set down the case, rising up to his full height, squaring his feet and lifting his Soviet-trained fists. “You have caused me a great deal of trouble. I am going to enjoy this.”
“No, you won’t.” Lanzo was so quiet I almost didn’t realize someone else had spoken. Mitnick turned to the younger man. Lanzo stood at a seaside door, a pistol on Mitnick, close enough he couldn’t miss, but far enough away that no one could take the gun from him. I breathed a sigh of relief, glad that I wasn’t going to have to fight Mitnick and that Lanzo didn’t have a functional weapon. It had been a good idea to bring him, after all.
Except I realized he wasn’t holding the revolver anymore. Somewhere in whatever travails Lanzo had endured in the house of his tormentor, he had acquired a different pistol.
Mitnick’s smile shrank to a rueful grin barely visible behind the neatly trimmed beard. He kept his eyes on Lanzo and asked, “Who are you?”
I felt Nika tense next to me, wanting to go to Lanzo, but I held an arm up to prevent her from running into the line of fire. For a short eternity, no one said anything. In the depths of that silence, I think I heard Nika whisper Lanzo’s name, but that was washed away by the blood in the boy’s voice as he said something to Mitnick in a language no one but him understood.
Between the inferno and the pistol, Mitnick must have felt the end was close. “I do not speak your language.”
In clear English, Lanzo replied, “You killed my uncle.”
Mitnick raised his eyebrows and hands higher. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
I think Lanzo wanted the man from Belarus to know, “His name was Moreau.”
I thought about the slavery and the murder and the drugs, the institutional corruption that Mitnick had climbed to his mansion by the sea. How, instead of seeking to contain that rot, he hoped to spread it beyond the borders of the old Soviet empire, to pour it over the world so he could eat of the bounty it stripped away from everything else. With all of that, I couldn’t think of a reason not to kill Mitnick.
But having watched one murder spill out and cascade into God knows how many more, I knew I didn’t want Lanzo to be the one to kill him. He could still walk away from this, possibly even with Nika, escape and start again. Killing Mitnick would destroy any possibility of that, as remote as it was. If I knew anything about organized crime, theAvoritet would never let it go.
“Lanzo,” I prayed, “We found Nika. Let’s go.”
Lanzo didn’t budge. I said to him, “Mitnick deserves to die. But you don’t want the consequences of killing him.”
Sweat beaded on Lanzo’s forehead, the muscles in his forearms flexed as he gripped the pistol. I don’t think he had ever killed a man before. I could only think to add, “Don’t do it.”
The pressure of the situation caused that final phrase to repeat in my head like a pulse. I could smell smoke in the air.
Mitnick opened his fists, demonstrating their emptiness. “Listen to your friend. Do you wish to end up like him? Blood on your hands, with no past or future?”
I could see Lanzo’s hand tremble and I think Mitnick could too. The future was bearing down on both of them, but only Lanzo had the choice in his hand. I could see the weight of it, his uncle’s blood calling to him, a future with Nika uncertain and unclear by comparison.
From behind me, Nika said Lanzo’s name, a pleading in her voice that set off the pistol in his hand. In a night of deafening sounds it was the loudest. Mitnick’s tall frame pushed away from the Corsican, his eyes round, mouth agape. Perhaps after surviving all that he had, he couldn’t believe that this was how it would end.
I swore, moving forward to grab Lanzo, trying to drag him away from the corpse he had just made. It wasn’t easy – the bullet unleashed the anger he had been carrying. He cursed and screamed at Mitnick, kicking at the body as I pulled him away. He struggled until I pushed him to Nika who raised her hands to him. In the rage and loss finally bursting out of him, he slapped her hands away and disappeared down the hall, the house’s storm of fire and fighting his only companions.
I knew exactly how he felt and that he’d regret treating Nika like that, but there was no talking to him now. He had killed a man and the world would answer him for it.
To start at the beginning of the story, go here.
Photo courtesy of Hert Niks.
To read the previous chapter, go here.
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