CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
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LUCA
Late Tuesday Nicolas had the terrace door open off the great room and the whole city under the glass, and he had not turned on the lamp, and he said it before I got my coat off.
“Luca.”
My father’s fountain pen was already in my fist and I do not remember taking it out. There was rain on my shoulders. The elevator had come up twice and the fridge cycled in a kitchen with nobody in it.
Rian came in from the security room with his hands hanging and nothing in them to break. He had left Bogdan’s watch face-down on his desk out there, the bracelet still curved to the shape of a wrist that was not in it.
“Warren’s is dark and nobody’s in it,” Rian said. “Register full. Her phone sitting next to it. Back door’s standing open on the alley.”
“How long?” I said, and Rian gave it to the window. “Two hours. Maybe more. Nobody’s sure yet.”
“The two men from the laundry are alive,” Rian said. “Bound in the stockroom. The all-clear wasn’t theirs. She went out through the back with Artur before either could reach a phone.” He put his own phone on speaker. Osiel was checking the next address. The first two had been empty.
Nicolas said nothing. He has been pakhan for six years and the only place his volume changes is somewhere I cannot see.
The last time I had my hands on her she was laughing at me about a comma. It arrived in that silence and it was not about her face.
“Warren’s doesn’t open tomorrow,” Nicolas said. “Or the day after. Put a man on the gate and one on her brother, and when she asks who shut it, tell her I did.”
“She’ll ask me first,” I said.
“Then you’ll be the man who doesn’t answer her, Luca.”
“Put the pen away, Luca.” Rian did not look up when he said it. “You’ve been holding it like a knife since you walked in.”
“It’s a fountain pen. The worst I could do to you is initial you.”
“Try me,” Rian said.
“You’d have to hold still, Rian, and you’ve never once managed it.”
“There’s something else,” Rian said. “Bogdan gave me the order on Sunday. In Hialeah. He gave me the order, and who it came from, and what it’s for.”
Nicolas turned around. That was the first time he turned away from the city.
“Sunday. You warned us about Artur, and kept Bogdan’s name out of it until Tuesday.”
“Yeah.”
“The rest of it.”
“Artur had an order to take her before the vote, and not to hurt her.” Rian put that down the way he puts down a tool. “They want her hand on a statement that says the marriage was a purchase. And the count’s three of four.”
“Whose?” Nicolas said.
“Sokolov’s own, and two more he’s bought or scared.” Rian’s jaw set. “Bogdan didn’t have the third name. He had the count and he had the order, and I broke his hand before he had anything else.”
“Then we don’t have it,” Nicolas said.
Nicolas led us into the windowless study and put one palm flat on the desk, and the room got smaller.
“You kept the source and the copied page to yourself for two days, Rian.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to bring you the man and not the news.” Rian was looking at the floor between his boots. “That’s the whole reason. It’s a bad one.”
“I told you to bring him to me.”
“I warned the house. I didn’t hand you the man.” Rian shrugged with one shoulder, which is the only apology he owns. “It’s the same thing in a different coat, and I knew that Sunday night, and I still kept him from you.”
“He’s alive in the clinic,” Rian said. “Under guard.”
I called for a written statement and the records from his phone.
Before the night was over they were on the desk: the payment notice, the outside company’s name, his account of the August alteration and the October copy.
He had signed with his uninjured right hand.
The nurse and Osiel witnessed it. I kept the originals together.
No more useful paper left in a brother’s pocket.
I heard the next sentence coming before Nicolas built it and stepped in front of it, and told myself that was for my brother.
“Nothing gets decided in a room you’re not in. You’ve said that to me since I was nine.”
Nicolas looked at me and let me stand in it. “Then talk.”
The next call came back empty. So did the one after. We kept the search on the desk between us while the questions we had avoided for weeks finally got asked. Each time the phone rang, all three of us stopped.
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I put the pen down on Nicolas’s desk in the study. My hand had made the barrel slick and it left a mark on the blotter, and I looked at the mark instead of at my brothers.
“You both know there’s a ninth sheet now. I wrote it. Here’s what I never told you.”
Rian’s head came up. Nicolas did not move at all.
“Page nine.” Nicolas said it the way a man says a word he has said to himself before. I heard it and filed it and kept talking, because talking is what I do instead of stopping.
“I know it by heart. I’ve known it since September.
” My mouth was dry and I went on anyway.
“An undivided one-quarter interest, undilutable, in AVC 4, LLC, vesting at the opening of the ninetieth day of the term, to Mary Corinne Warren. Esperanza stamped it. Two witnesses. There’s nothing this family can sign that touches it. ”
“In English,” Nicolas said.
“AVC 4’s the company,” I said. “The company’s what the Accord seats.
Not you, Nic, and not the name—the license at the Coliseum, this tower, Star Island, the Aurelio Building, the remaining ground leases.
Calle Ocho is already outside it, in Mary’s name.
If Vasily carries his motion, the table takes what this family holds. ”
“And the page?”
“They can pass a motion against us. They cannot execute it against a protected quarter that is no longer ours to lose. And they can’t keep her out of the room, because she’s a holder, and the Vault Room can’t refuse a holder.”
Rian came off the wall. He is six feet four and gets closer than that.
“So Vasily calls it a fake and they burn it.”
“They can’t. Esperanza retained a certified complete counterpart the same morning, and the original of page nine is unstapled in the safe behind the Rothko, twelve minutes from where you’re standing.
” I heard my voice steady itself, which it does when everything else in me is coming apart.
“Burn our copy and the notary’s counterpart and journal still prove what we signed.
