CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
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RIAN
The yard light was still burning over the boat stands at a sky that had gone gray and did not need it. Artur Sokolov knelt between two bollards on the finger dock, river mist up around his knees.
“Rian. Rian Varela. Let’s do this like men who work for a living.”
My mother’s father worked this water. Her brothers too, off a dock two bends east of here, and I had not thought about them in years.
“Let me stand up. I’m not going anywhere and you know it.”
“Stay down.” The planks were black with dew and he had knelt on them long enough to be wet through.
“Then I’ll do it down here.”
They had taken him off a boat at four in the morning, a forty-footer with a Bahamian registry and her tanks already topped. His shirt was still tucked in. There was mud up one linen leg, and that was all the damage on him.
Luca had sent Panetta the unsigned declaration from the rented house and the guards’ accounts before we came.
The Accord’s protection did not cover an abduction against another seated house.
Panetta had entered the breach. Artur’s father would call it murder anyway.
For once he would have to do that against his own book.
A bucket of live shrimp kicked and rattled by the rail. The shrimp boat two slips down had her generator running and a radio giving the forecast in Spanish, rain for the Keys. Nobody aboard came out.
“How much do you want?” Artur said. “Say a number. I’ll have it sitting in an account before your brother finishes his coffee.”
“You don’t have any money.” I put my boot on the coil of green line by the rail. “Your father has money.”
“That’s the first honest thing anybody’s said to me since Tuesday.”
“It’s a shut yard at half past six.” I watched the water instead of him. “You’re going to hear a lot of honest things.”
Artur shifted his weight off one knee onto the other. “I want to say one thing about her wrist first, and then you can get on with whatever you came out here for.”
“No.”
“I told those two not to put a hand on her. I was angrier about it than you were.”
“You weren’t angry.” The shrimp went over each other in the bucket. “You were short a signature.”
“Both of those were true at the same time. That has been the whole trouble with me.”
Then I heard her shoes on the ramp behind me.
My chest let go and set again harder before I had decided anything. I did not turn around. I know the sound of Mary on a hard floor the way I know a door coming open behind me.
She came down and stopped about ten feet back on the planks, Luca’s coat over her shoulders, her hands out of the pockets.
I did not send her up. She had said before dawn that she was coming and nobody argued, and a man who argues that twice was never listening.
From the second her shoes hit those planks I quit watching Artur’s face. I watched hers.
“I’ll give you the table. Every name, the whole count, my father’s timing—”
“I’ve got it.” The bridge horn went off once, east of us, and the mist took the end of it.
“You don’t have the timing.” Artur came up onto one knee and then thought better of it.
“He isn’t sending me. He’s coming to that room himself, he’s putting his own hands flat on that table on the second of December, because it’s finished as far as he’s concerned and he wants to watch your brother’s face. ”
“I know.” That one landed. His mouth stayed open on the word after it.
“You can’t know that. He’s told one person and that person is kneeling on your dock—”
“She gave me the count yesterday. Standing in a kitchen with your marks on her wrist.”
I watched the offer come apart in his mouth. Artur worked the way he always worked, four true things in a row so the fifth rides in on them, and we owned all four.
“Your father’s holding one page out of twelve and he’s never read the rest,” I said. “She got that off you too, while you were enjoying yourself.”
“You’ve got one seat at that table. I can hand you two.”
“You can’t hand me anything. You’re a message boy with a good haircut and a boat you didn’t get on.”
“That’s fair.” He almost smiled. “It’s also true that I’m the only man alive who knows what my father is carrying into that room, and you’re about to put me in the water.”
“He won’t come for you either way, Artur.”
“No. He’ll come for the seat, and he’ll do the arithmetic on me after.” Artur looked at me a second longer. Then he looked past me, because there was one thing left in his bucket. “Mrs. Varela. Mary. You know what my father does to families.”
Mary did not move. Luca’s coat was long in the sleeve on her, and there was flour on the cuff of her own shirt underneath it, and I got it off the air every time the air moved.
“I know what yours did to mine.” That was the whole of what Mary said.
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I turned my head enough to see Mary on the dock behind me and not enough to make a production of it.
“You don’t have to look, Mary. But don’t you dare do it for my sake either way.”
“I’m not going to,” she said.
Nicolas runs the family and Luca writes it down and I am the hands, and I have never needed that explained or apologized for. I went down on my heels in front of Artur Sokolov and took his right hand off his thigh.
“This hand. That’s the one, right? Say yes.”
Artur looked at his own hand like it belonged to a man he was about to be introduced to.
“Rian—”
“Say yes.” I did not raise it. His hand went heavy in mine.
“...Yes.”
