16. Ivan
IVAN
The cuffs of my shirt roll to the elbow, one fold at a time. I do it without looking at Armin or anyone else.
I’m silently counting.
Not the folds. Not the years of his service. The specifics. Three drops to Witte’s courier over eight weeks make a pattern too clean to be accidental, too careful to be anything but deliberate. Jaba has been selling me in installments.
And he had the balls to sit across from me at my own table while he did it.
I flex my hand once and walk into the warehouse. Armin follows me in. My captains form a loose ring, all of them, their faces arranged into careful neutrality. Armin now stands at the back wall with his hands clasped.
In the center, under a single hanging bulb that turns everything the color of old teeth, Jaba sits in a chair with his wrists tied behind him and a rag tied in his mouth.
His shirt is dark with sweat at the collar.
His eyes find mine the moment I enter. He is a big man, and that’s a part of his problem. He has mistaken his size for authority.
I cross the room at a walk and stop in front of him. “Cut him loose.”
The man behind Jaba hesitates. I don’t look at him. Only Jaba, who meets my eyes for a moment before his gaze drifts to my feet.
The zip tie comes off. Jaba rolls his wrists. He reaches up and pulls the rag from his own mouth and drops it on the floor between us. He works his jaw. His gaze shoots to the ring of captains once—a bid, perhaps, for the room’s sympathy.
I do not have to look at them to guarantee their loyalty or keep them in line. They are not here to be swayed. They are here to see what happens.
To hear what I say.
“Tell me what you sold to Witte.”
His eyes flick with thoughts, remembering the biggest mistakes he’s ever made. There’s no shame on his face. A twinge of pride, instead.
He has to clear his throat to speak. “Enough to be a problem.”
Jaba wants to force me to repeat myself. To make me jump through his hoops in front of everyone. He’s toying with me, even now.
“I must say, I respect your balls for trying that tactic.” I grab his shoulder and kick him in the balls, doubling him over. “Not a lot, of course, but some.”
He coughs, still hunched over. A hoarse, “Fuck you,” scrapes out of him.
I fist his hair and force him to look up at me. “Talk or lose your tongue.”
“Fine, fine!”
I release him to let him recover his composure for a moment. Over the years, I’ve found it is these moments I hate the most. The moments between. The ones where I must be patient and let them gather themselves.
It drags out the entire process when I’d rather get answers instantly.
This is not evidence of my loss of attention span. Initially, I had thought it was. The digital age has eaten into our attention spans, and I worried I had fallen prey to such things. But over the years, I have learned that is not the case.
The longer it lasts, the louder the snarl in my ears becomes. My work requires certain things of me, and violence is one of them. There’s this snarl that becomes a roar in my ears when I must be violent, and the longer it lasts, the louder it gets.
My thoughts go quiet. My feelings are numb. When the violence is over, it takes longer and longer for the snarl to die down.
Jaba’s voice pulls me back to the moment. “Witte knows about Greenstone?—”
“No shit. What else?”
Jaba blinks. “You knew that?”
I lower my voice. “Do I look like you surprised me just now?”
“No, you?—”
“Surprise me, Jaba. Tell me something new. Like your life depends on it.”
He takes a few quick breaths, thinking. “I told him about the trophy scheme.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “How much?”
“All of it.”
I sigh, long and loud. That was one of my more fun schemes. Almost no one knows that the Hodgson Trophy is a forgery.
Almost.
I’d had Jaba in on that job, thanks to his connections to one of the owners of the Chicago Bison.
It was a lot of sleight of hand, subterfuge, glad-handing, and distraction to swap that trophy for my forgery.
I have no interest in selling the thing—that would be a problem.
Too recognizable, could bring a lot of heat for no good reason.
Selling it was never the point. The point was to get one over on the owner because he is an asshole who outbid my legitimate business for a city contract.
Once a month, I send him a ransom note and pictures of the real trophy. A friendly rivalry, for the most part. But he can’t prove it was me. Not unless Jaba, or now, Witte decides to turn me in.
“What else, Jaba?”
“The Lavender Girl.”
My hands stretch and flex. “You fucking didn’t. You?—”
“I did.” His voice breaks, and he stares at the floor.
“No, you didn’t. Do you know how I know?”
He slowly looks up at me. “How?”
I grip his jaw. “Because you don’t want that girl to die.”
“I don’t. He won’t do anything?—”
I backhand him with no consideration to his ability to speak again. He goes down, but scrambles to his feet. “You fucking idiot!”
“Witte won’t hurt her?—”
I charge toward him, “What makes you think you can trust him—no.” I stop, two feet from him. “What makes you think that I pay you to think?”
“That’s your problem, Ivan. You don’t listen to us.”
I laugh, hard and sharp. “I’m listening to you now, Jaba. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”
“You were never going to move me up,” he says. “Fifteen years and I’m still a captain. That doesn’t happen to a man unless the man at the top has already decided.”
“And decided to get what you think you’re owed from Witte instead.”
“You never gave it to anyone.” His voice finds an edge. “You keep it all. Keep every man exactly where you put him, so no one ever gets close enough to matter.”
In the ring, nobody moves.
