Page 14 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

Urgh. “Please.”

Thirty minutes later, he calls back and reads it out in the flat voice he keeps for numbers. Vestbro Holdings, registered in the city, a director’s name nobody has ever heard of, and a mail drop for an address. Vestbro owns the warehouse I’m standing outside. It owns the old laundry at the top of Calloway Street. It owns the shuttered bookstore two doors up from the bank. And in March it bought the small parking lot at the end of the street, the one I leave my car in every time I cross the bridge to look at Kimmie through a pane of glass.

“There’s one more thing,” he says. “Bellingfell, four years ago. A row of six units near the marina. Vestbro took four of them inside a year. The wine bar wouldn’t sell.” He turns a page. “February, a pipe burst in the flat above and came through their ceiling. March, somebody complained to the licensing board about noise. April and June, two break-ins where the till was left alone and the stock was ruined. Their insurance went up nine hundred percent and they sold in the July for about half what they’d been offered at the start.”

I’ve been the burst pipe for other people. It’s cheap work that anyone can do. The bar owners in Bellingfell will have spent that whole spring believing they were having a run of bad luck, and by the time they stopped believing it they’d have been too tired to do anything about it.

A painting is worth whatever two men agree on with the door shut, which makes it the cleanest way to move money that has ever been invented. It’s something my family has been doing for forty years. Taking the Rebecchi off her wall in the middle of her run would also gut the show she has spent months building.

“There’s nothing here,” Mechislav says, but he breaks the lock anyway and swings open the door. “He must be sitting on it for something…”

He trails off, but I know this is a dead end.

“Lets leave it tonight,” I concede, and head back to my apartment.

Twenty minutes later I’m standing at my kitchen counter with the light off and look out towards the river.

Then I lie on top of the covers and try not to think of the curvy beauty asking me to leave because I’m not what she expected to want.

Sometime after one, the phone buzzes on the nightstand and I have it in my hand before my eyes are properly open. Eduard, about Monday. Mechislav, about his jaw. My sister Tasia, who has been sending me listings of houses she is considering with messages like just look at that kitchen.

Unknown number.

Hi. This is Kimmie. Farrow. Although I imagine you know which Kimmie, you probably haven’t handed that card out to a large number of women, or maybe you have, in which case that’s genuinely none of my business.

Sorry. It’s late.

Are you awake? Can we have a chat?

I read it twice. Then I’m off the bed, into jeans, and out of my own front door with my keys in my hand and my shirt not fully buttoned. The elevator takes long enough that I consider the stairs.

The bridge is empty. The water underneath it is black and flat, and I make it across in nine minutes because there is nothing on the road to slow me down and I’m not looking for a reason to be slowed.

Linby Road after midnight is one long row of dark houses with a streetlight out at the halfway point. Third from the end, the one with the bicycle chained to the railing and the pot by the step with something dead in it. There’s a light on downstairs behind a curtain that doesn’t quite meet in the middle.

I go up the path and knock once.

“Who is it?” she calls from the other side.

“It’s me. It’s Natan,” I offer.

The door opens. She’s in a t-shirt that comes down to her thighs with paint on the hem, her glasses have slipped to the end of her nose, her hair wet and dripping onto her collarbone. Her eyes are pink at the edges in a way that puts something cold through the middle of me.

“You didn’t text back,” she says.

“I came straight over.” My heart is beating so fast, I feel like I ran here.

She swings the door fully open.

Kimmie

He fills my doorway the way he fills every room he’s ever walked into.

“You came,” I say. “I didn’t mean…” I trail off, because I’m so glad to see him.

I look at the doormat for a second, and swallow down the words that I know would come out wrong anyway. “Come in, please, or before Mrs. Horace at number nine spots a man your size on my step after midnight and starts a group chat about it.”

He steps past me and my hallway turns into what I imagine a corridor on a submarine feels like. There are four boxes by the stairs I’ve been meaning to unpack since I got the keys. He moves around them like he already knows the floor plan of my house.