36. Ronan
RONAN
Pyotr Vasiliev shuffles into the light on legs that don't want to hold him. He's thinner than the last time I saw him. There's a yellow-green bruise under one eye and a split at the corner of his mouth that's scabbed over.
But his eyes are clear. Lev took everything else, but his eyes are clear. They find me across the concrete and hold, but I can't read what's in them. Fear? Shame? Something older than both?
"Sit him down," Lev orders.
Two of his men bring a chair. They shove Pyotr in it and step back into the dark.
Lev walks over and claps a hand on the old man's shoulder.
"You know Pyotr," he tells the captains.
"He kept the Bratva's books for thirty years.
" He tips his head at me. "If Igor or his son needed something buried, it was Pyotr who did the digging.
Numbers, debts, bodies—you name it, Pyotr was the man who made it disappear.
" He pats the shoulder. "Tell them, Pyotr.
Tell them what you buried the night Igor Akov died. "
Pin-drop silence in the room. Pyotr tries to talk, but his voice doesn't seem to be working.
Lev's smile curdles. "They told you Igor died of his heart," he says to the room, sweeping his eyes across them.
"Some of you were young. You heard it and you believed it, because why would you not?
A big, loud man, always red in the face, always shouting—of course his heart gave out. It's a good story."
He crouches down in front of the old man, so they're eye to eye.
"But it wasn't his heart that killed him, was it, Pyotr?"
The old man looks at the floor and shakes his head.
"Was it enemies?" Lev presses. "A rival crew? A hit?"
Another head shake. Smaller than the first.
"No," Lev agrees. "It was the son."
He stands up straight and points one damning finger at me across the warehouse.
"This man killed Igor Akov. Fifteen years old and he killed his own father.
How do I know? Because Pyotr here is the one who had the task of burying Igor's body.” He drops the finger.
"That's your real charge, Ronan Akov. You think we give a damn about business decisions?
Bah! Fuck the gunrunning trade; I don't care about it.
What matters most is that you're sitting on a stolen throne, paid for in blood.
You murdered the pakhan. You killed your father.
And in our world, there is only one sentence for that crime: death. "
The captains are looking at me now. All six of them. Grigor's face has gone gray.
I don't say anything for a long moment.
I look at Cali. Not at Lev, not at the captains, not at Pyotr. At her.
She's staring at me and there's fear in her eyes, but there's no retreat in them. She hasn't pulled her hand off the table. She hasn't stepped away from me. She's just watching. Taking it in. Adding it up.
New data.
I told her I'd tell her the worst thing on her steps, with a bottle of wine, after this whole saga had concluded. I meant it. That's still where the whole story will belong, if I do survive this—what I did and why and how old I was and how it felt to see the light drain from my father's eyes.
But this room? These people?
They get just the receipt. Nothing more.
"It's true," I say.
Sergei's mouth drops open again. One of the older captains slumps back in his chair, stunned.
I keep my eyes on Cali as I say the rest.
"My father put my mother in the ground. Slowly, over the course of years, so no one would call it what it was: murder by abuse.
I watched her get smaller until there was nothing left.
And then one night I put him in the ground, too.
" I don't blink. I don't look away from her.
"I've never lied to this family. Not once, in twenty years. And I'm not going to start for Lev."
The warehouse is dead quiet. The lights swing on their chains and throw the shadows back and forth across the floor.
Lev's smile has come back, wider now, triumphant, because he thinks I've just handed him the crown on a silver platter. He turns to the captains and spreads his hands, a man resting his case.
"There," he says. "From his own mouth. He confesses. Now, you know your law. You—"
"How much did he skim?"
Lev stops. He turns.
It's Cali who spoke. She's not looking at Lev, though.
She's looking at the old man in the folding chair.
"Pyotr," she murmurs in her gentle mother's voice, the one she uses on Isabella when the dark gets big.
"That's your name, right? Pyotr. You kept the books.
I know how that works; it's what I do for a living, too.
" She takes one step toward him, slowly, so the men in the shadows don't get twitchy.
"You just heard me lay out eight things about Crosby Hess skimming off this organization.
You buried those numbers, or somebody did. You'd know if I got them right."
Pyotr lifts his head.
"You'd know all the numbers," Cali says.
"Wouldn't you? Every dollar. Where it went.
Who took it. That's what Lev wanted you for.
Not to tell an old story about a boy. He wants you to run the machine in your head, the one nobody else can see.
" She tilts her head. "He's been telling everyone he holds the keys to the kingdom.
But he doesn't. You do. He just holds you. "
Something moves behind Lev's eyes. The first crack.
"Don't answer her," he roars. "Pyotr, look at me! You don't—"
"He fed me," Pyotr says.
His voice is a rasp, thin from disuse or from screaming, I don't know which. But it carries.
"On that chair," he says, and he means the one from before, though there's no chair like it now.
"In this room. My daughter, my grandchildren…
He gave me a marker and my life and told me to leave the country and never call.
