“Take it up with the witnesses Viktor rounded up,” Aleksio says. “In other news, we got the key to the code.”
“We can read the files now?”
“Yeah,” he says. “If we had the right files. The illegal adoptions were hidden in the basement in the maintenance record files.”
“That whole raid and you took the wrong files?”
Tito comes out, Glock in hand.
“Wait! What are you doing? You’re not going back to the Worland…”
“Until Daddy wakes up, it’s what we have.”
Of course. He’ll do anything to find his brother, and when he does, he’ll love him barbarically and unconditionally.
Aleksio’s love is the dangerous kind of love that breaks all the rules. It’s him killing and kidnapping as he goes after his brother.
It’s him pulling my hair and shoving his cock in my mouth.
I shouldn’t think it’s beautiful.
He turns and leaves with his guys, through the patio door, through the house.
The front door slams. Car doors slam. I stand there alone, stupidly wistful.
Chapter Nine
Viktor
The area around Worland is quiet on a Sunday afternoon. We park a few blocks away and split up, moving through the neighborhood like shadows.
The old buildings in Chicago are very blocky. Old Moscow buildings have more imagination. I have argued with Aleksio on this.
I move alongside him. Tito and Yuri go up opposite.
We are all on edge.
Hitting this place a second time, it’s madness. We hide in the dark out of the afternoon sun, like vampires.
“He may not have heard about yesterday,” Aleksio says, hopefully.
Perhaps. But if Bloody Lazarus did hear about our raid yesterday, a raid on the same day as Aldo Nikolla’s disappearance, he may very well think of Kiro. We cannot be sure what Lazarus knows. He may have found out from Ligne where Kiro is.
Our attempts to save Kiro may get Kiro killed.
Still, this thing must be done.
We go forward. We hide. Listen.
They say a baby of twenty-some months cannot remember things, but I remember violence. I remember fear and death. My memories are more like dark scribbles than photographs. They are memories all the same.
I did not know they were American memories, however.
When Aleksio came to our garage in Moscow, I did not recognize him, but he recognized me.
With his television clothes and scruffy American hair, Aleksio looked very strange, very out of place; I wondered whether I had known him as a boy in the orphanage. And then he began to speak. A brother, he said.
Yuri came up behind me, amazed. Brat, he said. Yuri had heard nothing of what Aleksio said, but he looked at our faces and he knew that we were brothers. Yuri clapped his hand onto my shoulder, over and over, so happy. Yuri and I had come up in the orphanage together, always dreaming of family.
This orphanage was a favorite recruiting ground of the Russian mafiya. They would adopt the strong boys and raise us like fighting dogs. Vicious to the last.
“Looks clear,” Aleksio says, seeing nothing in the alley. Tito makes a hand signal, and he and Yuri flank left with some of Aleksio’s men. Our two groups have learned to move together well in the past year. Merging our techniques—his gang, my gang.
There’s a dumpster to the left, stacked-up crates from the restaurant on the other side of the alley. We flow around it, avoiding the cameras, keeping to the shadows.
I lock eyes with Yuri across the span of alley. We wait. We let the area speak to us.
Yuri and I rose up quickly within the Bratva. I was to be a Bratva soldier until they noticed my ability to mimic American actors from the television. I could understand what they were saying when nobody else could.
They sent me to classes.
I picked up the strange English grammar quickly, easily. Everybody was amazed.
Because of my good English I was made a hit man. I even spent ten days in New York once, hunting a man who attempted to flee the Bratva. Never did I imagine I was born in America, that I spent my first twenty months here—not until Aleksio came to our garage and told me about Aldo Nikolla, who killed our parents and stole our lives.
He said we would make him pay, and we would make Lazarus pay, too, because Lazarus helped him.
And we would find our baby brother, Kiro, and take back the empire.
With the blessing of my superiors, I took five of our best, including Yuri, and went with Aleksio to Chicago. It was not charity, of course, that our mafia bosses let me go. A position at the top of one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Chicago would be a good thing.
Al Capone! That’s what Mischa and the guys said when they were told they would accompany me. Each and every one of them said the name of Al Capone.
Chicago was Al Capone to me, too, until I met Aleksio.
Yuri slides up to one of the windows. He gets ears in, pressing a listening device to a small square of safety glass.
I exchange glances with Aleksio. He tips his head. So far, so good. Perhaps our enemies do not know.
Yuri steals over. “Is quiet,” he says. “Too quiet.”
Tito slips in. Tito is Aleksio’s right-hand man. His Yuri. “What’s your feeling?” Aleksio asks Tito.
“Feels like a trap, smells like a trap. Is a trap.” Tito likes to make his hair bright blond on the tips of it. He is very formidable.
“A trap,” I say.
We have men around the neighborhood, and they text in. Nobody is watching.
Aleksio looks up and down the blocky building. “The files are right inside, and we have the decode key,” he says.
No question we’ll risk it. Aldo Nikolla may or may not talk. The file is sure.
We discuss what we would do in the place of Bloody Lazarus if he thought we might be back.
“I’d think about torching the place,” Tito says. “But then I’d say, how can I go for maximum death? That says explosives to me. And if I didn’t have a lot of time? Explosives connected to the door.”
“Or to the alarm system,” I say. “Sound, vibration.”
We narrow it down to the door. Easiest, smartest, fastest.
“Then maybe we should go up the side. Up that old fire escape.” Aleksio points. The fire escape is half falling apart, but it’s still up. “What happens if we break that window?”
I pick up a brick and hurl it. It sails into the window with a crash. We press against the wall, waiting for an explosion.
Nothing. So we have our entrance.
We argue about who’ll go in. “I’m not sending anybody in somewhere where I won’t go myself,” Aleksio growls. He’s like that, a strong leader.
But the girl will be trouble.
Aleksio creeps up the side and leaps to the lowest rung of the fire escape. The apparatus creaks as he begins to climb, balancing on the edges, seasoned criminal that he is. When he is the three stories up top, he throws his jacket over the sill and lifts himself up by his fingers.
He makes it look easy. It is not easy, though.
Aleksio is a strong ally, but a girl like that Mira will weaken him.
I loved a girl once, and then I had to kill her.
Killing the girl I loved weakened me very much for a very long time.
When Aleksio is half in the third-floor window, and explosion tears out from the floor below him. The wall buckles.