14. Ivan
IVAN
Dismantling a man without his noticing is slower than breaking him, and better, and I’ve been doing it to Hugo for three weeks with the patience the work deserves. A broken man knows who broke him. A diminished one blames the weather, blames his enemies, blames anything but himself.
The weather seeks no revenge. His enemies consider it business as usual. He persists, spreading blame until he has nowhere else to put it.
There’s nothing usual about Hugo’s past three weeks.
Nothing dramatic. Drama is evidence. A contract here, renewed under a different signature by a different captain.
A committee seat that quietly lapses when the gala’s host list is redrawn, by a chairwoman who owes me a favor she was delighted to repay.
Two of Armin’s eleven names, the flattered men who answered Pyotr’s questions, reassigned to postings where the only secrets available concern parking.
Hugo’s calendar still fills, because I leave him the ribbon cuttings and the photographs, the carbohydrates of relevance.
What I remove is protein. Access, signature authority, the rooms where numbers are decided, and a man on that diet feels full for months while the strength goes out of him by degrees.
Armin reviews the progress with me on Tuesday and pronounces it clean. “He suspects weather,” he says. “A bad month. He has blamed two subordinates and his golf swing, in that order, to three separate people who reported it to me.”
“And Witte. His questions.”
“Slowing. Witte reads erosion faster than your stepbrother does. He is recalculating what, exactly, he was invited to invest in.”
Good. That is the entire campaign in one line. Let the buyer watch the asset shrink.
Hugo chose this fight the day he married into Witte’s house without a word to me. That move made the organization look porous in front of the entire city. That, I cannot abide. Not professionally, because porous gets tested.
So the work proceeds, quiet and correct, and it would be a satisfying week if not for the other issue that has crept up in my life. The one where Luna has begun sounding wrong on the phone.
I call her on Tuesday evening. She answers on the fourth ring, which is new, and her voice sounds like it is wearing an ill-fitting coat. It’s not the words. It’s the tone. “… the shop was busy. The new wicks came. Hairy is well, thanks for asking.”
“I asked how your day is going.”
“Right.” She pauses. “And I told you.”
Perhaps it is merely a generational thing. Her people are not phone people.
“Very well. Talk later?”
“Sounds good.” A crisp click follows.
I sit with the phone afterward. Tone, flat. Tempo, fast. Laughter, absent. The woman who narrates her life to me at length in texts, gone.
Something is wrong.
I call on Wednesday. Same ill-fitting coat, same four minutes on the phone.
I don’t know how to ask her what’s wrong. The sentence exists. I’ve heard other men say it. What’s wrong? Talk to me . But in my mouth, it converts such things into interrogation.
When I think of asking, that’s where my thoughts go.
I’ve spent thirty years asking questions of people who were lying to me, and all my asking is built from that, the angles, the pressure, the watching for the tell. You cannot aim that at a woman you’re in—at her. You cannot aim that at her.
I sit in my office at the top of my city, a man who can dismantle a rival without fingerprints and cannot ask one woman one honest question over a telephone. The asymmetry would be funny in another man’s life.
I do what I do when a direct approach fails. I deploy an asset, and the best asset in my arsenal for a closed door is currently rolling out dough in my kitchen.
Darya puts down her knife and looks at me with the weariness of a woman who has watched a man circle a point for sixty seconds too long, which I have. “What is wrong with her?”
“Kind of you to assume it’s something wrong with her.”
She levels an arched brow at me. “I don’t. Not really. But you men, you always blame a woman for your problems. So, as you see things, what is wrong with her?”
I don’t like admitting this. “I don’t know.”
“You asked?”
“I called twice.”
“Calling is not asking.” She wipes her hands, already in motion, a one-woman mobilization. “Sick or sad, it doesn’t matter which, the treatment is the same. I have borscht from Sunday, the good pot. I will take it myself.”
“Darya.”
“You will say I shouldn’t interfere.” She’s packing the container as she says it, cutting bread, wrapping the bread for travel. “You are wrong.”
This sits ugly with me. “I’m your boss, if you remember.”
She laughs derisively. “Da. And boss, you’re wrong that I should not interfere. You want to know how she is. This is how a person finds out. You bring food, you sit, you say nothing with your mouth full. It works on everyone alive.”
“Perhaps I should leave you to the future interrogations. With methods like that, I might not have to break so many fingers.”
She huffs. “Only boys talk when there are broken fingers. I thought you interrogated men.”
I snort at the implication, and she leaves with the pot in a canvas bag, declining Lev twice, declining cab fare once, accepting only the dignity of the train. I attempt to work and produce, by the close of business, eleven readable pages. That’s it.
At four fifty, my phone sounds. The message is from Luna.
Did you just send your housekeeper to my place of business with a container of borscht?
It was either that or ask how you’re feeling, I type, and send it before I can think better of it.
The three dots appear. Stop. Appear again, and I watch them the way I have watched courtroom doors.
It’s a picture of the goldfish. Hairy, at the front of his tank, eye enormous against the glass, and positioned on the counter beside the tank, in frame, the open container of borscht, steam still visible.
The composition is careful, staged, lit.
The fish appears to be eyeing the soup with criminal intent.
I can hardly blame him.
The caption arrives two seconds later. He has demanded a portion. I’ve explained about sodium. Negotiations continue.
Such a silly message should not result in so much relief. But she still sounds like herself. This isn’t over, whatever this is.
I sit looking at a photograph of a goldfish menacing a container of my housekeeper’s soup, and I smile. Tell him the recipe survived three governments and one famine. He can appreciate it from a distance.
Darya returns and reports nothing, which I can appreciate. Luna’s secrets, whatever they may be, are hers to share. The visit was not surveillance, and she will not convert it into surveillance after the fact.
“She fed me a cracker with cheese. Treated me as a guest, in her own shop, mid-crisis. Good girl. Tired eyes.” A pause, her hand still on the coat hook. “Whatever it is, it is hers right now. Wait to be invited.”
Darya has given me direct orders perhaps four times. I have obeyed all four. Such a record argues for obeying the fifth.
Every problem I have ever owned, I solved by entering the room, invited or not. And here is one door, that I could open with a phone call or a knock or the full weight of everything I am, but the only correct play is to stand outside it and wait.
I hate waiting.
Friday, she texts first, unprompted. The wholesale order is dead, long live the wholesale order. Also the borscht was unreasonable. Tell Darya she fights dirty.
I will tell her no such thing, I reply. She would consider it a performance review and ask for it in writing, alongside a bump in pay.
A laugh emoji. Then, Soon. I just need a little more time. Okay?
It is not okay. But she needs it to be okay, and I have the overwhelming urge to make things okay for Luna.
Of course, I type instead. Take the time you need. The fish has my number.
And I put the phone face-up on the desk where I can see it, and go back to the slow work of taking a man apart.
All the while across town, a woman I’m no longer pretending to care about takes whatever time she is taking, uninvaded, with good bread and life-altering soup in the shop and a sentry in the tank.