Chapter 12
NICO
Marco meets me at the side entrance, the ink on his knuckles fresh enough to catch the dock light when he turns.
“Six hours,” he says, low. “Not one fucking word. No water. Just sits there.”
“He speaking?”
“Native. Refuses English.”
“Good.”
I go past him onto the floor.
Concrete under everything. One bulb over the table at the far end, the drain set into the floor between the table and the door, the river smell coming through the wall behind the chair.
Marco built it right. Restraints that hold without making a show of it.
The table at the height of a working man’s hands.
A single bottle of water on the side counter where a man in the chair can see it and want it.
I hang my jacket on the hook by the door, walk to the table, and sit.
Korvan watches me come. Beard grown in, stocky, the build a barbershop chair learns the shape of.
He is upright in the restraints because he has decided to be.
The bulb is in his eyes and he does not squint.
He has done this before. From my side of the table, and from his.
That tells me how long this is going to take.
I open the folder.
“Pavel Ivanovich Korvan.” I keep my voice where his own mother would have kept it.
Low. Unhurried. “Saint Petersburg, June of ‘eighty-nine. Came up through the Velikov network out of the Marigny shop. Three years on the chair. Fourteen of our soldiers under your razor. Four of theirs. The left chair is yours. The right belongs to your cousin Yuri. You take your coffee at Burgundy and Esplanade. Black. Two sugars.”
He does not move.
I turn a page I do not need to turn.
“Your sister Anya keeps the books for a dental office at Magazine and Felicity. Your mother is on the third floor at fourteen-eleven Tchoupitoulas, in the building with the wisteria that’s eating the gallery rail.
Your daughter is in the second grade at the school on Webster.
Left-handed. Her teacher sends notes home about it. ”
I close the folder. I lay my hand flat on the cover.
“I don’t raise hands on women. Not yours. Not anyone’s. That is not the offer I’m making.”
His weight comes forward against the restraints. He reacts to his daughter. That’s the door.
“You speak it like a Moscow man.” Low. “Where did you learn it.”
“It doesn’t matter where I learned it.”
“It matters to me.”
“It matters that I learned it.” I keep my hand on the folder. “Now you’re going to tell me about the source inside Casa Lucia.”
He gives me the shrug the restraints allow.
“There is no source inside Casa Lucia.”
I take the photograph out of the folder and slide it across the table.
It stops under the bulb. Izzy’s catch. Korvan in the doorway of the Tremé shop with a man in a Casa Lucia polo, the logo clean on the chest, the kind the front desk wears.
Three-quarter profile. A small red dot inked over the man’s ear, where Izzy circled him in the dark hours before dawn and said quietly, him.
The thread she’s been pulling since summer.
Korvan looks at it.
“You have a photograph. You do not have a name.”
“I have the photograph. I’ll have the name in fifteen minutes.” I let that sit. “I’m asking you to give it to me in five.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he pivots.
“You are Nico Santoro,” he says. “The Consigliere. The one who speaks multiple languages.” He sets the pause down like a card. “You are also the Canadian.”
I keep my hand down. I keep my breath where it is.
“The one who walked into the warehouse in Moscow three years ago and walked off the face of the earth. Morozov has been hunting that man since. He doesn’t have a name to hunt.” His mouth moves at the corner. “I could give him one.”
I have run this conversation from the other chair. Not the man asking. The man answering. Three years ago, in Moscow, a bulb in my eyes, Alexei Morozov reading my own life back to me in a voice with no heat in it. The folder. The names. The patience of a man who owns the whole night and knows it.
I learned this room there. Not from the asking side. The answering side. I am good in this room because I sat in this chair, and I know what breaks a man and what doesn’t because I watched myself to find out.
The recitation I just gave Markov is Alexei's. The rhythm of the pages. The offer wearing the face of mercy. It is what he used on Yelena but she didn't break.
She traded months of Bratva names for her family's rescue, her mother, her sister, herself, a deal she made with her eyes open and her chin up.
