Chapter 27 Dmitri #2
A mourner rushes me with a blade dressed as a candle knife.
I catch his wrist and twist. The blade clatters.
I drive his face into wood, and he slides to the floor in a slow prayer that ends badly.
Someone behind me fires. I feel the round comb my coat hem.
Misha shouts once, "Left," a muzzle flashes, a man grunts and goes still behind the pillar.
Another burst, chalk-white plaster powders from the arch.
Chips sting my cheek. A stained-glass saint gains a round hole in the palm and throws rubies and cobalt across the floor.
Boots drum. Benches scrape. Someone screams a name in Russian.
Someone else answers with a roar that makes the lamps tremble on their chains.
My shoulder floods with heat where stitches tear.
I clamp the arm to my ribs and keep moving.
Sergei fires twice. Stone spits off the altar rail, and he smiles, amused.
The choir stall erupts in splinters as another round walks the wood.
Smoke climbs into incense until the nave smells like a forge.
I pivot and answer with a round to his lackey's knee.
Aleksandr's mouth opens in a shocked "O", then he collapses into hot tears.
He crawls behind a pew, dragging a red stripe like a ribbon.
He sobs, curses, hears himself doing both, and clamps it shut, teeth bared, pride shaking in his jaw.
He fumbles for a pistol and finds only a rosary dropped long ago by the old sacristan.
He grips that instead and looks suddenly, painfully young.
The mercenary on the right flank kicks a basin, and water leaps across the floor.
Candles spit, steam rises, the room smells of old myrrh turned sharp by fight.
The air is close and bright and full of fast decisions.
Misha shouts a count once, then switches to hand signs.
Our men read them and answer with their bodies.
"Door," Sasha says and points with his chin.
The side bar begins to close. One of Sergei's men dives and wedges it again with a folded brochure of feast days he stole from the narthex.
He grins like a boy who has cheated a parent, and I put a round through his hand.
He shrieks. The brochure catches fire where it touches the candle.
Sergei steps onto the first rail step as if onto a stage.
He doesn't glance down at the glass under his soles.
He raises his pistol toward the Gospel as if finishing a thought.
I move forward, and the shot finds my shoulder again with a punch that spins me half a step.
The elders begin to chant. The words wash across the pews and settle into the smoke of the room. It gives me permission to do what I came to this house to do. Sergei sees the elders and the chant and the way the candles refuse to lie down. He understands what he has walked into.
"Walk away from her," he says just to me. "Come to the docks. I will sign the obshchak into your hands. I will give you Boston and a corridor to New York. You can finish your vows on New Year's Day with anyone you like."
"Anyone I like is already here." I keep my voice level.
He smiles like a gambler who has found a man who refuses the table. He lifts the pistol a fraction and then lowers it, a small admission. "Then we will do it the old way," he says.
From the nave's far corner, a mercenary in black rises with a long rifle he broke down in a choir stall and built again while we bled.
He plants his cheek. The barrel seeks a line that leads through the altar toward the aisle where Valentina stands.
I see the path, the breath he takes before the squeeze.
I move. There is no time for speech. I shoulder into him from the side.
The shot sends the thurible stand into the air, where it flips and rings.
She doesn't shrink. Her eyes are on mine that don't say thank you.
She holds her ground as a daughter of a house that will not fold.
Sirens far off would be a mercy. We have none. The fight narrows to small pieces. Wrist against wrist. Muzzle against arm. Boot against thigh. Knife against belt. We press. They press. A rosary snaps under a heel and scatters beads like hail.
I look for Sergei in the smoke of candles and the churn of bodies.
He is backing down the side aisle, resetting lines, men between us, Aleksandr dragging himself with his hand out.
Our men hold the doors. The side hinge screams as metal finally remembers it is fallible.
Misha puts a shoulder to it, and it sets true.
"Stay with her," I tell Sasha. "No gap."
Sasha nods once and takes his place a half step to Valentina's left, knife low, pistol high, posture like a vow.
"Sergei," I call. "You came into a church. Leave the way cowards leave."
He laughs. "I brought you a chair, and you brought me hymns." He scoffs. "We are at an impasse."
"You mistook hymns," I exhale, "for a lack of knives."
He lifts his pistol toward me in a little salute and winks. He knows he will not take me today. He is too much a merchant to die on a tiled floor when there are invoices to send.
Then the room changes.
A hand touches the pew behind me, and the old wood groans, a sound from thirty years ago, from a winter when a man built a city with favors and blows and the iron belief that vows outlast any ledger.
Anatoly has been standing near the back, hands on the pew, ring bright under the lamp.
He has watched with a face like law. He has not moved because moving costs him now in a currency none of us can repay.
The elders stop chanting as if a conductor lowered a hand. The men in black glance toward the sound because even men who fear nothing look when a king stands.
Anatoly takes one step into the aisle, then another.
His coat hangs hard on his frame. His mouth is set to the line.
His hand goes to his chest. A small, precise press over the cross he wears under cloth.
His knees touch the pew. He folds into the wood like a man sitting down without a bench. His mouth moves.
I'm at his side in three strides, Sergei forgotten, gun down, Misha with me, Valentina already moving from the rail, Sasha shifting to keep her covered, the sacristan lifting the oil as reflex, the elders reaching and stopping because love needs space and order.
I slide an arm behind Anatoly's shoulders and lower him to the pew.
His eyes have the clarity of a winter sky. It is six in the evening and very late.
His eyes go winter-clear and kind, finding mine, then lifting to the altar and back, a father's blessing and a general's surrender in one look. His thumb presses a small cross into my sleeve as if sealing a vow.
"Make him better than me," he whispers.