CHAPTER TWENTY
?
RIAN
Two in the afternoon, ninety degrees, and no shade on my side of Calle Ocho. Before the hour was out I would have another man’s phone in my hand. I would have my brother’s voice in my ear, setting my name down like a hand on a collar. Rian. That is how Nicolas says it when it is not hello.
The car was a white Camry with the engine running for the air, nosed toward Ninth in the coin laundry’s shade. Sun came through the windshield and lay flat across the kid’s hands. Across the street a loose shutter ticked against its bracket in a wind that was not there.
He had a camera with a lens the length of my arm resting on the door frame, and a phone in his free hand, aimed at the front window of Warren’s. I had been on that street since noon and nobody had sent me.
My hand was through the open window before I decided to move. The phone came out of his fingers the way a fork comes out of a kid’s fist, and I did not touch him anywhere else.
“Hey, that’s not—” he said.
“You can keep the car.” I turned the phone over and thumbed it awake against his own face to unlock it. “You’re going to sit still while I do this.”
“You don’t know who I work for.”
“I know exactly who you work for. It’s why you’ve still got all your teeth in the front.”
He put both hands flat on the wheel where I could see them, the smartest thing he did all day. The air off his vents came at me cold and smelled of cigarettes and pine.
“Tell him I took this out of your hand and left your face exactly where it was,” I said. “He’ll understand the message better than you will.”
“He’ll want that back,” the kid said.
“He’ll want a lot of things.”
“I’m just a—”
“I know what you are. Drive.”
He drove. My knuckles were closed and pink and ridged. They stayed down at my sides the whole time, because a camera is not a hand.
Nine photographs. Three days, the same hour, the same angle through the same glass.
I went through them in the doorway of the shuttered shoe repair with the sun coming off the sidewalk into my teeth.
Mary at the window with her arms up, tying her hair.
Mary at the propped door with the brick still in her hand.
Mary carrying a tray of pastelitos with her hip against the case, the tray tipped enough to show the wash on them going gold.
And one of her laughing at somebody inside her own shop.
I got to that one and went past it and came back and could not stay. I have looked at worse things on worse phones and stayed all day.
Then she was at the propped door herself, flour to her elbows, one forearm up on the frame. She looked at me across four lanes of white heat like I was a delivery she had not ordered.
“You’re not coming in, are you,” she called.
“No.”
She held that a second longer than she had to, and the whole street cooked between us.
“Coward,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She went back to her oven. She had a wet line down her back through the shirt, and I stood in that heat wanting her badly enough my hands hurt.
I had nine pictures of her in my pocket and did not cross. Crossing meant she got to see my face, and my face would have handed her the photographs before I had decided whether she got them.
On my way to the truck I put two hundred dollars and my number on the coin laundry’s counter.
“If a car sits in your shade again, you call that number and you don’t wave at it.”
“And the lady across the street? What do I tell her?”
“Nothing at all.”
He put the money in his shirt, and that is how a woman gets watched by somebody she says good morning to.
Then my own phone went off against my hip.
?
I took the causeway ramp at the Bayfront with the windows down and the truck full of salt, and put Nicolas on speaker.
“Rian. Star Island. Now.”
“I’ve just left Eighth Street.”
“I know where you are.” He hung up. The tires struck the causeway’s expansion joints in two quick pairs. The water threw the sun up at me off both sides at once.
Luca called before I reached the Star Island turn.
“Marchetti’s taking calls and Ferreira had lunch with Vasily’s man on Thursday,” Luca said. “Assume three of four until I can prove otherwise, and start being clever at me.”
“I’m driving,” I said.
“You’re always driving. It’s the entire personality. I keep telling Nicolas that if we took the car away we’d find out there’s nobody in there but a pair of—”
“Luca.”
Luca laughed at me for about a second and then quit, which is how I knew he was working from the worst count, not a joke.
“Three of four. Three carries it, and I’d like somebody in this family to say a word about that today.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Luca waited me out, which he is better at than I am. Two pelicans went by under the rail, the same two that are always there.
“What’s on Star Island?” Luca said.
“A bed.”
“That’s ominous even from you. Call me back when it’s a story.”
The stolen phone lay on the passenger seat, its gallery still open.
Three nights ago she had both hands in my hair.
She had the weight of her thighs on my shoulders and my mouth on her cunt, and at the end of it she made a sound that was not a word.
It came up the high span with me uninvited and would not get out of the truck.
I could think about my hand on her cunt at seventy in six lanes of glare and carry it fine. It is a weight. I know how to hold a weight.
