Chapter GRIFFIN #5
Deep down, I know: of all the dangerous shit that has ever happened to me, this strange calm is perhaps the most dangerous of all.
St. Jude’s Church is not far from the condominium, but every step toward it is a grain in the hourglass running out on my patience.
The car Alexei lent me—a black, unlicensed Audi, the smell of leather and French perfume stinking up the interior—takes me to within a block of the address before I decide I don’t want to arrive in that piece of shit car.
It would be like entering a brothel in a communion dress: wrong in the inverse proportion of the universe.
I park in a random spot, activate the Malakov’s GPS blocker (a gift from the boss, of course), and get out into the drizzle that turns the city’s sidewalks into a mosaic of trash, cigarette butts, and mud.
St. Jude’s is a primordial bunker of darkened bricks, a parenthesis between the betting shop and the pawn shop that shares a facade with a fifth-rate tobacco store.
The rusted sign announces that, here, salvation happens at three daily times, all of them incompatible with the clock of the condemned.
The hum of cars, of horns, of peripheral traffic, turns into white noise as I approach the line forming on the side of the building.
They are ghosts of the night shift: beggars wrapped in plastic bags, mothers with three-day-old dark circles under their eyes, restless kids, old people coughing up lungs destroyed by the cold and the city’s ancient plagues.
The smell is unmistakable. Potato soup, fermented sweat, and a nuance of old urine that impregnates everything from here to the altar.
I get in line. No one gives me a second look, not even the old woman with one tooth who tries to sell blessed tissue paper for ten cents each. Here, I’m just another one. Better this way.
The dead weight of my left leg forces me to walk slightly sideways, and the stump of my arm throbs, but I walk with my head held high because I need to catalogue Alexei’s so-called pattern.
I don’t see any familiar faces, no glazed eyes of Russian mobsters or casino fronts. Maybe the pattern is desperation itself.
The entrance to the underground soup kitchen is guarded by a nun who stops the more agitated ones and pulls by the collar anyone who tries to cut in line.
She sizes me up and decides quickly: looks like trouble, but not the kind that will make trouble for food.
She gives me a number, a blue piece of paper scrawled with a market marker, and waves me inside.
The smell of soup is now bordering on toxic. Too many people in a minimal space, steam from the cauldron, and the breath of huddled humans.
A group of teenagers in public school uniforms occupies half the refectory with jokes and laughter. In another corner, two immigrants—one Arab, the other probably Polish—argue quietly, each twirling a wooden rosary between their fingers.
I grab my tray and get in the buffet line. Three volunteers serve the portions: a ladle of soup, a hard piece of bread, and an oxidized apple. At the end of the line, the one distributing the bread is the priest. A worn brown cassock, a faded smile, white hair cut short.
He doesn’t look me in the eyes, doesn’t look at anyone. He just repeats thank you, thank you, thank you.
When it’s my turn, I make the rehearsed move: I leave the tray in front of him and, along with it, I slide Schmidt’s card.
The priest feels its presence before he even sees it. He gives a small nod.
“The potato soup is especially good today.” The smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Sit down. Eat. The blessing will find you.”
I went there to deliver a gangster’s message, and, in return, I get a children’s catechism lesson.
I’m tempted to leave, not to eat, to abandon the mission, but that would be the same as spitting in Alexei’s face, and I’m not suicidal, despite what he thinks.
I sit at the end of one of the tables, between an old man with a tuberculous cough and a mother trying to shove food down her four-year-old son’s throat.
The priest finishes serving people and disappears through a side door.
The volunteers collect plates, restock the piles of bread, clean up the crumbs.
No one seems to notice my presence, and yet I’m nervous, my skin burning with the certainty that Alexei is watching me somewhere—or, worse, analyzing my performance and judging every protocol error.
Time drags on. I wait for the “contact” arranged by Schmidt to appear.
And nothing.
I start to think the information was bad, or that I was thrown in as bait on purpose. I look at the line still forming at the door, at the groups alternating at the tables, at everyone’s eyes. No one stands out. No one approaches me.
Maybe that’s it, I think: maybe the message has already been delivered, and the card was just a prank to take me out of circulation for a few hours.
Maybe Alexei is laughing now, testing my loyalty, forcing me to crawl through the underworld again just to be sure I haven’t lost my touch.
