Chapter 15
Dominic Varga
The Anvil Boxing Club had been a cold-storage warehouse before it was a gym, and it still smelled faintly of the sea.
It stood at number fourteen Pier Road, three hundred yards from Teddy's shop, a long brick shed with a rusted steel door and a hand-painted sign that showed a gloved fist swinging a hammer. A line of cracked windows ran along the top, blacked out with tar. Inside, behind the walls, he could hear the dull rhythmic thud of heavy bags and the squeak of shoes on canvas, and a man's voice calling time. Two boys in hooded sweatshirts sat on the steps outside, passing a cigarette. They looked at the stranger in the old gray suit and the splinted wrist as he crossed the road, and one of them said something low. The other laughed.
He didn't stop. He walked up the steps between them, and one rose.
"We're closed."
"No, you're not."
"It's Sunday. Members only." The boy was about nineteen. He had a boxer's cauliflowered ear and a gold chain, and a swagger that did not quite fit. "You a member?"
"I'm here for Dominic."
"Mr. Varga doesn't see walk-ins."
"Tell him it's the man from 2009."
The boy frowned. He glanced at the other, who shrugged. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"He'll know."
"Mr. Varga doesn't—"
"Tell him," said Damen, "the man his brother was waiting for."
He said it quietly. There was no menace in it. But something in the flat, tired voice, or in the way the stranger's eyes rested on the boy's face, a long, mild, entirely uninterested look, made the swagger drain slowly out of the boy's shoulders. He stood a moment longer. Then he turned, and opened the steel door, and went in without a word.
The second boy dropped the cigarette.
They made him wait in a long concrete corridor with a green line painted on the floor.
It was lined on both sides with framed photographs. Boxers, mostly, in trunks, with their gloves raised: heavyweights from the fifties, middleweights from the seventies, a local legend called Tommy the Hammer, who had lost an eye in 1984 and gone on fighting. Posters for bouts. A newspaper cutting from 1991. And near the end, in a plain black frame, a color photograph of two young men in their twenties, with their arms round each other's necks, grinning, sweaty, in tracksuits, one big and fair and broad-faced, the other smaller and darker and more watchful, both with the same square jaw.
Dominic and Andrei, thought Damen. Nineteen ninety-six.
He stood in front of it. He had not looked at that face in sixteen years.
He remembered it very clearly. A rainy night in 2009; a fire escape, a lit window, a man in a vest at a kitchen table counting money. A name on a slip of paper that had been placed in his hand by a gentle voice. He has been stealing from us, Damen. Not much. A little. But a little is the thing that matters. He remembered the weight of the silencer. He remembered the man looking up, mild and surprised, with a stack of twenties in his fist. He remembered that the man's last words had not been a plea, but a question.
Does Dom know?
No, he had said.
Then don't tell him, said Andrei Varga. He'd make a mess of it.
Damen looked at the grinning face in the frame.
I never did, he thought. Tell him.
"That was a good-looking boy," said a voice behind him.
He turned his head. Without hurrying, as one turns toward a draft.
At the far end of the corridor, in the doorway of an office, stood a very big man.
He was fifty-two. He was six feet four, and heavy, with a thick sloping neck, a gray crew cut, a big bruised ruin of a face and hands like shovels. His nose had been broken so often that it lay flat. He wore a white undershirt and gray sweatpants, and in the crook of his arm, held as a man holds a newspaper, was a sawn-off shotgun. A small pair of reading glasses hung from a cord on his chest. He looked like a retired bear.
Behind him, in the gloom of the office, two men stood against the wall. Damen noted them. Both had guns. Neither was pointing it.
"I thought you were dead," said Dominic Varga.
"I was."
"Not enough." The heavy face did not move. "I heard you got married."
"Yes."
"I heard you had daughters."
"I did."
"Past tense."
"I have two," said Damen. "One's eighteen. One's twelve."
