31. Yakov
YAKOV
I left the two of Damir's boys at the channel with the car.
A wall full of Irish guns is a thing one man goes over, not three, and because of the way the night was already going I did not want two more of my dead laid out on it before dawn.
They did not like it. I told them that if I was not back by first light they were to go home and tell Anzor I died doing the only smart thing I had done all week, and I went into South Boston alone, which is a sentence that would have gotten me laughed out of any room in Moscow, a Morozov walking into the Donnelly heart on foot with no one at his back and no plan past the shape of a woman.
I have crossed hostile ground my whole life.
I know how to make myself small in a place that wants me dead, how to move at the speed of the shadows and not the speed of my own fear, how to read a street the way my wife reads a page.
Southie at that hour was a body with a fever, lit up and moving, cars going the wrong way fast and men on corners with their coats too heavy for the weather, all of it pointed at the water where the terminals were burning, which was the one mercy of the night.
Declan had thrown his whole house at the harbor.
It meant the compound behind it would be thin.
It also meant that every man I did pass was wound tight enough to shoot a shadow, and I was the shadow.
I got three streets in before I needed a door I could not read, and that is where I found my guide.
He was young and he was posted at the mouth of an alley that ran behind the compound wall, and he was doing the thing bored frightened boys do on a night that is bigger than they are, which is to smoke and check a phone and pretend the two are a job.
He never heard me. That is not pride, it is just true.
I came up on his blind side out of a doorway and I had the muzzle under his jaw and my hand over his mouth before the cigarette had finished falling, and I felt the whole of him go rigid and then, worse for him, go slack, because a smart body knows before the mind does when it has already lost.
"Here is the situation," I said, low, into his ear, in the reasonable voice I keep for exactly these conversations, the one that has talked more men into living than my gun has talked into dying.
"I am going to take my hand off your mouth.
If you shout, the last thing you will hear is me being disappointed in you.
Nod if disappointing me sounds like a plan you want to be part of. "
He shook his head so hard I nearly lost the gun.
"Good. A thinker." I took my hand away. "What is your name?"
"Colm." It came out of him in pieces. "Colm. Please, man, I only just, I do the wall, I don't even carry, look, I don't even, they don't let me carry a real one until…"
"Colm. I am going to do you the great favor of not caring about your life story.
" I turned him, slow, keeping the gun where his own eyes could admire it, and I looked at a kid who could not have been three years past the age where this all looked like a film.
"You are going to walk me in. Through whatever door you use, past whoever you nod to, all the way to the main house.
And you are going to be very calm, because if you are calm, you live, and if you are a hero, your mother buries a hero.
Boston is full of them. Cemetery is beautiful this time of year. Are we going to be calm, Colm?"
"We're," he swallowed the whole word and found it again, "we're going to be very calm."
"See. Already we understand each other better than most marriages."
He almost laughed. I felt it move through him, the little hysterical bark a body wants to give when it is too frightened to do anything useful, and he caught it behind his teeth, which told me he might live through the next ten minutes after all.
"Do people usually laugh," he whispered, "when you do the, the talking?"
"The smart ones. It is the screamers who worry me. A screamer has decided the story is already over. You are still editing." I moved him toward the alley mouth with two fingers between his shoulder blades. "Keep editing, Colm."
I will tell you a thing I am not proud of, which is that some cold old part of me was enjoying itself.
Not the terror on the boy, I have never once enjoyed that, it is only ever a tool and a sad one.
It was the banter, the old rhythm of it, the gallows music I have made in every bad room of my life, the jokes I crack when the odds are worst because a man who can still be funny is a man who has not yet agreed to die.
Maeve told me once, in the dark, that my worst self and my best self tell the same jokes, and that she could never decide which one was talking, and I told her that neither could I, and it was the truest thing I ever said to her that did not cost me anything.
Colm walked me in. He was better at it than he had any right to be, which I have noticed is often the way with the ones who swear they are nobody.
