"Surprises belong to children and holidays," I tell him, not smiling. Sasha is learning. Vetrov plans a handoff tonight. "Call the driver. He will take the long way."
The street swallows us. South Boston holds the worn beauty of an old fighter, still able to pivot when unwatched. The air holds that thin knife-cold that finds the seam in every coat, and the snow has not yet committed to a full confession. The driver loops the long way into Southie and idles two blocks off L Street. We go in on foot, cutting the alleys, past metal stairs that complain and windows that watch.
The SUV idles without lights, the driver pulling on a cigarette with the lazy mouth of a man who has never had to run for a bus. Sergei is hiring men who don't know how to hold a life. The truck sits with its breath held because it knows in its mechanical bones that this corner belongs to someone else and that absence is a lie. Two men by the tailgate perform the posture of criminals who learned theircraft by watching television. Their feet confess what their hands cannot.
"On my count," I say. Sasha's breath clouds the air in small bursts. The boy loves his counts. Time is a weapon.
On three, we open them like a lock that never fits the door. The driver turns toward the glow of his cigarette. I pull the door open and my hand closes on his collar before he remembers the word gun. I take the gun out of his hand after I have introduced his face to the frame. He sighs like men who thought they could buy a night and got a lesson instead.
Two men by the truck turn as if they heard a song they cannot place. Sasha brings one against the bumper and teaches his shoulder a new shape. The other reaches for his waistband, and I put his face on the hood before his fingers learn courage.
Misha appears with a man tucked under his arm like a disobedient child. The crate sits in the back, slats pried just loose enough to flash plastic and grease, the sickly shine that never belongs to anything good. I lift one corner and see what I expected—the familiar AK pattern in oiled steel. Sergei thrives on the old comforts.
Sasha jerks his chin at the truck bed. Under the crate sits a heavy square box, not ours. Greek letters scrawl the lid. I lift it. Foam, hard plastic cases, triggers that end nights fast. Sergei wants insurance and modernity. Some idiot thought that he could hide it like a priest can hide a knife under a cassock.
I close it with two fingers and give Misha the look thatmeans he will carry it to the basement safely. He nods because we have spoken this language for fifteen years.
Sergei's reinforcements arrive late and loud in a car, young men who wear the night the way children wear capes. When they see us, they form a circle of predators who have never had to finish anything they started. I don't let them taste the mistake because I prefer to teach in rooms without an audience. Two are enough for conversation. I send the driver back to his boss with a face that is not what his mother gave him. I just tell him to say my name correctly because names have teeth when spoken with attention.
We load two into the back and ride silently to Dorchester. They sit like stone. We walk the same dim corridor to a windowless anteroom. A single bare bulb glows without impatience. Except for a few chairs and a calendar from a hardware store with a woman dressed for a climate that is not ours, the only other feature is a drain placed where it needs to be.
I set my coat on the back of a chair and roll my sleeves with care. I cross myself because judgment without prayer is vanity, and then I do the work, not as a butcher, but as a man who has learned that patience breaks bone without leaving a mark you can photograph.
I have learned how to carve fear away from truth with a knife I keep hidden in the quiet edge of my tone. The younger one looks at his buddy for courage and finds none. He wears the badge of silence as if it will buy him a reputation. He is wrong. This is the sort of room that hears a hundred small lies and cannot be surprised anymore.
He breaks the way they all do when you let them feel safe for one minute and then take it away. He gives me the name of the man who received the crate on L Street. He gives me a time that smells like midnight. He gives me a place that doesn't matter. He gives me a sentence I don't like. "Christmas is good for business."
The second man tries to bargain. He tells me Sergei thinks Anatoly is an old saint with a tired heart and that the city wants a younger god. He calls power a stage and says Sergei will not clap from the seats. He strings together words he thinks make him sound like a man with vision.
I take control with a piano wire and my silence. When I stop, both men have learned that pain without purpose is noise. I don't make noise and end the lesson. They breathe. There is no need to decorate rooms with bodies. Sasha cleans the floor the way I showed him when he was eighteen and warming his hands on the engines of stolen cars. He hums to himself. I tell him to stop, and he stops.
The dock wind follows us back to Beacon Hill. The case in the trunk feels like an accusation. Misha drives with his mouth set and his eyes steady. The adrenaline has stepped off his bones. Snow comes hard now. On Dorchester Avenue, a man in a Santa hat sells hot dogs and salvation in the same shout. Sometimes, fools tell a kind of truth.
Beacon Hill looms black against the snow. We roll through the iron gates. Two watchmen lift the bar, check the plates, and wave us into the hush. Misha will log the case in the basement under my name because the chain of command is the spine of order. He will warn the guard on duty to sleep with both eyes open.
I don't seek my Pakhan. I take the back stairs to my room and let the hall grow quiet around me. My room is modest. The dark wooden bed remembers the hands that carved it. The rug on the floorboards is from a man near Tula who never wrote down a price because he wanted me to owe him. I put my things on the small table and stand for a moment before an icon corner where the Mother of God meets my eyes with a tenderness that breaks me if I let it.
I turn away, undress, and stand for a minute without the weight of cloth on my shoulders. The mirror throws back a body that was built to do work. Scars where history signed its name. The black ink of the Bratva insignia across my left chest, where loyalty anchors itself. I touch the bleeding cross over my heart with the old words that kept me alive when I was thirteen and starving and angry.By honor and pain, a vow marked in Old Church Slavonic shimmers along my ribs. They don't yet form a complete sentence because I have not finished earning it.
I wash the salt from my face, shave, and pour strong tea without sugar from my samovar. Setting the cup to the side of the icon shelf, I dress again, cloth over the cross, the weight of the holster settling where it always does, the ink cooling under the shirt.
In the quiet of the room, the thoughts I don't permit easily come back again. A girl at the top of a house that is too rich to be useful, sitting cross-legged and pretending the world cannot see her. Valentina Kirov with her braid and her sharp mouth and the way she looks at men like she has read the book that tells the truth about them. She moves through rooms like light that has decided to avoid glass.
Her name stays unspoken before God, a test withheld. I say nothing and feel everything. No boy sets a heart on a table to beg mercy. Love is not a word kept close. Protection is the choice, the only confession worth making.
The latch clicks. The door opens without a knock. Only one person would risk that. My half-sister Katya slips in with a red knit cap in her hand, her dyed hair cut blunt at the jaw, her boots loud against the floor. She tosses the cap onto the chair, seasoning the room.
"You look like a funeral," she says.
She frowns, touches the icon, and then says, "Tradition keeps you standing. But loneliness eats iron."
"I don't rust."
"You are thirty-nine," she shoots back. Then her voice thins, betraying something she hates. "You are tired."
"I'm working."
"You need a wife," she says softly. "Someone who knows your kind of holy."
