Chapter 4 #4
“And then the inspection runs long, and Vasily’s truck loads at the dock, and two extra bodies ride out the gate in a cab nobody searches, because nobody searches outbound produce leaving its own facility.
” I traced the route on the screen. “He drops us at a private bus depot in Pennsylvania—there’s one off the interstate, cash tickets, no cameras worth the name, the drivers there have been paid not to be curious since before we were born.
The truck continues to Chicago on schedule.
Vasily’s log shows nothing. By the time the house sits down to dinner Tuesday and notices the quiet, we are four hundred miles into a country with a great many buses in it.
” I had money in three places my father had never found because my mother had built the places before she built me.
“It works, Kiryusha. It’s risky, but it works. ”
He stared at the screen for a long time. Then he said, in his too-casual voice, the one he’d inherited from me and deployed almost as badly:
“What about the Sicilian?”
“What about him.”
“Once we’re out. He’s against Gianni—his whole family is, the drivers said the cousin runs Chicago now and they hate him.
You have his manifest. He gave it to you, Lena, he wanted you to have it.
If we contacted him after, from somewhere safe—they have money, protection, they’re already fighting the man we’re running from—”
“No.”
“They’re the enemy of our enemy—”
“They’re the family of our enemy,” I said.
“Gianni is their blood. And even if they’d take us in—we arrive with nothing.
We’d be witnesses, assets, leverage against Gianni, wrapped in one convenient package and delivered to a man who catalogs everything he sees.
What exactly would we be to him, after a week?
After a month?” I closed the laptop. “I’ll use his information.
Information doesn’t want anything back. I’m not trading Papa’s cage for a nicer one with better manners.
” I capped the lipstick tube. “ No. I want freedom. For both of us. Whatever happens after, it starts with us walking out on our own legs.”
He didn’t argue. There was something in his eyes. Hope.
The following morning, Gianni was at breakfast. That was the first wrong thing.
He did not stay nights at the house—my father’s rule, part of the untouched-bride theater—and yet there he sat at eight in the morning at my mother’s table, buttering bread with his left hand because his right was wrapped in white gauze, and smiling at me like a man who had already read the last page.
I sat. I unfolded my napkin. I poured tea I did not want, and I catalogued the room.
My father at the head, already finished eating, papers beside his plate.
Kiryl across from me, pale, not eating at all.
Gianni’s two men in the hall, visible through the doorway, standing where his men had never stood before.
Something had been decided in this house while I slept, and I had not been in the room for it, and my whole life has taught me that the meetings I’m not in are the ones about me.
“Good news. The lawyers worked through the night,” my father said. He didn’t look up from his papers. “The proxy is corrected. The notary block, the venue, everything. You’ll sign this morning.”
“Of course, Papa.”
“And the wedding is moved.” He turned a page. “Three days from now. Here, at the house. Private—the immediate families, a priest, witnesses. The public celebration can follow in the spring, when it suits everyone’s calendars.”
The tea went down my throat like a stone. Three days. I set the cup in its saucer without a sound, which cost me more than anyone at that table would ever be given the satisfaction of knowing.
My escape route, gone.
“Three days,” I said. Pleasantly. “The caterers alone—”
“There are no caterers for a private ceremony,” Gianni said, and there it was, the voice of a man unwrapping his own gift.
He leaned back, gauze-wrapped hand resting on the cloth between us like a signed confession neither of us would read aloud.
“Your father and I discussed it last night, ptichka. After I left you.” A pause exactly long enough.
“The situation has changed. My cousin flies to Brooklyn, asks questions at your father’s table, leaves papers lying around.
Three weeks is a long time. Three weeks is a gift to people who want this alliance to fail.
” He spread his good hand, reasonable, magnanimous, a statesman.
“Why give them the gift? We marry now. The paperwork completes now. Whatever the Scordatos in Chicago are planning, they can plan it about a finished thing.”
I looked at my father. My father looked back at me with the pale flat eyes he’d given me at birth like a debt, and I understood that this was not a proposal being floated.
This was a ledger already closed. Gianni had lost a skirmish in my bedroom and gone downstairs and won the war in my father’s study, because he had finally, after months of courtship, said the one thing Lev Sokolov could not argue with: speed protects the asset.
“How prudent,” I said.
“I thought so,” said Gianni.
“And Kiryl.” My father did not even turn his head toward my brother; he addressed the space above his plate. “You’ll move to the blue room this morning. Ground floor, east wing. Until the marriage is complete.”
Kiryl’s fork stopped. “The blue room is next to the guard station.”
“Yes,” said my father, and picked up his coffee, and that was the entire explanation anyone would ever receive. Kiryl looked at me across the table—one look, fast, our mother’s carefulness with our father’s fear in it—and I gave him the smallest fraction of a nod.
This morning, the hope in his eyes had gone.