CHAPTER SEVEN
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LUCA
The fourteenth floor smelled like wet asphalt and cold paper, because we keep the offices at sixty-eight degrees all year. I had my jacket over one arm and a folder under it. Ileana Sosa was in the corridor with a filing held flat against her chest.
“Mr. Varela—Luca. Sorry. There’s a filing.”
“Say it again without the apology in it.”
Twenty-five years old and she checked a room for permission before using a first name.
“Luca.” She got it out flat that time. “There’s a filing.”
“Better. Come in. Nobody good’s ever been talked to in a doorway.”
Under a white sky my office looks like a photograph of itself, no shadow anywhere. The coffee had gone cold and honest, and I drank it.
“Should I have taken it to your brother first?”
“Which brother?” I hung the jacket on the back of the door.
“Either.” She shifted the filing against her chest. “I wasn’t sure which one it—”
“I keep nothing from my brothers—not the good paper, not the bad. You’ll meet men who call that a weakness. Those are the men who keep their secrets and lose their families.”
She wrote it down. I have never known what to do with somebody who writes down what I say.
“There’s a word on the wire memo I couldn’t find anywhere.”
“Which one.”
“Obshchak.”
“Common purse. Every man pays in, nobody’s family starves, and I sign for all of it.” I turned the memo around so she could see the column. “In the bratva my father came out of, that fund was older than any man in it. Here it’s a checking account with a frightening name.”
Gio Panetta keeps the Accord’s book and takes my money, and he telephoned me at home on Sunday to say a page was coming I would want to read. I forwarded one line of it to Nicolas at ten and wrote that it would keep till morning. He did not answer, which is how my brother answers.
The telephone on the credenza went off on a tone the others do not use, and my hand was on it before I decided anything. One man has that number.
“Mr. Sokolov.” I put myself on the edge of the desk.
“Luca Varela. You have a good voice for a lawyer. Your father had a good voice for a liar, and I mean that with affection.”
“He’d have had that engraved. He took most things as compliments.”
“I’ve lodged a motion with the clerk this morning, in draft. The ground is that your brother’s alliance is a purchase and not an alliance, and that the Varela seat is forfeit. It’s a courtesy, counselor.”
Ileana had stopped writing. Fourteen floors down the traffic ran as one flat wet note.
“You could’ve let the clerk tell me Thursday.”
“I call it early so that you have time to put your house in order. My father said a man deserves to see the weather coming.”
“He sounds like he’d have been a pleasure at dinner.”
“He was not.” Nothing moved in the voice. He is a pakhan out of Brighton Beach with a bank’s telephone manners, and I have never been so pleasant to a man I hated so fluently. “My regards to your brother, counselor.”
“He’ll have all of them.”
He hung up first. He does everything first, courteously.
Ileana stood very straight, which is what people do instead of asking.
“Sit down. You’re learning this today instead of in a year.” She sat on the front edge of the chair. “Four crews carved Miami into four pieces thirty years ago and gave each piece one vote at one table, and any three of those votes can take a fourth man’s piece away from him.”
“And he’s after ours.” Her pen had stopped again.
“He wants ours. The vote is on the ninetieth day.”
Her mouth moved. She was counting.
“Don’t count, I’ll do it out loud, it’s faster. Four families, one seat each, three votes carries. He’s got his own, he’s got one he bought and I know which one, and Marchetti’s a half. A half is nothing. A half is a man clearing his throat.”
“So he’s short.”
“He’s short today.” I let her have the pause. “And I want him short on the ninetieth day. If he isn’t, my brother stops being a pakhan and starts being a landlord, and I’m the man who drew the paper.”
“Can’t we just—” She stopped and started over, better. “The marriage is on paper. Can’t we make him prove it isn’t real?”
“There used to be a clause for exactly that. The Accord couldn’t seat an alliance until it verified the marriage.
” I turned my father’s black fountain pen over on the blotter, once.
“My father struck the verification clause himself, six years ago, so he could marry a fourth time. It lasted eight months. Saved himself a month of paperwork and cost his son a seat.”
She was careful with her face.
“You’re allowed to say something rude about it.”
“He sounds like he was—”
“He was.” She laughed and put her hand over it, and I liked her for the two seconds it took.
“One more, then take it to the library. Nobody owns a quarter of a family, Ileana. You can own a quarter of a Florida corporation that holds the buildings and the license and the leases, and that’s the same thing with a stamp on it.”
“The seat is indivisible,” I added. “The Accord must reach every interest in the seated company before it can transfer the territory. My father hated loose ends. For once that may be useful.”
“AVC 4.”
“AVC 4, LLC. Three letters and a number that holds more of this city than the county believes anybody does. It’s on page one. Go on.”
She went. Her heels changed sound where the carpet gave out at the marble.
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With Ileana gone to the library, I put the folder on my desk on the fourteenth floor and opened it.
The unstapled original of the alliance contract came out in one soft slab, twelve pages that would not sit square unless a man made them. I made them. I squared the edges twice and read none of it.
