7. Adrianos
Adrianos
“That transaction’s eight years old,” I tell her. “The man it points to died this year, and not in a way I can put in front of you tonight. Go back in and find me a thread that’s still live.”
She doesn’t move for the door. The printed page sits where I set it, squared to the edge of the desk, Berezin’s name facing up between us, and she’s reading my face, going over it for the line that won’t reconcile, because I gave her a corpse and then told her he was a fresh one, and she’s already wondering why a name from this year would put a hairline through me.
“You want a current one,” she says. “Which tells me this old account connects to something that’s still running. A dead transaction wouldn’t make you flinch. A live trail would.”
“I’ve no use for the dead one. Bring me a name that still breathes.”
“Fine. I’ll get you a live name.” She sets two fingers on the page and squares it to the desk’s edge, the small correction of a woman who can’t leave a crooked thing crooked.
“But you went still when you read this one. I pulled him out of the records an hour ago, and I still don’t know what he is.
You knew the second you saw the name. That’s the part I want explained. ”
“Later.”
“You say later like it means never.” She goes, and I let her have the exit line, because taking it back would only tell her I wanted it.
The room empties of her and the quiet comes in behind, and the quiet is worse company than she is.
A day of her has trained my ear to the printer, to the low feud she runs with the screen, to the muttering she does at a number that won’t behave like she’s disappointed in it personally.
Strip that out, and I’ve got the apartment I had last week.
Last week the boy was alive on the other side of an ocean, and I was too deep in money I couldn’t find to answer a photograph of a harbor at dawn.
I drop the thought before it can finish, because finished thoughts are where the cold lives, and I’ve a phone ringing to thank for it.
It’s Volkov calling. I take it at the glass.
“Nazarov.”
“Kallistratos.” The voice carries the same gravel it always has, a man six months past a blade that should’ve finished him and wearing the survival like it cost him nothing.
“The Geneva line’s dead. Evelina took it apart account by account, all the way to a notary’s office that locked its doors in the spring.
They cleaned the way out behind them. There’s no thread left to pull. ”
“Another dead end.”
“Yes.” Air moving on his end of it. “Anything on your side?”
The page is on the desk down the hall, eight years cold, the one door I’ve sealed for the night. “Nothing I can move on.”
It’s not a lie, but not the clean truth either.
Volkov has put enough men in the ground to hear the gap where the rest of it should be, but he also knows when to leave it alone.
Though we share an alliance, we’re not friends enough to go digging in each other’s silences.
What we have came through blood, and it holds like a working tool holds, not like a friendship does.
He stays on the line past the point the business closes. Then his voice drops under itself.
“I heard. The yacht. Your boy, your mother and father.” A pause he doesn’t rush. “I’m sorry.”
The cold rises through the soles of my feet without being sent for, the way it does now, an uninvited tenant that’s stopped knocking.
I keep my eyes on the lit grid below me and say nothing to the front of it, because there’s nothing to be said and we’re both old enough in this to know that filling the silence is the cruelty, not the silence itself.
“I buried a brother,” he says. “I won’t stand here and tell you it’s the same shape, because a brother and a son aren’t the same loss and I won’t insult either of us by pretending.
But I know the house after. How it stays quiet.
How you keep half-listening for a sound that isn’t coming back into it. I know that piece.”
Lavro, unspoken, the same as I leave Nikos unspoken. Two men holding a phone between them and refusing to say their dead out loud.
“We’re not friends, you and I.” He says it without apology, because it’s true. “But if there’s a thing you need. Men, money, a door I can take off its hinges for you. The number’s the same.”
“I need the one who lit the match.” It leaves me lower than I planned, the single true thing the cold has left me room to carry. “Find me that. I’ll do the rest myself. I’ll do to him exactly what he did to a sixteen-year-old who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
The line holds steady. Volkov doesn’t reach for comfort, which is the most use he’s been all night, and after a breath he says, “Then we find him.”
The grief is in the room with me now, but I have no hours to give it, so I do the only thing that has ever reliably worked, which is turn and walk at the next problem before the cold sets hard around my ankles. The next problem is down the hall, feuding with a dead man through a monitor.
Elena hasn’t moved much. She’s deep into the next account of numbers now.
Her hair’s escaped her ponytail and gone its own way.
She’s got a bare foot up on the seat of the chair with her knee tucked to her chest, the least professional posture this office has held in its existence, and she doesn’t bother turning around when I come in.
“If you’re here to radiate at me, I moved the live-tracking to the left screen, so your usual weather won’t reach it. You’ll have to develop a new front.”
“Have you ever fired a gun?”
Her head comes around. She turns the chair, her foot dropping to the floor, and for half a second the dry delivery slips while she works out whether the words she heard are the words I said.
“No,” she says. “I’m an accountant. I shoot routing numbers. They don’t shoot back, which is the entire reason I chose the career.”
“You’re about to learn.”