14. Lev
Lev
“You’re up before her. That’s new. Usually you’re pretending to work and watching the hall.”
Danil says it from the office doorway with two coffees, and I don’t look up from the ledger I’m not reading, because the alternative is admitting he’s right, that I’ve been down here since five, that I left her asleep in my bed with the freckles I’ve counted so many times I could set them down from memory, and I came down three floors of my own building to get away from a sleeping woman who can’t walk fast enough to chase me.
“Put it down and go.”
“That’s gratitude.” He sets a coffee at my elbow but doesn’t go.
He takes the chair across the desk, the one nobody sits in without being told, and yet, he sits in it, because he’s Danil and he’s earned the one privilege I grant no one else.
“You had Malenko’s hand through the table last night.
The whole borough’s got it by now. Two versions already.
In one of them you took off the whole hand. ”
“Let them have the whole hand. It’s cheaper than the truth.”
“The truth being you did it because he talked about your wife.”
I don’t answer that. I’ve spent the whole night not answering that, to myself, in the dark, next to her, and I’m not going to start answering it to Danil over a coffee at six in the morning.
A feeling is a thing with a source, and I’ve spent my life doing to feelings what I do to threats, I find where they come from and I put them in the ground, and this one I’ve been hunting since the corridor but it keeps moving, it keeps getting up out of the grave I dig for it wearing her face, and I’m starting to understand I can’t shoot it because it’s already inside the wall.
My father’s picture’s on the desk where it always is. Face down, mostly. I turned it up sometime in the last hour and didn’t turn it back. Danil’s eyes go to it and then to me. He’s the only man alive who’d dare.
“You don’t take him out much anymore,” he says.
“There’s nothing new to say to him.”
“Matvei Etush.” Danil says the name like it still means something, because to him it does.
His own father ran with mine; that’s the whole reason I trust him, the only reason.
“My old man says yours could’ve had a captain’s seat twice and turned it down both times.
Said he didn’t want the paper, just wanted to do the work and go home to your mother. ”
“He did the work for thirty years.” I turn the picture the rest of the way up.
Matvei at forty, thick through the shoulders, the same shoulders I got from him, a man who looks like he’s about to tell you to sit down and eat.
“Thirty years he did the work. Then Ustin Filatov needed a name to hang a theft on, someone else’s theft, a hundred thousand that walked out of a count room, and my father was the one in the room who didn’t have friends who mattered. So they hung it on him.”
“You never talk about the day.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. A man came to my mother’s kitchen with a watch in a paper bag.
” I turn the steel on my wrist, both hands stopped at eleven past four, the way they’ve been stopped my whole adult life.
“Said the organization regretted the necessity. I was fifteen. They took me to identify him because my mother couldn’t stand up, and I stood in a room in the back of a fish house off Emmons Avenue and I looked at what thirty years of loyalty bought him, and I said yes, that’s my father, because there were three of them and one of me and my mother needed one of us to come home. ”
Danil’s quiet. He knows most of it. He doesn’t know the part I say next, and I don’t know why I say it now except that she’s asleep upstairs in my bed and I’ve been up since five.
“Ustin signed it,” I say. “The order on my father. Ustin Filatov himself, with his own hand. I found the paper eight years ago. Took me a decade of climbing to get to a room where a man was drunk enough and scared enough to show it to me.”
Danil sets his coffee down. He’s put it together, I watch him put it together, faster than I’d like, because Danil’s never been slow, he only lets men think he is.
“The throne you’re climbing toward,” he says.
“Is the chair Ustin Filatov sat in when he signed my father into the ground. Yes. Taking it was never about the money or the borough. It was about sitting down in the dead man’s chair and making his whole empire mine, every dollar, every soldier, every man who ever called him pakhan.
The last thing I was ever going to do to Ustin Filatov was wear his crown to his grave. ”
“And the crown,” Danil says slowly, “is his granddaughter.”
There it is. The thing I’ve been not-saying since the night I turned a photograph over in a basement and saw a dead woman’s eyes in a laughing girl’s face.
The revenge and the woman are the same object.
I can’t take the throne without her, and I can’t have her without the throne, and the plan I built over nineteen years, the whole patient beautiful climb toward desecrating the man who murdered my father, has a first-grade teacher sleeping at the center of it now, and every day the desecration feels less like the point and more like a house I built around something that turned out to be alive.
“Finish your coffee and go check on Malenko,” I say. “I want him telling the version where he insulted my wife and kept his hand. Gratitude travels further than fear if you plant it right.”
Danil stands. He gets to the door. And then he does the thing, the thing only he’d do, he stops with his hand on the frame and half turns.
“You know you look at her like—”
“Finish that sentence, and you’re cleaning the basement yourself. All of it. The drain too.”
He doesn’t finish it. But he doesn’t wipe the thing off his face either, the thing that’s almost a smile, the thing that says he’s known longer than I have and he’s been waiting for me to catch up, and he goes out and pulls the door shut, and I’m alone with my father’s picture and my father’s watch and my father’s murderer’s crown asleep three floors up.
I turn the picture face down.
Then I turn it back up, because I owe him the whole of it, I owe him at least the honesty, and I say it to him the way I couldn’t say it to Danil, in the room with no one in it but the two of us and nineteen years.
“I’m going to take his chair,” I tell the picture. “That part is still on. But I have to tell you about the girl, because she wasn’t in the plan, and she’s in everything now.”
Matvei doesn’t answer. He’s ink and paper and forty years old forever.
But I sit there with the coffee going cold that Danil brought me, and I understand that the vow I made in a fish house off Emmons Avenue at fifteen has grown a complication I never accounted for, that revenge was supposed to be a cold clean thing I did to a dead man, and instead it’s got warm hands and a scalpel tongue and it counts seconds on parallel bars, and it fell asleep last night with its face in my shoulder trusting me not to be what I actually am.
The intercom on the desk lights. It’s the kitchen upstairs, the camera. I don’t answer it, I just look at the little screen, and there she is, out of my bed, in my hall, in the traffic-cone robe, making two coffees.
She’s made enough for two.
I sit three floors down in my dead father’s shadow and watch my dead father’s murderer’s granddaughter turn a mug handle toward a spot at the island where she thinks I’ll come and sit, and I understand, the way you understand a shot’s already been fired and there’s nothing left to do but find out where it lands, that the house I built around her stopped being a cage some night I wasn’t paying attention, and I’m the thing living in it now.
I turn the picture face down for good this time.
“I’ll explain it to you when it’s done,” I tell him, and I go upstairs to drink the coffee she made me.