Calvin Cooper understands that now.
Even if that man’s continued existence on this earth runs contrary to any notions you may hold about fundamental or celestial justice. Even if that man has laid a trail of grievous harm and pain and death, inflicting misery on innocent others in some previous, despicable, and since-forgotten life. Even if that man’s manifold sins are enumerated plainly to you in a straightforward and pitiless accounting, and even if the terms of his subsequent protection and clemency under your watch were granted by powers you no longer have faith in and to which you no longer feel any loyalty.
Even then.
Even if that man is Gerald Dean, aka Lester Vogel.
Even then.
Or Errol Colfax. Or Hubert Gable.
Even then.
Take Colfax, for example. Because he was the first.
Real name: Kostya “Costco” Slivko. A debt collector for the Russian mob in New York. On the face of it, a standard thug, perhaps more enthusiastic than most. He’d earned the nickname “Costco” because he liked to kill in bulk. But this was not the quality that made him most valuable to his employers. Killers are a common enough sort, even enthusiasts. There are many sociopaths for whom a lack of access to the normal range of human empathies proves a formidable vocational asset. Slivko was one of those people. He possessed the kind of ill-formed mind, likely twisted in the womb, that came into this world with no interest in anything other than blood and no aptitude for anything but spilling it.
But that’s not what made him valuable, or feared, or infamous, among the kinds of people who employed him. What made him all those things was his particular psychological innovation to the enforcement trade.
Something Slivko liked to call krovnyi sled.
Translation: blood trail.
It worked like this: If you owed a debt to his bosses, he would not kill or even hurt you, or threaten you, or even contact you directly. Instead, he would find your furthest relative by blood. The further, the better. A distant aunt. Some second cousin’s niece. A person in some other state or distant country who did not even know you personally and with whom you had little or no contact. Certainly not someone you would feel a fierce loyalty to, or even a passing attachment.
Then he would kill that person. This distant relative. This blood relation.
Then he would work his way back toward you.
A gardener, pruning the family tree.
With the first person, he wouldn’t notify you. He’d just let word of their ill fortune wind its way back to you through the family grapevine. By the way, did you hear about poor cousin so-and-so. Very gruesome. Such a tragedy. Or perhaps you’d catch a stray news report. A face you vaguely recognize, come to a terrible end.
It might dawn on you at that point but the connection’s so unlikely. You might think nothing of it.
And then he would continue.
A cousin. A nephew. A grandparent.
Inching closer.
Until you start to put it all together. That your debt had set this in motion.
A brother. A sister. Then your child. Then your wife.
Until the debt was paid.
And all the while, you would come to know: You loosed this plague on your house. People were dying violent deaths and their only crime was sharing your blood.
This was a far more effective and ultimately devastating technique, Slivko had found, than some of the more traditional persuasions, such as, say, cutting off someone’s appendages: a toe, a finger, an ear. People don’t want to lose those, but they can carry on. Slivko’s technique, by contrast, was designed (he explained later to the federal agents who finally apprehended him, one of whom, an eighteen-year veteran of law enforcement, excused himself from the room to be sick) to inflict a particular kind of psychological torture. You would, at first, upon hearing your second cousin’s daughter had been tragically and inexplicably murdered, recoil with horror and yet—and yet—a wound like that, you could survive. Especially if you were the sort to incur debts you had no hope of ever repaying. Flowers and weeping and funerals aside, a second cousin’s daughter’s death is by nature a distant shock, a muted cry, an easily recoverable harm. It might not be enough to motivate you to action. Until you understood. That it was just the start.
That realization would definitely motivate you, Slivko had found.
Then, of course, you had to scramble to assemble the repayment, which would obviously be difficult, and by that time, Costco Slivko was working his way back through your more dearly held relations. Like some viral congenital epidemic, affecting only people whom you love. You would come to dread the very passage of time. Your debt of course would quickly become unpayable. Never mind the money. You’d find the money. But your entire family’s ruin was now on your hands.
A very effective form of terror.
Krovnyi sled.
Blood trail.
Slivko worried his technique might lose its capacity to terrorize once it became widely whispered of, his modus operandi quickly recognized. But he found, to his pleasant surprise, that there was no dilution of terror; in fact, when debtors recognized his work early on, from the very first victim, it made the whole ensuing process even more palpably devastating. Still, he came to miss the early days, when his technique was in its nascence, not yet infamous, and he could savor the slow accretion of tragedy as the debtor continued, clueless. Only eventually, over months, understanding the connection. Like Job in the Bible. Slowly figuring it out: Wait, this isn’t all just really shitty luck. Slowly figuring it out: My God has abandoned me.
By the time the FBI apprehended Kostya “Costco” Slivko, the most conservative guess put his personal body count at somewhere in the range of sixty killings. He was always coy to particulars. But to the FBI, catching Costco Slivko was like finding the cure to a lethal disease.