make enough to get out on my own. Because I swore I’d never end up like that again. Hungry and cold and poor as shit. I’d be the man my father never could be, if it was the last thing I did.” He worried his jaw as he picked up the coin and turned it back and forth in the light. “Do you know what the Janus society is?”
The name prickled in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t have said why. “No. What is it?”
“It’s a secret. Kept by the only people who really fucking matter in this world. But no matter what I try, no matter what I do, they won’t let me in.”
“And Eric is…a part of it?” Nina ventured.
His eyes flashed. “So you do know what it is.”
For some reason, Nina took a step back. “I just put two and two together. You’ve never stopped asking about him, despite the fact you’ve never met.”
“Don’t make assumptions you can’t back up, princess.” A vein at Calvin’s temple began to throb. He tossed back another large gulp of liquor. “It doesn’t matter now. The trick with these assholes is that you find a way to make them need you. And they’ll need me soon enough. I’m making fucking sure of it.”
He tossed the coin back onto a stack of papers, then turned around to dig through the liquor cabinet for another bottle.
“What are these?” she asked as she looked more closely at the papers and documents strewn across the desk.
They were forms, mostly. Some laminated cards or what looked like passports. And other documents bearing vaguely Eastern European names under official U.S. and Canadian seals. Many of the names were repeated on multiple documents, and nearly all of them requiring addresses used the same four or five residences in different areas of New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.
“Calvin, these are immigration documents.” Nina started paging through them. “Passports. Visas. Driver’s licenses. What is all this? Why do so many have the same addresses?”
She flipped another paper over—the front page of a title, also bearing the same address.
She looked up. “Is this one of the houses you bought with my money?”
Calvin snatched the papers from her. “Your money?” he snapped. “I thought it was a gift for me. That would make it mine now, wouldn’t it?”
“These are fake. Even I can see that. Just what do you think you’re getting away with?” She shook one of the passports at him. “What is this?”
“Nothing,” Calvin snapped as he grabbed it out of her hand. “Did I ask you to nose around my things?”
“It’s not nothing. What have you gotten involved in?”
“God. You really are such a fucking princess, you know that?” he spat. “Who do you think makes the world you live in so goddamn perfect, Nina? Who do you think cleans your tower in the clouds and makes your food and takes care of your children, huh?”
Nina backed away. “You’re drunk. Maybe we should continue this tomor—”
“People enter this country illegally every fucking day,” he rattled on as he walked around the desk. “And you know what? If they didn’t, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist. People like you need people like me to make sure you get your Marguerites and your Consuelas to cook your meals and clean your house and raise your damn kids. So why shouldn’t I make a buck out of it, huh? Why not, when my own fucking mother couldn’t in the same goddamn position?”
Suddenly, Nina found herself backed up against the row of bookshelves that filled one corner of the room. She stared at Calvin as if he were a stranger. Indeed, he felt like one.
But, she thought, it’s all over now. If he wanted to run some kind of immigration fraud ring without her, he was welcome to it.
She just wanted to be done with it.
As if he read her mind, Calvin’s bitter gaze shifted to the manila envelope lying haphazardly on the desk.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, eyeing the package like it was liable to attack.
Nina took a deep breath and pushed off the bookshelves to step nimbly around him. She didn’t know why she was so nervous.
“Papers,” she said. “The divorce papers.”
Calvin’s head turned so quickly, his jowls shook slightly under his weak chin. “What?”
“Well, um, it’s been a year. And we said—”
“I know what we said.” He picked up the papers and tapped them on the edge of the desk like he was getting