Page 23

She doesn’t need to.

***

There’s a black Mercedes parked outside the laundromat when I get home.

I see it from the end of the block. Long and polished and wrong on this street, where everyone else drives something with a dent in it. A driver sits behind the wheel with a newspaper he isn’t reading.

I park behind it and get out.

The door to my stairwell is propped open. The stairs smell of fabric softener and dry heat. Halfway up, sitting on the step outside my door with his coat folded neatly across his knees, is my father.

Twelve years. He’s gotten older. Grayer at the temples. The lines either side of his mouth are deeper. He still sits the way he always did, very straight, like someone might come along and photograph him at any moment.

Richardu Nevolin looks up at me without any expression at all.

“Fyodor,” he says.

“Get out of my building.”

He doesn’t move. He looks at the stairwell. The peeling paint. The water stain on the ceiling.

“So this is where you live,” he says.

“Kira didn’t give you this address.”

“No. Kira doesn’t speak to me unless her husband is standing behind her.” He brushes a speck of dust off his coat. “You’ve done very well for yourself.”

“I said, get out.”

“A Maximova.” He says the name like he’s tasting it. “One fifth of Yaroslav’s empire. Docks. Warehouses. Real estate. The best routes on the river.” He stands, slowly, folding his coat over his arm. “Your mother cried when Viktor Sokolov called. I believe it was joy.”

I don’t say anything. I’ve learned that with my father. The less you give him, the less he can use.

“I’d like you both to come for dinner,” he says. “Sunday. Your mother will cook.”

“No.”

“It’s appropriate. The families should be seen together.”

“There aren’t families,” I say. “There’s me, and there’s her. You’re not part of it.”

He sighs, the way he used to sigh when I was nine and got a sum wrong at the kitchen table. Patient. Disappointed. Like I was a machine that hadn’t been put together properly.

“You always did think too small,” he says. “Yaroslav’s daughters won’t hold that empire, Fyodor. Not for long. One of them cut a man’s throat on a dock last night like a fishwife. The rest of the city is already deciding which pieces to take.” He steps down one stair, so we’re closer to eye level. “When the house falls, it would be better for the Nevolins to be standing inside it than outside.”

My fists are clenched at my sides.

One of them cut a man’s throat.

Kolya, looking at the house. Not my story to tell.

“How do you know that?” I ask.

My father smiles. It’s thin and pleased and terrible, the same smile he wore when I put four thousand dollars in his hand and Lysenko’s daughter was still in my head.

“Oleg tells me things,” he says. “We’ve been friends for a long time.” He comes down another step. “He also tells me you hung up on his man last night. That was rude. And unwise.”

The blood goes very cold and very slow in my veins. I know this feeling. It’s the feeling right before I do something… ugly.