Chapter 2 #2
Zoe was waiting in the site office. She had commandeered the only chair that wasn’t covered in drawings and sat with her legs folded under her, eating the second half of the bagel she’d forced on me earlier.
The damaged drawings were spread across the folding table — elevation studies for the east wing gallery, now spotted with water and smeared where the ink had run.
“Sit,” she said.
“I need to call the — “
“Sit.”
I sat. She pushed the other half of her bagel toward me. I ate it without protest, because arguing with Zoe about food was a losing proposition and I had already spent my morning arguing with water.
“Drawings are salvageable,” she said, holding up one of the elevation studies. The ink had bled at the edges but the measurements were legible. “I can retrace these this afternoon. The acoustical panel specs are fine — they were in the tube.”
“Good.”
“The ceiling is not fine.”
“No.”
“The pipe is definitely not fine.”
“Also no.”
My phone rang at eleven-twenty. It was my brother, Anton.
I answered. “I’m at Harbor House, what — “
“Ksenia.” His voice was tight. Controlled, but tight. Anton was precise when he was calm and terse when he was angry, and right now he was both. “Sergei Petrov has been found.”
I sat forward. Sergei Petrov. Warehouse supervisor at Orlov Marine.
I knew him — quiet, reliable, built like a man who moved cargo for a living.
He had been missing for three days. His wife had called Anton twice a day since Monday.
The Orlov organization —my father’s organization, my organization — had searched the waterfront, the warehouses, the bars Sergei sometimes drank at after shifts. Nothing.
“Where?”
“In a garage. Newark. Daniil got him out before it exploded.”
“They?”
A pause. One second. Long enough for me to understand that whatever came next mattered.
“The Sokolovs.”
My hand tightened on the phone. I didn’t mean for it to. The gesture was small — my fingers pressing the case harder against my ear — but Zoe was watching me, and Zoe saw it.
“He’s alive,” Anton continued. “Beaten, but lucid. Stitched. They got him to a clinic on Coney Island Avenue. Father wants you at Orlov Marine. Now.”
“Why me?”
“Because Father wants you there. He always wants you there. Because Sergei is one of ours and his wife is downstairs losing her mind and you’re the person who handles things.
” He paused again. “And because what Sergei is saying about who took him and why is something Father wants you to hear directly.”
“I’m leaving now.”
I hung up. I stood. I reached for my coat, which was hanging on the back of the door, still damp at the shoulders from the morning.
Zoe hadn’t moved. Her coffee cup was halfway to her mouth, suspended. She was looking at my face.
“Sokolovs,” she said.
“What about them?”
“You heard the word and your hand did a thing.”
“My hand didn’t do a thing.”
“Your hand did a thing, Ksenia. I’ve known you for seven years. Your hand does a thing when you hear a specific name, and the name is not ‘Sokolovs.’ And I know it’s because of one specific Sokolov.”
I put my coat on. I checked my bag for my phone charger, my wallet, my Orlov Marine access card. Everything in its place. Everything useful.
“Daniil Sokolov,” Zoe said. “You’re wondering if he’ll be there.”
“I’m wondering nothing about Daniil Sokolov.”
“You’re wondering if he’ll be there.”
I turned to face her. She sat in the chair with her legs folded and her coffee in her hand and her brown eyes fixed on me with the particular patience of someone who had been waiting for this conversation for years.
“Daniil Sokolov has never regarded me as anything except another piece of Orlov furniture,” I said. “I appear at dinners. I stand beside Anton. I smile at Lev. Daniil looks past me the way you look past a lamp.”
“Ksenia. We both know you like him.”
I stopped. Zoe’s voice had shifted. Not teasing anymore. She was looking at me with something closer to concern, and I didn’t want concern, because concern meant she could see something I hadn’t decided to show.
“I’ve been attracted to him for years,” I said.
“Since I was twenty-one. Since the New Year dinner where he stood in the corner of Volna and watched the entire room for two hours without speaking to anyone, and I thought — I thought that level of self-control was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen. ”
Zoe waited.
