Chapter 32
Lex
The Day Before
The day before the grand jury.
She’s ready. She’s also vibrating beneath the readiness. I have been with her for fifty-six days, and I can read her register the way I read my brother's face.
It is 8:31 AM on a Monday in late January.
Nora is at the front door in dinosaur pajamas, a wool coat zipped over them, a small canvas school bag with an elephant patch slung crosswise over her chest, and purple snow boots.
"Daddy. Walking."
"It is twelve blocks, ‘agápi mou.’"
"Walking."
Nora has decided. She’s been deciding things with this exact register since she was twenty-two months old.
Walking is the only acceptable mode of transportation when wearing the purple snow boots.
Driving is for sneakers. The boots and the car are not compatible.
Nora's logic on this point has been internally consistent for fourteen months.
I am not going to be the one to dismantle the architecture.
"Walking," I say.
"Walking," Nora says, satisfied.
Maeve hands me the field-trip permission form on the kitchen island.
"Sign this. Children's Museum on Friday."
"Friday."
"Yes. Brontos is going."
"Brontos is going to the Children's Museum."
"Brontos has not been to a museum in three weeks," Nora says. "He’s overdue."
I look at the form.
The form is a single sheet. The top third is the trip details.
The bottom third is the parent/guardian signature line.
There are two lines. One says PARENT/GUARDIAN.
The other says PARENT/GUARDIAN. Maeve has filled in her name on the top line in the careful handwriting she uses for forms that will not matter for ten years and might matter for fifty. The bottom line is empty.
Maeve hands me a pen.
She doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t narrate the moment. She doesn’t point out that the bottom line is for me.
She’s decided, in the fierce private architecture of a wife who has been married to me for fifty-six days, that she’s not going to make a thing of the moment my name goes on a piece of school paperwork for our daughter for the first time.
I sign.
My hand is steady.
My hand is steady because I have been a man who kills men with steady hands for fifteen years, and the hand has been steady for fifteen years for that reason, and the hand is steady this morning for the same reason, but in service of a different work.
Lex Konstantinos.
Two words. Black ink on white paper. Below is my wife's name. On a Bic pen Maeve handed me at our kitchen island at 8:33 AM on a Monday in January.
Maeve takes the form back. She slides it into a folder. She slides the folder into Nora's small canvas school bag. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t have to.
Nora is at the door. "Walking."
I crouch. I take her small mittened hand.
"Walking, ‘agápi mou.’"
? ? ?
Twelve blocks of Brookline sidewalk on a Monday morning in late January.
The temperature is twenty-eight degrees. The sky is that flat gray that means snow by the afternoon. Nora is on my right. Brontos is under her left arm. Her right hand is in mine, mittened. The purple snow boots are clomping on the salted concrete.
I have a Sig in the shoulder holster under my coat.
I have a knife in the small sheath inside my left boot.
I am the most dangerous man in Boston walking down a Brookline sidewalk holding the hand of an almost-three-year-old who is narrating something to her stuffed elephant.
Nora is telling Brontos about the Children's Museum.
"Brontos. The museum has fish. Real ones. Mama said."
Brontos has no opinion on file.
"And there is a building you can walk inside that is shaped like a bubble. Not a bubble. A pretend bubble. Mama said."
Brontos accepts this.
"And there is a thing where you can put your hand in the water, and the fish do not bite you because they are nice fish. Mama said."
Brontos is keeping notes.
I walk in silence beside her.
Halfway down the second block, Nora stops walking. She looks up at me.
"Daddy."
"Yes, ‘agápi mou.’"
"Mama is sad today."
I crouch down on the sidewalk. The salt is grinding under the knees of my pants. I do not care. Nora's small face is at my eye level, and her eyes are golden like mine, and she is, in twenty-six months and however many days of being conscious of the world, learned to read her mother's face.
"Mama is not sad," I say. "Mama has work tomorrow that is making her serious."
"Serious like sad."
"Serious like brave."
Nora considers this with the gravity she brings to all important new information.
"Brave like Brontos."
"Brave like Brontos."
"Okay."
She starts walking again. The hand in mine is small. The boots are loud. We go on.
? ? ?
The daycare foyer is warm.
Ms. Fitzgerald is at the sign-in clipboard.
She’s in her late fifties, with a gray cardigan, half-moon reading glasses on a chain.
She’s been Nora's teacher for fourteen months. She’s, by my count, signed Nora in for approximately two hundred and sixty mornings.
She’s signed Nora in once with me before, on a Wednesday three weeks ago, when Maeve had an early federal building meeting, and I dropped Nora off at 8:15 AM.
Ms. Fitzgerald looks up.
"Good morning, Mr. Konstantinos."
"Good morning."
"Nora."
"Hi, Ms. Fitzgerald. Brontos says hi."
"Hi, Brontos."
Brontos accepts the greeting with his characteristic dignity.
Nora hands Ms. Fitzgerald the school bag. "Daddy signed the museum thing."
Ms. Fitzgerald looks at me. The look is the careful look of a daycare teacher who has been processing the addition of a ‘Mr. Konstantinos has been monitoring her sign-in routines for the last couple of months and has concluded that the addition will land. "Thank you, Mr. Konstantinos."
"Thank you, Ms. Fitzgerald."
Nora pats my cheek with her mittened hand.
"Have a good day, Daddy."
She walks into the classroom. She doesn’t look back.
I stand in the foyer for ten seconds.
Then I walk home.
Maeve is in the home office when I get back.
