11. Adrianos
Adrianos
She sleeps like she argues, all the way committed, one arm flung off the edge of the mattress and her hair waging a private war with the pillow, and I lie still and give myself sixty seconds to count the reasons this is a problem.
The list runs long, and I won’t pretty it up.
She works for me, so every hour she’s under this roof she’s mine to keep breathing, and I’ve added a complication to a job that had no slack in it for one.
She’s under my protection, the same protection with a body count already attached to its name.
Kalliopi worked for me too, and Kalliopi’s in the ground in Queens under flowers this woman chose, and the line you can draw from that grave to this bed runs through my own two hands.
Elena and I lost the same person, hers a friend who could read her from front to back, mine one of the few I ever let near the real work, and neither of us has put her name in the air since the car.
The dead don’t need me in bed with their grieving best friend to feel they were loved.
And she’s the most oblivious creature about her own survival I’ve ever been handed responsibility for. A man cocked a pistol against her skull her first day on the payroll, and she walked out of it sorry she hadn’t gotten more time with the filing cabinet.
Last night moves nothing on that list. What I take from the sixty seconds is one rule for myself, that I’ll go easy on her this morning.
Not soft, I haven’t owned soft in decades, but she kept losing her sentences halfway through last night.
Every time I’ve been near her, she’s talked without a single gap in it, fast, certain, three steps ahead of me, and last night her body kept outrunning her mouth and leaving her with nothing to say.
A mind like hers won’t forgive that easily.
She’ll come into my kitchen daring me to make it small, and I won’t give her the satisfaction.
I get up without waking her. She doesn’t stir, dead to the world, and the house I move through to reach the kitchen is the same kind of quiet it was the mornings my son slept past noon, and I let him. I cut the thought there and put the coffee on instead.
The kitchen’s mine alone at this hour, Penelope’s not in yet, and the city outside’s going from gray to a thin gold along the river.
I make coffee the old way, slow over the flame in the little pot my grandmother used, the smell of it climbing the room, because there are three or four things in my life I still do with my own hands and refuse to hand off, and this is one.
I’m into the second cup when she comes to the doorway in last night’s sweater pulled back into place, chin already up, loaded for a fight she’s bracing to come.
“Coffee’s on the stove,” I tell her, and I stay put, hip to the counter, a full length of marble between us on purpose. “It’s strong. You look like a woman who takes it strong and insults it anyway.”
“I take it strong, and I don’t insult; I assess.
” She crosses to the stove and pours. I watch her notice the gap I’m holding, the distance I put between us before she was awake.
It loosens her shoulders half an inch, the relief of it, but then that same half inch tightens again with irritation.
She’s impossible to please, which shouldn’t intrigue me as much as it does.
“You’re keeping that counter between us on purpose,” she says, into the cup.
“I’m drinking my coffee.”
“You’re drinking coffee on the far side of the room like I’m contagious.
Last night you carried me to bed, and this morning the counter’s a demilitarized zone.
” She drinks, watching me over the rim, honey eyes gone sharp before the caffeine’s even hit.
“I’m not asking you to feel things, you’d be bad at it.
I’m logging the reversal for the record, because I keep good records, it’s the whole reason I’m in this kitchen instead of dead in an office in the Garment District. ”
That last one she throws like it’s nothing, but it isn’t nothing, and the fact that she can put the gun and the paperwork into one joke before nine in the morning is its own wound.
“The policy hasn’t moved,” I tell her. “The work’s the work. Last night changes what happens between us when the work’s done for the day, but it changes nothing about what you are to the people I’m hunting, or what I need from you to reach them.”
“That was almost graceful.” She tips her head. “You rehearse it over the coffee, or does the diplomacy arrive pre-pressed, like the suits?”
“I have range, koukla. You’ve seen a thin slice.” The warmth comes up under the words, the charm I keep idling at all hours, a tool, and I know it’s a tool, and she rolls her eyes at it, but then her mouth twitches at the corner.
“There it is. The setting.” She points the cup at me.
“You turn the charm on like a faucet, and you think I can’t see your hand on the tap.
I’ve spent my whole life watching men turn taps.
The difference is most of them are hiding an empty account behind it, and you’re hiding a full one, which is worse, because a full one I can’t dismiss. ”
“You’ve thought a great deal about my big, fat account.”
“I’ve thought a great deal about every account in this building; it’s my job.
