10. Ivan
IVAN
Armin Kazarian has been my sovetnik for many years, and in all that time, he’s never opened a meeting with small talk, which is half of why he’s lasted this long.
The other half is that he tells me what I don’t want to hear in the same voice he uses for lunch orders, and this morning, the voice is in the door before he is.
“Hugo is maneuvering,” he says, taking the chair across my desk and steepling his fingers. “Pyotr Witte has dined at his home twice this month. Private, family-style, the wives present.”
“And?”
“And Pyotr has begun asking questions around the edges of our organization. Structural questions, succession questions. The questions a man asks about a company he is considering investing in, or acquiring.”
I set down my pen, because this deserves both hands on the desk. “Aside from Hugo, he’s asking whom?”
“Carefully chosen people. Men one circle out from the center, flattered to be asked anything.” Armin’s mouth does its thin line. “And your stepbrother has been doing the seating charts. He’s positioning himself as the modern option, accessible, reasonable, fluent in the century.”
“And me?”
“The vocabulary in circulation is old-world. Inflexible.” A pause, surgical. “Relic.”
There it is again. The word arrives wearing Hugo’s voice from the rehearsal-dinner corridor, champagne breath, and borrowed courage. The accusation has stopped stinging and started clarifying.
A man tells you his entire campaign strategy in the insult he chooses.
Hugo is not building an argument that I’m weak, because no one would believe that.
The city has too much evidence on file. He’s building an argument that I’m over, which is cheaper, and requires only repetition and an audience.
Repetition is the one craft my stepbrother has mastered.
And he is renting the audience through his father-in-law, paying in dinners and deference, the only two currencies he has ever minted himself.
“Assessment.”
Armin blows out a long breath. “Witte is shopping, not buying. Yet . But Hugo married his only daughter, which gives him a permanent seat at Pyotr’s table, and dinner is where empires actually move.”
I sit with that. He’s not wrong—Pyotr knows how to make things happen in other people’s empires. That’s what’s made him such a profitable man. But there are ways to maneuver around his strengths. “What options do you see, Armin?”
“A counter-campaign. We cultivate Pyotr directly and cut out the middleman. It wouldn’t hurt us to have Witte Corp in our pocket if Greenstone goes sideways. Two weapons manufacturers on friendly terms with us, instead of one. Redundancy is a virtue.”
A grim proposition. On paper, it is a clean idea, and I let him have the silence while I take it apart, because the flaw is not on paper. The flaw is personal, and it’s the reason I know this map better than my counselor does, because I inherited it annotated.
My father did business with both houses decades ago, before their feud went to court and then went somewhere worse than court.
He kept a file on it that read less as intelligence and more as scripture.
Certain enmities, he told me once, are load bearing.
Remove them, and the men collapse, because the hatred’s the last original thing either of them owns.
“It won’t work,” I say. “Greenstone is Boris Malsagov. Boris and Pyotr have had a blood feud over a contract since before you had gray hair, and neither man will share a room, a market, or an ally with the other. There is no both. There has never been a both.”
Armin waits, because he can hear the rest coming.
“Any alliance is one or the other, and Hugo made the selection for the entire organization the day he proposed to Olga Witte. Without asking, without noticing, possibly without knowing the history, because the history is older than his attention span.”
Armin absorbs this. “And we’re already in business with Boris.”
“Eighteen months of careful work with Boris, lunches and lamb, and his granddaughter’s recital schedule.
” All that fucking work for nothing. My fist balls without a thought.
“Everything which Hugo’s wedding placed a question mark over in Boris’s mind, where question marks become grudges and grudges become policy or worse. ”
“Hugo has always been impertinent, but marrying into Pyotr’s family was a direct hit to your reputation. His dinners do you no favors.”
My stepbrother reorganized our entire strategic map to upgrade his dinner invitations, and he wouldn’t understand the sentence if I said it to his face. Or, he simply wouldn’t care. Regardless, I must handle the fallout. “That is the actual damage. Not the whispering. The math.”
“Then what we do is, by necessity, uglier,” Armin says, unbothered, because ugly is where he does his best work. “Keep them both warm. Golf with Boris, drinks with Pyotr, separate rooms, separate flattery, no photographs.”
“Court them both.” It’s less a question than it is an unpalatable proposition.
He spreads his hands, presenting it. “Let each of them believe you are taking him to the prom, so to speak, and delay choosing a corsage until we see which way Hugo’s little campaign breaks.”
“That’s a recipe for disaster.”
“It’s a recipe for time,” he says. “Disaster is optional and comes later, if you cook badly. You’ll not cook badly. You never have.”
“There’s a first time for every menu.”
