Chapter 26
KHRISTOFER
Lev arrives at two with the Geneva file and reads it to me the way he reads casualty lists, evenly, in order, sparing nobody.
“The good news first, because there is some. She’s strong, the four are strong, growth is on curve for all of them, which at seventeen weeks with quadruplets is better than I had a right to write down.
” He turns a page. “Now the rest. This is a high-risk pregnancy by every definition the profession owns. From today, the rules change. Monitoring twice a week, here, my equipment. Stress managed downward, deliberately, like a dosage. Movement moderated. Travel only when I sign it, and I’ll be signing less and less, and from January I’ll be signing nothing at all. ”
“She’ll fight the word moderated.”
“She’ll fight every word, it’s why her pressure numbers are so good.”
“And the delivery?”
“February. Planned, surgical, a hospital with a name I choose. Thirty-two weeks if we’re excellent.
” He looks at me over the glasses. “We will be excellent.” He closes the file.
“I told her something in Ravello, in the room where you kept your promise about the door. If it endangers her, my silence ends. That sentence is now on duty, Khristofer Efimovich. I’d rather never owe it. Build her a world where I don’t.”
The breva comes down the lake at ten past three, early, out of season, and my world reorganizes around one radio call.
“Boss. The lady’s still out.”
The solo hour was negotiated in October, before the file, before the number four.
A dinghy the size of a bathtub, two hundred meters of shore water, a vest she rolls her eyes at but wears, the water team anchored down the shore pretending to fish, which she knows, permits, and pretends not to see, our whole arrangement in miniature.
She sails the way she does everything, competently, learned some Greek summer on an assignment, and I have watched her from this study window every hour she’s ever spent on the water while pretending, for the record, not to track her.
Now the record ends. The squall line is a gray wall halfway down the lake, the water below it going dark, ridged, closing on her little white sail, and the fishermen’s engine, I can hear it on the radio, has picked this exact moment to flood.
I don’t remember crossing the lawn. I’m in the speedboat with the lines off before the thought finishes becoming one, no guards, no vest, no plan except geometry, and the boathouse gets one sentence over my shoulder, tell Lev to run the water hot.
The lake goes from silver to slate in the four minutes it takes to reach her.
Rain arrives sideways. She’s done everything right, I can see it as I close, sail dropped, lashed, weight low, bow into the chop, riding it out like a sailor instead of running before it like a fool, and she’s still one gust from swimming, because the lake doesn’t grade on technique.
Neither of us says anything.
I come alongside on her lee, take her painter, make it fast. She looks at the tow line, then at me, rain running off both of us, fury arguing relief all over her face with neither winning.
She climbs across into the speedboat without being told, because she’s furious, not stupid.
I put my jacket around her. She lets me.
The dinghy follows us home like a scolded dog.
The squall chases all three of us to the dock and loses.
On the dock, under the boathouse eave, with Ferro already striding down the lawn with blankets like a one-woman field hospital, it finally breaks, the whole thing, sideways, into laughing.
She starts it. Soaked to the skin, hair flat, vest askew, she looks at me, an armed man’s dripping jacket over a sundress in November, and something equal parts adrenaline, equal parts outrage comes up her whole body, arriving as a laugh, huge, unreasonable.
Mine comes up to meet it. We stand on the dock holding each other’s forearms, laughing like survivors of something much larger, which we are, just not of the squall.
The sundress is finished as a garment, soaked to a second skin, stuck to the full new shape of her, the bump, her breasts, the long line of her thigh.
She laughs up at me with rain in her teeth, and I come within a half-second of a decision that the cold, the dock, Lev, her blood pressure all vote against.
“My hero,” she says, acid, meaning it, both at once.
“You came out with no vest,” she manages. “Into a storm. To enforce vest policy.”
“I’m aware of the shape of it.”
“The hypocrisy has a wingspan, Khristofer.”
