Because It Is My Blood

XIII I ENGAGE IN RECREATIONAL CHOCOLATIERING; RECEIVE TWO NOTES AND A PACKAGE

MR. KIPLING WAS MY DATE to the tracker-removal party at the East Ninety-Third Street police station. The police station had sentimental associations for me, as it was the same place I’d been detained after I’d been arrested for poisoning Gable Arsley. As for the tracker? Though it wasn’t supposed to be painful coming out, it was. The officer said I should go to a doctor to have it checked out in case it was infected. “These little buggers are supposed to be thrown away, but,” he apologized, “occasionally we do use them twice. Budget cuts, you know.”

As I was leaving, another police officer handed me a note:

Congratulations on your release. Please come see me at Rikers. I have information for you.

Fondly,

Your Cousin

I assumed it was Jacks, though—let’s face facts—I probably had more than one cousin in prison.

Outside, the snow had melted, and the day felt positively tropical for the end of February in New York.

“So, now what?” Mr. Kipling asked me.

The prior evening, I had lain awake in my bed, thinking of the things I needed to do once I was free. The list was so long that I had to get up to write it on my slate:

1. Find a boarding school for Natty.

2. Find a school for me.

3. Find out who killed my brother and Imogen.

4. Avenge my brother’s death.

5. Figure out how to get my brother’s ashes from Japan.

6. Figure out what to do with my life post–high school (should I ever manage to graduate, that is).

7. Call Granja Mañana to see how Theo is doing (not from a traceable line, of course).

8. Get a haircut.

9. Go through Imogen’s things.

10. Buy birthday present for Win (Saturday market?).

But I didn’t want to do any of that just then. “Mr. Kipling,” I said, “would it be all right with you if we walked around for a while?”

We went the long way, going west to Fifth, which took us past Little Egypt. Little Egypt looked as decrepit as ever. “When I was a kid,” Mr. Kipling said, “I thought this was the coolest place in the world. I loved the mummies.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Everyone and everything went broke. And no one thought the mummies were worth saving, I guess.” Mr. Kipling paused. “And now it’s this idiotic nightclub.”

I knew it well.

In front of Little Egypt, I could already detect that there were more black market products being hawked out in the open than when Charles Delacroix had been acting as district attorney. I walked past a chocolate dealer. You wouldn’t have known chocolate was being sold, as there was no product in sight. The table was covered with a dark blue velvet cloth and approximately one hundred matryoshka dolls sat atop it. Everyone knew what matryoshka dolls meant. I walked over to the table. Mr. Kipling asked me if I was sure I wanted to do that. “What if someone is watching?”

We’d paid off Bertha Sinclair so I thought I was pretty much in the clear.

“You have Balanchine Special Dark?” I asked the vendor.

The vendor nodded. He reached under the table and produced a single bar. I could tell from the wrapper that it wasn’t real. The colors were off, and the paper had an unappetizing, gritty matte finish. It was probably some cheap, 1 percent cacao chocolate in a counterfeit Balanchine wrapper. I bought the bar anyway. Ridiculously, the vendor wanted ten dollars for this knockoff.

“Are you serious?” I asked. A bar of Balanchine Special Dark was usually three or four dollars, tops.

“Supply’s been scarce,” the vendor replied.

“You and I both know this isn’t even Balanchine,” I said.

“What are you? Some kind of expert? Take it or leave it.”

I put the money on the table. Despite the cost, I was curious to see what was being sold in my father’s name.

Mr. Kipling stood a bit away from me while I was making this transaction. He didn’t want to be disbarred, I suppose.

I slipped the chocolate into my bag, and then Mr. Kipling walked me back to my apartment.

“Should we talk about schools?” Mr. Kipling asked.

What was there to talk about? “Homeschooling seems like the only option at this point. I’ll study at home and try to get my GED before summer.”

“And after that? College?”

I looked at Mr. Kipling. “I think we both know that I am no longer college material.”

“That isn’t true!” He argued with me for a while, and I ignored him. “Anya, your father wanted you to go to college.”

If he’d lived, that might have been an option. “And Natty will,” I replied.

“But you? What will you do instead?”

In the short term, I needed to find out who had killed Leo and ordered the hits on the rest of my family. As for long-term goals? It had begun to seem pointless for me to make any. “Mr. Kipling, I’m booked up,” I said lightly. “I’ve got my uncle’s funeral to attend, a cousin to visit in prison, and Win’s birthday party is next Saturday. The only thing I wonder is how I ever had time for school at all.”

