Chapter 13
Lex
The Lake House
The forty-eight hours ran out on Friday.
Petrov had two cars on the daycare before Orlov reached the corner. Orlov saw them, lowered the phone, and walked. No shots. No contact. Nothing a federal report could hold.
It was the cleanest kind of threat — the kind that costs them nothing and tells me everything. Nikolai had given me forty-eight hours, and at the forty-eighth he put a man outside my daughter’s daycare to prove the clock was real.
I did not sleep Friday night. By Saturday the sedan was circling the block. Petrov added a fourth car. By 8:00 AM Sunday I had decided we were not going to spend another night in the brownstone.
This is not a decision I make lightly. The brownstone is the most defensible position I own in the city of Boston. The walls are reinforced. The cameras are mine. The neighbors are mine. The street is mine. To leave it is to give up control I have spent fourteen months building.
I am giving up the control because the four circuits of the black sedan have told me a thing about Nikolai Reznikov I had not yet known, which is that he wants me to know he can find them. The probe was not a reconnaissance. The probe was a message. The message was: we have you located.
I do not give Nikolai Reznikov the satisfaction of being located.
I have one piece of property he cannot find.
? ? ?
I tell Maeve at 8:14. We are in the kitchen.
Nora is on the floor with Brontos and a stuffed dinosaur a Konstantinos cousin has sent.
I tell her we are going to a place I own three hours north of Boston, in New Hampshire, on a lake.
I tell her the property is in a name not on any document anyone in my family or my organization has ever seen, including Petrov.
I tell her it has been mine since my father died.
I tell her I have never had another person inside the building.
She listens. She does what she does. She considers the words before she chooses her response. I have learned, in the past few days, that the consideration is not hesitation. It is a calculation. She’s running the same risk assessment I would run if our positions were reversed.
"How long?" she says.
"Three nights. Maybe four. Until we have a better lock on Nikolai's position."
"Nora's daycare."
"Excused. Ms. Fitzgerald has been told there is a family emergency."
"My firm?"
"Cleared. They believe you are in upstate New York with your mother. Your assistant has been briefed."
"All right."
She turns to pack. I watch her go up the stairs.
She’s in jeans and a gray sweater I have not seen her wear before, and her hair is in a braid she’s done in two minutes at the kitchen window using the reflection of the dishwasher, and I am, in this moment, in a piece of trouble I have not yet found language for.
Her bag comes back down at 8:47. She’s packed light.
Three days, four maximum. A duffel for Nora.
A duffel for herself. And a book, on top, that she’s placed where her hand will find it without looking.
The blue spine. The Pride and Prejudice.
She’s decided, in the privacy of her own packing, to bring it.
I do not say anything.
She doesn’t look at me.
Both of us register the book. Neither of us names it. Whatever is going to happen with the note will happen in the place we are going, not the place we are leaving.
? ? ?
The drive is three hours and twelve minutes.
Petrov drives the lead car. I drive the second.
Nora is in the back with Maeve, in her car seat, asleep within twenty minutes of the on-ramp.
Maeve doesn’t speak. I do not speak. The radio is off.
The road is wet from a Saturday rain that didn’t finish.
The windshield wipers are at the lowest setting because the rain has gone to mist, and the mist is the kind of mist that turns the November woods into something between gray and silver, and I am driving a woman and her almost-three-year-old child to a building I bought when I was thirty-one because I had decided, that year, that I needed somewhere I could not be a Konstantinos for three days.
Maeve watches the woods through the window.
I watch her watch the woods through the rearview mirror.
At minute fifty-eight she meets my eyes in the mirror for half a second. She doesn’t smile. She looks at me the way she looked at me in the foyer when I was correcting her grip. Direct. Considered. Unafraid.
"How much longer?" she says. The first sentence either of us has said since the on-ramp.
"Forty minutes."
"All right."
She turns back to the woods. The voice she used was not her work voice. It was the voice she uses when she’s letting me know she’s alive and tracking and not going to fall apart, which is, I am learning, a voice she uses with me alone.
I have been driven by women looking at me through mirrors before. None of those moments has felt like this one.
? ? ?
The lake house is not large. Two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen open to a living room with a wood stove, a screened porch on the lake side.
Cedar shake. Slate gray. The dock is a hundred feet off the back deck.
The lake is one of fifty-three small lakes in this part of New Hampshire, none of them famous, all of them surrounded by trees and silence and the kind of people who do not ask you why you have driven up alone in November.
Petrov has prepared the property remotely.
The security system, which I installed two summers ago in a weekend with a man I trust who flew up from North Carolina for the work, is already armed.
The porta-crib that Petrov's secondary delivered at 2:00 PM is set up in the smaller bedroom.
The pantry is stocked. The wood stove has been lit.
The temperature inside is sixty-six degrees and rising.
I sweep the property. Twenty minutes. House.
Dock. Tree line. The two access roads. The boat shed.
The places I would put a man if I were trying to put a man on this property without my noticing, all of which are clear, all of which I know intimately because I have walked them every November for four years.
When I come back inside, Maeve has put Nora down for a late nap in the smaller bedroom.
The porta-crib is good. Nora is in fuzzy white socks with the small pink hearts on them.
Brontos is under her arm. She didn’t need to be coaxed; she was tired from the drive and went down the way she goes down at home, which is the way a child goes down when she’s decided the room is safe.
Maeve closes the door of Nora's room halfway. She turns. She looks at the rest of the house.
She’s not spoken since the on-ramp.
She begins to walk through it.
I do not follow her.
I stand at the kitchen island and watch.
She walks the way she does everything in a new room, which is to read the room before she decides what to do with it.
She goes first to the bookshelves, because Maeve is a reader and bookshelves tell her what she needs to know about a person before that person has said anything.
