Page 97 of Havoc

Nobody moves.

The sound goes out flat across that lot and off the back of the furniture store and away over the shotgun houses, and about a hundred yards off a dog starts up and doesn't stop.

Lucien is on the ground.

Rémy takes the handkerchief back out and wipes his hands, front and back, unhurried, the way a man does after handling something in a garden.

"That was owed to you," he says to Havoc. "I'd rather you had it from me than took it yourself, because if you had taken it I would have been required to do a great deal of work I do not want to do at sixty-eight years old."

And Havoc doesn't say anything.

I'm watching him. I have been watching him for eight minutes without stopping and I see the whole thing go across him — that he stood in that building forty minutes ago with sixteen inches of iron in his hand and he put it down, and he put it down for a reason, and now a small old man in a short-sleeved shirt has done it in three seconds as a courtesy, and taken even that away from him.

He doesn't get to have wanted it.

He doesn't get to have not wanted it either.

"Now," Rémy says. "The rest.

"Your club owes my family a balance you have never been given a figure for, which I have allowed because a debt with a number on it can be paid and I did not want it paid. That has been the arrangement for twenty-two years and it has suited both of us, whatever your treasurer believes.

"That arrangement is over."

"Say the new one," Warden says.

"The new one is that I am going to repair your shop."

The lot is quiet.

"I'll send a contractor Monday. The east bay, the lift, both compressors, the fence, and the front of your bar. It will be finished in six weeks and it will be better than it was. You will not receive an invoice." Rémy folds the handkerchief in half and then in half again. "The woman with the smoke in her lungs, her bills go through my office. There's a nurse at Our Lady who will make sure of it.

"You will pay nothing. Not a dollar. Ever."

Nobody says a word for about four seconds, and I stand in that lot and watch four grown men understand it one after another, and Ransom isn't even here and I can hear what he'd say.

"That's worse," Havoc says.

"Considerably," Rémy agrees. "I'm glad you got there quickly. Some men take a year."

"You'll own us."

"I own you now. What changes on Monday is that every man at your table will be able to see it, and stand in a building I paid for, and drink in a bar I put the front on, and not one of them will be able to point at a single thing and say that one's ours." He puts the handkerchief in his pocket. "You'd have preferred a number. A number is a thing a man can work toward, and men who work toward things get proud, and proud men make telephone calls to gas stations.

"I don't want you proud. I want you comfortable."

Raider is the one who breaks.

"And if we tell you no?"

"Then I burn the rest of it this month and you rebuild it yourselves out of a coffee can, and in two years you're four men in a shed and I've lost a very useful salvage yard on a river corridor." Rémy shrugs one shoulder. "It's not a threat. It's the other option and it's genuinely worse for both of us, and I would rather neither of us take it."

"There ain't a vote in this parkin' lot," Warden says. "That goes to a table."

"Of course. Take it to your president. He'll understand it faster than any of you." Rémy looks toward the fence gap. "One more thing, and then I'll let you take that boy home.

"The coat is yours."

I hear myself say something. I don't know what.