Chapter 4 - The Currency of Blood
The penthouse suite of the Four Seasons on Atlantic Avenue overlooked the dark, churning expanse of Boston Harbor. Inside, the heating was turned up so high the air felt like a greenhouse in July, smelling of expensive tobacco, hot buttered pastry, and the specific, heavy musk of three men who had spent thirty years living off the profits of human skin and illegal steel.
Kirill Morozov sat in a low leather armchair, his raw silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel, revealing a chest covered in old prison ink—the three-headed church towers of the Vladivostok transit camps, the black stars of a Vory v Zakone on his knees. He was fifty years old, his skin the gray color of lard, his fingers short and thick like sausages as he turned a silver heavy lighter over and over in his palm.
"He’s not coming, Kirill," one of his men said from the window, a lean cutthroat from Odesa named Yuri who was cleaning his fingernails with the point of a switchblade. "The pier went silent twenty minutes ago. Matteo’s phone is dead. The Russian didn't take the bait. He’s probably back in his brownstone, crying over his adoption papers."
Kirill didn't look up from his lighter. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. "Nikolai Vulov does not cry. He is like a machine that was built in the old factory in Sofia and never oiled. If he is not at the pier, it means he is already on his way here."
"The lobby has four men," Yuri said, spitting onto the parquet floor. "The elevators require a key card. If he tries to come up with his gorillas, the desk will call before the doors even clear the mezzanine."
"Nikolai does not use the elevator," Kirill said.
The words had barely left his mouth when the floor beneath their feet shivered. It was not a loud noise—just a heavy, dull thud from the direction of the service stairwell at the end of the hall, followed by the sound of three consecutive explosions that were so fast they sounded like a single, tearing piece of canvas.
The double doors of the penthouse didn't open; they were blown off their brass hinges by a linear breaching charge, the heavy mahogany panels flying across the foyer to smash against the marble console table.
Yuri didn't even manage to open his knife. A single twelve-gauge slug from Mikhail’s shotgun caught him in the center of his chest, lifting his lean frame two feet into the air before slamming him through the plate-glass window behind him. The glass didn't shatter into pieces; it spiderwebbed outward in a massive, silver frost pattern before the wind from the harbor blew the entire sheet into the night sky, fifty stories above the street.
Nikolai walked through the smoke first. He was still in his vest, his white sleeves stained with black carbon from the Charlestown warehouse. In his left hand, he dragged Matteo Leone by the collar of his mink coat; in his right, he held a heavy chrome-plated Stechkin pistol.
He threw Matteo onto the floor in front of Kirill’s chair like a sack of spoiled fish.
"Kirill," Nikolai said, his voice dropping into that flat, rhythmic cadence that made the old prison boss stop his lighter. "You have something that belongs to me."
Kirill looked at Matteo, then at the smoking shotgun in Mikhail’s hands, then at Nikolai’s face. He didn't reach for a weapon. He knew the mathematics of the room; he was fifty years old, out of shape, and surrounded by three men whose sole function in life was the clean application of force.
"Nikolai," Kirill said, his voice smooth, speaking in the low-class dialect of the Moscow docks. "You always were too dramatic. It’s your Bulgarian blood. You think everything is an opera."
"Four years ago," Nikolai said, stepping over Matteo’s shivering body. "You paid Savino Moretti fifty thousand dollars to alter the timing on the Mack truck. You told him to make sure the woman died, but to keep the boy alive. Why?"
Kirill reached into his shirt pocket, took out an unfiltered cigarette, and lit it with his silver lighter. He blew a long stream of gray smoke toward the hole where the window used to be. "Because a dead son is just a memory, Nikolai. A dead son makes a man angry for a year, two years, and then he gets old and buys a house in Florida and forgets. But a missing son... a son who is out there somewhere, living in the mud, eating cabbage with the poor people... that is a string I can pull whenever I want."
He leaned forward, his small eyes glinting in the dim light. "I was going to wait until you signed the port treaty next month. Then I was going to send you a little piece of paper with a address in Revere. And you would have given me the Charlestown terminal, the South End warehouses, and everything else you’ve stolen from us since you arrived in this city. You would have given it to me on your knees, Nikolai."
"The address was wrong," Nikolai said.
"What?"
"The boy wasn't in Revere," Nikolai said. "Savino lost him. He got scared after I cut his throat and left him in the lard barrel. His men threw the boy into the state system to hide the evidence. He’s been sitting in a home in South Boston for eleven months."
Kirill’s cigarette paused an inch from his lips. For the first time, his grease-colored face showed a flicker of genuine surprise. "The foster houses? The little trash can where they put the orphans?" He broke into a low, wheezing laugh that turned into a coughing fit. "Oh, that is beautiful. That is the best part of the joke. You spent four years looking for a ghost in New York, and the boy was three miles from your kitchen, eating state porridge."
Nikolai didn't laugh. He reached behind him, reached through the door frame into the hallway where two of his men were holding a small, trembling figure by the hands.
He brought Milo into the room.
The boy was wearing Nikolai’s black overcoat over his shoulders now; it trailed behind him like a royal robe, the hem dragging through the gray plaster dust on the floor. He still had his hands in his pockets, his small fingers clamped around the gold signet ring beneath his sweater.
He looked at Kirill. He looked at the prison tattoos on the man’s chest.
"He has the towers," Milo said to Nikolai, his voice completely calm despite the howling wind coming through the broken window. "The third house I stayed in, Mrs. Vance, her brother had those on his arms too. He told me they mean you went to the bad place where they don't give you spoons."
Kirill Morozov stopped laughing. His eyes locked onto Milo’s face—the green eyes, the high cheekbones, the specific, arrogant tilt of the chin that had belonged to the Vulov family since the days of the Black Sea privateers.
"It’s him," Kirill whispered, his cigarette dropping from his fingers onto the Persian rug, where it began to singe the silk fibers with a small, blue wisp of smoke. "My God... the mark. He has it?"
Nikolai didn't answer with words. He raised the chrome pistol, his arm perfectly straight, his eyes fixed on the point between Kirill’s silver eyebrows.
"Nikolai, wait!" Kirill gasped, his hands rising in a sudden, desperate gesture of negotiation. "The old man... my uncle... he has the keys to the Berlin accounts! Twelve million in Deutsche Bank bonds! If you kill me, the codes die with me! You’ll never touch a rouble of it!"
"My son is worth more than your accounts," Nikolai said.
The heavy pistol fired once. The sound inside the concrete room was deafening, a sharp, flat crack that made Matteo Leone scream aloud and cover his ears. Kirill Morozov’s head jerked backward, his body slumping deep into the leather armchair, his eyes remaining wide and empty as they stared at the white ceiling.
Nikolai didn't look at the body. He turned back to Milo, his long fingers reaching down to pick up the boy’s small hand from his pocket.
"Are you hungry, Alexei?" Nikolai asked, his voice returning to that low, quiet cadence he had used in the convent.
May you like
Milo looked at the dead man in the chair, then at his father’s stained sleeves. He gave a single, small nod, the gap between his front teeth showing for a fraction of a second. "They have cookies in the kitchen here. I saw them on the way up."
"Then we will eat cookies," Nikolai said. "Mikhail, clean the room. We leave for the airport in twenty minutes."
