28. Ivan
IVAN
Hugo did not call the police.
I’ve been waiting for it. The call that doesn’t come is sometimes louder than the one that does, and this one has been loud for three days now, sitting in the back of my awareness while I worked through the rest of it.
Hugo Dumas is— was —the public face of the family’s legitimate holdings. The hotels, the casino, the manufacturing arm in Bridgeport. His name is on letterheads and donor lists and the kind of charitable foundation photographs that exist so a man can point to them later. People know his face.
The police would have loved a reason to sit across from me, and Hugo walking into a precinct with what I did to his nose would have been a gift they’d have unwrapped with both hands.
He hasn’t called.
I have checked, twice, through channels that would know before any official report was filed. Nothing. I have been turning this over and arriving at the same answer each time, which is that Hugo knows something I haven’t confirmed yet—that the call would cost him more than it would cost me.
There are things I know about his secondary accounts and his arrangements with Witte that would surface in the course of any investigation.
A man who has spent three years skimming from an organization does not invite scrutiny even when scrutiny would wound the man he hates.
The math is simple enough even for Hugo.
Hugo is protecting Hugo. That has to be it. It’s the most consistent thing about him, and it is the thing that will keep him alive and keep him quiet. I find I have made my peace with that outcome even if peace is a strong word for what I have made.
He’s left with Olga’s family money and nothing else. No role. No access. No seat at any table I set. His nose is broken in two places.
His face, which has always been the thing he led with, the thing he pointed at when he wanted to be believed, will heal imperfectly. He will need a nose job to fix it. If it can be fixed.
I feel no satisfaction about it. That’s the part that surprises me each time I reach for it and find it absent. I expected satisfaction, and what I have instead is a kind of flatness, like a ledger that has been closed.
Hugo Dumas is no longer a problem in any meaningful sense—he’s just a man who made choices and is now living inside them, which is a cage of his own construction.
I expected to feel more. I feel finished.
I go to see Pyotr Witte at his office in the Gold Coast, which is not where he conducts his real business but is where he conducts the business of being seen conducting business—a distinction I understand well, having a few such rooms myself.
He meets me at the door, and the handshake is warmer and held a beat longer.
He has good coffee, and he pours it himself.
For a few minutes, we’re two men drinking coffee in a well-appointed room, a fiction we are both aware of and willing to maintain, because it is what makes the rest of it possible.
“The Hugo matter,” he says, when we are past the coffee portion.
“Resolved.”
He nods. He sets his cup down with the deliberateness of a man who has something to say and is deciding how to say it. “I want to reaffirm our agreement. What is his is not mine. I have no interest in your operations and no claim on what he told me.”
“I know.”
“You know, and you’re still sore about it.”
“Jaba was mine to handle. He wasn’t yours to cultivate.”
“Fair,” Pyotr says, without flinching. He sets his cup down. “I won’t insult you by arguing it. It was an opportunity, and I took it. You would have done the same.” He picks up his coffee again. “Hugo is a halfwit. You are better off with him at a distance.”
“We agree on that.”
“He thought proximity to you made him significant.” Pyotr turns his cup once in its saucer, a small rotation, considering. “Men like that are dangerous in a way that is hard to account for—not because they are capable, but because they are desperate. Desperation makes them unpredictable.”
“He is predictable enough now.”
Pyotr’s mouth moves. It is not quite a smile. “Yes. I imagine he is.” He pauses. “You would not happen to be looking for a young wife, would you?”
I look at him.
“I ask because I don’t have another daughter,” he says, before I can speak. “But Olga is less enchanted with Hugo these days. She may be single soon.”
“A widow?”
“We shall see.”
I sit with that for a moment. Hugo has earned whatever Pyotr’s patience eventually produces.
I don’t dispute it, and his survival past this point is his own problem to manage.
He has lied, cheated, stolen, and tricked his way into a situation that has no clean exit. I’m not required to find one for him.
And yet. “He’s still my stepbrother. In name only, and barely that. But in name. My family name carries weight. Not insults.”
Pyotr studies me. His expression doesn’t change, but something behind it shifts—the look of a man quietly revising his estimate of another and finding it higher than it was. “Noted.”
It is all he says on the matter. We finish the coffee and the meeting.
The drive back is long enough to be useful. I go through the remaining items in my head—the things that need doing now that Hugo is resolved and Pyotr is reaffirmed and the organization is running clean for the first time in months.
There’s a list. There’s always a list. I assign weight, sequence, and the names of the men who will handle each piece.
The list runs out somewhere on the expressway, and what’s left when it runs out is the quiet. I don’t like the quiet. Never have.
Tonight, the quiet is louder than the list was.
I miss her. She’s the channel I cannot change on the television of my mind. My favorite background noise. Lovely chaos.
There is a text on my phone from Luna from days ago.
I have read it before. I read it again.
Hairy is doing laps. I think he knows something happened. He’s very perceptive for a fish.
I look at it for a long time.
Four days ago, she was in her shop with her fish, and she was thinking about me, and she texted me about it the way she texts about everything—sideways, funny, with the ease of someone who assumes the other person is glad to hear from them.
And I was. I was glad. I read it at the time, standing in this same office, and felt the warmth of it land in the middle of whatever I was dealing with and stay there, the way things from Luna tend to stay.
I kept myself busy since things ended with her. Hugo, Pyotr, the organization, the list. All of it necessary. All of it, in the end, is beside the point.
There is a gap in the shape of things that was not there before Luna, and I know exactly what it is, and I don’t know what to do about it. She left a hole in my life.
How do I fill that hole? There is no spackle, no cement, nothing but Luna who will fit inside a Luna-shaped hole.
But she is afraid of what I am. She’s right to be careful, and I knew she was right even when I was standing in her kitchen saying the thing that ended it.
I went home knowing I had been honest, and that honesty was not the same as right.
I’ve been sitting with that knowledge for days while I kept myself busy with Hugo, Pyotr, and the list.
She said I lied to her, and I did, after a fashion. The reason I gave was true—she is too soft for the parts of my life that require what they require. My world is not hers. I cannot fix that.
I sit with my phone in my hand and the text on the screen and the gold light going off the buildings outside my window, and I think about a woman in a candle shop who named her fish Hairy and meant it seriously, who told me her fish was perceptive.
The memory leaves a tightness in my chest my cardiologist would order an analysis for.
I don’t respond to her text. It was four days ago. The window for that reply closed the night I walked down her stairs, and responding now would be something I’m doing for myself, not for her, which is not a good enough reason.
I put the phone down.
Once again, I have no idea what to do with my hands.