Chapter 2 #2
"How do you know my name." Beridze had pulled the second stool around and sat across from him, forearms on his knees, the kit closed between them.
He'd given Pavel water in a chipped enamel cup and Pavel had drunk it because refusing would have been a performance and he was done performing.
"Not the part you gave me in the truck. All of it.
He talked about me — fine. When. How. What did he say. Why did you keep it."
And there it was, the door with the whole of it behind it.
The thing Pavel had carried out of that yard two years ago along with the smell of it, the thing he'd held through Baltimore and the road and the cold, the last of Dato Beridze that existed anywhere in the world — because it lived in Pavel now, only in Pavel, a dead man's last minutes kept safe in the one place no one would think to look, inside the man who'd killed him.
He could give it to Beridze. He understood, sitting on the cold stool with fresh catgut pulling in his side, exactly what it would do.
It would take the clean thing out of the man's hands.
You cannot cut the throat of the person carrying your brother's last words; you cannot do the merciful necessary thing to the mouth that still holds them.
Give Beridze the whole of it and Beridze could not finish this, and Pavel would go on living, which was the one outcome he had no right to and — he was ashamed to find, here, now, with those green eyes on him — the one his body had started, quietly, treacherously, to want.
Which was exactly why he couldn't.
"No," Pavel said.
"No?"
"You want it to save yourself the trouble of hating me.
I won't help you with that." He set the enamel cup down on the bench, precise, in the ring it had left.
"What he said at the end belongs to him and to me.
I'm not going to hand it over to buy myself an hour.
I'm not going to use a dead man's mouth to make you soft.
If I did that, I'd be exactly the thing your brother thought I—"
He stopped. Too far. He'd gone too far, out onto the thin part, and he pulled back, and Beridze caught it — of course he caught it, the man read failures for a living, read the seep before the break — Beridze went very still across from him.
"The thing my brother thought you what," Beridze said, low.
"Nothing."
"Say it."
"There's nothing to say." Pavel found the far wall again.
The tanks. The exits. He counted them. Four.
He counted them again. Хватит, he told himself, the old word, enough, and it didn't help, it never helped, but it was a thing to hold.
"I killed him. That's the fact you get. I was sent and I went and I did it and there was no reason good enough to make it anything else.
Everything past that is mine to carry, including the part you want, and I'm going to carry it out of this room one way or the other — in my mouth if you let me live, in the ground if you don't. But you don't get it.
It's the only thing I have that's mine. I've never had anything that was mine.
" He heard his own voice do something then, thin at the edge, and hated it, and stopped.
The salvage shop ticked and settled around them. Somewhere the tide was working at the pilings under the building; he could feel it more than hear it, the old water breathing.
Beridze didn't say anything for a long time.
Then: "He was twenty-four."
"I know."
"He liked—" The big man stopped. Started again, and his voice was the flattest Pavel had heard it, flat the way the sea is flat before weather.
"He liked stupid movies. The worse the better.
He'd narrate them, the whole plot, out loud, to nobody.
Drove me out of my mind." A pause. "You want me to believe you know he was a person.
So tell me one thing about him that isn't how he died.
One. If you knew him for even a minute, if that minute meant anything, you've got one thing. "
It was a trap and it wasn't. It was the cruelest question and the kindest, and Pavel understood that Beridze didn't know which he meant it as either.
And Pavel had a thing. He had the thing.
He had the exact stupid ordinary human thing, and it was so close to the door with the whole of it behind it that giving even this much was standing on the threshold — but it wasn't the crack, it wasn't the last minutes, it was just a boy in a yard on an ordinary afternoon before Pavel had known what he was there to do, and Pavel could give this and keep the door shut. Barely.
"He was eating an orange," Pavel said. "When I came into the yard.
Before. He had it half-peeled and the peel all in one piece, going around, and he was—" The white came up at the edges of the room again and it wasn't the wound this time.
"He offered me half. He didn't know me. I was a stranger walking into his yard at the wrong end of the day and he held out half an orange without thinking about it, because that's the kind of—"
He couldn't do the rest of the sentence. He didn't try.
Beridze made a sound. Not a word. Low, involuntary, torn out of somewhere under all that size, and he put the heels of both enormous hands against his eyes and pressed, hard, and held them there, and Pavel looked away to give the man the only privacy the room had to offer, and the tide worked at the pilings, and neither of them said anything at all.
He'd wondered about it, in the abstract, starved way you wonder about things you'll never have — what it looked like, a person grieved like that.
Loved so far past use that losing him could still bend a man this size, two years on, in a cold building at the wrong end of the night.
He'd told himself the family had that, once.
Arkady had a word for each of them — my careful boy — and for years it had felt like being loved.
He knew better now. He'd watched the old man spend that word like coin and never once feel it leave his hand.
This was the other thing. The real one, ugly and useless and helpless, with no work in it at all.
And Pavel had put it into the world with his own two hands.
That, Pavel thought, exhausted, wrung out, is the danger. Not the tools. That.
***
The phone went off and broke it.
Beridze took his hands from his face — dry-eyed, jaw set; whatever had come up he'd forced back down, a man surfacing slow to keep from bending — and looked at the screen where it lit the bench.
"Irakli," he said, mostly to himself.
"Your cousin." Pavel had gone tactical again the instant the phone lit; it was a relief, honestly, to have something to be other than whatever he'd just been. "The one with the money and the numbers."
Beridze's eyes came up sharp. Pavel hadn't been told the name. But the man let it go — filed it, Pavel saw, for later; nothing got past this one — and answered the phone and put it to the good ear and said, "Yeah."
Pavel couldn't hear the words on the other end, only the shape of them, fast and urgent. He watched Beridze's face instead, which told him more than the words would have. He watched the moment the man decided to lie.
"No," Beridze said. "Nothing tonight. Dead channel, like the last three.
" A pause. The urgent shape, insisting. "Then your guy's wrong, Irakli.
There's nobody at the yard." His eyes were on Pavel the whole time he said it, flat and green and unreadable, saying nobody at the yard about the man he was looking at.
"I'll check it in the morning. Go to bed.
" Another pause, and something in the cousin's voice changed the shape of Beridze's shoulders, put a stone in them.
"I know what we said. I remember what we said.
When there's something, you'll be the first. Go to bed. "
He ended the call. Set the phone face-down on the bench.
For a moment neither of them moved.
"You lied to your cousin," Pavel said.