21. Ronan
RONAN
The Other Yacht sells on a Tuesday.
I don't haggle. A man in Greenwich has wanted it for two years, so when Navi puts out the word that it's up for sale, the buyer doesn't even blink at the number.
He wires it same-day. I sign the papers in the back of a car and don't look at them twice.
It was a good boat. I ate a lot of good dinners on it.
I told myself once that I bought it because life was meant to be lived. I believed that when I said it.
I don't feel a thing when it's gone.
The Yacht stays. That one is sacred. Cali stood on the deck of it in my head a hundred times before she ever set foot near the water. I'm not selling the version of the future I keep parked in the harbor. A man has to keep one thing.
The money hits payroll Friday, like I promised.
Grigor gets his men made whole and his own pocket paid back on top.
I hand it out myself so nobody has to wonder, and as I do, I watch the relief move through the crew like heat coming back into frozen hands.
For about four days, I think maybe I bought something with that boat besides a stay of execution.
Then Grigor calls another meeting.
It's the same fish place in Brighton Beach. Fewer men come this time. Sergei's here. Anatoly's not.
I notice that first. The empty chair.
"Anatoly?" I ask to the room.
Grigor's got his tea. He doesn't drink it. "His crew walked. Tuesday. All of them at once."
"To Lev."
"Correct."
I sit and process that unwelcome tidbit. Nobody fills the silence for me. That's how I know how bad it is.
"They got paid Friday," I say. "Every one of them. I put the money in their hands myself."
"They sure did," Grigor agrees. "Then Lev's people came Saturday and offered them triple."
"Triple? Is that a fucking joke? Lev doesn't have triple. He doesn't even have single, goddammit."
"He's got a picture," Grigor explains.
He reaches into his coat and puts a phone on the plastic tablecloth. He slides it toward me. On the screen is a photograph.
It's Pyotr.
He's thinner than I remember. Grayer. There's a bruise coming up under one eye. He's sitting in a chair in a room I don't recognize, holding a newspaper up next to his face. I lean in. It's this week's paper. The date's right there. Wednesday. Two days ago.
Proof of life.
"Lev's showing this around," Grigor explains. "To the men who are wavering. His pitch is, the pakhan turned the guns off and let the money-man get snatched up, and now, Lev's got the money-man, which means Lev's got the keys to the kingdom. So a smart man goes where the money is."
I look at Pyotr's face for a long time. A frightened old man with a bad heart and a dream of a cottage he'll never see.
I gave him his exit. I took his marker and I let him go.
I told myself I wasn't my father. I wasn't going to sink a scared old man in the marshes over a couple of dollars he took to ease his way out the door.
And Lev plucked him off a street in Istanbul. Now, Pyotr's holding a newspaper for a camera, and every wavering man in my operation is looking at that photo and wondering if he'll be next.
"He's alive," I say.
"For now," Grigor says. "That's the whole point of the picture. He's alive, and he's Lev's. That's what the men see."
I hand the phone back. "Anatoly's crew is how many?"
"Nine."
Nine men. Gone in a weekend, over a photograph of an old man I let live.
I think about what my father would say. You should have put him in the ground, boy. There is no leaving. You knew that and you let him walk. Now, look.
He'd be right. That's the worst part, the part that keeps me up at night more than any of the rest of it. Every soft thing I've ever done has a receipt, and Lev is out there collecting them.
"They'll come back," Sergei says. "When Lev can't pay triple past the first month."
"Some of them," Grigor argues. "Some of them don't come back from that. Once a man walks, walking gets easy."
"Grigor's right," I say. "Don't count on them coming back." I look around the short table. "You all stayed. I won't forget it. I've said that before and it turned out to be true. It'll turn out to be true again."
Grigor finally drinks his tea. That's something.
The meeting breaks up not long after. There's not much to decide. Lev has made his move and I've made mine. We're circling each other, waiting for something to bleed.
Before he leaves, Grigor puts a hand on the back of a chair and looks at me.
"Semyon's daughter's getting married," he says. "You heard?"
I nod.
"The whole family's going. Everybody who's still family." He lets it hang there so I understand exactly what he means by it. "It'd be noticed if the pakhan didn't come. It'd be noticed more if he came alone."
"I understand, Grigor."
"Bring your wife," he says, just to underscore the point.
"Let them see there's a family worth staying for.
Half these men, they don't stay for money.
They stay because they want to be part of something that isn't going to leave them out in the cold.
You show them a table with real people at it? That's worth more than triple pay."
Every part of me that's spent a month keeping Cali as far from this world as I can wants to tell him no. But a wedding is the chance to fight back publicly, and the pakhan who skips it might as well hand Lev the crown across the buffet table.
"I'll be there," I say. "With my wife."
Grigor nods, satisfied, and goes.
I call Navi from the car. It rings out. I frown and call again. It rings out again, then goes to the recorded voice that isn't his, the generic one that means the phone is off, or somewhere it can't be answered.
Navi's gone dark.
Odd.
It's the second time. The first was before the last meeting: a lead to run down, he said, offering no details.
I sit in the parked Land Rover a block from the fish place and I feel my unwavering belief in him flex. Just a little. Just enough to notice.