Her initials are in the margin where she struck the building out. I put my thumb over the ink and there is no professional word for that.
The Rothko is hinged on the left. Nobody expects a painting to swing. I swung it. Dust stood along the lip of the frame, a gray line of it, there since spring.
Behind it the wall is a different color, a warm rectangle of old paint nobody covered, and the bruise the first hanger left four inches to its left.
The dial was cold under my thumb. Right, left, right, then the keypad, and the folder went onto a shelf with nothing else on it. The brass emergency key stayed on my own ring. No clerk had either way in.
I swung the Rothko back and the dust was a lip again.
My hand stayed flat on the bottom of the frame. The air handler cycled, the stapler went twice in the bullpen, and I stood with my palm on the frame like a man checking a door he has already locked.
That painting is worth more than the building it hangs in. I have never once looked at it.
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Ileana put her head around my office door at half past three. “Reception says there’s a Ms. Warren downstairs about a bank card.”
Rian had brought her across town and was waiting in reception. She could get out of the Perch with one of us; that did not make the journey hers to arrange without an audience.
The words came out of me before I had a vote in them.
“Move the four. Move the five.” I was already standing. “Tell them my brother needed me. And her name’s coming off the book downstairs.”
She had her notebook up. “The five’s Gio Panetta.”
“I know who the five is. Move it, he’ll live.”
The Accord count was the only thing I wanted that afternoon, and I traded an hour of Panetta for a bank card. Ileana wrote the lie into the calendar without a flicker.
Mary came in and found the door and the window before she found me, then looked at my hands instead of my face, the way she does.
“Do I sign this one, or is it another one where I sign first and you tell me what it was after?”
“You sign, then I tell you, then you tell me I explained too much. That’s the order. I’ve come to enjoy it.”
“Good. One of us should.” She did not sit down. “How much of today did you move to be standing here?”
“Nothing that couldn’t be moved.”
“That’s a yes.”
“That’s a nothing-that-couldn’t-be-moved.”
She waited. She is very good at waiting.
“An hour,” I said. “It was an hour, it was Gio Panetta, and that one’s free.”
I set the account application and the signature card in front of her and laid the fountain pen on them. “Sign the top line, then the block under it. The bank wants your name in ink three times so a teller can hold it against your name in ink. That’s the whole event.”
She did not sign. She read.
She read the front of both forms with a finger under the line, then turned each form over and read the back, where nobody reads. She leaned in for the light and her weight came onto the desk edge.
What my head did with that was her tits against my desk and my mouth on her nipples, in the plain words, in that order, in the middle of a working afternoon. I put my eyes on the window.
“What’s a right of setoff?”
Nobody has ever asked me that, in ten years and hundreds of these cards.
“It means if you owe the bank on one account, they’ll take it out of another and won’t ask.”
“So they reach across.” She said it to the card and not to me.
“They reach across.”
She turned the card over again. “Do I have a debt at this bank?”
“You don’t.” Which was true, and was not the answer to her question, and I heard myself do it.
“You turn pages like somebody who reads them. You’ve no idea how rare that is in this building.”
She looked at the card, then at me, and had nowhere to put it.
“Sit down a minute. No, there’s nothing else to sign. I’d just like you in the chair.”
“Does that work in court?”
“It’s never once worked in court.”
She sat, crossed her legs, and the chair took her weight and gave under it.
I wanted the inside of her thighs and I wanted my mouth on her cunt, with the specificity of a man who has thought about it before.
Then I stopped, because she is married to my brother on paper, and I have been careful in this office for ten years, and the safe was eleven feet behind my shoulder.
“You’ve got working hands.” I heard it leave my mouth and did not stop it. “I could pick them out of a room. I’ve been trying not to say that since the first time you picked up my pen.”
“Luca—”
“There’s a ridge of callus across the right palm off a bench scraper, and the nails cut to nothing, and a shine on the fingertips that’s old sugar and won’t come off, and I’ve had four hundred documents signed at this desk and I couldn’t describe one other pair of—”
“Luca. You do this. You say one true thing and then you keep going until it’s a paragraph and I can’t carry it.”
“I’m aware of it.” She had the fountain pen still, and her thumb was moving on the barrel.
“Are you.”
“I’ve been told.”
She turned the fountain pen around in her fingers. “Let me see Danny.”
“I’ll ask. That’s not the same as yes, and I won’t pretend it is.”
“Okay.” She stood up.
“That’s it? You’re not going to—”
“You said you’d ask. If I make it bigger, you’ll make it smaller.”
She put the fountain pen into my hand, and her own hand came down over mine on the barrel and stayed a second, which was hers to do. I have argued in front of federal judges. I could not produce a syllable.
She took her copy and went. The elevator took a long time and I stood where she left me.
Out in the bullpen the stapler went twice. Ileana had the rule in her notebook in a careful hand, three lines under the date.
I keep nothing from my brothers, I had told her, and I had meant it when I said it, and it had been a lie since the night before Mary Corinne Warren walked through that door.