“I follow you.”
“So which is it gonna be.”
“Neither,” I said. “I’m not selling and I’m not paying you a dime. This is my father’s. It’s not for sale at any number and I’m not renting back what’s already mine. Now you’ve had your koulouraki, so.”
Under the counter, my hands were shaking. My mouth had gone to paper. There was a cold sick thing turning over in my stomach and I could hear my own pulse in my ears. Somehow, I kept it from my face.
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he laughed, soft, and came around the counter toward me, and stopped—too close. Far too close. Close enough that I could smell the koulouraki and the cologne and under it something rank, and I had to tilt my head back to keep my eyes on his, which is exactly what he wanted, and I did it anyway, because looking down was the flinch and I would not flinch.
“You’re a tough one,” he said, and his voice had dropped into something lower, something that had nothing to do with the money, and the something turned my stomach over harder than any of it. His eyes went down me, slow, the way he’d looked at everything else in the shop, like inventory, like deciding whether the kitchen worked for him. “All alone down here, every morning, every night. Pretty little thing, working herself to the bone.” He reached out and—I felt it before I saw it—took a piece of my hair, the loose flour-dusted piece that always came down, and tucked it back behind my ear, and his finger grazed my jaw doing it, and I went rigid as the floor under me. “Doesn’t have to be so hard, you know. A girl like you, all by herself. There’s friendlier arrangements than money. I could look out for you. I could be very good to you.” The smile again, the patient one, theopen-house one, and now it was an open house and I was the kitchen. “Think about how nice it could be, instead of how hard it is. You want my advice? You’re putting up a fight you can’t win, sweetheart, and there’s no one here to see you do it. So why.”
He let the hair go. He stepped back, finally, gave me the air again, and I took a breath I tried not to let him see me take.
“The next time I come down here,” he said, easy, conversational, picking up his patience again like a coat, “it won’t be me being a gentleman. You understand? This is the gentle one. So you think about it. You think real hard about it. You’ve got a nice place here. Be a shame.”
He didn’t leave.
“You should go,” I said. “We’re closed.”
“I gave you good advice.”
“I’m not paying you. I’m not selling. I’m not afraid of you, and you can come back as many times as you like, you can bring the not-gentle one, I’ll have a koulouraki for him too. This is my father’s. You don’t get it. There’s no number. There’s no arrangement. Now get out of my shop.”
It was the stupidest thing I’d ever said. I knew it was stupid while it was coming out of me. Brave is just stupid that worked out, and I had no reason to think this would work out, and I said it anyway, because the alternative was handing him the thing I’d refused to hand him all night, and I’d rather be stupid than hand it over. The wound’s an engine like any other. It’ll run you straight off a cliff if you let it, and that night I let it, and I’d do it again.
His face changed. Just a flicker. The patience didn’t crack — men like that don’t crack, that’s the whole horror of them — but something cooled behind it, went flat, took my measure and filed it away. He’d been hoping I was smart. He’d settle for me being a lesson.
“Okay,” he said. Soft. “Okay.”
And on his way past the counter—slow, deliberate, looking right at me while he did it so I’d know it wasn’t an accident, so I’d know there are no accidents with a man like this—he put two fingers against the photograph beside the coffee machine, the one he’d turned an inch off true, and he pushed it.
It went off the edge. I heard it before I understood it—the frame catching the lip of the counter, the small flat slap of it hitting the tile, the glass going with a sound like ice. My father’s face under a web of cracks. The whole thing in pieces at his feet.
“Whoops,” he said.
Chapter 3
Tonio
Thiswasnotthefirst night I’d been watching, ok? I’ll admit—even before I started watching the block, I was watching her. Just to make sure she was safe, you understand. It had become something of a habit, increasingly regular. And even though I knew why I was here, I told myself little lies to convince myself otherwise. Watching the yard. Watching the block. Building the case. All of it true, in a way. And today was the third night in a row. Thank god for my vigilance.
Olimpo had his enormous head on my thigh and was asleep, sack-like, gently snoring, peaceful and still. Every so often his eyebrow twitched at a dream. I scratched the wire under his jaw and he grumbled without waking and I went back to the street.
I was used to the rhythm of the street. The lights going out at different times. Storekeepers—the few that remained—coming and going. The grocer’s, gone to bed hours ago. Down the block, past the corner, the chain-link of the yard caught what little light there was—the freight line, the trucks, the whole patient uglymachine that ran from there up through a corridor of leaned-on storefronts to a man I’d called cousin my whole life.
I didn’t write it up like I was meant to. Instead, I sat there.
Tonight the light in Filoxenia was wrong.
Not the ovens—those were banked, the gold gone low. She was up at the counter with papers spread on the marble, her face in her hands, and even from across the street, even through the steam-fogged glass, I could read the line of her shoulders, and the line said worry. I’d sat across a hundred tables from men wearing that exact line right before I made their slips disappear and bought their gratitude for the price of a coffee. She was fighting facts and losing hard.
I almost went over. God help me, I almost crossed the street with a stupid joke in my mouth and a lie about needing bread at eleven o’clock at night, just to try to cheer her up. I was no business guru, but maybe I could help, somehow, too. Cast my eye over the figures.
Then the other man came.
I saw him before he hit the ligh. He had the unhurried open-house walk of a man who thinks the whole street already belongs to him. He stood under the dead lamp with his breath going up and looked at her through the glass the way you look at a car you’d already decided to buy.
I had him cold in two seconds. I’d been him, near enough. Not this exactly—I don’t do this kind of thing exactly—but I knew the species down to the bone. A collector. Low end. Gianni’s, almost certainly, three rungs down from anyone who’d ever heard Gianni’s name. A foot soldier of the machine I was parked here to map.