“Yes,” Armin agrees pleasantly. “And it’s still the safest move.”
I run the projections while he waits. Playing both sides of a blood feud is a maneuver that ends careers and occasionally pulses, and ten years ago, I would have refused it on that fact alone.
But the board is what the board is. I cannot drop Boris without burning eighteen months and confirming every word Hugo is whispering about decline, and I cannot ignore Pyotr while he is being courted nightly by a man with my surname in his marriage license.
There are no good options, only expensive ones.
Court them both and risk my neck, or pick one and guarantee I lose my head.
“Very well. I take Boris personally, lunches, no golf, he despises golf. You handle the Pyotr channel socially for now until I decide the moment is right for a direct meeting.”
“And the men answering Pyotr’s questions?”
“Their names on my desk by Friday. Not for consequences. For inventory.”
“Already compiling.” He stands, smooths his jacket, and pauses at the door with the expression he wears when he’s about to exceed his portfolio. “One more item. You seem distracted lately. Not impaired, distracted. As your counselor, I’m required to ask whether it’s a security matter.”
“It’s not a security matter.”
“Then it’s the other kind.” He does not smile, but something adjacent to it passes through. “Those are historically more expensive.”
“Mm.” He’s not wrong, which is the irritating part, and he knows he’s not wrong, which is the more irritating part. I’m distracted. The distraction has a name, a shop, and a goldfish, and it does not behave the way distractions are supposed to.
Distraction is supposed to be a debt you pay down, an itch that quiets once scratched.
I have scratched, and the itch has instead developed infrastructure.
I think about her at unscheduled times. Reviewing the casino numbers this morning, I caught myself wondering what she’d say about the pastry chef in our steakhouse, and I lost four minutes to constructing her argument, in her voice, and enjoying it.
This is the part I would not say to Armin, and the part he’s already half-assembled. There’s no angle in which Luna Ambrose advances the organization, shields me from Hugo, or improves my position with Boris or Pyotr.
She is, strategically, a liability with excellent posture. The rational play is to conclude the arrangement now, cleanly, with a gift, the way such arrangements normally conclude.
But I find I don’t have the heart to do so.
On Tuesday, she sent me a picture of her goldfish in front of a tiny paper sign reading “No swimming” , no caption, no explanation, and I closed my office door and laughed alone for the first time in far too long.
Thursday, she described the smell of rain on hot pavement for two unprompted minutes.
Petrichor, she said. But as she put it, “Smells like fresh steamed corn.”
I can’t argue with that.
When she fell asleep on my couch, the penthouse stopped being a holding I maintained and became a place I was in, The difference between those two conditions is one I didn’t know existed until that moment. Now it’s the only metric that matters to me.
A man my age, in my work, knows exposure from every angle. I’m currently viewing it from inside.
The afternoon proceeds. Captains send reports. Freight, the casino, a signature dispute in Cicero that requires fourteen minutes and one phone call. The last two minutes of the call are silence on my end, which is when the signature happens.
More can be said with silence than words, and that particular silence earns a wobbly, “Yes, Mr. Fedorov. Of course.”
At six, Armin’s preliminary list arrives, containing the men who answered Pyotr’s questions. One name I underline, not because the man matters, but because he reports to a man who does. Jaba Fainberg.
Given all the noise he’s made as of late, I hope, for his sake, that this is merely two coincidences and not a trending behavior.
At seven, my phone sounds. Luna.
Settle a debate. Hairy has opinions about the new fall scent. Cherry says fish don’t have opinions. This is discrimination, and he’s considering legal action.
I look at the message for a long moment, the whole gray day of maps and feuds and relics standing behind me, and feel the day lose the vote. Somehow, the tedium of my life is nothing in comparison to the discrimination lawsuit of a goldfish.
The fish has been right before. Note his objection formally. I’ll review the evidence on Friday .
Three dots while she relays this to the plaintiff.
He says you’re the only one in management who respects him. Also Cherry says to tell you nothing.
I smile, typing back, I understand why she would not wish to influence the judge, however, I’m to be presented with all the evidence before I render a verdict.
A smiley face pops up, and then, a picture of a smiling Luna and Hairy’s blank fishy expression.
I put the phone face-down, return to the names, and find their names blur together.
I don’t much care right now about bratva politicking.
Hugo’s whispering to the city that I’m a relic, old-world, finished, and somewhere on the south side, a goldfish has filed a formal objection, and only one of those two facts is going to matter in the end.
I know which one Hugo would pick. He was always smarter than he is wise. He’s trying to take my place. He got married to solidify his position. A bold move. One that means business.
Honestly, I should be concerned.
But as I look at my phone again, at her smiling face and her fish, all I can think is, I wish she were here.