CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
?
MARY
On Monday, the fortieth day, the study door stood open, so I did not knock. I had two days of this built and paid for, sentence by sentence, in a taxi and a shower and a dark kitchen at four in the morning. I got four words in before Nicolas looked up from the desk and said my name.
“Mary.”
One word, no volume. The middle of my speech went out of me the way heat goes out of a pan lifted off the burner.
“You did that on purpose.”
“I said your name.”
“You say my name the way other men say sit.” I put my bag on the chair nobody sits in. “I’d built a paragraph about the taxi. It was good. You’ve cost this family a paragraph.”
Something went across his mouth that was not quite nothing.
“That was a smile.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It was a smile with the sound off. I’m keeping it.”
The study lamp shone through its slatted shade, laying two bars across his face.
The desk drawer at his right hand stood open two inches.
The room smelled of gun oil and paper. Out in the hall, beyond the windowless walls, Yelena had left cut limes in a bowl.
I could smell those too, and hated that the house was going on having an evening.
I went to the desk and flattened the receipt on his blotter.
“Read it to me,” I said. “It’s your casino.”
It was a Coliseum receipt, written on the back at the cage with its chained pen, then folded into my bag. Six numbers down the left side. A total under a line I had drawn twice, hard enough to score the paper. And one word in capitals, because my hand had wanted to press: PURCHASED.
“Reyes logged it at two minutes past two,” Nicolas said. “Hector called me before you were off the floor. I’ve had two days to decide how to have this conversation.”
“So you’ve had two days to call me, and I’ve had two days to wait.”
“Yes.”
Nicolas put two fingers on the corner and turned it to face him. Then he said the number himself, before I could ask for it.
“Twelve thousand dollars.”
“Say the rest.”
“Sokolov’s people circulated the paper in August and put May on the purchase stamp. They wrote the rest onto it. He needed us to buy a wife, so he could call it a purchase and take the seat.”
The elevator settled far below us and the sound came up through the floor into my shoes.
“In the order it happened,” I said. “Every step. Don’t hand me the short one.”
“Danny borrowed twelve between March and July. Sokolov used an outside company to move the markers out of our book and sell them back as a collection lot in August. No family is allowed to collect another family’s paper, so his name had to stay off it.
” Nicolas kept his eyes on the receipt. “They backdated the lot to May and multiplied the amount by two hundred. We collected the cover figure. My own house collected it.”
“Two hundred times.”
“Two hundred times.”
My hands were flat on the desk. I took them off, because the lamp had warmed the edge and I did not trust what they were doing.
“He wrote it onto my brother,” I said.
“He wrote it onto your brother’s name. That’s not the same thing, and it’s worse.”
“How long have you had this?”
“Since the morning after the party.”
The air conditioning cycled on over our heads and I heard every part of it. My ears were ringing over the top of that.
“You’re the pakhan of this whole city and you couldn’t get me one piece of paper about my own brother.”
“I could. I did. I pulled the file myself.”
Nicolas reported it like weather. Both hands quiet on the blotter, the burned one lying under the lamp where I could see every shiny inch of it.
“Then what stopped you?”
“Nothing stopped me.”
Nothing. He gave me the word the way another man would have given me a chair, and waited, with his mouth hidden behind the shade’s shadow, for me to do whatever I was going to do with it.
“That’s worse. You know that’s worse.”
“I know what it is.”
“On Saturday I had a brother with a debt.” My voice came up and I let it. “Tonight I’ve got a debt somebody built. Out of him. On purpose. And you’ve been sitting on that since the morning after the party and passing me the salt.”
“Yes.”
“Then say the whole sentence. You pulled the file. What’d you do after you’d pulled it?”
“I put it back where it sat. I let the cage log stand, because a file that’s been pulled tells them somebody pulled it. Then I started counting what he’d have to do next. After that—”
He stopped.
He did not trail off and he did not look away. He stopped the way a man stops a car, mouth open on the next word and the next word going nowhere, and he let me stand there and watch him do it.
“Finish it,” I said.
“No.”
“You’ve stopped in the middle.”
“I did.”
The drawer at his right hand was still open and the oil smell came off it, and neither of us reached to shut it.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to lie to you about it. So I’m going to stop talking.”
Three feet from my left hand was the study’s second drawer, the one with the brass pull that stuck at three inches. I did not look at it. I looked at his mouth, which had closed over something and stayed closed, and thought about how much of my life I had spent reading ovens through a door.
?
The telephone on Nicolas’s desk rang, the old one with an actual bell in it, and in the quiet of that study it went off like a hospital corridor.
