10. Maxim
MAXIM
Alexei Sokolov keeps me waiting seventeen minutes in his own restaurant, which is the first message of the afternoon, and the cheapest.
The place on Mulberry Street hasn’t changed.
White cloths, dead quiet, a dining room that hasn’t served a stranger in fifteen years.
Two of his men stand by the coat check pretending to be furniture.
A third stands behind Alexei’s chair, a big man, bald, the scalp crossed with ridged scars, a face pulled at one cheek so it rests in the suggestion of a smile.
Kirill.
He doesn’t speak. He watches me sit, and the resting smile deepens by a millimeter, and he goes back to being a wall with eyes.
“Maxim.” Alexei has aged into a fat silver cat of a man, rings on both hands as if he needs to prove his wealth. As if his suits don’t prove it already. “It has been a long time. You look well. The travel agrees with you.”
“What was it, the Brodowski wedding?”
“Ugh, that affair was a bald-faced effort to squeeze guests for money. Envelopes at the ready for money? A cash bar? Beyond tacky.”
I nod once and add a smile to soften things. “Alexei, you wanted a conversation, and I doubt it is about an old wedding.”
“So direct. Sit, eat something. They made the pelmeni.” He gestures at a table set for a feast neither of us will touch. When I decline with a raised hand, he sighs, a man disappointed by the manners of the age, and folds his hands over his belly.
“Very well. Business. I’ll tell you what everyone in this city already understands, old friend.
Four years is a long time. Things drifted.
Your piers, your routes, your beautiful clean trucks, they have been lonely without a real hand on them.
I’ve been, let us say, attentive to the neighborhood in your absence. A good neighbor.”
“A good neighbor,” I repeat.
“The best. And now you’re home, and there’s confusion, and confusion’s bad for everyone’s business. Men get ambitious in confusion. Accidents happen in confusion.” He turns a ring on his finger.
“So, I propose clarity. Peace, Maxim. Full peace, guaranteed, my word on it. Your organization keeps everything north of the container terminals. The ports themselves, the berths, the union locals, the customs relationships, these come under my roof, where in practice they have already been drifting.”
He spreads his hands. “You keep your company, your buildings, your beautiful legitimate face. I keep the water. Everyone sleeps well. This is not a demand, understand. This is a gift between old men who remember when this city was harder than it is now.”
The ports in exchange for peace. He’s offered me the wallet from my own pocket and called it a present, smiling, in front of his silent dog, in a room he owns. The choreography is the message. You are a guest now, in your own city, and guests receive terms.
I let the silence sit. Kirill’s eyes don’t move from me. Somewhere in the kitchen, a pan rings once against a stove and goes quiet, and Alexei waits.
“I heard you were unwell last spring,” I say.
“Your heart. I’m glad to see the recovery took.
A man should have many years to enjoy what he’s built.
” I stand and button my jacket. “Thank you for the hospitality, Alexei. The pelmeni smell excellent. I’ll give your proposal the consideration it deserves. ”
His smile doesn’t fade at my non-answer. I nod to the room, I don’t nod to Kirill, and I walk out past the coat-check furniture into the afternoon. I’m in the car before I let my jaw unclench.
“Well?” Lev says, pulling into traffic.
“He asked for the ports and called it peace.”
“And you said?”
“I complimented his cardiologist.”
Lev drives a block in silence. “So… War, then. Eventually.”
“Eventually. He won’t move while the succession looks settled. He’ll probe.” I watch the city slide past. “Drive to the office. I want the Meridian Atlantic files on my desk tonight.”
Because the second matter of the day is worse than the first, and the second matter is my son.
It’s taken Zurich’s forensic man nine days to unwind what the woman with the folio pointed at in twenty minutes, and tonight the picture completes itself on my desk while the building empties below me.
Meridian Atlantic Services.
A subsidiary with a letterhead and no employees, invoicing our own logistics arm for consulting no one performed, and being paid, always on time. It sums that then walked offshore through two more shells and came home as dividends into an account in my son’s name.
Embezzlement, I assumed. Vanity money, the boy skimming his inheritance out of impatience. Squalid, familiar, survivable.
It isn’t embezzlement. The embezzlement is the wrapping paper.
The pattern is in the freight records, laid beside the invoices.
For three years, containers moving on our cleanest routes, our bonded carriers, our above-reproach customs lanes, have carried consignments our own manifests describe in the vaguest permissible language.
Machine parts. Textiles. Consolidated freight.
Each vague consignment correlates with a payment into Meridian Atlantic within the week. The payments originate, after the shells are unwound, from accounts Zurich’s man has flagged with a single handwritten word.
Sokolov.
Someone routed Alexei Sokolov’s product through my clean lines. The one thing that makes our company look legitimate. And my son signed the paperwork.
Carrier authorizations, vague manifests, whatever slid across his desk, because every signature kept the dividends flowing into the account that paid for the apartment, the tailor, the model’s earrings, the champagne fountain.
Alexei sat across from me this afternoon offering to buy my ports with my own money, and he’s been renting them for three years at a price my son set.
The question is what Klaus knew. Is he a traitor or a fool?
Did he know whose freight rode our lanes? Did he take the money with open eyes, and sell his father’s house to his father’s enemy for an allowance? Or did he enjoy what kept him rich without knowing and never once wondered why a consulting firm with no consultants paid him so damn well?