The shelves are full. They are not pretentious, and I have not arranged them for visitors, because I have never had visitors.
They are the books I have read here over four years of three-day stays.
Cormac McCarthy. Suttree. Blood Meridian. The full Border Trilogy.
Hemingway. The short stories. A Moveable Feast.
Sebald, well-thumbed.
And the small stack at the end of the second shelf, the one I didn’t arrange to be visible, which is a stack of poetry.
Mary Oliver. Marie Howe. A Wendell Berry.
What the Living Do on top because that is the one I read in October when I have driven up alone, and it is the only book I have ever read that has made me unable to leave a room until I had finished a poem.
Maeve stands in front of the poetry stack for a long moment.
She doesn’t touch the books.
"Mary Oliver," she says. The first thing she’s said inside this house.
"Yes."
"Marie Howe."
"Yes."
"Wendell Berry."
I did not put the poetry where it could be seen.
I put it at the end of the second shelf, two of them spine-in, because a man in my line of work does not advertise the books he reads when he cannot sleep.
She found it in under a minute. Of course she did — she has been finding the parts of me I keep hidden since the night she crossed a room to do it.
She turns to look at me across the room.
“You read poetry in November,” she says. It is not a question.
"I do."
She turns back to the shelf for one more second, the way you turn back to a thing you have just understood, and then she moves on.
She walks to the kitchen table. The half-finished puzzle.
Two thousand pieces. A map of the Greek islands.
The Cyclades, the Dodecanese, Crete in the south.
I have been working on it for three years, an hour a night when I am here, and it is half done because I have spent half of those hours putting pieces in and the other half taking them out and starting that section over because I am, in private, a man who doesn’t mind doing a thing badly the first time if it means I will do it well the second.
She studies the puzzle. She doesn’t touch it either.
She turns. She walks to the windowsill. The framed photograph.
My mother, taken in 1986, the year before everything.
She’s twenty-eight years old. She’s laughing at something my father has said off-camera.
The photograph is the only one I have of her in which she looks like she didn’t yet know what was coming.
I keep it here because my mother doesn’t know about this house, and because the photograph is a version of her that nobody alive has seen for forty years, including her.
Maeve stops in front of the photograph.
She looks at it for a long time.
She turns. She comes back across the living room. She passes the bookshelves and the puzzle and the wood stove. She comes to the kitchen island where I am standing. She stops three feet away from me.
"Lex?"
"Yes."
"I have just walked through your interior."
"I know."
"Did you intend that?"
"No."
She doesn’t say anything else. She crosses to the wood stove and stands in front of it with her back to me, warming her hands.
I stand at the kitchen island and watch the back of her, and I think, in a Greek I have not let myself think since the first time I saw her, in the language my mother taught me when I was four, the words mátia mou.
My eyes.
I do not say it. I have not earned it. I think it. Maeve doesn’t hear it. The air in this house, however, has heard it, and the air in this house is going to remember it for as long as I am alive.
? ? ?
My phone rings at 4:42 PM.
It is Nico. The number is the encrypted line. The line he uses when the call cannot be missed.
I take it on the screened porch. I close the slider behind me. The lake is gray. The wind has dropped. The porch is sixty-one degrees and falling.
Nico tells me what he’s just been told by a man whose name I will not write down even in my own head.
He tells me Nikolai is in Brighton Beach.
Nikolai is asking questions. Nikolai has put a contract on Maeve's testimony of one hundred fifty thousand dollars, which is fifty more than the last quote and which means Nikolai is buying speed.
Nico tells me a name. Maksim Orlov. The name Petrov flagged forty-eight hours ago and I have not yet escalated.
I tell Nico what I am going to do about Maksim Orlov.
I do it in a voice that is the voice I do not use in Maeve's presence and have not used in a while. The voice that is the voice my brother knows. The voice that decided, ten years ago, that Maksim Orlov's category of person doesn’t get a second contract.
Nico says, "All right."
I hang up.
I turn.
Maeve is at the kitchen window.
She’s been watching me on the porch. She didn’t hear the words because the slider is closed and the words were in Greek.
She heard the voice. The voice doesn’t need translation.
The voice is the voice of a man who has just told another man what he’s going to do to a third man, and Maeve Callahan has spent time at very close range to Konstantinos and has learned what every voice he uses means.
She’s looking at me through the kitchen window with the small, fine fear she’s not let me see before.
I come inside. The slider closes. The kitchen is warm from the stove. Nora is still asleep down the hall.
Neither of us speaks for a long second. She’s across the kitchen island from me. Her hands are on the marble. Her hands are not shaking. They are very still in the way a thing is still that has decided not to move.
"Maeve?"
"Yes."
"You heard the voice."
"Yes."
I do not deny it. I do not apologize.
I say, "Are you afraid of me right now?"
She says, "A little."
"Good. You should be sometimes. I am what I am."
She holds my eyes. The fear is there. The fear is small. The fear is not pulling her backward. She’s sitting with the fear the way a woman sits with a sound she’s just heard in the woods, deciding whether to walk toward it.
She nods, slowly.
I nod back.
She crosses the kitchen. Stops on my side of the island. Close enough that I can smell her shampoo. Far enough that I am not touching her, because she’s not given me permission to touch her.
"I want to ask you something," she says.
"Ask."
Then she says, "Tell me about Theo."
The name lands the way I knew it would land if she ever said it, which is the way the name has been waiting in my chest for fifteen years to be said by someone who would not look away when I answered.
"Are you sure you want to know?"
She turns from the window. She looks at me. Her face is unreadable in the way her face was unreadable in the foyer of her apartment when I first arrived that day.
"I want to know everything."