“The fuck is that?” he said, turning the engine.
“Mraaaow,” the cat replied.
“Her name is Binah.” I rested a gloved hand on her head, flattening her ears. She relaxed under my palm. “Don’t ask.”
“Uhn.” Nic pulled away with his headlights dark, only turning them on at the end of the street. “You did the job?”
“Of course.”
“And Moni?”
“A non-issue.”
“Good,” Nic replied. “Piece of shit.”
We settled into a comfortable silence, broken only by the sound of Binah’s purr and the rustle of fabric as I shucked my outerwear. Nicolai was not known for being chatty. He was an old soldier, an Afghan veteran and a hardened killer. I couldn’t say I liked or trusted him, but I respected him. He was my teacher, my superior… and less fortunately, my creditor.
“So, about my fee,” I said after a time. “I’m waiving it towards Vassily’s prison bribe.”
“Okay. But it’s not gonna cover it,” Nic replied. “Ten grand to go.”
The pleasant afterglow faded, and fast. “Ridiculous. I already paid five. How much did it really take to get him out early?”
“Thirty, plus interest. Five years of interest. That was the deal, kid.”
The Vochin job was worth twenty. I’d already paid off five. The rest of my money had gone to my father’s old debts, Chernobog take him. My jaw worked, muscles tightening and bunching. “You get one more round of work from me. That’s it.”
“I got one lined up already. You two can come talk to me about it when he’s back,” Nic said. He didn’t look over at me, steering laconically with one hand. It was the closest he got to sympathy. “Vassily’s out of the can tomorrow, isn’t he?”
“Today.” My voice sounded tight in my own ears. I petted Binah, who restlessly explored the seat beside me. “Nine thirty.”
Nic grunted. “Come to Sirens tomorrow. I’ll tell you more there and—fuck.”
I perked up as the tinny sound of Nic’s pager cut through the cabin and tensed as the car listed to one side of the road when he pulled it off his belt and read it.
“Fuck,” he said again. “Motherfucking piece of shit.”
“Pardon?”
Nic threw the pager back to me and stomped the accelerator, pitching me and the cat against the door as he strove to make the exit. I somehow caught it as the car righted and held it to the light. The code was a string of symbols: T1RH#4C.
T was for trup, the Russian word for corpse, and the number showed how many bodies. The location, RH#4, stood for Site #4 in Red Hook: the AEROMOR shipping yard. The last letter in the paging code showed the nature of the problem. ‘C’ stood for cherny, ‘black’—but to me, raised bilingual in Brooklyn, the C was for Crisis.
Chapter 2
The greasy violet taint of decay carried on the wind and coated the back of my throat. AEROMOR was one of our cover companies, and Dockyard Number 4 was normally like every other unremarkable warehouse-and-cranes yard in Red Hook. Tonight, the old warehouse and docks were absolutely lifeless. They smelled like a charnel ground.
Lev and his bodyguards were already waiting for us next to the guardhouse. The standin Avtoritet of Brighton Beach was nearly the spitting image of Bill Gates: a deceptively soft-looking man with an earnest pudding face and a receding hairline. He had weird, calm eyes, level and lightless, the gray-tinted green of the sea at dawn, and waited to receive us like a dignified heron in long sleeves and light slacks, unbothered by the heat. He was flanked by Vanya, a corpulent pufferfish of a man, and his favorite bodyman, Mikhail. Most of the Yaroshenko men were Ukrainian and proud of the fact. Mikhail was katsap,[8] Russian, a sleek and dangerous Doberman in human skin. He glared at me as we approached, but like most men in the Organizatsiya, he did not ever meet my eyes.
“Alexi, Nic. Good of you to join us.” Lev was terser than usual, his reedy voice stiff and halting. “Vanya’s man is bringing a truck to clear up the mess, but I wanted both of you to have a look before he arrives.”
“Uhn,” Nic grunted. He kept his chin down, scanning the docks. “What happened? I can smell it from here.”
“I am hoping we can work that out.” Lev glanced at me, and he did meet and hold my gaze. Thieves are a superstitious lot, and even though I can’t actually read minds, nearly everyone in the Organizatsiya thought I could—except Lev. “Someone was left here for us to find. We don’t know why, or who he is. He’s not from the Organization.”
“Has anyone disturbed the body?” Too much interference didn’t only destroy physical evidence, it also disturbed any spectral evidence I might be able to sense.
“Minimally.” Lev frowned, lips pursing. “And if you can tell us who or… what did it, that would be even better.”
“That bad, is it?” I had probably seen worse and, in all honesty, had probably done worse. Deal with enough dead bodies, and the shock wears off.
“You’ll have to see for yourself.” Lev motioned with a hand as he swept off towards the waterfront.
My self-assured cynicism began to fade as we came up on the body. It was a decidedly long way from where we started, and the stench slowly thickened to a skin-prickling, sinus-clogging cloud of unnatural filth. I felt sick by the time Lev stopped and turned back to look at us.
The body had been left in a ring of shipping crates in the stacking yard, under the container cranes near the threshold of land and sea. Our Ivan Ivanovich was crucified, nailed spread-eagled to the planking with thick iron spikes longer than my hands. The skin of his face was torn away to expose the meat and bone beneath. One eye was sewn shut over the eyeball, while the other socket was empty, gaping up at the gunmetal sky. He was shirtless, barefoot, his fly torn open. The front of his jeans was crusted with blood.
But the mutilation was not the focus of the ritualized pose. A large symbol was carved into the corpse’s chest. It was one of the demonic seals found in the Key of Solomon, a common grimoire often abused by novice Occultists with the hankering to dabble in “black” magic. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t a random guy somebody had thrown out the back of a van. His killers had turned him into a display. A sacrifice.
Nicolai went around the other side of the body, hands jammed in the pockets of his cargoes. A cigarette hung listlessly from one chapped lip. “Jesus.”
“No. Aamon,” I said. The smell was curdling the air in my lungs. It was not natural. The heavy, leaden sensation of rotten magic is difficult to describe. It is as if the air itself was cut up, as if this patch of reality was molding, full of holes. It sucked the light out of the immediate area. The associated color of the scent was an intense, vibrant violet, the sickly color of a fresh bruise.
“What?”
“The sigil is the seal of Aamon.” I was geared for a hit, not an investigation, but most of my tools were still useful. I took a penlight and set it between my teeth, trying not to breathe through my nose as I crouched beside the body. I searched under his dead weight for the telltale outline of a wallet, mildly surprised when I actually found one. The money was missing, but there were half a dozen cards with different names. I flipped the penlight over to use the UV end, scanning them for government seals. Even the best fakes always get the seals wrong. “Here we are. Frank Nacari?”
I waited for a response. When none was forthcoming, I looked back to see that Nic had joined Lev, and they were standing shoulder to shoulder in grim silence. They were both pale. As the pregnant pause stretched on, Nic tapped a new cigarette from his case, lit up, and drew a quarter inch off the end.