5. Five
She died mid-stitch.
The needle was down through the leather on a stroke she hadn't finished.
Her foot had slid off the pedal, and the machine had stopped with the thread caught, a single stitch held open in the grain of a belt the color of dried blood.
She was slumped forward on the work. Back of the head, one round, the way the rest of them had been done.
Clean job. Somebody had walked the line and put them down one at a time.
"Aleksi."
She was wearing a cardigan the color of oatmeal. There was a piece of masking tape on the machine with a name written on it in pen. Dragana. A cup of tea on the bench beside her had gone cold and skinned over. A pair of reading glasses sat folded next to it.
"Aleksi."
I'd seen a setup like this before.
"Aleksi! Hey!"
The voice came through water. I blinked.
The workroom came back in layers, sound before sight: the hum of the overhead tubes and the tick of a radiator, and Dmitri somewhere down the row saying something in Russian about a count.
Gregori was standing next to me with his hand half-raised, like he'd been about to touch my shoulder and thought better of it.
"Aleksi. What do you want us to do with the bodies?"
I dragged a hand down my face. The leather of the glove was cold against my skin.
"Count first."
"Eleven. We're still checking the back."
"Any men?"
"Three. Lieutenants. They went down by the door. The rest are women. Workroom staff."
"Mr. K?"
"Gone. Hours ago, looks like. Left this for the crew to handle."
I turned away from the bench and made my feet move.
The workroom was long and narrow, a converted warehouse space, with fluorescent tubes running the length of it.
Eight machines in two rows. A cutting table at the far end.
Bolts of lining on a rack along the wall.
Pattern pieces pinned to a corkboard in the shapes of bags, wallets, and belts.
Everything tidy. Everything in its place.
The kind of order a person makes when work is the only thing keeping them breathing.
The women were at their stations. Most of them were slumped forward the way Dragana was. Two had turned toward the door and gone down sideways. One was on the floor in the aisle. She'd run. She hadn't made it.
I walked. Gregori walked a half step behind me and didn't say anything. I could hear the men in the back room, boots on concrete, voices low. Somebody had the sense to keep it quiet.
"Time of death?"
"Collins says three hours at the outside. Maybe two."
Two hours. We'd been sitting on the Keystone intel for less than a day, and Mr. K had moved inside of that window.
Someone had told him the vory were coming.
Someone in my organization or someone in his, and either way it was a problem I'd deal with later, because right now I was walking through a room of women who'd been sewing fake handbags for a wage they never saw and Mr. K had put bullets in their heads to move faster.
"Boss."
Dmitri this time. He was standing at the cutting table at the far end. There was a ledger open on it and a stack of shipping manifests and a phone that had been wiped.
"Anything useful?"
"Numbers. Codes. I'll take it back to Pavel. Names on the first page, though."
He turned the ledger toward me. A column of names ran down the left side, production numbers next to each. Dragana. Petra. Marta. Stanislava. Eleven names on the page, matching the count on the floor.
"Pull the ledger. Pull the manifests. Pull the phone. Burn everything else."
"The bodies?"
"Call Collins. Tell him to bring the van and do it right. Names get logged. If any of them has family, we'll find them."
Gregori made a sound behind me. I turned.
"We're going to find their families," I said. "Any objections, Gregori?"
"No, boss."
"Get it done."
I walked back through the workroom toward the door. I made myself walk. I didn't stop at Dragana's bench. I didn't stop at any of them. I kept my eyes on the exit sign over the back door, and I put one foot in front of the other.
Gregori caught up to me outside.
"Boss."
"Don't."
"You all right?"
"I said don't."
He lit a cigarette and didn't press. The parking lot was quiet. The cold cut through the wool of my coat. My breath came out white, and I pulled my own cigarette from the pack, and Gregori lit it for me because my hands were not going to manage the lighter.
He didn't comment. He just lit it and stepped back.
I stood in the parking lot of a converted warehouse on the east side of Columbus and smoked two cigarettes in a row while my men loaded bodies into vans, and somewhere in my apartment a Scottish kid was sitting with my father's jacket in his lap.
"Go home," Gregori said. "We've got it. I'll call when the cleanup's done."
"The intel."
"Pavel's on it. You'll have something by morning."
I got into the car. Gregori closed the door for me. That was how bad I looked. Gregori, who'd seen me eat a man's gun and smile about it, closed the car door for me like I was somebody's grandmother.
The drive back was forty minutes, and I don't remember any of it. I came back into my body in the elevator on the way up to the apartment. My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs and kept my eyes on the floor numbers, and thought about nothing, or tried to.
I got the door open. The apartment was dark except for the lamp in the living room, the one Gregori had left on before the call came in. I stood in the entryway, pulled off my gloves, and set them on the console table. The sight of my own hands coming out of the leather was the thing that did it.
My chest went tight. Not the tight I knew. A different kind, the kind where the air was in the room but wasn't in my lungs, and my heart was slamming in my throat like I'd been running. I hadn't been running. I'd been sitting in a car.
I pressed my palm flat against the wall. The wall was cool. The wall was fine. The wall was still there.
She was going to make cheeseburgers.
The thought came from nowhere and landed whole.
She was going to make cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries, the ones she cut by hand because the frozen ones weren't as good, and she'd told me that morning before I got on the bus and kissed the top of my head and told me to be good.
I'd come home from prep school at three.
She was at the machine in the sewing room.
Her head was down. I'd thought she was concentrating.
My legs went out from under me. I hit the floor.
My coat rucked up around my hips and I couldn't breathe.
