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It was abundantly evident that, even though he’d lost his life over a refusal to leave his phone behind, he was still outdated in the ways of record keeping. There wasn’t a single computer in the house as I had seen so far. No laptop, no desktop, not even a tablet. It was all paper.
All paper, in these giant, wooden file cabinets.
Was Papa Koalistia as uncompromising in his record keeping as he had been in his role as Pakhan?
There was only one way to find out.
I approached the file cabinets, my chest heavy. In the back of my head, I could hear the suspenseful music playing, my throat scratchy as I opened the first drawer . . . to find neat, organized, rows upon rows of files and separators. The tags all seemed to be four-digit numbers.Years. He had separated his filing by years.
It seemed too easy, laid out like that, but I still flipped through the drawer I was in, going back to the decade before. There were so many folders, even in that divide, but opening up the first seemed to make it apparent that it was organized alphabetically after that and directly under S . . .there was Sawyer’s Sewage Systems?
I blinked, putting that file back, and pulling out the next.
Sanitation Department Billing.Sacred Heart Law Firm. Secretary of Funds Management.
These were all companies. No matter how far I went, it was all just expense reports and detailed accounting. I shoved the folders back with a grimace, eyeing the second column of cabinets and opening them to find the same dating system. Only this time it was names. Family trees, alliances, births and deaths, even with the cause of death listed, but no excess information other than roman numerals at the bottom of certain names or dates. They were throughout many of them, like subtext: the numbers between one and twelve, a date, and another set of roman numerals up to what seemed to be twenty.
I flicked through and finally came to a file markedSorokin. My heart fluttered in recognition, quickly dulled by the prospect of what waited inside. I closed the drawer, staring at the plain manilla folder.Not only had Yerik Koalistia been organized, but he had been painstakingly so . . . at least if my hunch was right.
The first set of roman numerals next to my mother’s name was ten, so I opened the tenth file cabinet, thumbing through the subsections until I reached the date that followed . . . the year of her death.
Sure enough, filed exactly where the numerals had led me was a file with my mother’s name on it.
My stomach bottomed out.
I had no permission to be snooping through this. Even if I hadn’t been explicitly told not to, I knew that there was no way Dmitry would buy that I had been that obtuse. Nevertheless, the ink seemed to wink back up at me, my mother’s name beckoning me to open the file.
Which I did, without preamble, without pause, to find those familiar black eyes staring back up at me. They were so much like my own that my heart nearly skipped a beat. There she was, in full color, looking across the street with a confused frown on her face.
It was like a punch to the gut, seeing her after so long, even if it was only a picture.
I knew the sunglasses on her head, dotted with red in a way that made it look like a reverse lady bug’s wing. I knew that it was sharpie, wielded by my hand, which my mother had just gone along with.
There were hundreds of these pictures, all candid, taken obviously without her knowledge. Though the further I flicked through, the more evidence I saw of a creeping fatigue setting over her face. The stress had started to tighten her skin, giving her premature crow’s feet, a paler complexion, and obvious bags under her eyes.Had she known Papa Koalistia was following her?Somehow, I doubted it.
There were handwritten notes too, of her day-to-day activities and how she conducted herself. Underlined in red it stated clearly: ‘threat level: 0. Threat level to who though? To Yerik? To the Bratva? Why, if it was either of those, had she still been killed?
I flicked through the rest of his notes in frustration, finding nothing of substance apart from something taped to the back. I peeled it away and unfolded the paper. It was the contract. It had been filled in with her name, the request that had been put in, the amount of money, where it would be laundered, and . . .
Heading the order was my father’s name,under ‘payments’.
The room seemed to tilt on its axis, my eyes running over the paperwork more slowly as if to prove myself wrong. But it was all there in black and white.
It made no sense.
Why would my father have my mother killed?
Why pay such an obscene amount of money rather than just divorce her, whatever their problems were?
Had they had problems even? What fights I could remember from childhood had all seemed superficial and easily forgotten about, but what did I know?
All I knew was the rage burning in my belly and the whir of emotion in my brain would not subside until I had answers.
Almost before I knew it, I was striding across the room, folders tucked under my arm. I knew very well that when Dmitry found out I’d left, there’d be hell to pay. A worthwhile price, knowing what I had just read . . .
