"Stay out of my fucking mail."
"It was on thecounter, Aleksi. Face up." He set the bag down. "Two fittings. You don't need two. You're one man." He tilted his head. "Unless the second one's for the bird."
I logged a bag. Then another. The flash on Niko's phone went off twice while I did it, and he didn't say anything, which from Niko was practically a scream.
"His dad was a tailor," I said finally. To the ledger, not to him. "Leatherworker. Bespoke. Three generations of it. He took one look at my suit the day I met him and told me it didn't fit. Told me the gloves were wrong. Told me my tailor had been guessing at my measurements for fifteen years." I set the bag in the bin. "He was right. About all of it."
"So you're getting a new suit."
"I'm getting a new suit that fits."
Niko was quiet for a second. "And the ten-thirty?"
I didn't answer that. I picked up the next bag and turned it over and found the stamp and photographed it. I could feel him watching me, but I kept my eyes down.
The kid had spent six months being measured for nothing but a coffin. Fitted by men who only ever put their hands on him to move him or hurt him. I wasn't going to explain to Niko what it meant to book a man a fitting where somebody took his measurements because he was going to be around long enough to wear the thing out. I wasn't sure I could've explained it to myself.
"Aleksi," Niko said, and his voice had gone soft in a way I trusted even less than the needling.
"Drop it."
"I was only going to ask about your first suit. How old were you?”
I lowered the bag, jaw clenched. I remembered standing on the stool in the middle of my mother’s workroom while a stranger ran his tape under my arms and down the inseam of my leg, taking measurements when I should’ve been in school. I’d been standing two feet from where my mother died, and I was waiting for my pop to come through the door. He was late.He was always fucking late to everything except his own funeral, and even then it was only because Uncle Yuri ran a tight ship at the funeral home.
“I was eight,” I replied, going back to work. “Mom’s funeral.”
“Ah,” was all he said.
“Why?” I tossed another bag into the bin. “How old were you?”
"Eleven." Niko didn't look up from his bag. "Papa took me to Moscow. Said a man's first real suit should be cut by Russians, not Frenchmen, that the French make you look pretty and the Russians make you look like a man." He almost smiled. "He took me to the old shop on Kuznetsky Most, the one Simeon used, and the man there made me stand still for an hour while Papa drank tea and argued with him. Then we went north and shot a bear."
"You shot a bear?"
"Papashot a bear. I held the rifle after and stood next to it for the photograph." He set the bag down. "He had the picture framed. It was in his study in Paris. Me, eleven, swimming in a coat two sizes too big, holding a gun bigger than I was, grinning like an idiot."
I logged a bag and didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say. He got treated like the golden son, as always, while I stood on a stool and waited for a father who couldn’t be bothered.
"You'd have liked Moscow," Niko said, quieter. “Very grim. Like you.”
"I wouldn't know."
"No." He picked the next bag up. "I suppose you wouldn't."
We worked in silence for a while, and I thought of Fin. His hand was healing nicely. He’d even been back at work a bit. Not on the jacket, not yet. He said he needed to practice first, relearn the craft with one less finger, and I understood. There was a part of me that didn’t want him to finish that jacket, anyway. It wassupposed to be an impossible task, the one thing no one could fix, and as long as he didn’t, I had a reason to keep him with me. Without the jacket between us, I’d have to start calling this what it was, and I wasn’t ready for that.
“Tiens, bonjour,” Niko said next to me and turned the bag inside out. “What are you, little friend?”
“What are you doing?”
“This one is heavier than the others.” Niko ran his thumb over the bottom of it. “And look here. The bottom is wrong.”
He worked a thumbnail into the lining seam until the stitching gave and then went digging around in the empty space. “Bingo!”
Niko pulled his fingers out, clutching a small black velvet pouch the size of a walnut.
“What the fuck?” I leaned in. “Open it.”
