33. Mat
MAT
My mind has been full of Cass all week long. Ever since I dropped her off in front of her penthouse, I felt like I was fucking abandoning her. That’s an absurd thought—it’s not as if I could just drag her back into the car and whisk her away with me for good.
Unless…
Unless I just did .
What if? What if I drove us straight to JFK, abandoned the car in the parking garage, and put us on a flight to anywhere.
Lisbon, Buenos Aires, some dusty corner of Croatia where no one would think to look—I don’t give a damn.
We’ll leave all this shit behind. I’ll keep a gun buried beneath the floorboards of whatever love nest we find to call our own, because you can only outrun your past so far, but besides that, it’ll be a fresh start.
Her face will never be bruised again.
I’ve played out the fantasy a hundred times this week. It’s gotten more vivid each time. I can see the kitchen window. I can see her standing in the sun pouring through the glass, belly rounded out, smiling at me like an angel.
It’s an unforgivable thing, for a man like me to want a thing like that.
I didn’t know I was capable of it. I’ve always thought the wanting parts of me had been cauterized at fifteen, when Afon dragged me bleeding out of an alley and my father wasn’t dragged out at all. I made myself into a man who didn’t need shit.
Suits. Whiskey. Women I forgot by morning. That’s all it took to sustain me.
Then a wild filly walked into Khaza and everything got flipped upside down.
I shake my head and focus as I park the car, step out, and turn up the collar of my coat against the vicious January chill. The cold off the ocean here in Brighton Beach is a different beast than the cold in Manhattan. It’s wetter, nastier, and far more invasive..
Lowering my head, I cut past a trio of old men in fur hats arguing on the park bench. Trash swirls around my feet as I cross Brighton Beach Avenue toward Café Volna.
Volna is the kind of place that tourists who accidentally took the Q train too far would never dare wander into to ask for help.
The windows are tinted. The menu out front is hand-lettered in Russian, no translation offered.
The man at the door isn’t a host; he’s a guy named Volodya with a neck as thick as a woman’s waist, uglier than sin, with no concept of manners or human kindness.
Volodya looks up from his phone and grunts at me.
“He back there?” I ask.
He jerks his chin toward the swinging door behind the bar. “In the kitchen. Don’t touch the pelmeni . They’re for the lunch.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I move past him and through the dining room, which is empty except for two grandmothers sharing a plate of syrniki near the radiator.
Neither of them looks up. They’ve seen plenty of men walk through this room toward that swinging door, and they understand precisely how unwise it would be to pay too much attention.
In the sweltering kitchen, a round woman in a hairnet is rolling out dough at the prep table. She doesn’t look at me, either. Not looking is the smartest thing anyone can do in a joint like this.
I push through a second door at the back and into a smaller room with a single steel table and a calendar pinned to the wall from a Russian funeral home.
Afon, unsurprisingly, has beaten me here.
He’s seated with his back to the wall, a small glass of tea in front of him, his coat folded over the chair.
His Sobranies are out on the table. So is a saucer of sugar cubes.
“You’re late,” he says.
“Sue me.”
I claim a seat as he pushes a second glass of tea across the table at me. It’s searing hot. I wrap my hand around it and let it burn my palm a little.
He lights up a cigarette and squints at me over the swirling smoke. “Did you sleep at all this week?”
“Did you?”
He chuckles and reaches for a sugar cube. He drops it into his tea, watches it sink, then stirs with the tiny spoon. The clink of the metal against the glass is the only sound in the room for a long moment.
“So,” he says. “Oglethorpe. Anyone interesting to point a finger at?”
“I have ideas,” I say. “Nothing I’d sign my name to quite yet.”
He nods slowly. “I have ideas, too. Lukas has ideas. Everyone has ideas. The problem with ideas is that they multiply.” He jabs the cigarette at me. “You think it was Raymond?”
I turn the tea glass a quarter rotation. “I think Raymond left the retreat in a hurry on a phone call, and twelve hours later, one of his name partners was on a slab. And I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I.”
“But.”
“But…?” he questions.
I exhale. “Bill pulled me aside in the woods that morning. He looked spooked as hell. He told me Raymond was not a good man , in those exact words. He thinks Raymond keeps files on the senior partners. Things they’ve signed, looked away from.
Said Raymond’s been leaning on those files lately.
Then Raymond came sauntering up and Bill changed the subject so fast he gave himself whiplash. ”
Afon’s spoon stops moving in the glass. “So Bill was scared of Raymond, and he confessed that to you,” he summarizes. “And now, Bill is dead. That’s consistent with the simple story. And yet you don’t look convinced.”
“It’s just that…” I work my jaw as I voice the things that have been bothering me since the moment those red-and-blue lights first lit up the inside of the room where I had Cass spread out beneath me.
“Bill was useful to him. Why snip that thread now? Killing Bill couldn’t have been easy or expensive.
It sure as fuck wasn’t quiet. So what’s the long game here? ”
Afon shrugs. “Men make stupid choices when they’re cornered.”
