Chapter 5 #3
I got the handle. The door was locked. I put my elbow through the quarter light, reached in, and unlocked it, and hauled the door open, and hauled him out—a big man, half a head taller than me, bleeding down his chin and still with his fist in a handful of white silk—and I put him face-down on the road and knelt on him until he let go.
“Don’t get up,” I said.
Then I turned back to the car and she came out of it at me like something let off a chain.
She was in the dress. White silk, half the bodice torn away from the shoulder where the man had had hold of her, one sleeve gone, her hair down out of its pins on one side and her mouth bleeding at the corner.
And her eyes were enormous and pale and completely, absolutely gone—nothing in them but a woman who had been dragged out of one car by strangers and was now being reached for by another one.
“Yelena—”
She hit me in the throat with the flat of her hand.
It was a good strike; somebody had taught her that much at least. Then she went for my face with her right hand closed around something, and I got my arm up half a second too slow, and the pin of the firebird brooch went through my cheek from the jaw to just under the eye.
I felt it open. I felt the blood go down inside my collar, warm, immediate.
I did not hit her. No chance.
My hands came up and I caught both her wrists and I brought them in and held them crossed against my own chest, and I put my weight into my heels and let her fight it. She was strong. She fought like somebody who had been waiting years to be allowed to.
“Yelena Lvovna. Look at me.”
“Get your hands—”
“Look at my face.”
She looked.
She stopped moving. Not calm. Coiled. Breathing in short hard pulls with her wrists still in my hands and my blood on her fingers.
“The wedding is over,” I said. “It’s not happening.”
Her mouth opened and nothing came out of it.
“Eight o’clock. Mill Basin. The priest and the witnesses and the proxy. It’s over, you’re free, you are not going into that house tonight.” My voice came out lower than I meant it to and I let it. “You are not signing anything tonight.”
She stared at me. Blood at the corner of her mouth, my blood on her knuckles, a hundred and thirty pounds of ruined couture and pure fury, and God forgive me—with a hole in my face and three men bleeding on a road in Brooklyn—I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted her in that second.
I let go of her wrists.
She didn’t run. There was nowhere to run to; that was the point of the road. She stood there with her arms down at her sides and her chest going, and she said, “You’ve made a very expensive mistake.”
“Almost certainly,” I said.
Tonio put a trauma kit down on the asphalt beside the boy I’d shot—tourniquet, pressure dressing, saline, the one we carry for ourselves—and cut the zip ties on the least injured of the lead-car men so he could work.
“Shoulder joint, through and through, he keeps the arm if you’re quick,” I told him. “Ambulance is eleven minutes on Flatbush. Nobody follows us.”
And I took out my phone and sent one message to a number Serafina had bought in Odessa three years ago and never used.
Lev Borisovich. Your daughter is alive, unhurt, and with me. Your son-in-law’s dispatch order authorized a physician to sedate her into her own wedding. I have the document. She will not be drugged into a marriage in my family’s name. Ask him about it before you decide who to bury. — S.S.
Then I put her in the car myself, with my coat around her shoulders, and we drove north with my cheek bleeding into my collar the whole way.
The cabin light was on low and we had thirty-eight thousand feet of nothing under us, and she sat across the aisle from me in the wreckage of her wedding dress with her chin up and her hands in her lap.
Pietro had put four butterfly closures into my cheek at Teterboro with a penlight in his teeth, and then he’d gone forward and pulled the curtain, because Pietro has never once in his life needed to be told to leave a room.
So it was the two of us and the engine noise. Her, and my blood dried brown across the knuckles of her right hand.
She’d refused a blanket. She’d refused water. She’d taken my coat off her shoulders and folded it, precisely, and set it on the seat beside her like something she was returning to a shop, and she’d been sitting like that for twenty minutes without saying a word.
I let her have the twenty minutes. I have spent my whole professional life understanding that silence is not empty; it’s somebody working.
“Turn the plane around.”
I laughed. “No, signora. No.”
“You don’t understand.” Her voice was perfectly level.
