Page 40 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Twenty-four, educated in Geneva, a true beauty. She’s already running his legitimate holdings, and by every account, she has twice the mind her father has.”

“Bully for her.”

He takes a breath, but I see the argument in his mouth. His lips tighten in a particular way while he plans to talk me into something.

“A marriage ends the war before it truly begins. It’s how the old families did it, and I’d be failing you as sovetnik if I didn’t put it on the table.”

“Lev. The subject is closed. It stays closed if Alexei himself proposes it himself. Move to the next item.”

A lesser counselor would push. A pettier man would sulk. Lev looks at me for one long moment across the brandy. “Next item, then.” He reaches into his jacket. “You should see these before anyone else decides you should.”

Photographs again. He likes physical evidence over digital. I lay them out on my desk and turn on the desk lamp to see them more clearly.

I wish I hadn’t turned on the desk lamp.

A restaurant I do not recognize, Brighton Beach by the signage. My son at a corner table, animated, gesturing with a fork. Across from him is Ruslan Volkov, the man who has managed Sokolov’s shipping interests for a decade.

The second photograph is a parking lot at night. Klaus leans against a black G-wagon, talking with two men I can name and one I cannot. The two I can name are criminals that Alexei bought a judge for.

Third photograph, the same restaurant, different night, different jacket. Different criminal across the table from Klaus.

The dates in the corners span the eleven days since I fired him. “It would appear that he took his firing rather hard.”

“He surfaced in their orbit within seventy-two hours of being fired,” Lev says, pouring more brandy into his glass. “Whether he went to them or they came to him, my people cannot yet say. For what it is worth, in the first photograph he is doing all the talking, and Ruslan is doing all the listening, and that particular arrangement has never once ended well for the talker.”

“No. It has not.” Everyone knows what Ruslan does to talkers.

Eleven days. That’s all it took before my son walked himself into the one dining room in this city where his surname is worth more dead than alive. He’s playing a dangerous game.

He has picked a family. It’s not mine.

I stand at the window for a while after Lev leaves. The city flows, taillights, bridges, ten million people going home to rooms where nobody betrays each other.

My brandy sits untouched. There’s work on the desk. There’s always work on the desk.

I have a son at Ruslan’s table. A war simmering at my piers. A marriage refused.

I want to forget tonight. Forget it all. The toothaches, the bollards, the fork in my son’s hand. What does forgetting look like? Not whiskey. Not work. Not the gymnasium in my building’s basement.

Her. It has looked like her every night this week.

I have the car brought around.

The estate’s quiet when I arrive this late. The ground floor banked to embers. Pasha’s silhouette straightening by the east stair as I pass. Under her door, a line of lamplight.

I stand in my own hallway in my coat, fifty-six years old, Pakhan of a family at the edge of a war, and I knock like a supplicant.

She opens the door in a T-shirt worn thin and reading glasses I didn’t know about, a pen pushed into her hair. Behind her, the bed is covered in my company’s paperwork. The sight of that, of her, the glasses, my son’s wreckage spread across her blankets, undoes some final knot the brandy never reached.

“Might I come in?”

“Maxim,” she says, taking me in, coat and all. “You look like the picture they use for bad news headlines.”

“It has been a long day.”

“Well… Mine was fine, thanks for asking. Your son labels things like a lunatic with a grudge against a label maker, but I found the pattern in the invoices, which you’d know if you answered my texts. Come in.” She steps back, and then she looks at me again, closer, the glasses coming off. “What happened?”

“I would prefer not to discuss it.”