8. Mikhail
MIKHAIL
Aman who is any good at waiting empties himself first. You put away appetite and memory and the small human noise that makes you easy to predict, until you are a room with nothing in it for the enemy to move.
I have done it a thousand times. I did it the night I set the trap for Roman, and I was still doing it three days later, except that this time the room wasn’t empty. There was a laugh in it.
It was her laugh, the real one, the one she keeps folded up and files away, the one that got loose in my kitchen over a story about Pasha and a man who refuses to be dead.
It had been living in my head ever since, rent I never agreed to pay.
I should have burned it out. That’s the correct move with any appetite an enemy can use against you.
You find it, you name it, you starve it until it dies, and you thank yourself later.
I’ve done it with wine and with anger and once, a long time ago, with a person.
I knew the whole procedure by heart. I stood at the door of it every night that week and did not go in.
So I’d done a thing I’m not proud of. I’d started trying to get it again.
I didn’t do it with charm. I don’t have charm, and the men who do end up trusting it, which is how they end up in the ground.
My method is simpler. I say one true thing, flat, with nothing at all on my face, at the exact moment she isn’t braced for it, and I watch the fight start behind her eyes.
I couldn’t tell you when it became the most important work of my day.
I only know I started arranging my afternoons around the chance of it, inventing reasons to be in whatever room she was counting money in, which is behavior I have ended men for calling weakness.
In another man I’d have seen it in a heartbeat.
In myself I refused to see it for weeks.
Her record is nine seconds. She set it the week before, holding a laugh through a thing I said about a funeral wreath, nine full seconds of open combat, and I’ve been quietly furious ever since. Not at her. At the part of me that wrote the number down and can still recite it.
The afternoon it nearly got away from me again, she was in the office over the club, reconciling the month and telling me the books were clean, which they were, because I’d made them clean before I ever let her near them.
“The Clark Street account balances to the cent,” she said. “Whoever kept these before me was a genius or a saint.”
“He was neither,” I said. “He retired to Arizona.” I let a beat go by. “In several boxes.”
She got seven seconds. I counted them. Seven seconds of a set jaw and bright eyes and one hand gone very still on the ledger, and then it cracked out of her, a single helpless bark of a laugh she hated the instant it escaped, and something in my chest did a thing I have no name for and no use for and could not make stop.
“That’s not funny,” she said, still wrestling the last of it off her face.
“The saint part was a little funny.”
“A man is dead.”
“A man is always dead. The only thing the business ever decides is whose.” I watched her file the horror away, the way she files everything. “You’re still new enough to think the sentence needs a kinder verb.”
“And you’re old enough to have run out of the kind ones,” she said, and there it was, not the laugh but the other thing, the quickness, the woman under the bookkeeper answering me back with her whole self before she remembered she was supposed to be smaller than that.
She caught herself. She always catches herself.
But I had seen it, and once you’ve seen the real thing you can’t go back to being content with the copy.
A wiser man would have been frightened by all of it, and not by the war.
The war I understand the way I understand my own hands.
What should have frightened me was that in the worst week my city had seen in years, I kept finding a corner of my mind given over to a number, and the number was how long a federal informant could hold a laugh.
I had never once in my life been a distractible man.
I’d have sworn it wasn’t in me. She’d found it anyway, the way she finds everything, without ever seeming to look.
Timo noticed before I did. He said nothing, because Timo has learned that the surest way to make me do a thing is to point out that I am already doing it, so instead he simply started finding reasons not to be wherever we were.
That told me more than any lecture could have.
That was the state I was in, a man running a private war on one woman’s composure, when the other war finally turned around and showed me its face.
I keep a standing arrangement with the Outfit, the way you leave a door unlocked between two houses that have agreed not to burn each other down. Every few weeks a man named Carmine and I sit in the back of a restaurant on Taylor Street and confirm to each other that the agreement still holds.
Carmine is a soft man in an expensive coat who has survived forty years in a hard trade by never once being the most dangerous person at the table and knowing it to the bone.
He likes me. I’ve never given him a reason not to.
So when he leaned in over the veal and dropped his voice, I understood he was doing me a courtesy, or being made to look as though he was.
“Friend to friend,” he said. “That shipment you’ve got moving through the yards on the twenty-second. I’d move it.”