“My brother is in that house. He is nineteen years old and soft. My father knows I care for him. Gianni knows I care for him.” Now her hands came out of her lap.
“So whatever you thought you were rescuing tonight—whatever this is, vengeance or leverage or whatever accountants do for excitement—you have just left the only person I have in the world alone in a house with Gianni Scordato and no reason for anyone in it to keep him breathing. Turn the plane around.”
I reached into my inside pocket, took out a folded sheet of paper, and held it across the aisle.
“Read this first.”
“I don’t want your—”
“Read it, Yelena Lvovna. Then tell me to turn the plane around and I’ll consider it.”
She took it the way you take something out of a dog’s mouth. Unfolded it. Held it under the reading light.
I watched her read the dispatch order. I watched her get to the top: collect principal from Zhar-Ptitsa.
Principal will be dressed and prepared on site.
I watched a muscle move at the corner of her jaw at the word principal, and then her eyes went down the page to the second attachment, and stopped.
Her face did nothing at all. That was the terrible part. I sat four feet away and watched a woman read a sworn instrument authorizing a stranger to put a needle in her arm and turn her into a signature, and her face did absolutely nothing, and the only thing in that cabin that moved was the paper.
It shook. Very slightly. Just the corner of it.
“Notarial capacity is not affected,” she read out loud.
“They asked a lawyer,” I said. “The lawyer said the signature would hold.”
“Yes.” Her voice had gone somewhere far away. “That’s—of course they did. Of course.” She read it again, all of it. “Six thirty-two this morning. He drafted this at six thirty-two this morning, and then he came to breakfast and buttered bread.”
“Now,” I said. “Your brother. Tonio didn’t get on this plane.”
Her head came up.
“He’s in a car in Mill Basin with two of Dante Caruso’s men and a third arriving from Cicero on the red-eye.
He has line of sight on the east wing and the guard station and both service entrances, and by midnight he’ll have a man inside the catering company that supplies that house.
” I let that land. “Kiryl doesn’t move without us knowing.
If anybody puts a hand on him, we know inside the hour.
And if the situation deteriorates, I have thirty-one men on this continent who will go into that house, and I will spend all of them. ”
She was very still.
“That’s not the same as having him,” she said.
“No. It isn’t,” I conceded.
“You took me.” Her voice was quiet now. “You took the asset, Scordato. You left the liability.” She said it without heat. “Don’t dress it up. You’re no better than Gianni.”
I could have defended myself. Could have got angry about the fact she was comparing me to a patricide. But I didn’t.
She was owed the insult and I couldn’t have changed her mind anyway, and because some of what she said was accurate.
“I had no choice,” I said. “There was no other option. Going into the house for your brother while the convoy was still moving means fighting inside a building with him in it, and Yelena—I’ve done that.
Boys get shot in hallways. He’d have been the first one hit.
” I held her eyes. “So yes. I made a choice. But I didn’t leave him. My brother will look out for him.”
“Your brother,” she said. “Wonderful. And what is your brother like?”
“Well. He’s a chef.”
She stood up.
I was out of my seat before she’d taken the second step, and I got between her and the cabin door with my back to it, and she came up short a foot away.
“Move.”
“There’s nowhere to go.”
“There is a door and you are standing in front of it—”
“We’re in the fucking sky, Yelena.”
She hit me.
Open hand, hard, across the face—across the left side, the side with four butterfly closures in it—and it landed like a thrown brick.
She went to do it again and I caught her wrists.
Both of them, the way I had on the road. I brought them in and crossed them and held them against my own chest, over my sternum.
We were very close then. Close enough that I could feel her breath on the wet part of my face.
Her hair was down on one side and her shoulder was bare where the silk had torn away and there was a purple ring around her left wrist under my thumb that I had not put there.
She was breathing in fast hard pulls. So was I.
My heart was going like a winch under load and hers was going against the backs of my knuckles, and she was so angry she was shaking, and something else was happening in that four inches of air and we both knew it, and it was the single most dangerous thing on that aircraft.
“You can hate me,” I said.
“I do.”