CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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NICOLAS
The carpet was still wet from the shampooer and every machine on the floor stood dark. My own building at eight in the morning was the quietest room in Miami.
Hector came out of the cage with his key ring already in his hand.
“Mr. Varela. Nicolas. You’re early and the machines aren’t up.”
“The physical file. Danny Warren, not the screen.”
He glanced back at the credit terminal, where the cursor sat blinking in an empty box. Six years he had been correcting himself like that, and neither of us had ever mentioned it.
“Four seconds and it’s on the screen.”
“The paper.”
“Bueno,” he said, and went to get it.
The magnetic lock let go behind him with a sound like a knuckle cracking.
Cage air came over the counter ten degrees colder than the floor, and under it the ammonia off the cash trays.
A cashier strapping her tray wore a rubber thimble on her index finger and was walking it down a stack of carbon copies, and she did not look up at me, which was what I paid her for.
Rian came in off the causeway at twenty past. Both sets of knuckles had scabbed over in the night and he kept breaking them open again by making fists.
“Three calls before seven. The line’s gone. One of Tomas’s people asked me, very politely, whether we’re keeping her.”
“Who did the three of them call?”
“Luca. Every one of them called Luca inside an hour, so they sat down together first and agreed who’d go in what order.”
He took the coffee out of my hand, tasted it, made a face, and put it back on the counter.
“Every contract on those boats?”
“Every contract. Ten years of them, gone before breakfast. Tomas signed the letters himself so we’d know he’d read them.”
“And the port schedule?” I said.
“He didn’t touch the schedule. He wants us to notice that he didn’t.”
“That’s the whole of Tomas Marchetti,” I said. Rian did not repeat it back to me. He never does.
“What did you say?”
“To who?”
“The polite one.”
Rian scratched the corner of his mouth with the back of one wrecked hand.
“I asked him how his teeth were.”
I picked the coffee back up. It was burnt, and I had been drinking it burnt for years.
“He said fine,” Rian said. “Then he offered to pass it along that we’re keeping her, like he was handing me something.”
“Did he use the word keeping?”
“He used the word keeping. Twice. They’ve decided what we did on Thursday and they’ve put a price on it already.”
“Then they’re ahead of me,” I said.
“They wired Sabatini’s jaw shut. He’s on soup till Christmas, and his mother’s the one making it, because he lives with his mother.”
And I laughed. One flat sound in a building with nothing running in it, and Rian looked up at the ceiling like a man waiting out weather.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say it to be funny.”
“You never do.”
“That’s what makes it funny.” He waited exactly long enough. “Three months of his mother’s soup.”
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Hector came back with the box on his hip and set it on the counter. Cardboard, soft at the corners, a green tab on the folder inside, out of the drawer that had been wrong past W since before I took the seat.
I read it standing at the counter with my coat on.
The first two years of it were nothing. Twenty dollars on a Tuesday, fifty on a Friday, one bad night in March that ran to four hundred and got paid down in cash, a little at a time.
“These are his. Twenties and fifties and one bad night in March. This is a kid’s paper.”
“He was never a problem,” Hector said. “He was a Tuesday. He’d drop two hundred and apologize to the dealer for it.”
“And then?”
“And then in the spring he stopped coming in, and I stopped seeing his face, and the number kept moving anyway. I figured he’d been calling it in through somebody.”
I turned the folder over.
On the inside of the flap there was a purple stamp, PURCHASED IN LOT, with a lot number inked in by hand and a date under it. The ninth of May.
We had not issued that paper. We had bought it in one lot from somebody outside this building, and it had sat in a drawer with the date showing where any clerk in the cage could read it.
“Hector. When did we buy this?”
“We didn’t buy anything. We carry Danny Warren.”
“Read the flap.”
He put his glasses on and read the flap, then read it again with his finger under the line, slower the second time.
“That’s a lot stamp,” he said.
“It is.”
“Then it isn’t ours. I mean, it’s ours, we own it, we just didn’t write it.”
I took the last three markers out of the folder and laid them on the counter in a row. The sixth of June. The nineteenth of July. The thirtieth of July.
“Look at the dates on those.”
He looked at them a long time. Out past the tables the vacuum shut off, and the building went quiet enough that I could hear the cage door’s lock cooling.
“Somebody wrote three more of his markers in June and July,” I said, “onto paper this house already owned in May.”
“That can’t—”
“It’s on the counter.”
Hector put both hands on the counter and then took them off it again.
“Nicolas, all three of those are signed. That’s his hand, I’ve seen a hundred of them.”
“I know whose hand it is. I’m asking you whose paper it is.”
Hector did not have an answer and did not manufacture one, which was the only reason he still ran my cage.
Two point four million dollars of debt, booked clean, collected in my own building by my own cashiers, and I had believed every line of it because the house had. Hector looked at my hands on the counter and then away from them.
Below the collection cover were the six original advances. I added them on the counter: twelve thousand dollars. The cover demanded two hundred times that. Somebody had kept the real advances where the cashiers needed them and made a different number travel to collections.