Don’t flatter yourself into the list.” She tears a piece of bread off the board and points it at me instead, an upgrade in weaponry.
The flush climbing her throat undercuts the whole performance, and she knows it’s there; she talks faster to outrun it.
“And quit looking pleased. You get this face when I say something true, like I’ve handed you a gift.
It’s unnerving. Men are supposed to flinch when I’m right, but you’re enjoying it. ”
“I told you at the bar that I’d rather be handed the thing I missed than be comfortable.” I drink. “You keep handing it to me. I keep being grateful. I don’t see the problem you’re describing.”
“The problem I’m describing is that I came in here braced for you to make last night nothing, to hand me some cool little speech about keeping it professional, and instead you’re being decent about it, and decent from you is more destabilizing than cold would’ve been, and you know that, which is why you picked it.
” She chews, swallows, and the heat creeps up her throat as the next thing arrives before her filter can stop it.
“Also, you left a mark on my neck, and I had to find it in the bathroom mirror like a teenager, so spare me the gentleman act; you were not a gentleman last night.”
“Left side. I know exactly where it is.” I hold her eyes, and the color climbs higher, and she scowls to bury it. “I put it there on purpose. I won’t be apologizing for accurate work.”
“You’re too old to preen over a hickey.” She drags the back of her hand across the corner of her mouth, the tell she doesn’t know she has, the one she ran all night when her brain got ahead of her tongue.
“We’re going to be normal about this. I’ve decided.
I’m a professional, you’re a deranged Greek crime lord with a coffee fetish, and we’re going to be completely normal. ”
“You forgot to mention my big, fat cock, the one you’ve enjoyed twice now.” The blush climbs higher, and I let myself enjoy it. “You’re doing wonderfully at normal.”
“I hate you before nine. Write it down.”
“Eat first. You go feral on an empty stomach and full of caffeine, and I’ve a long enough day without you vibrating through the walls.” I set the cup down. “I’m going into the bank this morning. See how the business breathes without me over its shoulder.”
She finishes the bread. “Go pat your legitimate money while I look for clues on how to save your ass.”
“Much obliged. It’s a fine ass.”
“I’ve seen better.” She’s grinning now, having lost the fight to hold it.
“Somehow, I doubt that,” I say with a wink.
My phone lights up on the counter with a name. I closed a deal across the night I shared a bathroom encounter with Elena in Lux, and I take it, because Petros doesn’t call to make conversation.
“Kallistratos,” I answer.
“Adrianos, sir.” Quick, pitched lower than he ran at Lux, the salesman scrubbed out of his voice.
“I’ve got something. The kind of something a man doesn’t say on a phone.
Money moving in patterns that sit right on top of the hits against the Crown, the framing, the whole bloody business.
I think it touches what everyone’s been bleeding for. ”
“Go on.”
“Not on a line. Face to face, somewhere with people, daylight on it.” A breath.
“I’ll be honest with you, I think I’ve picked up a tail.
Two days now, same sedan twice, a face that keeps turning up where I am.
” Then a laugh, short, abashed at himself.
“Listen to me. It’s probably nothing. I close one clean deal with the great Kallistratos, and overnight I’m a man in a thriller, flinching at my own driver.
Paranoia. This life breeds it. We all get there. ”
“Pick the place. Open, busy, daylight like you said.” I keep my voice level, because the thing he’s laughing off is the thing that happens on a daily basis in my line of business. “I’ll come to you. Today.”
He gives me the name of the restaurant, and I repeat it back to him to confirm.
“I’ll see you there in an hour,” he says, ending the call.
I set the phone down and turn. Elena’s not at the breadboard anymore. She’s two feet off my elbow with the coffee held to her chest and her eyes already lit with the thing that put a cocked hammer against her skull on her first day under my roof.
“Money in patterns that sit on top of the hits,” she says.
I can hear the case assembling under it, the sentences stretching longer the closer she gets to the conclusion I haven’t agreed to.
“He’s got primary information and he’s scared enough to want witnesses around him, which means it’s solid, and if it’s solid then I have to be in that room when he opens his mouth, because you’ll hear a frightened man telling a story and I’ll hear what his money’s been doing while he tells it, and those are two different instruments, and you hired me for the second one, you hired me for the gap between what a man says and what his accounts confess, so don’t stand there and tell me the one meeting where both halves matter is the one I sit out. ”
“No.”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
I lift the cup, drink, set it down between us on the marble I spent all morning keeping wide. “You’re not coming.”