Epilogue
Raven
We get married on a Saturday in October with forty-one people present, and about two-thirds of them are armed.
That isn't a joke, and nobody involved treats it as one.
Andrei ran the guest list like an operational plan for six weeks, and there was a genuine argument in September about whether the Cierros could bring their own men, which was resolved by Chloe telephoning me directly and saying, "Tell him yes, and tell him I said he's right to ask. "
It's on the terrace above the water because there was never any question of a church.
I get ready in a room with the door open, Maya Severese sitting at the end of the bed, eating the good chocolates.
"So," she says.
"Don't."
"I'm not going to say anything."
"You are absolutely going to say something; you flew six hours to say something."
"I flew six hours because you asked me to," Maya says, "and I'm going to say the thing anyway, because you'd say it to me." She puts the box down. "Miami. Two years ago. You sat across a table from me in a diner, and you asked me one question."
"Maya—"
"You said: why is a Don keeping a federal agent alive?" She's not smiling now. "And I gave you an answer, and you didn't believe a word of it, and you told me you'd give it four months and then you'd be pulling me out of a house in Coral Gables whether I liked it or not."
I look at myself in the mirror.
"Yeah," I say. "I remember."
"Do you have an answer yet?"
"No."
"Good," Maya says, and picks the chocolates back up. "The ones who have an answer are the ones I worry about."
Logan walks me down the aisle.
I asked him in August, on the telephone, badly, and there was a pause on the line long enough that I thought I'd made a serious mistake, and then he said, "Yeah, all right," in a voice which'd gone somewhere.
He's four weeks off his suspension. Thirty days, unpaid, for the handcuff key — which his representative called a travesty and which Logan describes as "the cheapest thing I've ever bought."
He offers me his arm at the top of the steps.
"You're shaking," I say.
"You're shaking."
"I'm allowed. It's my wedding."
"It's my first wedding," Logan says. "Nobody's ever asked me to do the walking part. I've watched eleven videos. There's a whole thing about the pace."
"Logan."
"There's a pace, Raven."
He does it perfectly, obviously.
And about four steps in, he leans over and murmurs, without moving his face at all:
"He's looking at you like you're the last helicopter out."
"Shut up."
"I'm simply reporting. That man is a stone, and he has gone completely to pieces, and it's the best thing I've seen all year."
Ilya is at the end of it in a black suit with his hands behind his back, and he is, in fact, in pieces, and doesn't appear to have any interest in hiding it.
Sergei is beside him with the rings on a cushion, standing at attention like a very small honor guard, and he hasn't had a single attack all day. He hasn't had one in six weeks. He has spent the entire morning telling anybody who would listen about a boat.
There is a moment where Logan hands me over.
It is entirely wordless, and it takes about a second and a half — an FBI agent and the Pakhan of a Bratva family, looking at each other across a woman in a white dress on a terrace above the Pacific.
Logan nods.
Ilya nods back.
And then Logan says, quietly, "Take care of her," and Ilya says, "Yes," and that is the entire conversation, and I could kill both of them.
The vows are four sentences long because Ilya asked if he could write his own and then produced four.
I am not going to write them all down.
The third one is: You came back down the hill, and I have been unable to look at anything else since.
The kiss goes on considerably longer than is appropriate in front of a ten-year-old and four crime families. Somewhere behind us, Yeremey starts a round of applause specifically to embarrass us, and it works.
The rest of it is the strangest afternoon of my life.
Victor Rozovsky brings his wife, two children, and a bottle of something from 1974.
He spends forty minutes in a corner with Ilya talking about ports, and at the end of it stands up and shakes his hand in a way that I understand, from eleven feet away, is about something considerably larger than ports.
Alex is heavily pregnant, hijacks my chair for most of the afternoon, and is very funny about it.
Basili and Chloe Cierro arrive last and leave first, which I gather is a Basili thing.
Chloe hugs me for slightly too long. Emmanuel is fourteen now and spends the entire reception being magnificently bored, right up until Sergei — who has never in his life had a conversation with another child — approaches him with the direct, unembarrassed courage of a boy who doesn't know that this is difficult, and asks him a question about a boat.
Twenty minutes later they are both on the steps with their jackets off, arguing.
I watch Ilya watch that happen. He has to turn around and look at the ocean for a moment.
Maya and Stefano stay the latest.
At around nine, Ilya and Stefano Severese walk down to the bottom of the garden together and stand under a tree for close to half an hour.
I do not go down there, and neither does Maya, and the two of us end up sitting on the terrace steps with our shoes off, watching two extremely dangerous men have a conversation neither of us can hear.
"What do you think they're saying?" Maya asks.
"Numbers."
"They're absolutely saying numbers."
They come back up together. Stefano has his hands in his pockets and looks like a man who has won an argument he has been having for two years.
Ilya comes and stands beside me and doesn't sit down.
"Well?"
"Two years," he says. "Miami takes the four things that cannot easily stop, at a valuation that is an insult, and Stefano has spent thirty minutes enjoying himself enormously about it."
"And the rest?"
"Wound down. Handed over. Closed." He is looking at the water. "There will be four conversations in the spring that I would rather you were not in the country for, and I will tell you when they are happening and where I am, because I am not going to do that to you again."
I put my hand in his.
"Say it," I tell him.
"Say what?"
"You know what."
Ilya Yaroslav looks out at the Pacific for a moment.
"In two years," he says, "I will be a man who runs a transportation company."
"And how does that feel?"
"Appalling," he says. "It feels absolutely appalling, and I would like it noted that I am doing it anyway."
Andrei stands three feet from Sergei for eleven hours.
He is in a suit, and miserable in it, and he doesn't eat, and he doesn't sit down once, and at one point I see him say something to Emmanuel Cierro's bodyguard that causes the bodyguard to relocate.
At around ten, when the boys are on the steps and half the guests have gone, I bring him a drink.
"I don't drink on—"
"It's water, you enormous idiot."
He takes it.
We stand there for a while, watching two boys argue about rigging.
"He hasn't had one today," Andrei says.
"I know."
"Not one, in eleven hours, with forty-one strangers in the house." He is very still. "In March I would have said that was not possible. I would have said it out loud, to your face, and I would have been rude about it."
"You were rude about it."
"I was," he agrees. "I was extremely rude, and I would like to say something now, and then I would like us never to discuss it again."
"Go on."
"Thank you," Andrei says.
And then he walks off to stand three feet from Sergei, and doesn't look back, and I stand on a terrace at my own wedding with a glass in my hand and have to spend a minute pretending to look at the ocean.
The last thing that happens is at nearly midnight.
Almost everybody has gone. The lights are down, and Karina has gone home, and Sergei fell asleep at half past ten in a chair and was carried up by his father without anybody making a thing of it.
Ilya finds me at the rail with my shoes in my hand.
"Your friend Foster has stolen a bottle of the 1974."
"He absolutely hasn't."
"He has it inside his jacket, and he thinks I have not seen it," Ilya says, "and I have decided to allow it, because he walked you up an aisle and because he told me to take care of you in a tone I didn't enjoy."
"He'll do it again."
"He may do it every year," Ilya says. "I have decided that also."
He comes and stands beside me and puts a hand low on my back, and then, after a moment, moves it round and rests it flat on the contour of my stomach, which at three months is no longer something anybody can be discreet about.
"Say it again," I tell him.
"You are extraordinarily demanding."
"It's my wedding day. Say it."
And he says it — in Russian first, which he has finally taught me, and then in English, quietly, at midnight, above the water, with an entire house asleep behind us.
The End?