7. Seven
I woke up alone. Fin had gone back to his room at some point in the night, taken the torn shirt with him, and left the water and the Tylenol on the nightstand.
I took the Tylenol. My head was a bell somebody was ringing for sport, and my mouth tasted like the bottom of an ashtray, but I had a meeting with Nikita at ten, and I'd never been late for Nikita in twenty years. I wasn't going to start today.
I got up, showered, shaved badly, and got dressed.
The shirt collar sat against the back of my neck where Fin had pressed his fingers two days ago in the dining room. Yer neck is thicker than standard. Most tailors never adjust for it. I knotted my tie and left without looking in on him.
Nikita's office was on the fourth floor of a building downtown that had his name on the lease and a law firm on the door. The law firm was real. The lawyers were real. The rest of it was debatable.
I'd been here a hundred times, but never with a hangover this bad.
The girl at the front desk waved me through without looking up from her monitor.
I went down the hall past the conference rooms and the kitchen where somebody had brewed coffee that smelled better than what I'd been drinking at home, and I caught a sound from behind the door of the small interview room at the back of the floor.
A man was sobbing and pleading quietly in Russian.
I kept walking. Not my problem this morning. Pavel handled the back room on Tuesdays, and Pavel was thorough. The poor bastard in there was going to be late for whatever he had planned for lunch.
I stopped outside the corner office and tried to make my face look presentable.
It wasn't working. My split knuckle was throbbing under the bandage I'd put on it that morning.
I'd missed a patch under my jaw with the razor.
The shirt was clean. The suit was the one Fin had told me didn't fit, and now I couldn't put it on without thinking about that, which was a hell of a thing to do to a man before nine in the morning.
I knocked.
"Come."
Nikita was at his desk with a stack of files in front of him, a teacup on a coaster, and a fountain pen in his hand, signing something.
He looked older than he had a month ago.
The man was sixty-two and held court like he was forty, and most days you couldn't tell the difference, but today you could. He didn't look up.
"Sit, Aleksi."
I sat. Nikita kept signing while I waited.
He was making a point, and I was letting him make it.
That was how this worked. Twenty years of working for the man and I still got the chair and the silence and the fountain pen scratching like I was a junior associate who needed reminding.
The vory ran on hierarchy and Nikita ran the vory.
He finished the page, capped the pen, and looked up. "You look like shit."
"Good morning to you, too."
"How is your hand?"
I glanced down. The bandage was bleeding through. I hadn't noticed. "Fine."
"Mm." He set the pen down on the blotter and lined it up parallel to the edge. "Tell me about the workroom."
So, we were doing it that way. Straight to it.
Fine. I'd been ready for that on the drive over.
I'd rehearsed the brief twice in my head and a third time out loud in the elevator.
I gave it to him clean. The count, the placement, the time of death, the ledger Dmitri had pulled, the manifests, the wiped phone.
Eleven women. Three men by the door. Mr. K hours gone.
He listened without moving. When I was done, he picked up his teacup and held it without drinking. "You sat on the Keystone intelligence for less than twenty-four hours, and Mr. K moved inside that window."
"Yes."
"Who knew, Aleksi?"
"Me. Gregori. Dmitri. Pavel and his analysts after the brief. Your office."
"My office."
"You. Tatty. Whoever in this building you told."
He set the teacup down. "I told no one."
"Then it's narrower than it looks."
"It's narrow either way." He pulled a folder out of the stack and slid it across the desk. I didn't open it. "Pavel has been working it overnight. He's flagged three names. None of them are people I want to be wrong about. So we will be careful. We will watch."
"Understood."
He tapped the folder with one finger. The signet ring on his hand was the only piece of jewelry he wore, aside from his wedding ring, old gold worn smooth at the edges.
He'd put it on the morning Simeon's body went into the ground, and he'd worn it every day since.
Whatever it had meant to Simeon, it meant double on Nikita's hand because Nikita had taken it the hard way.
"There's also the Scotsman."
There it was. Five minutes and thirty seconds in. I'd given him three more minutes on the over.
"Fin's not a candidate."
"He is in the field, Aleksi."
"He gave me the intel. Why would he give me the intel and then sell it to Mr. K?"
