CHAPTER 16 #3
We pass the long oak table on the way back to the bed.
I put my palm flat on the grain at the corner one more time.
The polish has cooled in the hour we have been at the bath; it is room-temperature now.
The wood records the print of my hand as it recorded it earlier.
It will record it tomorrow. The grain is a kind of memory the wood keeps even when the polish goes cold.
The bed is turned down. Alexei sets me at the center. Stefan goes around to the right side. Nikolai goes around to the left. Gabriel carries the leather club chair up the staircase — twelve treads, the ring of each — and sets it against the bed frame at the foot.
Alexei: "Krasivaya. I will go in two hours."
"Where."
"The garage. The Day Seventeen case is at eleven; I want the room prepared overnight."
"Be careful."
He laughs once, dry. "I'll be careful, krasivaya. Kostya will be careful for me. The road is empty at three and the FBI's man is a slow reader."
"Alexei."
"I know."
He kisses my forehead — angel-and-knuckle — and puts his hand once on Gabriel's shoulder, brief, brother-coded. Gabriel does not move. Alexei goes down the staircase. The iron rings under his shoes one last time.
Stefan settles at my right and pulls the cashmere up over us both. His palm against my sternum, scar against the medallion. The cord at his left wrist falls into the hollow of my throat. He counts the four-beat there. One. Two. Three. Four.
Nikolai has only removed the watch; the Patek rests on the bedside table with the gallery-glass key on the strap. He sits in the navy trousers and the white shirt and puts his palm at my brow again — the same cool, the same steady.
"Elena."
"Yes."
"Sleep."
"Yes."
Gabriel in the leather chair at the foot has not spoken since the bath. He has not slept on a bed in four nights and he will sleep against the bed frame tonight with his head against the mattress at the corner near my feet, because he sleeps where he can hear me breathing.
I lower my lashes. The freight elevator drops below — Alexei leaving. The sound is the architecture of him leaving the room without leaving me.
I sleep deeper than I have slept in three years.
I sleep the way Sophia slept before the world got into her.
I sleep on the brother's count and the chief's six-count and Gabriel's silence at my feet and the absence of Alexei that is also a presence because he is doing the work and the work is part of the structure too.
---
I wake at oh-six-thirty.
The light through the south casements is the cold partial-cloud light of October twenty-eighth. Tuesday. Day sixteen.
I am between two men. Stefan on my right.
Nikolai on my left. Stefan has not moved; his palm is still at my sternum, the scar at the medallion.
Nikolai's hand has slipped from my brow to the pillow above my head; his fingers are open.
He sleeps as he does everything — four counts in, six counts out.
Gabriel is asleep on the floor against the bed frame, leaning back, his head against the mattress at the corner near my right foot. The leather club chair is empty behind him. The black silk strap is folded once in his lab-coat pocket where the coat is laid across the chair-back.
Alexei is not here. He has gone to the garage.
The bullet that needs extracting is in the chest of an enforcer; the case is at eleven; the FBI's man on the street is the one Stefan called Rourke at dinner last night; the trouble has a name now and the name is being patched.
Alexei is in surgical gloves in a converted auto-body shop and his belt is back through his trouser loops and the ring is on his right thumb.
I touch the medallion. The angel's hairline crack is the same hairline crack.
I have done a structured three-handed and I have not broken. I have come twice and I have been bathed and carried and counted and held by all four men — three in my body and one in the air — and the architecture has held.
The protocol has a structure. It does not yet have a word. I do not have the word.
I have a structure.
I have the bath. I have the cord at my throat.
I have the medallion at my sternum and the pediatric pin in the writing-desk drawer where Stefan left it when he undressed me.
I have the black silk strap folded in Gabriel's pocket.
I have Alexei's belt back through his trouser loops in a garage in Long Island City.
Nikolai's Patek waits on the bedside table with the gallery-glass key on the third navy strap.
I have peace.
It is a word I have not used in three years.
Sophia died on a trauma table at twenty-three when I was nineteen and I have not used the word since.
I am using it now in a loft on Lispenard Street between two sleeping men with a third asleep at my feet and a fourth two miles east in a converted auto-body shop and the wind through the casements and the pressed-tin ceiling and the medallion at my sternum and the cord at Stefan's wrist falling into the hollow of my throat.
Peace. I do not know what to do with the word. I lay it down beside the strap and the cord and the watch and the angel.
I watch the dawn through the loft's south windows. The wind moves through the casement once more and the pressed-tin ceiling catches the light in a long uneven line.
I let the four-beat move through me. I do not count past it.