Chapter 2
Bookkeeping
There were four ways out of the room and Pavel had counted them before Beridze got the lights on.
Roll door, chained. Steel man-door, dead-bolted, hinges on the inside — good work, someone who knew. A window high up on the water side, painted shut, glass wired. And the way they'd come in, which was behind him now, behind the big man's shoulder, which meant it wasn't a way out at all.
Four. He counted them the way he counted everything, without deciding to, the old arithmetic running under the surface of him while the rest of him stood still and bled.
He had no use for the exits. He'd known that in the yard, the second the man came off the pallet stack and put a knife where a knife went and Pavel's body did the one useless thing it still knew how to do, twisted and cut and fought — and then his eyes had found the face in the yard light and the fighting had gone out of him all at once, like water finding the drain.
The shaved head. The size of him, filling the dark. And the eyes, when the light caught them — that particular green, sea-glass and cold.
My brother works the water, the dead voice said in him, patient, two years patient. You'd know him if you saw him. Big. Ugly. Green eyes like our mother. He'd come for me, if it came to that. He'd come for anybody.
He had come.
So Pavel had put down the knife.
***
The place smelled like every good memory he didn't have — diesel and cold salt and neoprene and cut steel, the honest reek of a working man's building.
A salvage shop. Dive gear racked along one wall, tanks standing in a row like patient soldiers, a wetsuit hung dripping though nothing had been in the water tonight; coils of yellow line, a welder under a tarp, a workbench down the long wall with its tools laid out in the particular order of a man who put things back where they went.
Pavel looked at the tools and did the other arithmetic, the one he'd been doing since the yard.
Vise. A row of chisels. A ball-peen. Bolt cutters.
Things that would be used on him, in an order, over hours, because that was what this was, wasn't it, this was a man taking his brother's killer somewhere quiet, and Pavel had seen the after of enough of those rooms to know the shape of the night ahead.
He'd built that shape himself, more than once, in more than one quiet room.
He knew where a man started and where he ended and how long the middle ran.
Knowing it from the wrong side now felt less like fear than like a debt arriving at the window it had always been going to arrive at.
He set himself for it the way you set a broken bone, bracing against the wall of it before it came.
He would not scream if he could help it.
He would give the man what the man needed to give and then, at the end of it, the mercy.
He'd earned the whole of it. He could carry the whole of it.
Beridze didn't go to the bench.
He crossed to a sink in the corner, ran the tap, and started cleaning the cut on his own forearm — the one Pavel had put there, a long clean laceration, still weeping.
He did it one-handed and unhurried, teeth set, not looking at Pavel at all, like Pavel was a thing he'd hauled up and dropped on the floor and would deal with when he was ready.
Water ran pink into the steel basin. The big shoulders worked.
And Pavel stood by the wall with his own blood going tacky against his ribs and understood that he'd read the room wrong, and did not know what the right reading was.
"Sit," Beridze said, without turning around. "Before you fall down. You've been leaking on my floor since the truck."
Pavel didn't move. "You should let me."
"Sit down, Raskov."
There was a steel stool by the bench. Pavel weighed it — the distance, the man's back, the chisels a hand's reach from where he'd be sitting — weighed all of it out of habit and none of it out of intention, and sat.
The stool was cold through his clothes. Sitting hurt more than standing; the wound in his side had opened somewhere on the drive and every breath dragged at it now, a hot wire pulling.
Beridze finished with his arm. Wrapped it in something clean, one-handed, a practiced ugly job. Then he turned around and looked at Pavel for a long time, and Pavel let himself be looked at, because that was owed too.
"Take the jacket off," Beridze said.
"Why."
"Because you're going to bleed out on my stool before you answer a single question, and I've waited two years for the answers.
" He said it flat, no heat. He crossed to a locker, came back with a plastic box — a real kit, the kind a man kept who worked places where help was an hour of cold water away.