Varga stood and looked at him. The silence stretched. In the gym beyond the wall a bag thudded, thudded, and a bell rang for the end of a round, and in the corridor the light from a high window fell in a long cold slab across the green line. Damen stood in it. He didn't raise his hands. He didn't reach for the revolver in his waistband, which he knew perfectly well the man could see. He stood as he had stood in a hundred doorways, upright, patient, at ease, and looked back at the man whose brother he had killed.
"You came to my house," said Varga, slowly.
"Yes."
"You walked in the front door of a place I own, with a gun in your belt, and asked for me by name."
"Yes."
"You must want to die very much."
"I don't," said Damen. "But I've no time to be polite."
The first of the two men moved before the sentence ended.
He had been standing against the wall with a short black pistol held low along his leg, and as he came off it he was already lifting it, a big, quick, good-looking man in a leather jacket, with a scar down his cheek and a look of relish. The muzzle came up. Damen was already inside the arc.
He caught the wrist with his right hand, twisted, and drove his splinted left elbow into the man's throat.
It was not a nice sound. The man made a noise like a boot in mud. The gun went off, once, into the ceiling, in a flat enormous crack that brought plaster rattling down, and Damen swung him round by the arm and used the body to take the second shot. It struck him high in the chest; the big man grunted and went limp. Damen let him fall. He was already moving. The second man had the pistol up. Damen threw the dead man's weight into him, driving him backward into the doorframe, and brought the butt of the revolver down on his wrist; the pistol fell. A knee came up. It took Damen in the thigh. He rolled his hip, took the second man by the collar, and hit him once in the face.
It was a short, flat, precise blow. The nose gave under his knuckles. The man's eyes rolled. He hung from Damen's fist for a second, like a coat, and then collapsed on the green line.
It had taken perhaps four seconds.
The corridor was very quiet. Damen stood with his back to the wall, breathing hard, and a dark thread of blood, his own, ran from his sleeve to his knuckles. His shoulder was a wet furnace. His wrist sang. He felt the old rhythm in him like a drum, and under it, rising, a terrible light dizziness; and he had the clear cold thought, as one has an observation about the weather, that he had nearly died.
And Dominic Varga had not moved.
He stood in the doorway of the office with the sawn-off shotgun in the crook of his arm. He had not raised it. He was looking at the body on the floor, the man in the leather jacket with the hole in his chest, and at the one beyond him, groaning and blowing bubbles of blood. Then he lifted his eyes to Damen's face.
"That was Rafe," he said. "He was my sister's boy."
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not."
"No." Damen's voice was steady. "I'm not. He shot at me."
"He's twenty-six."
"Then he's old enough."
The big man looked at him a moment longer. Something moved far back in the ruined face, slowly, like a fish in dark water. He lifted the shotgun. It rose, an inch at a time, until the twin barrels pointed at the middle of Damen's chest, six feet away, and he put his thumb on the hammer.
"Give me one reason," said Varga, softly.
"Mercer."
The thumb stopped.
"What about him?"
"He's marked your gym on a map." Damen drew it out of his coat with two fingers, slowly, and held it up. "Number fourteen. With your name beside it. He's watching the shop on Pier Road, and he's marked the next three buildings along. He's planning a sweep. Not for me. For you." He kept his eyes on the man's. "I don't know why. I can guess."
"Guess."
"He's cleaning house. The old man's dying. He's taking the Docks."
Varga looked at the map. He did not take it. He stood very still, with the shotgun rock-steady and the great hands whitening on the stock.
"Nobody takes my Docks," he said.
"He already has."
"He hasn't—"
"Dom." One of the men in the corridor said it, low, from the floor. "Dom. He's right. Ask Petrie. They've been round to Petrie's. They've been round to all of us. They want a cut." He tried to rise and failed. "Mercer says Mr. Strand's too sick to run the Docks and he's got the right."
"Shut up, Sully."
"He's offered—"
"I said shut up."
The big man did not turn his head. His small eyes, in their pouches of scar, never left Damen's face. He stood so long without moving that the light from the window shifted on the floor.
"What do you want?"
"Sit down with me."
