Page 17 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

The horse story goes on for fourteen minutes instead. It’s incomprehensible, it involves a customs official in Odessa, and the whole room laughs at the end. I laugh too, because it’s funny, because these people are funny, because the old woman in black is wiping her eyes and gripping my forearm like we’ve known each other since the war.

That’s the part nobody warned me about. They’re warm. It’s a party. There’s an accordion going in the corner, a kid asleep under a table, a woman feeding her husband off her own fork. The man with the split lip who bowed at me is down on the floor now, showing a four-year-old how to fold a napkin into a boat.

And every man in this room has the eyes.

Not lust. I could work with lust. I’ve had comebacks for lust since I was fourteen. This is worse. Reverence has weight. Reverence means they’ve already decided what I’m for.

They’re not seeing the chair at all. They see a bloodline in a dress.

The old woman leans in, still holding my arm, and switches to English for me.

“Your mother had your face. Exactly this face. She hated her freckles.”

“Did she?”

“She put lemon on them. Every summer. Lemon and buttermilk, out of a bowl, in the sun, like an idiot.” She pats my arm twice, hard. “Never worked. God gives what God gives.”

Then she goes back to her borscht.

Twenty-six years, and nobody has ever told me my mother hated her freckles. My father never said it. He had so many stories about her in him, but he never thought to share them with me.

I go looking for Lev’s hands. It’s a reflex I decline to examine. He’s got them flat on the table either side of a glass he hasn’t touched, His split knuckles scabbed over, the steel watch on his wrist. It’s not a watch. It’s a headstone he wears to work.

The party runs its ninety minutes. Lev stands, the room follows, and we go out to the cars with the accordion still playing behind us. The man with the cane gets up one last time to see me leave. My hands stay steady on my rims the whole way to the door, because forty people are watching me exit a room, and I refuse to do it as anything less than beautifully.

The car door shuts. Manhattan starts coming at us over the bridge, and I go off like a struck match.

“You knew about my mother.”

“I told you Tuesday.”

“You told me a fact. You didn’t tell me a room full of murderers was going to stand up out of their chairs.” My hands are shaking, which enrages me more than anything else this week. “You know the stories they told? They gave me more of my mother than I’ve had in twenty-six years. What gave you the right to decide tonight was the night?”

“I decided Friday was the night because the wedding’s tomorrow, and every man in that room needed to see you with their own eyes and your own name before he watches you take mine. If I’d walk you in cold on Saturday, half of them would spend the ceremony wondering what I’m pulling. Now that they’ve stood up, they can’t unstand.”

“I’m not a maneuver, Lev.”

“You’re the most important pawn in two countries, and I moved you like one.”

Bridge lights come through in long gold strips across his hands. I get my breath back, ready for round two.

“So here’s how this goes.” I turn in the seat as far as my back allows, which is further than he thinks. “Tomorrow, I’ll get married to you. I’ll wear any dress you want. I’ll stand at that altar as long as my body gives me and sit for the rest, and I’ll say the words. Then you and I are going to have the coldest marriage in the history of the state of New York. Separate rooms, separate lives. You get your church, your paper, your witnesses, and every man who stood up tonight goes home believing you own the last Filatov breathing. And you come back to a woman who says good morning to you like you’re a neighbor she doesn’t care for. But you do need to promise me that I’ll get to keep my job and that your… job won’t affect me in any way. You keep me safe and away from any killers.”

“That’s the offer?”

“That’s the offer. Take it. It’s the only one on the table, and I’m out of merchandise.”

He turns his head. In the gold strobing off the cables, I watch the corner of his mouth move, and it isn’t much, about a millimeter of a man, but I’ve had days studying that face, and a millimeter is a landslide.

“Something funny?”

“You’re the only person who’s threatened me this month,” he says. “Everyone else negotiates.”

8

Lev

“He’s asking to walk her down.”