Our walk had come to an end, and Mr. Kipling was giving me an annoyingly tragic face. “Okay, my dear, I’ll arrange to hire you a tutor.”

Just outside the front door of the apartment, someone had placed a medium-size box and an envelope. I carried both inside and set them on the kitchen counter. The envelope had no postmark, but envelopes were unlikely to contain explosives, so I opened that first.

It was a note:

Dear Anya,

Perhaps you remember me? My name is Sylvio Freeman. Syl. I had opportunity to meet you last fall when you interviewed at my school. I am aware that you are now back in the city, and for the moment at least, appear to have put your legal difficulties behind you. I had hoped you might speak at a Cacao Now meeting about your experiences. If this suits you, please come—

I tossed the note aside without bothering to finish reading it. I turned to the box. The postmark indicated Japan, and the return address was the Ono Sweets Company, which, of course, meant Yuji Ono. The box was surprisingly heavy. I debated whether to open it. There could be a bomb inside. And yet I doubted that if Yuji Ono wanted to finish me off, he would send a package with his own return address on it.

I retrieved my machete from my bedroom and sliced open the box. Inside was a gallon-size plastic bag filled with dust, and a small white card.

Leo.

Dear Anya,

I am sorry I am not able to come to New York to deliver this myself. I am detained by both business troubles and poor health. I am also sorry about the way we left things. The timing was very poor. Someday, I hope I will be able to better explain my behavior. So you know, I did have opportunity to view Leo’s body before cremation, but there was very little left of it. I do believe it was him. The corpse of his girlfriend, Noriko, was recognizable, and Leo has not been seen in Japan since.

You are still in my thoughts,

YUJI ONO

Oh, Leo.

Some part of me—my heart, I suppose—had hoped Leo’s death might be a mistake, but now I knew it wasn’t. The brain could not deny the evidence. Leo was dead.

I was glad that Natty was at school because I didn’t know what I wanted to say to her yet.

I set the ashes on the coffee table in the living room and contemplated my next move. Leo needed a funeral, but if I gave him one—if I, say, had him buried at the plot in Brooklyn—it could potentially implicate me in his escape. I did not relish the idea of a fifth stint at Liberty. So, perhaps Leo’s service could be informal: ashes scattered in the park on a sunny day, Natty reading a poem, etc. Did it really matter that Leo’s remains shared space with my parents’? They were all dead anyway.

I wanted to cry over Leo. I could feel the rusty gears turning behind my eyes and the tightening of my chest, but the tears would not come.

The longer I looked at Leo’s ashes, the more I began to feel, oddly enough, embarrassed. The steps I’d taken to keep Leo safe had been just the wrong ones. Look at the outcome! My father, wherever he was, would probably be ashamed of me.

I hadn’t moved for hours when Natty got home from school. Her eyes shifted from me to the bag to me. “Poor Leo,” Natty said before she sat down on the couch.

Natty leaned over the coffee table and picked up the bag by one of its corners, as if she wanted to make as little contact with it as possible. “Does it seem like enough is here? Leo was so tall.” She set Leo’s ashes back on the table. “I dreamed of him last night.”

“I didn’t hear you scream or anything.”

“I’m not a child anymore, Anya.” She rolled her eyes. “Besides, it wasn’t a nightmare. Leo was well and whole.” She paused. “I don’t think we should bury him. Leo wouldn’t like that. He liked being home with us. He liked being here.”

I told her I would pick out an urn next week.

I went into my bedroom. I took the chocolate bar out of my bag and set it atop my dresser.

The bar looked so sweet and harmless lying there. Not deadly in the least.

On Saturday, I put on my trusty black dress, which I couldn’t have been sicker of wearing, and dragged myself to Uncle Yuri’s funeral, which wasn’t held at my church but at the Eastern Orthodox one that most members of the Family favored. I debated whether to take Natty but decided against it. Natty had known Uncle Yuri even less than I had, and I didn’t want to put her in proximity of our nearest and dearest. I debated whether to take my machete, but decided against that, too. Since I would be frisked, there was really no point. I did take one of the bodyguards Mr. Kipling had hired to stand guard outside our place—a brick wall of a woman named Daisy Gogol. She was six feet tall, had arms as thick as my legs, and was in need of an eyebrow and upper-lip wax. She was Natty’s and my favorite, though. Daisy Gogol had a melodious speaking voice. I once mentioned this to her and found out that she had studied to be an opera singer before moving into the more lucrative field of security. Natty reported that she had spotted Daisy Gogol feeding the birds on our balcony.

