Chapter 2 #3
He knew the weight of that. He'd watched men in the house lie to the ones they'd come up beside, for the old man, for the work, and he'd watched what it did to them across years — the way it hollowed a thing out from the inside, quietly, until one day there was only the shell that answered to its name.
Beridze had just done it for Pavel. Put a lie between himself and his own blood for the sake of the man who killed his brother, and done it without a flicker.
That was either the beginning of something or the end of something.
Pavel had spent his whole life on the wrong side of that exact choice, and he knew one thing about it for certain: it was never free, and the bill always came.
"Irakli's people saw movement near the yard tonight.
" Beridze wasn't looking at him now. He was looking at the phone like it had done something.
"Two cars that don't belong to the neighborhood.
Sitting. Watching the water side." He said it slowly, the way a man says a sum he doesn't like the total of.
"They weren't there for me. Nobody knows about this place.
Nobody's watched me in two years; I'm a diver who lost his brother, I'm furniture.
" His green eyes came up and found Pavel's, and Pavel watched the same arithmetic he'd been doing all night finally, fully, arrive behind them.
"They were there for you. Your finder. He's already at the yard. He was maybe an hour behind us."
"Yes," Pavel said. Not surprised. He'd told the man this would happen; it was almost restful to be right.
"He'll have found where the truck sat on the pallet oil.
He'll have the plate by now, or a partial.
He's careful. He'll take a day, maybe two, to be sure, and then he'll come, and he'll come clean.
" He looked at the big man across the closed kit, the man who'd sewn him up and asked him for one true thing and pressed his own eyes with his hands.
"You have until then to do the smart thing.
Kill me. Burn what's got my blood on it.
Be furniture again. He can't hunt a man who was never anywhere.
That's the only door that stays open, and it's closing. "
Beridze stood.
He crossed to the racked tanks and stood with his back to Pavel, one big scarred hand flat on the cold steel of a cylinder, the way — Pavel understood, with a strange lurch — the way a man stands with his hand on a stone.
And when he spoke his voice had gone all the way down to the almost-gentle place, the place Pavel had already learned to be afraid of.
"Here's what I know," Beridze said. "Two years I wanted one thing.
Kill the hand. I built my whole self around it.
My cousin built his around it with me." He turned.
"And I've had you an hour, and you've handed me a grave and an orange and a man on the road who'll kill us both, and the one thing you won't hand me is the thing I came for.
And I find I can't do it. Not tonight. Not until I have the rest of you, whatever it costs, whoever's coming.
" He picked up his phone, pocketed it, looked at the chained roll door and the bolted man-door and the wired window like he was counting his own exits now, learning the arithmetic Pavel had known his whole life.
"So we're not doing the smart thing. We're doing the other thing. "
"There is no other thing," Pavel said. "There's the smart thing and there's dying."
"Then we'll die getting me my answer." Beridze pulled the wetsuit down off its hook, and a duffel from under the bench, and started, unhurried, to move — a man who'd already decided, back in the yard, and was only now telling the room.
"Get up, Raskov. Slow. You've got fresh stitches and I'm not carrying you.
" He glanced back, once, and for just a second the flatness cracked and something underneath showed through, something Pavel would spend the next hours trying not to have seen.
"You said proximity's the whole of the sin. Fine. Then I guess I'm a sinner. Move."
It would be so much simpler to make him do it.
Pavel knew six ways to turn that banked size violent inside a breath — to force the big hands to finish this out of pure reflex, clean and immediate, the smart thing done for the man too stubborn to do it himself.
He catalogued them the way he catalogued exits, without deciding to.
And he used none of them. Because under the training, under the penance, under two years of holding as fact that he had no business drawing breath, some small animal thing in him had heard you're mine and I'm not finished and lifted its head for the first time in longer than he could name — and wanted, God help him, wanted to see what a man like this would keep him alive for.
Pavel got up off the cold stool, slow, the wire pulling in his side, and did the thing he'd sworn in the yard he was done doing.
He followed a man toward staying alive.