CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
?
MARY
The back room at Vela Blanca has six tables and an air handler built for four. I had the corner one, my back to the wall and the door in front of me, and I had not decided any of that. Banyan shade came through the shutters in hard stripes and crawled across the tablecloth.
Luca called at ten past one. “Mary,” he said, in the voice he uses when he is being charming at somebody instead of to them, “I’d come myself, but there’s a judge in Broward who hates me and today is his day.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I won. Twice. The second time in front of his daughter, who clerks for him.”
“You didn’t know she was his daughter.”
A fan went by overhead and pushed the shade around on the cloth.
“I did not, and it wouldn’t have changed a thing, and that’s the part my brothers enjoy.”
I laughed at that with a mouthful of water, and I heard him enjoy hearing it.
“So who’s collecting me?”
“Rian, at two. Take the whole hour. Order something with a bone in it and don’t let them bring you the check.”
“I asked for one hour outside the house. I’ve got a booking, a driver, and a pickup time.”
I heard a courthouse corridor behind him, heels on stone, somebody paging a name twice.
“You’ve got a table on Giralda on a Saturday in September. Be pleased with me.”
The waiter had already moved my cortado twice without being asked, once for bread in a paper sleeve with the top folded over, once for butter on a slate.
There was a small silver dish of salt with a bent spoon in it.
I moved the dish two inches because my hands do not know how to sit still in a restaurant.
The screenshot of the county record was three days old on my phone and I had shown it to nobody. Ninety-one degrees outside and a white sky, and the whole reason to be in that room was that it was cold.
?
A man took the next table before my food came, and Rian was not due yet.
Linen jacket, open collar, sunglasses in his hair. Artur Sokolov. At Casa Ofelia he had looked at me and spoken to Nicolas. Now he was pulling out a chair close enough for me to smell his cologne, and I had nobody beside me to answer for him.
“Mary. We haven’t been properly introduced, and I’m about to be rude about that.”
“You’re off to a strong start.”
He put his sunglasses on the cloth and turned them so the arms lined up with the edge of it.
“Is it true you make eight hundred of those by hand?”
“Nobody makes eight hundred of anything by hand who has a choice.”
He laughed, and it was a real laugh, and it had nothing performed in it.
“How do you get them to rise? My aunt’s come out like coasters.”
“Four turns, rested cold overnight, and she’s cutting them with a knife. A knife seals the edge. You want a wheel.”
“That’s the difference? A wheel?”
I had my hands up off the table by then, showing him the wheel.
“That’s the difference.”
I want to be honest about the next ninety seconds, because I have gone over them since.
He asked a follow-up that was a real question and I answered it, at length, the way I would answer anybody who wanted to know.
I liked it. Nobody had asked me about lamination in a year, and Luca asks about everything.
“Artur Sokolov,” he said, and put his hand out, and took it back before I had to decide about it.
Hearing him introduce himself did not improve knowing who he was. Nicolas had already given me the name at the party. Artur was making sure I heard it from him now, with nobody between us.
“You were at the party at Casa Ofelia,” I said. “That’s the jacket.”
“I was at the edge of it. You had a green dress on and your husband broke a ten-year line to say your name in front of three hundred people.” He turned his water glass a quarter turn.
“He said no to my cousin in a room with six witnesses in it, and then he said your name out loud. Somebody should have told you what you cost.”
“That’s not true.”
“Your husband refused the offer. Ask him why nobody thought you should hear it.”
Under the table my thumb had found the burn on my left forearm and was pressing it flat.
“There’s a vote. Two of the four are my father’s. The third one takes his calls now, which isn’t yes, but it’s closer than it was.”
“You’re telling a stranger your father’s business in a restaurant.”
“I’m telling you. There’s a difference and you’ll work it out on the drive home.
” He moved the bread out of his way. “Has anybody in that house said the word bratva to you? They say family. Family’s a word you already had, so it goes down easy.
Your pakhan is very good at handing people words they already own. ”
The ceiling fans were all turning at different speeds. I made myself look at them.
“That paper has an end date on it. Has anybody in that house told you what you are the morning after?”
“You don’t know what’s in that paper.”
“I know it’s got an end date, because everything they write has one.” He waited, and he was pleasant while he waited. “You asked to see your brother’s marker. Did they bring it?”
I did not answer him, and my not answering was the loudest thing I had done all week.
“I’m not doing this with you.”
“You already are.”
The woman two tables over laughed again, on the beat she had been laughing on since I sat down, and it came across the room like weather in another country.
“Say what you came to say and then order your lunch.”
“Say the word and I’ll leave you alone. You were bought.”
