I felt ill. Vatroslav snatched the bottle and sat back with it, then looked at me, then patiently rotated the label in his hand to read the good news.
“Jesus,” he said. “This is a three-thousand-dollar Kamešnica.”
“Tastes like congealed urine.”
“Urine? I should kill you for saying that.” He drank some. “But I’m going to kill you anyway.” Then he drank more.
We didn’t talk for another painful minute, after which I cleared my throat and began. “Do you know the ending of Patrick Süskind’s Le Parfum?”
“What?”
“It’s a book. There’s a passage in the middle. ‘Se rendre parfaitement ininteĢressant. Et c’est tout ce qu’il voulait.’”
“Why is this warm?” Vatroslav said. “Brandy is supposed to be the temperature of dawn.”
“‘He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. And that was all he wanted.’”
Vatroslav stared at me, embarrassed for me. “Do you have any women in your life who don’t find you dull?”
“Do you have any women in your life who don’t come by shipping container?”
I was fully invested.
He stood up and nodded to his thug. His thug stepped forward, machine-gun in hand. I should’ve left a handwritten note on my dashboard for whoever might find my dog in my car. I should’ve parked in a more visible spot. I should’ve found religion. I should’ve gone to couples therapy. I “should’ve” a lot of things. I should’ve been a more interesting husband.
Chapter 39
“Listen to me, Michael Ryan,” said Vatroslav. “I built Boston. My family put serious money in this town.” I didn’t interrupt him. “We provide the most important product anyone here could want.” I didn’t remind him that a family donating ten million bucks to a city that does three hundred fifty billion dollars in business does not an empire make. “My brother…My brother got in the way of that.”
Ah, yes, one son to nail women, one son to sell them.
“My brother,” he continued, “was interfering with the natural evolution of this city’s commerce.”
“Your brother was in school. To avoid being as dumb as you.”
My gun lurked well behind me, somewhere, maybe on a shelf in the foyer. Vatroslav was getting angrier. He began to pace back and forth, still drinking from my bottle.
“Why are you calm?” he said. “I can kill you. I will kill you.” He looked at me. I looked at him. The girl was now looking, too. At us. Vatroslav’s question was not rhetorical. Everyone in the room felt the shift.
So I answered him by pointing my index finger at the liquor in his hands. “That,” I said.
He didn’t get it at first.
I told him. “It’s poison.”
He laughed.
“It’s tetrodotoxin,” I said. He stopped laughing. “Fast-acting. I added it before I got here. Tetrodotoxin numbs the spinal cord, then the heart.”
He was listening now.
“Impossible,” he concluded. He was putting two and two together. He was doubting the math. He looked at the brandy, then looked at me. “You drank it yourself.”
I nodded to the bottle again.
“You drank it yourself!” he repeated.
“Thought you said I was on suicide watch.”
He contemplated me for a long time. There was no twitch in my iris at this point. Full commitment.
And it painfully started to make sense, the possibility of a hit man who’d ensured mutual revenge.
“Guard!” he suddenly yelled. He grabbed his phone. Tetrodotoxin takes merely minutes to act. He dialed 911. A second guard ran in, ready to shoot me, but the prodigal son had a more urgent directive for him. “Get me the family doctor!”
“B-boss,” said the guard. “What happened?”
“Get me the fucking doctor!”
We then heard the 911 operator answer through his phone.
“I’ve been poisoned!” he yelled into it. Then he ran to the bathroom.
I remained in the armchair the whole time. The guard had no idea what to do with me. He wanted to shoot me, he wanted to ask me questions, but most of all he wanted to not have the last remaining son of a two-son emperor die on his watch.
From a distance I could see Vatroslav through the open bathroom door. He was bent over the sink. He began dry-heaving as hard as he could, having grabbed a toothbrush to gag his tongue. Not much welled forth.
“Where’s the medic?!” he screamed. Then he burst out of the bathroom and scurried down the emergency stairwell. Twelve flights of stairs to the ground floor. Followed by his second guard.
Gone.
Exited.
Both of them.
Alone with me now, the other guard had a serious dilemma. He could a) chase his boss, b) shoot me, then chase his boss, c) preserve me as the only source of