12. Ivan
IVAN
Boris Malsagov does not take meetings. He takes lunches, and the distinction, properly understood, is the entire man and half his biography.
A meeting can be rescheduled or delegated. A lunch requires your body in a chair across from his for two hours, eating what he orders, because he will order for the table without consulting the menu or you, and what you do with those two hours tells him everything the contracts won’t.
Boris is seventy-one. He has outlived two indictments, several wars, and multiple assassination attempts, so aside from his age, we have a lot in common.
We meet at the place he favors on Devon, where the owner kisses his cheeks, and the back room holds one table.
I arrive four minutes early, by design. Boris is already there, because arriving first is a statement about whose city it is, and I let him have it, because the statement costs me nothing and feeds him for an hour.
“Ivan Federov.” He doesn’t rise, waves me into the chair with two fingers. “You look less tired than the last time. Something agrees with you.”
“The freight business.” I let him enjoy not believing me.
“No one in history has looked rested because of freight.” He pours the tea himself. “We will eat first. Then you will tell me why I should still trust a man whose family is marrying into Witte’s house.”
So, there it is, on the table before the bread, which, from Boris, is a courtesy. He could have let it rot underneath the lunch and watched me dance around it. Instead, he is straightforward, a tactic he affords very few.
The lamb arrives, and then the eggplant, and by the time the flatbread is torn by his own hands, I knew where we’re heading.
He tells me about his granddaughter, who has advanced to regionals with the violin, second chair, robbed of first chair by politics he describes in the vocabulary of racketeering.
“Surely such oversight can be amended.”
His lips coil into a grim smile. “I prefer to let my progeny figure out their own way in the world. If I fix everything for them, they learn nothing.”
“Wise.”
Then the plates are cleared, the tea is refreshed, and Boris folds his hands. “The wedding. Your brother and the Witte girl.”
“Stepbrother.”
“To the city, family is family. To me, also.” His eyes are old and black and miss nothing. “Pyotr Witte and I have a history. You know this, everyone knows this. The history has its own zip code.”
“Da. Your conflict is well-known.”
He turns his glass a quarter rotation, the only fidget he owns. “I do not do business beside that man, downstream of that man, or within smelling distance of that man. So, when your house puts a ring on his daughter, I’m required to ask what I’m sitting at this table with.”
“You are sitting with me.” I let that stand alone for a moment, because it is the entire answer.
Then I give him the rest, because Boris has earned paragraphs.
“Hugo married for his own table, not mine. He did not ask, did not inform, and did not understand what he was disturbing, because he has never once given a shit about anyone but himself.”
“Sounds like a bad attribute in a captain.”
“It is. Which is why his title might be captain within our ranks, but to the outside world, he is a public-facing mouthpiece and nothing more. The organization’s commitments are made by me. They are unchanged.”
“Unchanged.”
“Greenstone’s corridor moves on our freight on the terms we built, and no dinner at Pyotr Witte’s house alters one comma of it, because no one at that dinner signs that deal but me.”
Boris watches me through the steam off his tea. Seventy-one years of reading men across tables, and he takes his time about it, while I sit still and let myself be read. It’s the only move that works on him, because it’s not really a move.
“Your father,” he says finally, “would have lied to me just now. Beautifully. I would have enjoyed it and counted my fingers afterward to make sure I still had them. He was slick, your father.”
“I do not have such qualities, Boris. As you are well aware. My word is my bond.”
“You are direct. No finesse. No games. No fun.” He lifts the cognac the owner brings without being asked, two glasses, his ritual for concluded business. “You’re a less entertaining man and a far better investment. The corridor proceeds. Papers to your Armin by Thursday.”
We drink. He tells me one more violin story, this one with a villain, an adjudicator from Skokie whose name he pronounces the way other men spit, and walks me to the door himself, hand heavy on my shoulder.
“Watch your house, Ivan Federov,” he says, in parting, quiet enough for two. “A man who rearranges your deals without asking will do it again. The second time, he asks someone else’s permission instead of yours. Make sure you know whose.”
“Hugo will not get another play over me. I assure you.”
He pats my shoulder twice, grandfather and warlord in the same gesture, and goes back in to finish the cognac alone. His warning rides with me to the car.
The trouble is, he’s absolutely right. I know it, thanks to Armin’s hard work and my own instinct. Every move Hugo has made for months has been to undermine me.
Now, the question is how to retaliate.
The drive back is long with the lake on the right, and the city assembling itself out of the haze. Strange to see fog this late in the day. I should be thinking about lunch. At the first stoplight, I hear three beeps for the three texts from Luna.
