2. The Collector
The Collector
Eleven miles from Chestnut Hill, a townhouse on Delancey Street kept its secrets behind a federal brick facade.
Nothing about it hinted at what its owner was worth or how he’d earned it.
Neighbors thought a professor lived there, a widower, private and courteous, the tall silver-haired man they saw leaving before dawn in a track jacket and returning an hour later barely winded.
The professor’s name was Aleksei Leonidovich Orlov, and half the illicit money that moved through the port of Philadelphia moved, at some point, through his patient hands.
He’d come across the ocean decades ago with a cardboard suitcase and a language he didn’t speak.
What he’d built since had no name on any document.
The men who worked for him called him Pakhan when they were sure no outsider could hear.
To everyone else he was a quiet collector of Russian books, and the disguise pleased him, because it was also true.
Tonight he was reading Lermontov when they brought the accountant in.
His library ran the full depth of the third floor. A card index in a cherry cabinet recorded every volume, kept in his own hand. Almost no one knew his collection of nineteenth-century Russian literature ranked among the finest in private hands outside Moscow. He hadn’t assembled it to be known.
He’d assembled it because a book was the one thing a man could own that told him the truth every time he opened it.
A first printing of A Hero of Our Time lay open under a shaded lamp.
He read a few lines more, unhurried, then set a strip of archival paper in the page.
Books, in his experience, repaid care more reliably than men.
He was in his early sixties and carried it like an asset, tall and broad through the shoulders, kept hard by the laps he swam at dawn.
Silver hair, rimless glasses, a pressed shirt open at the collar.
The scholar’s calm was real, and also a snare.
Men who took the soft voice and the shelves of poetry for softness relaxed in his presence, and every man made that mistake only once.
Pavel Ryumin stood between the bookshelves with his coat still on, sweating in a room that wasn’t warm.
“Pavel Sergeyevich.” Aleksei gestured at the chair across the desk. “Sit. You look unwell.”
“Aleksei Leonidovich, I?—”
“Sit.”
Pavel sat. A broad, still man in his late forties occupied a chair by the window, angled behind his shoulder, a boxer’s flattened knuckles and a small notebook open on his knee.
Kirill Andreevich Zorin didn’t look up. He wrote in a neat, patient hand, and for a moment the only sound in the library was the whisper of his pen.
Kirill had come out of a Spetsnaz unit whose name still didn’t appear in any file. He spoke rarely and forgot nothing. Everyone in the organization understood the same thing about that notebook: if Kirill had written your name in it, your future had already been decided.
“Tea?” Aleksei asked.
“No. Thank you.”
“So.” Aleksei folded his hands on the closed Lermontov. “The produce accounts. Fourth quarter.”
“There were losses,” Pavel said quickly. “The margins on the import side, the trucking costs, I have documentation, I can show you?—”
“You have shown me.” Aleksei opened a drawer and laid two thin folders on the desk, squaring their edges with one finger.
“This is the documentation you gave me in January. And this is the documentation that exists. They are very alike. Whoever prepared yours was careful. He was not, unfortunately, careful about the wire records of a bank in Nicosia, which do not read novels and cannot be persuaded of anything.”
His gaze over the rimless glasses stayed mild, the gaze he gave a misdated title page. “Sixty thousand dollars, Pavel. In eleven months.”
“I was going to put it back,” Pavel whispered.
“Ah. Now that, I believe. Thieves almost always mean to put it back. It is the mercy they extend to themselves.” He removed his glasses, polished them, and put them on again.
“The sixty thousand is arithmetic, and arithmetic can always be corrected. But in January I asked you whether the accounts were clean. You looked at me the way you are looking at me now, and you said yes.”
He spread his hands, a small, rueful gesture. “A thief takes my money. A liar takes my judgment. Which of us can afford to lose more, Pavel, I my sixty thousand, or I my judgment?”
Pavel began to cry, without sound. Aleksei found tears distasteful and didn’t watch, studying the shelf beside the desk instead, giving the man his moment. The Turgenevs* stood there, next to a gap where a Pushkin folio was away being rebound.
“Your wife’s brother manages the warehouse on Tasker,” Aleksei said at last. “He is honest, I’m told. Your family will not starve.” He nodded once, past Pavel’s shoulder. “Kirill will explain the rest outside. The money you will repay. The rest of it is already decided.”
Kirill closed the notebook, rose, and set a hand on Pavel’s shoulder. The touch brought Pavel out of the chair without any visible effort. At the door the accountant turned, his mouth working toward some final appeal, and stopped. Aleksei had already drawn the lamp closer and reopened his book.
He didn’t hate the man. Hatred was a waste, a fire that burned the hand holding it. A thief could be taught. A liar had to be removed, the way you removed a book with a broken spine before it infected the shelf.
When the door shut, he read half a page, then noticed his eyes had stopped taking in the words. He crossed to the desk by the window, where a different folder waited, thick, its corners gone soft from months of handling.
He didn’t need to open it. It held auction results from the Ashcombe Museum, going back three years: estimates, hammer prices, settlement statements for certain consignments he’d placed through intermediaries with clean hands.
A respected auction house was supposed to be the one room in the city where numbers behaved.
The numbers didn’t behave. Over three years, softly and steadily, they’d failed to agree with one another, and the gap now ran north of two million dollars.
Every discrepancy had passed at some point across the desk of the same charming man in the same beautiful suits.
Sixty thousand from a frightened accountant who’d flinch at closing doors for the rest of his life.
Two million from a curator who smiled for photographers and slept easy.
Aleksei stood at the window with his tea and looked out at the wet brick street. The frightened ones were never the problem. The problem was always the confident ones, who mistook silence for blindness, who believed that because no one had spoken, no one had counted.
There was one more thing he knew about the curator, a thing the man himself would not have guessed mattered.
Graham Ellsworth had married a Pembroke, and Aleksei had done business with Charles Pembroke for longer than the curator had been alive.
He had met the daughter once, years ago, in a paneled room where she’d corrected the date of a manuscript three experts had gotten wrong.
She had not tried to impress him. She had simply told him the truth, and apologized for it, as though truth were an imposition.
He had never forgotten her. He wondered, standing at the glass, whether she had any idea what her husband had been feeding into the sea.
He was in no hurry. A collector learns waiting before he learns anything else.