“So does the lake.” I pull the blanket Ferro hands me around her shoulders, over the jacket, and my hands stay on her arms, and the laugh is dying into something else, her mouth an inch away, rain in her lashes, cold radiating off us both, and the something else leans in.
“Inside,” Ferro says, in the tone that outranks everyone on the property, “before I’m delivering four babies and two pneumonias in the same wing.”
Cold and good sense. The moment joins the interrupted list, beside a dress fitting, beside a Vespa.
She goes up the lawn wrapped like a relief shipment, laughing again.
I stand in the rain one more minute with what almost happened.
Gust after gust, logged. The four minutes it took me, timed, retimed.
The picture, unwanted, free of charge, of a white sail going flat on gray water with nobody close enough.
That picture runs my next nine hours.
By six I’ve called Geneva about a transport incubator, in November, for babies due in February.
By seven there’s an architect’s sketch on my desk turning the east salon into a clinic room, oxygen lines behind the paneling where nobody has to look at them.
By eight Pavel’s logistics queue holds an order for an armored family car, the long one, the one with mounting points for four seats sized like hand luggage.
By nine I’m on the line to a workshop in Brianza that has built beds for three hundred years, ordering cribs.
Four of them. Walnut. I hear myself specify the walnut, because the desk in her study is walnut, and some part of me has decided the wood should agree.
At ten I catch myself specifying a generator for a nursery, and I put the phone down without dialing. It does nothing. The picture runs again, further this time.
At eleven Rurik comes in with the night report, looks at my desk, the sketches, the orders, the crib specifications fanned out like a hand of cards, and doesn’t deliver the night report.
“Does she know?” he asks.
“She’ll be glad of it when...”
“Does she know?” Not louder. Flatter. He picks up the incubator order, reads it, sets it down with two fingers.
“A storm happened, so a clinic is happening, a car is happening, furniture is happening, all of it tonight, all of it before she’s read her own medical file.
I watched you learn this lesson in a safehouse study, Khristofer, and I watched it hold through a closet, a range, a casino.
So I’ll say the short version.” He taps the crib order once.
“You built her a vote in Ravello. The cribs didn’t get one. ”
The clock on the mantel does its work for a while.
“Preparation,” I say, and hear how it sounds, and finish anyway, “is not control.”
“Preparation she wakes up inside of is control with better manners. You know the line. You wrote the amendment.” He gathers the night report back under his arm, deciding the rest can wait.
“Show her all of it tomorrow, as questions. She’ll say yes to most of it, she’s a realist, it’s her best feature after the aim.
But she says it, or Ravello was just talk. ”
He’s right. I knew it before he opened his mouth, somewhere under the picture of the white sail, and the picture kept winning.
This is what fear does in me, I told her so myself in that study.
It writes orders. Tonight it wrote furniture.
In October I caught myself mid-sentence.
Tonight it took Rurik. The war is moving me backward through my own repairs.
My father calls at midnight, on the house line, and for once I want the fight.
“Two warehouses,” he says, no greeting. “A route book handed to the Calabrians like a tip. My son is selling the family’s arms while his enemy is still breathing on his own lawn. Explain the strategy, because from Moscow it reads as a wound.”
“From here it reads as a foundation.”
“Foundations.” The word comes back at a temperature I can hear.
“A man builds foundations when he plans to be shot at slowly. You had the fastest instincts I ever trained, Khristofer. Faster than mine, though I never said it. And now you burn my letters, you answer in single words, you sell reach for respectability.” A pause, and then, softly, the actual knife.
“The woman broke your instincts. Whatever she’s carrying, she’s carrying your edge out of you with it. ”
“My instincts are the best they’ve been in twenty years, Papa. They just changed employers.”
I set the phone down on his silence and let him keep it. The last visitor of the night arrives without knocking, because she grew up in this family, and knocking is for staff.
Larisa, in the study doorway, holding a printout the way other women hold evidence.