“Or when somebody else is making the choices for them.”
My uncle’s eyes lift to mine. They’re tired eyes. They’ve been that way since I was fifteen. Behind them is a man who is still, in some unsalvageable way, my father’s little brother, and who has spent fifteen years paying a tab on my behalf.
“Elaborate,” he says.
I lean forward, lowering my voice even though there’s no one in this room but us. “What if Raymond isn’t the head of the Syndicate?”
He signals for me to go on.
“What if Raymond is the face ?” I press on.
“Can’t you see it? The legitimate-looking American man in a Brioni suit, with a corner office in Midtown and a Park Slope penthouse and a beautiful wife on his arm at the country club?
What if the Vainakh Syndicate is using him the exact same way Raymond used Bill?
Think about it: He can get so much done that these shady Eastern European fucks can’t yet manage to do themselves.
He walks money through customs. He files the paperwork.
But he doesn’t call the big shots; someone else does.
So what if Raymond didn’t like that… and Bill knew that Raymond didn’t like that…
and Bill decided he’d be better off casting his lot with literally anybody else? ”
Afon sucks down a long drag, then exhales the smoke toward the ceiling. “You been thinking about this a while,” he guesses.
“Yeah. All fucking week.”
“You been thinking it before that, too,” he accuses. “You just didn’t say.”
“Maybe. Who cares?”
“Matvei. Listen to me, plemyannik . I am going to tell you something that I want you to hear. Are you listening? Because this is important.” Rapping his Zippo on the table with every word, he says, “It. Does. Not. Matter.”
I balk. “Uncle?—”
“It does not matter ,” he repeats. “Whether Raymond is the head, or the face, or the fucking necktie, it does not change things. Whether he is the one who chose Bill to die, or the one who passed along the choice… Whether Vainakh has one boss or twelve… None of that is the question in front of us. The question in front of us is whether you and I, the Satyrin men, are going to be free of our obligation to Lukas Lazarev, or whether we are going to die working for him. That is the question. There is no other thing worth asking.”
He flicks ash onto the saucer as the cherry of his cigarette glows.
“I take your point,” I mutter.
“Do you, though?” The little glass of tea between his hands is steaming up into his face, fogging the bottom of his reading glasses.
“Because I’ve been listening to you for the last ten minutes spout unfounded theories about Raymond’s relationship to this organization, and not one second about how we put a bullet in him. ”
“One thing leads to the next.”
“Two things can be adjacent without having a damn thing to do with one another, Mat.” He stubs the Sobranie out on the saucer.
A second one is in his mouth before the first one has even stopped burning.
“Let me lay this out for you the way I would lay it out for a stupider nephew, since my smart nephew seems to be having a hard time hearing me today.”
I wave a disgusted hand at him. “By all means. The floor is yours.”
“There are three days between us and freedom. We can shed our debts and walk the fuck out the door. All you have to do is end the life of a miserable bastard who more than deserves it. Nothing could be simpler or more important. So what I want you to do is this,” he concludes. “Tell me the motherfucking plan.”
I take a slow sip of tea. It burns my tongue, but I welcome the pain because it gives me something to do other than look at him.
I set the glass down. “The DeMaris wedding is Saturday night at the Plaza. Raymond will be drinking, and he’ll need to piss every forty minutes like clockwork.
On his way out, I’ll redirect him into the service hallway behind the kitchen.
There are no cameras on the loading dock.
I use a small caliber with a suppressor to put two in his chest, one in his head.
Amateurish spread so no one suspects professional involvement.
I’ll dust the grip, then make sure the weapon ends up in Cass— uh, in the wife’s purse.
When the police search the serial number, they’ll find it’s registered under her name. Game, set, match.”
I feel sick as I speak. When I’m finished laying it all out, Afon balances his still-burning cigarette on the edge of the saucer and starts to applaud, slowly and sarcastically.
“See? Simple. Was that so hard?”
The wife. Fuck, even calling her that makes my stomach churn. She hasn’t been the wife in a very long time. She’s been Cass, my wild filly, my dikarka.
Afon is squinting at me like he’s seen exactly where my thoughts have gone. “What is it?” he asks.
“What is what?”
“The look on your face.”
“I don’t have a look on my face, Uncle.”
He nods. “Good. Keep it that way. Remember what I told you, Matvei: Put your heart in a box on a shelf. In our world, it’s irrelevant. Best kept out of reach.”
I lift my eyes. He is across the steel table from me, my father’s little brother, the man who once washed somebody else’s blood out of my hair in a gas station bathroom outside Newark and bought me a Coke afterwards, then proceeded to not say a word about it for fifteen years.
“It’s on the shelf,” I echo numbly. “It isn’t coming down.” I stand up abruptly, stool screeching backward, and slip into my dark suit jacket. “I have to go now. Bill Oglethorpe’s funeral is today.”
Afon bows his head in goodbye. “Godspeed, nephew. I’ll see you on the other side.”