Chapter One
Hello
The last ticket came in at 11:40, a mixed grill for table nine, and Alexander cooked it the way he cooked everything: without hurry and without waste.
Behind him the kitchen was coming apart for the night. Rami was scraping the flat-top and singing badly in Arabic. The dishwasher had the radio up. Someone had dropped a tray of glasses an hour earlier, and a few shards still glittered under the prep table where the broom had missed them.
Alexander noticed the shards. He noticed most things: the back door propped open with a crate for twenty minutes, a car idling on the street outside longer than a car should before it finally drove away. He noted each one, and let it go. Six years in this country had taught him how to let things go. Before that, nobody had ever asked him to.
He plated the lamb, wiped the rim and slid it under the heat lamp.
“Service,” he said.
It was the most he would say all night.
* * *
The apartment was a twelve-minute walk from the restaurant, up a hill that smelled of jasmine and diesel. He walked it every night the same way. And every night, somewhere around the pharmacy with the broken green cross, he caught himself checking the reflections in its windows. An old habit. He had tried to break it. Layla said he walked like a cat that expected to be kicked.
She was the only person who had ever teased him without wondering afterward whether she should have.
The kitchen light was on. She always waited up, though he told her not to. Nour would be asleep in the crib by the window, one fist up beside her face like a tiny boxer. Eleven months old. She had his eyes, Layla said. He hoped not. He hoped she had nothing of his at all.
He climbed the stairs. Third floor. The bulb on the landing was out.
That, he should not have let go.
He had the key in the lock when the air behind him moved. Not a sound. A change in the air, as if someone on the landing had just breathed in. Fourteen years in the house among the birches turned him halfway around before the thought had finished, his hand already rising.
Halfway was not enough.
Something heavy came down behind his ear. The landing tilted, and the stairwell folded up into black.
* * *
Water woke him. Cold, thrown in his face.
He came up the way he had been taught: eyes closed, breathing unchanged, listening before moving. Three men, maybe four. Cigarette smoke and gun oil. His own kitchen; he knew the hum of that refrigerator. His wrists were bound behind a chair with plastic ties, his ankles to its legs. Tight. Professional.
“He’s awake,” someone said in Russian. “Don’t pretend, Sasha. You were never good at pretending.”
Russian. In his kitchen. Alexander opened his eyes.
Layla was on her knees by the stove, hands tied in front of her, tape across her mouth. Her eyes found his and held on, wide and wet, asking a question he couldn’t answer. A man stood behind her with a pistol against the back of her head.
A second man held Nour.
He held her badly, out from his body like something he had never held before, her small legs kicking. She wasn’t screaming, only crying the thin, tired cry of a baby woken in the night. The man had a gun in his other hand and seemed to have forgotten which one mattered.
There were four of them. Alexander counted them as he had once counted exits. The man in the doorway, smoking. The two at the stove. And the fourth, leaning against the kitchen table with his arms crossed: a man with a heavy face Alexander almost knew, the way you almost know a word in a language you’ve stopped speaking.
“Six years,” the man said. “You cook now. Grilled chicken for tourists.” He laughed. “Did you know you’re on the internet, Sasha? The old man’s golden boy.”
Alexander said nothing. He measured the distance to the knife block. Four meters. He tested the zip ties against the chair’s back rail. Cheap pine; Layla had bought the chairs secondhand. Maybe, with time. He had no time. He had a gun at his wife’s head and his daughter in the arms of a man who didn’t know how to hold her.
“You know what you did,” said the man with the heavy face. “You killed the man who raised you. Who fed you. Who made you.” He pushed off the table and crouched so their faces were level. His breath smelled of mint over something rotten. “There are rules, Sasha. You hunted men who broke them. You know better than anyone what happens.”
“Let them go,” Alexander said.
Three words. His voice sounded strange to him. Calm, even now. He hated that it was calm.
“Let them go,” the man repeated, as if tasting it. “He speaks.”
He stood, taking his time, and nodded once to the men at the stove.
“The new boss,” he said, “says hello to you.”
Alexander was already moving. The chair came off the floor with him, the pine rail cracking, his whole body throwing itself toward the stove.
The first shot was loud in the small kitchen.
The second was louder.
Then the crying stopped.
He was on the floor without remembering the fall. A boot was on his neck. Someone was hitting him with the butt of a pistol, again and again, and he didn’t feel it. He was looking across the tiles at Layla’s hand, open, palm up, as if she were reaching for something.
“His face,” said the voice above him. “The boss doesn’t want him pretty.”
The knife was cold at first, and then it wasn’t.
He didn’t scream. He would think about that afterward: that even then, he did not scream. As if some part of him the old man had built was still standing guard over a house that had already burned down.
When they stood him up against the wall, he could see through only one eye, and only red.
The man with the heavy face raised his pistol.
“Six,” he said to the others. “So we’re sure.”
He fired six times.
Alexander felt the first two. After that he felt only the floor, the cold of the tiles against his cheek, and the hum of the refrigerator going on and on, as if nothing had happened in the room at all.
Footsteps. A door. Laughter on the stairs. Then nothing.
Then, far away, from somewhere he had not been since he was five years old, a woman’s voice, singing.
