by Holly Black
He smiles. “Maybe they do. I just know they are workers. Most of the agents in the division that deals with us folks are workers themselves.” By “us folks,” I’m guessing he means organized crime families on the East Coast. Families like his.
“Oh,” I say.
“Didn’t know that, eh?” He seems pleased.
I shake my head.
“They have been worrying you about your mother, too, yes? I know how these men operate.” He nods his head, clearly indicating that I can answer if I want to, but it’s not required. “I could get them off your back.”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Yes, you’re not sure. Maybe I pushed you too hard at Philip’s funeral. Lila thinks so, anyway.”
“Lila?” I say.
His smile smoothes out with something like pride. “Someday she will lead the Zacharov family. Men will die for her. Men will kill for her.”
I nod my head, because, of course, that’s what it means to be Zacharov’s daughter. It’s just that his saying it makes it uncomfortably real. Makes the future seem to come too soon.
“But some men might not like to follow a woman,” Zacharov says as the car takes a sharp turn. We pull into the covered garage of a building, and park. “Especially a woman he knows too well.”
“I really hope you’re not talking about me,” I say.
The locks pop up on the doors.
“Yes,” he says. “As do I.”
The garage is unfinished. Just rough concrete without signs or even lines painted to delineate one space from another. Someone must have run out of money partway through the build.
I’m guessing that means screaming for help is off the table.
We get out of the car. I follow Zacharov and Stanley into the building. The tattooed goon follows me, his gloved hand giving me a little push at the base of my spine when I look around too much.
If the parking lot is new and unfinished, the building it connects to is ancient, with a plaque that reads TALLINGTON STRING-MAKERS GUILD AND NEEDLE FACTORY. It has clearly been abandoned a long time, the windows covered with nailed-up boards, and the wooden planks covered in a thick layer of sticky black dirt. I’m guessing someone wanted to convert where I’m standing into lofts before the last recession hit.
The thought rises unbidden that I’ve been brought here to die. Grandad told me that’s how they do it. Take a guy for a ride, real friendly. Then, pow. Back of the head.
I stick my right hand into the pocket of my jacket and start worming off that glove. My heart’s racing.
We come to stairs, and Stanley hangs back. Zacharov holds out his hand, indicating I should go first.
“You lead, I follow,” I say. “Since you know where we’re going.”
Zacharov laughs. “Someone is cautious.”
He starts toward the stairs, and Stanley follows him, then skull tattoo guy, leaving me last. I’ve managed to work off my glove. I cradle it in my palm.
The hallway we come to is lit by flickering overhead fluorescents. They look yellowed and, in a few cases, burned. I follow the skull tattoo guy’s suit-jacketed back until we all come to a large steel door.
“Put this on,” Zacharov says, reaching into his coat and taking out a black ski mask.
I pull it over my head somewhat haphazardly with my one gloved hand. Zacharov and his guys must notice I keep the other hand in my pocket, but no one says anything about it.
Stanley knocks three times.
I don’t recognize the man who swings the door open. He’s tall, maybe forty, wearing stained jeans and no shirt. He’s so skinny that his chest looks concave. He’s covered in tattoos. Naked women being beheaded by skeletons, demons with curling tongues, blocky words in Cyrillic. No color, just black ink and an unsteady hand. It’s amateur work. Jailhouse, I’m guessing. The guy’s hair hangs over his cheekbones in greasy strings. One of his ears is as blackened as Grandad’s fingers. He’s obviously been living for a while in the room that he ushers us into. There’s a cot covered in a filthy blanket. A table made from sawhorses and a single sheet of plywood rests in the center of the room, piled with cardboard pizza boxes, a mostly empty bottle of vodka, and a take-out foil container of half-eaten pelmeni.
His gaze darts hungrily from me to Zacharov, then back again.
“Him?” the guy says, and spits on the floor.
“Hey,” Stanley says, stepping between us. The other bodyguard was leaning against the wall near the door. He stands up a little straighter, like he’s expecting trouble.