"I don't know. That's why we're having this conversation." He picked up the teacup again. "He had a phone?"
"No."
"He had access to a phone?"
"No. Gregori has him under direct observation. The apartment doesn't have a landline. His insulin came through Collins. His clothes came through Gregori. The only people in the room with him have been me, Gregori, and Irina, and Irina doesn't speak English."
"So you have considered it."
"I considered it for about ninety seconds. Then I considered who else it could be and ranked them, and Fin came out at the bottom of the list because Fin had no fucking way to do it."
Nikita drank his tea. The room was quiet for a long time.
"Tell me about him."
"You've read the intake. You've read the brief I sent. You know what he —"
"Aleksi. Tell me about him."
I shut up. He waited. My head throbbed. Fucking hell. I'd rather have done another six rounds of Russian roulette in the warehouse. At least the gun was honest about what it was.
"Twenty-two. Edinburgh. Family of leatherworkers.
The grandfather restored estate pieces; the father did bespoke goods.
Father was killed about seven months ago by the same operation that took Fin.
They needed the leatherwork. They got it out of the kid by killing his father in front of him, more or less, and then putting him on a plane to Ohio.
The Italians ran him out of the East Side workroom for six months.
He sewed for them. He's good. He was at the warehouse the night we hit it because they'd pulled him off the workroom to do a job they didn't want any of the women to do.
They left him to die when they cleared out. "
"And he's living in your apartment."
"I keep him in cuffs."
There was a beat of silence as he considered me. I should keep my mouth shut. I knew that. Men with nothing to say only let stupid shit fall out of their mouths, and Nikita was damn good at getting them to talk. Didn't stop me, though.
"He's working on Pop's jacket."
"Sacha's jacket?"
I nodded. "He identified the leather from across the table. The yuft. The birch oil. He smelled it. He knew the workshop. He laid out a conservation plan that —"
"Aleksi."
"— that combines bookbinding restoration with —"
"Aleksi."
I stopped.
"I'm not asking about the jacket."
"I know."
"Then stop telling me about the jacket."
Nikita stood up and walked to the cabinet on the side wall, pulling out the bottle of vodka he kept there, the good stuff with the Cyrillic label that came in once a month from a guy who knew a guy. He poured two glasses and walked one back to me.
I frowned at the glass. "It's ten o'clock, Nikita."
"And you are hungover. Drink. It will help."
I drank and set the empty glass on the corner of his desk.
"You know, your father came to me once and asked me how I did it." He swirled the vodka in his glass.
"Did what?"
"Loved Yuri while being married to Tatty. He knew, of course. Yuri was his brother. They shared everything, even the dangerous things. But Sacha… He didn't know what to do after he met that woman in Paris."
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. "Pop didn't talk to anyone about Paris."
"Pop didn't talk to you about Paris, Aleksi. That was the problem."
I closed my mouth around whatever I was going to say next. The vodka had hit. The headache wasn't getting any better, though. Fuck. I sat back in the chair.
"He'd been to Paris three times that year to see her," Nikita continued. "He said he loved your mother, but the woman in Paris… He loved her differently. But he wasn't an idiot. He knew your mother would find out. She was a smart lady, your mother."
I shrugged like it didn't matter. "That's how it is. Men are all cheating bastards. As long as you're discreet about it, the women put up with it."
Nikita raised an eyebrow. "Is that what you think?"
"I know it," I said. "I've been in the organization long enough to know how it works, Nikita."
He sighed. "Anyway, he thought it was a question of arithmetic. He thought if I gave him the formula he could go home and apply it like a man balancing a ledger."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him there was no formula. I told him that a man does not love two people the way he loves one.
I told him Tatty knew because I'd told her, and Yuri knew because Yuri had been there from the start.
The reason it worked was that nobody in my life was being asked to swallow a lie.
" He drank. "Then I told him to stop going to Paris. "
"He didn't."
"He couldn't," Nikita said. "Because of Nikolai."
My fingers tightened into fists at the mention of my half-brother.
He ran the operation in Paris, which meant we didn't see each other all that often, but every time I had to look at him, I wanted to punch him.
He looked too much like our father. He laughed like him.
He even fucking smelled like him and I hated him for it.