“The Vienna accounts got a notification tonight. Assets moving, structures closing, a foundation being chartered through Bassi.” Her voice is level in the way our father’s goes level.
“Family channels, brother. I am the family channel. I’ve laundered the art side of this house since I was twenty-five, quietly, competently, and I learn we’re going legitimate from a bank’s automatic email.
Me. After Vienna. After I stood in that hallway telling you to watch the border of protection and possession, I find out my own future got decided in a room I wasn’t in. ”
The phrase arrives at me from two directions, hers and Naomi’s, and I don’t think she knows she’s quoting.
“Lara...”
“And that’s before the furniture.” She steps in, drops the printout on the desk, on top of the crib order, which her eyes have already read upside down, of course they have, she’s an appraiser.
“Four, Khristofer. I sign the family’s art loans, I reconcile the household accounts when Moscow audits us, and I learn I’m being made an aunt four times over from a joiner’s invoice in Brianza.
I’ve known for weeks. I said nothing, I waited for my brother to tell me himself, and the paperwork got to me first.”
“How many weeks?”
It comes out with an edge I didn’t authorize, the wrong question, the interrogator’s question, and I watch my sister hear the interrogation in it. Something in her face closes with a click I almost recognize, a drawer, a case, a phone.
“Long enough to be hurt you didn’t say it,” she says, “which is the only answer a sister should have to give.” She straightens.
“Congratulations, by the way. I mean it. I’m taking it out for polishing until you deserve it back.
” At the door she pauses, not turning. “The joiner does beautiful work, brother. Those cribs will outlive all of us. Try to take it as a comfort.”
She’s gone. The exit is quieter than her exits usually run, and that’s somehow worse. I stand at the study window watching her cross the courtyard through the last of the rain toward the guest wing.
Halfway across, under the loggia, she stops.
Takes out a phone. Not the slim gold one that lives in her left hand like a sixth finger, a different one, dark, squat, a phone I have never seen my sister hold.
She answers it without dialing, which means it rang, which means somebody has that number, and she speaks into it for ten seconds with her back to my window.
Matvei crosses the yard with the night-shift rotation.
The phone is gone before his second step, into the coat, smooth, fast, and my sister walks on toward the guest wing at exactly her ordinary pace, a woman who was never standing still under a loggia at half past midnight talking into a phone that doesn’t exist.
I stand at the window for a long time.
The shelf where I keep things with teeth takes one more item, next to a boat that sat on my blind angle.
The shelf is getting crowded. I hate every separate thing I know how to think next, because I’ve suspected everyone this autumn except the two people who share my blood, and tonight my sister put a phone away faster than my men clear weapons.
I don’t follow her. I don’t call Rurik. I stand in the study doing nothing at speed, and then I take the day’s last walk, past the clinic room’s taped outlines on the salon floor, up the stairs, down the corridor to the room at the east end that got chosen this evening by a man with a picture of a white sail where his judgment lives.
The first crib arrived at ten, the floor model, driven up from Brianza in a van by the joiner’s own son because I paid for urgency without explaining it.
It stands in the empty room in the lamplight, walnut, impossibly small, older in design than every war I’ve fought, and someone, Ferro, it has Ferro’s hand all over it, has hung a folded blanket over the rail as if a guest might arrive any minute.
The good wool, second shelf, the lavender fold.
Her mother’s method, laid out for somebody who won’t exist until February.
I stand in the doorway. Just a door, just a room, just furniture.
I’ve been shot at in four countries. I’ve waited nine hours in a culvert, sat across from men sent to kill me, buried friends, carried the ones who almost made it.
None of it, not one night of it, ever stood me in a doorway like this, with my heart going like her hummingbird, afraid of a wooden bed.
Wars only ever took what I had. This room is going to hold what I haven’t met yet. It can take that too, and every man who wants to try knows my address.
Downstairs, on a desk, four cribs wait for a vote. I’ll ask her in the morning. All of it, as questions.
Almost all. The walnut isn’t negotiable.