CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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MARY
The east ballroom at Casa Ofelia smelled like cut limes and gardenias in the urns. At nine at night Nicolas walked me into the middle of it with his hand flat against the small of my back.
“Tomas. This is Mary Warren.”
Tomas Marchetti took my hand in both of his. They were dry as paper and he turned a signet ring with his thumb the whole time he held on. The cigar he put out an hour ago was still on him.
“The pakhan brings a guest. I’ve known him ten years and he’s never once done that.”
“He didn’t tell me it was a first,” I said.
“He wouldn’t. It isn’t in the man.” Marchetti kept my hand a beat past the length of the beat. “You bake.”
“I do. Pastelitos mostly, and about ten other things nobody’s ordered in years,” I said.
“Then you’ll be disappointed in the food here. I gave them a menu and they cooked a different one.”
“That’s why I work alone. Nobody to disappoint but me.”
“A useful arrangement.” Marchetti counted the room over my shoulder while he said it. “Enjoy the house. He never uses it.”
Marchetti let go. I stood there with a champagne glass I had no intention of drinking.
Luca arrived with a drink in each hand, one of them obviously for himself.
“Fifteen days in and you’re already the most interesting thing in this house.”
“That’s a low bar. Your brother owns the house.”
“He owns four of them, and it’s the only one anybody wants to be photographed in.
” He took away my untouched champagne and handed me a fresh glass I did not want either.
“Three hundred people drove out to Star Island in September to look at a green dress, and I want you to know I have never been prouder of a garment I did not—”
“Don’t finish that sentence.”
“Pay for.” Luca was enjoying himself. “I was going to say pay for, and it sounds worse in your voice than it did in mine.”
“Somebody paid for it.” Yelena had zipped me into it at seven with her hands flat on my back and nothing said. There is a word for a woman whose dress was bought for her by the man who bought her. I have been called worse by men who meant less by it. “Half this room thinks I’m the debt.”
“Half this room thinks you’re the collateral, which is worse arithmetic. The rest came out because somebody at the bar said bratva twice and wanted a look at it.” Luca drank. “It looks like a party. That’s the joke, and nobody standing in it is laughing.”
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“Nothing at all. Let them price you wrong. It costs us nothing and it’ll cost you one headache,” Luca said.
Nicolas took me out to the terrace, where the caterers had left two chairs at a table for six. He sat down in the wrong chair, back to three hundred people, and left me the wall. A man I had not been introduced to stood at the terrace door the whole time, watching me and not the lawn.
“What does Marchetti want?” I asked him.
“The port’s schedule for the winter.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“It’s what I can answer.”
“So you handed me the smaller question and hoped I wouldn’t check the size of it.” The mosquitoes had come up off the wet lawn and there was no wind to move them. “I check. Every single time.”
“I know you do.” He said it the way a man reads a number off a page. “It hasn’t stopped me yet.”
“Is it going to?”
“No.”
“At least you’re consistent. My brother lies about the weather,” I said.
“Danny lies to be forgiven,” Nicolas said. “I don’t need that from you tonight.”
A man in linen came along the edge of the room, sunglasses pushed up into his hair. He stopped at the end of our table and spoke to Nicolas without taking his eyes off me.
“My father asked me to come and look at her. He didn’t say why.”
Nicolas did not answer him and did not turn around. The man in linen smiled at the pair of us like we had agreed on a price, and went on toward the loggia.
“Who was that?” I said.
“Artur Sokolov. Vasily’s son.”
My palms had gone cold. I set the glass down and wiped them before I caught myself doing it.
“He didn’t say one word to me.”
“No. He wasn’t sent for that,” Nicolas said.
“Then what’s the point of him? He drove out here to look at a woman in a dress.”
“He goes home tonight and describes you to his father. That’s the entire errand.”
I looked at my own hands instead of the loggia.
“And you let him do it in front of you.”
“I’d rather he did it in a room I’m standing in than one I’m not.”
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At half past ten I left Nicolas on the terrace and went to find a bathroom. I took the jib door at the north end of the ballroom, because it was quieter and because I have never crossed a room of three hundred people when there was another way.
The corridor behind the paneling ran eighty feet of unpainted concrete, cold as a walk-in and smelling of ice and bleach. Four of the nine caged bulbs were out. The band came through the paneling like weather.
A hand closed around my wrist from behind. It closed the way a hand closes on a rail.
“I heard what you cost him.”
Marchetti’s valet. Sabatini, somebody had called him at the bar. A neat jacket, a thumb pressed up under my arm, and my breath went out and did not come back.
The grip tightened. A door struck its stop behind us.
Rian came through that jib door and crossed forty feet of concrete in under four seconds. He said nothing at all to the man. He took him by the back of the neck, the way a man carries something out of a kitchen, and walked him out through the east service door.
