Page 96 of Vasily the Hammer

“It was an overdose!” Dima yells, finally starting to move between the benches toward her, which gets the undercover agents moving more at a tortoise’s pace than the initial snail’s pace. “Heroin.”

“Where did he get it from? Why would he have taken it?What did you dooooooooo?”

Okay, that line was a bit too much, but with the way everyone’s watching it like a tennis match, they don’t care.

“I didn’t, I swear! I—excuse me,” he says to the agents who have filled in around him. “I just gotta—”

“You just gotta stay where you are, son,” drawls an agent as he holds up a badge. “FBI.”

Which is the moment Janson quietly slinks to the other side of the church.

“I didn’t do anything,” Dima protests, and I think everyone in the building feels at least a little bad for him because, again, we are all criminals here, and it is all our fears that we get arrested for some dumb thing we didn’t do, only to have our entire life stories come out. No one wants to go down like Gotti.

“You kidnapped us, you jerk?” Alex says.

“You got a gun there?” the FBI agent asks.

“What? No. I—what the fuck?” Dima whispers, genuinely surprised when he looks in his pocket and sees it. Those things weigh under a pound and are ultra-thin. I doubt he noticed Kostya slip it in there.

Another agent comes up from behind and pulls it out. “Jesus, whatisthis thing?” he hisses. “Is this a real gun?” He flops it back and forth between his hands, examining it, finally finding the release for what functions as a magazine on it, although it’s little more than a spring and a rake, more like a stapler than a gun.

“Didn’t you have a couple murdered security guards last week?” Kostya says. “I wonder if that gun was used.”

And the crazy thing is enough law enforcement know enough of us that they don’t even question this randomly thrown out fact. No doubt word got around that the warehouse was one of mine, and here we are at my funeral.

Handcuffs come out, and Ana bats my hand.

Right, yeah, once they go on, it’ll be a pain to get them off.

I carefully rock the Virgin Mother out of the way. She’s a heavy statue, but if something happened and I bumped into her and broke her, I’d definitely go to Hell.

I take her place, and honestly, I’m a little bummed no one notices me standing here.

“Before you arrest him, there’s something you should probably know,” I call out.

My great aunt Irena, who’s been resisting my great uncle Arkadi’s attempts to pull her toward the exit, looks up at me, gasps, and faints.

Chapter 29

Ana

This is bad.

Vasily’s trying to protect Dima, I know this. I’m proud of him for deciding to intervene early. We’ve gone through so many iterations of the plan, and Dima’s said every time that he can handle whatever is thrown at him and we shouldn’t appear until after Tony and Kostya have been neutralized. Vasily’s always agreed to that, but I know how stressed out he is; he needs to protect Dima, the same as he needs to protect the rest of us, and we can’t leave Dima helpless in handcuffs.

I hear the gasps and the screams, the chaos taking over again. I want to jump up and tell everyone that I’m here too, especially when I hear my own people shouting for me, accusing Vasily of my death. But we need to get ourselves downstairs to control the situation, and this is my best opportunity.

The stairs creak under my feet as I rush down them. The church is old, the loft an afterthought. The handrail wobbles when I grab it. But I can hear everyone carrying on through the uninsulated drywall. An authoritarian voice with a thick Russian accent demands an explanation, and Vasily says, “Why don’t you ask Kostya? This was his idea.”

I can hear the panic in Kostya’s voice as he shouts back, “I’m as clueless as you! The hospital told me he was dead. There was paperwork and everything!”

He’s right; there is. Supposedly for both of us. They’re not even forged, not in the most technical sense. They haven’t been processed, but the forms are real.

“Vasily, you better explain yourself right now!”

“That’s going to be tricky. It seems I’ve failed you all. Three years yourpakhan, and I’ve had a traitor in our midst the entire time.”

There’s a low rumble of men angry over this; like the Mafia, I imagine the Bratva does not appreciate public declarations of weakness from their leaders. Announcing one’s failure and the existence of a traitor, one who’s been kept quiet in the hopes it could get taken care of behind the scenes, is an incredible weakness.

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