CHAPTER TWO
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VICTORIA
“Victoria Russo. Don’t shut it.”
September, and the stairwell behind him went dark all the way down to the street.
The door was open six inches on the chain, and that was as open as it was ever going to get. The man on the other side of it stood back from the gap instead of leaning into it. That was the first thing that was wrong. People who want through a door crowd it.
He was lean and he was not in a hurry. Three gold rings on his left hand, and the hand hung loose at his side where I could see it, which I understood later was also for my benefit.
“It’s after one in the morning,” I said.
“It’s later than that.” He looked past my shoulder into my kitchen and then back at me, and he kept his eyes off the stairs behind him. “I need to come in. That’s me asking.”
“No.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t argue. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and waited, and the waiting was worse than pushing would have been.
“You want to tell me how you know my name?”
“Marchetti and Ward puts the courier on the manifest, and one of your dispatch guys drinks at a bar I own a piece of.” He said it the way a man reads a grocery list. “It took me most of an hour.”
“And that’s supposed to make me open a door.”
“No. It’s supposed to tell you how cheap you were to find.”
“Then go be cheap somewhere else.”
“I’d love to.” He rolled his shoulders like a man who had been standing a while. “There’s about four minutes left of somewhere else.”
My apartment smelled like my own kitchen. Burned coffee from the morning, the lemon stuff I use on the counters, a takeout box I hadn’t thrown out.
Then, under it, coming up the stairwell on a slow push of warm air, something else. Dust. Shut windows. A room where nobody had opened anything in a year.
No sweat in it. That was the part I couldn’t put anywhere. A building full of people on a wet September night, and the air climbing those stairs had no person in it at all.
“I’m asking. That’s twice. Third time I go stand in the street and you take your chances.”
My thumb moved the chain before I decided anything. I felt the brass slide give, heard it knock against the plate, and my face went hot in a way the fog had nothing to do with.
I was angry. At him, for asking in that low, even, unhurried way. At my own hand, for answering him first.
He came in past me and did not touch me doing it. He turned sideways in my own doorway so that he wouldn’t.
Neither of us finished the move. He was close enough that I could see the salt line dried into his collar, and the hall behind him had stopped being a thing I was looking at. Then he was through and the doorway was a doorway again.
He put my back to the counter without seeming to move me there. From where he stood, the only way out of my own kitchen went past him.
“Marcus Iyer,” he said. “There’s two men on your stairs.”
“There’s nobody on those stairs,” I said.
“There’s two. They don’t breathe right, and I could scent them off your stairwell from the street.”
I opened my mouth to put teeth in it, and that was when I heard them.
Two sets of feet, third flight, coming up. Not fast. That was the trouble with it. Feet on stairs have a shape — quick, quick, a hitch at the landing, a scuff on the tread where the rail is worn. These had no shape at all. Same interval, same weight, no pause at the turn.
My grandmother had a phrase about the wolf at the door. She meant money. She said it with her hands in the sink, and in twenty-seven years I had not thought about the wolf at all.
I had my phone in my hand. I had been holding it all evening not calling my dispatcher and being angry about not calling her.
“I’m calling the police,” I said, and my thumb was already moving.
He took the phone out of my hand.
He did it slowly enough that I could have kept it, and that is the part I have never gotten over. His fingers came in under mine and lifted, and for a moment we were both holding the same thing in the same place, his rings cold against my knuckles, and my whole arm went stupid on me.
Then he set the phone face down on my counter and put a book beside it.
Not the gray book. This one had a red cloth spine and a cashbook’s paper label; it came out of the inside pocket of his coat.
A hardback ledger, cracked at the spine. He opened it flat and turned it so the page faced me. Columns ruled by hand. Names, badge numbers, money.
PRINE 4471 $2,000. Under it, PRINE 4471 $2,000. Then BELL 4318 $1,500, and BELL again below that in the same tight, level handwriting.
“Prine and Bell. I’ve paid both of them twice, out of that book, and that’s whose car pulls up. Still want to dial?”
“You carry that around.”
“Southeastern District. They ride Alpha Twelve out of Fayette. You dial, and that book comes up your stairs behind these two.”
I looked at the page until the numbers stopped being numbers.
“Anybody can write two names in a—”
“Sure. Anybody can.” He didn’t move to prove it, which was somehow the proof. “Call the desk and ask for Prine. He won’t ask you what happened. He’ll ask you where you’re standing.”