I followed them.
The door did not shut. A gap of four inches, one caged bulb over it. The alley smelled of wet concrete and then, very fast, of copper. The band did not stop. They were playing a mambo with a horn line in it and they played it to the end.
I watched the whole thing. Rian put him into the wall first, and the second time he did not use the wall.
Three sounds came off that alley and I will pick all three of them out of any room I am ever in: a jaw going somewhere a jaw does not go, the flat knock of a head on concrete, and the noise a man makes after both, which is not a scream and is worse.
Rian straightened up. He found me in the gap of the door and did not send me back inside.
“You going to be sick?”
“No.”
He wiped his hands down his own shirt, which did nothing for either of them.
“Why not?”
“Because he put his hand on me and you didn’t ask anybody first.”
“How long were you behind me tonight?”
“All night,” he said.
Rian looked at me a long moment. There was one bulb over that door and I saw his face change anyway.
“Good girl.”
Here is the part I had no plan for. Standing over a man with a broken jaw, in a green dress, eleven feet from three hundred people eating shrimp, I was not sick and I was not cold.
I was wet. I felt the ache of it low in my cunt a whole second before I got around to wondering what kind of woman that made me.
The body went first. The body did not take it back.
“You’re not shaking,” Rian said. “Say why.”
“I don’t know why,” I said.
He said the next part to his own knuckle and not to me.
“You do.”
“I know I’m going to think about this later.” My voice came out level, and that frightened me worse than the noise had. “Tomorrow, in a kitchen, with my hands in dough. I know it standing here. That’s what you’re asking me.”
“That’s not a confession. Nobody out here’s writing it down,” Rian said.
“It felt like one to me.”
“You want somebody to tell you what it means. That isn’t a thing anybody does out here.”
He came over, breathing through his nose, a spatter across one forearm. Behind him the man on the concrete moved a leg and stopped moving it.
“Don’t look at him. Look at my hands. That’s what you came out here for.”
I took them. Both sets of knuckles were split open, three across the left and two across the right, the blood already tacky in the heat. I put my mouth on the left hand first and then the right one, on the splits. I tasted iron and skin and the salt off him.
“That’s blood, and you’ve got a mouth on you, and I’m not stopping you.”
He didn’t stop me. Through the steel door the band went into a bolero. His hand jumped once against my lower lip and then held still.
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Nicolas was in the concrete corridor at the north end of the ballroom when we came back through. Somebody had told him, because he did not ask one question about it.
He looked at my wrist. Then at Rian’s hands. Then at my mouth.
“He put a hand on you.”
“Yes.”
“In my mother’s house.” He straightened the strap on my shoulder with two fingers. His hand was steady and mine was not. “You’re ours. They hear it from me, not off the room.”
“Nicolas, you don’t have to—”
“Walk.”
He went half a step ahead and let me come.
“You’ll cost yourself something out there. I can hear you deciding to,” I said.
“Yes.”
He took me out into the middle of that floor, under the eleven chandeliers, with Tomas Marchetti eight feet off. He took my hand. He did not let go while he talked and he did not raise his voice. Three hundred people went quiet the way a room does when it works out what is happening in front of it.
“She’s my wife. If that’s confusing, I’ll say it slower, and I’ll keep saying it to whoever’s still standing.”
Nicolas’s cufflink caught the beading at my hip when he turned and pulled a green thread loose. I watched him close his hand on it and put that hand in his pocket, and he did not look at it once.
Marchetti left before midnight. He stopped at the thirteen-foot doors and set his drink down on a caterer’s tray.
“Ten years, Nicolas. You just spent them on a sentence.”
“I know what it cost,” Nicolas said.
“You don’t. You will.”
He went down the steps to his car alone. Luca watched the taillights go out through the gates and did the arithmetic out loud on the gravel.
“That line was the only reason Tomas stayed out of it. He isn’t out of it now.”
“Out of what? Say the rest of it.”
“The boats.” He turned his glass on the balustrade and did not drink from it. “Tomas has moved everything this family brings into the city for ten years. As of tonight he doesn’t. That’s what the sentence cost, and it isn’t the whole bill.”
“Then why did he?”
“Because he wanted three hundred people to hear it more than he wanted the port,” Luca said.
The car went back over the MacArthur Causeway, twenty minutes of flat black water and the smell of rain that was not coming.
I sat in the back between the two of them and nobody said anything.
Nicolas took my phone off my knee, put a number into it and handed it back.
He did not ask for mine. He already had it.
Rian pulled me across the seat by the hip, like a man moving something that belonged to him, and Nicolas shifted toward the far window to give us room. Rian’s cock was hard against my hip through his pants and neither of us did one thing about it.
All the way home I kept my fingers on the split across Rian’s knuckles, and what I felt was not horror, and I knew exactly what that made me.