I look over at Zacharov, waiting for his reaction.
“You are going to change his face,” he tells me calmly, as if he was discussing the weather. “For old times’ sake. For the debt you still owe me.”
“Make me pretty,” the man says, coming as close to me as he can with Stanley between us. He smells like stale sweat and vomit. “I want to look like a movie star.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, taking my hand out of my pocket. Bare. The air feels cool on my skin. I rub my thumb against my fingers in an unfamiliar gesture.
The man dances away. Stanley turns to see what freaked the guy out, and backs off too. Ungloved hands get attention.
“You sure he’s what you say he is?” the guy asks Zacharov. “This isn’t your way of getting rid of a problem, right? Or making me forget my own name?”
“No need to bring a boy to do either of those things,” Zacharov says.
That doesn’t seem to reassure the guy. He looks at me and gestures to his neck. “Show me your marks.”
“I don’t have any,” I say, pulling at the front of my sweater.
“We don’t have time for these pointless questions,” Zacharov says. “Emil, sit down now. I am a busy man and I do not oversee murders. I also do not take pointless risks.”
That seems to settle him. He pulls up a folding metal chair and sits in it. Rust has eaten away at the joints, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy watching my hand.
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“I will answer all of your questions later,” Zacharov says. “But for now, do as I ask.”
Stanley eyes me coldly. Zacharov’s not asking. There never were any good choices.
Emil’s eyes go wide when I touch the pads of my fingers to his filthy cheek. I bet my heart is beating just as fast as his.
I’ve never done anything like this transformation, something requiring fine detail and finesse. I close my eyes and let myself see with that odd second sense, let every part of Emil become infinitely malleable. But then I panic. I can’t think of a single movie star whose features I recall in detail. Not a guy, anyway. They’re all blurs of eyes and noses and some vague sense of familiarity. The only actor that comes to mind at all is Steve Brodie as Dr. Vance in The Giant Spider Invasion.
I change Emil. I’m getting the hang of this. When I open my eyes, he looks like a passably hot dude from the 1970s. No more tattoos. No more scars. I fixed his ear, too. Stanley sucks in his breath. Emil reaches up to touch his face, his eyes wide.
Zacharov is staring at me, one corner of his thin mouth lifted in a hungry smile.
Then my knees cramp and I go down hard. I can feel my body start to spread, my fingers branching out into dozens of iron nails. My back spasms and my skin feels like it’s sloughing off me. I can hear a sound coming out of me, more a moan than a scream.
“What’s wrong with him?” Emil yells.
“It’s the blowback,” Zacharov says. “Give him some space.”
I hear the table being dragged back as I flop around on the floor.
“Is he going to bite his tongue?” That’s Stanley’s voice. “I don’t think that looks right. He’s going to give himself a concussion. We should at least put something under his head.”
“Which one?” asks someone else. Emil? The guy by the door? I no longer know.
It hurts. It really, really hurts. Blackness rises up, looming and terrible, before breaking over me like a wave, dragging
me down to the bottom of the dreamless sea.
When I wake, I’m on the cot, swaddled in Emil’s stinking blanket, and only Zacharov and Stanley remain. They’re sitting on the folding chairs, playing cards. The boarded-up windows have a halo of light around their edges. It’s still daytime. I can’t have been out for that long.
“Hey,” says Stanley, spotting me shifting. “Kid’s awake.” “You did good, Cassel,” Zacharov says, turning his chair to face me. “You want to sleep some more?”
“No,” I say, pushing myself up. It’s a little awkward, like I’ve been sick or something. The mask is gone. They must have taken it off me while I was sleeping.
“You hungry?” he asks.
I shake my head again. I feel a little queasy after the change, like I’m not sure where my stomach is. The last thing I want is food.
“You will be hungry later,” he says, with such certainty that it seems impossible to contradict him. I’m too tired to bother, anyway.
I let Stanley help me up, and he half-carries me out to the car.
We ride for a while, with my head resting against the window. I think I fall asleep again. I drool on the glass.