“So I take your word for it,” I said.
“You take mine or you take theirs. That’s the whole menu tonight.”
“I signed for a delivery this afternoon,” I said. “That’s it. That’s the entire thing I did today.”
“I know.” Something went across his face and was gone before I could name it. “That’s the one I’d have talked you out of.”
Then the smell came in the door.
They didn’t knock. My door was still open on its hinge and they came through it the way water comes through a gap.
Both of them wore work clothes cut for somebody else. One had a lanyard on, the card turned backward.
They had no scent of their own at all. What arrived with them was the closed room, the dust, the shut window, and under that nothing.
And they breathed. That was the thing that put my back against the fridge. They did breathe. Four short pulls, then nothing for far too long, then four more. Nobody breathes on a count.
Neither of them made a sound with a mouth. Neither of them looked at Marcus either, which I have since decided was the stupidest thing in the room, because looking at him was the only thing in that hallway worth doing.
Then he moved.
I want to be exact about it, because I have been asked.
He took the steel out of the block on my counter, the round one for knives, and he crossed the hall the way the panther at the zoo used to cross its concrete, all shoulder and no sound.
He put his left hand flat under the first one’s chin and pushed the head back and away from him.
He drove the steel in under the collarbone, downward, once.
Four seconds. I counted them without meaning to.
The salt cellar went off the counter and burst on the tile, and that mattered, and I did not know why.
The thing went down against my hall closet and stayed there.
Here is what came up in me. Not horror. Heat, low down and clean, and a thought I had never let out of my head: do it again. He had done that in my kitchen and I wanted to have watched it twice.
I knelt. I did not decide to kneel. My knees were on the floor and my hands were on my thighs and the tile was wet under one of them.
“It’s not bleeding,” I said.
“No.”
There was a hole under the collarbone and the steel had come out of it clean. Nothing was coming out behind it. No pump, no seep, not even the dark bead you get off a shallow cut in a kitchen. I put my face closer to it than any sensible woman would have.
Inside, it was gray. It was dry the way a wasp nest is dry.
“What was he?”
“Wasn’t a he.”
He said that to the floor and not to me.
“Then say what it was.”
“No.”
He crouched down across from me, elbows on his knees, and looked into the hole the way you look at a thing you own with somebody.
“I’m not going to lie to you and I’m not going to answer you,” he said. “Those are different. Tonight they’re all I’ve got.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It isn’t,” he agreed. “It’s still true.”
“There’s a dead man on my floor.”
“There’s no man on your floor.” He stood up out of the crouch without using his hands. “That’s the part you already know and haven’t let yourself say yet.”
The second one was standing in my doorway with its hands down at its sides.
It had watched all of it. It had watched Marcus work from where it stood and had not come a step closer since.
Marcus put himself between it and me and spoke to it the way a man speaks to a dog belonging to a neighbor he does not like.
“Wrong door. Go tell him she’s under my hand as of tonight, and tell him I said it out loud in front of her.”
Nobody had ever settled anything about me while I stood there to hear it. My body took it in a good while before my head got a vote. I wanted it said again, in front of more people.
Then it turned around and walked back down the stairs.
Same interval, same weight, no hitch at the landing, all the way to the bottom.
I would rather it had come at us. I want that written down somewhere. A thing that leaves is a thing that has somewhere else to be.
Marcus wiped the steel on his own sleeve and put it back in the block where it came from.
He closed the red cashbook and put it back inside his coat. The empty salt cellar lay in pieces across the doorway. The second thing had stopped on the far side of the spill. I kept that, too.
There was a thing on my kitchen floor that had never been a person, and I was watching how the sleeve moved over the back of his hand. I would like to call that shock. I have been in shock. Shock does not hold opinions about a man’s forearms.
“One thing. Not a bag. Ninety seconds.”
“I live here,” I said.
“You lived here.” He was already at my window with two fingers in the blind. “Ninety.”
“Corinne calls me at seven. Every morning. She’ll come here.”
“Corinne’s going to call and get nothing, and she’s going to be scared, and she’s going to be alive.” He didn’t turn around from the glass. “Eighty.”
“You don’t get to decide this.”
“I’m not deciding. I’m counting.” He knocked twice on the glass with one knuckle. “Seventy.”