Page 16 of Dressed to Kill
"How did you know what to do?"
"I've had them."
I looked at him. The lamplight caught him from the side, and his red hair looked darker than it was. He was wearing the dark gray cotton shirt I'd bought him. The collar was open. His wrists were on his knees, and there were no cuffs on them.
"Ye want to tell me what happened?"
The workroom came back to me. The cardigan. The masking tape. The name on the tape. The thermos with the lid off under the bench.
"We hit the operation."
"Aye, I gathered."
"They'd cleaned house. They shot the women at the machines. All of them."
He went still.
"How many?"
"Eleven."
"Dragana?"
I closed my eyes.
"She was on the left," he said. Quiet. "First machine in. She'd been there the longest. The others called her Mama."
"Mr. K wasn't there."
"Aye, he wouldnae be. He doesnae do that kind of work himself. He has men for it."
I drank more of the water. My throat was raw. I didn't know when my throat had gone raw.
"I knew them," Fin said. "All of them. Dragana taught me how to set the Italian machines. Marta's husband was in Belgrade. Stanislava had a boy my age. She'd been trying to get him out too."
His hands closed on his knees. The knuckles went white, released, and went white again.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Aye. So am I."
We sat there on the floor of my entryway for a long time. My legs wouldn't hold me yet, and I wasn't going to test them with him in the room. He stayed where he was.
"When I was eight," I said, "I came home from prep school and found my mother dead at her sewing machine."
He didn't move.
"She was letting out my father's pants. He'd gotten fat on French food while living with his mistress."
The silence went a long time. I'd never said any of it out loud. Not to Nikita. Not to anyone. And I'd said it to a prisoner on my own floor because a woman named Dragana had died at a sewing machine on the east side of Columbus.
Fin looked at me for a long moment. His jaw set.
"Yer da was a cunt."
I hit him.
My body did it before my head did. The flat of my hand caught him on the side of the jaw, and he went sideways into the wall. His head bounced off the plaster and he slid a foot along the floor before he stopped. His hair was in his eyes. His lip had split. Blood came up red against the pale of his chin.