“Time to wake up.” Someone is shaking my shoulder. I groan. Everything is stiff, but otherwise I feel okay.
Zacharov is grinning at me from the other side of the car. His silver hair is bright against the blackness of his wool coat and the leather seats. “Give me your hands,” he says.
I do. One is gloved; the other one isn’t.
He takes off my remaining glove and holds my bare hands in his gloved ones, palms up. I feel uncomfortably vulnerable, even though he’s the one who’s in danger of being worked. “With these hands,” he says, “you will make the future. Be sure it is a future in which you want to live.”
I swallow. I have no idea what he means. He lets go, and I fish in my pocket for the other glove, avoiding his gaze.
A moment later the car door opens on my side. Stanley’s there, holding it wide. We’re in Manhattan, skyscrapers looming over us and traffic streaming past.
I shuffle out, breathing the car exhaust and roasting-peanut-scented air. I’m still blinking the sleep out of my eyes, but I realize that not being in New Jersey means that whatever I’ve been brought to do isn’t over.
“Oh, come on,” I say to Zacharov. “I can’t. Not again. Not today.”
But he just laughs. “I only want to give you some dinner. Lila would never forgive me if I sent you back on an empty stomach.”
I’m surprised. I must have really looked in bad shape back at the warehouse, because I am sure he’s got better things to do than feed me.
“This way,” Zacharov says, and walks toward a large bronze door with a raised relief of a bear. There’s no sign on the building; I have no idea what to expect when we go in. It doesn’t look like a restaurant. I glance back at Stanley, but he’s getting back into the driver’s seat of the Cadillac.
Zacharov and I walk into a small mirrored entranceway with a polished brass elevator. There’s no furniture other than a gilt and black bench and, from what I can see, no intercom or bell. Zacharov fishes around in his pocket and removes a set of keys. He puts one into a hole on an otherwise blank panel and twists. The doors open.
The inside of the elevator is richly burled wood. A video screen above the doors is showing a black-and-white movie without any sound. I don’t recognize the film.
“What’s this place?” I ask finally as the doors slide shut.
“A social club,” Zacharov says, clasping his gloved hands in front of him. Neither of us has pushed any button. “Here, things are private.”
I nod, as though I actually understand what he’s talking about.
When the elevator opens, we’re in a huge room—huge like, seriously, you can’t figure this place is really in New York. The marble floor is mostly covered in an enormous carpet. Along it are islands of two or four club chairs with high backs. The ceiling far above our heads is decorated with intricate plaster moldings. Along the nearest wall is a massive bar, its marble top shining against dark wood paneling. Behind the bar, on a high shelf, are several hulking jars of clear liquor with fruits and spices floating in them: lemons, rose petals, whole cloves, ginger. Uniformed staff move through the room silently, carrying drinks and small trays to the occupants of the chairs.
“Wow,” I say.
He gives me a half grin, one that I have seen on Lila’s face before. It’s unnerving.
An old man with sunken cheeks in a black suit walks up to us. “Welcome, Mr. Zacharov. May I take your coat?”
Zacharov shucks it off.
“Would you like to borrow a sport jacket for your friend?” the man asks him, barely glancing in my direction. I guess I’m breaking some kind of dress code.
“No,” Zacharov says. “We will have drinks and then dinner. Please send someone to us in the blue room.”
“Very good, sir,” the man says, just like a butler in a movie.
“Come,” says Zacharov.
We walk through the room, through double doors into a far smaller library. Three bearded men are sitting together, laughing. One smokes a pipe. Another has a girl in a very short red dress sitting on his knee doing a bump of cocaine off a sugar spoon.
Zacharov sees me staring. “Private club,” he reminds me.
Right.
In the third room a fire is blazing. The room is smaller than the other two, but there’s only one set of doors—the ones we came through—and no one else inside. Zacharov motions that I should sit. I sink into the soft leather. There’s a small, low table between us. A crystal chandelier swings gently above us, scattering bands of colored light across the room.
