20. Lev
Lev
Forty hours since the van came up that bus lane, and I’ve spent thirty-six of them below ground.
The room under VOLNA that isn’t the poker room has a drain at the center of the floor, a hose on the wall, and no ventilation worth the name, because down here I want a man smelling himself.
Danil’s at the door with his arms crossed and his sleeves still down.
I stand where the kid in the chair has to bring his head up to find me, and I open with the one fact he believes nobody outside his own family has.
“Your sister works overnights at the laundromat on Neptune, the one with the broken door, and she walks home at six because the bus doesn’t run. I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you what I already know so you can work out what else I know before you open your mouth.”
Eleven hours he’s been in the chair I bolted into this floor myself, and in eleven hours he’s given me three lies, one prayer, and a lot of noise.
The name is Arsen. Twenty-six years old, from Rostov by way of a shipping container, and he drove the gray van up the bus lane at four in the afternoon while the man beside him put forty rounds through a school wall, a wheelchair, and Ruslan Zavgorodny’s back.
He’s crying now, which I’ve got no use for.
“I didn’t know she was in the chair,” he says. “They said a woman.”
“They said a woman.” I take the seat across from him because standing over a man makes him stupid, and I need what’s left of him working. “Say who they are, Arsen. That’s all I need from you. Everything after that we can do quickly.”
“A broker. I don’t get names, I get a phone and a face.
Coney Island Avenue, above the travel agency with the dead plants in the window, a fat prick who sweats through his shirt.
” He’s shaking so hard the chair moves. “Forty each. Half up front, cash, no envelope, he counts it out on the desk like he’s dealing. ”
The travel agency above the dead plants is a man I’ve had two soldiers watching for weeks, since I told Danil I wanted him breathing and comfortable, and convinced nobody was onto him.
A live middleman tells Semyon Krutov nothing at all.
I’ve been paying for that silence for months with nothing to show for it, and tonight it pays out in one piece.
I go up the stairs and leave Arsen for Danil. I don’t ask what’s done with him, because I already know, and because the man put a rifle on a building with twenty-six six-year-olds inside it.
The city gets taken apart the boring way.
That’s what nobody in the movies understands about this business, they think it’s guns, and it’s phone calls.
I make sixteen of them before midnight. A captain at the six-one who owes me for a nephew, a woman at a bank in Bay Ridge whose brother I moved out of a problem in 2016, a tow-yard owner in Willets Point who has never in his life asked me a question.
The van turns up burned to the frame in Brownsville, which tells me nothing, but the plates on it were dead six weeks and the dealer who sold them dead plates works out of a lot in Ozone Park.
The lot in Ozone Park keeps a book, and by two in the morning the book is on my desk with a coffee ring on it.
Yefim comes to the club at nine the next morning with his cane, his terrible hip, and a list in his own handwriting of every man in Brighton who ever took Ustin Filatov’s money but never took Krutov’s. Forty years of grudges in blue ink. He doesn’t sit down.
“You want them, you have them,” he says. “I need you to understand that’s not for you. It’s for her.”
“I understood that before you came up the stairs.”
“Good.” He puts the cane back under him. “Ruslan’s mother is in Odessa. She’s eighty-one. Somebody has to call her, and it shouldn’t be a stranger.”
I call her myself at four in the afternoon, which is eleven at night there, and I tell an old woman in a language my father used to swear in that her son died standing between a rifle and a schoolteacher, that he didn’t run, that there’ll be money every month for as long as she’s alive and after that for whoever she names.
She asks me if he suffered. I tell her no, and it’s the first lie I’ve told this week, but it doesn’t cost me a thing.
Her boy carried a paper cup of sunflower seeds in his coat pocket every day of the eight days he had my wife, and he learned twenty-six children’s names before he learned the layout of the building.
I put him in the ground on Friday with four hundred people at the church and I pay for the stone before anybody asks.
The fat prick above the travel agency takes forty minutes.
He’s not brave, and he was never going to be.
I don’t have to do a thing to him except sit in his own office with the door shut while he adds up how many of his people are downstairs and how many are mine.
He gives me the routing. Cash comes to him monthly from a laundromat chain, and the laundromat chain files through a produce importer in Red Hook, and the produce importer has been Semyon Krutov’s left hand since before his hair went silver.
He gives me the date of the order. Two days after the dinner where I put a knife through Pyotr Malenko’s hand, which means Krutov sat somewhere with a glass in his fist and heard that thirty people watched Lev Etush kill a man’s hand over a joke about his wife’s body, and he did the calculations every animal in this business would do.
A man who does that is a man in love. A man in love is a man with a hole in him.
Put the woman in the ground and the whole climb comes apart on its own.
He read me correctly. That’s the part I fucking hate.
I sit in the car outside the travel agency for a long time after, and the thing I can’t get out from behind my eyes isn’t the van or the wall.
It’s the couch. It’s her on it, talking to Danil about sight words with a dead man’s blood in her hair, saying the same three sentences over and over like a record with a scratch.
I went over every inch of her on that couch with my thumbs, both legs, both hips, the whole length of her spine over the scar, and I found no holes in her, but my body did what it does around her anyway, right there, with another man’s blood going tacky under my nails.
There’s a word for that, and I don’t want it.
I’d do it again tonight and twice tomorrow.
She got hold of my wrist at the end. Over the watch. She’s the only person who’s ever touched it while it was on me.
The crash takes another three days, and it takes them because I’m not looking at a shooting anymore, I’m looking two years back through a case nobody worked, which means going around the police entirely and going at the money.
