18. Eighteen
There were one thousand four hundred and twelve fake handbags in the warehouse on Cleveland Avenue, and Nikita wanted every one of them counted, photographed, and logged before they went into the holding truck to be sold.
The plan was to slowly drip them into the market so they didn’t tank the price.
It was basically free money for us, courtesy of Mr. K. All it cost was a few innocent lives.
The job would normally fall to some low-end foot soldier, the kind of guy who was still trying to earn his stripes in the organization. Instead, it fell to me and my good for nothing half-brother.
Apparently, Nikita knew how to hold a grudge.
I logged a red bag in the ledger, photographed it, and tossed it into the bin with all the other red ones.
“You know, Pop bought mum one just like this for their fifteenth anniversary,” Niko said on my left.
“Pop didn't buy fakes. Not for my mom, at least."
"Mm. No. You're right. Hers was a real Prada. He had taste." Niko turned a tan one over in his hands like he was appraising it instead of logging. He slipped the bag over his shoulder. “What do you think? Is pink my color?”
I snorted. “Pink is a girl’s color.”
“It is not.”
“Is so.”
“Is not.”
I sighed and put down the bag I was working on to glare at my brother. “Then why is every Barbie car pink?”
Nikolai stared at me like I’d lost my damn mind. “How do you know what color a Barbie car is?”
“Just shut the fuck up and do the damn job, okay?”
“Colors don’t have genders,” he muttered, but he slid the purse down from his shoulder to photograph it. But I caught him checking the line of it in the dark of the window first. Whatever he saw there, he filed it away and said nothing.
“Course they fucking do. Pink is for girls. Blue is for boys.”
“And what about the others, eh? The non-binary baes. The trans masc disasters. The—”
“Okay, I fucking get it!” I snapped. We stared at each other for a minute before I turned back to the work. A beat of tense silence passed before I finally answered. “Purple.”
“Pardon?”
“They can have purple. And green. And orange. And all the other fucking colors, ok? Fuck, man. I don’t know. Forget I said anything.”
“Purple, eh?” His camera clicked. “Purple is my favorite color.”
"Course it is," I muttered. “Fucking queer.”
“Says the man who shares a bed with another man every night.”
I looked up and made sure he met my eyes. “Don’t.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Niko, if you start talking shit, you’d better be ready to eat it. I will knock out your fucking teeth if you don’t shut the fuck up about that right fucking now.”
He lifted his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay.” A small beat of silence. “But it wasn’t like I was passing judgment. Only pointing out that we are cut from the same cloth, no? Papa would say it’s beneath a Laskin to throw stones in glass houses.”
“Who I sleep with is none of your fucking business. Or anybody else’s,” I said firmly.
“Of course. I agree.” He photographed another bag. “But if you ever want advice—”
“You’re getting real close to needing a fucking dentist, Niko.”
He put his head down and muttered. “Endodontist.”
“What?”
“Technically, I’d need an endodontist.”
I turned and drew back my fist, and he finally shut his fucking mouth.
He let me have a few minutes of quiet, which should have been my first warning.
"So," He photographed a bag without looking at it. "Thursday."
My hands didn't stop moving. "What about it?"
"You booked Henri for Thursday. Two fittings.
" He said the cutter's name the French way, drawing it out, because of course he knew Henri, because the one good tailor in this city was the one place every man in the organization eventually washed up.
"Ten and ten-thirty. I saw the card on your counter. "
"Stay out of my fucking mail."
"It was on the counter, Aleksi. Face up." He set the bag down. "Two fittings. You don't need two. You're one man." He tilted his head. "Unless the second one's for the bird."
I logged a bag. Then another. The flash on Niko's phone went off twice while I did it, and he didn't say anything, which from Niko was practically a scream.
"His dad was a tailor," I said finally. To the ledger, not to him.
"Leatherworker. Bespoke. Three generations of it.
He took one look at my suit the day I met him and told me it didn't fit.
Told me the gloves were wrong. Told me my tailor had been guessing at my measurements for fifteen years.
