CHAPTER 22
Gael
◆
There's a kind of work my brothers can't do, and it's the kind I'm for.
Emil builds the map. He sits in his office with his three screens and his black ledger and his pen that costs more than Pavel's monthly draw, and he draws the lines between the dead and the living until the picture of how Lev killed our father stops being a feeling and starts being a thing you could hand a man across a table.
Mateo decides. He sits very still behind Yuri's desk with the watch in his fist and he says go, or he says wait, and the whole house leans the way he leans.
And then there's me. The legs of the thing. The hands. The one who drives down off the cliff in the cold gray morning and goes and finds the human being at the bottom of Emil's beautiful line and looks him in the eye and gets him to talk.
This morning the line ends at a pharmacy.
It's a humble one, a narrow place tucked under a chiropractor on the wrong side of the south waterfront, the kind that's been there since the cranes were new, the kind that still keeps paper.
That's the whole reason I'm here. Lev is clever about a lot of things, but he's fifty-eight, and fifty-eight men think paper is safe because paper is quiet.
Emil says the digoxin was filled somewhere, malyshka, and somebody carried it up the cliff to a sick old man's house, and people remember a sharp-faced courier and a script that didn't match the patient.
Emil doesn't say malyshka. That's mine. I'm getting his words in my head mixed up with hers.
That's new, and I hate it, and I'd light the city on fire before I'd give it back.
The receipt in my hand is thermal paper, and it's old, and it wants to curl back into its own coil the second I stop holding it flat. I've got it pinned with two tattooed fingers against my thigh in the parked car, reading it again. A date in the window I need it to be in. A quantity.
A prescriber code that the woman behind the counter, when I leaned on the counter and smiled the smile and let her see exactly enough of the blade in me to be afraid and exactly enough of the boy to want to help, told me belonged to a doctor who retired two springs ago and never wrote a thing in this district.
A dead man's heart medicine, filled under a doctor who'd already hung it up.
I whistle, low, one bar, before I even know I'm doing it.
Then I catch myself, because there's nobody here to do violence to, just a curl of paper that proves a murder, and I fold it careful as a love letter and slide it into my breast pocket, over the heart, where I keep the things I'd die before I'd lose.
Material progress, Emil would call it. We've moved from suspicion to a paper. He'd clean his glasses while he said it.
I call it the first true thing I've held all week that isn't her.
Inés is next, and Inés is harder than the pharmacy, and I don't see it coming until I'm in the room.
The safe-flat is three streets back from the water, second floor, a good door, one of ours on it round the clock and the other one I cycle myself because I don't trust anybody with this the way I trust me.
Emil moved her here when the official got himself dead.
Leverage, the contract called Inés, back at the start.
The sick mother. The thing they put in the fine print to make Amara sign.
I read that page once and wanted to find the man who wrote it and explain some things to him with my hands, and then I remembered the man who wrote it was, in a way, all of us.
She's at the window when I let myself in, in a chair with a blanket over her knees, and she's so much Amara that for a second the breath goes out of me sideways.
Same hazel turning green at the edges, gone pale and tired in her face but there.
Same way of looking at a man like she's already got his measure in inches and is just being polite about it.
"The blade," she says, and there's no cruelty in it. "They send you to guard me."
"They send me to do most things, Mrs. Costa. " I check the room out of habit, the way I always do, the lines of sight, the second exit, the window she shouldn't sit so close to. "I'll move your chair, if it's all the same. You're framed up nice for anybody on the roof across."
She lets me move the chair. She watches me do it, which is its own kind of work, being watched by a sharp old woman while you make a room safer for her.
When I crouch to lock the wheel on the chair leg, she puts her hand on my forearm, right over the blackwork, the thorns and the bird and the rest of the armor, and she leaves it there, light, like it weighs nothing, like she has every right.
Nobody touches me there. Men grab the arm to pull a punch. She just rests her hand on it like it's a place a person could set a hand.
"You've got blood under that nail," she says.
"It's mine," I lie. It's mostly mine.
"Sit down, boy. You make me tired, hovering."
