Due Diligence #2
her argument on the interplay between forgiveness, perfection, and agency within different understandings of predestination,
when her phone rings, alarmingly loud. Lili almost drops her apple, scrambling for the call.
“Shit—fuck—hello?”
“Colorful. Hello to you, too, Lili.”
It’s him.
“I texted you,” she says, a faint note of accusation.
“I was traveling. Landed a few hours ago.”
Relief washes through her chest; it’s followed fast by irritation.
Lili, she warns. Don’t be an idiot.
A murmur of foreign noise on his end. Frowning, she hops onto the kitchen counter. “Where are you?”
“Istanbul.” The noise resolves into sounds, images: open water, lazy rush of waves against hulls, the roar of disorganized
traffic, a language both melodic and harsh, evening laughter, packed streets.
Her parents had visited: post-undergrad, the nineties. Memories they’d shared with her, planning the trip they’d eventually
take again, this time as a family, back to the Middle East. An idea that died with them, now only contained in photographs
buried deep in her closet. She’s never been out of the country.
Lili swings her legs, pushing the memories aside. “When are you back?”
“Wednesday.”
“Right.”
A pause hovers. The sounds from her street mingle with the distant city on his end.
Lili chews her lip, but the silence seems comfortable for him.
A glass clinks, the call of seagulls on drafts of warm wind.
It’s late evening in Istanbul, purple dusk: dying sunlight on the Bosphorus, the push of ferries across dark waters, the Hagia Sophia looming, caught between the sunset and nightfall call of the muezzin.
She can do this: keep fucking him and feel nothing. Casual—it could be casual, inconsequential, efficient.
She’s an adult. She can handle this.
“Are you—are you free, when you get back?” she asks, swallowing a bit of pride.
Sex. It’s just sex she wants. Simple, mind-clearing sex.
He laughs. “Yes, Lili. I may be able to find some time.”
“Only if you’re not too tired from dismantling welfare states worldwide,” she snaps.
“I actually find it restorative. Invigorating, really, to expose people to the power and force of the free market.”
“Goodbye,” she says, hanging up, but not before she catches his laugh again, the soar of birds and a summer night, hot and humid.
The Maybach idles at her curb on Wednesday evening. Lili rolls her eyes, but gets in; the back seat is empty this time.
Nervous excitement skitters through her. She feels anxiously buoyant; she chooses to interpret it as relief from sending her
draft off to Kerr, rather than anticipation of tonight’s plans.
The thin straps of her silky minidress keep slipping off her shoulders. There’s a little black thong underneath, bra forgone.
She’d stared at her underwear drawer for a moment too long when she was getting dressed; it doesn’t matter what he’d like.
The sun is setting as they drive over the Williamsburg Bridge, gold syrupy light over the buzzing city. A honey-like languor,
seductive and sly and winking. Off the bridge, the car takes a right turn onto Bowery, instead of continuing through the traffic-choked
downtown streets.
“Excuse me?” Lili says, leaning forward towards the driver. “Sorry, but I think we’re headed to Tribeca?”
“Mr. Petrov gave an alternate address,” he volunteers. Not rude, but not exactly forthcoming.
“Where, exactly?”
“He’s instructed to keep it confidential.”
Lili settles back in her seat.
(7:27 p.m.) are you kidnapping me
(7:30 p.m.) Hardly.
She huffs.
As they keep driving uptown, her concern twists. She decisively does not like being in the dark.
(7:35 p.m.) where am i going
(7:37 p.m.) if you have another apartment, i’m rioting
(7:41 p.m.) Petrov.
(7:45 p.m.) Have you always had problems with authority?
Prewar buildings, stately and towering, the brilliant green of the park. Limestone town houses off Fifth, ornate lion’s head
knockers. Briefcases, black cars, and idling doormen, women in heels trailed by young toddlers and nannies.
When the car slows to a stop in front of familiar steps at 82nd and Park, Lili is not happy.
She’s torn between folding her arms and refusing to get out, when the driver—Richard, she’d learned, when she tried to finagle
further details about where they were going, and she did not appreciate that he seemed both amused by her and loyal to his
employer—opens the door for her.
“Thank you,” she grumbles, glaring up at the Met’s steps.
“Hello, Lili.”
It’s Aleksandr, not his driver, who opened the door.
He looks a little tired, weariness hinting at long days of travel, but relaxed. Golden hour suits him. A few buttons of his
shirt are undone underneath his black linen suit.
It’d be much easier if he didn’t look like this.
“Why are we here?” she asks, scowling.
He smiles, shutting the car door. “My trip went well, thank you. The return flight was uneventful.”
Her scowl deepens. “What is this? I thought we were going to your place—”
He rests a hand on her lower back, guiding her up the steps. “Come on, Lili.”