Scent emergency. F-2 smells haunted in a good way for exactly one hour and then the dry-down goes church basement. I need a second nose.
What I wouldn’t give to have the biggest emergency in my life be scent-related.
To be clear, the second nose is you. You smell things honestly. Cherry flatters me and Mike says everything smells great, which is sweet and useless.
Me?
Hairy abstained. Cowardice.
I read all three twice. They’re equally silly and equally innocuous, and I don’t want to stop reading them.
There is a board meeting brief on the seat beside me, papers to review, names in my pocket, and a feud to choreograph.
The full freight of an ordinary Tuesday.
But I look at the second nose is you, a method to be useful to her in a way that has nothing to do with what I am and everything to do with who, and the freight loses by knockout in the first round.
I’ll be there at seven, I type . Tell the fish the abstention is noted in his file .
The shop at seven has its sign flipped but its lights warm, and through the glass I watch her cross the floor to let me in, wearing an apron with wax on it.
There’s a pencil in her hair, and the smile she opens the door with is unstaged and uncalculated.
The smile of a woman whose second nose has arrived.
No one has ever looked at me that way in a doorway. Or anywhere else.
I’ve been received with respect, with fear, with hunger, with terror that the trouble has come in person. Never with uncomplicated gladness. I don’t know what to think of that.
“Okay.” She steers me to the worktable by the sleeve, where a battlefield is laid out, numbered jars, blotter strips in ranks, her notebook dense with cramped verdicts. “F-2. Smell it cold first, then lit. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. That defeats the entire enterprise.”
I smell it cold. I smell it lit. She watches my face with the focus of an auditor at year-end.
I clear my throat, because this is clearly serious for her, and I want to be heard well.
“Cold, it’s good. Smoke, old wood, something underneath—” I stop, reroute around the lazy comparison, and give her the exact one. “The inside of a violin case.”
Her pencil stops moving. “I like that.”
I continue the report. “Lit, the scent holds at first. Then something goes wrong. Wet cardboard, or?—”
“Church basement,” she says, vindicated, stabbing the air with her pencil. “I knew it, it’s the sandalwood base, it’s cheap. My supplier swore it was the good batch, and it’s not the good batch.” She writes a sentence with violence in it, and then looks up.
“Violin case. That’s the heart of it, that’s exactly the heart of it. You have a real nose, Big Guy. You could have been a perfumer if you weren’t, you know, whatever the technical term is for your job.”
“Logistics.”
“Logistics,” she agrees, gravely, and snorts, and hands me the next jar, and I realize I have just been complimented more sincerely than at any board meeting in a decade.
We work through six of them. That’s my entire evening, the whole itinerary, six jars and her pencil and the radiator clanking its commentary.
No fistfights, no missing inventory. No one threatening to crash my organization, no stepbrother trying to thwart my work.
Is this what a normal life is like?
At some point, she puts a sandwich in front of me, half of hers, cut on her cutting board with her one good knife, and I eat it standing at her worktable in a suit that costs more than her quarterly rent. It’s the best meal of my week by a distance that should embarrass the casino’s chef.
Later, Hairy is fed, and she hands me the flake canister, an investiture I receive with appropriate ceremony. “I’m honored.”
“It’s fish flakes.”
I sprinkle some in, and the fish takes the flakes from my side of the tank. “See? He trusts me.”
She smiles up at me. “Yeah, I think he does.”
“Thus, honored.”
She giggles under her breath, then leans into me, and it’s the greatest moment I’ve had in days. There’s a thing I keep turning over while she relabels F-2 for reformulation.
I have been included in many things. Transactions, ceremonies, wars in miniature, the grave deliberations of serious men. People include me when the matter is large. I fix things. I end things that need endings.
No one has ever included me in a Tuesday. No one has ever handed me half a sandwich, a numbered jar, and a jar of fish flakes, expecting my participation. It’s the small mundanity of a normal life. No one has ever thought I’d want to be involved in such things.
But I want that. Exactly that.
I want the jars and the radiator and the pencil in her hair, the fish’s significant flakes, the church-basement scent crisis and its sequel. The large matters have my whole biography. The small ones, it turns out, were the overlooked asset all along.
She walks me to the door at ten, unlocks it, and stands on her toes to kiss me, tasting of the coffee she shouldn’t drink this late, and says, “Same nose next batch?”
“Standing appointment.”
She grins. “Excellent. Be right out.”
I wait on the sidewalk, while she locks up behind me, two bolts and the bar, and through the glass she waves with the pencil still in her hair. The tank light glows behind her in the dark shop, and I walk to the car, having concluded the most profitable meeting of my day.