The funeral service was tedious as I felt almost nothing at Yuri Balanchine’s death. Daisy, however, wept copiously. I asked her if she had known Yuri. She hadn’t known him at all, but had been moved by the reading from Ecclesiastes. She clutched my hand in her meaty paw.

Since the night of the three attacks, I had not been in a room with anyone from the Family. In the front pew, Mickey sat next to his wife, Sophia. Fats was two rows behind them. The rest of the church was filled with employees of Balanchine Chocolate, some of whom were relatives I knew vaguely (but have found no need to mention in this narrative). It occurred to me that any of these people could have been responsible, or none of them. The world was very large, and at that age, I believed it to be filled with potential villains.

When it was my turn to view Yuri’s body, I leaned over the casket and crossed myself. The mortician had managed to erase the effects of Yuri’s stroke, and his face looked more symmetrical than it had the last time I’d seen him. His lips were painted an unnatural purplish hue, and I wondered what they had been trying to tell me that day in September. I thought of his other son, Jacks. He hadn’t been let out of prison for the funeral, but Yuri had been his father, too. And despite everything Jacks had or hadn’t done, on that day, I was able to manage a dust mote of pity for my poor cousin.

I went up to Mickey and Sophia to pay my respects. Mickey was wearing a dark suit as was to be expected. Sophia was wearing a shapeless maroon dress that was draped almost like a toga. An odd choice for a funeral.

Mickey’s eyes were bloodshot. He took my hand and thanked me for coming.

Sophia smiled at me, but the smile was forced. “How are you, Anya?” She planted a kiss on each of my cheeks. Her cheekbones were sharp against mine. “We have been meaning to come see you since your return but we were much occupied with Yuri. How did you enjoy your time abroad?” Sophia lowered her voice. “With my cousins?”

“I loved them,” I replied. “Thank you.”

“You and I—we must really catch up,” Sophia said. “Much has happened these past months.”

On my way out, I was stopped by Fats. “Annie,” he said. “You haven’t been to my place since you’ve been back.”

“No,” I replied. “I haven’t.”

“You have nothing to fear from me,” Fats said. “I wasn’t involved in the attacks.”

“Everyone I know says they weren’t involved,” I said. “And yet the attacks did happen all the same, didn’t they?”

“Listen, Annie. I’m real sorry about Leo, but my interest here is business. Mickey is running Balanchine Chocolate into the ground. He’s not a bad kid but he doesn’t know what he’s doing any better than his dad did. I work with a lot of the guys that actually sell the stuff. And they need to know that the supply will come on time and in good condition. With Mickey running things, no one believes that anymore. He’s lost their confidence.”

“Fats, I can’t think about any of that until I know who was responsible for—”

“Listen to me, Annie!” I had never heard Fats raise his voice before. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It doesn’t matter who did it. There isn’t time for you to track down the parties who were involved. Someone has to step in to organize Balanchine Chocolate, and I think that person should be me.”

I said nothing.

“I’d like you to back me. Your support would mean a lot.”

I chose my words carefully. “From where I’m standing right now, it looks like you tried to kill off Natty, Leo, and me so that you could take control.”

Fats shook his head. “No. That’s not what happened.”

“So, who did it? Say it if you know.”

“Kid, I am telling you I don’t. I wish I knew. But what I think, what I think is that someone outside the organization wanted to inject chaos into it. Just like with the poisoning last year.”

“Do you mean Yuji Ono?”

“Annie, I don’t know. Could be.”

“Why should I back you to run Balanchine Chocolate if you know so little?”

“All right … Here’s one thought I had.” He lowered his voice and looked across the room at Sophia. “What if she was involved? Her maiden name is Bitter, and Bitter is the perennial fourth-place chocolate distributor in Germany.”

I looked across the room at Sophia Balanchine. It didn’t seem likely that she would have sent me to hide in Mexico, potentially putting her mother’s family in danger. At this point, it felt like Fats would point his finger at anyone to stop mine from pointing at him.

Daisy Gogol put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you copacetic, Anya?”

I nodded and told her I was ready to go.

Fats grabbed my arm. “I remember the day you were born. Your daddy bringing the pictures to the Pool for us to see. I would never have done anything to put you or your brother and sister in harm’s way. You have to know that.”

The only thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t know anything.