CHAPTER 9 #2
I watched her clear exits. Front door, one.
Back door through the kitchen, two. Terrace door behind Stefan, three.
Service stair, four. Basement stair, five.
The window over the sideboard we cannot get a body through — a fact she has yet to learn — six.
She is a fucking professional. She got to six and stopped because she understood that the fourth man at the top of the stair stood clear of the sixth.
Pakhan said, in the voice he uses for every important decision: "Rossi. Sit. We are going to have a conversation."
She stayed standing.
She held the book at the spine and the lower right corner. Looked at Pakhan for three beats. At me for one beat. At Stefan for one beat. At Castellan for two beats. Back to Pakhan.
"I am the one in the room," she said. "I would like to be told what room I am in."
Suka.
Good answer.
The words stayed inside my teeth where they belonged. Pakhan inhaled at four and exhaled at six and his right thumb moved over the crown of the Patek for a fraction of a second, hovering, releasing.
"Sit," Pakhan said. "Please. The book stays with you. You will not be asked to put it down. I am asking for the room."
She walked into the west sitting room with the book held at the spine and at the lower right corner.
The four of us followed at distances that had been picked the night before.
I took my position at the threshold of the dining-room arch because the arch is the place you put the man whose voice is least useful in a conversation he cannot yet contribute to.
She sat on the edge of the couch with the book on her knees. She drank the water at twelve eleven. I counted.
She asked her first question at eleven thirty-two: what was on the third page.
Pakhan answered. A Brighton Beach woman with a mesenteric infarction whose husband could not present her at any hospital in 1989 because her name was on a Bureau list. Exploratory laparotomy.
Thirty-six-centimeter resection. Payment X.
She lived eleven months on the resection and died of the next thing.
The page was the first time a Romanov man put a knife to a person nobody else would.
The page was the beginning of the practice.
Second question, twelve forty-four: why was the book in the wall and not in a vault.
"Because nothing of importance to this family is ever in a vault," Pakhan said. "Vaults are for the things you have agreed to lose. The wall is for the things you have agreed to keep where they cannot be removed without your face being in the room. The wall is the record."
Third question, one fifteen: did the family take an organ from a living person who had not asked to be a donor. Pakhan said no, the word once. Vincent set the line in 1991. The line is absolute.
Castellan said: "The line is absolute."
Fourth, one fifty-eight: what was F in the third column. Foundation absorbed. R recipient pay. N Naples-routed. X standing charity.
Fifth, two thirty-three: had a federal agent ever opened a case. Stefan answered. The Bureau's organized-crime field office has a thin cipher on us. He was not promising the case would remain at the level of a cipher.
Sixth, three twelve: was there a body in the basement.
Stefan smiled at his coffee. Castellan's left hand flattened a fraction farther on the wainscot. Pakhan inhaled at four.
"Not today," Pakhan said. "The basement holds Kostya's apartment and a wall safe. Bodies the Practice cannot send to the morgue we do not bring to this house. We have a place. It is not under your feet."
"Thank you."
Seventh, three forty-seven: what happens now. Pakhan answered with the sentence he had constructed at two in the morning at his desk in the spring of the year I joined: "That is what the conversation is for."
She watched his face. She put the sentence behind her eyes.
Eighth, four oh one: what do you want from me. "That is what the conversation is for."
I had not spoken for four hours. Stefan had told me at six fifty-eight: do not speak for the first three.
Let her hear the man with the folder. Let her hear the man with the coffee.
Let her hear Castellan and his goddamn blueprints.
Speak when she is ready to be told a thing one of us knows that none of the rest of us are going to say.
I spoke at fourteen thirty.
She looked at me for a four-count.
"Thank you, Dr. Volkov."
The word Alexei stayed behind my teeth. So did krasivaya. I had said it twice in my head and would say it again in a room whose temperature I had yet to take. "It was nothing."
At fifteen twenty-eight she said it. "I want to call Sister Mary Catherine before I answer."
"You may," Pakhan said. "We do not record."
Stefan took his phone from his jacket pocket.
The screen was open to her contacts because he had opened it at six in the morning and the man thinks twelve steps in front of any of us.