A traitor I could deal with. There are procedures for traitors, old ones. A fool is worse. It means the rot was stupidity. There’s no fixing stupid.
I don’t know which verdict I’m praying for.
The security console on my desk chirps. Badge activity, after-hours protocol, my own rule. I glance at it expecting a cleaner.
RIDER, D. Archive room, sublevel two. Just after midnight.
She’s in the paper crypts, alone. A very dedicated EA. It’s a pity my son couldn’t muster one-tenth of the same devotion toward the empire that carries his name.
I take the elevator down.
Sublevel two smells of paper and cold concrete.
The archive room runs long and narrow under fluorescent tubes, steel shelving to the ceiling, and I find her mid-aisle, shoes off, standing on a rolling step stool, wrestling a banker’s box off a high shelf with a laptop balanced on the shelf edge and a pen in her teeth. She hasn’t heard the door.
“Miss Rider.”
She startles, box tipping. I cross and catch it one-handed and set it on the cart, and now we’re standing close in a narrow aisle at midnight. She takes the pen out of her mouth, and the air scorches.
I remember what it felt like to be in that mouth, and now, I’m jealous of the pen.
“You scared the hell out of me.” Her whisper is furious. “Why are you lurking in my archive?”
“It’s my archive.”
“I’m working. Some of us take the audit seriously.”
“You shouldn’t be down here alone at this hour.”
“Then you shouldn’t have given me a deadline.”
“I didn’t. You did.”
She steps down off the stool, which brings her closer, not farther, and her chin comes up, and she’s burning with it, hours of dust and my son’s signatures.
“You want to know what I found? Because it’s ugly, and I’m only halfway in, and I’ve been down here alone with it for three hours getting angrier. ”
“Tell me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? You came all the way down here at midnight to tell me to brief you tomorrow, that’s, why are you even—“ and she stops, because I’ve stepped inside. My trousers have tightened.
There’s no distance left to argue across, and her voice drops out of the whisper. Her breaths come harder as she eyes me. “We have a pact.”
“We do.”
“It never happened.”
“And nothing is happening now.”
Neither of us moves for one second. Then both of us move at once.
She grabs my lapels and I lift her up, and her back meets the steel shelving hard enough to rattle a decade of receipts.
Her legs lock around my waist. My mouth finds her silken throat, the pulse going hard under my tongue.
She makes a sound that’s half curse, half my name, and drags my hair back in both fists to get my face up to hers.
The kiss is nothing like the hotel. The hotel was patient. This is teeth and two weeks of conference tables and being good and polite.
“Two weeks,” I tell her against her mouth. “Two weeks of watching you pass me folders.”
“You looked down my blouse.”
“I did.” I’ve a hand up her skirt already, shoving it to her hips, and she’s bare-legged and warm and my fingers find the edge of her underwear. “I’d do it again. I’d do it in front of the board.”
“Max—”
I hook the fabric aside and push two fingers into her, and she’s wet, soaked.
Her head goes back against a box of 2019 invoices with a thud, and she bites her own wrist to keep quiet and fails.
I work her fast, thumb on her clit, her hips rolling into my hand.
I watch her face come apart in the fluorescent light, flushed, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, a sight worth every second I spent pretending not to look.
“I can’t,” she pants, “I can’t be quiet, you have to—“
“Then don’t.” I kiss her to swallow it anyway, and she comes on my hand with a broken sound into my mouth, shaking, her thighs clamping around my wrist.
I don’t let her finish shuddering. I get my belt open and my zipper down one-handed with her still pinned to the shelf, and she’s fumbling at me too, shoving my trousers off my hips, wrapping her hand around me and dragging a groan out of me I didn’t authorize.
I pull her underwear fully aside and line up and push into her in one long shove, and she’s so tight from coming that it takes a yelping second.
Then she opens and takes all of me, and both of us stop breathing.
“God,” she says. “God, Max.”
“Hold on to the shelf.”
She grabs the steel upright above her head with both hands and I take her hips, and I fuck her, no finesse, no patience. I’m out of patience. A box of files goes over somewhere behind us and neither of us cares, every thrust rattling the steel.
She’s loud now, gasping my name and yes and harder, her heels digging into the back of my thighs. I find the birthmark on the nape of her neck with my teeth, mine, still mine, and she clenches around me so hard I almost lose it.
“Not yet,” I grit out, more to myself than her, and I get a hand between us again and find her clit to rub hard circles in time with my hips. Her whole body goes rigid against the steel. All of it.
“Again. Give it to me again.”
She does. She comes with a cry she muffles in my shoulder, and the pulse of her around me takes the last of my control.
I drive deep and hold there and empty into her with my face in her hair, growling something that isn’t English and isn’t anything. Her hair smells like vanilla sugar, and I want to devour her all over again.
Sadly, there’s no time for that.
After, we stay propped against the wrecked shelf, breathing, her forehead on my collarbone, my trousers around my knees, one of her shoes somewhere under aisle four.
“So,” she says, muffled. “Same pact?”
“Same pact.”
“Great. It’s working beautifully.”
“Never happened.”
She snorts. “You’re still inside of me.”
“No, I’m not.”
When she giggles this time, her body squeezes on me.
“Okay, maybe I am.”