He nodded to a man at a side gate and made a joke about the cold that was only a little too high in his throat, and he took me through a kitchen that smelled of tea and old smoke and a hallway hung with photographs of hard men at christenings, and every step deeper into that house was a step further from any version of the night where I walked back out of it, and I felt the strangest thing come over me as we went, and I have had a while now to find the word for it.
It was relief.
I have spent my whole life armed. Not just the gun.
Armed the way you are armed when you have decided the world is a thing that happens to you and the only question is whether you see it coming.
Every rule I have ever lived by, the whole catechism that kept me breathing, do not trust the warm thing, do not walk in without your people, do not let anyone close enough to cost you, do not ever, ever choose a person over the position, all of it was a kind of armor, and I had worn it so long I had stopped feeling the weight, the way you stop feeling a coat you have slept in for years.
And walking stripped of all of it into the one house on earth most likely to kill me, carrying a gun that I finally understood was the least useful thing on my body, I felt the coat come off.
Because here is the joke at the bottom of me, the one Maeve saw before I did.
I am the most dangerous man in most rooms I enter.
I can find any enemy, take any dock, out-wait any patient bastard on this coast. I have every weapon a man can carry.
And not one of them, not the gun, not the patience, not the whole cold clever arsenal, can do the single thing I came here to do, which is convince the one person who ever mattered that I will not fail her.
You cannot shoot your way to trust. You cannot out-wait it or out-think it or take it off a dock in the dark.
You can only walk in unarmed and hand a person your throat and hope she does not do to you the thing you spent your whole life making sure no one could.
I had spent two months being taught that at a price, and I had failed the exam in a holding room, and now I was doing the retake on foot in enemy country with a terrified boy for a proctor, and the strange thing, the relief, was that for the first time I was not afraid of the answer.
I had already given up the empire for it.
A man who has paid the highest price he has does not stand at the door and haggle over the rest.
"Boss," Colm said, and then flinched at himself for the word, because it was the word he used for men on his own side and it had come out on reflex, and I saw him hate it, and I did not correct him, because the truth is I had earned it off him fair, the way you earn most loyalty, by being the most immediate problem in a person's life.
"The main house is through that court. Declan keeps the east wing.
If she is here, and if what everyone's whispering is true, that is where he will have her. "
"You have been very good, Colm."
"Are you," he did not want to ask it, and asked it anyway, "are you going to kill me now?"
"No." I looked at him, this boy on the worst night of his short career, and I thought about a twenty-year-old who covered a door, and I thought about how many boys just like this one my war and Declan's war and Marsh's tidy invisible war were going to feed into the water before it was done, boys on both sides who thought they were nobody and were right only in the way that mattered least. "No, Colm.
You are going to go back to the channel and find two Russians in a gray car and tell them Yakov is inside and they are to wait one hour and not one minute more.
And then you are going to keep driving. You did the wall for the last time tonight.
Go be nobody somewhere they are not burning. "
He looked at me like I had said something in a language he did not know he spoke. Then he went, fast and low, a boy running toward the rest of a life he had not expected to have, and I turned toward the court and the east wing and the woman who did not know I was coming.
I had my hand on the cold iron of the courtyard gate, and I was doing the last thing I do before a hard room, which is empty myself down to the single fact of why I came, when the night ahead of me cracked open.
Gunfire. Close. Inside, past the court, in the direction of the east wing, two shots and then a third that was a different gun answering, and then the particular silence after that is worse than the noise, the silence of a room deciding what it has just become.
Every rule I have ever followed, every year of the education that kept me alive, every cold instinct my father bred into me on his way to handing me a city to drown in, all of it said the same thing, screamed it, the way it has screamed at me at the mouth of every dangerous room since I was younger than Colm.
It said the shooting is the thing you move away from.
You let it finish. You let the room settle and count its dead and then you walk in and read what is left, because a man who runs toward gunfire is a man volunteering to be a name in it.
I went through the gate at a dead run, toward the guns, toward the one direction all of it forbids, because she was on the far side of that sound and there was no version of me left that could stand at a gate and be sensible while the woman I had crossed a burning city to reach was in a room full of it.