He didn't answer right away. But his eyes tracked me across the room this time, all the way, and that was more than I'd gotten in four days.
"That a promise," he said, "or another one of yer threats?"
"Eat the sandwich and find out."
I went and made the sandwich.
That's the part nobody warns you about. You spend twenty years building a reputation, you've got crosses on every finger and a body count you've stopped keeping straight, and one day you're standing in a galley kitchen at four in the afternoon arguing with the mustard because your hands won't quit shaking. They weren't shaking from the cage. They were shaking because a half-dead Scotsman had cracked one filthy joke at me and I'd damn near put my fist through the wall from relief.
I built two sandwiches the way I liked them when Irina had a day off: rye bread from the Jewish bakery, thick cut garlic bologna, mayo, mustard, pickles and a slice of Kraft American because it was cheap and I'd grown up eating the stuff.
"What the fuck is that monstrosity?" Nikolai said from the doorway.
"It's called a sandwich, idiot."
"With bologna and American cheese?"
I twisted to scowl at him. "Sorry. I'm fresh out of beluga caviar."
"You can't feed him that. You'll kill the poor bastard." Nikolai opened my fridge and started pulling out things I didn't even know were in there: a stick of butter, imported Dijon mustard, a cucumber, prosciutto and salami, and a cheese I couldn't pronounce.
Then he shouldered me out of the way, grabbed the rye bread and started assembling a sandwich like he knew what the hell he was doing.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I growled at him.
"Making a proper fucking sandwich. What's it look like?"
"A proper fucking sandwich doesn't need a skillet."
"This one does."
He buttered the bread on both sides. Both sides. Who the fuck does that?
He cooked it in the skillet, butter going gold and loud in the pan.
"Papa made these," Nikolai said, pressing the sandwich flat with the back of a spatula. Not looking at me. "When he came to Paris. Mama hated the smell, so he'd cook them late, after she went up. Just the two of us in the kitchen at midnight, eating like thieves." He flipped it. The other side was perfect, dark and even, and I hated that it was. "He ever do that for you? In Columbus?"
I thought about it and couldn't ever remember seeing him cook. The man was a ghost who showed up with money and left with most of it.
"No," I said. "He wasn't around much."
Nikolai nodded slowly. "Half a father each. That was his trick. Two houses, two wives, an ocean between so neither one ever counted the gaps." For a second Niko wasn't a leash or a little bastard or a frozen account in a borrowed Mercedes. He was just a man who'd gotten the same absence I had, in a different language. "We could have hated each other for it. The two halves. I used to think we were supposed to."
"Maybe," I said.
"Maybe." He slid the sandwich onto a plate, cut it clean down the middle, and held half out to me on the flat of the knife. "Here. Taste what your boy is not getting."
I took it and bit into it, ready to tell him how inedible it was.
God help me, it was the best food I'd put in my mouth in a year. Crisp where it should be crisp, the cheese gone to liquid, some sharp bright thing cutting the fat that I figured was the Dijon.
"Good?" Nikolai said.
"It's fine."
"It's perfect. Say it's perfect."
"It's good," I said. "Don't push it."
