I lean forward, lowering my voice even though there’s no one in this room but us. “What if Raymond isn’t the head of the Syndicate?”
He signals for me to go on.
“What if Raymond is theface?” I press on. “Can’t you see it? The legitimate-looking American man in a Brioni suit, with a corner office in Midtown and a Park Slope penthouse and a beautiful wife on his arm at the country club? What if the Vainakh Syndicate is using him the exact same way Raymond used Bill? Think about it: He can get so much done that these shady Eastern European fucks can’t yet manage to do themselves. He walks money through customs. He files the paperwork. But he doesn’t call the big shots; someone else does. So what if Raymond didn’t like that… and Billknewthat Raymond didn’t like that… and Bill decided he’d be better off casting his lot with literally anybody else?”
Afon sucks down a long drag, then exhales the smoke toward the ceiling. “You been thinking about this a while,” he guesses.
“Yeah. All fucking week.”
“You been thinking it before that, too,” he accuses. “You just didn’t say.”
“Maybe. Who cares?”
“Matvei. Listen to me,plemyannik. I am going to tell you something that I want you to hear. Are you listening? Because this is important.” Rapping his Zippo on the table with every word, he says, “It. Does. Not. Matter.”
I balk. “Uncle?—”
“It does notmatter,” he repeats. “Whether Raymond is the head, or the face, or the fucking necktie, it does not change things. Whether he is the one who chose Bill to die, or the one who passed along the choice… Whether Vainakh has one boss or twelve… None of that is the question in front of us. The question in front of us is whether you and I, the Satyrin men, are going to be free of our obligation to Lukas Lazarev, or whether we are going to die working for him. That is the question. There is no other thing worth asking.”
He flicks ash onto the saucer as the cherry of his cigarette glows.
“I take your point,” I mutter.
“Do you, though?” The little glass of tea between his hands is steaming up into his face, fogging the bottom of his reading glasses. “Because I’ve been listening to you for the last ten minutes spout unfounded theories about Raymond’s relationship to this organization, and not one second about how we put a bullet in him.”
“One thing leads to the next.”
“Two things can be adjacent without having a damn thing to do with one another, Mat.” He stubs the Sobranie out on the saucer. A second one is in his mouth before the first one has even stopped burning. “Let me lay this out for you the way I would lay it out for a stupider nephew, since my smart nephew seems to be having a hard time hearing me today.”
I wave a disgusted hand at him. “By all means. The floor is yours.”
“There are three days between us and freedom. We can shed our debts andwalk the fuck out the door.All you have to do is end the life of a miserable bastard who more than deserves it. Nothing could be simpler or more important.So what I want you to do is this,” he concludes. “Tell me the motherfucking plan.”
I take a slow sip of tea. It burns my tongue, but I welcome the pain because it gives me something to do other than look at him.
I set the glass down. “The DeMaris wedding is Saturday night at the Plaza. Raymond will be drinking, and he’ll need to piss every forty minutes like clockwork. On his way out, I’ll redirect him into the service hallway behind the kitchen. There are no cameras on the loading dock. I use a small caliber with a suppressor to put two in his chest, one in his head. Amateurish spread so no one suspects professional involvement. I’ll dust the grip, then make sure the weapon ends up in Cass— uh, in the wife’s purse. When the police search the serial number, they’ll find it’s registered under her name. Game, set, match.”
I feel sick as I speak. When I’m finished laying it all out, Afon balances his still-burning cigarette on the edge of the saucer and starts to applaud, slowly and sarcastically.
“See? Simple. Was that so hard?”
The wife.Fuck, even calling her that makes my stomach churn. She hasn’t beenthe wifein a very long time. She’s been Cass, my wild filly, mydikarka.
Afon is squinting at me like he’s seen exactly where my thoughts have gone. “What is it?” he asks.
“What is what?”
“The look on your face.”
“I don’t have a look on my face, Uncle.”
He nods. “Good. Keep it that way. Remember what I told you, Matvei: Put your heart in a box on a shelf. In our world, it’s irrelevant. Best kept out of reach.”
I lift my eyes. He is across the steel table from me, my father’s little brother, the man who once washed somebody else’s blood out of my hair in a gas station bathroom outside Newark and bought me a Coke afterwards, then proceeded to not say a word about it for fifteen years.
“It’s on the shelf,” I echo numbly. “It isn’t coming down.” I stand up abruptly, stool screeching backward, and slip into my dark suit jacket. “I have to go now. Bill Oglethorpe’s funeral is today.”
Afon bows his head in goodbye. “Godspeed, nephew. I’ll see you on the other side.”
