CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
?
RIAN
On Sunday evening the roll-down door of a body shop in Hialeah was pulled halfway and I went under it on my heels.
“Rian. Rian—please. Please, man, I’ll—”
Bogdan Petrenko was taped to a mechanic’s stool in the second bay with his sleeves still buttoned at the wrist, and he had started in before I straightened up.
Nobody had put a hand on him yet. Somebody had run tape around his forearms and the stool frame and left the sleeves alone. That was the whole courtesy of the night. The drop light hung off a hook and swung.
The compressor kicked on, ran, shut off.
Two bays over a radio was playing bachata that nobody was going to turn down.
The concrete came up warm through my boots.
The slab had been holding the day since noon.
My mouth tasted like iron. I had bitten my own cheek somewhere on the drive and had not noticed doing it.
I set a water bottle on the bench, cracked the cap, and held it to his mouth.
“Drink it. You’re going to want the water.”
Bogdan drank the whole thing with his chin up and his eyes on me. A third of it went down his neck into his collar. I wiped his chin with my sleeve. Then I put the empty bottle back on the bench beside the tape and the drill, where he could see all three of them at once.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “But I’m glad it’s you.”
“You’re going to stop believing that,” I said.
Bogdan looked past me at the steel man-door in the wall. The bar on that door stuck, and it took a lift and a pull at once, and he had been sitting there working that out since Saturday night.
Nicolas was the pakhan and the pakhan decided rooms. This was a room I had kept from him. He knew I was looking for Bogdan, but not that my men had found him Saturday night. Luca did not know either.
A tire-shop calendar over the bench was still turned to August. Somebody had kicked a bucket of pink windshield wash over, and it had been crossing the floor toward the drain since before I got there.
“I kept off her block Friday night,” I said. “Yesterday too. You know what that cost me? I gave her one thing she asked for and spent every hour wondering which of you would use it.”
“Rian, I never touched her. I swear on my life, I’ve never once—”
The tape creaked. He had pushed himself forward into it without knowing that he was doing it.
“I know you never touched her. That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it? Tell me what it is and I’ll say it. Whatever it is, we can both go home.”
I pulled a rolling stool over and sat down so the two of us were level. He liked that less than he had liked me standing.
“You’ve driven this family for years. You know how I ask a thing. I ask it once, and then I ask it a different way.”
“I know how you ask.”
“Who bought Danny Warren’s paper? Who went into the cage log and wiped the counterparty field?”
Bogdan’s shoulders came down about an inch, which was a man deciding to spend a lie.
“A guy out of Hollywood, Kravets, I only ever saw him the one time, I swear to—to God, Rian. He came into the cage with a lawyer and a folder and he had the numbers before anybody gave them to him. He knew what Danny owed. I drove him to the airport after and he didn’t say ten words the whole way.
That’s the whole ride. I drive people. That’s the job, that’s the only job I’ve ever—”
“Wrong, Bogdan. You get one more.”
I took Bogdan’s left hand out of the tape, held the wrist, and brought the back of it down on the rolled lip of the bench, once.
The bench was steel and it did what steel does.
He made a sound with no word in it. The stool went over sideways and I stood it back up with him on it.
The pink water kept coming toward the drain, slow.
?
Bogdan gave it up to the floor of the bay, in one breath. “Eleven thousand. Eleven, and a job in Brighton Beach after the season. That’s it. That’s all of it.”
Eleven thousand dollars and a job in Brighton Beach, and he bought a watch with the first of it.
“I wiped the field. The counterparty field. One line on one screen, Rian, that’s what I did. I didn’t sign a thing. I didn’t hand anybody over. I moved a cursor and I went home and I slept.”
He had covered cash-office errands often enough to be trusted at a terminal. In August he had used that trust. He gave me the outside company’s name next, and the name of the Sokolov man who had paid him.
“You moved a cursor.”
“And the contract?” I asked. His eyes went to my hands.
“October third. I carried the audit folder from Luca’s office to Nicolas, then back.
They wanted the sheet about the debt. I copied that one.
Only that one.” The third page. Luca’s margin.
I had left the courier alone with it because he had been ours.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s—that’s what I’m telling you.”
His left wrist had gone the wrong color under the bracelet. I released the folding clasp one-handed. The whole thing came off warm. There was a pale band of skin under it where the sun had never been, and I put it in my right jacket pocket.
“It’s a fake. The watch. It cost two hundred dollars, it’s not even—”
“Then you got robbed twice.”
The laugh came out before I had any say in it. One flat sound in a concrete bay. I hated it on the way out of me.
“I told you my cousin got it for me. On the stairs. You remember that? I said it was my cousin.”
“I remember.”
I had stood beside him on the service stair and watched the bracelet slide down his wrist. I had let him finish the lie.
I turned my hands over under the drop light.
There was blood down in the creases of the right one, where it had got in and stayed.
