Boris is unsure which idea he dislikes more: the one that poses that everything’s changed, or the one that poses it’s all stayed the same. That they’ve stayed exactly the same, a decade later, frozen in time, forced to look one another in the eye and reckon with it. It’s not true, of course. Boris is still conniving at best and manipulative at worst, with a dash of cruelty to go along on the side. Lucien is –
Best not to go there, maybe, before he thinks himself into circles. Lucien proposes that they leave – it’s getting loud in here, except the volume hasn’t changed at all and the crowd hasn’t even begun to push in. Boris is holding a tupperware container of borscht in his hands, all the way from Russia, and the last thing he is thinking about is dinner, or going back to the library and the stack of paperwork sitting on his desk, ordered into neat yellow folders. He is thinking about Would you make it feel better if I texted him to tell him? (a decisive no) and staring at Lucien’s mouth.
Against his better judgment – against any judgment, he looks over his shoulders, sees that no one is coming to bring him his takeout, and makes a decision that he will probably come to regret later down the line. When he is held up against his tapestry of numberless mistakes to see how he sizes up, he hopes whatever God is up there doesn’t pick this one. He’s done worse things. Several, in fact. “Alright,” Boris acquiesces. “A walk doesn’t sound so bad.” He moves away from the bar, between the gathering throngs of people getting down with their days and gathering for an evening together. He doesn’t want for Lucien to tag along because this is the way it always was: Boris led, and Lucien followed. All the way through Moscow, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, and the countless train stations and airports in-between destinations. Boris first, every time, and Lucien afterward, eyes wide as saucers.
He’ll never say it out loud, but he misses it, sometimes. Better days. Simpler ones, maybe, when he thought the world was on his side and all it took to knock a man from his throne was power of will. You need more than that. You need hunger, too, the kind that won’t let you feel guilt when you pluck the bread that might let them live another day from their grasping fingers. Bread, being gold, being the motherland, being the hard work of the masses, being victory. Bringing something home. He’d been a fool then. He’s still a fool, just a different one.
They break out into the chillier evening air and Boris is glad for the relief of it. He hadn’t realized how close he’d been to strangling, in there, weighed down for reasons he has no want or particular need to explain to anyone, much less himself. Here, he can rationalize with himself. Lucien had accepted his substitution: someone else. Anyone else.
Except there is no one else with the sort of contacts he has, the resources, the downright idiotic ability to get to them. Well, no one except Calina, maybe, but Boris would rather think of anyone else right now. Lucien knows it. Boris knows it. They are move-for-move, match-for-match, and Boris has chosen to continue this tête-à-tête with no rhyme or reason why. He could leave now, call Lucien later, make this as short and to the point as humanly possible.
There’d been – the phone call – a long time ago, and as much as Boris would like to think it’s tissue that’s scarred over by now, it isn’t. Sometimes, if he’s bored, and he wants to torture himself mindlessly over something that isn’t his wanton and moreover blatant betrayal of the people he’s supposed to protect, and then feeling guilty about not feeling guilty, he’ll think of it. T In the evening, a phone cradled to his ear, listening, cotton-mouthed, as Lucien had broken the silence with something like I want you to be there, and Boris had said no.
He wishes he’d ended it there. No, and hung up the phone. But he likes to talk. It’s his profession. So he kept going.
Boris watches as Lucien exits the restaurant, puts his free hand in his coat pocket, the other holding the borscht, and then picks a direction and starts walking. Maybe they’ll cut through an alleyway, or work their way back around, but he’s already made it up in his mind that he’s not going to be returning to work this evening, so he’s trying to map the route back to his car out in his head. He clears his throat. “We haven’t spoken in a while. How’s Apollonia?”
“Dead.” The word is out of his mouth before he can stop it. Lamprius couldn’t stop the truth if he tried. He’s thankful for the sudden burst of cold night air that hits him as he steps into the alleyway; Verona will always be his distraction of choice. Especially when Boris goes around picking at old wounds. What’s Boris doing, going about asking him about that? Lamprius shouldn’t have expected any less. He’s so very tempted to add on ‘So about as well as Sasha,’ and put a little bite in his words -- though in the end he doesn’t. The Witch doesn’t make a habit of showing what he knows in a conversation, only plays his cards when he needs then, no matter how good Boris is at draws a specific kind of pettiness out of him.