I turned the little dish of salt around until the bent spoon pointed at him.
“Get another word.”
“There isn’t one. That’s what I’m here about.”
“You people keep telling me what I am. Nobody’s asked me once, and I’m starting to think that’s the—”
He let me get that far and no further, and did it by putting his water down.
“It isn’t an oversight. No.”
Somewhere under my ribs the four bars started against the fan noise, and I had gotten the whole first phrase out through my teeth before I heard myself doing it. Cielito Lindo, in a cold dining room in Coral Gables, humming to a man in a linen jacket.
He heard it. He smiled at it, the way you smile at a dog doing a trick you taught it, and that is when the room went cold and stayed that way.
He picked up his glass and moved to my table and sat down across from me without asking.
“I walked your grandmother’s street this morning. There’s bougainvillea grown through the fence on the corner and all the thorns are on the sidewalk side. Everybody steps around that one spot. Nobody’s ever once thought about it.”
He put two fingers on my elbow, on the bare skin above where the banquette leather had stuck to my arm. Dry and warm and in no hurry at all.
“That’s the whole business, Mary. Everybody steps around the spot.”
“Take your hand off me.”
“I have.”
He had. That was the trouble with Artur. My pulse was going in my throat and he had done nothing I could put in a sentence, and he was never going to have to.
Rian was there. He had come through the arch and sat at the two-top without being seated, and long enough for the waiter to have put water in front of him, and I had not seen him arrive. His knuckles were scabbed over and closing. He did not stand up.
“Mr. Sokolov—that’s our wife you just put your fingers on, and you’re going to want to be out of this room before I finish deciding how I feel about it.”
Rian said it at the volume you use to ask for the salt. Half the back room heard it and did not know what it had heard. A woman two tables over stopped eating with her fork up.
Artur moved his water glass away from mine. He kept smiling the whole time, which cost him, and I watched it cost him. He stood, put money on his own tablecloth, folded his jacket over his arm, and went out through the arch.
I had stood when he did, ready to get out of that little room before he could turn around. Rian’s next words caught me with my knees against the tablecloth.
Rian did not follow him. Rian did not get up, did not touch him, did not touch anything. He sat with his hands flat and the tendons standing up in the backs of them and watched the arch for four or five seconds after there was nothing in it.
“Sit down, Mary. Finish the coffee. He doesn’t get to move you.”
I sat down. The cortado had gone cold and bitter an hour ago. I drank some of it anyway, and moved the little dish of salt one more time, and neither of us said anything about a Sokolov knowing which room I would be in.
?
The Tahoe’s floor had been hosed out and the third row was gone and it smelled like hot upholstery and soap. Rian drove with the windows down because the air in it had been sitting at ninety-one all morning.
“Word for word. Everything he said to you, from the beginning.”
I gave it to him word for word. At the end he told me to start again and go slower, and I did it again over the noise of the open windows.
“He wanted me to put him through that window. He drove to Coral Gables to get put through a window.”
“Rian, he knew which room I was going to be—”
“I know.”
He got us out of Coral Gables and onto the highway with one wrist over the wheel, and did not say the next part, and neither did I.
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because then it’s us that started it, in a full room, on his day.” He changed lanes without looking at me. “He’s had that drive planned since breakfast. I’m not paying for his gas.”
“That’s the most patient thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
Here is a thing I have not said to anybody in that house. When Rian sat down at that table with his hands flat on the cloth, I wanted him to do it. I wanted that man to go through the window onto Giralda in front of all six tables, and I have not been sorry about wanting it once since.
On the causeway the water went flat and white and the cruise terminals came up on the right. He took his hand off the shifter and put it high on my thigh, above the hem, and left it there.
“Sit still.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I’m not doing anything about it in a moving car. I’m going to leave my hand where it is and let you think about it the whole way over, and you’re going to let me.”
So I sat there with his hand on my leg and my cunt aching and my nipples up under a dress I had picked out that morning for a lunch that turned out to be somebody else’s correspondence, and I thought about it the whole way over, which is what he said would happen.
Then he started humming. Four bars, flat, wrong in two places, out the open window at the water.
“You’re flat.”
“I know what I am.”
Rian did not explain it and I did not ask him to, and I watched the port cranes go by and let the arithmetic I had been working on all afternoon finish itself.
Artur Sokolov had not driven to Coral Gables for me. He had not needed one thing I knew. He had needed a man with scabbed knuckles to be told, in a full room, that a Sokolov had put two fingers on his brother’s wife.
“I was the message. I wasn’t even the person he came to talk to.”
“You were the envelope. He wanted me to open you in front of eighty people, and God help me, I nearly did.”