CHAPTER FOUR
?
NICOLAS
The squall came over the bay at seven and hit the shutters at Casa Ofelia, on Star Island. Down the hall the furniture stood under white sheets and rain came in over the marble.
Pyotr Ilyin gave his coat to one of his men and sat down across my mother’s table.
“Nicolas Varela. Your mother’s house is smaller than they say, and better.”
“It was built for a family.”
“So was mine. Then the family got bigger and the house didn’t.” His hair oil had crossed the table ahead of him, under the snapper and burnt garlic. “Your father sat where you’re sitting.”
“He did.”
A paler rectangle behind him marked where my mother’s portrait hangs, out for cleaning. Ilyin looked at it twice and did not ask.
Luca poured for him and not for me and set a printed card face up by the salt.
“You sent this,” Luca said. “To the tower, this morning, on a tray, put down beside a woman’s signature while the ink was still wet. That’s a lot of staging for a dinner invitation.”
“I had it sent before nine. I wanted the evening on your brother’s calendar before anybody else wrote on it. And I wanted him to know it came from us. A card from a stranger is a threat and a man wastes a week finding out from who. Mine is a dinner.”
“It’s a beautiful card.”
“It cost more than the fish.”
A silver bowl of pickled mushrooms sat in the middle of the table and nobody touched it, tonight or at any dinner my mother gave.
Ilyin ate slowly, and the fish was cold before he got to what he came to say.
“Four families, one seat each. Three hands carry a motion. My uncle can count, and so can you, so let’s not perform.”
“Nobody’s performing.”
“Your brother is, a little.” Luca smiled at him and Ilyin smiled back and both smiles came off together. “A seat can be declared forfeit at the table. Your father took the verification clause out himself, six years ago, for his own reasons. I’d call that unlucky.”
“You’d call it lucky in the car going home.”
“I’d call it both. There’s a view up north that a bratva with a Cuban name on the door is a costume. I don’t hold it. I sit in rooms with men who do.”
“Say brotherhood, then, if the Russian’s going to be a problem for you.”
Luca laughed into his glass. Ilyin set it aside for later, which is the only part of him I liked.
Ilyin put his fork down. The burn across the back of my right hand pulled tight the way it does every September in the damp.
“Her name is Anya. She’s twenty-four, she plays the piano badly, and she comes with my uncle’s hand in the air and a city that doesn’t burn.”
It was a good offer. I have been pakhan six years and nobody has put a better one in front of me.
“No.”
Ilyin let the word lie there, and a no you can walk back is not a no.
“I have a wife. Her name is Mary Warren. She’s mine, and she’s not a seat at anybody’s table.”
Luca set his glass down without a sound. It is the only time this year I have watched him decide not to talk.
“Since when?”
“Since this morning.”
“And there’s a contract.”
“There is.” I did not look at Luca and Luca did not move.
“You understand I’ll carry that north word for word.”
“I’d be insulted if you didn’t.”
Ilyin squared the card to the table edge.
“Then my uncle takes it in December, at the table, in front of everyone, and every man there will call it lawful. He’d have preferred the piano.”
I could have had both men at the wall and him on the floor before the plates were cleared. An unprovoked killing off the table is its own forfeiture, and it hands Vasily Sokolov my seat with a ribbon on it.
I want to be accurate, because I am going to be dishonest with her about other things. I did not refuse him for the Accord. I refused him at her name is Anya.
Ilyin looked at the pale rectangle once more, and Luca put the card away in his jacket.
“Thank you for your mother’s house.”
?
Luca went through the jib door at Casa Ofelia ahead of me and had the corridor before I was in it.
Eighty feet of unpainted concrete, four of nine caged bulbs dead, a mop bucket over the floor drain. I could hear Luca breathing through his nose.
“You’ve just spent the only move we had, in front of two of his men, and you did it between courses.”
“I know what I spent.”
“Do you? Say it out loud, then, because I’d like to hear the arithmetic in your voice.
” Luca does not shout. He gets warmer and the sentences get longer, which is worse.
“Sokolov moves it. Ferreira has been taking his calls. That could be two, and then they only need Marchetti, who sells his vote to whoever asks him last, and the one person standing in front of it was a girl who plays the piano badly.”
“She’s not standing in front of anything now.”
“No. Now there’s a contract on my desk with her name on it and a seat with a month attached to it.
” He said the next part to the wall and not to me.
“We took her against a debt. That’s the sentence Ilyin is saying into a phone right now, and there isn’t a man alive who can make it sound like an alliance. ”
“Then don’t try.”
“That’s my entire profession. Trying is the—”
“Nothing gets decided in a room I’m not in.” My right hand was in my pocket. I took it out and left it where Luca could see it. “This included. And every room after it.”