I have used Alexei's method in this room a dozen times since.
I am good at it. I have never let myself think too hard about what that means until right now, sitting across from a man I am threatening with the same method she faced.
I do not let any of it reach my face. He is watching for the face. They always are.
“You won’t get the chance,” I tell him.
“I might.”
“You won’t. You don’t get to a phone, and there’s no one in this building who’ll carry a word out for you. Nobody on your side knows where you are, or that you’re alive to be somewhere. Morozov can hunt the Canadian as long as he draws breath.” I keep my voice flat. “He doesn’t get him from you.”
His eyes drop to the photograph. I stay where I am. I keep my hand on the folder and I let the silence do the work. This is the part Alexei was best at. The silence after the offer is made. The patient sitting. I can do this all night and Korvan knows it.
His shoulders drop a quarter inch. Not surrender. The decision before surrender. I have watched enough men make it to know what it looks like.
“Andrei Volin,” he says. “Reception. Nine months he has been there.”
I do not write it down. I will not forget it.
“He is not Bratva. He has a sister in Naples and a debt to the family that took her. He has not paid it.” A breath. “That is his leash.”
“How long has he been giving you the list.”
“Six weeks.”
“What does he give you.”
“The Don’s wife runs the intake board. Volin reads it every morning before the doors open. He passes us the rerouting list. He does not know what it is. The family in Naples told him this is how he pays the debt. He thinks he is buying his sister back.”
My hand stays on the folder. I keep my face where it is.
“What did he see that morning.”
Korvan looks at me.
“Your girl,” he says. “The front passenger seat. The young one with the violin.” He stops. One beat. “The Algiers route.”
The air goes out of my chest.
My jaw locks and I feel it lock and I cannot stop it and Korvan sees it.
I know he sees it because his eyes change, the stillness in them something I have not seen in this room tonight, and for the first time since I walked through that door he looks at me the way a man looks when he has found something he did not expect to find.
He has a daughter. A man with a daughter knows what a face does over a name.
The Algiers route.
She was in that seat. I drove her on that road.
Someone in a Casa Lucia polo read her name off an intake board and handed it to the man sitting across from me and this man knew which road I drove her on a Tuesday morning and put it in the hands of someone looking for her and I want to put my hands through the table.
I am going to destroy something and I am not moving.
I am moving.
I am across the table before I decide to be.
My fist finds his face. The crack of it goes up my arm and into my shoulder and I do not stop.
The chair goes back. Korvan goes with it.
I go with him and my knee is on his chest and my fist is coming back a third time when Marco’s arms lock around mine from behind and drag me off the floor.
“Nico. Nico.”
I let Marco pull me back because I choose to. That is the only thing I have chosen correctly in the last thirty seconds.
Korvan is on the floor with his chair. His nose is broken. Blood on the concrete. Blood on my hand. He is breathing, which is the only reason this room stays useful tonight.
Marco sets me back on my feet. His hands stay on my arms one extra second. Checking.
I straighten my jacket and pick up the folder. I sit back down at the table and I breathe through my nose and I look at the blood on my knuckles.
I just showed him everything. I have never shown anyone anything in a room like this. And I just gave it to him for free.
Two of Marco’s men get Korvan off the floor and right the chair and put him back in it.
He spits blood onto the concrete. His eyes find mine.
He does not look afraid. He looks at me like a man who has just been handed something he did not know he was going to get. He is very still. That is the only thing I can read on him right now, and it is enough.
I hold his eyes and I do not look away.
I could not take it back if I tried. I am not sure I want to. Anyone who reads her name off a list deserves to know what it costs them.
“Nico.” Low. Even. “I am giving you Andrei because I do not want my daughter to be the woman in Naples. I am not your friend.”
“I didn’t ask you to be.”
I stand. I pick up the folder and leave the photograph face up on the table where he has to keep looking at it. I cross to the door.
