Page 18 of Captured By the Pakhan

It is not a map of territory. Everybody who has ever seen it assumes it is and everybody is wrong. It is a map of ports, freight corridors, customs brokerages, and the eleven inland hubs where a container changes hands without anyone keeping record of it.

The cities are not the point. The cities are the beads. What I have spent eleven years buying is the string.

You do not take Baltimore. Baltimore is nothing more than a hundred thousand people with opinions. You take the four brokers through whom everything in Baltimore must pass.

Then a year later a family has a problem with a shipment and they call the only man who can solve it. Then they owe him, and they still do not know his real name.

Four cities so far. My father drew the first version of this on a napkin when I was fifteen.

I remember the napkin better than I remember him. We were in a restaurant on Brighton Beach that no longer exists and he drew eleven circles and a line through them and told me that every man in our business fights over the circles and not one of them has ever once looked at the line.

He was the cleverest man I’ve ever known. He was also constitutionally incapable of doing anything unkind, which in our business is not a virtue, it is a vacancy — and his own brother walked into it one afternoon and taken everything he’d build.

My father lived eleven more years as a guest in a house he used to own by the graciousness of his own flesh and blood. He spent that time teaching me chess, and never raised his voice about anything ever again.

I was twenty-two when he died. Nobody killed him. Which was somehow worse. He just slipped away in his sleep.

Three weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday I killed my Uncle and took back everything he’d stolen from my father. He died in the study of that same house, and I did it myself rather than sending someone to do it for me.

Because there is a difference between an execution and an inheritance and I wanted the men in the hall to understand which one they were listening to. It was a correction.

Everything since that day has been about the napkin.

“Walk me through it."

"Four are ours going back years — Andrei, Bogdan, Grigor, me. I'd put my hand in a fire for three of them and I'd want a conversation about the fourth– and no, I'm not telling you which one, because you'd have him killed by lunch and I'd rather be thorough before rash actions are made."

"Yeremey." I warn.

"Two are contractors from the build in 2021. Both clean, both boring, one of them's in Portugal, has been since March." He counts on his fingers with an irritating lack of urgency. "Three are money — the lawyer, the title company, the man who did the tax structure. All three had access to a property, not to a purpose. And two are Vasilenko. That leaves the woman who did the interiors, which I mention only because I promised to be exhaustive."

"And still no answer?"

"No answer yet." He shrugs. “It's a list of eleven, and by the end of next week it'll be a list of three. You want it fast or you want it right, Ilya? You've never once wanted it fast."

He's correct, which is his most consistent failing.

"How long is ‘next week’?"

"Thursday." He tips his head. "And before you ask — no, I'm not putting anyone in a room. The moment you put a man in a room, the other ten find out there's a room, and then everybody's behaviour changes and I lose the only thing I'm actually reading, which is behaviour. Nobody knows I'm looking. That's the entire method and it stops working the day you get impatient with it."

"I am not impatient."

"You're standing up."

I am. I hadn't noticed. I don’t even remember moving. Swollowing, I grimace and sit back down.

"There's a fourteenth thing," he says.

"There were only four things before."

"I've been saving it." He leans back, and I know exactly what is coming. "How is she?"

"Working well enough."

Yeremey grins at the ceiling. "Andrei called me last night, you know. Not to report. To complain, which he has done twice in nine years and both times about the same person, and that person is not you mind you." He puts on an approximation of Andrei's voice, which is genuinely offensive. "'She asks too many questions. She even counted the dogs.'"

"She counted the dogs?" I repeat with amusement.