10. Ten
My mother had raised me Catholic. She'd taken me to Mass on Sundays and put me in catechism on Wednesdays and made me sit through the whole rosary on the kitchen floor every Lent until I could rattle off the Sorrowful Mysteries faster than the priest. When she died, I'd kept going for about a year out of habit and then I'd stopped, and I hadn't been inside a working church in eight years for something that wasn't a funeral.
Orthodox churches were a different animal.
I stood across the street in the rain and looked up at the dome.
The cross at the top of it was the three-bar kind, the bottom bar set at the slant the Greeks and the Russians both used and the Catholics didn't. Pop had explained that bar to me once.
I couldn't remember what he'd said. The rain was coming down steady and the stone of the church had gone dark with it.
I'd been standing here long enough that my collar was wet.
Fin didn't come to breakfast this morning.
He was being a petulant child about the whole thing.
I was the one whose entire world view had been upended last night.
I didn't know what his fucking problem was.
The asshole got free rent and three square meals a day.
A free orgasm with no strings attached should've been the cherry on top.
Instead, he chose to sulk in his room. Fine. Let him sulk. I had work to do.
I crossed the street and took off my hat going up the steps.
The narthex took the sound out of the rain in one breath.
The doors closed behind me and the city was gone.
The air was thick with incense — not the candle-shop kind, the real thing, layered into the stone over a century or however long the building had been here.
The ceiling was low and the walls were close and the light was the dim gold of beeswax in iron stands.
Every inch of wall was painted. Saints stacked floor to ceiling, all of them facing me, none of them with the soft Catholic eyes I'd grown up under.
Orthodox saints didn't suffer. They watched.
I crossed myself out of habit, the Catholic way, and felt the wrongness of it the second my hand moved. I let my hand fall.
The nave past the narthex had no pews. The iconostasis at the far end was covered in icons, the doors closed, the altar hidden behind it. Candles burned in front of it in a long brass rack. Someone had lit a lot of them recently.
I stood near the back and put my hands in my pockets. The rain was a soft pressure against the stone outside. The candles guttered in a draft I couldn't feel.
Pop had been Russian Orthodox. He'd never made me come to a church like this one.
My mother got Sundays and Pop hadn't fought her on it, and whatever he'd kept of his own faith he'd kept to himself.
I'd seen him cross himself maybe twice in my life.
The bar on the cross outside was the same one he wore on a chain under his shirt, and that was about all I knew about it.
The rest of what he'd told me about it was gone.
I tried to picture him in a room like this as a boy, before the wars, holding his father's hand. I couldn't imagine it. He'd been too American by the time I knew him, too loud, too much of everything.
Then I tried to picture myself next to that boy with Pop's hand on my shoulder, and I couldn't imagine that either.
He'd taken Nikolai to church. Pop had a whole life in Paris where he stood next to a different woman and held a different boy's hand, and he'd left the Catholic version at home with my mother and me.
A door opened somewhere behind the iconostasis. Footsteps. Izzy came out from the side, dressed for the weather, his hat in his hand. He crossed himself when he passed the candles, slow, the Orthodox way, and kissed his thumb at the bottom of it.
"My brother used to say the saints liked the rain," he said without looking at me. "It made the candles work harder."
Isador Costas was younger than me by a decade and looked like a Greek sculpture that life had taken its time with.
He was tall and thin in the face, with dark hair starting to fall the way the saints' hair fell in the icons over his shoulder, and sad eyes, the kind of mouth women wrote letters about.
Somebody somewhere had built him to be looked at and somebody else had been hitting him with a hammer ever since.
The combination had produced a man you couldn't stop looking at and couldn't quite stand to keep looking at.
He stopped a respectful distance from me.
"How's the shrew?" I said.
He turned his head toward me and held my eyes. The candles guttered, and somewhere in the dome a beam settled with the cold and let out a single groan. Izzy waited it out before he spoke. "Hillary is well."
"She let you out of the house?"
"Aleksi," he said quietly. "You and I have known each other a long time. I would consider it a personal favor if you spoke about my wife with the respect a man's wife is owed."
"She doesn't talk about you that way, Izzy. I've heard her. Tatty's heard her."
Izzy turned to face me fully then. The candles were behind him and the gold of the iconostasis was at his back, and he looked at me the way the icons did, all attention and no temperature.
"My wife is my burden to bear," he said. "Just as your demons are yours."
Fin crossed my mind without permission, the split lip and the cum dried on the shirt I'd put in the laundry at three that morning.
I held the look. The rain was steady on the stone outside. Somewhere down the nave a candle gave up and the smoke climbed thin and gray into the dark of the dome.
"All right, Izzy."
"Thank you, Aleksi." He inclined his head a fraction and the iconostasis caught the movement, and he was Izzy Costas again, soft-spoken and sorry for the weather. "Shall we?"
He gestured toward the side of the nave.
