Page 32 of Dressed to Kill
Schedule me with the tailor. ASAP.
My mother had raisedme Catholic. She'd taken me to Mass on Sundays and put me in catechism on Wednesdays and made me sit through the whole rosary on the kitchen floor every Lent until I could rattle off the Sorrowful Mysteries faster than the priest. When she died, I'd kept going for about a year out of habit and then I'd stopped, and I hadn't been inside a working church in eight years for something that wasn't a funeral.
Orthodox churches were a different animal.
I stood across the street in the rain and looked up at the dome. The cross at the top of it was the three-bar kind, the bottom bar set at the slant the Greeks and the Russians both used and the Catholics didn't. Pop had explained that bar to me once. I couldn't remember what he'd said. The rain was coming down steady and the stone of the church had gone dark with it. I'd been standing here long enough that my collar was wet.
Fin didn't come to breakfast this morning. He was being a petulant child about the whole thing. I was the one whose entire world view had been upended last night. I didn't know what hisfucking problem was. The asshole got free rent and three square meals a day. A free orgasm with no strings attached should've been the cherry on top. Instead, he chose to sulk in his room. Fine. Let him sulk. I had work to do.
I crossed the street and took off my hat going up the steps.
The narthex took the sound out of the rain in one breath. The doors closed behind me and the city was gone. The air was thick with incense — not the candle-shop kind, the real thing, layered into the stone over a century or however long the building had been here. The ceiling was low and the walls were close and the light was the dim gold of beeswax in iron stands. Every inch of wall was painted. Saints stacked floor to ceiling, all of them facing me, none of them with the soft Catholic eyes I'd grown up under. Orthodox saints didn't suffer. They watched.
I crossed myself out of habit, the Catholic way, and felt the wrongness of it the second my hand moved. I let my hand fall.
The nave past the narthex had no pews. The iconostasis at the far end was covered in icons, the doors closed, the altar hidden behind it. Candles burned in front of it in a long brass rack. Someone had lit a lot of them recently.
I stood near the back and put my hands in my pockets. The rain was a soft pressure against the stone outside. The candles guttered in a draft I couldn't feel.
Pop had been Russian Orthodox. He'd never made me come to a church like this one. My mother got Sundays and Pop hadn't fought her on it, and whatever he'd kept of his own faith he'd kept to himself. I'd seen him cross himself maybe twice in my life. The bar on the cross outside was the same one he wore on a chain under his shirt, and that was about all I knew about it. The rest of what he'd told me about it was gone.
I tried to picture him in a room like this as a boy, before the wars, holding his father's hand. I couldn't imagine it. He'd beentoo American by the time I knew him, too loud, too much of everything.
Then I tried to picture myself next to that boy with Pop's hand on my shoulder, and I couldn't imagine that either. He'd taken Nikolai to church. Pop had a whole life in Paris where he stood next to a different woman and held a different boy's hand, and he'd left the Catholic version at home with my mother and me.
A door opened somewhere behind the iconostasis. Footsteps. Izzy came out from the side, dressed for the weather, his hat in his hand. He crossed himself when he passed the candles, slow, the Orthodox way, and kissed his thumb at the bottom of it.
"My brother used to say the saints liked the rain," he said without looking at me. "It made the candles work harder."
Isador Costas was younger than me by a decade and looked like a Greek sculpture that life had taken its time with. He was tall and thin in the face, with dark hair starting to fall the way the saints' hair fell in the icons over his shoulder, and sad eyes, the kind of mouth women wrote letters about. Somebody somewhere had built him to be looked at and somebody else had been hitting him with a hammer ever since. The combination had produced a man you couldn't stop looking at and couldn't quite stand to keep looking at.
He stopped a respectful distance from me.
"How's the shrew?" I said.
He turned his head toward me and held my eyes. The candles guttered, and somewhere in the dome a beam settled with the cold and let out a single groan. Izzy waited it out before he spoke. "Hillary is well."
"She let you out of the house?"
"Aleksi," he said quietly. "You and I have known each other a long time. I would consider it a personal favor if you spoke about my wife with the respect a man's wife is owed."
"She doesn't talk about you that way, Izzy. I've heard her. Tatty's heard her."
Izzy turned to face me fully then. The candles were behind him and the gold of the iconostasis was at his back, and he looked at me the way the icons did, all attention and no temperature.
"My wife is my burden to bear," he said. "Just as your demons are yours."
Fin crossed my mind without permission, the split lip and the cum dried on the shirt I'd put in the laundry at three that morning.
I held the look. The rain was steady on the stone outside. Somewhere down the nave a candle gave up and the smoke climbed thin and gray into the dark of the dome.
"All right, Izzy."
"Thank you, Aleksi." He inclined his head a fraction and the iconostasis caught the movement, and he was Izzy Costas again, soft-spoken and sorry for the weather. "Shall we?"
He gestured toward the side of the nave. There was a low stone bench built into the wall there, the kind they put in for the old women who couldn't stand the whole service. He went over and sat, hat balanced on his knee. I came over and stood beside him, because sitting on a bench made for grandmothers was a step further into Izzy's church than I was ready to go.
"The Italians came through the door of Demetriou's Flower Shop on High Street at two this morning. They killed two and walked out."
