6. Nina
NINA
In less than a week in this house, I have learned the following things.
Marta runs the domestic staff and reports to Rico, not to Nikolai directly, which means the household operates on a chain of information that has at least one remove between the staff and the man at the top.
The gardener arrives at seven and leaves at three. The gate rotation changes every six hours. The cameras on the east side of the property have a gap between the second and third posts that lasts approximately forty seconds when the guard at the end of the path turns to check the lower garden.
Forty seconds is enough.
The delivery truck comes in through the east service entrance every Tuesday at nine fifteen.
I know this because I’ve been at my window at nine fifteen every morning since I got here, not reading, not working, just watching.
I know the truck, I know the driver, I know that he spends four minutes unloading, and that the gate stays open for the duration, and that the two men who are usually posted there walk around to help him when the load is heavy, which it always is on Tuesdays.
I map it four times in my head before I try it.
On Tuesday morning, I come downstairs at eight forty-five in my running clothes because I asked Marta three days ago whether there was somewhere on the grounds I could run, and she said yes and showed me the path that loops through the lower garden and back, and I’ve been running it every morning since. Nobody follows me.
It’s the most freedom I’ve had since I arrived, and I’ve been using it to learn every inch of that path and everything adjacent to it.
I run the loop once. Then I angle off the path toward the east side, move quickly and low, the way I learned to move in places where moving incorrectly was a problem, and I get to the second camera post, wait, and count. At thirty-eight seconds, I go.
The truck is not there.
The gate is closed. The two men who are usually posted at the east entrance are there, both of them, and there’s a third man I have not seen before standing at the service door, and none of them are looking at me because I have already stopped moving and I’m standing in the shadow of the wall doing nothing in particular.
The gap I mapped is not there. The delivery that comes every Tuesday at nine fifteen has simply not arrived, and the rotation that was predictable for three days running has quietly rearranged itself overnight.
No confrontation. No one comes toward me. No alarm.
Just a wall where a door used to be.
I walk back to the path, finish my loop, go inside, shower, sit at my desk, open my laptop, and start writing, because I’m not going to sit in this room and be defeated by a Tuesday morning.
I write for four hours. It’s the best four hours I’ve had since I landed in New York and walked into a church.
When I’m at work, everything else recedes to background noise, and the background noise today is considerable, but the work is still the work and the work is still mine, and when I come up for air at two in the afternoon, I have nine hundred words I’m genuinely pleased with and a clearer head than I have had in days.
The clearer head is useful because it lets me think about the truck.
The rotation changing once could be a coincidence which means one of two things.
Either this estate runs on a security protocol that randomizes its own patterns regularly enough that I simply picked a bad day, or someone in this house knew I was watching and moved the pieces before I could use them.
I don’t know which one it is.
That’s the part that bothers me most. Not the failed attempt, not the closed gate, but not knowing whether I was unlucky or seen.
I sit with it for a long time and then I put it away and get dressed for dinner because Marta told me this morning that Nikolai eats at seven and that I am expected, and I’ve decided that attending dinner and being cooperative on the surface is more useful to me right now than refusing and having less access to the house than I currently have.
I’m playing a longer game than a Tuesday morning escape attempt. I just needed to know if the short game was available.
It is not.
Dinner is in a room off the main hall that is smaller than I expected, a round table, two settings, and no staff once the food is down.
He’s already there when I arrive, jacket off, sleeves rolled, and he looks like a man at the end of a working day rather than a man performing domesticity, which I find marginally less irritating than the newspaper at breakfast.
We eat. The food is extraordinary. I don’t compliment it, because I’m not giving this house anything for free.
He lets the silence run for a while, which I have noticed is something he does deliberately.
He’s comfortable in silence in a way that most people are not, and he uses that comfort as a kind of pressure, waiting to see what fills the quiet.
I’ve spent ten years interviewing people, and I know every version of that tactic, and I’m not going to be the one who fills it.
I last longer than he expects. I can tell because there’s a brief shift in his expression at the twelve-minute mark, not quite amusement, something adjacent to it.
“The Warsaw piece,” he says. “The interior ministry sourcing. How long did it take you to build that network?”
I look at him across the table. “Eighteen months.”
“From scratch?”
“I had one contact going in. Everything else came from that.”
“Who was the contact?”
“I don’t give up sources.”
“Not even to your husband?”
“Especially not to my husband.”
He picks up his wine. “The piece took down three people. You had enough for five.”
I keep my face still. “The other two weren’t ready.”
“Or you were protecting someone.”
“I told you. I don’t give up sources.”
He looks at me, and I look back, and we both know he just walked directly into the gap I left and that I know he knows and that neither of us is going to say that out loud.
“You’re good,” he says.
“At what?”
“Giving enough to make the conversation feel open.”
I take a drink. “You asked about my work. I answered.”
“You answered the questions that didn’t cost you anything.”
“That’s how conversations work.”
“Not between us.” He sets his glass down. “Between us, it’s going to cost both of us things eventually. You might as well get used to that.”
I have no answer for that that doesn’t concede something, so I say nothing, and we finish dinner in the kind of quiet that is different from the quiet at the beginning, fuller somehow, and less comfortable, and I’m not sure which of us is more responsible for that.
Back in my room, I sit at the window and go through the dinner the way I go through every conversation that matters.
The Warsaw question, which he already knew the answer to.
The five names mean he has access to information about that piece that was never published or shared.
The gap he found in under four minutes of conversation.
The walls in this house are not the gates, the cameras, or the rotating guards.
They are him.
I have been watching the wrong thing since I arrived.