The hut goes very quiet. Even the wind seems to lean in.
"Gervasii," I say softly. The middle man in the photograph. The arm slung around young Afon's shoulders.
"Gervasii," he confirms.
And then he tells me the story. By the haunted look in his face, you'd think he was exhuming a corpse. Maybe, in some ways, that's exactly what he's doing.
"Gervasii chose a swallow, because the bird crosses the mountains every year and always finds its way home. The key was because we were the key, our own way out." He's looking at the lamp flame, not at me. "It was our crew's mark. A private one, a nameless one. We called the route we found 'the Lastochka.' That's Russian for 'the swallow.'"
"The route," I repeat. "What route?"
"A smuggling route," he explains. "This was the better part of twenty years ago. Product came down out of these mountains and into the city. My brother and I ran it."
"Product meaning…?"
"Narcotics." A muscle thumps in his jaw. "Off the books. Against Lukas's express rule. He considered drugs bad business—too much heat, too many federal agencies with budgets. He forbade it. But we did it anyway, because Gervasii was ambitious and I would've done anything that damn fool asked me to do."
I could swear, for just a moment, his eye glistens with a tear. Then he clears his throat and continues.
"It was a small crew. Six men, sometimes eight. All of us marked with the swallow, here." He touches his own ribs, low on the left side, exactly where my fingers found it. "The youngest of us was a kid Gervasii found half-starved running errands for a chop shop in Kingston. Hungry kid. Clever, too. Gervasii brought him in like a stray and raised him like a son. Taught him everything we knew. He had a gift."
"What was his name?" I ask, concerned about overstepping my bounds.
"Viktor Reznik."
I shiver. I've never heard that name before in my life, and somehow it still makes the hair on my arms stand up, like my body recognizes it instinctively.
"What happened?" I ask.
"It came apart." He turns the mug another quarter turn. "The crew came apart, and Gervasii died. I got out. I dragged Matvei clear of it—he was fifteen, and he'd just watched his father die. I was not going to let the life have him too. Then I crawled back to Lukas on my knees." His smiles sadly. "There's a price for being forgiven, in our world. Mine was fifteen years of doing the Bratva's ugliest work. Whatever Lukas needed done that no one else would do, I did it. That was the cost of the venture that killed my brother. I paid it willingly."
I think of Gold Chain in the bunkhouse:Used to kill people for the Lazarev Bratva.I knew in broad strokes that Afon had been involved with the Lazarevs' dirtiest work, but it's one thing to know that and another thing to see in his face just how muchthat work cost him. He looks haunted by ghosts that no one else can see.
"And Reznik?"
"Vanished," he says. "Everyone assumed he was dead. I wanted to believe it." He finally looks at me, and his eyes in the lamplight are the color of the forest in November. "It's easier to forget a dead man."
"I take it he wasn't actually dead, though."
"No." Afon leans back, the chair creaking under him. "As I later learned, he spent twenty years rebuilding the exact same thing we'd had. The Lastochka, but bigger and grander. Nastier, too." He sees the question forming on my face and heads it off. "Which I am not elaborating on tonight. The point is, a few weeks ago, Viktor got word that Afon Satyrin—of all the phantoms in all the graveyards he's passed through—was living in a cabin on his mountain."
"What do they want with you?"
"They want me in the ground," he replies. "I'm the last one left who knows what Reznik did to get where he is. That makes me a loose end with a long memory. In his line of work, you can't afford a liability like that to remain free."
"But then why me?" I croak, suddenly afraid. "The men at the camp, one of them called me?—"
"Bait," Afon finishes for me in a very good guess. "I'm sure they thought they could grab the woman who came down the mountain with me to draw me out. They want to know how much I've told, and to whom." He holds my eyes. "You were a fishing lure, Caroline. And I'm the fish."
My body is reverting back to the cold-sweat, hollow-stomach thing it learned in the back of the kidnappers' panel van. Wolf's snoring suddenly sounds very far away and less reassuring than it did a moment ago.
"Okay," I say. "To recap: Smuggling route plus dead brother equals vengeful kingpin with abandonment issues. I'm following all of that. But…" I lean forward over my cold beans. "Afon, where does myfatherfit? Because Bill Oglethorpe was an attorney from the Upper East Side who wore Brooks Brothers and thought jaywalking was a moral failing. And yet he drew your secret smuggler bird in his last letter to me, which means he knew about the Lastochka." I shake my head. "How? Why? He wasn't—he can't have been?—"
I can't even finish the sentence. The end of it is too absurd. Or too plausible. I genuinely can't tell which anymore, and that's the part that scares me most.
Afon looks at me for a long, long moment.
"Because your father was in this world," he says at last. "Not like I was, but tangled up in it nonetheless." He rubs a scarred thumb along the table's edge. "Bill and I knew each other. A long time ago. He did me a very big favor when I needed it most."
