CHAPTER 13
Kolya
They found Timofey in his car outside his daughter's school, four hours before she would have.
I couldn’t pin down why someone would do it at the school. He’d parked where he always parked, an hour early. He had done that every Thursday since the girl was six. Timofey believed a man should be early for the people he loves and late for everybody else.
Whoever did it knew that. A stranger didn’t find a man at a school gate at seven in the morning by accident.
Ivan drove me out. Neither of us spoke. There was nothing in me to say and Ivan has never in his life filled a silence for the sake of it.
The street was ours by the time we arrived.
Two of our cars at either end, a third across the gate.
The men were restless, furious with nothing to aim the anger at.
Somebody had put a coat over the window on the driver's side.
Somebody else had already called the school and told them there was a burst water main.
No child came out of that building for two hours.
A nine-year-old girl learned about her father in a room with a counsellor in it, rather than on a pavement.
I didn’t know which of my men thought of that. I never asked.
I stood at the car and made myself look at all of it. A pakhan who could not look was a pakhan who started sending other men to look for him.
Two rounds. Close range, through glass, from the passenger side. Timofey had the window down. Twenty-two years in this life and Timofey put his window down for whoever leaned in at seven in the morning outside his daughter's school.
Behind my ribs the cold came down and kept coming.
"Kolya." Ivan held out a phone near my shoulder. "It’s on the wire already. Two of the Orlov crews are saying it was them. Saying it loudly."
"Of course they are."
"You do not think it was."
"I think somebody wanted it to be." I didn’t take the phone. "Timofey was our voice with the Orlovs. He drank with Konstantin Orlov's brother. He was the one man who could pick that telephone up and be believed on both ends."
It didn’t take him long to work it through. Ivan was not quick but nothing got past him twice. "So, the truce dies with him."
"Now I have two wars. And in five weeks a man asks the vory whether a pakhan who cannot keep a truce should keep a chair."
Ivan cursed in Russian, hard enough to make my ear ring..
"Yes," I said.
Then I took out my own phone and I checked where my uncle had been at seven o'clock that morning. I felt sick all the way through it.
Yuri had been at the Nikolaevsky church on Second Avenue since six-thirty. A memorial service for a man I have never heard of. Forty people and a priest.
I stood in the road with my brigadier of twenty-two years cooling in a car six feet away. I read that message four times. That confirmation settled any remains of uncertainty that lingered in me.
It remembered Siena's voice saying nobody has an alibi for a night they did not know was coming.
She had handed it over at four o'clock that morning, on a legal pad, in her hard clean hand. Three hours later the fourth one arrived and it fit exactly. My wife had described a machine she had never seen from the marks it left.
The proof I needed to stop that machine could only be manufactured by letting it run.
I did not decide anything at that car. In that car I realized thatYuri would move again. He had to. He had five weeks and a crown to take. He was three-for-three on getting away with it. A man didn’t stop doing what worked.
So, he would move again. And he would build the alibi first. Which meant I could know where he would be before he was there. For the first time in my life I would be standing in front of him.
Which required knowing what he would reach for next.
I already knew the answer. He had told the entire council, in his soft voice, six days ago.
There is also the matter of the woman.
I looked at Timofey's car and thought about my wife. The order those two arrived in shamed me. I put a hand on the roof of the nearest vehicle and stood there a moment like a man taking a call.
Ivan saw everything and said a tenth of it.
"You will tell her," he said.
"Tell her what?"
"That the schedule she found has a fourth date on it now." He looked at the coat over the window. "She liked Timofey. He taught her the names of the men on the doors so she could say good morning properly."
I did not know that. I had no idea when that happened, or how. Or how many other small treaties my wife had been signing in my house while I had been busy being at war.
"I will tell her," I said.
I told her half.
I gave her Timofey. The school. The window down.
The two crews already claiming it, and the truce coming apart in my hands.
I gave her the alibi at the church. I let her be right.
She went pale and steady. That is what she did when she carried a weight and had decided to set it down in front of nobody.
I did not give her the rest. I didn’t admit she was right, that she was more deeply involved thanks to my uncle, or that I was going to use her to end him. I let her process this one change while keeping everything else to myself.
She stood in that library with her arms folded and worked the problem out loud.
I watched her while focusing on her words rather than how gorgeous she was when solving a mystery.
That was easier said than done, since I had already solved the issue.
I let her spend an hour arriving somewhere I had left at seven that morning.
"He'll do it again," she said. "It's the only way this works for him. He needs the house bleeding right up until the council sits."
"Yes."
"So we stop being surprised. We watch him instead of the victims. The next time he starts building an alibi, we know the clock's running." She pushed her wavy, dirty blonde hair back with the flat of her wrist, the way she did when thinking with her hands. "We need to know what he'll aim at."
"Yes," I said. "We do."
She looked up at me then and her expression changed. For one second I was certain she had it. That the whole thing had come to her in one piece, the way the alibis had.
"Kolya."
"Milaya."
"When we know what he's aiming at." Her voice was very level. "You'll tell me. Whatever it is. Even if it's a name that makes me want to run."
"Yes," I said.
She believed me. She spent her whole life reading people and she believed me. She believed me because I never once lied to her. I spent ten days building that in her on purpose and because I was selfish enough to want her and her trust.
Later, when she had gone up, I sat in the room where my father used to sit. I made myself say, "I am going to put my wife in front of him."
It sounded exactly as bad in my mother's house as it had in my head.
I poured a drink I did not touch. Somewhere above me a floorboard went, and stopped, and went again. Siena, walked the length of the library, trying to fix this cleanly.
I sat under my wife's footsteps and drew up a list of the places Yuri would find it easiest to reach her.