“A 2008 Suzuki Hayabusa,” he said with a shrug. “Rebuilt it after some asshole totaled it and wrote it off as a loss.”
“Sick.” Gregori stuck his fist out for a fist bump.
Aleksi glared at him, and he retracted it before EJ could hit it, and I swear the big Russian driver shrank two inches.
"All right," Aleksi said, and that was all it took. The bickering went out of the air. He had the jacket over one arm and a bottle in his other hand. I hadn't even seen him take it from the car.He started up the slope without waiting to see if we'd follow, because he knew we would.
The grave was near the top, under a tree. It was good granite, modest in size, far from the gaudy thing I’d been imagining. The stone bore the man’s name, two dates, and the line: BELOVED FATHER AND BROTHER.
Niko’s expression sobered when he saw it, and he stopped about a foot and a half behind Aleksi. “It’s a good stone,” he said. “Did you pick it or did Uncle Yuri?”
“I did.” Aleksi crouched down in front of it on his bad knee and laid the jacket across the top of the stone. The bullet hole sat there, dark against the granite.
Then he cracked the bottle and poured a measure straight into the cold, hard ground, saying something quick and plain in Russian. Then he took a drink straight from the bottle and passed it to Niko.
Niko stepped up to the grave, bottle in hand. “À toi, Papa,” he said. “Even dead, you somehow manage to steal the show.” Then he took his drink and offered the bottle to EJ.
EJ’s cheeks flushed. “Oh, um… I’m only twenty.”
“Ah, Americans!” Niko declared. “Old enough to bleed, but not to drink? What kind of poor country is this?” Then he picked up EJ’s hand and put the bottle in it. “Drink. You need more chest hair, mon gars.”
EJ took the bottle in both hands like it might go off, looked round at all of us watching, and tipped it back.
He got about a mouthful down before his whole face caved in. He came off the bottle coughing, eyes streaming, thumping his own chest with a fist.
"Christ—" he wheezed. "That's—that tastes like rubbing alcohol—"
The laugh that went round the grave was the first easy thing that had happened on that hill. Niko howled. Gregori took thebottle off the kid before he dropped it and clapped him on the back hard enough to put him forward a step, grinning, and even Aleksi's mouth turned up.
"That," Niko said, wiping his eyes, "is the finest vodka in the state of Ohio, and you have insulted it, and your punishment is you're going to drink the rest of it with me." He got an arm round the kid's shoulders and steered him back down the slope toward the cars. "Come. I will teach you how a Laskin drinks. Badly and in great quantity. Gregori, bring the other bottle, the good one's in the boot—"
And then it was just the two of us at the stone, and the wind in the old tree, and Sacha's jacket lying across the granite with the hole in it.
Aleksi stayed crouched in front of the stone. I came and lowered myself down beside him on the grass, close enough that our shoulders touched, and I didn't say anything, because I'd learned by now that the surest way to get nothing out of the man was to ask for it.
For a while there was just the wind.
"He'd have hated you," Aleksi said.
"Cheers."
"Not like that." The corner of his mouth moved. "He'd have hated that I found something that fit. He never did. Two wives, the woman at the Foxhole, God knows who else, and not one of them ever sat right on him, so he just kept getting more. Like if he had enough of it, it'd add up to the thing he was missing." He looked at the jacket. "It never added up. He died still short."
He turned to me. "And here you are," he said. "One mouthy Scottish bastard with nine fingers, and I'm not short anymore. He'd have hated that. That I managed it and he never could."
He was quiet for a while. The wind worked the trees over our heads. I waited.
"I came home, and she was at the machine," he said, and his voice had changed, gone flat like he was somewhere else. "I told you that part. What I didn't tell you was that I was glad it was her and not him."
I turned my head.
"Eight years old. I found my mother dead, and the first thing I felt, before the rest of it, before I even understood, was that I was glad it wasn't Pop. Because Pop was the one I wanted. He was never there, and I wanted him, and she was always there and I—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "She was always there, Fin. And I'd have traded her for him in a heartbeat at eight years old. I got my wish thirty years too late and turned out I'd have traded him right back."
There it was. The thing under the cold. Not the murders, not the warehouse, not any of the blood he'd shown me without flinching. This. A boy who'd loved the wrong parent because the wrong parent made him work for it, and had hated himself for it for thirty-two years.
"It still hurts," he said, like he was admitting to something shameful. "I thought it'd stop. I'm forty fucking years old and it still—" He pressed the heel of his hand against his chest. "Here. It doesn't stop."
"No," I said. "It doesnae."