The clerk who’d have to rule on it is Marchetti’s man, and Marchetti’s man is mine. ”
“And if they take the whole company anyway?”
“They can’t execute a partial forfeiture. The Accord seats one undivided company. A protected outside interest blocks the transfer of its territory. Her quarter is hers; because it is hers, they cannot parcel the rest of the seat among themselves. That rule is older than all of us.”
“And if she signs whatever Artur’s carrying tonight?”
Rian asked that with his eyes on my hands.
“It doesn’t matter what she signs for them.
She can’t sign that unit away—undilutable, non-transferable, and I put both words in twice.
” My hands would not hold still, so I put them in my pockets.
“But a statement in her handwriting saying she was bought hands Vasily his motion, and the motion’s what puts eleven men in the Vault Room. ”
Rian looked at Nicolas and got nothing back, which is what Rian has been getting all his life.
“You wrote her a quarter of us, Luca. And Nic signs whatever you put in front of him, and you knew it.”
“Yes,” I said.
Rian waited. His silences are shorter than Nicolas’s and cost more.
Rian put his hand out for it. “The number, Luca.”
“One quarter. Hers on day ninety, in her name, and the three of us hold what’s left between us.”
“You gave a pastry chef a quarter of the bratva, Luca.”
“I gave her a quarter of the paper. The bratva isn’t paper.” My voice cracked on that and I let it. “The seat is, and the seat’s the only thing Vasily can take off this family.”
“So page nine’s the whole defense.”
“It doesn’t stop the vote,” I said. “It stops the forfeiture. Those are two different rooms, and only one of them is for sale.”
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Nicolas came away from the closed study door and stood over the desk where my pen bled into his blotter.
“When’s it vest?”
“At the opening of the ninetieth day. The second sentence says the unit’s held in her name alone, and—”
“—and shall not be subject to any forfeiture, dilution or encumbrance executed by the company or by its members.”
Nicolas said it to my face. Word for word, in my order, with my comma in it.
Nobody moved for a breath. In the kitchen the fridge cycled off.
“I read it on the thirtieth day.”
The floor tipped and I put a hand on the chair back.
“He’s known since the thirtieth day.” Rian said that to me, not to Nicolas. “You stood in that kitchen last Wednesday and let me argue like a—”
“I didn’t destroy it,” Nicolas said.
“You could have,” I said. “You could have destroyed our copy, Nic. You’d still have had Esperanza’s counterpart to contend with, and you left that alone too.”
“I know what I could’ve done.”
“That’s a sentence you hand people, Nic,” Rian said. “It isn’t a reason.”
“It’s the one you’re getting tonight.”
Rian looked from Nicolas to me and back, and his mouth went hard.
“You read all twelve and left the rest of us arguing about one. That takes practice.”
Nicolas let that go past him as though Rian had coughed.
“You told me you don’t keep anything from your brothers.”
“He signed it unread,” I said to Rian, because I did not have the nerve to say it to the man himself, “because for six years I have been the one who reads things, and I used that.”
“You used it.”
“I put the alliance contract in front of my brother at ten that first morning, twelve pages of it, and I turned it to the signature block, and he signed where my finger was, and I didn’t say a word.”
“Then why write it,” Nicolas said.
“I wrote it the night before she got here. I’d never touched her. That’s the part I can’t make sound decent.”
“Try.”
“I thought we were going to lose. I thought there’d be a morning where this family owned nothing a table hadn’t handed back to it, and I wanted one signature nobody at that table could reach.
” I heard how well it was going and I stopped it.
“That’s the closing argument. Here’s the truth.
I had my mouth on her in that office with the safe eleven feet behind my head, and I still didn’t tell her. ”
Rian’s jaw moved and I got there first.
“Don’t do that with your face. I know what I am. I’ve had all night to know it.”
I had been telling myself since September that I wrote that page for the family, for the seat, for a war I could see coming across the water.
That is a lawyer’s answer and a lie the size of this building.
I wrote it for a woman I had not met, whose name I had off a marker file in Hector’s cage, because I could not stand the arithmetic of what happens to a woman when the men holding her lose.
I was protecting her, before I had one reason I could say out loud in front of my brothers. And knowing where she is tonight, and that the page may be why, I would write it again before morning and not change a comma.
“Does that page keep her alive, or does it get her killed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then say that part first next time,” Rian said.
“The page stays in this room until we have her back,” Nicolas said. “I’m not giving Sokolov another reason to keep her alive only long enough to sign something.”
“It’s her name on the instrument.”
“It’s her name on it. She’ll get the whole document from us, not a piece of it from him. Right now find her. When she’s back, neither of you leaves her protection to a man we haven’t checked ourselves.”
Rian looked at me. I looked at the blotter. That was the vote.
In the security room Rian’s phone lit the wall blue and he went for it. Nicolas stood beside the study door and did not say one word to me.
Then my body, without being asked and with her in a car somewhere, went and got the Aurelio office at night—her thighs over my shoulders, her cunt against my mouth, my cock in her hand, black glass going on for miles behind her head.
I sat on the arm of the chair. She was in a room I could not name with a man who wanted her handwriting, and I had a body tonight, and I would have traded it.
“Get up,” Nicolas said. “He’s got something.”
It was five past six. I had watched the clock lose the whole night. Nicolas already had his keys in his hand when Rian came back.
Rian came back into the doorway with Bogdan’s phone lit in his hand. “Kendall. A rented house off Killian. The letting agent just matched the booking reference in Bogdan’s messages. Empty since June; the power went on last night.”