Marco is at the side-room threshold, tablet in his hand, his eyes red at the rims from the monitors.
“Hold him. No water for an hour, then bring it at the hour. Second pass at first light. I want Izzy inside Volin’s phone before the Russian’s finished his water. The Naples thread. The sister, the family, the debt, all of it. Have me a number by morning.”
“On it.”
“And Marco.”
“Yes.”
“I’m proud of you. You know that?” A beat, quieter. “What you and Izzy gave me today is a chance to keep her safe. That means everything to me.”
Marco’s throat moves. “Izzy found him,” he says. “I just picked him up and brought him here.”
“I know what you built.”
He turns toward the side room before the rest of his face shows.
Renzo is at the gate.
He has been here since I went in. He has not come inside and has not asked to. He’s leaning on the post with the gate guard, passing a thermos, not talking. He straightens when he sees me and hands me the keys to my own car like he just happened to be holding them.
“You good.”
“Always.”
He looks at me. We both know that isn’t the answer. He lets it stand, because that is the courtesy between us.
He opens my door, which he has not done since we were boys and it was a joke. It is not a joke now.
He leans in the window. His eyes drop to my hand and come back up.
“Marco called me,” he says. “Told me what happened in there.”
I don’t answer.
“Good.” Flat. No qualifier. “Anyone who puts eyes on her gets what they get.”
He straightens. His hand goes to the roof of the car.
“She’s at the compound. Safe. Nobody is getting through that gate tonight.”
“I know.”
“You know it up here.” He taps the side of his head once. Then his fist goes to his chest. “Not here yet. Drive. Straight route. Eighteen minutes.”
He steps back.
I drive.
The compound is asleep when I come through the gate.
The kitchen light is on at its lowest. Nonna has left a plate on the island under a cloth, the way she has left a plate for every man in this house who came home late from work she does not ask about.
I stand at the island with blood still on my hand and I do not touch the plate. My hands are not clean enough tonight to eat food Nonna made for me.
I go to my study. I hang the jacket on the back of the chair, set the folder on the desk, open the cover, and write the name in pencil on the inside, small, the way I write things I mean to act on. Andrei Volin. Reception. Six weeks. I close it.
I sit.
The door of my bedroom stands open across the gallery.
The corner of the bed from the desk. Made.
Empty. It has been made and empty every night since I gave her the room across the house and the one rule that goes with it.
That door is hers. She crosses to mine or she does not, and no one in this family decides that but her.
I could go to her hallway. Stand outside her door.
I have the name now, the man with eyes on every road she’s been on, and I want to walk to her room and put my body between her and every doorway she has ever been watched from, and I want it so badly my hands are flat on the desk and my jaw is locked and the blood on my knuckles is drying and I am not moving.
I don’t go.
The door is hers. I gave it to her and I don’t get to take it back because I am not the man I was this morning. Tonight I am the man who lost control in that room, and I do not bring that man to her door.
I sit with the folder closed on my knee and the river soft through the wall, and I do not move.
Then bare feet from her wing, the rhythm I have learned without deciding to learn it. Light, even, a small hitch on the fourth stair where the board has gone soft.
I am out of the chair, my hand already reaching for the door, before I catch myself.
No.
I put my hand on the back of the chair and hold it. My knuckles go white. I stay.
Not toward my room. The other way. The back stairs, the hall, the kitchen.
She is in the kitchen long enough for the pipe to sound, water to run, water to stop. Then the bare feet again, back the way they came, up the stairs, the hitch on the fourth, the hall.
Her door closes.
I sit, and I listen for it to open a second time.
It doesn’t.
She went to the kitchen and she went back up and she chose the kitchen tonight.
Not my door. The kitchen. I am going to sit here and let that be what it is, and I am going to keep my hands on this desk, and I am going to breathe through the fact that she was three rooms away and I have her name written in someone else’s file and there is blood on my hand that is not mine and I did not keep her safe enough and I am not done.
Volin.
Soon.