Wednesday? I groaned and rubbed my face. The meeting at Sirens was supposed to start at eight.
It took a disproportionately long time to get out of bed, get dressed, and reach the phone. I dialed Nic’s office number. Lev turned his handset off during meetings.
“Security,” grunted the voice on the other end.
“Nicolai, it’s Alexi. Can you put me through to Lev?” I had no energy for nicety. Fortunately, Nic never cared.
Nic hung up, and while the muzak played, I composed an address to my Avtoritet. I wasn’t going to apologize for being late. I’d found what I’d been sent to look for, and I wanted my money and some reprieve while I considered what to do—if anything—about Jana’s magical fruit.
“Alexi. Glad to see you’re still with us.” Lev’s voice was slightly crisp.
“I have Vincent.” I spoke in Ukrainian, snapping each word off cleanly so I didn’t stammer from fatigue. “He’s asleep in my living room. Beaten up, but otherwise sound.”
There was a thick pause, and then Lev exhaled with relief. “That’s… that’s fantastic news. Thank you, Alexi, really. Where did you find him?”
“Jana’s house.” I listened carefully for his response.
“I…” he trailed off. “How did Jana have him?”
“You didn’t know she was a spook?”
“No. No… but I suppose that… makes sense in retrospect.” I could almost hear him frowning. “What did you do to her?”
“She’s…” I nearly said ‘dead’, and then I remembered the absent white hole on her bedroom floor. “She’s around.”
“Alright. Something to discuss in private, later in the night. Did we solve the mystery of Vincent’s family story?”
“He was disowned by his dad when he was still a teen, apparently.”
The pause this time was longer, broken only by Lev’s tense breathing over the receiver. “I see. Look, Alexi. Are you still able to come into the office for that meeting with our Pakhun?”
“I can.” I was immediately wary and glanced at the glass case, and the hammer. He wasn’t telling me something, but there was no mistaking the surprise in Lev’s voice. “But I’ll be late.”
“Good, and that’s no problem. Come in at ten. Sergei won’t be here until midnight, at least, and if you could bring Vincent and Vassily with you, that would be… advantageous.”
“Vassily won’t be able to make it. But I can bring Vincent.” I rubbed my fingers on the edge of my bathrobe, over and over. Unaccountably, sweat beaded on my upper lip.
“Are you sure?”
“He’s sweating off a fever.”
“Not good. But bring Vincent. It will boost morale.” Lev sighed. “I was able to talk us out of any arrests at the Taj Mahal, but there is bad talk over here, Alexi. Watch your back. There’s wolves about, and they want our blood.”
I hung up and moved away from the desk into the living room, unhappy and unsettled. Vincent was a white lump in the center of my sofa, and his breath filled the room with an ammonic reek. A dark head of hair protruded over the edge of the blanket bundle. It reminded me of Vassily, and with a pang of guilt, I realized I hadn’t even thought about him before Lev brought him up. I needed to go and visit, but Lev would kill me if I left Vincent alone. I chewed a flake of skin from my lip as I pondered my decision and couldn’t settle on any one thing. I was still exhausted. There was no time for sleep, though, no time for anything, except maybe food.
The smell of frying dumplings and butter was enough to rouse Vincent and pull him out of the living room. While he stared from the entry to the kitchen, I wordlessly dished out four eggs, two to a plate, alongside fried pelmeni and onions. The coffeemaker was on, and for the first time in a week, the kitchen smelled like normalcy. I heaped a large dollop of sour cream onto our eggs before taking the plates over and set one down in front of Vincent.
“Thanks.” Vincent still sounded as tired as I felt. He poked curiously at the pelmeni. “Hey, I’ve heard of these. Russian pasta.”
“Veal and cheese.” I cut into my eggs and folded half of one over my fork. “So, you knew Lev was a Phi— a mage?”
“Nah. Figured it was likely, though.”
I finished swallowing. “You know, for all that magi are supposedly rare, I seem to have encountered a lot of them in a very short period of time.”
“Yeah, well. Like attracts like.” Vincent pushed the onions aside and crammed an entire pelmeni into his mouth. “Who knows, man. I think there’s some energy happening in the world or something. That’s my opinion. But speaking of supernatural shit, what do you think Carmine wants with this thing? The Fruit?”
I wasn’t sure I cared anymore. The more time passed since the vision of the White Woman, the less enthused I was about pursuing the lead. Whoever she was, she had ruined me in some past life, or fucked up my psyche to the point where I fully believed she had. The visions, the dreams… they felt like railroading. All I wanted was to return Vincent, get the meeting done and dusted, and then go to Mariya’s. She and Vassily were all I had left, and nothing else really mattered to me anymore. “I have no idea.”
“Me either.” Vincent’s eyes narrowed as he looked down at his food. He was picking the egg white off from around the yolks. “I know that if I found a horkin’ great big spiny thing bobbing around in the ocean, I wouldn’t fuckin’ pick it up. You know? Logic would kinda dictate something like that is bad news.”
“Reason isn’t the greatest strength of most men in our lines of work.” I arched an eyebrow, fork partway to my lips.
“Yeah, but it ain’t just the Families. People are dumb. It’s how I’m making a mint off my business.”
As I watched him devour the meal, his first in several days, it occurred to me that this man was, in part, responsible for Vassily’s addiction. He was one link in a long chain stretching between the American continents. “Is it a messy business? The coke trade?”
“Jesus. You got no fucking idea. The stuff might as well just be made out of dead bodies.” Vincent’s appetite seemed to increase as he got into the spiel. “They gotta joke down there, translates to something like: God made Colombia the closest thing to Paradise. When other countries around the world started asking him: ‘Hey God, wait a sec, what’s the deal? Why do they get this fucking amazingly beautiful country and we get this shithole over here?’ He tells them: ‘Yeah sure, it’s pretty, but wait until you see the motherfuckers I put there.’”
“Hmph.” I snorted.
“I mean, Colombia is fucking gorgeous, but yeah. It’s a bloody trade, and unless you’re really tight with your suppliers, they’ll fuck you over as soon as anyone else. Georgie’s lucky he’s got me and the Twins. If you don’t know somebody down there, you’ll get to see some of the prettiest forest in the world for maybe a couple days before you’re dead in a firefight or having your ass robbed bare. A guy I knew, they put a bomb on his plane and blew him and three hundred other people out of the fucking sky. Just to nail one man.”
I wanted to judge him, the ways in which his trade had ruined the lives of so many, but what ground did I have to stand on? I killed for money. Fact is, nearly everything we owned in this country—TVs, clothes, drugs, sex—came in at someone else’s expense. It was as Jana, speaking through Yuri’s corpse, had said: we were nothing but small cogs in a grand, capitalist machine. Between that and her deceptions—layers and layers of them—I wondered if that was how she’d gotten so deep under my skin. She’d spoken the truth. Even her lust had been sincere.
Suddenly, I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I scraped the rest of my eggs onto Vincent’s plate and took mine, now empty, to the sink. “Finish up. We have to head out. Sergei Yaroshenko has come back to America, and you and I have a meeting we must attend.”