"I've sat down with you once. It cost my brother his life."
"Yes," said Damen. "I know. I'd like to tell you about it."
It was a small, cold, cluttered office, with a metal desk, a leather chair split at the seam, and a bare bulb. A calendar from a tire company hung askew on the wall. On the desk stood a bottle of Hungarian plum brandy, a glass, a photograph of a woman in a gold frame, and a heap of unpaid bills. Varga lowered himself into the chair. The shotgun lay across his knees. He did not offer Damen a seat.
Damen stood.
"Sixteen years ago," he said, "I was sent to a flat on Dunmore Street. I was given a name and a night. I was told the man was stealing."
"Andrei didn't steal."
"He did."
Varga's knuckles whitened.
"A little. Not for himself. Your sister's daughter had leukemia, in 2008. There was a clinic in Switzerland. It cost sixty thousand dollars. He took it from the count, a few hundred at a time, over four months, and put it in an account in her name." Damen's voice was perfectly level. "He didn't tell you. He knew you'd go to the old man. He thought he'd put it back."
The heavy face had gone slowly gray.
"How do you know that?"
"Because I read the file after." He met the small eyes. "I read everything, after. It was a habit. It's what I did, to stop myself from thinking. I read the papers the night I killed him, and I found the receipts, and the account, and the child's name. She lived. She's twenty-two."
"Her name's Lia."
"I know."
"She doesn't know who paid."
"No."
The big man sat motionless. In the bare yellow light his face looked carved from a block of wet clay. The shotgun had slid a little on his knees. He seemed to have forgotten it.
"He asked me one thing," said Damen. "At the end. He asked if you knew. I said no. He said: then don't tell him. He'd make a mess of it." He swallowed. "I never did. I thought you'd rather not know. I've thought about it for sixteen years."
"You thought."
"Yes."
"You thought." The voice that came out of Dominic Varga was thick and strange. "You stood in my brother's kitchen and shot him in the head, and for sixteen years you've been thinking."
"I did what I was paid to do."
"Is that what it is?"
"It's all it ever was," said Damen. "I've never pretended otherwise. I've no excuse. I'd rather you knew." He was swaying a little now; he could feel it, and he put his good hand on the desk. "I didn't come for forgiveness. I came because the man who gave me that order has taken my wife and my daughter. And the man who carried it out for him is the same one who's about to take your Docks. And you are the only man in this city who has a reason to want him dead."
Varga said nothing.
"I'm not asking you to like me," said Damen. "I'm asking you to be as angry as you are."
The big man was silent for a long time.
Then, without a word, he reached out and picked up the bottle of plum brandy. He poured a single inch of it into the glass. He drank it, in one swallow, and set the glass down, and poured another, and held it out across the desk.
Damen took it.
His hand was shaking. The liquor burned, a clean rough fire down his throat, and for a moment the floor seemed to tilt and then settled. He stood with the empty glass. Across the desk, Varga was not looking at him. He was looking at the photograph in the gold frame, the woman with the dark hair and the wide smile, and his thumb moved slowly over the corner of the glass.
"My wife," he said. "Katya. Cancer. Two thousand and eleven." A pause. "Andrei sat with her every Tuesday. He brought her pastries from a place on Hallam Street. She said he was the only person who made her laugh."
"I didn't know."
"You wouldn't." The voice was low. "I'd have killed you with my hands if I'd known where to find you. I looked for sixteen years." He lifted his head, and the small eyes were wet. "And you walk in at noon with a gun in your belt and tell me you were sorry."
"I am."
"I could break your neck."
"Yes."
"I could do it very slowly."
"Yes," said Damen. "But then Strand wins."
The big man laughed. It was a short, ugly, shuddering sound. It broke into pieces and trailed off, and he took off the little reading glasses and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and for several seconds the only sound in the office was the thud of the bags beyond the wall and the ticking of the cooling tin roof.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Dominic Varga, hoarsely.
"Tell me."