She’s at the desk in jeans and one of my sweaters, the dark gray one she wears now, the laptop open, three binders stacked at her elbow, her reading glasses on, the small frown she gets when she’s deep in the work she’s been doing for forty-three hours.
The home office is warm. The radiator is running.
The light at the window is the flat gray of the morning sky.
I bring her coffee.
I set it down on the desk. She looks up. The frown softens.
"How was the walk?”
"Brontos is going to the Children's Museum on Friday."
"Brontos is excited."
"Brontos has been excited since Wednesday."
Maeve smiles. Small. Real. Then her face does the particular thing it has been doing for the last six days, which is what comes when she remembers tomorrow.
I pull a chair over. I sit down across from her. I say, "Tell me what you are doing today."
"Final pass on the Marchetti sequence. Klein wants me to run it cold one more time without notes. After that, the chronology. Then the names. Then the dead-informant description. Then I am going to take a long bath and stop thinking until tomorrow."
"All right."
Long pause. Maeve looks at the binder. Then she looks back at me.
She says, "Lex."
"Yes."
"I cannot tell whether I am scared or whether I am just tired."
"Both," I say.
"Yes. Both."
"How do you walk in?"
She says it almost as if she’s asking herself, but the phrasing of it has the precision of the question she’s been carrying for six days, and the question is for me.
I take a breath. I have been thinking about this question since the kitchen six days ago, when she said, ‘I want this to be over.’ I have been thinking about it on the drive to my mother's apartment yesterday morning. I have been thinking about it last night while she slept against my ribs.
I say, "You walk in for who you are walking in for. Not what you are walking in to do. Who."
Maeve looks at me.
I say, "Tomorrow you walk in for Vincent Marchetti, who cannot testify on his own behalf because he’s dead and the men who killed him made sure of it.
You walk in for Nora, who is the reason you got into this work in the first place, even before you had her.
You walk in for the woman who took the job at the federal prosecutor's office at twenty-six because you wanted to be the woman who said the names of dead men out loud in rooms where powerful people had decided not to.
You do not walk in for the case. You do not walk in for the sentence.
You walk in for them. The case is a vehicle. The names are the work."
Maeve is very still.
Then she says, "Walk in for them."
"Walk in for them."
"Lex."
"Yes."
"That is the answer I needed."
"I know."
"Where will you be?”
"In the corridor outside the courtroom. I will not be allowed in the room with you. The grand jury is sealed. Klein has cleared me as far as the corridor. I will be ten feet from the door for as long as you are inside. I will be exactly there when you walk back out."
"Ten feet."
"Ten feet."
She nods. Once.
She picks up her coffee.
She gets back to work.
? ? ?
Mid-afternoon, I step out of the home office to take a call from Petrov about the Karpov federal arraignment, which is happening in absentia today because Karpov is still in federal medical custody after the disarmament.
I am in the hall when I see her.
Maeve has closed her laptop.
She’s not noticed me. The home office door is half-open. Through the gap, I can see her at the desk, the binders pushed aside, her hand at the top right drawer of the desk.
She pulls the drawer open. Slowly.
She reaches into it.
She lifts out something flat. From the angle of her hand, a piece of paper.
Eight by ten. She sets it on the desk in front of her.
Her hand stays on it for a long second. Her shoulders move once.
She’s looking at the paper. She doesn’t pick it up.
She doesn’t turn it over. She doesn’t examine it. She just looks.
I do not know what is in the drawer.
I do not need to know.
I have been with this woman for fifty-six days.
I know the exact architecture of her interior.
I know that she’s, in the home office on a Monday afternoon at 2:47 PM the day before grand jury, opened a drawer she’s not opened in some amount of time, and she’s taken out something she needs to look at one more time before tomorrow, and the looking is private and the looking is hers and the looking is doing the work that the forty-three hours of testimony preparation could not do.
She sits with it for two full minutes.
Then she puts it back.
She closes the drawer.
She opens the laptop.
She gets back to work.
I stand in the hallway with the phone against my ear and Petrov on the other end, and I do not interrupt. I do not enter the room. I do not ask her about it. I do not, when I come back into the office twenty minutes later with a fresh coffee for her, mention that I saw her open the drawer.
She’s been waiting a long time to be exactly who she is in front of me.
What she’s doing right now is being it.
I am not going to ask her to share the part of it that is hers.
? ? ?
That night, Maeve takes a long bath. I make dinner. We eat. She calls Eleni and asks her to keep Nora again tomorrow night. Eleni says yes before Maeve has finished the question.
At 9:47 PM, Maeve says, "I want to go to bed."
We go to bed.
She’s in my old T-shirt. Her hair is wet from the bath. She lies against my ribs the way she’s been lying against my ribs for fifty-six days. Her hand is on my collarbone. The small gold chain I gave her on Day thirty-one is at the base of her throat. She’s not taken it off in thirty-eight days.
I do not sleep.
I lie awake watching the ceiling and the woman against my ribs and the slow rise and fall of her breathing as she finally, around 10:23 PM, lets go and falls asleep against me.
The brownstone is the brownstone. The radiator is running.
The night-light in Nora's empty room is on because we leave it on every night.
The clock on the bedside reads 11:14 PM.
Then 12:42 AM. Then 2:31 AM. Then 4:09 AM.
At 5:48 AM, the light at the window goes pale.
Maeve stirs against me. She lifts her head. The hair is in her face. The eyes are still half-closed. She says, "Today."
"Today."
"Lex."
"Yes."
"Hold me for one more minute."
"Yes."
I hold her.