" I set the bag in the bin. "He was right. About all of it."
"So you're getting a new suit."
"I'm getting a new suit that fits."
Niko was quiet for a second. "And the ten-thirty?"
I didn't answer that. I picked up the next bag and turned it over and found the stamp and photographed it. I could feel him watching me, but I kept my eyes down.
The kid had spent six months being measured for nothing but a coffin.
Fitted by men who only ever put their hands on him to move him or hurt him.
I wasn't going to explain to Niko what it meant to book a man a fitting where somebody took his measurements because he was going to be around long enough to wear the thing out.
I wasn't sure I could've explained it to myself.
"Aleksi," Niko said, and his voice had gone soft in a way I trusted even less than the needling.
"Drop it."
"I was only going to ask about your first suit. How old were you?”
I lowered the bag, jaw clenched. I remembered standing on the stool in the middle of my mother’s workroom while a stranger ran his tape under my arms and down the inseam of my leg, taking measurements when I should’ve been in school.
I’d been standing two feet from where my mother died, and I was waiting for my pop to come through the door.
He was late. He was always fucking late to everything except his own funeral, and even then it was only because Uncle Yuri ran a tight ship at the funeral home.
“I was eight,” I replied, going back to work. “Mom’s funeral.”
“Ah,” was all he said.
“Why?” I tossed another bag into the bin. “How old were you?”
"Eleven." Niko didn't look up from his bag.
"Papa took me to Moscow. Said a man's first real suit should be cut by Russians, not Frenchmen, that the French make you look pretty and the Russians make you look like a man.
" He almost smiled. "He took me to the old shop on Kuznetsky Most, the one Simeon used, and the man there made me stand still for an hour while Papa drank tea and argued with him. Then we went north and shot a bear."
"You shot a bear?"
"Papa shot a bear. I held the rifle after and stood next to it for the photograph." He set the bag down. "He had the picture framed. It was in his study in Paris. Me, eleven, swimming in a coat two sizes too big, holding a gun bigger than I was, grinning like an idiot."
I logged a bag and didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say. He got treated like the golden son, as always, while I stood on a stool and waited for a father who couldn’t be bothered.
"You'd have liked Moscow," Niko said, quieter. “Very grim. Like you.”
"I wouldn't know."
"No." He picked the next bag up. "I suppose you wouldn't."
We worked in silence for a while, and I thought of Fin.
His hand was healing nicely. He’d even been back at work a bit.
Not on the jacket, not yet. He said he needed to practice first, relearn the craft with one less finger, and I understood.
There was a part of me that didn’t want him to finish that jacket, anyway.
It was supposed to be an impossible task, the one thing no one could fix, and as long as he didn’t, I had a reason to keep him with me.
Without the jacket between us, I’d have to start calling this what it was, and I wasn’t ready for that.
“Tiens, bonjour,” Niko said next to me and turned the bag inside out. “What are you, little friend?”
“What are you doing?”
“This one is heavier than the others.” Niko ran his thumb over the bottom of it. “And look here. The bottom is wrong.”
He worked a thumbnail into the lining seam until the stitching gave and then went digging around in the empty space. “Bingo!”
Niko pulled his fingers out, clutching a small black velvet pouch the size of a walnut.
“What the fuck?” I leaned in. “Open it.”
He pulled the drawstring loose with his teeth and tipped it into his palm.
Six tiny, glittering gems tumbled out.
Diamonds.
“Putain, Aleksi, do you see?”
“I see them. But what the fuck are a bunch of diamonds doing inside a knockoff leather bag?”
Niko didn't answer me. He was rolling one of them between his thumb and forefinger, up close to his eye, turning it against the light.
"Niko."
"These are not glass." He tipped his hand and let them slide, watching how they caught. He pinched one and held it. "Six of them. In one bag. In one bad bag, in a crate of three hundred bad bags."
"So Mr. K was moving them in the product. This wasn’t just a counterfeiting operation. It was a diamond smuggling operation."
"Mm." He still wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the bag, the slit lining, the false bottom, his thumb pressed into the wrong seam like he was reading something off it. Then something moved across his face, slow, and his hand closed around the stones.