“So, you risk a young girl’s life to get what you think you’ve earned.”
He blinks away. His voice weakens. “He won’t hurt her.”
“Fine,” I say. “You want to make the calls? You want be in charge so badly? Take me. You take me, the organization is yours.”
The silence that follows this is its own kind of sound. I watch him search it for the trap.
But I wait in stillness. Breathing. Doing the math of doubling the Lavender Girl’s security somehow without her knowing about it. The only thought echoes in my empty head.
Jaba stands. He swings first, hard.
I roll inside the arc of it and drive my elbow into his ribs with enough force that the crack is audible in the silence.
He grunts. Adjusts. He’s fast, Jaba—I’ll give him that, always was—and he pivots and gets a hand in my collar and tries to use his weight.
I let him feel like it’s working for half a second. Let him think the weight matters. Then I drop my center, seize his lapel and wrist, and send him over my hip with enough torque that he leaves the ground completely before he hits the concrete.
A wet thud. Wet from sweat or blood, I don’t know. Don’t much care.
He gets up. This is the part about Jaba I have always respected.
He gets up. He always gets up. It is the only courage he has ever had that was entirely his own, and it is the thing that has kept him alive in this organization for fifteen years.
It’s the thing that will hurt him most tonight because it means he will keep getting up until he physically cannot.
He comes at me again, lower this time, smarter, trying to tie up my arms.
I let him get one. I use the other to hook the back of his knee and collapse him sideways, and we go down in a pile. Then I put a knee into his back and wrench his arm to the angle where the shoulder makes its decision. There’s a slide and then a sudden pop under my hand.
He makes a sound into the concrete. I hold it there for a moment—not long, just long enough—and then release. I stand. I wait.
He pushes up onto his hands. He’s breathing through his teeth.
“You’ve had fifteen years to be better than this. Fifteen years to train, to study, to become something I could not overlook. You spent them hoping to get more instead of earning it. You’re pathetic.”
He gets his feet under him. His left shoulder sits wrong.
He tries one more time. He’s telegraphing it before his weight even shifts.
I step into him instead of back, forearm to throat, drive him back three full steps, and take him down onto the floor with the weight of my body behind it.
His head bounces off concrete, and his chest empties under me.
When I come off him, he is looking at the ceiling, eyes glassy.
His chest still drifts upward and downward. He doesn’t get up.
I stand over him for a moment. The warehouse is absolutely still.
Then I step back. Armin is already there with a rag, white and folded, and I take it and clean my hands without looking down at what I’m cleaning off. Doesn’t matter.
My audience will not forget today.
I grunt to Armin, “Get the doctor. I want him to be able to answer questions tomorrow.”
“Already arranged,” Armin says.
I hand him back the rag. I roll my sleeves down, button the cuffs, and walk out.
The restaurant is on the eastern edge of the city, past the freight yards, tucked between a laundromat and a tire shop in a strip of storefronts that doesn’t ask questions. Mexican. I’ve never been here before.
That’s why I chose it.
I sit in a corner booth with my back to the wall, and I order in a voice that comes out quieter than I intend because the restaurant is smaller than I expected.
I order too much. I know I’m ordering too much—three platters, rice, beans, something with mole that the woman at the table describes with her hands more than her words—and I order it anyway because I know what a hard adrenaline crash feels like from the inside, and the only thing that fixes it is volume.
My body will want it eventually. It just doesn’t want it yet. The food comes. I look at it.
The smell is good. Warm and dark and layered with something that might be chili and char and the sweetness of caramelized onion, and under any other circumstances, I would already be eating.
But my gut is sealed shut. The fight sits in me like a stone. Jaba’s face when he said you were never going to move me up. The certainty in it. The years of it.
I have known Jaba since he was a boy. I put him in the room where decisions were made. I put money in his pocket and weight behind his name. And he looked at Witte’s courier and that was all it took for him to betray me. I had raised him up, and it counted for nothing.
This isn’t the first time a man has betrayed me. It’ll happen again. That’s the nature of my life. Never knowing who will be the next. Always wondering who thinks they aren’t getting their due.
The food goes cold. I sit with my hands flat on the table. The thing that walked into the warehouse tonight and walked back out again is not the thing that happily sits across from Luna and talks about borscht.
It is the other version of me. The one she does not know yet. The one I wish her to never know.
She would be afraid of me now. If she saw what happened. If she knew.
Luna looks at me like I’m a man, and that’s the most disorienting thing anyone has done to me in recent memory.
I don’t understand it. But she always has. Ever since we met. When I dragged her into that coat closet like a beast, she saw the man underneath. Didn’t even flinch.
She would flinch today.
My gut moves. Slightly, but it moves.
I think about her at my kitchen table, talking to Darya about bread like a woman who has no idea what’s underneath the apartment she’s sitting in. The absolute absence of performance in it. Just a woman who liked a bakery and wanted to talk about it.
I pick up a fork. The food is cold, and I eat it anyway, slowly at first, then less slowly, working through the first platter in the silence of a restaurant that has politely decided not to look at me. The stone in my gut breaks up incrementally with each bite.
Even cold, it’s delicious.
Maybe that’s the way Luna thinks of me.