“Hector. Where’s the counterparty sheet?”
“It’s always in the folder.”
“It isn’t in the folder.”
I held the folder up under the cage light so he could see through it. Two staple holes in the top corner, clean, and nothing under them.
“Then it’s loose in the drawer somewhere. It fell out.”
“It didn’t fall out through a staple.”
“No,” he said, after a while. “It didn’t.”
“Who books a lot purchase in this building?”
“Credit office books it. It comes down to me with a signature on it and I file what I’m given.”
I turned the folder around so the two holes were facing him.
“Whose signature?”
“That’d be on the sheet that isn’t in the folder.”
I put the folder back in the box myself, squared the edges, set the lid down, and left both hands on the lid a moment longer than I needed to.
“Nobody touches this box again without calling me first. Three in the morning, I don’t care.”
“Nicolas, that box hasn’t been out of the drawer since—”
“Then it’ll be an easy rule to keep.”
He took it. Down the counter Bogdan had stopped talking to the cashier he was waiting on, and I watched Hector carry the box back through the coded door and thought no more about it.
Rian had not moved off the end of the counter.
“Find out who sold it. Don’t ask anybody in this building twice.”
“You want me to be quiet about it or do you want it fast?”
“Quiet.”
He nodded once and pushed his fists into his pockets, which was what he did instead of arguing, and the scabs pulled open along the back of his right hand and he let them.
“Put a man on the bakery on Calle Ocho. She hasn’t gone yet. He’s there for when she does.”
Then he waited for the next sentence, and the next sentence was what we were going to tell her, and I let it sit on the counter between us until it went cold.
She had asked me for the paper, standing at the island with her hands in a bowl, and I said I would, and I meant it while I was saying it.
The phone was on the counter beside the thimble and the carbon copies.
I looked at it. I called her before I could put it off again.
“The file was bought in a lot. Rian’s tracing the seller.
” She asked me the amount, and I told her I would bring her the paper when I had the source.
Then I put the phone down with twelve thousand still behind my teeth.
No family at that table was permitted to trade another seated house’s markers through a hidden buyer.
Somebody had done it to my cage, with a Warren’s name on the cover.
Whoever it was had never once thought about this morning.
I had been pakhan six years and had not put my hands on a man in five of them.
I would have him in the second room behind the coded door, the one with no window.
I would not raise my voice. I would start with the hand he signed with, and I would take the whole morning over it, and I would be calm the entire time and he would not.
“She asked me for it too,” Rian said. “On the stairs, on the way out. She wanted to know what the number’s made of.”
“And?”
“I told her to ask you. That’s the whole of what I’ve got.”
I put my hands in my coat pockets.
“You’re going to tell her,” Rian said. It was not a question.
“Not this week.”
“She asks me every day.”
“Then she’ll ask you every day.”
“Take the causeway back,” I said. “The Boulevard’s flooded at Twentieth.”
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At noon Rian was waiting by the truck in the garage under the building, which was hotter than the street had been at eight. The storm had not moved off the coast all week, and the drizzle coming up the ramp was not worth an umbrella and had soaked my shoulders anyway.
I had the thread in my inside pocket. I put it there in the car near midnight without deciding to, and in the garage with my coat open I took it out and rolled it between my finger and thumb.
Green. A hand’s length of it, gone furry at one end.
The ballroom came back without being asked for.
The beading across her chest had pulled out of true when she breathed in, and her nipples had come up hard under it in a room they kept cold for the flowers.
I had my hand flat on the small of her back for the length of one turn and left it there and nowhere else.
All that soft weight along my arm, and I took nothing.
My cock had an opinion about it at midnight and the same opinion twelve hours later over one green thread, and I was thirty-eight years old and could not have told anybody why I kept it.
Rian watched me across the hood of the truck.
“You can stop looking at my hand.”
“I’m not looking at your hand.”
“It’s a thread. Get in the car.”
“It’s a thread,” Rian agreed. “You want it framed, or will the pocket do?”
I had nothing for that. He got in still grinning and put the window down, because he cannot leave a thing alone once he has seen it. “Ten years of Tomas’s boats for one sentence. Worth it?”
“I’d pay it again this afternoon.”
He let that sit and looked out at the ramp.
“Luca had it priced before I was off the phone with him. He says Tomas votes against us now, and he says that vote’s already bought and the man doesn’t know it yet.”
“Then Luca knows what it cost, and so does Tomas.”
“Everybody at that table knows what it cost. That’s the part you paid for, brother.”
He climbed into the truck, put it in gear and left one hand on the wheel. I stayed beside the open window.
“Go and find me the name off that sheet.”
“I’ll have a name before the weekend’s out.”
I stepped away and he took the ramp. I put the thread back in my pocket and went up the service stair to the floor.
The machines were running by then, the same eight notes over and over, and the carpet had dried in patches with the wet ones darker.
Bogdan stood at the cashier’s window with his cuff pushed back off a watch I hadn’t seen before, and he kept his eyes on the cash tray the whole way across my own floor, and in six years he had never once done that.