of cyanide seeping into their children’s drinking water.” Andre takes a breath. “Soon enough, people might notice someone’s running an anonymous campaign, and the first person they’ll suspect—”
“The new guys asking a bunch of questions.” A series of panicked expressions chase each other across Brendan’s face. “I’m sorry.”
“Keep your head down, your eyes open, your mouth shut,” Andre says. “You’re not here to make friends.”
“Head down. Eyes open. Mouth shut.” Brendan mumbles the phrase, once, twice, three times, as though each time the words are new. “I need to be more careful. I’ll do better. Seriously, Mr. Ross, I’ll do better. I will. I will. I will!”
* * *
Andre has an ongoing feud with Alenushka Romanov. Alenushka, a Russian naturalized citizen, works the desk at the firm’s travel office, her duties including booking tickets, calculating per diems, and monitoring use of the company credit cards. When teams hit the road for lengthy, faraway campaigns, she scours the Internet for houses that the firm could lease, a cost-saving alternative to renting each employee an individual hotel suite. She has a reputation both as a thoughtful steward of the firm’s finances and as a bureaucrat who plays favorites, bestowing upon her closest friends first-class accommodations. And because she possesses this power to grant comforts, staffers compete for her favor: flattery; gifts; inquiries about her son, Daniil, a high school swimming sensation. She enjoys sharing pictures, the pale, sinewy boy in swim caps and briefs, brags that one day Daniil will medal in the Olympics.
Once each year, she takes up a collection, donations to help finance her son’s latest international competition. Toronto and Tokyo, Sochi and Rio. Daniil’s traveled the globe, each trip financed through his mother’s old-school strong-arm shakedown. Most people quietly complain, but everyone pays. Junior associates give one hundred dollars; senior associates give twice as much. Shit, even Mrs. Fitz antes up; last year she gave a solid grand. Andre knows the game, each year writing a check, but this year, he forgot; between work and Hector and the breakup with his girl, he failed to meet Alenushka’s deadline, an oversight he didn’t realize until she denied his request for reimbursement for a client dinner. He assumed he’d eat this one expense, that this cost would teach him his lesson, but now, standing on the veranda of a broken-down Victorian gothic, replete with gargoyles and turret, a house that surely should be condemned, Andre understands that Alenushka still holds a grudge. “We’re staying at an abandoned funeral home?”
“Funeral home and taxidermist.” Brendan fumbles the keys that unlock the front door’s three dead bolts. The porch, bowed planks beneath their feet, smells of rot. The only light is from the full moon and the glow of a bug zapper. Andre can’t see much, but he can make out shapes, filled garbage bags against the rail, and beside the front step, a water heater inside a clawfoot tub. Brendan says, “This used to be the whites-only funeral home. You know, back in the segregated days. African Americans weren’t allowed inside.”
“And who says Jim Crow was all bad?” Andre feels a gnat fly into his mouth and, without thinking, swallows. He spits, though it’s too late for that, swats the swarm circling his face. “Did these gnats follow us from the Jeep?”
“I think we’ve been walking through one continuous swarm.”
Andre glances over his shoulder, catches a shadow, perhaps a rabbit or raccoon, scurrying across the lawn. He estimates fifty-five feet between the porch and the pebbled drive. A continuous swarm of gnats? Well played, Alenushka. He steels himself for whatever’s inside. No matter what he sees, he knows he’s survived far worse. For most of his childhood, his family moved around. By his twelfth birthday, Andre and Hector and their mother must have lived in a dozen different homes, the most luxurious of which could have generously been described as a slum. More than once, they had no home at all. His social worker in juvie called his life peripatetic, a word he did not know and assumed was fancy white-people speak for pathetic. He cursed his social worker out, threatened to beat her ass, a threat that got him thirty days in seg, which, he now thinks, may have been better accommodations than this Victorian shithole.
“The house has four levels.” Brendan opens the door. “The embalming room is downstairs in the basement. That’s mostly storage now. Then, there’s this floor. The living quarters are upstairs on the second floor, and the attic’s