Page 15 of Merciless Daddy

I spoke.

Caruso Produce moved refrigerated freight through the Northeast and paid strangers too much for cold storage near the port. The Sokolov network had capacity in Newark. Two operations that had brushed against each other across the Adriatic for a decade might find it profitable to brush against each other in New Jersey instead. Rates, volumes, term of contract. Clean business between serious houses.

Lev listened with the stillness of a man who had sat through ten thousand pitches in prisons and banyas and rooms like this one, and when I finished he let the silence sit for a while, the way you let tea steep.

“Strange,” he said at last. “Your cousin Gianni tells me the Chicago operation is dying. Bleeding money. Old families with old debts, propped up by a girl playing at being a Don.” He turned one heavy hand palm-up on the cloth. “And yet here is the eldest Scordato, flying across the country to buy warehouse space. A dying man does not shop for refrigerators. So. One of you is lying to me at my own table. Which?”

Behind me, Pietro had gone very quiet. I let the insult to Serafina pass through me and out the other side, because that was its purpose—a hook, dangled, to see if I’d bleed.

“My cousin,” I said, “has spent his whole life mistaking attempted theft for successful conquest. He reaches for a thing and announces he owns it. He announced he owned Palermo. He announced he owned his father’s chair.” I held the old man’s eyes. “You’ll notice that he does not. Seems like he’s trying to buy someone else’s.”

Something crossed Lev’s face that was not quite amusement—a shift of weather behind stone. He glanced at his daughter.

“The files,” he said.

Yelena opened the leather folder.

She didn’t read from it. She recited—Newark facility, four hundred twenty thousand cubic feet, sixty-one percent current utilization, Section C offline pending compressor repair scheduled for completion Tuesday. Elizabeth overflow facility, capacity, current load. Fleet: how many refrigerated units, how many under long-term contract, how many free, average turnaround on a Chicago run, fuel surcharge structure, transfer cost per pallet at three different volume tiers. Numbers in clean, unhesitating strings, her eyes on the middle distance, one fingertip resting on the closed page like a formality.

I checked her against my own homework, which had taken Angela a week and me two long nights, and she was correct to the decimal. Every figure. From memory. While her father sat beside her wearing the benign, proprietary half-attention of a man listening to a music box he’d paid for.

Lev had brought her to decorate the table—the beautiful daughter, the alliance made flesh, proof of goods before sale. And he could not conduct this business without her, because the numbers lived in her and nowhere else.

She finished the transfer-cost tiers and stopped, hands folding on the leather, and Lev opened his mouth to resume being the only man in the room worth speaking to.

I spoke first.

“The Section C compressor,” I said, directly to her. “The repair contractor. Is it the same firm that handled your August failure, or did you go back out to bid?”

The room changed pressure. One of the door captains shifted his feet. It was a small transgression dressed as a technical question—in this house you addressed the pakhan and the pakhan distributed your words as he saw fit—and everyone at the table knew exactly what I had done. Lev’s face cooled by several degrees, the courtesy staying while the warmth left, a window closing behind glass.

Yelena did not look at her father. Did not ask permission with her eyes. She looked straight back at me, and for one bare instant something flickered in that pale, level stare—not offense. Recognition.

“The same firm,” she said. “They know the equipment, their emergency rate is fair, and rebidding a repair in February is how you turn a four-hundred-thousand-dollar loss into a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar one.” A beat. “As I’m sure a man who runs the eastern shipping for his family already knows.”

“I do,” I said.

Her chin was lifted. Her eyes did not move. And I saw, with a clarity that disturbed me more than any weapon at the door could have, that she understood precisely why I had aimed the question at her instead of at him.

“My daughter,” Lev said into the silence, each word laid down like a stone on a grave, “keeps the papers.”

“So you said,” I said, not looking away from her, nor she from me.

The first course had just come through the side door—smoked fish, black bread, small dishes laid down by hands that made no sound—when the noise started in the restaurant.

A voice. Raised, Italian, riding over the music. I knew it before I could make out a single word, the way you know a car alarm belongs to your own street. Pietro knew it too. I felt him behind me, the temperature of him changing, and I set down my fork and put both hands flat and visible on the white cloth, because in about thirty seconds I was going to need a documented history of not reaching for anything.

The paneled door didn’t open so much as get opened at.

“—and you can tell your pakhan that I do not surrender anything at doors, I am family, I am practically the man’s son—” and then the door swung wide and there was my cousin Gianni, flushed, magnificent, gesturing, with two of his men behind him wearing the particular sour expression of soldiers who had just been relieved of their guns by larger professionals and would be hearing about it from their boss for a week.

Gianni. A patricide.

The tall guard from the vestibule stood at the threshold with the lacquered tray. On it lay two pistols that had, evidently, not belonged to family after all.

Gianni saw the table. He saw Lev. He saw his fiancée.

Then he saw me, and I watched his whole face reorganize itself in real time—the flash of raw alarm, gone in half a second, buried under a smile he shoveled on top of it like dirt on a body.