The Sacred Band

Vignette 2. - Rotkoff encounters love.

Stephen Rotkoff grew up with sex ever-present in his life. His mother, Edit had been a battle hardened brothel keeper in Hamburg, when she and her husband took the decision to up sticks and go to England in the miserable, starving aftermath of the Great War. They bribed their way onto a tramp steamer and fetched up in Birmingham via Liverpool.

Stephen was a menopausal child - born when his mother was in her late forties. This indignity was the culminating insult. She was a hard, brutal woman who despised everyone around her. Above all she hated and despised her husband to the depth of her being. Rotkoff''s early childhood was made hideous by her tirades of screaming insults - calling her husband a weakling, a coward, an eunuch, a pansy; on any or no provocation.

The child soon learned not to be anywhere in sight when he heard these virago howls. If his father saw him at these times he would inflict a savage beating on the helpless child, so Stephen went into hiding and did not emerge until he was sure his father had left the house.

He had no memories of affection, or even of simple kindness from his mother. It was a relief, rather than a grief when she died of an aneurysm when he was twelve years old.

He and his father slowly began to build a relationship. The random brutality that so terrified him was replaced with strict, physical discipline in which mistakes and misjudgements were violently punished, but successes were rewarded.

Around the time Rotkoff killed his first man, he was given the responsibility of training the young teenagers recruited as whores. This was a task he relished. His mother's legacy to the family was the belief that nothing a punter could ask would not be available to him at the right price, and available with at least an appearance of complaisance.

Rotkoff's knowledge of the more extreme forms of sexual practise was encyclopaedic, and he taught each girl all she could stand to learn and a bit more. He was wryly amused at the thought that, even those perversions so extreme that the professionals would balk at undertaking them would be taken on happily by enthusiastic amateurs.

Out of his role as a trainer of whores came a knowledge and understanding of drugs. Heroin, cocaine and hashish were tools in his armoury, used sparingly and frequently withheld to enforce compliance.

It was Stephen Rotkoff's initiative that led his father's organisation into the lucrative and rewarding paths of drug-dealing, and thence into casino gambling. Soon these exploitable human weaknesses fed back into prostitution, as wealthy women could be used, sometimes with their total co-operation, as part-time, afternoon and weekend whores. This gained him great prestige in his father's eyes. Before his twentieth birthday he was de facto second-in-command of the business.

***

SUMMER 1949.

He first saw Sonja Kanievsky in the line of contestants in the Mecca Ballrooms beauty pageant. She was a tall, blonde, leggy teenager, slim and small-breasted. He noted her exceptional beauty, but also her vulnerability. She lacked the sort of practised poise that would win her a crown. Her figure was flawless, but her makeup was amateur, her costume and shoes not of the best, and her hair was dressed in an over-complicated, fussy way that took too little account of her colouring or features.

There had been whores in his organisation who had her beauty and grace, but it was not long before they had sold both to make him money. This girl was not a commodity to be bought and sold. He felt that she had a quality that should have made her immortal.

That evening, she made it into the final ten competitors on her promise rather than her performance, but she failed to be selected as one of the three runners-up or the winner. Her disappointment was palpable, and, when she came out of the staff entrance in a gaggle of other girls, her face was bleak and set in hard lines.

He was waiting for her at the stage door with a broad smile and a bouquet of roses and carnations. She allowed herself to be led to his deep blue Alvis TA14 drophead coupe, goggling at its rakish elegance. He took her to the Casablanca nightclub, where he knew he would be treated like a king. Then he waited, trying to relax her before he began his sales pitch.

He escorted her to a table and helped her into a seat as the Head Waiter came over. He called for champagne, and, noticing her pallor and pinched face, he asked:

"When did you last eat?"

"I had something at the bus station at Wednesbury first thing this morning."

Rotkoff turned to look at the Head Waiter.

"...And get us a plate of hot bacon sandwiches."

The Head Waiter knew very well that if he were to say that the kitchen was closed, it might not ever re-open, so he took the order with a silent bow. If necessary, he would fry the bacon himself.

She ate hungrily, wiping the grease from her lips and sipping the chilled champagne. She guessed that she was about to be propositioned, and she had decided that, for tonight anyway, she would play hard to get.

Instead of making a pass, her escort started to give her a shrewd and detailed analysis of her strengths and weaknesses as a beauty contestant. The points about her cheap costume and make-up came as no surprise, and, although she felt she had done a pretty good job on her hair, she could see that it was a little bit amateurish. Then he really surprised her.

"But the biggest thing is; you've got to work on your walk," he said baldly. Keep your shoulders back, head up, and glide. You wobble on those high heels, and when you made that turn at the front of the stage I thought for a moment you were going to go arse over tit into the orchestra pit."

She was torn between indignation and amusement, but she allowed amusement to win and giggled charmingly.

Rotkoff pressed on, presenting himself as a prosperous businessman, and offering to sponsor her in future contests. Sonja was not so naive as to see this as a purely business proposition. Rotkoff seemed to her just the sort of protector and sponsor she was looking for; a decided cut above the seedy spivs who had come on to her in Wednesbury. She mentally wrote off the ten and sixpence she had paid for a room in a boarding house near the bus station, and let events take their course.

He took her back to his flat and suggested confidently that they should go to bed. She was not surprised or shocked, and allowed herself to be led to the bathroom. A few minutes later she made her way through the open door of the bedroom. He was already down to his underpants, and she undressed, shyly, folding her clothing carefully over a bedroom chair. She stripped naked, but then, as an apparent afterthought, replaced her best silk petticoat and slipped into bed beside him.

***

Rotkoff was charmed and delighted by Sonja's apparent innocence and genuine lack of sophistication. She was not very highly sexed, and her readiness to lie quiescent whilst Stephen enjoyed her body was exactly what his heart desired. His world was full of overtly sexy girls who traded on their sexuality to manipulate men. Her willing but passive compliance was the perfect antidote.

The one occasion, shortly after they met, when he attempted to kiss her sex was received, to his secret delight, with heartfelt revulsion. Each of her very infrequent orgasms was to him a personal triumph. He was never to know that she hated and distrusted them - seeing each involuntary spasm as a breach in her wall of reserve and self-defence. If she had a secret wish it was that he would take his sexual demands to one of his stable of high-priced call-girls. It would never happen.

A year after he took her under his protection, the careful professional coaching and lavish investment in grooming and costumes paid off to gain her third place in the Miss England contest. Of course she knew perfectly well that her protector was a criminal, and the leader of a brutal gang, but this only made her feel more secure. By this time he was ready to marry, and she, her heart in her mouth, realised that she was pregnant.

Sonja and their two children, Tim and Bee were the most precious things in Rotkoff's world, and he knew he must take all risks to protect them and provide for them. He was a man driven by twin ambitions. He had long since achieved his first goal, to dominate the Birmingham underworld. The second; to achieve respectability for himself and his family, was harder to achieve, but he was making headway, and he privately saw himself in five to ten years time as a respectable and respected businessman.

His hard, ruthless drive to win at all costs meant that he was always ready to ride over anyone who got in his way. but although he used cruelty and fear as a management tool, he kept his deep, sadistic desire to torture and destroy under iron control. The urgency of his desire to establish his children in respectability had led him to assert his dominance in quarters far outside the Birmingham underworld.

Rotkoff had the perfect, mechanistic morality of the ichneumon fly. He would feed his children at all costs - and at any sacrifice - provided that those sacrifices came from others.