A uniformed attendant appears. He looks me over, obviously skeptical, then turns to Mr. Zacharov. “Would you care for a drink?”
“I will take Laphroaig with a single cube of ice to begin, and Mr. Sharpe will have—”
“A club soda,” I say lamely.
“Very good,” says the attendant.
“After that you will bring us three ounces of the Iranian osetra with blinis, chopped egg, and plenty of onion. We will both take a little Imperia vodka with that, very cold. Then a turbot with some of the chef’s excellent mustard sauce. And finally two of your pains d’amandes. Any objections, Cassel? Anything you don’t care for?”
I have never eaten most of the things he named, but I am unwilling to admit it. I shake my head. “Sounds great.”
The attendant nods, not even looking at me now, and walks off.
“You are uncomfortable,” Zacharov says, which is true but seems like an uncharitable observation. “I thought Wallingford prepared you to take your place in society.”
“I don’t think they expect my place to be anywhere near this place,” I say, which makes him smile.
“But it could be, Cassel. Your gift is like this club—it makes you uncomfortable. It’s a bit too much, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“A man may daydream of how he would spend a million dollars, but playing the same game with a billion dollars sours the fantasy. There are too many possibilities. The house he once wished for with all his heart is suddenly too small. The travel, too cheap. He wanted to visit an island. Now he contemplates buying one. I remember you, Cassel. With all your heart you wanted to be one of us. Now you’re the best of us.”
I look into the fire, turning back only when I hear the clink of our drinks being set down on the table.
Zacharov picks up his Scotch and swirls the glass, making the amber liquor dance. He pauses another moment. “Do you recall being thrown out of Lila’s birthday party because you had a fight with some kid from her school?” He laughs suddenly, a short bark of sound. “You really cracked his head on that sink. Blood everywhere.”
I touch my ear self-consciously and force a grin. I stopped wearing an earring when I enrolled at Wallingford, and the hole has almost closed up, but I still have the memory of her
with the ice and the needle that same night, her hot breath against my neck. I shift in the chair.
“Back then I should have seen you were worth watching,” he says, which is flattering but pretty obviously not true. “You know I’d like you to come work for me. I know you have some reservations. Let me answer them.”
The attendant returns with our first course. The tiny gray pearls of caviar pop on my tongue, leaving behind the briny taste of the sea.
Zacharov seems like a benevolent gentleman, loading his blini with chopped egg and crème fraiche. Just a distinguished guy in a perfectly tailored suit with a bulge under one arm where his gun rests. I’m thinking he’s not the best person in whom to confide my moral quandaries. Still, I’ve got to say something. “What was it like for my grandfather? Did you know him when he was younger?”
Zacharov smiles. “Your grandad’s from a different time. His parents’ generation still thought of themselves as good people, thought of their powers as gifts. He was part of that first generation to be born criminals. Desi Singer came into the world—what?—not ten years after the ban was passed. He never had a chance.”
“Dab hands,” I say, thinking of Mrs. Wasserman’s version of this story.
He nods. “Yes, that’s what we used to be called, before the ban. Did you know that your grandfather was conceived in a worker camp? He grew up tough, like my father did. They had to. Their whole country had turned on them. My grandfather, Viktor, was in charge of the kitchens; it was his job to make sure everybody got fed. He did whatever he had to do to make the meager rations go around—made deals with the guards, made his own still and distilled his own booze to trade for supplies. That’s how the families started. My grandfather used to say that it was our calling to protect one another. No matter how much money we had or how much power, we should never forget where we came from.”
He stops speaking as the attendant returns, setting the fish down before us. Zacharov calls for a glass of 2005 Pierre Morey Meursault, and it comes a moment later, lemon pale, the base of the glass cloudy with condensation.
“When I was a young man of twenty, I was in my second year at Columbia. It was the late seventies, and I thought the world had changed. The first Superman movie was on the big screen, Donna Summer was on the radio, and I was tired of my father being so old-fashioned. I met a girl in class. Her name was Jenny Talbot. She wasn’t a worker, and I didn’t care.”