“That’s a rule, Nicolas. It isn’t an answer, and I’m the one who has to go and be the answer in the morning.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
Luca looked at me a while under a dead bulb.
“You could’ve asked me first.”
“I was in the room.”
Luca stopped walking. “Does she get a card for that elevator?”
“No. And she doesn’t go out of the building without one of us.”
“She’ll go looking for a card inside a day.”
“Then she’ll find it out from the panel.”
It got settled in a service corridor at half past ten, and nobody was going to tell her either half.
Luca started up the corridor, then turned around, because he cannot leave a conversation alone.
“For what it’s worth, I hear the girl really is terrible at the piano.”
It was almost a laugh, one breath out through the nose, on the night I put my family in front of a war. Luca saw it and said nothing and did not stop looking at me, and I would rather he had.
The lawn outside the east service door took the wet a foot up Luca’s absurd pants. He did not mention it.
We went back over the causeway. The expansion joints drummed under the tires.
“The Calle Ocho building,” I said. “The June purchase. Finish the lease assignments under it.”
“She struck that clause this morning. I’m the one who initialed under her.”
“She struck it out of the contract. AVC 4 already holds the deed. Finish the outstanding lease work, and nobody tells her.”
Luca wrote it down and did not look up.
I opened the screen in the console.
Four angles on a kitchen. Green tile, a steel bench, two ovens with one dead. She came into the top left frame with her hair up and her forearms floured past the elbow, went along the bench and out into the picture below.
It was not tonight. It was not this week. I have watched those eleven seconds more times than I will write down, and not once for anything a camera is for.
Luca watched it and did not ask how long I have had it. I know what four cameras in a private kitchen are, and I have not taken them down.
I closed the screen before the causeway ran out.
?
The east terrace door at the Perch does not seal, and Mary was out past it. Above fifteen knots the gap plays one low note all night, and nobody replaces the weatherstrip because my father liked it. It was playing at eleven.
Bare feet. The rain had gone through and the stone still had the day in it, and she stood on it in the nightdress Yelena gave her, a mug in both hands.
I put the door back in the frame and the note stopped.
“You do the thing where you stand there and say nothing. It’s very effective and I hate it.”
“Then I’ll talk.”
She turned around with the mug against her chest and the wind took her hair off her face.
“Did somebody die tonight? You’ve got the face for it.”
“No. Nobody died tonight.”
She put the mug on the rail and picked it up again.
“Where were you?”
“My mother’s house.”
“Is that an answer?”
“It’s the true one,” I said.
She drank whatever had gone cold in there and made a face. Nobody has been rude to me in a year. She stood in my weather and told me my own face was a problem, and my right hand came out of my pocket before I decided anything with it.
“Come here.”
She could have gone in. The door was behind me and she is not tied to anything here. She looked at the water first. Then she came, four steps over wet stone, and stopped close enough that the wind was not the loudest thing out there.
She set the mug beside the sea grape before she reached me.
That is the part I will keep. The kiss came after, and the kiss was the easy half.
I put my right hand under her jaw, the burned side against her cheek and my thumb under her chin, and turned her face up, and kissed her.
I had it for three seconds. I know the count because I was keeping it. Then she made a sound into my mouth, small, more surprise than anything, and her mouth opened under mine and the count stopped mattering.
My cock was hard against her stomach through two layers of nothing and she felt it.
She did not step back. She came up into me instead, the whole warm weight of her, soft under my hands everywhere I put them, and her hands went under my jacket, flat on my ribs.
Nobody puts their hands inside my jacket.
“Keep them there,” I said into her mouth.
My other hand went down her back and took a full handful of her ass and pulled her up onto her toes, and she let me, and made the sound again with her mouth still on mine.
Then I stopped.
Sunday is what Sunday is for. I decided it before she was in this building, and I do not change a decision because a woman is warm.
I took my left hand off her first. That one was easy. The right stayed under her jaw, her pulse going against my fingers, her eyes open and wet and furious about it.
I did not buy her. I bought the four years it took to be allowed to stand this close.
Then I set her back on her feet and took the hand away.
She stood there breathing badly and covering nothing. Her mug was on the stone by the sea grape, where she had put it before she crossed to me.
“You’re cold and you came out here anyway. That’s the whole problem with you.”
“That’s not a problem, that’s a personality. And you’re the one who—” She stopped and put the back of her wrist against her mouth. “Go inside, then. You’re good at it.”
“Yelena leaves the hall light on for you.”
I got the terrace door open and the note started up in the gap. She had my cock hard against her a minute ago and had come up on her toes for it.
“Why did you stop?” she said, to my back.
Rain came off the frame onto the back of my neck. I have a rule about rooms and no rule at all about her, and I did not turn around.
“I stopped because I wanted to. On Sunday I won’t.”