He set it on the bench. "Jacket. Or I take it off you, and neither of us wants my hands on you right now. "
No, Pavel thought, and didn't say, we don't.
He got the jacket off. It cost him; the left arm didn't want to lift, and the pull in his side turned the room white at the edges for a second before it steadied.
Under the jacket his shirt was black and stiff with old blood and new.
He heard the man's breath change — not sympathy, nothing so soft.
The professional intake of someone assessing a hull.
How much water's in her. Whether she floats.
"Who did this," Beridze said, crouching, cutting the shirt away from the wound with a pair of trauma shears from the kit.
His hands were enormous and careful. He didn't ask permission and Pavel didn't give it and it happened anyway, the strange gentleness of competent hands, the first hands that had touched him without meaning harm in longer than he could count.
He'd been touched plenty. Hands checking him for damage so he could be sent back out.
Hands on him the practical way you handle a tool — oiling it, setting it true, so it would cut clean the next time.
Arkady's palm warm on the back of his neck at exactly the moments the old man asked for the worst things.
But not this. Not a stranger's hands moving over torn skin with nothing behind them but the wish to close it.
Pavel held still under it and found he had no drawer to put it in, and the not-having was its own kind of pain, quieter and worse than the needle.
"Men who'll be here soon," Pavel said.
Beridze's hands stopped. "Explain that."
"The man who runs what's left." Pavel watched the far wall, the racked tanks, the exits he wasn't going to use.
"His name is Vadim Sorokin. You already know the name; you said it in the truck.
He wants me gone. Not dead — gone. Erased.
There's a difference and it matters to him.
" A breath, careful, past the wire. "I opened a door I wasn't supposed to open.
I let a man walk who the family needed brought back.
In that house there's one unforgivable thing and I did it, and now I know too much of the old man's business to be allowed to just run.
So he sent word. And someone's on the road behind me.
Has been for a while. He got close, in Baltimore.
" A gesture, small, at his own side. "This is his. "
"Vadim Sorokin's man did this to you."
"Someone Vadim owns. Young. Good." Pavel finally looked at him.
"Someone like I used to be. I've done what he's doing — cornered men who ran better than I'm running now.
It isn't a gift. It's a patience most people can't survive having in them, and he has it, and you won't out-hide him.
I've tried, the whole way down the coast. He's four days back and closing, and he found me anyway.
" A breath. "That's who they send. Not soldiers.
A finder. He'll be careful and he'll be patient and he won't stop, and when he gets here — and he'll get here, Beridze, he's better than your net, no offense to your cousin's money — he'll kill you for the crime of having been near me.
That's how it works. Proximity is the whole of the sin.
" He let it sit. "So you should do it now.
Tonight. Get your answers, take what you're owed, and then be a man who was never here.
That's the only version of this where you live. "
Beridze looked at him with those cold green eyes, and then he went back to the wound like Pavel hadn't spoken at all.
"Hold still," he said. "This is going to hurt, and I'm not going to be gentle about it, because you don't get gentle from me.
But I'm not going to let it go septic either, because I decide when you're done.
Not you. Not Sorokin. Not the man on the road.
" He threaded a needle in the bench light, steady as anything Pavel had ever seen.
"You gave yourself to me in that yard. Fine.
Then you're mine. And I'm not finished."
You're mine.
Pavel held still and let the man he'd made into a hunter sew the hole in his side, and told himself the thing turning over in him was only the pain.
***
He'd expected the bench in the end. He got the questions instead, and the questions were worse, because a man being taken apart with tools only has to endure. A man being asked has to choose, over and over, what to give.
Endurance he had. Endurance was the one thing the house had built into him past taking away; you could hurt Pavel Raskov a long time and get nothing but the sounds a body makes.
But choosing — being handed, again and again, the question of what he'd keep and what he'd give, being treated as a man with things worth keeping — that was a country he'd never held papers for.
In the house he'd been asked nothing. He'd been aimed.
A weapon doesn't get consulted about where it wants to go.