Dennis Kilroy of Ozone Park, blood alcohol point two four, no priors, box truck bought cash six weeks out, drowned in Jamaica Bay in November with no jacket and no license and no reason.
His cousin in Howard Beach took eighty thousand in eleven days.
Danil already pulled that much for her, and my wife sat in a classroom under a paper sun, reading about it, then she went outside and got shot at. I wasn’t there for either one.
The eighty goes back through a check casher on Cropsey that closed in 2023, and the check casher goes back through the same produce importer in Red Hook.
Same hand. Same house. Two years apart but it’s the same house.
Which leaves the only question worth the week.
Krutov spent ten years cutting the Filatov line down one tidy funeral at a time, sons and nephews and a cousin who burned in his sleep in Sea Gate, and every one of those men was on a list any soldier in Brighton could have written from memory.
Vasilisa was on no list. She was a Plaksin, a name with nothing on it but debt, a girl in a Brooklyn public school who didn’t know her own grandfather’s face.
To put a truck on Vandeveer, Semyon Krutov first had to be told she existed.
So I go and buy the man who kept his books.
Grigori Sudets is seventy-four with a heart that quit twice, and he lives in a two-bedroom in Sheepshead Bay with his daughter and two grandchildren.
Krutov put him out to pasture four years ago with a thank you and no pension, which is the only reason this works.
I don’t take anybody up the stairs with me.
I sit at his kitchen table with a plate of cookies I didn’t ask for while cartoons run in the next room, and I tell him what I’ll pay.
I tell him the amount out loud so his daughter can hear it through the wall, and the old man’s hands come apart on the oilcloth.
“You know what he does to people,” he says.
“I know exactly what he does. I’m doing it to him this spring.”
He goes into a closet and comes out with a shoebox.
Inside the shoebox is twelve years of a man’s private ledger, the real one, the one that never sees an accountant.
Kilroy’s eighty is in there under a code Grisha explains to me twice.
There are nine other entries in there I’ll be using in April.
And then I go backward through the pages with the cartoons going in the next room, and I find the one that stops the whole world in its tracks.
Ten years ago. March. Nine thousand six hundred dollars, and beside it, in the old man’s small, dead handwriting, a note: debt of the Plaksin man, Brighton, cleared. Information. Daughter of M. F.
“This one,” I say. “Tell me this one.”
Grisha puts his glasses on. He takes his time, and then his mouth does an ugly thing, because he remembers it. I understand from his face that he’s remembered it plenty of times before tonight in this kitchen.
“A gambler,” he says. “In deep with the Odessa people over cards, they were going to break him up over nine thousand and change. He asked for a sit-down with Semyon Ivanovich. He came in with nothing to trade, no money, no product, no names of any use.” The old man takes the glasses off again.
“He said his wife was Filatova. Ustin’s daughter, the one who ran.
He said she died having a baby and the baby lived, a girl, and nobody in the world knew it but him.
He wanted his number wiped, so he sold it.
Semyon paid him and let him walk. I wrote it down myself. ”
The cartoons go on in the next room. One of the grandchildren laughs at something.
“Did he ask what it was for?”
“They never ask,” Grisha says. “He got up from that table like a man who’d got away with a thing.”
I drive back into the city with a shoebox on the seat beside me, and I don’t put the radio on.
Nine thousand six hundred dollars. That’s the number.
Her father sat down in a room with the man who’d spent a decade filling holes with her blood relatives, and he handed over his dead wife’s daughter for nine thousand six hundred dollars, and then he went home to a girl in a school uniform and ate whatever she’d made him.
Eight years later, a man with no priors bought a box truck with cash.
Krutov didn’t hunt her. He was given her by her own father, and then he took his time with it the way he takes his time with everything, and when her turn came up on his list, she was twenty-four years old and driving home on a wet road she’d known since she was seventeen.
She’s spent two years fighting a set of steel bars for one extra second a week. She keeps those seconds like a miser, she lies awake doing the arithmetic on them, and every one of them was taken off her in advance by a man who needed nine thousand six hundred dollars on a Monday in March.
In my office I put the ledger page under the low lamp, and I sit with it a long time.
Her chair’s in the corner where my men set it down, what’s left of it, three holes through the seat back and the frame gone out of true, but the yellow’s still on the rims, dirty now, street grit in the enamel.
I’ve ordered the new one built to the same spec, every measurement of it, and I’ve had the rims left bare metal, because I can buy her fifty chairs but I can’t buy that.
I finally understand that I was never supposed to be able to.
Then there’s my father, face up on the desk where I left him.
Nineteen years I’ve been climbing toward a chair a man signed a piece of paper in, and the whole time I thought the worst thing in this business was what the organization did to Matvei Etush in an afternoon.
It isn’t. The worst thing in this business is a weak man with a bad night and a name in his mouth, and the price of it, and the girl who paid it out of her spine without ever being told there was a bill.
I’ve lied to her once. I got away with it for two months, and then it took a folder, four minutes, and everything I had.
Once is all I get.
I take my father’s watch off and set it on the ledger page, both hands stopped, the steel gone cold off my wrist for the first time in days. Upstairs she’s asleep in a room with my name on the deed, three floors up, waiting for me to be the next man who leaves.
I pick the page up, and I go find Danil.
“Move, Gavril,” I tell him. “Off the boardwalk, into the Ocean Avenue building, two men on the door. He eats, he sleeps, nobody touches him.”
Danil takes one look at the page in my hand and doesn’t ask. “For how long?”
“Until his daughter tells me what she wants done with him.”