“No, it’s fine. I didn’t know him–know him, you know?” Her whole body flooded with a smile that I caught when I glanced sidelong at her. “But yes… about that call. I have something I need to talk to you about in private. Do you have time to visit my house?”
Her house? My shoulders stiffened. “No, no. Not today, sorry. But we could go down to the boardwalk. No one will hear.”
“Well, as in, I heard something around the office, and it needs to be somewhere really private.” The smile fixed on her face like a mask. “What about your place?”
My place was a pigsty, post-Yuri. Under the best of circumstances, having a strange woman in my apartment was barely more comfortable than being in the apartment of a strange woman. I glanced furtively at the cashier. “There’s another deli near here where I have access to the back. We can go there and talk.”
“I don’t know, Alexi.” Jana ducked her head a little, and before I could stop her, she reached out and touched my bare forearm with light fingers. Her eyes widened, as surprised as I was by the brief contact, and her hand flew back like she’d been burned. Just as well. “It, um, it involves Lev. But I guess it can wait.”
“Yes. In that case, it should wait.” Feeling increasingly guarded and paranoid, I took a step back from her. If it involved Lev and my investigation, then it couldn’t wait at all. “Look, the boardwalk will be busy, but no one will be listening. As long as we’re moving in a crowd, it’s the safest place for us to be. Even if someone I know sees us there, it’s easily explained. You are clearly an attractive woman.”
“All right, well, that works. Here, I’ll pick that up for you.” She blushed. This poised, confident attorney suddenly looked as shy and awkward as I felt, fumbling her purse a little as she bumped into me again. She slapped a ten down on the cash plate in front of the buxom cashier, who was watching the pair of us as judgmentally as only an old Russian woman could. I grimaced at her, bundled my cheap food, and snatched up the change before I followed Jana’s swishing skirt out the door.
We stuck to the shadow of the bridge as we walked, shoulder to shoulder. Jana was vibrating with tension. I noticed she still had her jacket on, and she hadn’t loosened the buttons. There was only ever one reason I did that when it was this hot: I was carrying. It was hard to say if she was, not without staring rudely at her chest.
As soon as we rounded the fruit stand and started up the quieter street towards the seashore, she sighed heavily and picked up the pace. It was quieter than I expected, which meant we could actually walk at a normal speed instead of being bogged down in beachgoing families and throngs of old people and fox terriers.
Jana waited until no one was nearby. “Alexi, I have to warn you. I think you need to get out of this mess. I don’t know what you can do, but from what I overheard Lev say this morning, you’re in real danger.”
“That’s not really anything I can control,” I replied. “Things like this are inherently dangerous. What did you hear?”
“I don’t think Vincent’s even missing,” she said. Her heels clicked quickly on the concrete beside my own silent shoes. “I overheard Lev talking to someone on the phone this morning. He was saying he had someone looking for Vincent, but from what I could make out, Lev’s in on it with someone. I wanted to call you and warn you, but when I tried this morning…”
“I was out of the house.” My intuition pinged me strangely as Jana spoke. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case, that Lev was playing another level of subterfuge. The game of politics was one of direction and misdirection. But why?
“It’s a sham, Alexi,” Jana said. She looked around as we crossed the road and mounted the ramp leading up onto the boardwalk. It was busy, though not as much as I feared. There was space between the people. “The whole thing. I don’t know as much about the business as you do, obviously, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with Vincent at all.”
Would Lev lie to my face like that? Probably. He and anyone else in the Organization would lie to their own grandmothers if it suited them, and Vassily’s remark on the amount of money I was being offered to find Vincent Manelli was not out of turn. Maybe he had hit it on the head. Maybe we were being herded down a cattle chute by our elders, and we needed to get them before they got us. “And what exactly was said?”
“There was some arguing, and that’s what got me to stop by his door. It got quiet after that… but I heard him say Vincent was secure somewhere and he had ‘someone’ looking for him anyway.” Jana’s face flushed, whether from heat or embarrassment at having to report on her boss, I could not say. “I knew he was talking about you, and I also know Lev very well, Alexi. He’s cunning, and he’s ruthless.”
It was true that the only other person who’d known I was searching for Vincent was my Avtoritet. I remembered Carmine’s ‘little bird’ speech. Someone had tipped him off as to my whereabouts. Lev had known I was going to speak to Jana in the morning, and while I was waiting for and seeing her, my car was rigged. It seemed… elementary. One of those things that was so obvious you didn’t want to see it. I looked out over the ocean, rubbing my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “That begs the question, though. Why would you be so eager to warn me of such a thing?”
“You seem like a polite and intelligent man, and, well…” Jana’s mouth quirked, and she shrugged. “It’s not very often I meet men in your line of work who can hold a conversation. I don’t really have the moral high ground or anything, but I don’t like hearing someone get set up by those in power without even the ability to defend themselves. That’s why I became an attorney in the first place.”
I felt an inexplicable chill pass through me, and with it came Yuri’s words from the night before. You’re already a slave. “Well, yes. And I think that’s a very moral thing to do, actually. I appreciate it.”
“Appreciate it enough you might want to go to Tatiana’s with me on Wednesday night?” A sly gleam lit Jana’s eyes, and suddenly, her confidence was back full-force. She could play the flirt from a distance, as long as we weren’t actually touching, and maybe… maybe I could work with that.
That probably wasn’t a bad idea. Crina wouldn’t mind—or at least, I didn’t think she’d mind—and Vassily would have no reason to continue to doubt my masculinity. As I considered my reply, I looked away and then behind us… and noticed the standout.
He had his hands in his jacket pockets: a heavy puffer jacket and jeans, like what a dockworker would wear. The coat was far, far too heavy for the weather, bulked out around the middle. But that wasn’t the only thing I noticed. He was wearing a baseball cap that did nothing to disguise his likeness to Frank Nacari’s license photo.
“We need to turn the corner and get back to the Ave,” I said abruptly. I patted down my pockets. No knife, no mirror, no gun. I had left it all in the glove compartment. How professional.
“Hmm?” Jana’s eyebrows quirked.
“We’re being scoped,” I replied. We had just passed the start of Brighton 3rd. As the mouth of the street loomed, the rest of my skin began to creep.
“Are you sure we’re being followed? I mean—”
“Do you have a compact mirror?” I motioned to her purse.
Lips pressed together, Jana nodded. She fumbled around in her bag until she came up with her powder, which she opened and lifted up to reflect between us. I glanced back: sure enough, there he was. He was nearly the spitting image of Frank’s license photo, but older. Different hairstyle, and not wholly identical, but closely related. His expression was one of blank determination.