Chapter 10
Maeve
The Family Arrives
I watch them arrive from the upstairs window.
Nora is at my hip. She’s holding Brontos with one hand and pulling on my earring with the other, the small absent-minded tug of a girl who has not yet been told she’s being introduced this morning to the most dangerous men in Boston.
Lex is downstairs. I don’t need to see him to know where he is. I know where he is in this house at any given minute, the way a person knows the weather without looking at the sky.
Cormac comes first. The black SUV pulls up at 9:58.
He gets out with two soldiers I do not recognize and one I do, a man named Tomas, who used to drink with my Uncle Brendan at the Black Rose in the years before my Uncle Brendan died.
Cormac is bigger than I remembered. He’s six-six and broad and gray at the temples, and he walks the way men who run South Boston Walk.
With the deliberate ease of a man who has not had to hurry for anything in twenty years.
Declan is already inside. Has been since dawn. I have not seen him properly yet, but I have heard his voice in the kitchen at six and the small, low laugh he produced when Lex told him about the dinosaur plate.
Dimitri arrives last, at 10:04, on foot from the corner.
He’s walking. The other men drove. The other men parked at calculated distances.
Dimitri has been dropped off at the corner and has walked the half-block in the rain that has begun in the last fifteen minutes, the kind of November rain that is not quite cold enough to be sleet but is doing the work of cold.
His hair is wet. He’s not wearing a coat.
He is, even at this distance through the upstairs window, the most contained man I have ever seen.
I have read about him. He’s the third Konstantinos brother.
He’s a year younger than Lex. He’s the one Boston papers describe as the strategist in the family, which is how they describe a man whose role in an organization the papers do not understand.
He runs a fund. He’s on three boards. He’s been to Davos.
He’s also, by every operational signal I have learned to read, being protected by a Konstantinos, the most dangerous person in this morning's lineup, and he’s the one who has come on foot.
"Bug," I say. "We are going downstairs."
"Okay."
She holds Brontos. I carry her on my hip. I go down the stairs of a man's brownstone to meet the Konstantinos family in his living room.
? ? ?
Lex meets us in the foyer.
He’s put on a jacket. I don’t recall seeing him wear a jacket in the house before.
He’s worn shirts and rolled sleeves, and at one point, on a Sunday morning, that soft gray sweater that I can’t think about right now.
But the jacket is for his brothers. The jacket is the version of Lex who is performing for the family, which is the version I have not yet seen.
His hand finds the small of my back.
It is brief. Two seconds, maybe less. The hand is warm through my cardigan.
The hand is the first place he’s touched me on purpose, and it is doing it now in a foyer with his three brothers and an Irish crime boss waiting in the next room, and it is doing it because he’s decided I need a small physical anchor before I walk into that room.
He removes the hand. He says, very low, "Cormac knows you. Declan is fine. Stavros keeps to himself. Dimitri—"
He stops.
"Dimitri what?"
"Dimitri sees everything."
"Got it."
We walk into the living room.
Five men stand up at once. The two I do not know turn out to be Stavros, the youngest brother, who has been keeping back at his own request, and a Konstantinos cousin named Andreas, who is here as a logistics person and is at this moment standing in the corner so as not to crowd Maeve Callahan, which is a thing he’s been told to do.
Cormac speaks first. "Maeve."
"Cormac."
"You're Brendan O'Connell's niece."
"I am."
"He was a good man. I drank with him for fifteen years."
"I know. He talked about you."
"All good things."
"Some of them."
Cormac smiles. The smile is one of a man accurately described by an old friend’s niece, and he is amused by the accuracy. He nods at Nora.
"And who is this, then?"
Nora, who has been considering the room from my hip the way she considered Lex on the first day, slides down. She walks across the hardwood in her fuzzy white socks. She stops two feet in front of Cormac, who is six-six and built like a wall, and she looks up at him with her gold eyes.
"You are very tall," she informs him. "Are you a giant?"
Every man in the room becomes very still.
I stand a few feet back with my heart in my throat, watching my almost-three-year-old walk up to a wall of men who have, between them, ended more lives than I will ever know, and ask one of them whether he is a giant.
I don’t call her back. Calling her back would teach her to fear the room. So I hold my breath and let her go.
Cormac doesn’t move for one full second.
Then he kneels. The kneel is a slow, controlled motion, the kind of motion a six-six Irish boss makes when he’s making himself smaller in the presence of a small girl who has just asked him a serious question.
He kneels on one knee, which puts his face roughly at her face, and he says, "I am, lass. The biggest one in Boston."
Nora considers him gravely. "Okay," she says. She holds out Brontos. "You can hold him."
Cormac takes Brontos with both hands.
He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t look up at me.
He doesn’t look at Lex. He looks at Brontos, who is a stuffed elephant with one eye and most of his stuffing concentrated in his trunk, and he says, in a voice gentler than any voice I have heard him use in the eleven minutes I have been in his presence, "He’s a fine elephant. I will hold him."
"His name is Brontos."
"Brontos."
"He doesn’t like milk."
"I will not offer him any."
She nods. The matter is settled. She turns away and goes to investigate Dimitri.
Dimitri is standing by the bookshelf.
