12. Elena
Elena
Nobody decides for me what I do with my own legs, which is a position I’ve held since I was four, and one the King of the Greek Elliniki is about to lose from clear across the borough.
He’s twelve minutes gone when I write the address down.
I held it in my head through the whole kitchen routine, the bread and the banter and his fine ass going out the door, the street and the cross street sitting in a back room of my skull while the front of me ran its mouth, because I can do two things at once and one of them’s always the work.
I dig a pen out of a drawer, write the address across my palm like a kid copying test answers, and put on the clothes Penelope bought me that fit better than anything I own.
The obstacle this time has a name, and the name’s Giannis.
He’s planted by the elevator, which he wasn’t before, because last time I walked out of here and nobody so much as coughed, and that earned the floor a fresh policy.
Twenty-three at the most, built like a man who lifts heavy objects for fun, with the open face of a boy who still calls his mother every Sunday.
He squares up when I come down the hall, hands drifting to that ready position they all keep on standby, and one breath tells me the door’s shut and the lock on it is a kid who’d rather chew glass than be the reason today goes wrong.
So I don’t pick the lock. I befriend it.
“Giannis, isn’t it?” I prop myself on the wall next to him like we’re two strangers waiting on the same train. “I’ve got a problem, and you’re the only person alive who can solve it, which is a rotten thing to do to a man before noon, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
“Ms. Markides, I really can’t—”
“It’s coffee. The whole problem’s coffee.
That’s it.” I let my shoulders drop and give him the face, the warm one people spill their secrets to on long flights, and I aim it on purpose for maybe the first time in my life, because mostly I forget I have it.
“Three streets down there’s a tiny Portuguese place, and they make a cortado I can’t talk about without sounding like I need help.
I’ve been thinking about it since I opened my eyes.
The coffee in there’s gorgeous, it’s the good rich-man stuff, but it isn’t mine.
You get one thing in this life, Giannis. That’s mine.”
He’s softening. I can see the wish in him to be the kind of man who lets a woman have her one thing.
“I’d go myself if you’d let me,” I tell him, “but you won’t have me wandering loose, which is the whole reason I’m asking nicely instead of just taking the elevator.
Three streets down, the little Portuguese place on the corner.
A cortado, extra hot. I’ll sit right here and behave, scout’s honor, you’ll see me through the door the whole way back. ”
“You don’t move.” It’s not a refusal; it’s a man drawing up the terms of his own defeat. “You stay on this floor where I can see you the second I’m back. You don’t touch that elevator. Promise me.”
“On my mother.” I lay a hand on my chest like a woman who’s never broken a vow in her life. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He goes, because a sweet boy can’t stand to be the reason a woman doesn’t get her one thing, and the moment the elevator swallows him I’m in the stairwell, feeling a tinge of regret for lying to him.
The restaurant’s a French corner spot with good bones, white cloths, a lunch crowd thin enough that a woman by herself reads as early instead of odd.
I’m here twenty minutes ahead of Adrianos, which is the whole point, I take the table I’d have chosen if the meeting were mine to run, spine to the wall, a clean lane to the door, near enough the middle to hear the next table swallow.
I order a red I’ve no plan to drink, because the glass turns me into furniture, a woman killing time before a date, invisible the second the waiter walks off.
I’m one sip in when he comes through the door, and I get the gift of watching the exact half-second he finds me at the table.
His jaw tightens. That’s the entire tell: one muscle pulling once, his stride never breaking, the rest of him gliding on like the room’s precisely as he left it.
A smaller man would cross the floor. A much smaller one would make it a scene.
He picks the cruelest item on offer instead, which is nothing at all, his eyes passing over me like I’m the coat stand and moving on, and that nothing’s louder than any sentence he could’ve spent stalking over here to say.
He takes his reserved table, six feet off mine, sits facing the door, and I open a menu I’ve already learned by heart and become a woman agonizing between the fish and the chicken.
He shouldn’t be allowed the not-looking. My skin knows where he is down to the inch, this morning’s heat still under it, his teeth at my throat half a day ago and his eyes going through me now like I’m not here. He skips me on purpose, but I go warm and tight low in my belly anyway.
Petros comes in four minutes later, and I’d have made him for a banker through a power outage.