He swallows and finds his heart in his throat. Like it’s trying to jump out of him, make its way back to the other.
“Happened a few years ago. I was going to move to Sicily to take care of her but - ”
He shrugs. That same ‘I don’t know’ Boris so often commits to. He can see why. It’s convenient. Imagine a life where you just didn’t provide answers when you didn’t want to. Lamprius really doesn’t believe in that sort of lack of accountability even though Boris clearly does. The heart that’s stuck in his throat yearns to speak of a life that no longer feels like it belongs to him. Of long evenings in hospital rooms, of sickness and health, and that bone-tired wake that he had been late to because he had gotten into the habit of willing every sleep into being a sort of personal death. That’s a box Lamprius won’t open, he’s not even sure if he has the right key for it anymore.
He keeps walking, through this silence, in this dark. He wraps it around himself.
Feels like old times, cutting through a city in the night, when there are fewer eyes to watch them make their way. Lamprius is the one leading here, at least his feet are picking the well-known paths. Russia belongs to Boris, Verona belongs to Lamprius. He leads and Boris follows. He turns his collar up against the night sky of Verona, hands dive into pockets. His feet will know where to take him, Lamprius trusts muscle memory to kick in quickly enough.
“I think there are more pertinent issues at hand.” He ties a knot at he the loose end of that conversation. “I’d rather not talk about my mother.” A clear: Don’t mention her again. Lamprius looks forward, always. They exit the alley, round the corner and Verona opens up in front of them. He doesn’t know how to tell Boris he really isn’t the kind of person to play catch up and talk about family members or turn the spotlight on himself. He’s terrifyingly focused on business. Not to mention, time’s ticking, not for him but for the city, and each fallen grain of sand in an hourglass might as well be keeping count of the bodies of innocents caught in the crossfire.
“Those men you introduced me to, in 2010, I need to see them again.”
“But as you correctly pointed out, I doubt I could get a meeting with them without you.” There’s too much at stake here to be risking crawling through windows. Besides, he doesn’t know the windows of St. Petersburg the way he knows the windows of Verona.
They walk next to a line of windows now, and Lamprius tugs Boris’ jacket to move him two centimeters to the left so that he narrowly avoids the leaky air conditioner he knows is there, before returning his hand to his pocket. He has a very vivid, very brief after-image of their last trip to Russia, of bare skin that had finally shifted from cold to hot to the touch after time spent under the steady work of warm fingertips. All he gets is the fabric of the jacket on fingertips right now, though he won’t think about the chasm of difference between these two tactile senses until later.
“My other three points of contact are suddenly dead - a fate that I was curiously spared. Your friends can’t help but see this as suspicious.” He gets it. The smirk that tugs at the corner of lips says this. How strange that they were dead and he was not. “The only other person they know in relation to me is you. They need someone to vouch for my character, say I am who I still say I am. And much as I would love to do this without them, it’s becoming incredibly apparent that I cannot.”
There. His hand. He grows quiet, allowing Boris to reflect. This is how Lamprius’ has always conducted business: with a quiet firmness. He’ll show the steel of his spine if needed, but he doesn’t see that need now. The ask is pretty clear, he thinks, including the unsaid: ‘Fly to Russia for me, put a pause on your alliance, put your neck on the line for me.’ Lamprius is entirely aware of what he’s asking for.
Hands still in pockets, he looks at the cracks in the pavement, not sure what he’s expecting to find, because reading them like they’re the lines on the palm of this city is kind of passé this time this year, and (to the surprise of many, all things considered, despite the fact that he literally calls himself a Witch), Lamprius is not that superstitious.
After a moment of silence, he decides to add one more thing, because he knows that time has passed between him and Boris. “I also feel the need to say: if you can’t speak to the person I am now, speak to the person I was a few years ago. I assure you when you get down to it, not much has changed.”
His feet have suddenly stopped moving. Lamprius comes to a halt, like he won’t move Boris provides his answer. The man is not at all superstitious, but doesn’t discredit the fact that if he turns 90 degrees exactly, he will be facing his father’s boarded up trattoria.
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