Chapter 18
Katerina
My head hurt.
My mouth tasted of smoke and copper. When I tried to lift my hands to my face they came up raw.
I was on a cot, an army thing, canvas gone grey, in a room that had been somebody’s office once.
I sat up slow and the room held still, which was something. White subway tile climbed the walls to shoulder height, the old kind, gone the color of weak tea with age and grime in the grout. Above the tile, cork. The whole upper half of the room lined in cork board, dingy and deadening.
There was a window, but somebody had painted it over.
White paint, thick, brushed on from the inside in long ugly strokes, so the daylight came through it grey and dead and shapeless, no street, no sky, no telling east from west. An iron radiator sat under it, the fat old ribbed kind, and when I put my palm to it on instinct it was cold.
The door was steel. Steel, with a bar across it on the outside; I could see the shadow of the bracket through the gap at the bottom. Bolted. A door built to keep people out, and now me in.
The smell of the place told me something.
Under the bleach, under the chemical reek of a place somebody scrubs hard and often, there was something else—green and brown and old, the river, the flat dead mineral breath of the water that runs the freight corridor.
And then, while I sat there with my cold palm flat to the cold iron, it came: a long low shudder up through the concrete and into the soles of my feet and the bones of my hips, building and building, the whole floor humming with it, a freight train going by on the spur close enough to feel in my teeth.
It rolled past for a slow age and faded, and the silence the cork made afterward was somehow worse.
I felt the terror come up.
My hands shook. My breath went short and high, the Little in me right there under the surface, the one Tonio had taught my body to find, shaking, wanting to come up and cry and be held and told it was over.
And then I folded her down.
I didn’t have space for her now. Right now I needed the other me, the me who had been bloody-mindedly keeping my bakery going for the past year. The me who wouldn’t give up, who wouldn’t surrender, no matter how desperate things seemed.
I needed the boss, and I needed things to hold onto. Good things.
Tonio’s voice. I’ve got you. He’d said it to me a hundred times—over his lap, in his bed, in the bakery.
Oh, I loved his voice. His confidence, the charm I had pushed back against for so long.
I wished I hadn’t been so cold, so resistant to him.
Think of all the time we could have spent together.
I closed my eyes and put the sound of him in the room with me.
The loaf. My father’s loaf, come right at last. Late, cold, gentle—the mastic let in instead of fought in—the crumb opening soft and the pine running sweet under the honey, and an old man from the old country going still over a broken piece of it because he’d tasted his own dead mother in my dead father’s bread.
I held the smell of it. Pine and honey. Sixty years and an ocean folded back together in my two ruined hands.
Olimpo. That good, good boy. He’d known. He’d known before any of us. And then he’d tried to save me.
Oh, my darlings. Tonio and Olimpo.
I didn’t know if they were alive.
I pressed my raw wrist to my mouth, the way I press it to the loaf, the way he presses his lips to mine, the way Olimpo pressed his warm body to my legs.
And I waited. The boss on the line, the Little shaking underneath, the train coming again far off, building up through the floor.
Iheard boots on iron.
The cadence was slow, patient.
This was a man who wasn’t in a rush, and that meant a man with power. I had time to set my face, to conjure the boss as best as I could. As though that might help.
He had two coffees.
Two paper cups, balanced careful, steam coming off them, and he stood in the doorway a second and looked at me on my cot like a host who’d found his guest awake earlier than expected and was pleased about it.
“You’re up,” he said in accented English.
“Good. I had someone get these. The coffee in this part of town is criminal, but I sent out.” He came across the small room and crouched and set one cup down on the concrete by the foot of the cot, near my hand, the way you set a saucer of milk near a cat you’re not sure of. “Careful. It’s hot.”
I didn’t touch it.
I looked at him instead. Good grey suit, well cut, a watch, a haircut — the whole assembled look of a man who’d read a description of what a powerful man should be and bought every item on the list. Soft around the jaw.
Hands that had never hauled anything. And then I got to the eyes and the bottom dropped out of the room.
I knew those eyes.
