Free California Fire and Life by Don Winslow Page B

your spots, and those Bolshevik bastards are the same and will always be the same. Czarist, Bolshevik, Stalinist or glasnostnik, it’s all the same because they’re still and always anti-Semites.
    “We have served,” Nicky observes, “as an indispensable factor knitting the Russian social fabric. We have done them an enormous favor: over the centuries of conflict we have provided a unifying focus of hatred.”
    So Nicky grows up as an outsider. Excluded from sports clubs, social clubs and the Young Communist League, young Nicky lives in a physical and social ghetto.
    “What we had,” Nicky says, “is what those Bolshevik bastards will never have: a legitimate culture. We had God, we had literature, we had music, we had
art
. We had an immutable
past
, Jack, that could not change and did not change with the tides of political purges and the shifting sands of doctrine. What makes a Jew is the Jewish past. So they excluded us. Excluded us from
what
?”
    Well, not the army.
    Nicky gets drafted. Greetings, Jewboy, here’s hoping you get smacked.
    So if you think it’s fun being Jewish in Leningrad, try being a Russian Jew in Afghanistan. They hate you twice. They can’t figure out if they hate you more for being a Russian or for being a Jew. It’s like hatred squared or cubed or something.
    Nicky doesn’t help matters.
    “I was stupid,” Nicky says. “I wore a Star of David on a chain around my neck. For what? So in case I’m captured they can torture me twice as long? But when you’re young …”
    Nicky survives his tour in mullah-land.
    Comes home to what?
    The same old crap.
    So what he wants is out.
    “Glasnost comes,” Nicky says, “and the bastards try to curry favor by opening the gates to release people they don’t want in the first place.”
    The hypocrisy is stunning to Nicky but all right with him. While the gate is open he’s determined to walk through it. Mother wants to go to Israel but Nicky …
    “Well, I have seen my war,” Nicky says. “I’ve seen enough of people being blown up. And Israel, well, to be frank …”
    Young Nicky has other ideas. Young Nicky has heard of the land of dreams, the land of golden sands and golden hair. The land where a young man with no money and no background and little formal education—but energy, smarts and determination—can still make a splash. Young Nicky wants to go to California.
    They have some family here. Some cousins who made the escape and live in L.A. and are doing all right. They give Nicky a gig driving town cars on the airport run. A couple of years of this, Nicky buys his own car. Then two, then three. Then a used-car lot, then a parts wholesale business. Then he goes in with several partners and buys an old apartment building. Fixes it up and sells it. Buys another. Then another. Now he has a fleet of cars, two used-car lots and his parts business.
    Leverages them to buy an apartment complex in Newport Beach. Converts them to condos and makes a killing. Leaves his money on the table, so to speak, and buys another. Pretty soon he’s in the crazy ’80s real estate market. Sometimes buying commercial property and selling it on the same day. Gets into development, buying raw land and developing town houses, condos, country clubs.
    Orange County is booming and Nicky with it.
    “The only problem with Americans?” Nicky says. “You don’t appreciate what you have here. Every time I hear an American running this country down I laugh.”
    He’s booming and blooming, enough to get into a sideline which is his true love.
    Art.
    Paintings, sculpture, fine furniture.
    Especially fine furniture.
    “It is, to use a hackneyed phrase, the craftsmanship,” Nicky says. “In those days they cared about quality. About the quality of the wood, the quality of the workmanship. Attention to the smallest detail. Devotion to the aesthetic of the whole. They built furniture to be useful, to be beautiful and to last. They didn’t just throw it