Page 6

They stop talking when we come in.

Twelve men sit at the long table, jackets off, ashtrays in front of them, smoke hanging in a flat layer under the chandelier. Bottles of expensive whiskey grace the surface of the table, but the glasses are mostly untouched. A map of the city lies spread across the middle of the table, corners weighted with random things—a decanter, somebody's phone, Février's tobacco tin—and there are pencil marks on it already. Circles. The docks. The eastern crossings. Two streets I know, because there are Novak funeral homes on both of them. Ah, they’ve been discussing important business.

My father stands at the head of the table with his sleeves rolled, looking formidable as always. I swallow at the sight. Nothing frazzles me much, but the man has a way about him.

Henri Valmont is sixty-three and built like the men who used to load ships in Marseille, which is what his father did, and his grandfather before that. That was before the family found more profitable uses for the docks and brought the whole business across the Atlantic. He's got a wide frame, big chest and shoulders. He stands shorter than half his men yet fills a room just with his presence. His hair went silver at forty and he wears it brushed straight back. Sun-creased face, hooded eyes, a boxer's flattened knuckles, and his mother's gold signet ring on the pinky finger of his right hand.

My father has three types of looks I’ve seen him in: the suit, the shirtsleeves, and the apron he wears on Sundays to cook for forty people. The apron means you are family. The suit means business. The shirtsleeves mean somebody, somewhere is already dead and doesn't know it yet. And now his sleeves are rolled up.

He studies Julien for a long moment. The eye. The lip. The bandage.

Standing up, he crosses the room and takes Julien's face in both hands, gently, then kisses his forehead, murmuring something in French too low for me to catch. Julien's shoulders drop. So do mine—half an inch, stupid, hopeful.

The slap comes on the release. Open hand, full weight behind it, and the crack goes off the paneled walls like a shot. I instinctively take half a step toward him before I stop myself. Julien hits the edge of the table and folds into a chair. Nobody dares look at him. Everyone keeps studying the map, as if nothing has happened. Février turns his tobacco tin over twice.

I look at Julien though because somebody should, and because I've just set that nose and my father has just undone half my work.

"Assieds-toi, fils," my father says, unnecessarily. "And do not speak in this room tonight."

Then he comes to me, and his whole attitude changes. This is the thing about my father that people who only fear him will never understand. The tenderness is real. He can kiss Julien's forehead and break his face in the same minute and feel no contradiction at all. I've stopped waiting for him to notice one. He tilts my face to the chandelier light with two fingers under my chin, checking me the way I checked Julien in Novak's garden, and up close he smells of tobacco and cologne.

"Rien?" Nothing? "No one touched you?"

"No, Papa."

"Novak's men. Not one hand."

"He told them not to." I watch that sink in. "He stood up and told them, and they let go of me like I was suddenly contagious."

His eyes cut to the window and back, fast, and the hand on the table goes still.

"You should have called me, mon cœur."

"Because you'd have gone to war over a knife fight Julien started. And I could still fix it myself. So I fixed it."

"Yes," he agrees, almost pleasantly. "Like you do."

He gestures at the empty chair beside his own—my mother's chair, kept empty at these tables. A courtesy to a woman who never once wanted to sit there, and never pretended otherwise. I don't take it. I walk to the foot of the table instead and stand facing him down its whole length in my creased scrubs, the other men between us, and I can see him registering the situation, mulling his words, the cogs of his brain working. He's a deceptively calm man, my father, and that cold calculation in his demeanor would make the Devil shiver in hell.

"Alors," he says. "Tell me how my son is alive."

"Julien's out. Completely. No payback, not next week, not in ten years. Nobody's waiting for him." I hold his gaze. "And Nicko's situation doesn't change anything. Even if he dies, it's done."

Even if he dies. Out of my mouth like it's nothing. Like there isn't a man with four holes my brother put in him, fighting for his life.

Olivier leans into the light. He's been my father's second since before I was born; a lean, careful man wearing small round glasses, and the kind of guy who revels in paperwork. "Guaranteed how, chérie?"

He still addresses me with that endearment, as though I've never grown past the age of ten. But it isn't meant to be insulting. I'm his little girl after all, and always will be. Today though, his concern holds a different flavor—not simply mildly annoying, but invasive.

"By Laszlo Novak's word. Given to me directly, in front of his family and his men."

"His word," Sandro says, and ugly laughs.

Février doesn't laugh at all—that man, ninety if he's a day, who came over on the boat with my great-grandfather, nods at me across the table with his cloudy eyes and says, "Novak's word has a price. That family sells nothing cheap. Say the price."

They're all waiting for the answer, and the only sound is Février's thumbnail going around the rim of his tin. The hair on the back of my neck lifts anyway, like my body's worked out what I'm about to say before I've said it.

Last spring I stood in my office with a man whose daughter's scan I was holding, and I told him the thing that ended his world in the same voice I use to order coffee, because a level voice is the last kindness available.