Chapter 13 Tati
TATI
It’s only been about two weeks since my meltdown at the old Mercer Department store and I feel like a switch has been turned on in my brain.
I wasn’t giving Marla’s whole crusade to find my brother’s killer too much weight until after I found out about this pregnancy.
Somewhere between the late hour of the night and my ending up there, I just kept wondering what Nicki might say if I told him about this predicament.
Would he be pissed at me for screwing his mentor?
Probably. But in the end, he’d find a way to help me.
I’ve been feeling like I’m twisting in the wind with nowhere to land. It sucks.
I guess the upside is that Viktor and I have been talking more.
I’ve been asking him to take me places every few days, mostly just so that we can talk without being monitored.
We’ve been walking through the park together, having ice cream and coffee, or rather, I’ve been having those things with him sitting with me while I enjoy them.
Along the way, I’ve been trying to connect with him.
Trying to see him past the wall he has up.
It’s a pretty thick wall. He barely gives me anything, really. This man is supposed to be my baby’s father?
Today, I’ve decided to take full advantage of my door remaining unlocked during the daytime hours.
Somehow, my father has decided not to punish me too severely for my latest transgression.
I’d love to say that it’s because he’s going easier on me, but I think it has more to do with the fact that Viktor actually stood up for me when he brought me home that night.
I honestly think it broke his brain a little.
But whatever punishment that he has for Viktor, he doesn’t seem to be worried much about it. Or at least, that’s not what he’s showing me. I wonder if he worries about anything.
It’s close to lunchtime and I’m not interested in whatever is going to be brought to me to eat. My father has been relying on bland bologna and salami sandwiches lately, and I don’t know if I’m getting serious cravings or not, but I’m really not interested in eating anything like that today.
Down the stairs and toward the kitchen I go. As I walk down the hall, I hear talking… and I smell Viktor’s cologne. The scent of sweet musk stops me in my tracks as I wonder why he’s been summoned.
Maybe my father has decided to take his pound of flesh for standing up to him. The thought of turning around and walking away occurs to me. After all, what can I do if he decides to shoot him in his office? I doubt he’d stop if I begged him.
My feet are moving forward almost against my will. I want to know why he’s here, at least. I need to know.
The door of his office is slightly ajar, so I hunker down and peer through the crack. Viktor is standing in front of my father’s desk, his hands clasped behind his back as my father talks.
“It’s the one thing we can’t abide. You know that.”
Oh, no. My heart starts racing as I try to think of some way to distract him from hurting Viktor.
“I understand,” Viktor says. “Rats in the house have to be exterminated.”
Rats? Oh… There’s a snitch. Okay, so, my father has a job for him. I start biting my nails as I think about that. He’s asking Viktor to kill someone for him.
“The target will be in front of Community Bank tomorrow between noon and three,” my father says. “I expect the job to be done swiftly without any fanfare. You think you can handle that, being that it’s in public?”
“Of course. It’ll be an easy kill.”
My stomach turns when I hear him say that. I stand up and carefully walk away from my father’s door.
I know that Viktor is an enforcer for my father. I’ve known that my entire life. And while I’ve never had to address that job in any kind of up close and personal why, I’ve always had an understanding about it.
I stop at the stairs and sit down, my hand going to my stomach automatically as tiny sobs start to build in my chest. What’s wrong with me?
Why am I upset about Viktor doing his job?
I don’t know what a good father is supposed to be.
I never really thought that hard about it, I guess.
Now, I’m questioning it and myself. Now…
Now, I don’t know.
I hear the door open down the hall, so I stand up. I should go back to my…
No. Maybe I can find out what’s what from him now.
They both walk through the living room. The moment that they both see me, I see two different reactions on their faces, my father’s mild disgust that I’m not in my room and Viktor’s slight surprise that I’m out and about.
“Tatiana,” my father grumbles. “Is there something you need?” He glances at his watch. “It’s almost lunchtime. I was about to have something brought up to you.”
“Is it okay if I go out for lunch today?” I ask as sweetly as I can. “I’m in the mood for a change of pace.”
Viktor’s face is unreadable, but he doesn’t say anything. Father glances at him and says, “All right. Viktor?”
“I will take her,” he says. He glances at me in my yoga pants and oversized T-shirt. “Are you ready?”
“Just let me get my shoes.”
We’re sitting in a booth of this diner, a cup of coffee in front of Viktor and a hamburger and fries in front of me. I take a bite of the salty stick of potato and smile, savoring the manufactured taste of it.
“I really missed American food,” I say to him.
He perks up a little. He’s been quiet and distracted the whole way over here. Now, he’s glancing around us at the other tables, his eyes watching the movements of the waitresses as they go from table to table.
“Ever been to Europe?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “Once when I was younger. Maybe twenty-five, thirty years ago.”
I blink dumbly for just a second and feel my face flush. I forget how much older he is than I am.
“I was deported back to Russia,” he says, sipping from his coffee cup. “Got into some trouble with the law. I forget what the charge was, exactly. Stealing, probably.”
I’m just staring at him. All these years I’ve known him and I never knew he was an immigrant. “You weren’t born here?”