The twenty-second was a lie. I had built it myself, a true route with a false date, and I had handed it to exactly one man in the world.
“Why would I move it?” I said, flat, giving him nothing to hold.
“Because it’s on a list, and the list isn’t mine.” He dabbed his mouth with the napkin. “Sal’s been asking after you. Sal DeLuca. You know him.”
I know Sal DeLuca the way you know a tumor a doctor has assured you is nothing.
He runs the west end of the Outfit’s business and most of its appetite, and he has wanted my city since before it was mine.
We have been polite to each other for years, the way two men are polite when each is waiting for the other to grow old or careless first.
“And if I leave it where it is?” I asked.
“Then it moves without you.” He had the grace to look unhappy saying it.
“Mikhail. I’ve known you a long time. I’m telling you the water’s rising, I’m telling you whose hand is on the valve, and I’m doing it in a room with witnesses, so that when this is finished you remember I’m the one who told you.
That’s all I have. It’s all Sal left me to give you. ”
I thanked him, and meant it, which surprised us both.
Then I paid, because in forty years no one has once been permitted to watch Carmine pay, and I walked out into an afternoon that had rearranged itself while I sat in it.
An hour earlier I’d had a leak and a theory.
Now I had an enemy with a name and a face and an old reason, and the leak had a shape I could no longer pretend I didn’t recognize.
He’d made a run at Chicago once, DeLuca, the year my father set me here, and my father had answered him in a way that bought a decade of quiet.
My father was in the ground now. Sal can do arithmetic.
He could count four empty chairs, a pakhan in New York with nine other cities pulling at his sleeve, and the one man who used to be the reason nobody tried this, now buried beside his own father.
DeLuca was leaning on the fence with a body a week, feeling for the plank that would give.
Carmine hadn’t come to warn me. He’d come to carry a message, dressed as a friend so I couldn’t kill him for it at the table.
DeLuca had taken my own lie, the one that could only have reached him through a hole in my own house, and handed it back to me in a stranger’s mouth, so I would understand two things in the same breath.
He was the one bleeding me. And he had a door into my house I hadn’t found.
There was a name on that door. I knew whose it was.
I’d known it since two empty lots on the South Side, and the trap I’d set had just said it again, louder, in an Outfit man’s mouth this time.
And I sat over the cooling plate and did the very thing I’d have put a soldier in the river for.
I looked straight at the answer and told myself I needed more.
I drove home carrying two weights that wouldn’t sit side by side.
There was a man taking my city apart a soldier at a time, and there was a woman who’d pulled a laugh out of me I hadn’t known I still owned, and the worst of it, the thing I would never say to Lev or to Timo or to the empty study, was that I couldn’t have told you which of the two felt more like a threat.
DeLuca gave me two days to sit with it. Then he sent the last piece, in case a message delivered over lunch had been too subtle for me.
Timo called it in at first light. By the time I reached the club he’d cleared the dock of everyone but Danil, who stood at the corner like part of the wall, and the two of them let me come the last stretch alone.
They’d laid Kolya on the loading dock behind the Cygnet, out in the open where the morning crew couldn’t miss him, where I couldn’t miss him, arranged with a care that was its own kind of sentence.
DeLuca sent me a name in another man’s mouth. Then he sent me a body to make sure I read it. I read it.
He was twenty-six years old, too quick to smile for this life, and I’d always meant to fix that in him and never found the hour, and now the hour was gone for good.
He’d trusted me to keep him breathing. It’s the only promise the job really makes, and I’d broken it while I was busy timing a laugh.
Something in me that had argued for three days went quiet then.
It wasn’t the grief. Grief can wait, the way grief always waits.
The other voice, the soft one that kept whispering not yet, not proof, not him, finally ran out of things to say, because DeLuca hadn’t only killed my man.
He’d reached through my own house to do it, and only one hand in that house could have held the door open that wide.
I still wasn’t ready to say the name aloud. I was done pretending I didn’t know it.
I stood over him a long while. Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say that a dead boy on cold concrete hadn’t already said better.
Then I told the empty dock, and the man who had arranged it for my eyes, the only thing left that was true.
“He wants my attention,” I said. “He has it.”