He handed it to her. She walked through the dining-room arch and past me and across the foyer and to the terrace door.
She opened it and stepped onto the brick.
The foghorn went at the second she set her left foot down.
I went out behind her at five seconds. Stood at the door, inside the threshold, back to the jamb, wood at my right shoulder, cold air on my left jaw.
Her back stayed to me. She walked to the south corner of the terrace where the brick is cracked the way Vincent's wife used to read the weather and she stood with Stefan's phone in her right hand and her left hand on the iron rail.
The phone stayed in her palm, dark.
The foghorn went at one minute twenty. I counted four. Her right hand kept the phone at her side and her left thumb tapped twice against the rail and that was the only motion her body made for nine minutes.
Krasivaya will keep the phone dark. I know it by the way a person holds a call they have already refused. That kind of refusal has a temperature. I held one outside a hospital in Murmansk with my mother's name on the screen and the four fingers would not close. The four fingers refuse.
She put the phone in her coat pocket at four o'clock.
Turned. Walked back across the terrace. Passed me at the door without looking at me.
Put Stefan's phone on the foyer console between his two coffee mugs.
Sat in the sitting room. Set the ledger volume on her left knee. Set her right palm on the book's cover.
"I did not call her. I will. I'll stay tonight. I am not promising anything else."
I said it.
"Krasivaya. That is the answer of a person who knows what tomorrow is for."
Pakhan looked at me across the room for a half-second.
The reprimand stayed inside his throat — Volkov, do not speak for her — and so did the second one, the one about the word and the voice.
He inhaled at four. He set his Patek's crown under his right thumb for a fraction of a second and released it untouched.
"Rossi. You will go to your apartment with Kostya. You will take what you want to take. You will be back at the hospital at fourteen hundred. The suite at the West Annex is ready. You will not be locked in. You will hold the key. We will talk tomorrow."
She stood. Put the book on the couch beside her. Walked to the foyer. Put her coat back on. Kostya was at the door with the leather gloves on. He opened the door for her. The Mercedes started. They pulled away at four nineteen.
Stefan looked at me.
"Garage," I said.
"Garage. Loading dock at thirteen forty-five. Castellan?"
"The suite at thirteen fifty," Castellan said from the foyer stairs. "I have the strike plate. I have the brass screws. I have the key blanks. I have the rasp. " He went up to the study.
Pakhan stood at the foyer console with his right hand on the watch.
"Volkov."
"Pakhan."
"You did well."
The last time he had told me that was 2019. I held my mouth shut because what climbed at the back of my throat was the thing I refuse to let happen at the root of my tongue in front of him. I turned the ring on my thumb once and went out the kitchen door.
I drove back to the city with the river at my right shoulder and the bridges accounted for in reverse and the radio off and the foghorn still in my chest at the interval the harbor was keeping it.
Krasivaya, you gave Pakhan ninety seconds at the bottom of that ledger before he had to decide what kind of man he was being today.
He took them. That is the only fucking math.
---
At thirteen fifty I was at the suite door with Castellan kneeling at the strike plate.
The original steel plate was out of the doorframe on a clean cotton cloth at his right knee.
Stefan was at the suite's kitchen counter unwrapping the espresso machine.
Pakhan was at the brownstone writing the standing order in the active ledger because the standing order required ink.
The sub-basement was eight degrees colder than the corridor above.
The air in my throat was the air I have not been able to drink for ten years without thinking of Lab C, two corridors away. Today I was on the floor outside a room I would not let a body be brought near.
Castellan works in silence. Six in, eight out.
The brass was a fraction taller than the steel.
He worked the recess with a steel rasp for ninety seconds.
Set the plate. Drove the four screws with a hand bit.
The lock seated. The lock unseated. The lock seated.
The brass kept its quiet through all three.
"It was the steel," he said, almost to himself. "The brass is right."
He is the only one of us who would think to do it himself. Pakhan would have called a contractor. Mikhailov would have offered to help and then he would have done all of it. I would have welded the doorframe.
Kostya brought Elena down at fourteen ten.