“Aren’t those supposed to be attractive qualities in men?”
Crina laughed again, more loudly than before. “Maybe if you’re a masochist. And, well, I’ll put it to you this way. If I were at Misha’s or Petro’s house, or pretty much any other guard’s place, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”
“As in… none of them would know how to ask these questions, Alexi.” Her smile became gentler. “It’s all ‘me me me’ with those kinds of guys. Suck my cock, dance in my lap, but don’t dare hang around: that’d be ‘clingy.’”
It was true, and something which this whole mess had been making clearer and clearer as the days went by. I shrugged. “I did just ask you a very selfish question.”
“Hey, you asked something about me first.” She mirrored me, my head and hands. I noticed it because it was the sort of thing an interrogator would do. “What makes you think you’re not good with people? You just seem like the quiet, confident type.”
I looked at her clear brown eyes and held them for a moment before I concluded she wasn’t trying to mine anything serious from me. She was safe. “To be honest, the only reason I’m still alive is Vassily. His family took me in at a young age when I left my home. It was… not a good place. I couldn’t speak much, or communicate normally, and I was violent, angry. His grandmother and sister took me in… I protected Vassily from his elder brothers, and he taught me how to talk to other people.”
“Taught you?” She looked confused but interested.
My expression turned distant, and I looked towards the bookshelves and the unused radio on the coffee table. “Yes. He would tell me when I needed to say certain things, or not. ‘Hello,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘please.’ I still forget, now and then—to say those things, that is. We worked out some hand signals, these little rituals to prompt me to do the right things at the right time. As I grew older, I got better at it. When he went to prison, I had to learn to do it myself.”
“Have you met anyone else with the same problem?”
I shook my head. “No. Everything I’ve read suggests some kind of neurological disorder. Autism, maybe. But no… Vassily was a boon. He was very patient when he was younger. Now? Not so much. Our careers diverged at the end of college. He went into business and I… went into other business.”
Crina sucked her lip under her teeth and let it go with a little pop. “Is the rage-thing better now you’re older?”
“I don’t really want to talk more about myself,” I demurred, looking away.
“If you’re worried that I’m bored, I’m really not.”
The whole thing was making me increasingly uncomfortable. Vassily had taught me to take strangers at their word when they expressed curiosity, but to bring it back to the other person as soon as possible. “I don’t know. The social element has been static. Fortunately, faces have patterns. If people stay the same, I look for the patterns and the colors.”
“Colors?”
“In their voices.” I’d never quite grasped how others missed them. The colors and textures and scents in sounds were so vivid as to be overwhelming. “And in sounds of all kinds, actually. They make… colors. Scents.”
Crina seemed strangely impressed by that. She was silent for several seconds as she digested the concept, as Vassily had tried to do so long ago. “What color’s my voice?”
“Yellow. Usually.” I didn’t hesitate, grateful she’d claimed her attention at last. “And effervescent. Sometimes it bleeds more towards green, and then it smooths out back towards yellow.”
“Green’s my favorite color.” She grinned. “This is great, and I don’t think you’re really that awkward. Maybe you just need to hang around the right people. Get out of the ivory tower a bit more, let out your hair.” She paused for a moment, and then chuckled. “Not that I’m necessarily the ‘right’ people, but you know what I mean.”
“Not really, I’m afraid. My dealings with living people are usually fairly short and to the point.” I checked the clock on the other side of the room, noting the time, and slid from my seat. In defiance of what I’d just told her about being better with common cues, I nearly walked off on her and started packing up but remembered myself just as I jerked away from the breakfast bench. “I… really have to get going. There’s things I must do at home.”
“Okay.” Crina rose and smoothed down her borrowed jeans. They fit her snugly but were rolled at the cuffs. I guessed they were Anya’s. “I’ll go with you. I really don’t want to stay here with Vanya the Lounge Lizard.”
“No doubt.” I glanced aside for a moment. “Thank you.”
“For what?” She had been walking away herself, but stopped as I spoke.
“For last night. The beginning of the night, and the end.”
Her mouth curled up in a cat’s smile. “It sucked pretty hard… I can’t lie. But that’s okay. We aren’t going to be able to make our date tonight, are we?”
“I don’t think so.” And I was genuinely regretful. “We both need sleep.”
Crina’s lips twitched as she looked down, then back at my face. Her eyes were very brown, a lambent amber that reminded me strongly of a bird of prey. “You owe me another one once all this is over. Don’t forget it.”
We got dressed and took the subway. It was only two stops to Brighton Beach. I got off there, and Crina carried on the Q line to wherever it was she lived. It was usually a seven-minute walk from the station to my apartment, but this time, it was more like twenty. The cut from the glass shard was inflamed and painful, though not infected. I considered the elevator but decided against it, hobbling up the stairs to my floor. A letter-sized, plain white envelope was stuffed half underneath my front door.
Curiously, I limped over and picked it up. I could be lucky, for once, and it was some vital clue from a helpful participant in the Manelli–Yaroshenko drama. Given how variable my luck was, it could also be that someone sent me a packet of anthrax. I cracked the seal carefully, holding my breath just in case, but it was nothing but an ordinary sheet of yellow steno notebook paper.
“Sergei arrived 0030 Tuesday,” read Nic’s blocky, heavy penciled hand. “Lev back in office. No arrests. Both S & L want to see you Wed 8pm at #2.”
Sergei, back already? My heart froze in my chest. Back already, and he wanted to see me. And I had nothing to show for it, no success, and no excuse. No Vincent. I hadn’t protected Vassily and Lev like I was supposed to. And Sergei was going to want to know how and why I’d killed my father.
Resigned, I tucked the letter into my sweaty jacket and let myself in. I went through the motions: fed the cat, showered, shaved, found a container of pelmeni and salad left over from that first lunch I’d had with Vassily. The dumplings were dry and the cabbage and mayonnaise a little too pink, but I ate mechanically, staring off into the too-quiet apartment.
Mariya had tried her best, but she was wrong. Things weren’t going to be okay. I was cold as I thought back over the previous night. I was, quite frankly, fucked. I had no leads, no way to combat the array of half-seen forces against me. I was sure it all came back to Carmine, Carmine and Lev. If I didn’t kill Carmine soon, he was going to kill me. He’d seen me at the casino, and even if by some miracle the Vigiles had caught him, he was probably going to get out sooner than later.
As if detecting my need for inspiration, Binah ran into the kitchen with a rolled-up sock in her mouth, meowing around it, and dropped it helpfully at my feet. I snorted, bent down, and threw it. She chased after it like a dog and brought it back again, making muffled sounds of triumph through the cotton. We played this until she dropped it near the fridge, batting and clawing at the toy as she scooted around on her side. I watched her indulgently—and then almost magnetically, my eyes were drawn to the freezer door. And suddenly, it clicked.