Nicolas lifted the handset, listened two seconds, pressed a button on the base and set it back in its cradle. He did not ask me to leave the room. That was a decision, and I watched him make it, and I did not know yet whether it was a courtesy.
The voice came up out of the desk. Soft, unhurried, older than both of us.
“Nicolas Varela. My father used to say that a man who buys a wife has published the price of everything else he owns.”
“Mr. Sokolov,” Nicolas said.
“You’ve put me on a speaker.”
“I have.”
“Mrs. Varela. You are listening. Good. A woman should know what she cost.”
My mouth was dry. I said it anyway, and my voice came out steadier than the rest of me deserved.
“Mr. Sokolov. You bought my brother’s markers.”
“I bought paper. Paper’s bought and sold in this city every day and nobody calls that cruelty.
” He was in no hurry, and there was nothing in the voice that sounded like pleasure, which was the part that got into me.
“What was done to you was done at your own table, by the man standing beside you. He’s known the shape of it since September and he didn’t tell you. I’m telling you.”
“You want something from me.”
“I want nothing from you, madam. I’ve never wanted anything from you. That’s the piece your husband keeps behind his teeth, and you should find it worse than a threat.”
Nicolas turned the receipt on the blotter with one finger so it faced me again, and said it to the desk.
“Fifty days from now they call the vote.”
“It’s filed. It’ll be heard. Three men will stand up and say what you did with a woman and a piece of paper, and the seat your father sat in will be divided before dinner.” A pause, no longer than a breath. “Is Yelena Baranova still in that house?”
“She is.”
“Give her my regards. She’ll know that they’re real. Good night, Mrs. Varela.”
The line went dead with a small domestic click, like a lamp.
?
In the study Nicolas pressed the button and the green light on the base went out under his right hand.
“You’re not opening tomorrow.”
“That’s not yours to decide in this room.”
“It’s decided,” Nicolas said. “The shop stays shut and I’ll wear whatever that costs you.”
“So he set the price and you paid it, and either way I’m the thing on the table. You just got me at a discount.”
“You’re not the thing on the table.”
“Then what am I?”
He did not take that one fast. He looked at the receipt, then at my hands, which is where he always looks, and a car horn sounded far below the closed room while he did it.
“You’re my wife. There’s a contract with a date on it. Both of those are true in the same room.”
“I’ve been rehearsing this since Biscayne and you’ve already ruined the middle of it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to know. You get to answer.” I heard my own breathing getting away from me and could do nothing about it. “The fourth of September. My own kitchen. If I’d stood there in the flour and said no—”
“You were never walking out of that kitchen.”
“Never.”
“Not in any version of it.” He came out from behind the desk. “One of Rian’s men had the back door. I was between you and the front one. I’d decided before I came up the step. You can hate that. It’s true, and I’m not going to dress it up for you.”
My pulse went up under my jaw before I had decided one thing about him. Nicolas crossed the study, eleven feet of it, unhurried and unasked, and I did not step back, and the not-stepping-back was mine and I own it.
He took my left wrist. He turned my arm over, thumb on the pulse, and put his mouth on the ridge of the burn before he said anything at all, the way he had since the first week in that house.
“You can be angry with your arm where it is,” Nicolas said, against the scar.
“Don’t do that while I’m still talking. Don’t—do it and let me finish.”
The heat came up through me and had no business being there.
My nipples went tight under a thin cotton dress in a room with the air running and nobody’s hands on me above the elbow.
Lower down my cunt clenched around nothing, while my own mouth called me a purchase in his study, and there is no version of that I get to be proud of.
“What aren’t you saying?” I asked him.
Nicolas did not answer. He did not shake his head, or soften it, or hand me an object instead of a reason. He let the nothing stand in the room with us and the smell of gun oil, a long time, and out east the storm held its place over the water and never came in.
“Nothing. Fine. That’s an answer too.”
I took one step toward the door.
One. My body would not take the second one.
I stood in the middle of a study I was legally free to walk out of, in a building with an elevator that would have opened for me, holding nothing at all, and I did not go, and he watched me not go and said not one word about it.
That is the sentence, in plain words, with the door open behind me and my brother’s number drying on his blotter: I had the reason to go and I stayed because I wanted his mouth back on my arm, and I would have called any other woman on this earth bought, for less.
“I’m going to say the ugly one out loud, because you’ve said all of yours.” My voice was flat and I let it be. “A man bought me. I found that out tonight and I’m still in his study. There’s a word for a woman who does that and I’m not going to make you say it.”
“There isn’t one that fits you.”
“There’s one that fits what I did tonight. I’d have used it on another woman by now and not lost a minute.”
“How long have you known who I am?”
He lifted his eyes to me after he stepped out of the lamplight.
“Longer than you think.”