Seduced by the Bratva Brothers

CHAPTER ONE

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MARY

The fourth tray came out of Number One at eleven at night with the guava gone dark along the seams and the sugar one minute short of ruined. I set it on the rack at the steel prep bench in the back of Warren’s, on Calle Ocho, and took four hundred degrees of butter in the face.

“Okay, Mary,” I said, to a kitchen with nobody in it. “Four hundred done, four hundred to go, and two hundred and twenty on the electric, and the gas is a bridge we’ll cross when the gas man crosses it.”

There was flour under my thumbnail. There always is.

The marble pastry bench stood opposite the steel one, cool enough for the next folds if I worked fast. Between them was an aisle I knew without looking, right down to the loose green tile under my heel.

The Delgado invoice was face up by the scale. Eight hundred pastelitos for the quincea?era on Saturday, in one oven instead of two, because Number Two died six years ago and I use its door as a shelf. I had to fill that order or lose the power in a building I do not legally live in.

Eighty-eight degrees at eleven o’clock, rain that started twice and quit both times, sheet lightning out west with no sound to it.

Danny had not come through that screen door in four nights.

Then the screen door opened without a knock. The strike plate came out of the frame years ago and I prop it with a brick.

Two men came in and stood on my green tile and touched nothing.

They were dressed for a funeral that had already happened.

One stayed by the open door with his hands in front of him.

The other walked the length of my kitchen and stopped in the dark front shop between me and Calle Ocho.

The only thing to see in there was the back of Corinne’s sign, propped in the window facing in, because nobody is left outside to read it.

“The front counter’s been closed seven years. Custom orders only, and you haven’t ordered anything,” I said.

Neither of them answered. I kept going.

“The case is empty and the register in there doesn’t total past a hundred. There’s a cold cortado I made at eight, and I’m going to offer it to you anyway, because Corinne raised me and she’s stronger than I am.”

The walk-in kicked on. My hands went on doing what hands do, and my right hand came across my left forearm before I put it back to work.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s fine. We can do it like this.”

?

He came in behind them, into Corinne’s kitchen, and I did not hear the door do it.

Charcoal jacket, no tie, on a night like the inside of a proofing box. Black hair going gray at the left temple. He did not sweep the room. He picked one thing and stayed on it, and it was my hands.

“Finish the tray,” he said.

My throat closed over the answer I had ready. So I finished the tray. I brushed the syrup on hot so it would go glassy, because my hands had somewhere to be and the rest of me did not.

“Then sit down, Miss Warren.”

“Who are you?”

“Nicolas Varela.”

There are two seats at that end of the bench, a taped stool and the wooden chair Corinne used to shell things in. Nicolas crossed the kitchen, moved the wooden one, and sat with his back to the open door and the alley behind him, and left me the stool against the tile, where I could see both doors.

I stood there and looked at that for longer than the night could afford.

“You took the good chair,” I said.

“I did.”

Nicolas said it the way a man says yes to a waiter, and nothing came after it. I sat down on the taped stool with the tile behind me. What went through my chest was not fear. I did not look away from him. Some part of me had been waiting for somebody to walk in that door, and I am not sorry.

Nicolas put both hands on his knees. “Two point four million dollars. Owed to the Coliseum, against your brother’s markers.”

I watched his mouth while he said it, and I hated that I did.

“Markers is a casino word, and this is a bakery.”

“He borrowed against the house and signed a piece of paper for it, and then he did that again, and then he kept doing it.”

I laughed. Once it was out I could not get in front of it. I laughed with a hand over my face and then with both hands on the bench, and nothing in that room was funny.

“Danny doesn’t have two point four thousand,” I said.

“No. That’s the whole problem.”

One of the men made a noise through his nose. Nicolas looked at him and said nothing, and the man stopped, and the kitchen got quieter than a room with an oven fan ought to get.

“Warren’s is a family business,” I said. “We do quincea?eras. We do the boxes for the funeral home. The biggest check that ever came through that register was four hundred dollars and it bounced.”

“I know what that register does.”

“So it’s Danny’s debt and it isn’t mine,” I said. “You know that. You people have lawyers.”

“He owes the Coliseum. You don’t. It doesn’t help you.”

“Then why are you sitting in my grandmother’s chair?”

“Because it doesn’t help you.”

I wiped my hands down my hip because there was nothing left in them.

“Here’s what I know about my brother,” I said. “He gambles. He’s always gambled. Every time the phone goes off after midnight I do the number in my head before I pick up, and the number in my head has never once had a comma in it.”

“This one’s got two of them.”

“Then say the rest of it, because somebody’s getting bought in this kitchen tonight and I’d rather hear it than sit here guessing at it.”

“Tonight you get two sentences,” Nicolas said. “You’ll get the rest of it somewhere with better chairs.”

“What happens to him if I say no? Don’t be nice about it.”

