CHAPTER 17
Kolya
That Wednesday my uncle booked a table for eleven at a restaurant in Midwood, for the following evening, in his own name.
Ivan brought it to me at six in the morning. He had the look he got when something was too good, which on Ivan was almost no look at all.
"Eleven covers," he said. "Thursday. Nine o'clock. He telephoned it himself."
I read it twice.
A private room. A guest list that would include two vory and a man from the Brighton crews. And Yuri, at the head of it, visible to eleven witnesses from nine until whenever he decided to go home.
An alibi. Built four days in advance, by hand, in his own voice, for a Thursday.
I took it upstairs.
Siena was at the table in the window with her hair still wet and three pads open. She read the note without touching it, the way she reads anything she does not want to contaminate.
"Thursday," she said.
"Thursday."
"Then Thursday is when it happens." She sat back. Her whole face had changed. "Kolya. This is the first time we've been in front of it."
"Yes."
"Do you understand what that means? Every other time we've been reading the wound afterward. This time we're standing in the room before the shot." She was already reaching for a pen. "What's happening Thursday? What moves? Who travels?"
I had spent two hours on that before I woke her.
"There is a shipment out of the Red Hook yard at ten," I said. "Ours. Twelve men on it. If he takes that, he takes twelve at once and the Orlovs get blamed for all of them."
She was writing. "That's the one."
"I agree."
It felt like winning. Not the end of it, but the turn. Seventeen days I had stood in my own house reading the marks a man left on my people. For one morning I was going to be waiting at the place, ahead of him.
I put the whole of it together myself. Twenty men. Two cars at the yard gate. Four on the water side. The rest in the buildings opposite. Every one of them told to hold. To take alive if they could. To give me one of Yuri's six with a pulse and a mouth.
Ivan asked me once whether I wanted to tell the vory in advance.
"No," I said. "I want to hand them a man."
He accepted that.
Thursday came in wet and gray.
By nine I was in an office above a warehouse across from the yard, lights off. Yuri was six miles away in a private room. Eleven witnesses, and a bottle of the wine he pretended not to spend money on.
At nine forty a van came down the service road toward the water side with no lights on.
Everything in me went quiet. There was a version of me that only existed in the four seconds before violence started. I had never been able to describe it to anyone. Siena would’ve understood it. She had the same one.
The van stopped short of the gate. Six men got out.
"Now," I said.
We took them in under a minute. We did it well. Nobody of mine was hurt. Two of theirs were on the ground and the rest had their hands behind their heads. I came down out of that building with my blood up for the first time in a season, thinking I have you. I have finally got you.
Then Ivan said my name in a voice I had heard from him twice in nine years.
The men on the ground were not Yuri's six.
They were Orlovs.
I knew two of their faces. One of them, the older one, with my man's knee in his back and his cheek on the wet concrete, was Konstantin Orlov's brother.
The one Timofey used to drink with. The one who came to Timofey's funeral alone, in a black coat.
He stood at the back, spoke to nobody, and left before the food.
There was a case in the van. Ivan had it open by the time I got there.
Paper. Ledgers. Two phones in an evidence bag, still sealed. The kind our people use when they are handing a thing over.
The Orlovs had come to hand us their own accounting on who had been claiming Timofey's murder in their name. They had come at night, without lights, on the water side. That was how something like this was done. When someone held a truce together, they didn’t want their own crews to see them do it.
Konstantin's brother turned his head on the concrete and got one eye on me. "He said you would be reasonable."
I had run this business for six years and I had been afraid perhaps four times. "Who said?"
"Your uncle." There was blood in his mouth. He was almost laughing. "He came to us. Ten days ago. Said the young pakhan was drowning and would not ask for help. Said if we came quietly, with proof, on a night nobody would see, he would make sure you understood it was peace."
On a night nobody would see.
Yuri had built the meeting.
He had gone to the Orlovs as a peacemaker. He had arranged for six of them to come into my yard in the dark with no lights on. Then he booked a table for eleven, in his own name, four days out. Loud enough for my own men to find. And he let me do the rest.
He didn’t need to lift a hand. He handed me a night and let me build the ambush myself.
I got Konstantin's brother up off the concrete with my own hands. I don’t remember deciding to. I remembered the weight of him and that his coat was soaked through and that he did not fight me.
"Stand him up," I said. "All of them. Get the doctor."
"Kolya—"
"Now."
It didn’t matter. It was already six miles away and moving.
By eleven that night every vor with standing in this city knew the same sentence.
Nikolai Volkov had ambushed an Orlov peace delegation in his own yard, in the dark, and put two of them on the ground.
By midnight the Orlov crews were in the street.
By one, Konstantin Orlov had refused my call twice.
And at half past one my uncle telephoned me himself. From the restaurant, with eleven people laughing behind him. He asked in that soft voice whether the rumor could possibly be true, and whether there was anything at all he could do.
I said there was not.
"Kolya." He paused exactly long enough. "You must let me speak for you at the skhodka. You will need someone the old men will listen to."
Then he hung up. I stood in my father's study with the telephone in my hand. The whole architecture of it arrived at once, the way she must see a body.
He had not tried to stop me finding the alibi. He had made the alibi findable.
Every alibi from the beginning had been for the vory, not for me. He had spent three months teaching a young pakhan to watch for a pattern. So that on the one night it mattered, the pattern would walk him into a room and shut the door.
I sat down heavily.
Siena came in at two.
She didn’t turn the light on. She had heard it from the house, all of it. She came and stood at the side of the desk and did not touch me. She has an unerring sense of when a man cannot be touched.
"It was my method," she said.
"It was my order."
"You wouldn't have known where to stand if I hadn't handed you the map."
"Siena." I made myself say it properly, because she was going to carry it otherwise and she was already carrying too much.
"The read was correct. Every part of it was correct.
He built alibis because he is a man who builds alibis.
You saw it and no one else in this city saw it.
" I looked up at her. "He simply knew that a man who has learned to look for a thing can be shown one. "
She sat down on the edge of the desk. "How did he know we were looking?"
"Because he was told," I said.
She stopped dead.
"Eight men were in that room when you sat in his chair," I said. "Eight men heard my wife ask for the obshchak ledger by line item. That is the only place it could have come from and the timing is exact. He went to the Orlovs ten days ago, which is four days after you sat down."
"Ivan."
"No."
"You're certain."
"Ivan carried my brother out of a car when I was twenty-two and I have never once had to think about it." I heard my own voice go somewhere flat. "It is one of the other seven."
She was quiet a while. Then she said what I had been walking around for an hour.
She had never in her life left a diagnosis unsaid to spare anybody's feelings.
"Then it isn't just Yuri. It hasn't been Yuri alone for a long time.
And every plan we make in this house from tonight, we make in front of whoever it is. "
"Yes."
"Kolya. That means the vory won't be the ones who take it from you," she said gently, which made it much worse. "You'll lose it to somebody who eats at your table."
I looked at my wife across my father's desk. A house with a hole in it. Four weeks out from a council that now had every reason to unmake me.
And the thought that came was not about the leak, or the Orlovs, or the crown.
It was that one person in this house is not on that list of seven. One person has been at the center of every conversation. And nobody would ever think to suspect her.
And if I were Yuri, wanting a young pakhan to shut the door on himself, I would put that person exactly where she was.
I put it down. I had never in my life put a thought down so fast.
But it had been in the room. I had let it in. And a part of me had turned over to make space for it before I could stop it happening.