I shook my head. “How did you even know to check?”
"The stitching." He held the bag up so I could see where the false bottom met the side, the doubled line of thread sunk down into the leather where nobody would think to look.
"You see how it's set? Recessed. Sewn from the inside so the seam disappears into the grain.
You'd have to know it was there to find it.
You'd have to know how to make it there.
" He lowered the bag. "Papa had a man who could do this.
He used to bring me… Oh, what do you call them?
They are…like a firework wrapped in thin paper.
You throw them on the ground and they make a loud sound? "
“Bang snaps?”
“Oui!” He snapped his fingers. “Illegal in France. You sell them in supermarkets here. I loved those fucking things. He would put them in his luggage to get through customs and showed me how to cut the lining so you could sew it back up to hide it.”
"Bang snaps," Niko said again, softer, like the words had walked him somewhere he hadn't meant to go.
He looked down at the stones in his palm, and whatever was on his face wasn't a joke anymore.
"It was the same cut. The exact same cut, Aleksi.
He'd open the lining, lay it flat, and sew it back so you'd never know.
" He closed his hand. "That's how Pop used to get diamonds through customs. Not bang snaps. I just got the bang snaps."
I almost felt sorry for Niko for a second.
Here he was thinking Pop cared enough about him to invent a secret compartment just for him, and the bastard was using it to move diamonds.
The gift for his kid was an afterthought.
I knew the feeling he was wearing intimately, but by the look on his face, it was one he was less familiar with.
"Put them back in the pouch," I said.
"Aleksi—"
"Pouch. Now." I pulled my phone out. "And don't lose the bag. That bag's the only one of three hundred that matters."
He bagged the stones and held them out, and I didn't take them, because the old Aleksi would have.
The old Aleksi would have pocketed six diamonds and a problem and gone and solved it himself, quietly, off the books, and called it initiative.
The old Aleksi got a man's finger taken off for that exact instinct.
I scrolled to Nikita's number and put the phone to my ear.
He answered on the second ring. "Aleksi."
"We've got a problem with the inventory."
A pause. "What kind of problem?"
"The kind where I'm holding six diamonds I pulled out of the bottom of a counterfeit handbag, and my brother says the stitching's a smuggling job.
I think Mr. K was washing money through the product.
There's more in here. There's got to be.
" I looked down the rows of crates, three hundred bags a crate, crates to the ceiling. "What do you want me to do, boss?"
The silence on the line went a beat longer than I liked. Then something in it shifted, and I understood I'd passed a test I hadn't been told I was taking.
"Don't touch another bag," Nikita said. "Photograph what you've got and seal the warehouse. Kostya will put men on the door tonight."
"Understood."
"How sure is Nikolai about the stitching?"
I looked at my brother, who was still holding the black bag like it might bite him. "Sure enough to recognize it from when he was a kid. Says it's a craft job. Says you'd have to know it was there to find it."
"Then we have a problem bigger than one warehouse." A pause, and I heard him set something down on his desk. "If K was sewing stones into the product, he wasn't doing it himself. He had hands. Skilled ones. The kind that don't grow on trees in this city."
He meant Fin.
“He couldn’t have known,” I said. “If Fin knew, he would’ve told me.”
Nikita sighed. “I believe you. The boy’s an asset to the Italians, and assets don’t need details.
He did the fine work for the Italians for six months.
They had him making the pieces that had to pass while the women did all the rest. If anybody alive can pick one of these out of a crate by feel, it's him. "
Nikita was quiet for a moment longer, and when he spoke again, there was something almost amused under the grim. "Talk to your Scottish boy, Aleksi. Find out if he can be our bloodhound." A beat. "And Aleksi. I appreciate you taking the time to call me."
He hung up before I could answer, leaving me standing in a cold warehouse holding a phone and a chest full of something I didn't have a word for. Niko was watching me.
"So," my brother pressed. “What’s the verdict?”
I tucked my phone away. “Looks like we’re going shopping.”