I shake my head and focus as I park the car, step out, and turn up the collar of my coat against the vicious January chill. The cold off the ocean here in Brighton Beach is a different beast than the cold in Manhattan. It’s wetter, nastier, and far more invasive..
Lowering my head, I cut past a trio of old men in fur hats arguing on the park bench. Trash swirls around my feet as I cross Brighton Beach Avenue toward Café Volna.
Volna is the kind of place that tourists who accidentally took the Q train too far would never dare wander into to ask for help. The windows are tinted. The menu out front is hand-lettered in Russian, no translation offered. The man at the door isn’t a host; he’s a guy named Volodya with a neck as thick as a woman’s waist, uglier than sin, with no concept of manners or human kindness.
Volodya looks up from his phone and grunts at me.
“He back there?” I ask.
He jerks his chin toward the swinging door behind the bar. “In the kitchen. Don’t touch thepelmeni. They’re for the lunch.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I move past him and through the dining room, which is empty except for two grandmothers sharing a plate ofsyrnikinear the radiator. Neither of them looks up. They’ve seen plenty of men walk through this room toward that swinging door, and they understand precisely how unwise it would be to pay too much attention.
In the sweltering kitchen, a round woman in a hairnet is rolling out dough at the prep table. She doesn’t look at me, either.Not lookingis the smartest thing anyone can do in a joint like this.
I push through a second door at the back and into a smaller room with a single steel table and a calendar pinned to the wall from a Russian funeral home. Afon, unsurprisingly, has beaten me here. He’s seated with his back to the wall, a small glass of tea in front of him, his coat folded over the chair. His Sobranies are out on the table. So is a saucer of sugar cubes.
“You’re late,” he says.
“Sue me.”
I claim a seat as he pushes a second glass of tea across the table at me. It’s searing hot. I wrap my hand around it and let it burn my palm a little.
He lights up a cigarette and squints at me over the swirling smoke. “Did you sleep at all this week?”
“Did you?”
He chuckles and reaches for a sugar cube. He drops it into his tea, watches it sink, then stirs with the tiny spoon. The clink of the metal against the glass is the only sound in the room for a long moment.
“So,” he says. “Oglethorpe. Anyone interesting to point a finger at?”
“I have ideas,” I say. “Nothing I’d sign my name to quite yet.”
He nods slowly. “I have ideas, too. Lukas has ideas. Everyone has ideas. The problem with ideas is that they multiply.” He jabs the cigarette at me. “You think it was Raymond?”
I turn the tea glass a quarter rotation. “I think Raymond left the retreat in a hurry on a phone call, and twelve hours later, one of his name partners was on a slab. And I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I.”
“But.”
“But…?” he questions.
I exhale. “Bill pulled me aside in the woods that morning. He looked spooked as hell. He told me Raymond wasnot a good man, in those exact words. He thinks Raymond keeps files on the senior partners. Things they’ve signed, looked away from. Said Raymond’s been leaning on those files lately. Then Raymond came sauntering up and Bill changed the subject so fast he gave himself whiplash.”
Afon’s spoon stops moving in the glass. “So Bill was scared of Raymond, and he confessed that to you,” he summarizes. “And now, Bill is dead. That’s consistent with the simple story. And yet you don’t look convinced.”
“It’s just that…” I work my jaw as I voice the things that have been bothering me since the moment those red-and-blue lights first lit up the inside of the room where I had Cass spread out beneath me. “Bill wasusefulto him. Why snip that thread now? Killing Bill couldn’t have been easy or expensive. It sure as fuck wasn’t quiet. So what’s the long game here?”
Afon shrugs. “Men make stupid choices when they’re cornered.”
“Or when somebody else is making the choices for them.”
My uncle’s eyes lift to mine. They’re tired eyes. They’ve been that way since I was fifteen. Behind them is a man who is still, in some unsalvageable way, my father’s little brother, and who has spent fifteen years paying a tab on my behalf.
“Elaborate,” he says.