So I sit. I, who do not sit in strange rooms, who keep my back to the wall and my weight on the balls of my feet and one eye on the door for a living.
I sit at a sick woman's window because she told me to in a voice that's three-quarters Amara's, and she pours me tea I didn't ask for from a pot somebody keeps full for her, and the cup is too small for my hand and I drink it anyway.
"My girl," she says, after a while. "She's all right? Up there in that stone house with you wolves."
"She runs the house," I say, and hear the warmth come up in it before I can sand it off. "She struck a clause out of her own marriage contract with her own pen the day she signed. She told Pyotr — never mind. She's all right. She's more than all right. She's the realest thing in the place."
Inés looks at me a long time.
"You love her," she says. She lays it down flat as a fact, quiet, the way you'd note the weather.
And here's the thing about being good at faces.
I can lie to anybody. I can grin at a man with a gun on me and make him believe I haven't got one too.
I've made my whole life out of a face that says nothing here, nothing under here, just the joke and the blade, move along.
I open my mouth to do it now, the deflection already loading, the easy, Mrs. Costa, I love all the pretty ones —
And the lie dies in my throat. It won't come at this window, with her hand-print still warm on the ink.
"Yeah," I say. "I do. For all the good it'll do either of us."
She nods like I've confirmed a thing she already wrote down. Then she says the thing that goes into me and stays.
"Amara gives herself away," Inés says, "to people who hold the receipt.
" Her eyes go past me, out at the gray, at something a long way back.
"Her father, God rest him, taught her that, and he never meant to.
You owe, you pay. You take, you owe. Everything's an account.
She grew up watching honest books and she learned the worst lesson off them — that love is a balance, and somebody always holds the slip that says you cost more than you're worth.
" She brings her eyes back to me, and they're wet, and they're hard.
"Men have had her thinking she's a debt her whole life. Don't you be one more receipt, boy. Don't you be one more thing she has to pay off."
I have caught a knife with the meat of my hand and called it Tuesday. I have been shot twice and stitched myself in a gas-station bathroom whistling. I have the bird over my heart that I let a half-blind man with a needle put there at nineteen and I didn't make a sound.
I have to look at my tea so the old woman won't see my face do what it's doing.
"Don't be a receipt," I say, to the cup. Tasting it.
"Don't be a receipt," she agrees. "Be the one who tears it up."
Roman's waiting for me at the car.
He's not whistling. That's the wrong of it, the thing my body clocks before my brain does, halfway down the stair with Inés's tea still warm in me.
I whistle before I work. It's a courtesy.
It's a confession. It's me telling the world here it comes, because some old superstitious part of me needs the warning out loud, needs the bad thing to have a note before it.
Roman doesn't give a note. Roman is just suddenly there, leaned on the hood of my coupe like he was poured there, scarred and patient and smiling with the bottom half of his face, and the quiet of him is the worst sound on the street.
"Gael Sokolov," he says. "Running errands. The blade fetching paper. How they've fallen."
"Roman. " I let my coat fall open, casual, so he can see I'm carrying and so he understands I want him to see it. My switchblade's in my left fist already; I don't remember opening it. "You're a long way off Lev's leash."
"I go where the family interest goes. " He turns something on his hand, some bare band where a signet would sit if he'd ever earned one, just a habit he's caught off the master, the way dogs catch a limp off the man who beats them.
"And the family interest, just now, is up in that flat.
And up on your cliff. " He tips his chin at the safe-flat window, at the chair I just moved.
"The sick mother. And the soft little Costa your Pakhan's gone stupid over. We're keeping a list, blade. Two names on it I'd hate to read out."
There it is, spoken plain. He's done with hinting and circling; he's put them both into words, Inés and Amara, set down on a list by a man who silences loose ends with his hands.
The want to open him up runs through me so clean and so bright it's almost a relief.
I could. Empty street, his back half-turned to show me how little he rates me, my blade already grinning in my fist. I'd whistle first. I'd give him the note he didn't give me, because I keep my manners even when I'm being a monster, and then I'd —