Chapter 4 - The Currency of the Unseen
For the next forty minutes, the boardroom on the forty-second floor ceased to be a diplomatic summit and became a interrogation chamber conducted in three dead languages and two gutter dialects.
Mave did not soften the words.
When Gregory growled a threat involving Dominic’s mother, Mave repeated it with the exact anatomical vulgarity Gregory had used. When Gregory attempted to pivot to a soft lie about the shipping manifests in Hamburg, Mave cut him off mid-sentence, informing Dominic that the port terms Gregory was using belonged to a confiscated pier in Rotterdam that had been seized by the Dutch authorities three weeks ago.
"How do you know about Rotterdam?" Gregory snarled at her in low Chechen, his eyes bloodshot, a bead of sweat tracing the deep furrow between his eyebrows.
“I worked the sorting line at the florists in Aalsmeer,” Mave replied in his tongue, her voice monotone. “Every trucker from Rotterdam talks about the seizures when they’re waiting for their coffee. You’re trying to sell him dead paper.”
Dominic listened. He didn't interrupt her. Every time Mave translated a phrase, Dominic made a small, precise mark with his fountain pen on a blank white index card.
By 2:50 a.m., the power balance in the room had utterly collapsed.
Gregory was no longer leaning back. He was sitting forward, his large hands clasped together so tightly his knuckles were white. He knew he had lost his leverage. The surprise element with Julian was gone; ten minutes earlier, Dominic had quietly issued three words into his personal phone, sending a tactical crew to an industrial site in Maspeth that Mave had pinpointed based on Gregory’s casual use of a specific local transit landmark.
At 2:58 a.m., Dominic’s phone vibrated once against the mahogany table.
He picked it up, held it to his ear, listened for four seconds, and said, "Good."
He laid the phone back down.
"Julian is in the car," Dominic announced to the room. "He has a bruised rib and a ruined jacket, but his throat is intact."
Gregory let out a slow, heavy breath through his nose. His shoulders dropped an inch. He looked at the two bodyguards standing behind Dominic, then at the heavy mahogany door. He knew what usually happened to men who failed a kidnapping attempt against the Rossy family.
Dominic stood up. He buttoned his charcoal jacket with one hand.
"You have twenty minutes to get to JFK, Gregory," Dominic said, his English precise and frigid. "My men will escort you to the gate. If you are still on North American soil at four o'clock, you will be fish food in the East River. Do you understand that English?"
Gregory didn't need Mave to translate. He stood up, his massive frame looming over the table, gave Mave one final, venomous look, and walked out the door flanked by Dominic’s guards.
The double doors clicked shut.
The room was suddenly very quiet.
The smell of ammonia was gone, replaced entirely by the cold smell of air conditioning and old sweat. The gray water in Mave’s bucket had settled, a thin skin of white foam floating on the surface.
Mave stood up from the leather chair. She walked back over to her bucket, reached down, and picked up her coarse brush.
"What are you doing?" Dominic asked.
"I have to finish the baseboards," Mave said, looking down at the wet wood. "My supervisor checks the floor at five. If the wax isn't dry, he docks my pay."
Dominic looked at her. Really looked at her.
He took three steps around the massive table until he was standing five feet from her. Up close, he smelled of sandalwood, slate, and very old leather. There was no trace of panic in him, no residual adrenaline twitching in his jaw. He was a man who lived in the cold.
"What is your real name?" he asked.
"Mave," she said. "Mave Miller."
"That’s the name on your Apex badge," Dominic said. "It’s not the name of a woman who knows Pankisi Romani, Rotterdam shipping manifests, and Dutch border slang."
"It's the name on my pay stub," she said flatly. "It's the only name that matters to the people who pay my rent."
Dominic pulled the gold money clip from his pocket again. He didn't pull out a hundred-dollar bill. He pulled out the entire stack—at least ten thousand dollars in crisp, uncirculated hundred-dollar notes—and laid it on the edge of her gray plastic bucket.
Mave looked at the money. She didn't reach for it.
"I don't need a tip," she said.
"It’s not a tip," Dominic said. "It’s a retainer."
"I’m a cleaner."
"You were a cleaner at two in the morning," Dominic said, his dark eyes locking onto hers with a quiet, unyielding weight. "It is now three in the morning. And twelve interpreters have just been rendered obsolete by a woman with a sponge."
He stepped closer, his shadow falling over her wet bucket.
"Apex Janitorial pays you twelve dollars an hour," Dominic said. "I am going to pay you five thousand dollars a day. Your job will still be cleaning."
Mave raised an eyebrow. "Cleaning what?"
"Trash like Charles," Dominic said softly. "Lies. Misunderstandings. And the blood that gets spilled when people think I don't know what they're saying."
Mave stared at the stack of bills sitting on the rim of her dirty bucket. She thought of the three hundred and forty dollars in her savings account. She thought of Leo’s small, worn shoes sitting by the front door of her Queens apartment.
"I have a daughter," Mave said.
"She will have a better school," Dominic replied without hesitation.
"And I don't wear a suit."
May you like
Dominic looked down at her faded blue smock, then back to her clear, steady eyes.
"You can wear whatever you want, Mave," Dominic said, a faint, cold smile touching the corner of his lips for the first time all night. "As long as you bring your sponge."
