Page 47 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

The Russian comes low, fast and wrecked. I catch only two words.

“Zhiva. Zhiva. Alive. Alive.”

He repeats them like a man arguing with someone who is not in the room.

“It isn’t mine,” I tell him. “Lev. The blood isn’t mine. It’s Ruslan’s.”

He does not stop.

He gets both hands beneath my knees and works down each leg with his thumbs, checking a body he already knows better than my last three doctors. I let him.

Every place he touches comes alive at once, the entire traitorous switchboard lighting beneath another man’s blood.

His hands are shaking.

I close my fingers around his wrist, over the watch with its dead hands, and hold on.

“They thought I died the first time,” I say.

His searching stops.

I look into his face and give him the truth Kilroy sold for eighty thousand dollars.

“They know better now.”

20

Lev

Forty hours since the van came up that bus lane, and I’ve spent thirty-six of them below ground. The room under VOLNA that isn’t the poker room has a drain at the center of the floor, a hose on the wall, and no ventilation worth the name, because down here I want a man smelling himself. Danil’s at the door with his arms crossed and his sleeves still down. I stand where the kid in the chair has to bring his head up to find me, and I open with the one fact he believes nobody outside his own family has.

“Your sister works overnights at the laundromat on Neptune, the one with the broken door, and she walks home at six because the bus doesn’t run. I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you what I already know so you can work out what else I know before you open your mouth.”

Eleven hours he’s been in the chair I bolted into this floor myself, and in eleven hours he’s given me three lies, one prayer, and a lot of noise. The name is Arsen. Twenty-six years old, from Rostov by way of a shipping container, and he drove the gray van up the bus lane at four in the afternoon while the man beside him put forty rounds through a school wall, a wheelchair, and Ruslan Zavgorodny’s back. He’s crying now, which I’ve got no use for.

“I didn’t know she was in the chair,” he says. “They said a woman.”

“They said a woman.” I take the seat across from him because standing over a man makes him stupid, and I need what’s left of him working. “Say who they are, Arsen. That’s all I need from you. Everything after that we can do quickly.”

“A broker. I don’t get names, I get a phone and a face. Coney Island Avenue, above the travel agency with the dead plants in the window, a fat prick who sweats through his shirt.” He’s shaking so hard the chair moves. “Forty each. Half up front, cash, no envelope, he counts it out on the desk like he’s dealing.”

The travel agency above the dead plants is a man I’ve had two soldiers watching for weeks, since I told Danil I wanted him breathing and comfortable, and convinced nobody was onto him. A live middleman tells Semyon Krutov nothing at all. I’ve been paying for that silence for months with nothing to show for it, and tonight it pays out in one piece.

I go up the stairs and leave Arsen for Danil. I don’t ask what’s done with him, because I already know, and because the man put a rifle on a building with twenty-six six-year-olds inside it.

The city gets taken apart the boring way. That’s what nobody in the movies understands about this business, they think it’s guns, and it’s phone calls. I make sixteen of them before midnight. A captain at the six-one who owes me for a nephew, a woman at a bank in Bay Ridge whose brother I moved out of a problem in 2016, a tow-yard owner in Willets Point who has never in his life asked me a question. The van turns up burned to the frame in Brownsville, which tells me nothing, but the plates on it were dead six weeks and the dealer who sold them dead plates works out of a lot in Ozone Park. The lot in Ozone Park keeps a book, and by two in the morning the book is on my desk with a coffee ring on it.

Yefim comes to the club at nine the next morning with his cane, his terrible hip, and a list in his own handwriting of every man in Brighton who ever took Ustin Filatov’s money but never took Krutov’s. Forty years of grudges in blue ink. He doesn’t sit down.

“You want them, you have them,” he says. “I need you to understand that’s not for you. It’s for her.”

“I understood that before you came up the stairs.”

“Good.” He puts the cane back under him. “Ruslan’s mother is in Odessa. She’s eighty-one. Somebody has to call her, and it shouldn’t be a stranger.”

I call her myself at four in the afternoon, which is eleven at night there, and I tell an old woman in a language my father used to swear in that her son died standing between a rifle and a schoolteacher, that he didn’t run, that there’ll be money every month for as long as she’s alive and after that for whoever she names. She asks me if he suffered. I tell her no, and it’s the first lie I’ve told this week, but it doesn’t cost me a thing. Her boy carried a paper cup of sunflower seeds in his coat pocket every day of the eight days he had my wife, and he learned twenty-six children’s names before he learned the layout of the building. I put him in the ground on Friday with four hundred people at the church and I pay for the stone before anybody asks.

The fat prick above the travel agency takes forty minutes.