CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
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NICOLAS
Late that afternoon, while Luca was still upstairs with the police and the vault-camera recording, Danny Warren stopped me in the cashier’s corridor with a sign-out slip in his hand.
“Nicolas. I don’t—thanks. That’s it. Thanks.”
My right hand went into my pocket before I had decided anything. Six years I have owned that corridor. I could not make myself give a thin sober man four words back.
“Come through,” I said. “Your sister’s inside.”
The office behind the cage has no window, one lamp and a steel wastebasket. Mary sat against the wall with her coat on and the doorway in her sight. The cut above her eyebrow had healed to a narrow pink line. I took the chair with my back to the open door and put the marker file on the desk.
“That’s it?” Danny said. “That’s the file? It’s smaller than I thought.”
“Sit down. This’ll take two minutes.”
He sat. Mary did not look at the file. She looked at my hands, and my thumb was moving on the soft corner of the cardboard, so I stopped it.
I opened the cover.
“Twelve thousand dollars. That was the real outstanding balance in September, and you’ve been carrying two point four million around in your head because somebody wrote it there.”
Danny made a sound with no word in it.
“That’s the whole number,” he said. “I signed for twelve and then they kept handing me paper and I kept—”
“You kept signing. The rest of it got written on afterward by a polite man in a white car.”
Mary put her palm flat on the desk.
“Say the rest,” she said.
“Other small balances were paid for years before this one, and not by him.”
“By who?”
“Upstairs. Not in a room with a camera in the corner.”
Hector Ruiz keeps a can of lighter fluid in that desk with the pens and I have never asked why.
I put the marker in the wastebasket. Then the voided purchase line.
Then a copy of the old sheet with its erased field, no longer the only record of who had sold it.
I struck a match and dropped it onto the paper.
The signed release was in Mary’s bag. The evidence copies were with Panetta. What I put in the bin could no longer collect a dollar or hide how the number had been built.
The smoke came up black and stinking and went white. The ash held the shape of a page before it lifted off the bin.
Danny reached for it. Mary caught his wrist without standing up.
“Mary,” he said. “I told you twelve.”
“I know.” My wife did not look at me when she answered. “You told me the truth that day. I should have heard it.”
He swallowed. “I’d made that hard.”
“Yes. You had.” She let him have the whole answer, not only the part that would put him to sleep.
“It’s hot. Leave it,” she said. “Sit down and let the man finish.”
“So what do I owe?” he said.
“The house, nothing. Your sister, everything. I can’t burn that one for you.”
I laid the release in front of him too. “And I kept you here after I knew the figure was wrong. That was mine.” Mary looked at me then. I did not give her a reason dressed as an apology. I gave Danny the paper and let him read it.
He looked at the bin. His hands would not stay anywhere on the desk.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. That’s fair. I’m not going to stand here and—”
“Go out the front. Walk. Nobody in this building’s going to stop you.”
“You’re the pakhan of this whole—”
“Yes.”
Mary made a noise into her collar that was nearly a laugh. Danny went out through the floor on his own feet, and the debt stayed behind him as ash in a bin. When the statements were finished, I drove her home myself, fifteen minutes, my father’s cracked dash and the heater ticking, and no radio.
Her knee was in the light off the dash and I wanted my mouth on the inside of it, and my hands smelled of burnt paper.
She waited until the causeway.
“You said upstairs,” Mary said. “I’m holding you to that one.”
“I know what I said. That’s the reason I said it down there.”
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Yelena had left food under a cloth on the island and gone to her own rooms without a word, which is her entire opinion of the hours we keep. The terrace door was playing its one low note off the water. Mary stood at the counter and ate standing up, and I stood where I could watch her.
“How do you know me?”
She asked me that in October and I gave her a smaller answer, and she has not asked since. She stops. She stopped in November, and that silence is the worst anybody in this family has ever done to me.
My chest went tight before I had a sentence ready.
“I’ve known how you take your coffee for four years. You asked me the rest before. I wouldn’t answer. Ask me now, Mary. I’m not stopping at the part I can make sound decent.”
She put the fork down.
“Then all of it,” she said.
“I burned my hand taking a caramel tray off you at a street festival four years ago, and I never told you my name.”
She looked at the back of my right hand. She had asked me about it in bed. I had made her carry the unanswered question until tonight.
“That was you,” she said. “There was a man with his hand wrapped in a dish towel and he wouldn’t give me a name and he wouldn’t let anybody look at it.”
“Rian wrote down how you take your coffee in his first month of watching you for me. I kept that report. He didn’t tell me he kept going back afterward.”
“The cinnamon—”
“The cinnamon’s in the book,” I said.
She sat down on the walnut stool the way people sit when their legs have decided for them.
“Rian watched you move your own counter twice in a week so you’d never once have your back to a door, and he told me, and I’ve taken the bad chair ever since.”
Her right hand went over her left forearm.
“The clothes,” she said. “In the closet. Hanging there before I ever walked in.”
“Yelena bought them in March from the woman on Eighth who made your grandmother’s aprons.”
“Marisol Betancourt,” she said. “She’s got a bell on her door and she knew my grandmother’s hands.”
