Chapter 17 - Zara
The penthouse has stopped feeling like a prison.
I am not comfortable here anymore but I am not uncomfortable either.
I simply have to be here.
Mikhail has been absent since we arrived back from the airport. This is not something I asked for, but it is something careful. This is the withdrawal of a man who understood I could not manage his presence right now.
I flip open my notebook instead.
That number is still in my phone, sitting inside the message thread. A door I have been standing outside of and have finally decided to open because something shifted in me on the plane over the Atlantic, in the dark air cabin where I refused to look at my husband for five hours.
I press call before I talk myself out of it.
The phone rings four times, then it connects.
“Ms. Khan,” comes the subtle, electronic signature of a voice modulator; genderless, age-less, built for staying anonymous. “I expected you to call sooner.”
“Where are my parents?” I demand impatiently.
“Alive,” the voice says, knocking the air out of me. “But not accessible by the means you have been attempting.”
Alive. They’re alive.
“Then tell me the means that work.”
“There are things you need to see before you can understand where they are and why they are there. Materials that were gathered years ago and have been kept in a location I am willing to give you.”
“Why?" I risk asking. This question is the most important one, and I have never in my life accepted a source offering materials without understanding the motivation behind the offering.
“Because the people who put your parents where they are would prefer you stop looking,” the modulated voice states flatly. “I prefer the opposite.”
Huh.
“So you’re suggesting a meeting,” I say, raising a brow.
“Yes,” the voice confirms. “Alone. No Korovin personnel, no security detail, no communication to anyone in that household before you arrive. Those are the conditions. I understand they are significant ones given your current situation. They are not negotiable.”
I should hesitate. Every instinct I have developed across five years of investigative journalism, and the past several weeks of learning to move in this crime world is telling me that this is a trap.
Coming alone to an unknown location is the kind of decision that ends stories rather than advances them.
My parents are alive.
“Give me the address.”
The location is in Brooklyn, which is not where I expected it to be. I thought it would be somewhere further removed, somewhere that required distance to reach. Instead the address belongs to a forgotten section of the waterfront in Red Hook.
I go in the late afternoon, alone, in a car I arranged separately from anything connected to Mikhail. Some part of me is relieved to have a reason to move through the investigation without him.
The building I arrive at is a former warehouse, stripped of function and withering. The exterior is corrugated metal with a gray-brown shine of rust working its way across the panels in slow, branching patterns. The door at the front is unlocked.
Inside, the space is enormous and entirely empty.
My footsteps echo, the light coming through four high windows on the eastern wall in long, declining columns that illuminate the dust suspended in the air, turning it to something almost beautiful, the particles catching and releasing light.
There is no one here.
I stand in the center of the space and turn through a full three-sixty to confirm it.
My phone is in my hand, the security detail’s number two taps away. I stand in the center of a large empty building in a part of Brooklyn that will take them twelve minutes to reach, and the modulated voice that directed me here has not answered the two follow-up messages I sent on my way over.
Then the light from one of the eastern windows catches something near the far wall.
A package sits on the floor against the base of the wall, visible from the door, hidden just about enough from sight.
Has someone left it here for me specifically?
Crossing the warehouse floor with my phone still in my hand, my eyes move through the space while my heartbeat pounds in my ears. Crouching down in front of it, I look before I touch it.
It is a flat, sealed package, used for document storage, wrapped in what appears to be oilcloth and secured with a binding that has been knotted carefully.
My name is written on it. Handwritten, the script italicized like whoever wrote this knew exactly who this package was for and wanted there to be no possibility of mistake in its delivery.
The oilcloth binding resists my fingers for a moment before it gives, the knot loosening wearily.
I peel it back to see photographs.
They spill from the package—different sizes, different quality, some printed on paper that belongs to the older, thicker stock of a decade ago and some on the thinner, more recent variety, edges worn on some and clean on others.
My legs fold beneath my weight as I flip through them.
The dust on the concrete is cold through the fabric of my jeans, which I don’t notice for several seconds because of the first photograph.
It is of my father.
He is standing with his back partially turned to whatever camera took it, and he looks considerably older here than in the handful of photographs I have collected over the years through manila folders.
His hair has gone entirely gray at the temples and significantly along the top, and his shoulders carry the weight of a man living a difficult life. But he is upright, and his hands, visible at his sides in the image, which is the thing that breaks me open.
He is alive.
A small sob tears out of my throat and I quickly seal my mouth with the back of my left hand. I set the photograph down gingerly, and I pick up the next one.
My mother is seated in this image, her hair longer than any photograph I have of her, streaked through with silver. Her chin is slightly lowered, as if she is looking at something in her hands, and her face is carefully blank, artificial peace.
I go through the photographs one at a time, suspended in time; the warehouse light and emptiness belongs to a different dimension from the one I come from.
There are dozens of these photographs: thirty, forty, more—spanning what appears from the aging in their faces and the quality of the paper to be a period of several years, possibly as many as eight or ten.
In one, my father is carrying something across a courtyard, in another, my mother is standing near a window with the light falling across her shoulder.
Both of them together in three photographs, captured in the loose, unguarded proximity of people who have been living in close quarters for a long time.
And in all of them—beneath the aging, beneath the gray hair and the changed postures—the background never changes. By the fifteenth photograph, I wonder how I missed it.
The same wall in the background of my father’s images—rough stone, with a specific course of darker material running horizontally through it.
The same intensity of light through the same window in my mother’s photographs—the angle of it is fixed, only seasonal variations in intensity but the angle is the same.
They must be stuck in one place.
They have been in one place, in the same building or compound or whatever this location is, for years… Possibly for the entirety of the time they have been gone, possibly for longer than I have been looking.
The photographs do not look like surveillance from multiple sources, but a record kept by someone who has known where they were and has been watching and waiting for the right moment to send this package to this warehouse with my name written on the front.
Someone has been watching over them.
Someone, for reasons I do not yet have, has been documenting the proof of their survival across a span of years.
Now, it is all in my hands.
As the light creeping in the warehouse grows weaker, my fingers have gone pale with how tightly I’ve held onto these photographs.
Since the letter arrived three months ago—since before that, since I was eight years old and understood for the first time that hope was the most expensive thing, I finally let the creature of my heart do one thing I’ve always stopped it from doing:
I let myself hope.
My parents are in a location that can be found.
There is a wall in those photographs with a specific stone texture. There is a window that faces a specific direction. There is a quality of light that belongs to a certain place.
There is also a woman who investigates things for a living sitting on a warehouse floor in Red Hook with forty-three photographs in her hands and fifteen years of hope blooming violently in her chest.
I am not running after nothing anymore.
This has a beginning and a middle and an end that I can reach, and the end is them, the end is real, and it is closer than it has ever fucking been.
Pressing the photographs carefully back into the protective envelope of the oilcloth, I stand up. The warehouse light is going amber now as my feet lead me toward the door, the photographs tucked tightly against my chest.
I know how to find a location from a photograph. I have done it twice before in my career.
For the first time in three months, the search has a direction and it leads me out of the warehouse and into the Brooklyn evening without looking back.