There was a low stone bench built into the wall there, the kind they put in for the old women who couldn't stand the whole service.
He went over and sat, hat balanced on his knee.
I came over and stood beside him, because sitting on a bench made for grandmothers was a step further into Izzy's church than I was ready to go.
"The Italians came through the door of Demetriou's Flower Shop on High Street at two this morning. They killed two and walked out."
I waited. The candles kept at their work and the rain kept at the dome.
"Two of the men inside were my cousin's," he said. "Distant cousin, the kind nobody likes, but he is family. He has been on the phone with my father since six."
I did the math while he said it. Nigel had been chewing on this for hours by the time I walked into the church.
"How long do we have?"
"Until my father makes a decision I cannot walk back?" Izzy turned the hat on his knee. "Lunch. Maybe a little after."
"Then we give him something before lunch."
"Yes."
I shifted my weight off my bad knee.
"It's the same crew that ran the workroom we hit on Tuesday," I said. "Same man at the top. He cleared the counterfeit operation three days ago and the next thing he does is walk into a Greek flower shop. He's planting a flag. He'll keep planting until somebody puts him under the ground."
"I agree."
"Then we put him under the ground."
Izzy gave me a quarter of his attention and three-quarters to the candles. "How?" he said.
"I’m working on it."
Izzy gave the candles a long moment. The hat turned another quarter on his knee. Then he looked up at me.
"Doesn't Nikita have a man named Pavel working for him?"
"Probably."
"The bald one. Works in Nikita's office."
I shrugged.
Izzy reached into the inside pocket of his coat and drew out a thin envelope. He held it for a second against the dark wool of his lapel.
"One of my men gave me a gift this morning. One I cannot accept. I have no use for it." He extended the envelope across the space between us. "Considering your situation, it may be of use to you."
I took the envelope and turned it over in my hands before opening it.
Inside were three photographs. Pavel with a woman on his arm who wasn’t his wife—that was nothing.
Half the men in the organization had a woman who wasn’t their wife.
It was the door behind them that stopped me.
Saggio’s Italiano Ristorante. We’d made Saggio’s as an Italian hub months ago.
Pavel knew that better than I did. He’d helped me make it.
I flipped to the next one. Pavel again, same telephoto grain, shaking hands on the sidewalk with a man I knew on sight.
Tonio Marchetti ran the counterfeit pipeline for the Italians.
You didn’t shake that hand by accident. You didn’t shake it at all unless you’d already stepped over a line I’d spent a year keeping men behind.
The third was the two of them at a table, heads close, Pavel laughing at something. Comfortable. Old friends.
Pavel had built the leak file. He’d stacked it on Doug and left himself one clean line at the bottom of his own page.
He’d been the loudest voice in the room for handing Fin to the back room on Friday—the one man alive who’d worked that Italian operation from the inside, the one man who could put a name to everything the Italians didn’t want named.
I’d read it as caution. It wasn’t caution.
It was a man making sure the only witness ended up in his chair and nobody else’s.
The leak was Pavel. It had been Pavel the whole time, and he’d handed me the file himself, and I’d read it exactly the way he built it to be read.
I closed the envelope.
The rain was steady on the dome. The candles at the iconostasis kept on at their work.
"Thanks for the gift," I said.
"What will you do with it?"
"Clean house."
Izzy nodded once. "And the Italians?"
"Have your people call my people. We've got an infestation, and you know as well as I do that once they get in the walls, the only way to get rid of the fuckers is to burn the whole place down."
Izzy looked at the candles for a long moment.
"So we stop them from nesting in the walls," he said.
Izzy walked me to the door. In the narthex he put his hat back on, told me to be careful on the roads, and waited until I'd said the same before he stepped aside.
Pavel. Christ. The man had stood next to me at Pop's funeral with his hand on my back. A week ago he'd been in my apartment drinking the good vodka, telling me about his daughter at Ohio State. He was so fucking proud. And the whole time, he was on Dario Kastelani's payroll.
I crossed the street, dodging cars and keeping my head low in the rain. When I reached the car, I yanked the door open and dropped into the back seat.
"Call Nikita," I barked, peeling off my gloves.
"Everything okay, boss?" Gregori glanced in the rearview.
"Fine," I lied as the phone rang over the car speakers.
"Volkov Law Office. How can I—"
"This is Aleksi. Put me through."
The phone line clicked as Nikita's secretary transferred my call. Nikita picked up on the second ring. "Do you have good news?"
"I have news. Don't know if I'd call it good." I gestured for Gregori to start driving. "The Greeks are going to sit down. They want the Italians almost as badly as we do. Fuckers hit a flower shop. This is starting to get ugly."
"Agreed. I hope there've been further developments with that research I asked you to do."
I let out a heavy sigh. "I'm on my way over right now. Get Pavel. And Nikita? You're going to want to clear your schedule for the rest of the day."
"Noted," he said. "See you in twenty."