" His clear eyes hold mine. "I did as I was told.
I got as far as Istanbul." He stops. His hands are shaking in his lap.
"Then Lev's people came through the door. "
"Pyotr," Lev barks.
The old man ignores him. He keeps talking to me, and only to me.
"Lev wanted the numbers," he says. "So they took me and they hurt me and they said if I gave them what they wanted, I could still have my quiet ending.
" A dry, terrible laugh. "I'm too old to believe that.
But they were going to hurt me until I gave it, and then hurt me anyway, so.
" He shrugs. "I gave them a little. Enough to keep the beatings spaced apart.
I know how to do that. I've been buying myself out of rooms my whole life. "
Lev is starting to get red in the face. "Pyotr, enough—"
"You want to know a number?" Pyotr says. Now, finally, he turns his head and looks at Lev. There's forty years of fear in the look, and beneath that fear, there's rage. "Here is one."
And then the old man starts to talk.
He doesn't need a screen. He doesn't need Cali's laptop.
He just closes his eyes and recites, in that thin, cracked whisper, a flood of numbers.
Dates, amounts, shell corps. A dry cleaner in Bay Ridge that never washed a shirt, a marina in Red Hook that never held a boat, a percentage skimmed off the top of the gun money going back not just under me but under Igor.
He tells the room where it went, and who took it.
He unveils Crosby's skim, and then the second one that Crosby was a servant for.
Lev's.
"Lev Abaturov has been stealing from the Bratva for thirty years. Crosby worked for him. He is a parasite on our backs, and it's long past time that we plucked him off and threw him out."
The room has turned. I feel it go over, all Lev's support draining away.
Grigor is the one who breaks the tension. He's the oldest, and he was Igor's man, too, long ago.
"You brought the one witness," he says to Lev, slow, wondering, "who knows where your money is buried. To tell a story about where his is." He shakes his head. "You old fool."
Lev's face is doing exactly what I waited for. The white. The scramble. His panicked response comes too late to save his own worthless skin. "He's lying!" he declares, pointing at me and Pyotr at the same time, like he can't figure out which one of us to blame. "He's—"
"Enough," Grigor cuts in. "The laws of the skhodka require the captains to make a decision. We've heard the evidence. It's no longer your turn to speak."
Silence.
Then the captains huddle together.
From where Lev and I are standing, neither of us can hear them speak.
It's a low undercurrent of Russian. I stand still with Cali's body heat to warm me.
Lev is stammering, but no one bothers to listen to him.
I don't feel any urge to talk. All that matters has been said already. The receipts are on the table.
It doesn't take long.
Grigor straightens up. He looks at me first. There's no warmth in it, but there's no death in it, either. Then he looks at Lev.
"The pakhan told the truth," Grigor says, "when a lie would have saved him.
He stood there and confessed to killing Igor.
But you…" His frown turns into a sneer of disgust. "What lies have you told, Lev?
For thirty years, you robbed the man you say you're avenging.
You murdered a father—a coward, yes, but a civilian, the father of two small children—to hang a rat's collar on an innocent man.
You snatched an old man from his retirement and beat him for numbers you'd been stealing yourself.
" He looks at the other five captains. They don't disagree.
Nobody moves. "Under the old law, our law, the one you keep invoking… there is only one outcome."
Everyone in the room knows what it means.
Lev's lips part. Nothing comes out that matters.
Grigor looks at me. "It's yours to carry, Ronan," he intones. "The room's decided. But you're still pakhan. You do it, or you name who does."
I look at Cali.
I've spent so long trying to hide parts of myself from her. I meant to keep this part hidden, too, so she'd never know the true story of my father's murder at my hands unless I was already dead and gone.
But it's all in the light now. She's still watching. I need to know before I decide my next move:
Can she live with all of me?
She looks back at me. Her face is pale, but her eyes are determined.
Then she nods.
Just once. Small.
But she nods.
I don't ask twice. She said I'd never have to.
I take the gun from under my coat. Lev is saying something now, begging, the words tumbling out, a man who spent forty years watching my father do this to other men and never once believed it would be done to him.
I don't listen. I've listened to enough old men tell stories in this room to last me the rest of my life.
I fire off two shots.
Lev crumples to the ground.
And then I wait. I wait for Cali to look away. To close her eyes so she doesn't have to see it.
She doesn't.
She keeps her eyes open. On me.
She looks at me standing over a dead man, but she doesn't flinch. It's a data point, nothing more. Not an unforgivable sin.
Men emerge from the shadows with tarps and start to carry away Lev's body. Poor old Pyotr sits in his folding chair, breathing in relief that his long nightmare is finally over.
I lower the smoking gun.
Cali crosses the small distance between us. She takes my free hand just like her son did at the treeline in the cemetery.
"You're coming home," she whispers. "You have things to answer for."
"I know, kotyonok," I tell her. "I know."