24. Lev
Lev
“Doors. Both ends. I don’t care what it costs.”
Danil goes without answering, which is why he’s lived to thirty in this business, and the hall comes apart behind him.
Two hundred men leave their chairs at once, and the sound of it is worse than the shooting, wood on marble, glass going down in sheets, a chandelier taking a burst and raining its whole load across the table in front of me.
The gray suits are four deep between me and my wife.
That’s the only thing in this building worth a thought.
Krutov’s house men came in through both doors and made themselves a wall across the head of the table.
My wife is on the far side of it with the hearth at her back, and I’m on this side with a hundred and forty pounds of Ustin Filatov’s dining table between me and her.
So I go over the table.
The first one gets a decanter across the bridge of the nose, and while his hands are up I take the pistol out from under his arm and put two into the man behind him, low, through the hip, because a man on the ground clogs the floor for the three coming behind him.
Nineteen years I’ve paid other people to do this.
It comes back the way a language comes back, all at once, ugly, in the accent I learned it in.
The old guard is up now. That’s Krutov’s real error, and it starts here, not with her.
He built the house security, and he never once asked what forty years of Ustin’s men were carrying in their coats out of habit, and Yefim’s four rows have gone through the gray line from behind like a wave against a seawall.
A man of seventy in a suit from 1988 has a gray suit down on the marble and is using a candlestick on him, and he isn’t stopping, and nobody in this room is going to make him.
The fire in the hearth is throwing everything it has, and the whole hall keeps going orange and dark, orange and dark.
I can’t see her.
I put a shoulder into the wall of them at the seam.
There’s a slab of a man in front of me who takes the first two shots into his vest, and while he’s working out that he’s still alive, I get inside his arms and put my elbow through his throat.
He goes down with a choking sound, and I take his knees to get past him.
My father boxed. He taught me the only useful thing anybody ever taught me in that kitchen, which is that the fight is over at the range where a man can’t set his feet, so live there.
I live there for nine seconds, and I get four feet closer to her.
Then Danil comes across the hearth end of the room with a fire iron.
He’s got the doors done, both, which means somewhere in the last minute he crossed two hundred feet of open floor twice, and now he’s coming up the flank with three feet of Victorian wrought iron in his fist and a face on him I have never once seen but will be paying for out of my own pocket forever.
The first man he takes at the knee and the second one across the jaw.
He doesn’t stop moving through either of them, and the gray line comes apart at the end because a line only holds while both ends hold.
“Timur’s down,” he says, going past me.
“Where is she?”
“Behind me. Sitting.” He’s already moving. “Go.”
I go, and I take the round seven feet from her.
It comes in under the right arm through the ribs, but it doesn’t feel like anything at all for one whole step, which is the part nobody believes until it happens to them.
Then it feels like a horse. My legs stop taking instruction, the marble comes up and hits my shoulder.
The pistol goes out of my hand and skates off into the wreckage under the table with a sound I’d know anywhere.
I get a hand under me. I get about four inches off the floor before the ribs quit and put me back down. The blood comes out of me fast enough that I can feel the warmth of it going down my hip and pooling at my belt.
A pair of shoes stops in front of my face. English, brown, the good welt, out of place at a funeral, let alone a war.
“Well,” Semyon Krutov says.
He crouches. Not the way a man crouches to a child. He goes down on his heels an arm’s length from me with a pistol hanging loose off his knee. The cardigan under the suit has a spatter across it, and the grandfather is entirely gone out of his face. What’s underneath is a bookkeeper.
“You went over the table,” he says. “At your age. Like a boy in a bar.”
I don’t answer. There’s blood coming up into my mouth, which is the ribs, which is survivable if somebody gets a hand into me inside the hour. I’ve been in this business long enough to have watched men die talking, and men live by keeping their mouths shut.
Then I make the one exception of my life, because I can see past his shoulder.
She’s sitting in the chair with the hearth behind her and the whole hall between her and the doors, and she isn’t moving.
Timur is face down on the marble, a yard from her wheels, his coat open.
She’s got her hands in her lap. Her chin is down.
Any man crossing this room would put her at the bottom of his list and go on to the next thing.
Krutov has his back to her.
“You know what I’ve never understood about your generation,” he says.
