On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 3: Daniel's Warning

The coffee shop on Brattle Street was called Algiers, and it had been there longer than I'd been alive. My father had taken me here on my ninth birthday, ordered me a mint tea I pretended to like, and let me sit in the green room upstairs reading The Little Prince while he talked business with a Harvard economist I now realized had probably been one of his mistresses. The memory arrived with the smell of Turkish coffee the moment I walked through the door.

Daniel had suggested Algiers because he said no one from Beacon Hill would be caught dead there, and he was right. The Cambridge intellectual crowd drank their coffee black and didn't recognize money when it walked in wearing Brioni. I climbed the narrow staircase to the green room, and I heard the old floorboards protest in exactly the tones I remembered.

He was already at the back table when I arrived. He stood up when he saw me, and for one unprotected second I saw the boy he had been — twelve years old, awkward in a funeral suit, holding my hand at my mother's graveside because no one else would.

Then he said, "You look like her."

And I had to sit down quickly, before my legs remembered how.

* * *

"Coffee," I said to the waiter, because I needed to do something with my voice.

Daniel waited until the waiter had gone. He was wearing the grey suit I'd told him years ago did not fit him at the shoulders. He had, as far as I could tell, three suits, and rotated them with the stubborn seriousness of a man who did not believe clothes should require his attention. He'd always been like that. The only thing he had ever truly cared about how it looked was me.

"How was the flight?" he asked.

"Fine."

"The apartment?"

"Fine. Danny, you said you had something new."

He exhaled. Then he reached under the table and brought up a folder. It was thin — thirty pages, maybe. He set it on the table between us like a loaded object.

"Marcus Cross," he said. "Not Nathaniel."

I looked at him.

"I've been pulling threads for months," he said. "Acquisitions Cross has made over twenty years. Patterns. Who got hurt. Who didn't. Who signed and who didn't, at what stage, under what pressure. Nathaniel was an executor. Marcus was the architect. On every deal, including ours, including — "

"Don't."

"Ari."

"Don't call me that here."

He closed his mouth. He opened the folder. He turned it around so the first page faced me.

I read it. Then I read the second page. Then I closed the folder.

* * *

"You're telling me," I said, "that I have spent five years building this — my body, my name, my career, my apartment, my entire life — to go after the wrong Cross."

Daniel's jaw tightened. "I'm telling you the wrong Cross might be both of them. I'm telling you Marcus is a worse animal than you thought, and if Nathaniel is — "

"Nathaniel signed the papers."

"Nathaniel was twenty-nine years old and had been a VP for six months."

"He was thirty when my father died."

"And he didn't kill your father, Ari. That's what I'm — "

"Don't."

I did not say please. I did not need to. He heard it.

He sat back. He looked at me for a long time. The radiator in the corner ticked in its old, wounded way. Outside the window, a boy in a Harvard hoodie crossed the street with a stack of library books, and for a second I thought about being twenty, and about being allowed to walk through this city the way he was walking — as though nothing inside it had ever hurt him, because nothing inside it ever had.

"Okay," Daniel said, finally. "Okay. I'll keep pulling on Marcus. You do what you're doing. But you need to know, if Marcus is the architect, he will react to anything that threatens the structure. Anything. And right now what's threatening the structure is an M&A consultant named Aria Kenzari who just walked into the Gardner Museum with fifty thousand dollars and a very specific dress."

I blinked. "How do you know about the dress."

"I don't. I guessed. You always had a specific dress."

In another life, I would have laughed. In this one, I just looked down at my coffee.

* * *

We walked out together into the autumn afternoon. The leaves on Brattle had started to turn, and the wind carried the specific, slightly rotted smell of a city preparing itself to freeze. Daniel paused on the sidewalk.

He almost hugged me. I saw him decide not to. He held out his hand instead, a gesture so formal between us it was almost funny. I shook it.

"Ari," he said. "Just — be careful. Please. This city has teeth you don't remember."

I looked at him for a long moment. He was thirty years old, still too thin, still wearing that grey suit that didn't fit at the shoulders, still my sweet sad cousin who had held my hand in the cold at the funeral.

"I remember the teeth," I said. "That's why I had them filed down."

I left him on the sidewalk.

I took the subway home because I wanted to remember how to be invisible in this city, and the Red Line across the river has always been good for forgetting. I stood in the car without holding the rail, and I let the train's rhythm reshape my spine into something harder.

By the time I reached my stop, Daniel's warning was already filed and forgotten. I did not need to know if Marcus was the architect. I did not need to know if Nathaniel had been a reluctant signatory or an eager one. The fact was simple, and the fact was this:

My father had walked into a building owned by a Cross, and he had not walked out. Whichever Cross had built that door, I would see all of them through it.

— Daniel —

Daniel walked back to his office on Mass Ave with his hands in the pockets of a coat he had bought in law school and never replaced. The wind had picked up. He did not mind it. He was a man, had always been a man, who preferred weather to comfort.

His office was three rooms on the second floor of a brick building that had once been a print shop. He climbed the stairs. He nodded to his paralegal, Janine, who nodded back and did not say anything because she had learned, in the eight years she had worked for him, that there were days he came in and said hello and days he came in and did not.

He closed the door of his inner office. He sat down at his desk. He opened the top drawer on the right.

Inside, beneath a stack of old business cards and a pen his father had used, was a photograph.

Ariana, at eighteen. Standing at the end of the dock at the Devlin summer house in Marblehead, holding an ice cream cone that had started to melt over her wrist. Laughing. She was laughing. She had been laughing at something he said — he could not remember now what. Some stupid joke. She had always laughed too easily at his stupid jokes.

He looked at the photograph for thirty seconds. He did not touch it. Touching it, over the years, had become something like a prayer he no longer believed would be answered, and he had stopped needing the prayer. It was enough, now, just to know the photograph was where he had left it.

He closed the drawer.

He had waited ten years. He could wait ten more.