CHAPTER 25
Kolya
He came for her on the Thursday, at the cemetery, in the rain.
I had known for days that it would be a Thursday. Yuri booked his witnesses on Thursdays. What I did not have was the where. It turned out to be the one place I would never have chosen for her and could not refuse her.
Timofey's daughter had a stone put up. One week after the funeral, which is the custom, and the family asked for my wife by name.
Not me. Her.
The girl had asked for the woman who sat with her upstairs on the night of the wake.
I could have said no. I have gone back to this a great deal. I could have invented a reason, and Siena would have argued. I would have won because I always won that one.
I said yes.
The invitation was real and the refusal would have cost that family something and my wife would never have forgiven me for it.
But when Ivan brought me the details, my first thought was not how do I keep her out of a cemetery.
It was: he will not get a better one than this.
We took eleven men. Six visible and five where they would not be, and the five were the point, and I put Ivan on the near gate himself.
It rained the whole morning.
Siena stood with Timofey's wife and the girl at the front, in a black coat. She said almost nothing. She put her hand between the girl's shoulder blades and left it there for twenty minutes.
The girl’s mother was still speaking when Ivan's hand went to his coat.
Two cars were on the service road. They came in with the doors already open, which is what was done when someone intended to leave quickly with a hostage in the back.
Four men out of the first car.
I did not shout. There were seven people at that graveside and half of them were family.
I went for Siena. I had her by the arm and behind the nearest stone before the first shot. It was Ivan's. It took the lead man in the hip and put him in the mud six feet from where my wife had been standing.
Then it was noise.
Our five came out of the trees on the far side, where there had been since six that morning. It was finished in under a minute. Three of the four were down and the fourth ran for the car.
I went after him.
I didn’t have to. I had eleven men in that field and any one of them would have taken him for me. Ivan was already moving. I heard him say my name.
I got him at the door of the car.
The man was young, twenty-five, perhaps. He had a scar through one eyebrow and a good coat. He had come to a cemetery in the rain to put a woman in the back of a car.
He got a hand up.
I don’t remember making the decision. I put him on the ground and I killed him with my hands in front of my wife. It took longer than people think. There was nothing quick about it and there was nothing clean. I never once pretended otherwise to myself.
When it was done I stayed there a moment, on my knees in the mud, and then I got up.
Siena was standing eight feet away.
She had come out from behind the stone. Of course she had. Every instinct that woman had ran toward the thing rather than away. I loved her for it since the first night.
It meant she had watched all of it from eight feet with rain darkening her hair and blood on her coat that was not hers nor mine.
Nobody moved. A large handful of people in a cemetery and the only sound was the rain.
Siena looked at me for a long moment. She came forward and went past me. She knelt down in the mud next to the man Ivan had shot in the hip. She put both hands on his leg and started shouting for a belt.
That was my wife.
He lived. I didn’t want him to. He was in a room under the garage with a doctor and two of my men. He gave us four names. Every one of them would matter in eleven days. And he was alive because Siena knelt in the mud.
We didn’t speak on the way home. She sat with her hands in her lap. They had stopped shaking by the time we reached the bridge, which frightened me more than the shaking had.
She went straight upstairs.
I found her in the bathroom with the shower running and her coat still on, standing in the middle of the floor, not moving.
"Milaya."
"Don't." Her voice was perfectly level. "Don't say it kindly. I can't do kindly right now."
I stood in the door. "Say it, then."
"You could have let him run." She turned round. "There were eleven men in that field. Ivan was six feet behind you. You could have let anyone in the world do that. You went after him yourself and did it with your hands. In front of a child."
"Yes."
"Why?"
I could have given her the operational answer. There was one. Eleven days out from a skhodka, a pakhan who let another man do it in front of the vory had already lost.
It was true and it was not the reason.
"Because he came for you," I said.
"That's it? That's the whole of it?"
"That is the whole of it." I did not move from the door. "You want me to tell you there was strategy in it. There was strategy available. I did not use any of it. He put his hand on a car door with you eight feet away and I stopped being able to do arithmetic."
She looked at me. I have been looked at by dangerous men my entire life. Nothing had ever gone through me like that.
"Come here," she said.
"Siena."
"I have watched you do something today I’ll carrying for the rest of my life." She was already pulling at the coat. "And the correct response is horror, and I have it, and it is in the room. But so is something I have no language for and no interest in examining tonight. So, come here now."
I got the coat off her.
It was not tender. She had my shirt open before we were out of that room. Her mouth on my throat. Her nails down my back hard enough to break skin. The sound she made when I put her against the wall was one I had never heard from her.
"Did he touch you?" I asked.
"No."
"Say it again."
"He did not touch me." Her hands were in my hair, pulling. "Nobody touched me. You got there first."
I got her legs around me and I had my cock buried in her against that wall inside a minute, still in half my clothes. The shower was running six feet away and rain was still in her hair.
Neither of us was careful.
She bit down on my shoulder to keep from making noise and did not manage it. One of my hands was under her, one in her hair. I couldn’t get close enough to her, which I had not known was possible.
"Kolya."
"Moya."
"Again."
"Moya. Mine. Moya."
She came with her forehead against mine and her heels locked at the base of my spine. My name in a voice with nothing left in it. I went right after her, with my mouth on the mark she had put in my shoulder.
We stayed there a while. I couldn’t have put her down if I had wanted to.
Afterward, she sat on the edge of the bath and cleaned the split in my knuckles with her thumb and a cloth without a word.
"I'm not going to tell you it was all right," she said.
"I know."
"It wasn't. I'm going to see it for years." She turned my hand over. "And I would not have had you do anything else. Both of those. Don't ask me to pick one, because I can't, and I'm not going to pretend I can just to make it easier for you."
That is the closest thing to absolution I’d ever been given and it wasn’t one.
She went to bed. I sat on the floor of that bathroom for a while with my hands hanging between my knees.
Yuri came for her at a funeral, in the rain, in front of a nine-year-old girl. And he came because I opened the door four inches, and told nobody, and let him.