After all, someone fluent in the Bratva tongue issued the stand-down order the night the man came up Cali's stairs. Only the family knows those codes. Three people know the story of the scale. Me. Her.
And Navi.
I dismissed it then, so I dismiss it now, out loud, alone in the car, like saying it will make it stick.
Navi has bled for me. He's buried things for me that I'll answer for at the gates of heaven, if there are any.
He put a hand on my shoulder in an empty apartment once and told me my old man never could've done what I'm doing, and he meant it.
But Navi's gone dark, twice, with no explanation, in the exact weeks the ground started sliding out from under me.
I don't want the mole to be Navi. But in order to believe that, I need a good reason. The loudest reason of all is that I love him.
Which is why I can't trust it.
I put the phone in the cupholder, screen-up, so I'll see it the second it lights. Then I drive home. The whole way I turn it over: the wedding I don't want to go to, the cousin who won't pick up. Underneath all of it, one problem whispers louder than the rest.
How do I ask her?
It's a stupid thing to be afraid of. I've knelt in front of terrified men and made them tell me the truth.
I've said things in a low voice that emptied a man's bladder down the front of his pants.
There's a photograph of Pyotr going around this city that could end my world, but I'm worried about trying to figure out how to ask my fake wife to a wedding?
Because it's not fake. Hasn't been for a while now. It kept not being fake last night, when she bit my name into my shoulder and I pulled the blanket over both of us and broke the only rule she ever asked me to keep.
So for some reason, this feels important.
If I ask her wrong, she'll hear the ask underneath the ask. True patience is required. I have to ask it like a man who can hear no and live.
I rehearse it in the car, but I hate how it sounds in here. I rehearse it on the stoop and it comes out worse. By the time I get the vault-heavy door open and locked behind me, I've said it eleven different ways in my head and loathed all of them.
Cali is at the kitchen table with her laptop, glasses pushed up into her hair, a pencil between her teeth. The kids are down. She looks up. "You're back late."
"Meeting ran long."
"The good kind or the bad kind?"
"The kind we don't talk about at the table."
She takes the pencil out of her mouth, sets it down, and watches me. "Okay," she says. "So what is it you're standing there not-asking me?"
I open my mouth.
What comes out is: "There's a wedding."
She waits.
"Semyon's daughter. It's a… a family thing.
It matters that I'm there. It matters even more that I'm not there alone.
There are men deciding right now whether there's anything left in my world worth staying for, and a wedding is where they'll decide it.
So it would be… useful. If you came. As my wife. It would help."
She sets her chin on her hand. "Useful," she repeats.
"That's not—"
"No, no. Go on. It'd be 'useful' if I came.
As your wife. To help." There's something moving at the corner of her mouth she's not letting me have yet.
"You know, for a man who took the mirrors out of my whole house because you couldn't stand watching me talk down to myself, that was a terrible way to ask a woman to a party. "
"I'm aware."
"Was that the ask? Because I want to be sure I heard you right."
"That was about the whole of it, yeah."
"Mm." She leans back and folds her arms, and now I can see that she's enjoying this. She wants to make me squirm. I could almost laugh, if shit wasn't so damn serious. "No, I don't think so. I don't think I can say yes to that one. It was too… What's the word…?"
"Calista."
"Useful. It was too useful." She tips her head at me, and God help me, it's the sand tiger, the look I described to her at the aquarium in the blue light: patient, and without mercy. "Try again."
She's really doing this. She's actually going to make me do it twice. Not because she's cruel, though maybe she is a little bit, and only because I taught her how to be. But also because, for once, she gets to be the one who says do it again, do it right.
So I do it right.
"Calista Meadows." I pull out the chair across from her and sit down, because you don't ask a woman like this from your feet like you're checking off a list. "There's a wedding on Saturday.
I'd like you to come with me. I want to walk into a room full of the people I come from with you on my arm and let all of them see the thing I actually care about.
I've spent a month keeping you out of that world to keep you safe, and I'm disgusted that the only version of you those men know consists of a rumor and a photograph.
I want them to meet you. I want to be the man who brought his wife.
" I make myself finish it. "You can say no.
If you say no, I'll go alone. But that's my problem, not yours.
I'm asking. Just asking. That's all this is. "
She doesn't answer right away.
She looks at my hands on the table. Then she looks at my face. "That one," she whispers, "was better."
"So what'll it be?"
"I'm still deciding. It's fun to be the one in charge, isn't it?" She smiles devilishly. "This will be a Bratva wedding, right? Full of criminals?"
"Every last one of them."
"And I'd have to wear something and stand next to you and let a room full of dangerous people think I'm your wife?"
"You are my wife," I say. "That's the part that isn't pretend anymore. You know that."
She's quiet again. The laptop fan hums. Upstairs, one of the kids turns over and the bed creaks and goes still.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Yes. I'll come." She points the pencil at me. "Because it's useful."
"Now, you're just being cruel."
"Good. It's about time you learned how it feels to be on the receiving end."
I grin and, before I can stop myself, swoop in to kiss her. Surprisingly, she lets me, though I keep it brief so I don't push my luck. It's not dark enough for tongue yet, after all.
That'll come later.