The Siberian Dilemma by Martin Cruz Smith

Author:Martin Cruz Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

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Kuznetsov was the last person Arkady expected to admire. However, he had a certain perspective on life—the long view, some would call it. His book, Prisoners, was not a self-aggrandizing account of his own time in prison but portraits of other men who were serving sentences of five or ten or fifteen years.

For example, Arkady was intrigued by the story of a violent prisoner called the Butcher. He had a reputation that lived up to his name, and the only creature that dared approach him was his beloved pit bull. However, the dog was accidentally shot with a bow and arrow, and someone had to relay the news to the Butcher. Instead of reacting with violence as expected, the Butcher turned into a meek shadow of himself. Easy prey. Now, that was a storyline, Arkady thought.

The book was a compilation of stories like that, each one no more than a few pages. He told tales about murderers and thieves who understood how important it was to defend even a shred of honor. Some were heroic, others pathetic, all full of rue. One man had amassed a fortune in cigarettes. The moment he stepped out of the prison gate and was a free man, his treasure was worthless. The stories tended to be obsessed with perceived insults, letters from home, days left to serve. Reading was taken seriously, and learning was respected. One man beat his cellmate to death for tearing out the last fifty pages of A Tale of Two Cities.

Kuznetsov learned that there were more than two ways to flip a coin. He played the honest broker for cigarettes and circulated books like a lending library. By the time he came out of prison, he had developed the skills of a negotiator and politician. He stayed on the good side of both the Russian penal system and the “black camps” of career criminals. He was a shrewd criminal lawyer.

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