Deep-set, dark, set under the brow—I’d had them on me in a garden two days ago, taking me in slow and thorough and missing nothing, an old man reading my ruined hands like he was reading a maker’s mark.
Don Arturo’s eyes. The exact same eyes, transplanted into a softer, weaker, hungrier face, a face that the strength had been left out of when they made it.
The father’s eyes in the son who couldn’t fill them.
“Gianni,” I said. Not a question.
His whole face lit up, delighted, like I’d given him a present.
“She knows my name. Good. They told me you were sharp.” He went and sat on the radiator and crossed one leg over the other, comfortable, settling in, a man with all the time in the world.
“It saves us a step. I hate the part where I have to explain who I am. It’s so—pedestrian.
Everybody knows my father. Nobody knows me.
” Something flickered under the charm there, just for a beat, and then he papered over it with the smile. “That’s changing.”
I said nothing, just waited.
“I want to tell you something,” he said, and he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and for a horrible second the feeling in his voice sounded real.
“I admire you. Genuinely. I want you to understand that this isn’t — I don’t take pleasure in this part.
” He gestured at the room, the tile, the door, me.
“That whole street. Every storefront on that block. You want to know how long it took to fold the rest of them? Weeks. A few of them, days. A man comes and he says the right thing in the right voice and they fold, every one, because they’re tired, because they’re undercapitalized, because the dream went out of them years ago and they were just waiting for an excuse to stop.
” He spread his soft hands. “And then there’s you.
One woman. One storefront. And I throw everything I have at it and you don’t move.
Not an inch. Not for money, not for fear, not for a broken window or a man in a coat saying a scary word.
You just—held.” He shook his head, and the wonder in it was genuine, and that was the sickening thing.
“Do you have any idea how rare that is? I’ve been doing this a long time and I have never once seen it. I found it remarkable. I still do.”
“You blew up my shop,” I said.
The boss again. Flat. Counting.
His face folded into something like regret.
“Well. Yes. I suppose you’re correct, technically.
I know. I know. And that’s the part I’m sorry for, truly—I want you to hear that I’m sorry, because of all people I understand what it costs to keep your choices when everyone around you wants to take them.
You think I don’t?” The flicker again, deeper this time, the wounded thing under the suit.
“I’ve spent my whole life having my choices made for me, sweetheart.
By my father. By the way things are done.
By people who decided what I was before I had any say in it.
So I know. I know exactly what I’m taking from you, and I’m sorry to be the one taking it. ”
It was the worst kind of apology. The kind that wants you to comfort the man delivering it.
“So are you going to let me go?” I asked. “There seems to be something you want. You’ve set your terms, I presume. What are they?”
He smiled, almost kind, almost gentle, and shook his head slow.
“That’s not for you to carry, sweetheart.
That’s the beauty of your position—you don’t have to do anything.
You don’t have to be brave anymore. You don’t have to hold anything up by hand.
” He stood, and brushed at the seat of his trousers where the cold iron had been.
“You’re the price. That’s all. The principals will sit down and they’ll settle it, and you don’t have to lift a finger, not for one minute.
After everything you’ve carried, that should come as a relief. ”
It didn’t. It went through me cold. I hated to be a piece on a table. A playing piece. Something with no agency whatsoever. Decisions made for me by others. It made me sick.
“And my shop?”
I shouldn’t have asked. I knew it as it left my mouth.
His face did the regret thing again. “Collateral,” he said, and he had the decency, or the cruelty, to sound like he meant it.
“That’s the ugly word for it. I’m sorry about the building.
I genuinely am. And the bread — “ he paused, and tipped his head, and something almost wistful came into the deep-set borrowed eyes — “I heard about the bread. Sounded fantastic! Lots of happy customers.” He sighed.
“What a shame. What a waste. To provide such an amazing service to a community like that and— “ He spread his hands at the air, at the fire he’d set, the gesture of a man commenting on weather.
“You’re a monster.”
“So people tell me. But if that’s true, why am I so well loved?”
I looked at his grin, at his wide-held hands, and I saw the monster in him.
“You relax,” he said. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Time went strange after that.
The building started to talk to me.