Chapter 17 #2
"You just have to mean it," Yuri says, careful, repeating my words back like scripture.
"Pelmeni tests you. If you flinch he's got you for a year.
" The dog in question leans his whole weight against the boy's leg, devoted, and Yuri's hand drops to his head without the boy seeming to know it's happening.
"Borscht's soft. Borscht would let a burglar in for a belly rub. "
"That tracks," Nora says. "I've met Borscht."
Dima crouches, lets the soft one shove a head into his hands, and looks up at the boy with something I don't see on my brother often, which is respect with no joke under it. "He teach you that?" He tips his chin at me.
"Mr. Radulov taught me everything," Yuri says, and goes red to the ears the second it's out, like he's confessed to a crush.
I look at the middle distance and keep my face shut, because the boy meant it. A thing meant that plainly is the one kind of payment I've never learned how to take.
Dima watches the whole exchange like a man at a tennis match, his head going back and forth. When I finally look at him he's wearing an expression I haven't seen on him since we were kids, since before the money, since before I was what I am.
"You're happy," he says, quiet, just to me, in Russian so she won't get it. "I came out here to laugh at you. You've gone happy on me instead, and now I don't know what to do with my afternoon."
"Eat my food. You're good at that."
"I am." He goes back to the food, and we don't speak of it again. We're brothers. That's how brothers say a thing, by not saying it, both of us hearing it anyway.
Marisol comes at noon, and the afternoon I thought would be the hard part turns out to be the easy part, because the hard part is watching my brother meet Nora's best friend.
Marisol Vega is dry the way good knives are dry. She walks into my house, takes in Dima sprawled across my sofa like a man at his own villa, and her face does nothing at all.
"Who's this?" she says to Nora, not to him.
"Isaak's brother. Dima." Nora is already grinning, because Nora can see it coming too. "Dima, Marisol. She works with me at Halo. She's the only person who likes me for me and not for the criminal money."
"I haven't decided if I like you yet," Marisol says to Nora. Then, to Dima, flat, "And I definitely haven't decided about you."
Dima sits up like she's rung a bell. "I'm extremely likable. Ask anyone."
"I don't know anyone here," Marisol says. "That's the problem. For all I know you're the worst one. You've got the face of the worst one."
"That's my brother's face."
"Then you've both got the face of the worst one."
I watch my brother, who has charmed customs agents, rival bosses, and at least one judge, run face-first into a vet tech from Glendale who won't give him a single inch.
I watch him realize it's happening. I watch him decide, all at once and out loud, that this is now the most important project of his life.
"Nora," he says, not taking his eyes off Marisol, "I'm going to be staying longer than I planned."
"Oh no," Nora says, delighted.
"Oh no," Marisol agrees, meaning something completely different. The two women look at each other. Something passes between them that I recognize, because it's the same look Lev and I trade when a job's about to get complicated. God help us, I think. There are going to be two of these.
The thing I don't expect, the thing that ruins my whole evening, comes later, after Marisol's gone, after the house has quieted, with Dima three drinks in on my terrace, looking at the dark where the hills are.
"Your wife's friend dug something up," he says, not turning around. The play's gone out of his voice. This is the other Dima, the one almost nobody gets to see, the one who's better with a forensic spreadsheet than I am with a gun. "Not on purpose. The crypto boy. The ex."
"Brandon." I keep my voice level. Nora's asleep upstairs. "What about him?"
"His numbers don't work." Dima turns the glass in his hand, watching the light come through it.
"I got curious, because I get curious, it's a sickness.
His wallets. The fund he runs, the one all the Calabasas money men park their cash in.
It's short. Badly short, ten million at least, maybe more, and it's hidden well, but it's hidden by someone who learned to hide money from a screen, not from people who actually do this.
" He finally looks at me. "It's amateur work, Isaak.
Tidy. Too tidy. He learned to hide it from a screen, not from anyone who'd have killed him for getting it wrong. "
The cold comes up the back of my neck, the old cold, the one that kept me alive for forty years. Tidy. Too tidy. I have heard those exact words come out of my own mouth once before, in a club office on Rodeo, reading a dead rancher's books and finding a wrong note I couldn't name.
"Where'd the ten million go?" I say.
"That's the part I can't find yet." Dima drains the glass.
"It went somewhere analog. Off the chain.
Somebody took ten million in dirty crypto and turned it into something you can hold.
Then that something vanished. The man it belonged to is going to want it back, and he won't be patient about it.
" He sets the glass down. "Who's the ex to your wife, exactly? "
I look up at the dark window where Nora's sleeping, my wife, who defended a fourteen-year-old I used to be against a girl who's been dust for decades, who has the whole household renamed, the dogs ruined, a kitten asleep on my chest every morning, who came into this marriage with two duffel bags and a sealed box she won't let anyone touch.
"He's nobody," I tell my brother. "He's a man she used to know."
It's the truth. It's also the first lie I've told Dima in years, because I already know, the way I knew about the books, that nobody is exactly what he isn't.