Pale suit, paler face, a soft man who’s gone softer at the belt, his eyes touching all four corners before they find Adrianos.
He sits with his back to me, a kindness he doesn’t know he’s doing, because now I get the whole of his voice and none of his face reading mine.
“Thank you for coming to me,” he says. “I wasn’t honest on the call. I told you I had information, and I do, but I shrank it, made it sound like less than it is, because I couldn’t make myself say the true size of it down a phone line.”
“Say the true size of it now.” Adrianos’s voice barely makes the six feet, and I have to hold my own breathing to catch it.
“I know the man. The one moving the money.” Petros’s elbows work as his hands knot on the cloth.
“Three years he’s been my contact. I took him for legitimate, I swear to you, ordinary structured cash, the sort that crosses every desk in my building on a slow Tuesday and nobody asks a second question.
The fees were fat, the paperwork was spotless, and I didn’t ask the one thing I’m paid my whole salary not to ask. ”
“But now you’re asking it.”
“Now there are dead men.” His voice sinks, and I lean a breath toward the wine like the vintage’s caught my eye.
“The children, the marks cut over them. A week ago it came together in me, that the accounts I’ve been keeping warm and the bodies in the paper are one pot of money, and I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since, because I finally see what I was carrying and who it was meant to bury.
I didn’t know it was the Crown. You have to believe that part.
I’d never have laid a finger on it if I’d known it was aimed at the table.
I’ve a daughter at Fordham. She’s nineteen. ”
And there he is, the thing I read in his numbers that first night and couldn’t put a face to, the clumsy early hand before it taught itself to disappear clean.
This soft, scared man moved the money back when it still left prints in the wet, and he moved it blind, which I believe, because every part of his body believes it, and a body’s the one set of books nobody’s ever learned to read.
“I’ll take you to him,” Petros says. “The place he meets, the schedule he keeps, the name he wears, all of it. I want one thing in trade.”
“Name it.”
“Keep me out of it.” The plea cracks straight down the seam.
“My name goes in the ground and stays there. Whatever you do with what I hand you, I was never the door you came in through. I made a greedy, idiot mistake, and I want to undo it and still be breathing to drive my girl to her graduation in May. Can you give me that? Please. I’m begging a little, I know it, I’ve made my peace with the begging. ”
“You came to me,” Adrianos says when he’s let the silence run long enough. “Of every man at that table, you carried this to my chair. I won’t forget you chose right on the night choosing wrong would’ve bought you an easier sleep.” He pauses. “Your name stays buried. I keep what’s mine.”
The relief comes off Petros in one long breath I catch from here, his shoulders dropping. He thanks Adrianos three times inside two sentences. He brings up the daughter again, the graduation, the spring.
Then he stands, a lighter man leaving than the one who sat, his suit hanging right on him again, and walks out into the bright afternoon believing he’s bought himself back to safety. Through the window I watch him cross the street with a bounce that wasn’t anywhere in him on the way in.
I give it a slow ten-count. Then I pick up my untouched red, carry it to Adrianos’ table, and sit across from him like a woman who was always expected, because at this point I think I was.
“I half-thought you’d come to my table to yell at me the moment he left,” I say. “I built a whole defense speech with footnotes and everything, and now it’s going to rot inside me unspoken, which is its own small heartbreak.”
“You’d have enjoyed the yelling far too much. I don’t hand you things you enjoy where people can watch.”
“And yet, here I sit, at your table, drinking your wine, having heard every syllable you banned me from over coffee this morning.” I take a sip I don’t taste. “So tell me what happens now. What’s your next move?”
He doesn’t answer fast. He brings his eyes up to mine and keeps them there, and the warm idling thing’s gone out of them completely, no charm turning over underneath, only the dark center of him with the light somewhere behind it, looking at me like he needs me to take this in instead of arguing it down.
“He’ll give us the man,” Adrianos says. “Which means he’ll hand over the one thing he has that’s worth his own life.”
“He’s a liability,” I realize. The wine turns to vinegar on my tongue. “A witness who’s seen too much. Knows too much.”
“Yes.”
“You told him you’d keep his name private.”
“I told him his name stays buried.” Adrianos slides the card into his jacket and finally lets his eyes leave mine. “I never told him the rest of him wouldn’t be down there keeping it company.”