The last thing those hands had been on was her forearms. The Friday before, at Warren’s, floured to the elbow.
The flour under her thumbnail that never came out for anybody.
The burn scar on the left one, which I have never once looked at a second longer than she let me.
She had leaned back into me at the bench and not apologized for one ounce of it, and I had gone hard against her over a proving rack and said nothing about it.
I did not stop doing what I was doing. Here is the part I have never said out loud in this family.
I am good at this. It is the one thing I never had to practice, and there is a place low in me that goes quiet while I do it, quieter than it goes in a church or a bed, and it went quiet in that bay with her flour and his blood on the same hand. I am not going to be sorry about that.
“I’ve still got flour on this jacket from her shop. That’s whose house you sold.”
“Rian—”
The drop light swung and put his face in the dark and gave it back.
“You sold the street she sleeps on. To a guy who’s never even seen her.”
“It was paper. It was a debt on a screen. It was numbers, Rian, I wasn’t sitting there thinking about a person, I swear to you I never once—”
I let that lie on the concrete between us until he could hear it himself.
“She’s got flour under one thumbnail, all the time, you can’t get it out. That’s who you put a number on.”
“I know. I know that now.”
He said it fast, the way a man says a line he worked out in advance.
“It was a family. You ate at my father’s table and you drove my brother’s wife to her bakery in September. That’s the bratva, whatever anybody else tells you it is, and you sold it for a watch.”
He was crying by then. It did nothing to me one way or the other.
“The count.”
“Three of four. They’ve got it. Your brother’s on his own at that table.”
Three of four. He handed me the whole table in seven words and did not know that he had.
“Who’s the third?”
“They don’t tell drivers that. On my mother, Rian. They tell us where and they tell us what time to be in the car. Nobody told me which man promised the deciding vote.”
I believed him, and I heard myself do it. He had been lying about Hollywood and he was not lying now, and the difference was as loud as a bearing going.
I put two ribs in on his right side, under the arm, and then I stood off him and let him find his breath, because I still needed him talking.
“You’ll call my sister? Tell her I was working.”
Working. That was the word he picked, with his hand lying in his lap in a shape a hand should not have been in, and I laughed a second time. The second one was worse than the first.
?
Bogdan found it in pieces around the ribs, his eyes on the man-door at the end of the bay. “Rian. Listen to me. I’ll give you a name you didn’t come here for. Then you take my phone and you go, and you leave me the door. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Go,” I said.
“They told Artur to take her before the vote. A missing wife can’t stand up at the table. And a frightened woman signs whatever you put under her hand.”
My hands stopped.
That is the only way I know how to put it.
They were open, both of them, hanging off the ends of my arms, and there was nothing left in that building to set them on.
There was a used-up man on a stool with a broken hand.
The man who gave the order was in a house on the water I had no address for.
And she was asleep behind the back door on Calle Ocho I had finally made lock, and I was in Hialeah with another man’s watch in my pocket.
Every other night of my life this has come with a man attached to it. I find the man, I go to where the man is, and it is finished inside a minute and I sleep after. Somebody had taken the man out of it and handed me a sentence instead.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Nobody tells me when. On my life, Rian, if I had when I’d have opened with it.”
I wanted that to be a lie and it was not one.
“Again. The order.”
“Before the vote. Take her before the vote, get the statement signed, and the seat goes without a shot fired. That’s how it came to me. Those are the words that were used.”
I stepped away and called Osiel. Then Nicolas.
Artur meant to take her; the bakery needed a watch again, now, and she needed to hear why.
I gave them that much. I did not give them Bogdan, the copied sheet, or where I was standing.
I wanted the man who had bought him before I handed my brother the bill for trusting him.
The compressor kicked on and I let it run. I had driven out to Hialeah to find out who sold the house. I had that now. It had cost me nothing I was going to miss, and it was the smallest thing I was carrying out of that bay.
I went through his pockets left-handed, took the phone, and left him his cigarettes.
“You’re not going to see me again,” I said. “That isn’t mercy. It’s arithmetic.”
“Rian—”
The pink water had got as far as the door track. I walked out through the edge of it and ducked back under the roll-down, and it came off my boot on the gravel for a few steps and then quit.
The two men on the lot came off the fence and neither of them asked me anything, which was why they still worked for me.
“The clinic on Twenty-Seventh. Inside the door, not in the lot. Keep him there under guard. Nobody turns this into a story for my brother’s wife.”
The wind was coming dry off the Glades with cane smoke in it.
The sky over Hialeah was orange. A dead Buick sat on blocks against the chain-link with weeds up through the wheels, and the one light on the fence put my shadow out flat across the gravel.
My knuckles had opened over the second one down and I could not feel that either.
The phone went in my left pocket, the watch still warm in the right, both of them against me. I was three steps from the car when the phone in my jacket started buzzing, and Artur Sokolov’s name came up on the screen.