Chapter 7 #2
“You should do it,” I say. “I have two conditions. Platon tells him what the interview is for before it starts, and I get the recording afterward.”
“That’s acceptable,” Platon says.
Maren looks between the three of us from her chair. “I have follow-up questions about literally everything that just happened.”
“You’ll get answers,” I tell her. “You won’t get all of them today.”
“Then I want one thing right now.” She stands and comes close enough that this becomes a conversation between the two of us, even though nobody’s pretending the men can’t hear.
“That man over there waited for you to open my binder. He asked permission before he touched your brother’s situation. He’s letting you set terms.”
“He is.”
“I’ve watched you get fooled by exactly that.
” Maren keeps her voice steady, and the effort shows.
“Nobody’s ever fooled you with cruelty. Restraint fools you every time, because restraint looks like respect and you’ve never had enough of either to tell them apart.
” She takes my hand. “He’s waited when waiting was cheap.
You need to watch what he does the first time your answer takes something away from him. ”
I don’t have an answer for her. Maren has stood next to me through every bad decision I’ve made since I was twenty-three, and she has never once won an argument by being harsh.
“I’m watching,” I say.
“You’re watching the easy part. You need to watch the first time telling him no actually takes something from him.” She squeezes my hand and lets go. “You should take the binder and everything in it. If those men come back, I don’t want anything here worth taking.”
Platon steps forward. “I’d like to replace your door camera with a full system and keep two people on your block. I brought a technician in the follow car for exactly this, so we do it now, before we leave.”
“I’d like to not need that.”
“I’d like that for you too. Your block has other ideas.”
Maren stares at him for a second longer than the sentence requires. “Fine, you can put them on the block, as long as they park where I can see them. If one of them so much as touches my inventory, I’m charging retail.”
Platon packs the binder, the printed message threads, and Maren’s backup drive into a locking case while a technician pulls her old door camera off its bracket. The gate goes up long enough for the car to reverse out, and it comes down again behind us.
We’re on the Expressway heading back when Nikita’s phone buzzes. He reads it, and he wipes every readable thing off his face until nothing shows at all.
“Adrian moved the verification,” he says. “Nine tomorrow morning at Water Mill. Two examiners, and they’ve requested the surviving spouse present with photo identification and a signed affidavit.”
Tomorrow I have to convince two strangers I loved him, while the actual man stays somewhere in the same house, close enough to ruin us both if he coughs at the wrong moment.
At the mansion, I set up at the kitchen island with a legal pad, because pretending to be a widow requires the same preparation as any other job and I’ve never once walked into a job unprepared.
I’m forty minutes in when Nikita sits down across from me. Nobody asked him to. He brings two cups of coffee and sets one beside my pad.
“Where did we marry?” I ask.
“You should say a civil ceremony in Bridgehampton. The Southampton Town Clerk’s office processed forty-one marriage licenses that month, and its delayed returns were indexed in batches.” He turns his cup a slow quarter-turn on the counter. “You should say I didn’t want a photographer.”
“Why wouldn’t you allow one?”
“I never allowed public photographs of myself. Not at the wedding, not during the years I ran the family. The estate kept private family photographs, but none circulated publicly, and none are recent.” He says it evenly.
“That part is true, and true things survive cross-examination better than invented ones. It’s also the reason I can stand in a room full of Shilov’s people and be a stranger.
The men who took my territory took it from a name and a reputation.
Almost none of them ever saw my face, and the few who did saw it four years and one very deliberate change of appearance ago. ”
“The widow had a camera-shy husband, then, and the dead man gets to walk around.”
“The dead man gets to walk around carefully.” He turns the cup a quarter turn.
“Volkov is my cover: a jacket and an alias over a face nobody outside the estate has a recent, clean picture of. It holds until anybody familiar with my real face looks hard enough. That’s the part we don’t test unless we have to. ”
I write it down. “What did you do for our anniversary?”
“We didn’t have one. You should tell them I was traveling.”
“That’s sad.”
“That’s accurate.” He turns the cup a quarter rotation. “You should tell them I was in Rotterdam and I called you at two in the morning because I’d miscalculated the time difference, and I stayed on the line for an hour anyway.”
I stop writing.
“Would you have done that for me?” I ask.
He takes a drink of his coffee and doesn’t answer, which is the answer.
We work through it for another hour. He gives me the name of the restaurant where we supposedly ate on Sundays and the reason we sat at the back table, the model of the car he supposedly picked me up in, the exact wording he’d have used to introduce me to people who didn’t matter.
He builds the marriage in load-bearing pieces, the same as he builds everything else.
By the end of the hour, it feels detailed enough to survive questions and personal enough to make me uncomfortable.
Around six, Platon comes into the kitchen with a laptop.
“I pulled the footage off Maren’s old door camera before my technician replaced it,” he says. “The two men from this morning came to photograph something in particular.”
Nikita sets down his cup. “What were they photographing?”
Platon turns the screen toward us and freezes the footage. The image is grainy and shot from above the doorframe, but the man standing at the front window is holding a camera with a telephoto lens, and he has it aimed past the glass at Maren’s workstation.
The binder lies open on the shelf in front of him.
Maren left it open to page eleven: the Peter Halloran sale, with my buyer thread stapled behind the entry.