“And then I thought about it for another six years,” I continued, “and I realized it wasn’t self-control. It was indifference. To Daniil, people are assets, liabilities, or obstacles. I have never been important enough to qualify as any of those.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that I have been in the same room as him two dozen times and he has never once initiated a conversation with me that lasted longer than thirty seconds. I know that he remembers Anton’s name, Father’s name, Lev’s preferences in tobacco, and the exact terms of the freight agreement.
I know he does not remember what I do for a living, because three years ago he asked Anton — asked Anton, not me — whether I was still studying. ”
“Maybe he was being polite.”
“He asked Anton if I was still studying. I had been a licensed architect for two years at that point, Zoe. He didn’t ask me. He asked my brother. As though I weren’t in the room.”
I picked up my bag. The site office smelled of plaster dust and cold coffee and the particular mustiness of old buildings that have been opened up and are still deciding whether to cooperate.
“I’m going to Orlov Marine,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”
“Ksenia.”
I stopped at the door.
“Be careful,” she said. “Not with the Voronins. With him.”
“There’s nothing to be careful about. He doesn’t see me.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
I didn’t answer. I left Harbor House, walked to the corner where my car was parked, and drove toward Red Hook’s waterfront.
The morning’s competence settled back over me like a coat I knew how to wear.
The pipe, the ceiling, the inspector, the funding deadline — all of it had been manageable.
Solvable. Problems with clear actions and measurable outcomes.
Daniil Sokolov was not a problem with a clear action.
I drove toward Beard Street and did not think about him. I thought about Sergei Petrov, and his wife, and what it meant that the Voronins had taken an Orlov man and left him beside a bomb with a Sokolov union card in his pocket.
I thought about that all the way to the warehouse, and it was almost enough to thoughts of frustratingly handsome bratva men out of my mind.
Orlov Marine & Storage sat at the end of Beard Street, its brick facade darkened by a century of waterfront weather.
The building had been a working warehouse since before my family owned it, and it still looked like one from the outside — loading bays, roll-up doors, the faded sign painted directly onto brick that read ORLOV MARINE in letters that had been refreshed once in the nineties and not since.
The legitimate import operation occupied the ground floor.
The upper floors belonged to the family.
I parked in the private lot behind the building and entered through the service entrance. The ground floor was active — forklifts moving pallets, dock workers on break, the smell of salt water and diesel and cardboard. Nobody stopped me. They knew my car.
The private medical room was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and old carpet.
I had been in it twice before — once when a dock worker had crushed his hand between two containers, once when Anton had come home with a knife wound he described as a “disagreement.” The room was small, clean, and deliberately anonymous.
White walls. A medical bed. Cabinets stocked with supplies that no legitimate warehouse would need.
Sergei Petrov sat on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor and his hands gripping the mattress on either side of his legs.
He wore a clean shirt that was too large for him — one of Anton’s, probably — and his face was a landscape of damage.
Both eyes swollen, the left nearly shut.
The bridge of his nose had been reset and taped.
His jaw was bruised in a pattern that suggested methodical, repeated impact.
Stitches closed a laceration above his right eyebrow.
My father stood near the window with his arms folded, watching carefully.
Anton leaned against the wall beside him.
Roman Belov, one of Father’s senior men, stood by the door.
The doctor was checking the stitches on Sergei’s eyebrow with the careful attention of a man who understood that his patient’s value to the organization was considerably higher than his rank.
Sergei saw me come in. He tried to stand.
“Stay,” I said. “Please.”
He sat back down. I pulled a chair from the corner and placed it across from him, close enough to talk but not close enough to crowd. I sat.
“Sergei,” I said. “I’m going to ask you some questions. If you need to stop, tell me.”
He nodded. The movement made him wince — his neck was stiff, the muscles along his spine probably seized from hours of being bound in one position.
“Get me up to speed. Tell me what happened from the beginning.” Of course, I held official power in my father’s organization. But I held a fuck ton of unofficial power. That’s what happens when you’re smart and well-loved.
Sergei filled me in. His voice was hoarse, broken-nosed, the words arriving in fragments that he assembled with visible effort.
He had been leaving Orlov Marine on Monday evening, walking to his car in the lot, when two men had approached him.
They had been calm. They had shown him a photograph of his wife, taken that morning outside the grocery store where she worked.
“They said get in the van,” Sergei said. “I got in the van.”