Bela takes up the money and gives me back half. “If the world were fair to me, I’d be driving a Bentley home to a mansion in Beverly Hills.” From a drawer beneath the counter he removes a slender plastic box. “But then I would be in California and you’d be here, paying full price.”
He sets the box down on a little velvet mat and opens it. The fountain pen—piano black with the words To Dad, Love G engraved in script down the side—actually glistens as if it were wet. I pick it up and remove the cap, rotating the pen in my hand, watching the silver nib at the end catch the light like the blade of a scalpel.
*
I climb the three flights of stairs to our apartment. There’s only one apartment per floor, each running from the front of the building all the way to the back. I enter and hear Miles Davis playing softly, an elegantly melancholy piece, a trumpet alone in a dark room, talking to itself: It’s not so bad, no, not so bad. My dad says it lifts his spirits to think someone at some time could handle sadness with such grace.
I kick off my boots and pass through the kitchen, where on the small table in the corner there are take-out boxes from the Indian restaurant we like.
“Dad?” I call. “What’s with the Indian food? Spaghetti a la Gwendolyn, remember?” Every year since I was eight I made spaghetti for him on his birthday. He was too sad to go out that first year after my mom was killed, and it just sort of became a tradition after that.
He’s lying on the couch, almost flat except for his neck, which is bent a little so he can see the screen of the laptop resting on his chest. This is how he is most of the time when he gets home from work: worn out, ground down after a day of heroically battling memos and reports. His title is political officer, which sounds interesting, but he says all he does is shuffle papers and go to meetings. They’re top secret papers, or so he tells me, and the meetings sometimes have him leaving for Nairobi or Singapore on a day’s notice. But they’re papers and meetings nonetheless, and how interesting can that be?
“Hey, kiddo.” He smiles, the laptop’s screen reflecting in the lenses of his glasses. He’s been losing weight lately, and his face is long and narrow. Stress, he answered me last week when I told him I was concerned. Stress is the key to staying thin.
I drop to the floor next to the couch. “Happy birthday, old man.”
He looks down at me over his glasses with a dorky expression of confusion on his face as if he had no idea today is his birthday, just like he’s done every birthday. He reaches over and rubs my head. “Sorry about the Indian food. I was just tired of spaghetti. I thought we’d try something new tonight.”
“Indian isn’t new.”
“So—kale soup from the vegan-hipster place? Fine with me.”
I smile, pull his hand away from my hair. On the laptop screen is small type I can’t quite make out and a picture of a fat man with a shaved head, eyes open, a black dot the size of a dime near the center of his forehead. It takes me a second to recognize that the black dot is a bullet hole. “Ew,” I say. “What the hell is that?”
My dad closes the laptop. “Viktor Zoric. Shot by a cop two days ago at his home in Belgrade,” he says as he stands. “It’ll be in the paper tomorrow. Serbian crime boss killed during arrest.”
“What’d he do?”
“Very bad things,” he says as he plods into the kitchen.
I get up and follow. “What kind of bad things?”
“The worst things,” he says.
“That’s not what I asked.”
He twists the cap off a bottle of cheap red wine and sniffs at its mouth, then pours himself a glass. “Doesn’t matter. Just be a teenager, Gwen.”
I take the wine from his hand and sip it. Our deal is I can have a single glass of wine with dinner if the adults are drinking it, too.
“So, arresting Viktor Zoric,” I say. “Were you involved?”
My dad takes down two plates and hands them to me. “I moved some papers around and wrote a little report. This time, someone actually read it.”
I set the plates across from each other on the table. “So was he a murderer? Drug lord? What?”
“Enough, Gwen.”
“I read the news. I’m vaguely aware that the world isn’t all rainbows and butterflies.”
“You want to know? Fine.” He hands me another wine glass. “Murder, drugs, all that. But Viktor’s main things were arms dealing and human trafficking. For prostitution. Women. Kids.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Okay. I get it.”
“Mainly they were sent to Europe, but also to Abu Dhabi, Shanghai. Los Angeles, too. Cargo containers on ships. That’s how he sent them to LA.”
“Thank you for that picture in my head.” I scoop rice and vindaloo onto the plates.
“Put in a metal box with a little food and water and a bucket for a toilet,” my dad says. “They were dead when Customs found them. Fourteen girls from Russia and Ukraine.”
“Jesus. Stop already,” I say. “Inappropriate dinner conversation.”
“You asked, so I told you.” He gestures to my chair. “Put it off as long as possible, Gwen. Finding out how shitty the world is.”
As I sit, my dad pours wine into my glass with a flourish like a waiter in a fancy restaurant. “Votre vin, mademoiselle,” he says.
“Why, merci,” I reply, and tuck into the vindaloo.
We eat without speaking for a few minutes, and the room is quiet except for the sounds of our chewing and the buzzing of the refrigerator and the thrum of the city outside our windows. The city’s always there, reminding you with horns and sirens and shouts and screams that even when you’re alone, you’re alone in the middle of a hive filled with a billion other bees.
“So something happened today. A thing at school,” I say. “I’ll need you to sign something.”
He raises his eyebrows as he wipes sauce from his chin with a paper towel. I reach over to my jacket hanging on a peg by the door and pull out the suspension form from Mrs. Wasserman.
My dad unfolds the paper and studies it for a second. “What the hell, Gwen?”
“It’s just a one-day suspension.”
“Just a one-day suspension? That’s not a small thing.”
I inhale deeply. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“What happened?”
“Astrid Foogle, she said some things. So I swore at her in French and this teacher heard it and—now I’m suspended. Can you just sign it, please?”
“What did Astrid Foogle say, exactly?”
“Dad, they were nasty things, all right? Can we leave it at that? Please?”
“What concerns me, Gwen, is that you know better than to take the bait. Don’t take it, and there won’t be a problem.”
A sort of electric fog comes over me. I look away, grip the edge of my chair. I’d love nothing more than to tell him about Astrid slapping me, but then he’d just be disappointed I didn’t fight back, or at least rat her out.
“I mean, Gwen, this isn’t the first time. There was that kid in Dubai, remember? What was his name? And that girl in Moscow, Sveta. Same thing there, really.”