“There are three men in my kitchen,” he says, voice taut with remembered fear. “My wife is on the floor by the refrigerator.They have not hurt her.Yet. One of them is holding my daughter.”
I feel my jaw set, but I know better than to interrupt yet. Afon wants to make a point.
Yura whimpers. “She is eight months old next week. These men, they are holding a bottle to her lips, feeding her. They do not raise their voices once. But… if you know anything about this life, you know what they are capable of.”
He stops again. Afon’s hand stays on the back of his chair, steady.
“They tell me they have a job for me,” Yura continues. “They want shipment data for the Lazarev Bratva. Routes. Times. Names of drivers. Things they can use to steal from Mr. Lazarev. They tell me where to leave it, how often. Then the one with my daughter, he—” He breaks off.
“Take your time,” Afon murmurs.
“He explains,” Yura whispers, “what will happen to her if I refuse or if I try to tell anyone. He is very specific. And the whole time, my daughter is laughing. Because he is bouncing her. She does not understand the words, but I do.Ido.”
Nobody says anything for a long moment.
Yura opens his eyes again. They’re red-rimmed and exhausted. “I have not slept,” he says, like he’s reading my mind. “I have not eaten. Since they came, I sit at the kitchen table at night and I watch the door. My wife is at her mother’s now, with the baby.” He looks at Afon, then at me. “I came here to tell you this because I trust Mr. Lazarev and Mr. Afon. But I am afraid. I am so very fucking afraid.”
He stops talking.
Afon doesn’t move for a long time. His hand stays on the back of Yura’s chair, his thumb working slow circles into the metal like he’s worrying a rosary. He’s looking at me steadily, emotionlessly, his face the same grey calm it always is.
Then he bends down and puts his mouth close to Yura’s ear. “You did right,” he says. “You hear me,bratishka? You did right. Your family will be kept safe.”
Yura’s shoulders cave forward and he starts crying without sound. Afon straightens, pats him once on the back of the neck, and turns to me. “Let’s go outside,” he suggests.
I follow him out.
In the front of the shop, the kid who drove us here is leaning against the Mercedes with his arms crossed. The big guy is back at the door, looking at nothing. Afon walks past both of them and out the side door into the alley behind the shop where the dumpsters live. He fishes a pack of Sobranie cigarettes out of his coat pocket and lights one, puffing on it thoughtfully. It’s a while before he speaks.
“That’s the fourth one this month. I think you can guess who sent them.”He exhales twin ribbons of smoke through his nose. “And that’s only counting the ones who came in. We have something like sixty runners on the eastern routes. How many, you think, got the same visit and chose not to report it to us?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter.
“Neither do I.” He takes another drag. “But it is not zero.”
The cherry of his cigarette glows and dims, glows and dims.
“Raymond did this,” he says, in case I didn’t yet understand. “He and this Vainakh Syndicate are not afraid to hurt people. He is in the homes of our men. He is holding their babies. You understand, yes?”
I nod when he looks at me.
“Yura in there will be okay. Lukas and Kir will see to it.” He flicks ash. “But somewhere out there tonight, there is another man rocking his baby and deciding who to lie to. And another. And another. Some of them, eventually, will break. Because that is what men do when you put their child in a stranger’s arms. They break. I would. You would. That is what we are dealing with.”
He smokes the cigarette down to the filter, then drops it and grinds it under his heel into the wet pavement.
“Unless you help us put an end to it.”
The sun comes up as Afon takes me back home. The river is silver now instead of black when we pass over the bridge back into Manhattan.
It’s a quiet ride. My father was a yeller; Afon is a silencer. Dad would have spent the ride telling me what a sentimental idiot I’d been at the Pierre, what a liability, what a disgrace. He’d have spit it at the windshield until he ran out of breath.
Afon, instead, lets the silence do the work. He lets me sit in it and listen to my own pulse and figure out, on my own, what is important.
It’s somewhere on the West Side, around 96th Street, that he finally speaks. “I know you’ve gone soft on something,plemyannik.” I start to argue, but he raises a pacifying hand. “I don’t need to know what. That is your business. But I needed you to see that today. So that, when the moment comes, the next moment, the real one, you do not hesitate again. Whatever it is that made you come back from the Pierre with the gun still cold, I am asking you to put it in a box and stow that box on a high shelf, out of sight, until the job is done. Two weeks from now, once this thing is finished, the box is yours again. Whatever is in it. You can take it down and open it and live with it however you want. Yes?”
He turns back to the window. The conversation, such as it is, is over.
We don’t speak again until the kid pulls up in front of my building. I get out. The morning is bright now, the sidewalk crowded with the first wave of suits hustling toward the subway. Afon rolls his window down halfway and rests his forearm on the frame. The wedding band on his hand is the same plain gold he’s worn for twenty-one years, even though he’s been a widower for twenty of them.
