“Put up? With what, Lekshi?”
“This bullshit. Your addiction.” I sat up and turned so he couldn’t see my face. “You’re going to clean yourself up.”
“Hey, hey. What? I’m not… not…”
“No. That’s not how this works. I know it’s not how it works. And if you don’t get clean, that’s it. You’re moving out. I won’t have this in my house.”
My words hung in another protracted period of silence. When Vassily spoke again, his voice cracked. “That’s fucked. You’d break off with me because… ‘cause I went on a bender?”
I knew what cocaine did to people. I’d never used, never dreamed of using, but I’d seen enough people use it like this to know what happened afterward. The gibbering and gabbering, the violence, the superman complex, the burnout. “After your lecturing of me last night?” My voice felt cold in my own throat. “I watched my father destroy my mother and himself with this kind of behavior. Thanks to you, I just had to relive every day I spent cleaning up after them. If you want to kill yourself, fine. But I won’t hold your hand while you jump.”
Vassily lay on his pile of pillows, stunned. “You’d kill me?”
“I didn’t say that,” I replied. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“Yeah…” He looked up past his arm at the ceiling. “Yeah. I guess.”
“And in unrelated news, you have a parole meeting in—” I checked my watch. “Fifty minutes.”
“Parole?” Vassily’s eyes narrowed, then widened like blue saucers. “Oh, fuck. FUCK! Shitfuckmothershit.”
“Yes. And you’re going. I brought your suit. So come on, get up.”
As I pulled away from the bed, a wiry hand clapped around my wrist and stopped me in my tracks. Vassily’s right hand, the one with the intricately inked skull. A snake’s tail wove through it, part of a design that wound its way up his arm to his bare shoulder.
“Lexi… don’t kick me out.” His voice was higher than what I was used to hearing, fragile and desperate. “Please. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again, all right?”
How many times had I heard it? The pleading, the ‘it won’t happen again’? Grigori always said the same thing. The last bender was always the last. Then came the storm clouds, the bad mood, the stressful day, and the bottles returned to the house.
“Sure thing.” Heavily, I reached back and clasped Vassily’s hand before peeling it from my arm. “Come on now, get up. It’s time we got back to the real world.”
We were nearly fifteen minutes late to the parole center. Every light on our route turned red before we reached the line, and by the time I’d dropped Vassily off at the office, surly but functionally sober, I wanted to kill something. My car smelled like vomit and pepper-flavored liquor. I wanted to take my fist to every jaywalking pedestrian, every yappy dog, and every shrieking toddler. I was stranded at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy, unable to get a day—just one day—to rest.
The whole mess of circumstance contracted around me, a tight sheath of stress. Yuri, Carmine, my aching knee, the bruises and cuts from the night before—wholly unnoticed by my supposed best friend—the dreams and sense of impeding sickness. I parked on the side of the road and just fought to breathe, hands shaking. This was bullshit. Absolute bullshit. I wasn’t supposed to feel like this. I was a hard man, a spook. And I was struggling with nothing. The oppressive stickiness of the air, the tackiness of my own skin. Nothing.
But a whole lot of nothing makes a something, a small voice said. It makes a NOthing.
Vassily had done a lot of stupid shit in his life, but not drugs. He modeled his father religiously. Simon Lovenko had been everything my father was not, to hear Mariya tell it; a real Vor v Zakone, a handsome ringmaster steeped in thief’s honor and gypsy romanticism. He’d sworn himself clean his whole life, and Vassily had followed in his footsteps… until now. It had been one of the things we’d kept to together as teens, as young adults. We sold drugs; we didn’t take them. We were smarter than that.
What had happened to him in prison? What had they done to him?
Deliriously, I stepped out from the car onto the sweltering pavement. I was back on the Ave under the rail bridge. It was the end of the lunch hour rush, and Brighton Beach Avenue was a packed ambulating gallery of the soon-to-be-former USSR. The cacophony was almost too much to stand, but I had to eat. I had enough energy to either cook or start thinking and looking for Vincent. The former was the more optional option.
But where to even start? I knew how to find people, but missing persons leads weren’t really my specialty. If I’d wanted to train as a detective, I’d have sold my soul to the mussora, the Vigiles Magicarum, for a badge. The only place I’d known to look for sure was Vincent’s house, and I hadn’t been able to find much there. It was a no-go zone now. The Laguettas probably knew his hangouts, but asking around too much about someone like Vincent was dangerous. The Mexican cartels wanted him. Manelli wanted him. Also, asking the wrong people—people who didn’t know he was missing—would cost Lev face. It wasn’t a good idea to cause your Avtoritet a loss of face. All I had after that was Jana, and maybe Yuri’s friends. Of the two options, I preferred dealing with Jana.
That wasn’t much, but it was something. I decided I’d deal with it at home: sleep, food, shower, not necessarily in that order, and then a call in to Jana. It was almost a plan, but I still had the nagging sense that I was forgetting something. Something about Monday night, tonight.
I avoided Mariya’s, even though I’d normally go there for lunch. I couldn’t face her. Instead, I walked half a block to M & I, the neighborhood’s old workhorse deli. I slunk in through the sliding doors and went for the self-serve window, where I numbly scooped chicken katleti and salad into a plastic dish. Kutkha was a distant presence, masked by a smokescreen of fatigue and self-pity. ‘True Magus’ my ass.
“Alexi!” A familiar smiling face with a braided corona of neat blonde hair loomed up in the corner of my bleary eye.
I nearly threw the dish and the ladle at the wall. I flinched and slammed the food down on the counter instead. “Bozhe,[22] Jana. Oh. Good morning. Afternoon, I mean.”
All faces briefly turned to look before they were once again downcast.
Jana’s hand went to her mouth. She was made up and dressed for work, perfectly crisp in the muggy heat. There was not a single blemish on her spotless white blouse. “Sorry. I just saw you, and thought…”
“No. It’s fine.” It was in that moment I remembered that I hadn’t shaved in two days. I probably reeked of vomit and certainly smelled of old fear, sweat, and violence. “In fact, I was about to go home and give you a call.”
“You were?” she said. “That’s funny. I was just getting lunch, and then I was going to call you and ask you how things were going.”
If Kutkha was right and the universe was a living creature, then it was a merciless sadist with a bad sense of humor. I turned back to the double boiler and resumed dishing up, unable to stop the flush that crept across my cheeks and down my collar. “How serendipitous. I didn’t know you came up this way for lunch.”
“Mmhmm.” Her mouth quirked ruefully, and she took a container herself. “My usual place closed for the day. The son of the manager died.”
“No one escapes life alive,” I replied. It felt dull and sour coming out of my mouth, and I fumbled with the lid as I boxed up the dish. “No… I apologize. For that. I shouldn’t say such a thing.”