He shakes his head. “The short version of my origin story is that my parents came here when I was five, and maybe six years later, they both died in a car accident. So, I had to fend for myself… and I did. One day, I got caught and got deported back to Russia.”
I frown as I do the math in my head. “You were just a kid. Eleven, right? And they still deported you?”
“I was a criminal, Tanechka. The courts didn’t care how old I was.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, well, it was fate. If I hadn’t been deported, I wouldn’t have met your father.
He was overseas around the same time I was.
He happened to see me stealing rolls off the plates of a restaurant one evening.
Unfortunately, so did the Politsya.” He smirks at me, his eyes twinkling playfully.
“You know what the crime was thirty years ago for a young boy caught for petty theft?”
“Jail?”
“Bingo. This was maybe a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, so there were still some laws that needed to be changed. Now, if you’re caught for petty theft, you’ll probably pay a fine or something like that.
Back then, though, you would not be so lucky.
And trust me, Tanechka, you do not want to do time in Russia. ”
He finishes his coffee and pushes the cup to the outer corner for the waitress to refill. “Anyway, Nikolai pretended to be my father. He told the cop that I was mentally disabled to get me out of that jam. Once that was settled… for some reason that I’ll never know, he took me in.”
I’m speechless. How is it that I never knew this story? My father basically raised Viktor and I was never told about it. “Did Nicki know all this?”
“If he did, he didn’t hear it from me,” he says. “All this happened shortly before he was born. Your mother was still pregnant with him when they took me in.”
I blink with wonder. “You knew my mother.”
He nodded.
My stomach is doing flips. He’s been a part of the Bratva since before I was born. Of course he knew her… but I didn’t know that she cared for him.
“By the time Nicki was in the world, I was well on my way to becoming Bratva. When I was eighteen and on my own, I was committed to the role as byki, even though I think Nikolai thought I’d be better suited for a higher rank.
When Nikolai asked me to mentor his son a few years later, I almost said no.
He convinced me that it could only be me, as I was like a big brother to him anyway.
Or that’s how he saw it.” He pauses, his eyes drifting back around him again, as if checking the exits.
“I never told Nicki. I thought that it wouldn’t be right if he knew that for all intents and purposes, I served as a surrogate son before him. ”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say as I poke my fry into the pool of ketchup on my plate. “I think he might’ve liked to know that you were more brothers than he thought.”
He smiles slightly at that. “Thank you for saying that.”
The waitress comes by and refills his cup of coffee, then asks me how everything is. I tell her it’s fine, but in my head, I’m already planning my next questions.
She leaves and I say, “So, I have kind of a confession to make.”
“I’m listening.”
I take a breath. “I know that my father gave you a job today. I overheard you.”
His smile fades and he takes a sip from his cup, but he doesn’t say anything.
“So, you’re really going to… take care of someone for him?”
He doesn’t speak and for a second, I think that maybe he won’t. Then he says, “What I do for your father is not up for discussion,” he says in a low tone. “Especially not in the middle of a busy diner.”
I nod. I should leave this alone. I suppose if this were a few years back, I might’ve. Under the table, my hand automatically goes back to my stomach again.
“Do you know who it is?” I ask.
He tilts his head slightly, a little bit of amazement in his eyes that I’m still asking questions. “No,” he says.
“Then how do you know—”
“Is there a reason you’ve decided to ask me about my job, Tati?”
He hasn’t raised his voice, but his tone is firm. I can almost feel the vibration of it in my chest. “I’m curious,” I say. “I mean… how do you do what you do and sleep at night?”
“Ah,” he says with a smirk that’s a little sharper. Somehow, the turn of his mouth looks sinister. “So, you want to know about my moral code. That’s funny.”
I set the fry that I was turning around in my fingers down as my stomach tightens. “I don’t see what’s so funny.”
He sits back in his seat. “It’s funny that you suddenly feel the need to connect with me. You know better than that, Tati. Our relationship is business only.”
A rush of anger flashes through me. “You think I’m hitting on you? Really? God, you are so fucking arrogant.”
“Am I? So, these last couple of weeks, you haven’t been pretending these little outings are dates or whatever you’ve decided they are?”
I stiffen. I hadn’t thought of them as dates. I hadn’t thought that far into it at all. He shakes his head and pushes his cup of coffee to one side.
“You don’t want to know anything more about me than you already do,” he says. “You don’t need to know, Tatiana. It’s better for you this way. Trust me.”
“Because of my father?”
“Because I am Bratva,” he hisses as he leans toward me, “and I am the worst kind there is. I’m a stone-cold, unrepentant killer. It’s the one thing that I’ve done for years and the only thing I do well. Do not get it in your head that I am anything more than that.”
And like a slamming of a door, the conversation is over. I look away from him as my eyes start to sting, down at my plate, still mostly full of food. Suddenly, I don’t have an appetite. “I’m ready to go home,” I tell him without looking at him.
He doesn’t say anything to that. I see him raise his hand to get the waitress’s attention out of the corner of my eye, but I don’t look at him otherwise. I’m too mortified to.
On the way out, he does his job and opens doors for me. And on the way back, we’re both silent once more.
I guess as hurtful as that was, I have my answer. He’s not fit to be a father to this child.
I’m really, truly on my own.