Page 17 of Merciless Daddy

Ilet the table breathe. I ate a little of the fish, praised the bread, gave the room ninety seconds of a man with no grievance in the world. Then I opened the slim case beside my chair, took out a single document, and laid it on the white cloth beside Yelena’s leather folder—close enough to her figures that the two pages became, unavoidably, one conversation.

“Before we discuss new capacity,” I said, to Lev, “I’d like to understand the existing commitments. This came to us through a freight broker in Newark.” A lie with clean hands; it had come to us through Angela, through a server in Zurich, through hours of her quiet fury at a keyboard. “A reservation against the Sokolov cold chain. Forty refrigerated slots monthly, Newark and Elizabeth, standing allocation. Booked through Northbridge Freight.”

I let the name sit on the tablecloth.

“Effective the first of next month,” I went on. “Which interested me. Because as I understand tonight’s arrangements, no one outside this family holds any authority over those facilities until—” I inclined my head toward my cousin—“certain paperwork is completed. Three weeks from now. So either your network is being reserved by a man who doesn’t yet own the pen, or Northbridge is booking freight it has no right to book. I came to buy space, Lev Borisovich. I’d like to know how much of it has already been promised out the back door.”

The old man’s face did nothing, which told me a great deal. A man surprised by that document would have looked at it. Lev looked at Gianni.

Gianni was already talking. Of course he was.

“This—no, no, this is nothing, this is routine, a produce contract.” His hand found the manifest and waved over it without touching it, the way a man waves over a bill he intends to dispute. “Forward planning. Any serious operator books capacity ahead. Tomatoes, citrus, I have suppliers in Calabria, in Morocco—you of all people should appreciate a man who plans, Sal. This is business hygiene. This is nothing.”

“Then it will survive one question.” I turned the manifest ninety degrees so the cargo schedule faced him. “The standing allocation declares three hundred forty tons monthly, inbound. The vehicle list attached to the reservation—” I touched the second column, “—comes to eleven trucks at maximum legal load. Which carries three hundred ten. Your nothing weighs thirty tons more than your trucks can lift, cugino. What is it that ships without a truck?”

Silence has a texture in rooms like that. This one had teeth.

“There’s a—the loads split,” Gianni said. His hands had started conducting again, faster now. “You’re reading it wrong. The tonnage includes packaging, the gross figures, and there’s a second fleet, a contracted overflow fleet out of—the numbers overlap across the reporting month, it’s an accounting convention, any freight man knows this—”

“It’s three hundred forty against three hundred ten,” Yelena said.

She said it quietly, into her wine glass almost, without looking up—the tone of a woman correcting a dinner guest’s grammar out of housekeeping rather than malice. “There is no convention that makes thirty tons weigh nothing. The gross-net spread on refrigerated produce is four percent, not ten. And we have no overflow contract with anyone.” She set the glass down. “I would know. I countersign them.”

Gianni’s face went through several colors, none of them flattering.

Lev turned his heavy head toward his daughter and said something in Russian, low and final. My Russian is dockside Russian—a decade of Balkan quays and Odessa manifests, enough to argue over demurrage and understand a threat—but I caught it clean enough: Let the men conduct the business, Yelena Lvovna.

And I caught her answer, because she made no effort to soften it: Then invite men who can add, Papa.

One of the door captains made a sound low in his throat that he converted, heroically, into a cough. Lev’s stare went flat as a frozen pond. And Gianni—Gianni leaned across the corner of the table toward his bride, dropped into Italian, and said, in the hissing register men like him mistake for privacy, “Attenta. You will not embarrass me in front of these people. Not you.”

She turned to him. She answered in Italian—beautiful Italian, the vowels polished and placed like table silver—and she said: “I corrected your arithmetic, Gianni, not your masculinity. Although I understand how you confused the two. They fail at the same moments.”

The laugh got out of me before I knew it was coming.

Understand: I do not laugh at tables like that. I have spent thirteen years constructing a man who does not laugh at tables like that, and she took him apart with one sentence in my own mother tongue. It came up out of my chest, short and real, one hard breath of it, and Pietro shifted behind me in what I knew without looking was appalled delight, and Gianni’s head snapped toward me with murder in it, and none of that was the problem.

The problem was that she turned on me.

The pale eyes came across the table like a hand slap, and she switched to English—cold, exact, American-edged English and said: “And you may stop looking so pleased with yourself. Competence is not a performance arranged for your enjoyment.”

The table waited. Lev waited.

I held her gaze. I let the smile go and gave her my actual face, which few people get, and I said, “No. But it is attractive in every language.”

And her composure faltered.

It was small. It would have been invisible from the door. Her fingers found the stem of her wine glass and held it. Not to drink. To hold something.

Heat went down through me like a mouthful of grappa, and I understood in that moment that I was in a category of trouble I had not filed a plan for. She wasn’t beautiful the way the photograph was beautiful. She was beautiful the way a well-run port is beautiful, the way accuracy is beautiful, and she had just been caught — for a quarter of a second, in front of her father and her buyer and God — being human at me, and she hated it, and the hating made it worse, and I wanted to see it again with an appetite that had nothing to do with Serafina’s mandate and everything to do with the pulse I could see ticking at the side of that throat.

“Flattery,” she said, recovered now, glacial again, every wall back up and freshly mortared, “is also not a performance I have any use for.”

“You didn’t seem to mind it,” I said.

Gianni slapped the table. “Enough of this—”

“Yes,” said Lev Sokolov, and the one word landed on all of us at once, and the room remembered whose roof it was under. But before the old man buried the moment, his pale eyes moved once between his daughter and me—slow, deliberate, appraising—and I watched him file something away.