“The hurry. Ten years I gave this. Ten years, one funeral at a time, sons, nephews, a cousin in Sea Gate who took months to arrange properly, and not one man in this house ever heard my name in the same sentence as any of it. You wanted the chair in a season. You bought a woman at a card table, and you thought that was patience.”
“You knew my father,” I say.
That stops him, and I watch it please him, which is the whole point of saying it.
“Matvei.” He turns the name over like a coin he’s found in an old coat.
“I stood at Ustin’s shoulder while he signed that paper.
Your father had thirty years in and no friends worth the trouble, and that’s the only math that ever gets a man killed in this business.
I’ve never seen a son take a lesson so badly.
” He shifts the pistol from one hand to the other.
“You should have been a bookkeeper. You’ve got the head for it and none of the temperament. ”
Four meters behind him, my wife takes the gun out of the dead man’s holster. She has to lean, and it costs her, I watch it cost her all the way down her right side, but she brings it into her lap with both hands, sets it there, and doesn’t lift it.
“Talk about the throne,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ve been waiting ten years for the room to be empty enough to say it out loud.” I get another inch off the marble to hold his eyes, and the ribs charge me for it. “So say it.”
He smiles. Two hundred men are killing each other in this hall and Semyon Krutov puts a hand on his own knee and tells me about bloodlines, about the old country, about Ustin building forty years of an organization out of nothing and dying in a bed with no son to hand it to, about how a house without an heir goes to the man who kept the books and not the man who married a name.
He tells me he’ll do the girl last. He says it exactly like that, the girl, last, the way you’d leave the smallest item on an invoice for the bottom of the page, and he doesn’t turn his head one degree while he says it.
He’s forgotten her.
That’s not a figure of speech, and it isn’t carelessness.
Every man in two countries has done it since her accident, the doctors, the therapists, her father, the fiancé with the duffel bag, Malenko over the veal, forty men who bowed at a bloodline and never saw the woman wearing it.
Krutov believed her dead for two years because a drunk lied and the man carrying that lie went into the East River.
But now she is six feet behind him, alive and armed.
“Semyon Ivanovich,” my wife says.
He turns.
She’s got it up in both hands with her elbows braced against her own ribs. There’s no shake in her at all.
“You should’ve counted me,” she says, and she shoots him through the chest.
The first one turns him half around. The second takes him under the collarbone and puts him down on his side on the marble.
The pistol comes out of his hand, and he’s still alive for a moment with his mouth working.
In that moment, he looks at the chair. Not at her face.
At the chair, at the frame, at the bare rims with one coat of sunflower enamel dried on them and the second coat never gone on.
I get to watch the last thing Semyon Krutov ever does be the math, and I get to watch it come up wrong.
The hall goes quiet in pieces, the near end first, then the middle, then the far doors. Nobody claps. Two hundred men stand in broken glass and understand what they just watched. The understanding travels through that room faster than any story I could have paid for.
Then she’s coming to me.
The floor between us has two bodies and a hundred pounds of chandelier on it, and there’s no line through it for a chair, so she sets the brakes, gets both hands on the frame, and lowers herself down out of it onto the marble.
She crosses the last distance on her hands and one hip through other men’s blood in an oxblood dress.
Danil moves to lift her, but she says one word to him without turning her head, and he stops where he stands.
She gets to me. She gets my head up onto her thigh, and her hands come onto my face, both of them, red to the wrist.
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t you do that with your eyes. Look at me properly.”
“You’re on the floor.”
“I’m aware of where I am, Lev. I’ve got an excellent working relationship with floors.” Her thumb goes across my cheekbone and leaves a stripe I can feel go cold. “Danil, if you tell me the ambulance is twenty minutes out, I’ll take that iron off you and use it.”
“Seven,” Danil says. “Yefim’s cleared the gate.”
She takes her hand off my face and puts it flat on my side, under the arm, leans her whole weight into the hole, and doesn’t flinch when I do. Her hair’s down over both of us, and she smells like paint and smoke.
“You went over a table,” she says. “At thirty-four.”
“You make me sound ancient. And I’ve already been told.”
“You’re going to hear about it forever. I want you to understand the scale of what’s coming.” Her voice goes then, all of it at once, and she gets her forehead down against mine and holds it there. “You don’t get to leave. Do you hear me? Not tonight, not with all this paperwork. I just got you.”