I got my grip on it and said the reason out loud first, because she was standing right there. “You put your hand on her. There was never a version of this morning where you got to keep it.”
I did it there on the planks and it took no longer than saying it had. He made a sound. The pelican on the second piling did not move, and the radio went on about the Keys.
“She’s ours, Artur. You knew that when you put her in the car and you did it anyway.”
“Take him instead.” He got it out through his teeth. “My father. I’d help you. I’d drive.”
“I know you would. That’s the one thing about you your old man never worked out, and it’s most of why you’re kneeling.”
“Wait—wait, listen—”
The gun finished it at the end of the dock, over thirteen feet of tea-colored water with no bottom you can see. It was quick and it was not a speech and I did not make it one.
Here is what I was doing while it happened, and I am not going to tidy it up for anybody.
I was watching Mary. Her hands were down at her sides, out of the coat, and they were steady. Her jaw set one time. She took a shallow breath. The one after it came even, and her shoulders came down and stayed down.
She did not look at the water. She did not check my face first to work out what I wanted from hers.
I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted her standing there, in the cold, on a dock my mother’s people worked, with what I had done lying behind me on the boards. I know how that sounds. I am not sorry and I would not give a word of it back.
The yard light shut itself off on its own sensor and I never saw it go.
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Mary walked the ten feet of dock between us. It took about four seconds and I counted every one of them.
“Give me your hand.”
I gave her the right one, because that was the one she meant.
She turned it over in both of hers. She looked at the knuckles, the two fingers that sit off the line, the fresh split over my knuckle, and said nothing about it.
My hand shook once in hers before I knew it was going to.
“You’re cold. You’re always cold after.”
“It’s the river.” It was not the river.
She did not let go. “It isn’t the river. You were like this in the gym in September and there’s no river in the gym.”
“Is that it? Is there another one coming, or is that it?”
“There’s his father and whoever he brings with him.” Her thumb went back and forth over one knuckle. “That’s the last of it.”
“I keep waiting to be sorry,” she said. “It hasn’t come.”
“It might later.”
“It won’t. I’m glad he’s dead and I’d stand here twice.” Her thumb never stopped on that knuckle. “Don’t any of you tell me that isn’t what I am.”
Nobody has ever handed me that, and I did not talk her out of it.
She took my wrist as well as my hand. “Then talk about something else. Anything, I don’t care what.”
“You sound like Luca.”
“I sound like somebody who doesn’t want the last voice out here to be his.”
I looked around the yard for something I could give her. “There’s a pelican on that piling that hasn’t moved since four.”
“More.”
“Fourth plank from the end’s springy. Don’t put your weight on it in those shoes.”
“That’s the most you’ve said to me all week.”
I said it quiet, with him lying behind me on the boards. “Good girl. Come here.”
I have said those two words to her in a gym, at a party, in a bed and across her own counter with an oven going. I have never said them to thank her for anything. I said them to thank her.
“The tide’s going out and I’m standing in suede, Rian. Some of us plan.”
That came from the head of the ramp, forty feet up.
“Then stand on the concrete,” I said, and kept my eyes on Mary.
“The concrete’s where the water is. That is the entire point I’m making.”
There was a dead man on the planks behind me and I laughed at my brother’s shoes, and I hated it, and Luca did it anyway with his eyes nowhere near the water.
“He bought those in Milan,” Mary said. “He told me twice.”
“He told me four times.”
She was shaking. She had not shaken through one second of it and she was shaking now, the way a hand goes after a load is set down.
I put my hand on Luca’s coat to pull it closed at her throat.
“Don’t put the coat on me. Put your arm.”
“Come here. You’re shaking and I’m not going to pretend I mind.”
She came in under my arm and stayed, and I took the coat off her shoulders and carried it, and she was warmer without it, which is a thing I only find out by being told.
The gun went off the end of the dock into the river. The tide was running out hard and took it, and that was that.
We went up the ramp. Nicolas had not moved off the top of it, and in thirty-four years I have not once had to ask why that is the arrangement.
Nicolas looked at the cut over her right eyebrow, then at her wrist, then at the coat over my arm, in that order.
“Get in the car. Both of you.”
Nicolas did not ask her one question—nothing about the ramp, nothing about what she had stood there and watched, nothing about whether she was all right—and I understood he had worked it out before I did.
I got in the back with her. She put the bruised wrist in my lap like it was mine, and the car went out through the gate with the wheel singing on its track.
Nobody in that car named the ninth page. Luca had known it longest, Nicolas had read it later, I had been told standing up in a study, and she rode home not knowing.
I had it wrong on the dock and I had it wrong all the way up that ramp.
She hadn’t come down that ramp to watch him die. She’d come down it so I wouldn’t have to walk back up alone.