The floor was not the floor. I was eight years old in a house in Bexley and my mother was slumped at her machine and there was a pair of my father's trousers under the needle, the waistband half-taken-in because he'd come back from Paris the last time a size bigger than he'd left.
"Aleksi. Hey. Look at me, aye?"
Someone was crouched in front of me with his hands on my face, warm palms bracketing my jaw, his knees pressed against mine.
It wasn't her. I knew the voice. I couldn't place it until I looked up and Fin was there, close enough that I could see him clearly, holding my face steady so I couldn't look anywhere else.
"Good lad. Eyes on me. Ye breathe with me now. In. One, two. Out. One, two, three, four."
I did what he said because I couldn't do anything else.
His mouth shaped the numbers, and I followed them until my lungs remembered the pattern, and his palms stayed where they were, steady pressure on either side of my jaw, an anchor I could feel when the rest of me was somewhere I didn't want to be.
"That's it. Keep going. Yer doing fine."
I kept going. The tightness eased by slow degrees, and the floor came back under me, and eventually my hands were my own again.
Fin kept his hands on my face until my breathing evened.
Then he moved one palm and slid two fingers to the side of my throat and held them there, pulse-counting, the way Collins would have.
When he found what he was looking for, he took that hand away too.
The other one stayed on my jaw a second longer than it needed to.
Then it was gone, and I immediately missed it.
He sat back on his heels and stayed on the floor with me, a foot of space between us.
"Right. I'm getting ye water." He got up and came back with a glass, pressed it into my hand, and sat down again. "Small sips."
I drank. The glass rattled against my teeth the first time. The second time it didn't.
"How long?" I said.
"Five minutes. Maybe six."
"How did you know what to do?"
"I've had them."
I looked at him. The lamplight caught him from the side, and his red hair looked darker than it was. He was wearing the dark gray cotton shirt I'd bought him. The collar was open. His wrists were on his knees, and there were no cuffs on them.
"Ye want to tell me what happened?"
The workroom came back to me. The cardigan. The masking tape. The name on the tape. The thermos with the lid off under the bench.
"We hit the operation."
"Aye, I gathered."
"They'd cleaned house. They shot the women at the machines. All of them."
He went still.
"How many?"
"Eleven."
"Dragana?"
I closed my eyes.
"She was on the left," he said. Quiet. "First machine in. She'd been there the longest. The others called her Mama."
"Mr. K wasn't there."
"Aye, he wouldnae be. He doesnae do that kind of work himself. He has men for it."
I drank more of the water. My throat was raw. I didn't know when my throat had gone raw.
"I knew them," Fin said. "All of them. Dragana taught me how to set the Italian machines. Marta's husband was in Belgrade. Stanislava had a boy my age. She'd been trying to get him out too."
His hands closed on his knees. The knuckles went white, released, and went white again.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Aye. So am I."
We sat there on the floor of my entryway for a long time. My legs wouldn't hold me yet, and I wasn't going to test them with him in the room. He stayed where he was.
"When I was eight," I said, "I came home from prep school and found my mother dead at her sewing machine."
He didn't move.
"She was letting out my father's pants. He'd gotten fat on French food while living with his mistress."
The silence went a long time. I'd never said any of it out loud. Not to Nikita. Not to anyone. And I'd said it to a prisoner on my own floor because a woman named Dragana had died at a sewing machine on the east side of Columbus.
Fin looked at me for a long moment. His jaw set.
"Yer da was a cunt."
I hit him.
My body did it before my head did. The flat of my hand caught him on the side of the jaw, and he went sideways into the wall.
His head bounced off the plaster and he slid a foot along the floor before he stopped.
His hair was in his eyes. His lip had split.
Blood came up red against the pale of his chin.
I was on my feet. I didn't know when I'd stood up.
"Say it again," I said.
"Yer da was a cunt." He wiped his mouth, and his hand came away red. He looked up at me from the floor without blinking. "He made her sit at a machine letting out his trousers so he could fuck a French woman in Paris. He was a cunt."
"Shut your fucking mouth."
"Make me."
I stood over him with my fist still closed and looked down at him on the floor of my entryway with blood on his lip and his wrists bare. No cuffs. No marks either, which meant he hadn't taken them off when I came through the door. He'd been out of them.
The little shit had picked the lock.
Of course he'd picked the lock. Scottish leatherworker, been in captivity for six months, had hands like a surgeon's. I'd been cuffing him every night with all the faith of a man putting a padlock on a screen door. Fucking brilliant. Add it to the list.
"Don't say another word," I said.
"All right."
I walked down the hall to my bedroom, shut the door, and stood there with my hand on the knob. My knees were killing me. Of course they were. My knees were always killing me.
At the dresser, I pulled the bottle out of the back of the top drawer, looked at it, and put it back. The last thing I needed was to wake up tomorrow hungover on top of whatever the fuck tonight was going to turn into.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. My back complained. Jesus Christ.
My knuckle was split. Middle one, right hand.
I hadn't even hit him with the fist. I'd hit him with the flat of my hand, and my knuckle had opened anyway, because apparently tonight nothing was going to work the way it was supposed to. I’d scraped his tooth, probably.
Maybe I'd caught it on the wall. I didn't know, and I wasn't going to stand up and go to the bathroom mirror to figure it out because my knees were not on speaking terms with me.
My hand was still shaking.
I picked up the phone and scrolled until I found Valentina's number. We had an arrangement, the Madam and I, and her girls never disappointed.
"Send Nadia. Within the hour."
"Yes, sir."
I hung up and dropped the phone on the bed beside me.
Real convincing, Aleksi.
I got up to find a clean shirt.