He’s not come further into the room. He’s been in the room for ninety seconds and has not yet sat down or extended a greeting or said a word to anyone, and Nora has decided he’s the next item on her list. She walks across the rug. She stops three feet from him. She studies him.
Dimitri studies her.
It is the second silent conversation in this living room in the last three minutes, and it is happening between a forty-year-old Greek strategist and an almost-three-year-old in dinosaur pajamas, and it’s doing several things in two seconds.
Then Dimitri's eyes move from Nora's face to Lex's face.
He doesn’t say anything. Lex doesn’t say anything.
The look between them is brief and absolute, the kind of look two brothers exchange when one of them has just been shown the answer to a question the other one was about to ask.
Dimitri's eyebrows do not move. His mouth doesn’t move.
He registers what he’s registered, and he files it, and he turns his attention back to Nora.
"I am Dimitri," he says, very gently.
"I am Nora."
"It is good to meet you, Nora."
"Okay."
She accepts him. She turns and goes back to Cormac, who is still kneeling, still holding Brontos, and will likely remain in this position for some time.
Lex is watching Dimitri. Dimitri is not looking at Lex.
Dimitri is, instead, looking at me, which is a separate problem, because Dimitri Konstantinos has just understood three things that no one else in this room understands, and he’s now turning his attention to the woman who has been carrying the secret with him.
I meet his eyes. Somewhere inside, everything has gone cold and quick, because the most contained man in Boston has just solved, in two silent seconds over my daughter’s head, the one equation I have spent three years making certain no one could solve.
There is nothing I can do about it now. So I do the only thing left.
I do not look away. I have gotten very tired of being looked at by men who think they know things about me.
Dimitri sees the not-looking-away and registers it, and he gives me a small nod that is the nod of one professional acknowledging another professional, and then he sits down on the couch, and the briefing begins.
? ? ?
The briefing is forty minutes.
I will spare myself the recounting of the forty minutes.
The men describe things they have already described to Lex in their own briefings, in language that has been adjusted because I am present, and I listen, take notes on a legal pad I brought down from upstairs, and at minute thirty-seven, I ask the burning question on my mind.
"What does Nikolai gain from killing me before the grand jury testimony, given that the prosecution has my deposition on file?"
The room goes quiet.
Cormac looks at me, and for the first time since he knelt for Brontos, he is not being a giant.
He has been courteous and easy for thirty-seven minutes, the version of himself that a man like Cormac uses with women he has already decided will matter to this family.
The look he gives me now is the look of a man recalculating.
"That is the right question," he says.
"It has been the right question for four weeks. Nobody has asked it."
"You are correct."
"So…"
Cormac looks at Lex. Lex looks at Cormac. Declan, who stopped pretending to track the briefing about thirty minutes ago, watches his brother.
"So," Cormac says, "the contract on Maeve is not about silencing the testimony. The deposition is on record. Killing her doesn’t stop the grand jury. Therefore, Nikolai's contract is something else."
"Vengeance," Declan says. "Reznikov family blood debt."
"Partially. Vengeance is part of the wrapper. But Nikolai is not Viktor. Nikolai is a strategist. He doesn’t spend a hundred thousand dollars on vengeance unless the vengeance pays a second function."
Dimitri speaks for the first time in the briefing. "Leverage."
"Leverage," Cormac agrees.
"He wants her alive," I say. The room turns to me.
I am still holding the legal pad. I am still wearing the cardigan.
I am the witness, and the deposition, and the woman whose daughter is currently arranging Brontos on Cormac's knee, and I have just said what none of these men were going to say in this room with me in it.
"He wants me alive long enough to use me.
Against the Konstantinos family. Or the Walsh family.
Or someone whose cooperation can be bought with my body. "
Lex's hand has gone still on the arm of his chair.
"Yes," Cormac says. "That is what we believe."
"Then this is not a protection detail. It is hostage prevention."
"That is correct."
"All right," I say. "Tell me what you need from me."
? ? ?
They leave at 12:15, separately, the way they came.
Cormac kneels one more time before he goes. He hands Brontos back to Nora with a small ceremonial seriousness. "He’s been a fine companion this morning. Thank you for trusting me with him."
"Welcome," Nora says.
Cormac looks at me. "Anything you need, Maeve. Through Lex or directly. You call."
"I will."
He goes. Declan goes. Stavros goes. Andreas goes. Dimitri goes last. He doesn’t say goodbye to me. He doesn’t say goodbye to Lex. He puts on a coat that someone has brought for him, walks to the corner in the rain, and the SUV picks him up.
The door closes.
The brownstone is silent. Nora is on the rug with Brontos. I’m standing in the middle of a living room that has just held seven dangerous men and one almost-three-year-old, in the silence of a room altered by their presence and not yet resettled.
I look at Lex. "Your brother knows."
"I know."
"Are you going to tell the others?"
"When I'm ready."
I nod. I do not push. I pick up Nora and Brontos. I take them upstairs to wash their hands before lunch.
Lex stands in the living room alone. I hear his phone buzz on the coffee table. I have no idea what it says. I do not need to.
Dimitri said he would come tonight.
Dimitri is going to come tonight.