The old man with the cough starts to tremble next to me, coughing until tears well up, and the mother on the other side puts down her spoon to gently pat the old man’s back.
The boy takes advantage of the interval to eat part of the old man’s bread. The circulation of survival.
I’m about to get up when the chair in front of me scrapes on the floor, and a heavy tray lightly hits the table.
“May I?” a voice asks.
I don’t even look. Just another fucker in the soup line. I make a “whatever” gesture.
He sits down. The old man between us calms his cough and starts breathing through his nose again, the sound getting fainter and fainter. The boy next to him watches everything with the eyes of a rat.
“The nuns used to say that pain purified the soul,” the voice of the man with the tray sounds. “I always thought it was just a shitty excuse to let us bleed.”
My body freezes. It’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a decade. It has the smell, the taste, the sound of a past I forcibly killed years ago. Only one person in the world would say that, in that way, with that tone, in this situation.
I raise my eyes and look at his face for the first time.
It makes me dizzy: not because of the surprise, but because of the confirmation of a fear that has been with me since childhood.
Time has passed, but the eyes are the same.
The eyes of someone who has seen hell, survived, and came back to visit.
Eyes of an abyss, eyes of a reptile, the eyes of Cain.
“...Cain?” I say.
The noise of the soup kitchen—the coughs, the children’s screams, the sticky sound of plastic trays hitting the rusted metal of the tables—diminishes. First muffled, then suffocated.
There’s nothing holy in this refectory, except perhaps the absolute certainty of the final judgment.
Cain. Who would have thought? His face is thinner; the deep dark circles under his eyes create dark valleys, and his red hair, which was always cut in a military style, now grows at a strange angle, typical of someone who hasn’t seen their own reflection in weeks.
He’s wearing a cheap sweatshirt, the cuffs stained with pen ink, and his hands—those hands—rest on the countertop. His skin looks gray, covered in freckles. But his gaze is the same, rust under ice.
And it’s that gaze, fixed on me, that rips me out of my body and throws me back to that night.
None of this should affect me anymore. The trauma should be a muscle atrophied by routine, not a beast that wakes up every time I’m seen as a victim. But Cain is not just anyone, and time, in his case, only served to distill the essence of what was rotten and preserve what was beautiful.
I see it all again: the dimly lit basement, the smell of oil and blood, the wet sound of the blade, his look—of mercy, not sadism—when he positioned the machete on my arm. He cried. I saw it. And I never knew what to do with that fucking piece of information.
Now, I see the same hesitation, but it’s smaller. Tamed. Something tells me that if it were up to him alone, he wouldn’t be here. Not today, not ever. But I didn’t come here to pretend we’re friends. I came to understand what the fuck kind of pattern Alexei wanted me to decipher.
“Myrddin,” he says, almost inaudible over the refectory noise. His eyes fall to the prosthesis, and there’s the hesitation, the shame, the quick calculation of how many words it would take to explain the inexplicable. He doesn’t try. “Nice arm. The other side treats you well.”
He’s drawing the line in the sand. His world, and Alexei’s world.
The old man next to us, sensing the change in atmosphere, gathers his pieces of bread, shaking his head like someone who’s seen this movie before. The boy’s mother also picks up her things and moves the kid to the end of the table.
The space around us opens up, a vacuum created by the tension, and the two of us are sitting in the middle of the storm. Exactly like ten years ago.
“That’s because you took the real one as a souvenir,” I say. “Didn’t know it came with a return policy.”
Cain absorbs that like someone who always knew that one day he would slip back into the role of the defendant. His face hardens, pulling the thin skin taut over his bones, but he doesn’t immediately retort. He swallows the insult and digests it, perhaps out of habit or penance.
“I had no choice, Myr,” he whispers. “It was an order. You know that.”
“An order,” I repeat, the word tasting like ashes in my mouth. “And now? What’s the order of the day, Cain? Coming here to judge my boss while your guardian angel gets a fat check from his brother to be loyal?”
Cain falters, loses his composure, but recovers before I can capitalize. He didn’t expect me to know.
“You don’t understand,” he says, and like every convert, he seems to truly believe that life is an undecipherable code for the uninitiated. “He owes no loyalty to those worms. Seraphim is sacrificing things for us.”