Then I thought about the picture of her laughing. Some kid stole it through her own glass from a car with the air conditioning running. Something went through my chest sideways and lodged there under the bone. That was not want. I did not have another word for it and I did not go looking for one.
?
The crushed shell in the motor court at Casa Ofelia came up under my tires loud enough for Nicolas to hear from inside the house, which is what it is there for.
The house smelled of lemon oil and chlorine and dried the back of my throat out. A vacuum was running over my head. In the east wing hall two of Yelena’s women had a bed half made in the second room on the left. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon in a house nobody lives in.
“The good sheets,” one of them said. “That’s what he asked for.”
“He asked for a bed made up. He didn’t say who for.”
I stood in that doorway longer than I meant to. East side. Two doors. No glass on the street side at all, and a window that gave you the seawall and nothing else.
A good room. Also a room you could hold somebody in, and I knew which one I was looking at before I got my hand off the frame.
There was new brass on the hall side of that door. A bolt, the screws bright in the wood, put on this week. Nobody had mentioned it to me and nobody was going to mention it to her.
Nicolas was at the mahogany table under that window. The photographs were already printed and squared up in front of him in color, three rows of three, edges lined like a hand of cards.
A courier had brought Nicolas’s set at one, before I ever put my arm through that car window. No note. Whoever sent it wanted us to recognize the angle. He had been standing in this room deciding on his own with the door open behind him.
The table was cold under my palm and nothing else in the house was.
“There’s a picture on that phone of her laughing,” I said. “Some kid took it through a window with a lens the length of my arm, and I’d have broken his jaw for it if you hadn’t told me not to break anything this month.”
“I know. Mine’s been here since one.”
“It’s the same three days?”
“Same three days, same hour, same car.” Nicolas turned one of the prints around with two fingers so it faced me. “They parked in front of a working camera on a laundromat and they did it three times. That’s not surveillance. That’s a letter.”
“So we answer it.”
“She goes to Casa Ofelia tonight,” Nicolas said. “East wing, two doors, our men on both of them. Yelena’s already making the bed.”
Next door one of Yelena’s women laughed.
“Or I put the old man and the boy in the water this week and we stop having this conversation,” I said.
“And the seat goes in after them. Four families, and three of them would have to sit still while we did it, and they won’t, and there are federal people in this city who read the paper.” He said it at the volume he says everything. “That’s the reason. It isn’t a no.”
“I know it’s the reason.”
“Then you know why she’s behind a gate by dark.”
“I know why you want her behind one,” I said. “That’s a different sentence and you know it.”
He let that sit. Somebody had already turned the top sheet down. There was a lamp with the shade still wrapped in plastic, and a chair set at an angle nobody would ever sit in.
“Three nights ago she was in my hands,” I said. “Today she’s nine pictures on a kid’s phone and you want her behind a gate. I know what she sounds like now. That’s the problem. You can’t unknow what a woman sounds like.”
“I’m aware of it.”
He looked at the bed and not at me while he said it, which he does not do.
“Then you know what I’m about to—”
“Say it.”
“No.”
I’ve said yes to that man my whole life. The first time I say no it’s going to be about her, and he’s going to have to live with that.
“Again,” Nicolas said.
“No. I’ve never said it to you. Thirty-four years and not once, and I’m saying it now, and I’ll keep saying it while you work out what you want to do about me.”
He did not move. Over our heads the vacuum stopped.
“Move her tonight and she stops being a woman who stayed,” I said. “She’s a woman you’re keeping. She’ll know the difference by the first morning and after that we’ve lost her and we’ll still have the seat, and I don’t want it.”
“That’s the trade you’re putting on the table. Her, or the seat.”
“That’s not the trade. She’s ours. Ours means she gets to walk out of a door she picked.”
He did not answer. I counted it, because I count things when my hands are empty, and I got to eleven. Next door the two women had stopped talking about sheets somewhere around six. Neither of us had lowered his voice. Mine came back off the plaster at me.
I have never told the pakhan of this family no. Every man in our bratva knew that about me, and I had just said it out loud in a made-up bedroom in the house named for Nicolas’s mother.
“Then she stays on Calle Ocho,” Nicolas said. “Put four more men on that street and don’t let her see one of them.”
My chest let go before I understood what he had said, and my hand came off that table wet. He had heard me and he had let it stand there in the room like furniture. I did not know what to do with a brother who did that. I was not going to ask Luca for the word.
“Nicolas—”
“Four more men. Yours. You pick them, you pay them out of your end, and you’re on that street yourself on the days you can be.” Nicolas squared the photographs one last time, edge to edge, and stopped touching them.
“And if somebody puts a hand on her in that bakery, brother, that one’s yours to carry and not mine.”