21. Mat
MAT
I’m ready to fucking murder whoever is pounding on my door.
I’m awake already. Have been since two. I haven’t slept a full night since the Pierre. I’m sitting at my kitchen island in a pair of sweats and an undershirt, halfway through my second espresso, when three hard raps on my front door jar me into action.
I rip open my door to find Uncle Afon in the hallway in his black wool overcoat, hands in his pockets, hat pulled low. His grey beard is freshly trimmed. His eyes are the same flat grey they’ve been my whole life, the color of a river that’s about to ice over.
“Get dressed,” he says. “We’re going for a drive.”
He doesn’t tell me where. He never does, when he gets in moods like this one. I’ve learned not to ask.
I dress fast. I clip the Glock to my hip out of habit, then think better of it and lock it back in the drawer in the hall console.
In the elevator, he doesn’t speak. The Mercedes is idling at the curb with one of his men behind the wheel, a kid I half-recognize from a wedding two summers ago. Afon takes the back; I slide in next to him. The kid pulls into traffic without a word.
We head north. The FDR is empty at this hour, the river still black, the bridges hung with their string of orange lamps. The city looks softer when nobody’s awake to mess it up. I’m guessing that’s exactly what we’re on our way to do, though.
We cross the Henry Hudson into the Bronx, then up into Yonkers. The streets get wider and uglier. Warehouses with sagging roofs. Chain-link strung over chain-link. A wig shop with its grate still down. The kind of neighborhood where the street lamps only work every other pole.
The car turns into a body shop with a faded sign that reads ROCCO’S COLLISION Afon is a silencer. Dad would have spent the ride telling me what a sentimental idiot I’d been at the Pierre, what a liability, what a disgrace. He’d have spit it at the windshield until he ran out of breath.
Afon, instead, lets the silence do the work. He lets me sit in it and listen to my own pulse and figure out, on my own, what is important.
It’s somewhere on the West Side, around 96th Street, that he finally speaks.
“I know you’ve gone soft on something, plemyannik .
” I start to argue, but he raises a pacifying hand.
“I don’t need to know what. That is your business.
But I needed you to see that today. So that, when the moment comes, the next moment, the real one, you do not hesitate again.
Whatever it is that made you come back from the Pierre with the gun still cold, I am asking you to put it in a box and stow that box on a high shelf, out of sight, until the job is done.
Two weeks from now, once this thing is finished, the box is yours again.
Whatever is in it. You can take it down and open it and live with it however you want. Yes?”
He turns back to the window. The conversation, such as it is, is over.
We don’t speak again until the kid pulls up in front of my building.
I get out. The morning is bright now, the sidewalk crowded with the first wave of suits hustling toward the subway.
Afon rolls his window down halfway and rests his forearm on the frame.
The wedding band on his hand is the same plain gold he’s worn for twenty-one years, even though he’s been a widower for twenty of them.
“Eat something today,” he advises. “You look like shit.”
Then he taps the door once with his knuckle, and they’re gone.
I stand on the sidewalk and watch them go.
But just before I turn to go inside, my phone buzzes in my coat pocket.
Not the work phone. The other one. The black one, the small one. The burner.
I pull it out.
CASS
I need you. Now.