Him and his stupid Parisian accent. He didn't deserve that, or the memories, or the way my father had doted on him growing up.
He still had his mother, and half the cash my dad had hidden away before he died.
I picked up the empty glass and turned it in my hand. The crystal was heavy. Simeon had given the set to Nikita on his wedding day, supposedly.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you are your father's son," he said, and I couldn't help but glare at him for it. "Sacha loved every woman who gave him the time of day. He married two of them. He fell in love like most men fall asleep."
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"I'm talking about your Scotsman, Aleksi."
My lip curled in disgust. "I'm not in love with him. Christ, Nikita. He's a fucking prisoner. He's information and a means to an end; he's—"
"You smile when you speak of him," Nikita said. "Do you know that?"
My face fell. I didn't. Did I?
"Aleksi. Listen. I am not asking you to name anything. I don't need it named. The men in our family handle this badly. You understand me?"
The men in our family. Jesus Christ. Here we go.
"Yes."
"Sacha cost your mother her life."
I held my breath.
"He couldn't be in Paris enough. He couldn't be in Ohio enough. He could not pick. He made her wait, and she waited, and she died waiting. That was your father."
She died at her sewing machine. Don't say sewing machine, Nikita. Don't fucking say it.
"She was sick before he started Paris," I said. The words came out before I knew I was going to say them. "She had a heart thing. Pop didn't put her in the ground."
"Aleksi."
"He didn't kill her. People want to make it that simple, but it isn't."
"Aleksi. Listen to yourself."
I shut up. I'd been about to defend my father. Across the desk from the man who'd known him longer than I had. Known him in rooms I'd never been in. I'd walked in here ready to be dressed down about a leak and instead I was defending Sacha Laskin like a teenager. Real convincing, Aleksi.
"I loved Sacha. He was Yuri's brother. I would have buried anyone for him. But he was a coward in the one place a man cannot afford to be cowardly."
I shot to my feet, fists balled. If Nikita were any other man, I'd have punched him, and he knew it. The fucker knew what he was saying, and what it cost me to sit and listen to it, and he said it anyway.
"Just say what you need to say," I spat. "And leave the dead out of this. You got a problem with me? Fucking say it to my face, Nikita. We’ve known each other long enough you owe me that much."
He sighed. "I don't have a problem with you. That is not what this is. I'm trying to offer you advice. Learn from your father's mistakes. Whatever you're going to do, do it all the way. No half measures, da?"
"Nikita —"
He held up a finger, cutting me off. "And as for the job, you're going to walk out of here and find Mr. K's leak. You'll have Pavel's three names, and you'll watch them, and you'll bring me a name in seventy-two hours."
"Understood."
"I'm not finished, Aleksi." He leaned forward.
"If in seventy-two hours you have not brought me a name, I have to assume the leak came out of your apartment.
So if you do not give me a name by Friday morning, I will pull the boy.
Gregori will collect him. I will hand him to Pavel, and Pavel will find out everything he knows.
And then what's left will go to Yuri and his boys to dispose of. Do we understand one another?"
Fucking hell. He was a fucking prisoner. Why the fuck was I freaking out? I shouldn't care what happened to him. But I found myself blurting, "And what about my father's jacket?"
His brow furrowed. "It's just a jacket, Aleksi."
Except it wasn't. Not to me.
"Look, if it's a problem, let me solve it." He put his glass down next to mine. "I can have your Scotsman moved to a safe house. He can fix your jacket and—"
"No," I said too quickly. I cleared my throat. "I mean… No. It's fine. I've got him handled. He's slippery. We have an agreement in place. If he were in someone else's care—"
"You don't have to explain it to me, Aleksi." He patted my shoulder on the way past me to pull open the door. "Go home. Do what you need to do. I'll call you later, da?"
"Sure," I said and walked through the open door.
In the hallway I stood for a second with my hand against the wall.
The interview room at the back of the floor had gone quiet. Pavel's morning was wrapping up, and somewhere in this building there was a body or a man who wished he was a body, and that was the room Fin would be in on Friday morning if I didn't bring Nikita a name.
But that wasn't even the biggest problem I had. Not anymore.
"Fuck," I said to no one and pushed off the wall.