“I did it for my son here,” said the old man, patting the other guy on the back. “For him and for my grandson.”
“Your grandson?” I said, panicking, thinking there was still another nut out there we hadn’t found yet.
“My son, Mikhail,” the younger Russian said, staring almost sadly at me. “We did it for Mikhail.”
Chapter 105
The younger Russian took a photo out of his wallet and walked over and crouched beside me.
“Do you recognize him?” he said.
The picture was of a pale young teenager with a slightly misshapen shaved head. His eyes weren’t exactly level with each other. He was more than a little loony-looking, but I kept that to myself.
“No. Should I know him?” I asked.
“Yes. He was on the cover of the Daily News last year.”
Too bad I read
the Post, I thought, not knowing where this could be going.
“Did something happen to your son?”
“I’m a thinker, an introvert, a shut-in, some might say,” the Russian continued. “I like books. Math, physics, mechanics, engineering, abstract things. But back in my twenties, I was a little more outgoing, and I had a dalliance with a stripper.”
“One of my workers,” said the old man. “I owned four clubs in Miami at the time. It was his twenty-first birthday. The least I could do.”
Father of the year, I thought.
“So she got pregnant, and Mikhail was born. He had problems from day one. Birth defects, then a diagnosis of autism, then schizophrenia. All these stupid diagnoses just to say he was mentally not okay.”
“Years of psychologists and medication and my favorite—therapy,” said the old man, disgusted. “Bullshit! All of it!”
“They wanted to institutionalize him,” the son continued. “But I said no. I knew there was somebody in there. Somebody smart who could be funny and who just needed to be watched over. So I took care of him. I raised him by my side; he was with me all the time. He was a big pain in my ass, but he was smart. We would play chess and cards. He was so good at cards. Could add in his head almost as fast as me.”
The son looked down at the floor wistfully as he took a breath.
“In 2012, he was doing okay enough that I was able to leave him with an aide every once in a while. The aide, I thought, was a good man, but he turned out to be not so good. Because he smoked dope and fell asleep one morning while I was at an engineering conference in Philly, and Mikhail left the apartment alone.
“He got on the subway, and I don’t know what happened, but that morning in upper Manhattan, he pushed a woman in front of the number one train.”
“At a Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street,” I said, vaguely remembering the case now. “That’s why you blew it up.”
“Yes,” the son said. “You’re catching on. See, Mikhail was taken into custody. I’m away. Mikhail has no one, no ID. He can’t speak for himself, but he was obviously mentally sick. They should have taken him to a hospital, yes?”
“No,” said the old man bitterly. “Turned out the Manhattan DA knew the female victim and pulled strings to have Mikhail booked, put immediately into the system. Without learning the details about Mikhail’s condition. Without thinking about any of the consequences. Do you know the name of the man who was the DA at the time?”
“Mayor Carl Doucette,” I said.
He nodded, smiled.
“The late mayor Carl Doucette,” he said.
“So Mikhail is booked, and there’s no room in Central Booking to hold him, so they send him over to Rikers,” the son said. “My son cannot cope with this. He’s mentally sick, like I say, so he starts freaking. A corrections officer puts him in a room they have in the basement for people not cooperating. This room was over a hundred degrees. They said it was some boiler problem.
“It sure was a problem for Mikhail. They left him there for two days—my son. They forgot about him. My poor Mikhail. New York City boiled my mentally ill son alive.”
Chapter 106