
But as he left the apartment, something bad happened. The worst fears of Russian planners were realized, though not in a way they might have expected.
In this fine country, in this land where store windows were filled with plenty, Vassily Rabinowitz was mugged. They were three teenagers. They were of the oppressed black race. Vassily, whose only knowledge of American racial matters was the historic injustice done to these people and the daily persecutions they suffered, felt an immediate sense of brotherly compassion.
In the midst of his compassion he suffered contusions about the eyes, lacerations of the head, a broken left wrist, and a damaged kidney. When he got out of the hospital he was told to check his urine for blood.
This could never happen in Moscow. A drunk might take a loose swing at someone, but never would anyone so blatantly assault another.
Coming out of the hospital, Vassily Rabinowitz knew he was going to have to take care of himself. In every aching part of his body, in every accidental brush against a wound, he knew he was never going to allow this to happen to him again. He would create a fortress Vassily. He would trust no one to take care of him. He would do everything for himself. He would protect himself, he would set up a business for himself, and foremost, he would never again expose himself to the vicissitudes of brotherly love. He was going to get his own police force, to substitute for the people dressed in blue who called themselves police, whom he had never seen hit anyone on the head with a nightstick. He was going to get himself the strongest, deadliest, most powerful protection available in this new country.
Rabinowitz wasn't quite sure what that was, but he knew how to find out. And so he began protecting himself. He talked with a policeman. The policeman thought he was talking to his father.
"Dad," said the policeman, "the toughest man in the city, the one I would hate to be left alone with, the one I would walk miles to avoid, has got to be Johnny 'The Bang' Bangossa. "
"Is a strongy, huh?" asked Vassily.
"Pop, that man has been breaking bones for a living since he was twelve. I heard he beat up four patrolmen by himself when he was sixteen. By the time he was twenty he had made his bones."
"What is this making of bones?" asked Vassily.
"Dad, how long have you been on the police force, that you don't know what making your bones is?"
"Talk to your father already," said Vassily. They were in a luncheonette. Some of the food Vassily recognized from Russia. The rest he wanted to eat.
People were looking strangely at them. Vassily could sense that. He didn't care. The man had red hair, blue eyes, and was six feet tall, almost a half-foot taller than Vassily. He was also by any reasonable estimation a good ten years older than Vassily.
"Pop, making your bones is killing someone for money."
"So where does this Bangossa fellow live?"
"Queens. He's been under surveillance for a month. And he knows it. Word on the street is he's going crazy 'cause he hasn't busted anyone's skull in a hell of a long time. Everyone's waitin' for him to break."