My father was shorter than me. Broader through the chest. The maker had gotten the measurements right the first time because the maker had known my father and my father had stood in his workshop and been measured by hand.
I kept my face still. The kid kept talking.
"The bullet hole." He touched the edges of it, tracing the curled leather where the round had punched through. "Small caliber. The entry is clean, so it was close range. The blood is set into the grain. Ye cannae get that out. Any restorer who told ye they could was lying to ye."
"They told me they'd cut the panel out. Replace it."
His head came up fast. "They what?"
"Four different restorers. Best in three cities. They all said the same thing. Cut the panel, match the leather, replace the section."
"That's fucking barbaric." The accent thickened when he was angry. His jaw was tight and his hands had gone still on the jacket, protective, the way you'd put your hands over a wound. "Ye dinnae cut out the original panel on a piece like this. Ye'd destroy the integrity of the whole garment. The hide is one continuous skin. Ye cut into it and the tension changes everywhere. It'd never hang right again."
"So it can't be fixed."
He looked at me like I'd said something stupid. "I didnae say that."
He turned the jacket over in his lap and examined the back of the bullet hole from the inside. He pressed his fingers into the leather around the entry point, working the grain, testing the give. Then he brought the jacket close to his face and ran his thumb across the cracked edges, and his whole body went still.
"The hole stays," he said. "Ye dinnae want it gone. If ye wanted it gone, ye'd have let one of those butchers cut it out."
I didn't answer. He didn't need me to.
"Here's the problem." He spread the jacket across the table and pointed to the leather around the bullet hole, the area where the grain was splitting in hairline cracks that radiated outward like a web. "The hide is dying. Ye can see it here, and here." He touched two points where the surface had gone powdery and dull. "The fibers that hold the grain together are coming apart. The bullet tore through the structure of the hide when it went through, and the blood soaked in and changed the leather around the entry. It's rotting from the wound outward. Every year it spreads. Another winter, maybe two, and this whole panel cracks apart, and then nobody can save it."
Great. So the jacket was dying, and I was drunk at two in the morning listening to a kid in handcuffs deliver the prognosis. This was going well.
"What the restorers offered ye was amputation. Cut the panel, graft in new hide, match the color. That's how a furniture man thinks. That's no how ye save a garment." He turned the jacket over and ran his palm across the flesh side, the rough inner surface, reading it with his fingers. His hands moved the way they'd moved on my glove, unhurried, sure of themselves, and I kept my eyes on the jacket because looking at his hands was becoming a problem. "What I'd do comes from bookbinding. Conservation work. My granddad used to restore leather forestate pieces, old shooting bags, officers' cases — things that were too valuable to cut and too damaged to leave alone. He taught my da and my da taught me."
His voice had dropped into something I hadn't heard from him before. No performance, no charm. Just the voice of someone who knew exactly what he was doing, and God help me, it was doing something to me that the brat voice didn't.
"I'd consolidate the damaged fibers first. There's a solution, a resin, that ye work into the grain where it's breaking down. It soaks into the fibers and rebinds them. Stops the cracking from spreading without changing the surface." He glanced up at me. "Conservators use it on leather that's hundreds of years old. Books, artifacts, things behind glass that nobody's allowed to touch. The difference is, those things stay behind glass. This has to be wearable. It has to move. So the consolidation has to be precise. Too much and the leather goes stiff and the whole panel is dead. Too little and the cracking comes back inside a year."
"How precise?"
"I'd be working by the millimeter. By hand. Under magnification, if ye can get me a loupe." He traced the web of cracks with his fingertip, and I tracked the movement of that finger the way I'd track a threat in a room. "Every crack gets treated individually. Ye follow the damage along the fiber and ye stop it where the healthy grain starts. It takes days. Maybe a week just for the consolidation."
A week. The kid was telling me he'd spend a week doing something that required a magnifying glass and a steady hand, in my apartment, in handcuffs, and I was going to have to sit here and watch those fingers work for seven straight days. I poured the last of the vodka and drank it.
He turned the jacket over again, back to the grain side, and smoothed it flat.
"Once the fibers are stable, I'd back the damaged area from the flesh side. A thin piece of compatible hide, bonded with a flexible adhesive that moves with the original leather instead of fighting it. The backing gives the panel its structure back without changing how it hangs on the outside. The bullet hole stays open. The blood stays in the grain. But the jacket stops dying."
He said it like it was nothing. Like he hadn't just described something that combined three different traditions of leatherwork that nobody alive practiced together.
"Then I'd re-oil the whole piece. This is Russian leather. Yuft. Birch oil in the finish, aye?" He brought the collar to his face again and inhaled. "Whoever stored this kept it in plastic. Plastic suffocates the hide. The birch oil is what keeps the leather alive, keeps it flexible, and it's been slowly dying inside that bag for years. I'd need to source birch oil, strip the old finish, recondition the entire jacket, and re-oil it by hand. The color will darken where I work it, but I can feather the transition so it blends with the wear pattern."
"How long? All of it."
"Weeks. Maybe longer, depending on how the consolidation takes and what materials ye can get me." He rattled the cuffs. "And it'll be bloody difficult to do work this fine in these."
"You're not getting out of the cuffs."
"Then it'll take longer." He set the jacket down on the table between us and leaned back in the chair. The brat was coming back. I could see it in the way his chin came up and his eyes sharpened. "This is yer da's jacket."
I picked up the gun.
"I'm no being smart. I'm telling ye I know what this is." He held my eyes, and his voice dropped, not soft, just steady. "Ye've been carrying this around like a body ye cannae bury. Every restorer ye took it to looked at the damage and told ye it wasdone. And ye kept it anyway because throwing it away would be the same as letting him go."