“You asked me by who, downstairs. Me. The older balances, in pieces, into my own cage. Those payments were separate from the twelve thousand he still owed when Sokolov’s people got at his file.”
“How long?”
“Four years.”
The study’s second drawer sticks at three inches and I have never had it fixed. I went down the east hall, brought the photograph back and put it in her hand face-up. She is standing outside Warren’s with the gate half down and flour on one wrist.
“I knew the week you found it,” I said. “You put it back square. Everybody puts it back crooked.”
“You let me think I got away with it.”
“Yes. That was the whole idea.”
She turned it over. The pencil date was still on the back. She ran her thumb just beneath the year.
“So this is the part where we live happily ever after,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re supposed to argue.”
“Why?”
She got her hand up over her mouth and it came out anyway, and I stood in my own kitchen and let a woman laugh at me until she was finished.
“There’s a man outside your shop tomorrow, and the day after. I’m not going to pretend I’m going to stop.”
“That’s not an apology.”
“No. It’s not going to turn into one, either.”
“Good,” she said, and stood up.
She kept the photograph when she stood. I left the file on the island and followed her down the hall.
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I took Mary up to the master bedroom, which takes the terrace on one side and the city on the other, and the city was far down and clear.
I undressed her at the foot of the bed and stood back and looked at her, her shoulders and her belly and the weight of her breasts, her nipples going tight in the cold off the glass.
She moved to fold her arms across herself.
I took her wrists down and held them at her sides.
“You’re beautiful. Don’t move.”
“Nicolas, don’t do that—”
“You’re beautiful. Your nipples go dark when you’re cold, and I’ve known that since your first night in this room.”
Her breath went out of her before she could catch it. I have watched this woman think her way out of every room in this house. She did not get out of that one.
“Stunning. That’s not a compliment. It’s a measurement, and I’ve had four years to take it.”
I put my mouth on the burn on her left forearm first, because I always do. She laid her right hand over the back of my right hand and held it there, and neither of us said a word about that.
Then her back was on the bed. My mouth went to her breasts, my tongue flat on one nipple and then on the other nipple, and she made a sound she has never made on purpose.
My hand went between her thighs. Two fingers on her pussy, wet before I got there, my thumb on her clit, and her hips came up off the sheet to get my thumb harder on her clit.
“Every part of you’s exactly the right amount,” I said, with two fingers still in her pussy. “Hold still and let me prove it.”
“You keep saying that and then you make it impossible—”
“Then stop talking and lose.”
I worked her pussy slowly, two fingers, the heel of my hand hard against her, my thumb going on her clit until her thighs closed on my wrist and opened again.
She said my name and then could not say anything.
Her nipples went hard enough to hurt under my mouth.
When she came, with my fingers inside her pussy and her clit under my thumb, I put my hand on her jaw and turned her face up.
“Look at me.”
She did. Her eyes are gray and there was nothing behind them, my fingers still in her pussy and my thumb on her clit, and I have wanted that from her since a street festival on Calle Ocho.
She came up on one elbow and took my cock in her mouth.
She has never been shy about it. Her tongue went flat under the head of my cock, her hand closed at the base, and she took more of my cock than she needed to take to prove a point to me.
I let her have my cock until my hand was in her hair and I wanted her face where I could see it.
“That’s enough of my cock. Come up here and give me your wrists.”
I put her hands above her head and held both wrists in my left hand. My right went under her ass and lifted her to the angle I wanted. Then my cock in her cunt, every inch of it, slow, out to the head and back into her pussy to the root, and I did not take my eyes off her face.
“Perfect. That’s the word and I’m not taking it back.”
She laughed, and it broke apart in the middle and came out as a moan.
Somewhere after that she stopped tracking.
Her mouth stayed open and her eyes went past me to nothing, her nipple hard against my chest, and her cunt closed on my cock every time I came down into her, and she was not deciding one single thing.
“That’s it. That’s you, gone. Stay gone, I’ve got the rest of it.”
I got my thumb down between us onto her clit and she swore at the ceiling in two languages.
Her nipples dragged on my chest and her clit stayed under my thumb.
She came the second time with her wrists in my hand and her ass off the bed and her cunt locked on my cock, and she took me with her, and I put my face in her neck and did not move, still inside her pussy, for a long time afterward.
Later I brought water and she drank it sitting up with the sheet at her waist and her breasts bare, her nipples up from the air off that door, and I put my mouth on one nipple because it was there, and looked at her as long as I wanted.
The photograph was face-up on the pillow between us where she had left it.
She put two fingers on it and turned it toward me.
“Four years,” she said. “You could’ve said hello.”
“I did the other thing.”
“You did the other thing for four years.”
“You’re mine,” I said. “That was never the part I was keeping from you.”
“I want that notebook. You’re going to get it off Rian for me, and you’re not going to tell him why.”
“He’ll know why before I’ve finished asking him.”
She looked at the burn on the back of my hand and then at my face, and she said nothing at all, and I have never wanted her to talk so badly. I took her left hand and held it. My chest was going hard enough that she could feel it through her fingers.
“Marry me on purpose this time. Not for the paper and not for the table. Will you have me?”