And he answered it. That is the part I had no plan for.

“He gets taken apart in pieces small enough that the next man pays on time. I don’t have to give the order. I only have to go home.”

A radio was going upstairs, an announcer a long way off, and my breath went in and refused to come back out on schedule.

“You said that like it’s a delivery schedule.”

“You told me not to be nice about it.”

“I did.” My voice came out wrong on it. “I’d like to take it back and I already know I can’t.”

“No. You don’t get to take that back.”

“Is he alive?”

Nicolas took a phone out of his jacket and set it face down in the flour on my bench, a thing I would have taken Danny’s head off for. He pressed it once and turned it over.

There was a room inside it. A chair leg went over concrete, slow. Somebody coughed off the microphone. Under that, the hum a room makes when nobody is talking.

I got as far as one word.

“Dan—”

Nicolas picked the phone up and put it back in his jacket.

“He’s in a room,” he said.

“That’s a smaller answer than the question was.”

“Yes.”

My pulse had come up under my jaw where he could see it, and my hands lay flat on the bench like they belonged to a sensible woman. The open back door was behind Nicolas. To reach it I would have to pass him, and I could not make myself get off the stool.

I am a big woman. Size twenty, five feet six, forearms off a twenty-quart mixer, and twenty-nine years of going sideways through gaps nobody asked me to.

Men look past me, or they look and then explain the looking.

Nicolas Varela did neither one. The kitchen had gone cold when the three of them came in and my skin had not.

“Your hands are steady,” Nicolas said. “I expected them not to be.”

“They’re not steady, they’re busy. It’s a different thing and I want the difference on the record.”

“You’ve got flour on your mouth.”

“There’s flour on everything I own. It’s a condition of employment and it isn’t getting fixed tonight.”

He did not move to fix it. Neither did I. It went on past the point where either of us could have called it nothing, and I thought about my own mouth in a way I will have to live with.

There is a word Danny used in here once, with his shoes up on my stool.

“You’re the one they call pakhan.”

“Yes.”

Nothing got decorated. I have known men who could not admit to owning a boat.

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The one at the back door of Corinne’s kitchen bent down and picked up my brick.

“That brick’s the only thing holding that door open,” I said.

He shut it. He set the brick on the floor on his own side of it, and my kitchen had one door in it now instead of two.

Then he came off the frame, walked down past the mop sink, put his hand on the wall and turned my oven off.

The fan wound down in a long sag, and Number One started ticking.

“Oven’s off.”

“No. No, no. Hey.” I was up off the stool. “There’s thirty pounds of laminated dough on that bench that I folded four times and rested overnight, and in this heat it’s got twenty minutes before it’s lard and flour and garbage. Turn it back on.”

Nobody turned it back on.

“You could’ve let me finish. It’s six hours and I’ve done four of them.”

“I know how long it takes,” Nicolas said. “It stays off.”

Nobody asked me. Eight hundred pastelitos stopped being a job in the time it takes to move a switch.

“There are two ways tonight ends,” Nicolas said. “You come with me and your brother’s paper stops moving while we talk. Or I leave, and it doesn’t.”

Nicolas had not raised his voice once. A man in a rented tuxedo yelled at me about a cake in this room in April and that was louder than this, and this was worse.

“Say the second one slower,” I said. “I want to hear a man say it out loud in my grandmother’s kitchen.”

He said it slower.

“Or I leave, and it doesn’t.”

“Okay. Now I’ve heard it in here, and I’m going to be hearing it for a while.”

Here is the part I will be carrying around.

I stood in the middle of Corinne’s kitchen and did the math on Danny.

The phone at two in the morning. The good shirt gone bad at the collar.

My mother’s face, which I have been running sums against since I was sixteen.

And for a length of time I am not going to defend, I worked out what would happen to me if I said no and went up the stairs and did not answer the door again.

Nothing happened to me in that version. That was what was wrong with it.

Then I untied the apron. Corinne wrote her name inside the bib in laundry pen. I pulled it over my head and hung it on the hook by the swing door. My hands were steady doing that too, and somebody will have to explain that to me.

The recipe book lives on the shelf over the bench, a composition notebook with the cover gone soft, guava on every third page and Corinne’s numbers down the margins. I took it down.

“I’m going to say this so it’s in the room,” I said. “I’m coming with you. I’m not agreeing that any of it is fair.”

Nicolas stood and put Corinne’s chair back where it had been.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“North.”

“That’s not an address.”

“No.”

At the back door I had my canvas bag on my shoulder with my wallet and keys inside, my phone in my back pocket, and the book in my hand over the mouth of it, and I could not make the last inch of it happen.

The two men were on the sidewalk. The car sat at the curb.

Nicolas stood in the doorway with his hand on my brick.

“If I do this, when do I get to see—”

“Bring the book. You won’t be coming back for it.”