“Alisa?” he called hesitantly.
His footsteps padded down the hallway, hands trailing across the banisters erected along an awkward staircase that went into a half story between the second and third. Benedikt kept walking, until he came upon a door that had been left slightly ajar. If memory proved correct, there was another sitting room on the other side.
He pressed his ear to the wood. He had not misheard. There was a Frenchwoman in there, mumbling incoherently, as if she were in tears.
“Hello?” he called, knocking on the door.
Immediately, the door slammed closed.
Benedikt jolted back, his eyes wide. “Hey! What gives?”
“Mind your business, Montagov. This does not concern you.”
That voice was familiar. Benedikt pounded his fist on the door for a few seconds more before a name clicked in place.
“Dimitri Petrovich Voronin!” he called. “Open this door right now.”
“For the last time—”
“I will kick it down. So help me, I swear I will!”
The door flung open. Benedikt barged in, looking around for the source of the mystery. He found only a table of European men playing poker. They all stared at him with annoyance, some putting their cards down. Others folded their arms, sleeves crossed over the white handkerchiefs poking from the chest pocket of their suit jackets. Merchants, or bankers, or ministers—it didn’t matter; they were allied with the White Flowers.
Benedikt blinked, puzzled. “I heard crying,” he said.
“You misheard,” Dimitri replied, in English. Perhaps it was for the benefit of the foreigners at the table.
“There was a woman,” Benedikt insisted, his jaw clenching hard, remaining in Russian. “A crying Frenchwoman.”
Dimitri, lifting the corner of his mouth, pointed to the radio in the corner. His shock of black hair whipped after him as he spun and adjusted the volume, until the speakers were loudly running a program in the middle of a play. Indeed, there was a Frenchwoman reading her lines.
“You misheard,” he said again, walking toward Benedikt. He didn’t stop until he was right in front of him, placing his hands on his shoulders. Benedikt was about as close to Dimitri as Roma was: not very. This manhandling was hardly fitting for a fellow White Flower, and yet Dimitri had no qualms about pushing Benedikt toward the door.
“I don’t know what you have going on,” Benedikt warned, staggering to the entranceway, “but I am monitoring your funny business.”
Dimitri dropped his smile. When he finally switched to Russian for his response, it was as if a change had come over him, a look of complete scorn marring his expression.
“The only funny business,” he hissed, “is that I am maintaining our connections. So do not butt in.”
Fast as the fury came, it was gone again. Dimitri leaned in suddenly and feigned placing an exaggerated kiss on Benedikt’s cheek, the way that relatives sent off children. A chmoc! echoed through the room before Benedikt grunted in indignation and shoved Dimitri aside, shoved his hands off of him.
Dimitri was hardly fazed. He smiled, and returning to English, commanded, “Now, run along and play.”
The door slammed closed.
Tyler Cai was picking at a bāo, rolling up little bits of the dough into mini pellets, and throwing them at the men who were slacking off.
“Come on, no snoozing!” he shouted, aiming another mini bun pellet. It struck one of the assistants right on his forehead, and the boy chortled, opening his mouth so it trailed down his face and dropped in.
“Why don’t you help out?” the boy shot back. Despite his tough talk, he quickly straightened out of his nap and ducked to lift a big bag beneath the table, throwing it across the room.
Satisfied, Tyler leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the foreman’s desk. The foreman was nowhere to be seen. He had run off an hour ago, when Tyler came down into the lab to run inspections, and had yet to return, likely passed out in some brothel. Never mind that it was two in the afternoon.
No matter. That was what Tyler was here for after all—he’d do a much better job of overseeing the vaccine creation than a man with half their drug supply dusted in his beard.
“What does that say?” one of the scientists muttered over the worktable. “I can’t read any of this English; the letters are in horrendous shape.” He showed it to the man working opposite him, and they both peered at the copied sheet, squinting at the handwriting that some hired Scarlet help had copied over twenty times for every scientist in the facility, down to the flicks and dots.