12. Dmitri
DMITRI
Two weeks had passed since a kitchen in the East Village, two weeks of phone calls that ran later than either of us admitted to anyone else, and I had spent most of that stretch telling myself the ordinary excuses a man tells himself before he does something he has already decided to do anyway.
Rosa had Cora's coat off before I finished making introductions, which told me everything about how this evening was going to go before either of us had said a full sentence to each other.
"You're too thin," Rosa said, already steering Cora toward the kitchen by one elbow, the same grip she used on every unfamiliar body that crossed her threshold, guest or delivery driver or, on one memorable occasion, a health inspector.
"Sit. I made too much of everything on purpose, in case someone showed up who actually eats. "
"I eat," Cora said, laughing, letting herself be steered.
"We'll see."
I had brought exactly four people into this penthouse in the fifteen years I had owned it, and three of them had been contractors.
Rosa did not count. Rosa had cooked in this kitchen since before the marble floor existed, back when it belonged to somebody else entirely, and I had simply kept her on, because she worked, and I did not disturb things that worked.
Watching her fold Cora into her kitchen like she'd always belonged there, inside of ninety seconds, told me something I filed away without examining too closely.
Cora had flown in that afternoon for a supplier expo two miles from here, a legitimate reason to be in my city that had nothing to do with me and that I had not engineered, though I had thought about engineering it more than once before she mentioned it herself.
I met her at the door with more restraint than I felt and less than I meant to show, and she stood in my entryway for a long moment before she said anything at all.
"This is a lot of glass," she said finally.
"The building was built for the view."
"I can tell." She turned in a slow circle, taking in the floor to ceiling windows, the lake going dark and silver past the last light of the afternoon, the marble underfoot that had cost more than most people's houses.
"It's beautiful. It's also the kind of beautiful that shows up in magazines right before someone explains why the owner never actually lives there. "
I did not have a ready answer for that, mostly because it was accurate in a way I had not expected a first-time visitor to land on this fast.
Rosa fed her before I had the chance to give her the actual tour, which was probably for the best, since Rosa's version of hospitality left no room for a man to get a word in about square footage.
"This is incredible," Cora said, halfway through the first plate, and meant it, the way I could tell she meant most things, by the specific quality of the silence that followed while she chewed instead of talking.
"It is acceptable," Rosa said, which from her was closer to a medal ceremony than modesty.
"No, genuinely. What is this?"
"Food. You eat it, you don't interrogate it." Rosa set a second plate down before Cora had finished the first, watching her with the narrow, satisfied attention of a woman conducting an experiment she already suspected would go well. "You ask a lot of questions for someone at a dinner table."
"Occupational hazard. I ask people about their flowers, their linens, their second cousin's opinion on chair covers. Food's more interesting."
"Finally," Rosa announced to the room at large, to nobody in particular, the way she announced anything she considered a matter of public record, "a woman who eats."
"High praise," I said.
"It is the only praise that matters." Rosa pointed a wooden spoon at Cora like she was awarding her something official.
"The last one he brought here, if you could call it bringing, picked at a salad for twenty minutes and asked if I had anything with fewer opinions in it.
I told her the kitchen doesn't do opinions, it does food, and she left early. "
"There was no last one, Rosa."
"There was a photographer once. For a magazine. I am counting her because she counts." Rosa waved this away like it settled the matter permanently, which, as far as Rosa was concerned, it did.
After the second plate, I gave Cora the tour I had promised, walking her through rooms I had not actually looked at in years, not as someone looks at a place they live but the way a man checks that nothing has shifted since he last forgot to look.
She moved through them slowly, asking good questions, running her hand along surfaces just as she had once run it along the gold molding at the Ambrose, cataloguing a space professionally even when she was not working.
"You have a library and no books in it," she said, standing in the doorway of a room I had furnished and never used.
"I read on a tablet."
"That's not the point of a library, Dmitri."
"Enlighten me."
"Evidence. That you've read things. That you're the kind of person who sits in a chair with a book and gets so absorbed you forget to turn a light on until it's too dark to see the page.
" She wandered further in, touched the spine of nothing, since there was nothing to touch.
"This room is a rumor of a person who doesn't exist."
"That's a very specific accusation for a bookshelf."
"I plan events for a living. I notice when a room is performing something instead of living it."
She stopped in the hallway outside my office next, studying the bare wall with the same focus she had once given sightlines and seating charts, and I watched her arrive, without quite saying it out loud, at the thing I had spent fifteen years not naming to myself.
"You don't have any photographs," she said. It was not a question. It was an observation, delivered with the same care she gave anything that mattered to her, weighed silently before she let herself say it out loud.