"I'll give you three days. Because I'm a man of my word and because I've lost a good deal of patience with Mr. Mercer." He lowered his hands. "After that, I'll come looking for you. And you'll tell me, then, what you did with Andrei's cigarette case, because he had it on him, and I'd like it back."
"It's in a drawer in Port Merrin."
"Good."
"Marta Szabo has it."
"Of course she does." The big man nearly smiled. "Marta has everything. All right." He rose. He was enormous. He stood with the shotgun hanging loose from his hand, and the bulb swung slightly over his gray head, and he looked down at Damen with a face that was neither forgiving nor kind but had begun, very slowly, to be something that served the same purpose. "Sit. You look like death. Sully, get him a chair. Rafe, if you're not dead, get up."
On the floor outside the door, the young man in the leather jacket drew a long, whistling breath.
"He's not dead," said Varga. "He's a tough little bastard. He'll live." He looked at Damen. "Now. Tell me what you need."
They sat for two hours.
It was a thing that Damen had not expected. The big man listened. He sat in the split leather chair with his glass between his palms, and listened while Damen laid out, piece by piece, as one lays out a map, everything he knew. He was blunt. He spoke without excuse. He did not mention the name Wren; the story, as he told it, was of a witness, and a ledger, and a man named Strand who had decided that the people Damen loved were worth more as hostages than as victims. When he finished, Varga said nothing for a while. Then he took out a pencil and began, with a thick careful hand, to draw.
It was the Docks.
Every pier, every shed, every road. The Coldwater Point cannery, three miles up the coast, a long gray spit of crumbling brick and rusted iron where the Strand Foundation had once run a charity for fishermen's widows. "He's got the Tower there," said Varga. "The old Harbor Master's. He lives in it. Has done for twenty years. He keeps his clocks in the top room. Fifteen of them, running, all different, and a man whose only job is to wind them." He made a small X. "Nobody goes in. Not Mercer. Not the Table. You have to be asked."
"And the cannery?"
"Is where he keeps his guests." The pencil stopped. "I've never been inside. I know a man who has. He said there's a long loft on the second floor, over the old net room. He said you could hear the sea."
A long loft, thought Damen. Over the net room.
Thirty-one iron stairs.
He didn't know why the number came. It came out of nothing, and sat in his mind like a stone. He had no reason to believe it. But he found that his hand had closed on the edge of the desk.
"How many men?"
"Forty. Fifty, when Mercer's there. Mostly his. Army boys, contract people. They rotate." The pencil moved. "There's a boat house on the north side. A gate on the road. Cameras on the wall. And the old man's got a doctor living on the premises, and two nurses, and a lawyer." A grim smile. "You couldn't walk in with an army."
"I'm not going to walk."
"No," said Varga. "I don't suppose you are."
He sat back. The shotgun had been laid across the desk. His small eyes studied Damen for a long minute from under their scarred brows, as one studies a horse before a race, and something in them had altered, subtly and permanently. It was not liking. It was not trust. It was the look of a man who, having decided to climb into a ring, has looked across it and recognized his opponent.
"There's a detective," said Damen.
"Pratt."
"You know him."
"Everyone knows him. He plays poker on Sundays in my back room. Tonight, eleven. Stakes high enough to ruin a man." The big man's lip curled. "He's Strand's. He's been Strand's for twenty years. He leaks like a sink. If you wanted to know who was on the list, he'd know."
"What does he drink?"
"Bourbon. Neat. Too much."
"What does he love?"
"His daughter."
Damen looked at him.
"She's twelve," said Varga. "A violinist. He keeps her in a school in Vermont. He sends her flowers." The pencil tapped, once. "He thinks nobody knows."
The bulb swung slowly. Somewhere beyond the wall, a bell rang, and a bag thudded, and a voice shouted a name. Damen set down the empty glass.
"What time does the game start?" he said.
"Eleven."
"I'll be there at ten."
"You'll need a better suit," said Dominic Varga, and for the first time in sixteen years something moved at the corner of his ruined mouth. "That one's a corpse's."
"It is," said Damen. "He didn't mind."