Chapter 9
MOLLY
Vet makes excellent coffee.
This is the first thing I appreciated about her, in those early days before I appreciated anything else.
She arrived on a Monday morning with a calm, unhurried efficiency that settled into the office like it had always been there, learned my coffee order without asking twice, and had my inbox sorted by end of day in a way that made me feel mildly ashamed of how I’d been managing it alone.
She is, in short, a godsend.
Vet is quietly competent in the way that people are when competence is simply their natural register, not something they perform for an audience. I liked her immediately, which is not something I say about many people.
It takes about three weeks before I realize she is also extraordinarily well-informed about things that have nothing to do with office management.
It comes out gradually, the way things do when you spend enough time with a person, and the professional veneer wears to something more comfortable underneath. Three weeks is too short a time for that to happen, but it just flowed so naturally.
We start getting lunch together on Tuesdays.
She drinks her coffee black and has opinions about the deli on Forty-Third that align precisely with mine, which established a foundation of trust more efficiently than most things could.
She’s easy to talk to. She listens without the small affirmative noises and tilted head that signal someone waiting for their turn to speak.
She simply listens, and then she says something precise and useful, and I find myself telling her more than I intended to, which, in retrospect, I should have examined more carefully.
I think she didn’t realize that the information could flow the other way.
It starts small. An offhand reference to a name I recognize from Pavel’s organizational structure, mentioned with a familiarity that doesn’t fit a woman who has only just arrived as an office assistant.
A passing comment about overseas logistics that carries the flavor of firsthand knowledge.
Nothing overt, nothing that announces itself.
She mentions the rye bread from the deli is too sweet, unlike bread in Russia. Since she told me she’s from Nevada, that seems odd.
Just small things that accumulate at the edges of my attention until one Tuesday over sandwiches, three weeks in, I put them together and look at her directly. “How do you actually know Pavel?”
Vet finishes chewing her sandwich with complete serenity, as though she has been waiting for this question and decided the appropriate response is to finish her bite first. She sets it down, wipes her fingers on a napkin with precise little dabs, and tilts her head at me.
“He did not tell you?” Her accent is faint but present, curling around the edges of certain words like smoke.
“He told me you were an administrative hire.”
“Mm.” She considers this with the expression of someone reviewing a mildly interesting piece of information.
“Well. I can administrate. I’m doing it right now, am I not?
I reorganized your inbox this morning. Truly, you should look into programs that will do that for you on a constant basis, so you don’t fall behind again—”
“Vet.”
“Fine, fine.” She waves a hand, bracelets shifting at her wrist. “I worked for him. Overseas.”
I wait. She picks up her coffee, looks into it thoughtfully, then back at me with those calm brown eyes.
“Operations,” she says, in a tone that manages to be both completely straightforward and entirely opaque at the same time.
“The kind that don’t appear in any quarterly projections you will ever file, Molly. ”
“What kind of operations?”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I watch her decide something.
“The kind where the goal is that nothing happens,” she says carefully.
“And when something does happen anyway, the goal becomes that it is contained. Quietly. Quickly.” She sets her coffee down.
“Pavel is very good at containment. I was very good at helping him.”
I think about this. Outside the deli window, Forty-Third moves past in its usual indifferent stream of coats and cabs and people with somewhere to be. “So the men who come in sometimes, the ones who aren’t clients…”
“Yes.”
“And the calls he takes in Russian that he never translates.”
“Also yes.”
“And the reason there’s always someone loitering near the building entrance who isn’t waiting for anyone.”
Vet looks at me with something that might, on a different face, be called impressed. On hers, it’s merely a slight elevation of one brow. “You are very observant for someone who files quarterly projections.”
I fold my napkin and wait for the small hairs on the back of my neck to simmer down. They don’t. “Why are you telling me this?”
She considers the question with the same unhurried thoroughness she brings to everything, tapping one finger against the side of her coffee cup.
“Because you are smart enough to have already picked it up,” she says finally.
“And smart people who have partial information make worse decisions than smart people who have more complete information. Also, I think you deserve to know who you are working for. Not as a warning. More as a…” She searches for the word. “Courtesy.”
“A courtesy,” I repeat.
“Da.” Then, briskly, as though the matter is settled. In a perfect American accent, she says, “Finish your sandwich, Molly. You have a two o’clock.”
I eat the rest of my sandwich and think about the word operations, and all the territory it covers. It looks like all the things I have been carefully not looking at directly for the past few years.
I think about it for the rest of the afternoon.
On the subway home. While I lie on my couch with a glass of wine that I work through more purposefully than usual.
Staring at the water stain duck and trying to lay what Vet described next to the man I know and find the shape that contains both of them.
I find that I can’t, not cleanly. The inability to do so is a problem I’m going to have to sit with for a while.
Vet said things without saying them, a particular skill she has. I know what she meant by those not-words. Pavel is capable of real darkness. I believe this now in a way I only notionally believed it before.
It’s not a comfortable thing to believe about someone whose hands you know. He is also, in that same low and inconvenient voice that lives in the honest part of my brain, the most careful person I have ever been with.
I fall asleep without resolving it, and I go to work the next morning without resolving it, and I’m professional and competent and fine, which I have a great deal of practice being. No one knows I’m having a romantic crisis, and I will keep it that way. My mask is impenetrable.
“What’s wrong?” Vet asks flatly.
Of course, Little Miss Operations would have X-ray glasses.
“Nothing,” I chirp brightly. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Not a thing, darling, but I am not the topic here.” She stares down her nose at me, which gives me the weird sensation of being judged by a nun. “You, however, are, and you are bothered by something. You’re doing that hyper-professional fake thing you do when you’re trying to cover—”
“Can you not read me for once?”
She lifts a shoulder. “Professional hazard. My apologies.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t snipe at you. You’re the only person who’s honest with me around here.”
“Ah.” Her tone says she already knows everything. “You feel betrayed, yes?”
“Just… like I’m standing on shakier ground than I thought.”
“That is the trick, no? Never stand on ground someone else owns.”
“That sounds like strikingly good life advice.”
She smiles. “That’s what I do. Come to me with anything, I have the answer. I have all the answers. A pity there are so few who listen to me.” With that, she wanders back to her desk.
And me? I’m still sighing at my monitor, wondering how I’ve gotten to the point with Pavel that I’m standing on his ground and it’s still shaking.
Then, on a Thursday evening, Pavel stops by my desk as the office empties and quietly tells me he would like me to come to his apartment after work. Tonight, if I’m free.
I look up at him. In three months of this, whatever this is, I have never been to his penthouse.
We have kept to the office, always, with the city burning through those eighth-floor windows, the couch, the desk, the geography of a space that belongs to his professional life and therefore feels, I think, like less of a concession.
An invitation to his home is something different. So, I tell him I’m free.
He nods, and then he tells me how to get there, and this is when it gets specific in a way that sits interestingly alongside everything Vet said at lunch three weeks ago.
I am to take a cab, not a rideshare. I am to give the driver an address two blocks from his building and walk the rest of the way.
I am to pay cash. If I notice anyone following me at any point, I am to go into the nearest busy public space and call the number he gives me, not his regular number.
He says all of this in the calm, matter-of-fact tone he uses for operational instructions, the tone that means these are not suggestions, and he watches my face while he says it to make sure I’m taking it seriously.
I take it fucking seriously. What Vet described is sitting right there at the edge of my mind, giving context to his every word.
How much danger am I in by being with Pavel?
But I follow his instructions to the letter. The cab, the cash, the two-block walk through cold air that cuts right through my coat, checking the street behind me with a casualness I have to work to manufacture. Nobody follows me, as far as I can tell.