"No."
"None. Anywhere. Not your parents, not you as a kid, not a school picture, not one bad vacation photo where everybody's squinting." She turned to look at me directly. "Most people have at least one bad vacation photo."
"I don't take vacations."
"That's not actually an answer to what I said."
She was right, and I let the silence sit there instead of filling it with something that would have sounded like an excuse, because it would have been one.
"I don't keep things that can be used to find what I care about," I said finally.
"A photograph tells anyone who sees it exactly who matters to me, and exactly what to threaten if they want something from me.
I stopped keeping them a long time ago. It became a habit before it became a rule, and now I don't remember which came first."
Cora did not say anything for a moment, and when she did, her voice had lost the light, cataloguing tone from a minute earlier.
"That's a very lonely way to keep yourself safe."
"It's worked for fifteen years."
"I didn't ask if it worked. I asked what it costs.
" She looked around the hallway once more, at the bare walls, at the marble, at a house that had never once been asked to hold a memory.
"This is a beautiful house, Dmitri. It doesn't feel like anybody's home.
It feels like a very expensive hotel where the guest never checked out. "
I thought about telling her she was wrong.
I did not, because she was not, and I had never found much use in lying to a woman who could already see straight through the walls I'd paid a great deal of money to make look solid.
Instead I reached for her hand, and she let me take it, and we went in to dinner before either of us had to find out what I would have said next.
Dinner was easier than the hallway had been. She told me about the expo, a vendor who had tried to sell her on centerpieces made entirely of dried fruit, Beckett's ongoing campaign to get the office a better coffee machine using increasingly elaborate spreadsheets nobody had asked for.
"He made a slide deck," she said. "For a coffee machine. There were projected return-on-investment numbers based on staff morale."
"Did the numbers hold up?"
"Surprisingly, yes. I still said no, on principle, but I couldn't argue with the math."
I told her about the lake, about a boat I had not taken out in longer than I wanted to admit, about the specific quiet of this city before the sun came up that I had never managed to describe properly to anyone who had not stood in it themselves.
"You should take me out on it sometime," she said. "The boat."
"You'd have to be here before six."
"I've done worse for less interesting reasons."
"It's not glamorous. It's cold, and it's quiet, and there's nothing to do except sit there."
"Sounds like exactly what you'd actually enjoy showing someone, then. Not the penthouse. Not the view built for magazines. The cold, quiet thing you actually do when nobody's watching."
She was not wrong about that either, and I was beginning to understand that she rarely would be.
"All right," I said. "The boat. Next time."
"I'm holding you to that."
"I know."
We were still laughing about something neither of us would have found funny in any other room, in any other life, when the buzzer sounded from downstairs, sharp and unfamiliar in a way that told me before the doorman's voice confirmed it that whoever it was had not been expected.
"Mr. Zolotov, I have a Kirill here. Says it's urgent, about the driver investigation. He says he tried calling."
I had not felt my phone. I did not entirely believe that was an accident.
"Send him up," I said, and watched something careful settle over Cora's face, the professional stillness she wore when a room shifted under her without warning.
Kirill came off the elevator already talking, already smiling, a folder under one arm and an apology arranged on his face that did not quite reach his eyes, though I had spent longer than I should have telling myself that was simply the shape of his face and not a fact about the man wearing it.
"Dima, I'm sorry, I know it's late, but I found something on the driver's route history I thought you'd want tonight instead of tomorrow." His eyes moved past me, found Cora, and something in his expression recalibrated fast enough that I almost missed it. "I didn't realize you had company."
"It could have waited until morning."
"I wasn't sure. You've been keeping count lately. I didn't want to be the reason the count went up." He said it lightly, a joke with a blade folded somewhere inside it, and set the folder down on the table without opening it, his attention already elsewhere. "You must be Cora."
"Cora, this is Kirill. He runs logistics."
"It's nice to meet you," Cora said, offering her hand with the easy warmth she gave everyone, the same quality that had gotten Rosa to adopt her inside of two minutes.
Kirill took it, and held it half a second longer than the moment required, his smile widening in a way that had nothing to do with courtesy and everything to do with cataloguing something for later use.
I watched that half second the way I watched everything that mattered, quietly, without letting my face admit I had noticed, and filed it in the same part of my mind where I kept the thirteen-minute gap on a loading bay camera and a phone that was not the one I had issued him.
None of it was proof of anything. It rarely was, until it suddenly became all the proof a man needed.
"So you're the one," Kirill said, smiling with everything but his eyes.