“Is this a heist?”
“You seemed to like art.”
“I do, but this isn’t what I agreed to—it’s closed, anyway—”
“Not for us.”
Lili twists away from the warmth of his hand, storming ahead up the stairs.
Us isn’t a concept she’s yielding tonight.
“This is ridiculous,” she mutters when the guard at the door lets her through. The Great Hall, usually cavernous with noise
and people and fascination, audio guides and unfolded museum maps, tourists’ khaki shorts and polos somehow endearing when
they’re staring up at the high ceiling, is empty. Serenity laces it, an after-hours sense that hovers between excitement and
secrecy.
“Where would you like to go first?”
He’s not even trying to contain his grin. She should turn around and leave. This concept—a museum, the two of them, summer
evening—veers too close to the contours of a date.
Except—it’s the Met. It’s the Met, and it’s empty.
Thirty minutes. She’ll give this—whatever this is—thirty minutes, before she pulls him into some corner, gets what she came
here for, and leaves.
“Temple of Dendur,” she announces, hooking right towards the Sackler Wing.
His footsteps—too-expensive shoes, hard leather soles—follow, keeping up without effort as she heads into the Egyptian galleries.
The museum hush soothes her a bit, as she passes sandstone bas-reliefs, the protective heft of sarcophagi. Funerary art, the
direct gaze of Fayum portraits in faded hues of ocher and cerulean, looks down at her from the gallery walls: death, stone,
and color alive across centuries.
In her first months in the city as an undergrad, nearly free admission in hand, she’d dissected the Met down to each of its rooms, a wing each visit.
She’d pressed her nose against the glass protecting the long stretch of Imhotep’s Book of the Dead, feet after feet of priests’ hieratics on papyrus chanting out spells, incantations, prayers.
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she muses, looking over the limestone reliefs. “It’s the same type of stone as the buildings outside.
There’s some humor in that—tombs of the living, galleries of the dead.”
“Some similarity in the materialism, too. I’m surprised you aren’t disparaging the pharaohs for their avarice. Buried in their
wealth, boats, and chariots, with full wardrobes, retainer sacrifices.”
“Retainer sacrifice, is that what you’re planning to do with Michael?”
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow, amused. “Excuse me?”
“I met him,” she clarifies. “He was in the car, when I left your place last time.”
He frowns. “I wasn’t aware.”
“Apparently, I’m a problem,” Lili informs him primly; Aleksandr laughs, loud.
“Don’t laugh!” she exclaims, faux-outraged.
“I’m sorry, but you sound proud of his disapproval.”
She beams. “He did not like me.”
“Michael doesn’t like most people. He’s mostly harmless. He likes to think he keeps me out of trouble.”
“Am I trouble?” she teases.
Aleksandr grins, shaking his head. “I’m not doing my job right if he’s not lying awake at night.”
The galleries give way then to the Sackler Wing: the huge room, glass stretching above them, still water reflecting the green
of the park, the stone temple, dusk falling, tinges of golden sunset fading at the edges of the sky.
“You know, most of this shouldn’t really be here,” Lili says. Her voice is quieter, a little more reverent as they walk around
the reflecting pool, past its benches. Spare coins gleam under the water. “It’s a form of cultural pillaging.”
“Nasser gifted the temple to the States in ’65. The Aswan Dam would have flooded it.”
“That’s one piece in hundreds of thousands.”
“Would you have them repatriate all of it? Leave the museums of the world empty?”
“Should people have to travel and pay to see their own heritage?”
“Yes, of course. The museum’s preservation of the art, that’s a service—”
“Oh, dear God,” she mutters, as they step into the temple.
“Nations aren’t always best positioned to preserve their own legacies,” he says, rounding a column, looking up at the carvings
on the lintel: the sun disk, outspread wings of Horus.
She gapes after him. “How can you say that? These are the literal cradles of Western civilization. You don’t think the Greeks
can handle the Elgin Marbles?”
“The Greeks can barely handle a common currency,” Aleksandr mutters.
“What was that?” Lili asks sharply.
His smirk indicates he knows she heard him, as he examines a relief carved into the sandstone walls. He skims a light finger
over the outline of Isis, ankh in hand.
Lili’s eyes widen. He should not be touching that.
“I find it strange you wouldn’t want this preserved,” he says. “Is this not your heritage?”
She frowns. “You think the Middle East is just one big place? Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, all synonymous?”
“No, I’m not American.”
“Yes, because the Brits have a much better track record in the region.”
He laughs. “I’m not British either, Lili.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” she retorts, frustrated.
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow. “Nor you me.” He continues walking through the temple. “What about the ruins of Palmyra?” he