19. Chapter Eighteen #2
About their fathers, briefly. Viktor Zakharov, who had taken the throne and held it for eighteen years until someone poisoned his coffee at a restaurant in Tverskaya, a death that was never officially solved because officially solving it would have required the police to acknowledge what Viktor was and what the throne was, and acknowledgment was not something the police traded in.
Andrei Belyaev, who had run a financial operation in the shadow of bigger men and who had taught his daughter that the shadow was where the real work happened.
"The man in the light gets the bullet," Andrei used to say. "The man in the shadow gets the money."
"Woman," Elena had corrected him. She was fourteen.
"Yes," Andrei had said. "Woman."
About the first territory each of them had acquired.
Hers: the courier network in Presnensky, three drivers, purchased with money she had earned running Maksim's financial operations, purchased without telling him, purchased because she had seen the opportunity and because the opportunity was hers and because she had understood, even then, that a woman who worked for a man's organization needed to own something that the man could not take away.
She had told him about the acquisition after the fact.
He had not been angry. He had been impressed.
The impression had been the beginning of everything.
His: the Kitay-Gorod sector, inherited from his father, reorganized in four months.
The reorganization had involved replacing nine of eleven sector captains, restructuring the entire revenue collection system, and personally meeting with every business owner in the territory to establish new terms. He had been twenty-four.
He had done it in four months because four months was what his father had given him and because meeting the deadline had been the test and passing the test had been the price of the throne.
About a restaurant in Zamoskvorechye that neither of them had been to in years.
Malenkaya Kukhnya, on Pyatnitskaya Street, the entrance through a courtyard, the tables small, the ceiling low, the kitchen visible through a window in the back wall.
The borscht was not as good as Oksana's.
Nothing was as good as Oksana's. The vodka was better than it should have been for the price, a Beluga that the owner sourced through a connection he would not disclose, the vodka cold and clean, served in small glasses that he claimed were from St. Petersburg but that were probably from a factory in Tula.
They had gone there together, once, before everything, a Thursday night in November, and the memory of it sat between them on the phone line, a dinner she had worn a green dress to and that he had arrived late to because a meeting had run over and that they had left early from because they had not needed the restaurant to keep talking.
"That was a good night," he said.
The sentence sat on the line. She held it. She could feel the weight of it, the simplicity of it, the way it named something without naming it, the way it admitted something without admitting it, the way it opened a door that she could walk through or not.
"Yes," she said. "It was."
The call was three hours long. Three hours and fourteen minutes, to be precise, because Elena's phone logged the duration and she would see the number later, when she set the phone down, and the number would stay with her.
"I have a morning briefing," she said eventually.
The eventually was the word that mattered.
The eventually was the admission that she had not wanted to say it, that the briefing had been true for two hours and that she had not mentioned it for two hours because mentioning it would end the call and ending the call was not what she wanted.
"I know. Me too."
Neither hung up immediately. The silence on the line was not the silence of two people who had run out of things to say.
It was the silence of two people who had not run out and who knew that the next sentence, whatever it was, would be the last one tonight, and neither wanted to be the one to say it. The silence stretched. She let it.
"I'll see you tomorrow," he said.
"Yes," she said.
She hung up. She set the phone on her desk. The screen went dark. The office was quiet. The morning light was full now, the sun above the skyline, the glass of the surrounding towers bright, the city below moving at the pace of a Tuesday morning in January.
She was smiling. Something he had said near the end of the call, something about the restaurant, about the owner's insistence that the glasses were from St. Petersburg, the quiet certainty in Maksim's voice when he said "Tula.
Definitely Tula," and the way the certainty was not about the glasses, the certainty was about the memory, the certainty was a man remembering a detail from a night seven years ago with the precision of someone who had kept the detail the way he had kept the dress.
She was smiling. She noticed she was smiling. She stopped immediately.
She was forty-five seconds too late. The smile had already happened.
The smile had already done its work, which was to remind her body what her mind was trying not to know: that she had just spent three hours on the phone with a man she was supposed to be maintaining professional distance from, and the three hours had been the easiest three hours of her month, and the ease was the problem.
The ease was the thing that frightened her more than the assassination attempt, more than the merger's complexities, more than Lev's unnamed pattern.
The ease was the evidence that the distance she had been maintaining was not distance.
The distance was discipline. And the discipline was cracking.
She picked up her phone. She opened the merger files.
She read the co-Pakhans clause again, the clause he had written by hand on the document she had walked out on, the word "co-Pakhans" in his handwriting, the handwriting she had not seen in six years and that she had recognized instantly because the handwriting was his and because his handwriting was stored in the same place she kept everything about him, which was the place she did not open and which had been open for three weeks and which she could not close again.
She looked at the word for a long time. Co-Pakhans. Two people running one empire. Two people who had just spent three hours on the phone talking about their fathers and a restaurant and glasses from Tula.
She closed the file.
She put her phone face down on the desk.
The glass surface reflected the phone's dark screen back at her, a rectangle of nothing, a mirror that showed her nothing because there was nothing to show.
There was only what she knew, and what she knew was that she had called him M.Z.
in her contacts and that the initials were a lie.
There was no distance in initials. There was no professional boundary in a three-hour phone call about glasses from Tula.
She went to bed. The penthouse had a bedroom adjacent to the office, a room she used on nights when leaving the building was impractical, a room with a bed and a window and a view of the city that she had slept beside for six years and that had never looked the way it looked tonight, which was the same way it had always looked. The city had not changed. She had.
She did not sleep for an hour. She lay in the dark and she listened to the building and she thought about the phone call and she thought about the restaurant and she thought about the smile and she thought about the word "eventually" and she did not sleep.