15. Raven
Raven
"Again." Andrei Dudin barks.
"I'm bleeding."
"You are bleeding a small amount from a place that does not matter." He rolls his shoulder. "Again."
He has put me on the mat four times in eleven minutes and never makes it look easy, which is the only thing that keeps me from hating him.
The pool house has a floor and enough space, and neither of us said anything about starting this — it just began on the third morning, when he came down at seven, found me working through forms alone, stood in the doorway for a while, and then took his boots off.
We've done it every day since.
I go in low, and he lets me get further than last time, which is worse, because it means he's giving me the first two seconds to see what I do with them.
I do something clever. He takes the clever thing away from me with one hand, uses my own commitment against my hip, and I'm on the mat looking at a ceiling.
"Your left is a lie," Andrei says, above me.
"My left is fine."
"Your left is a lie you tell before you go right, and you have told it eleven times, and after the third one I stopped believing you.
" He puts a hand down. I take it. "Whoever taught you was very good and very small.
You have been fighting people your own weight for nine years. I'm not your weight."
"No kidding."
"So stop trying to beat me. Try to be somewhere else." He resets. "Again."
We go for another forty minutes, and I don't win once, and I learn more in that forty minutes than in the last two years, and by the end of it my forearms are shaking and I'm — inconveniently — enjoying myself enormously.
Afterward, he gets two bottles of water from the fridge in the pool house, hands me one, and sits down on the step, and neither of us says anything while the sun comes up over the hill.
"You asked me a question," Andrei says. "In the house. On the first day."
I keep very still.
"Why I'm not the boy's bodyguard."
"You said you can't."
“You worked out the rest eleven days ago. Ilya told me he spoke to you.” He turns the bottle in his hands. “So there is no point hiding it. I would rather tell you myself.”
"Andrei, you don't have to—"
"I broke the door." He says it flatly, looking out at the water. "Four years ago. I put my shoulder through it twice, the second time the frame gave. I carried her out."
"I know."
“Everybody knows that part.” He pauses to take a drink before going on, “Nobody knows the rest. Not Ilya, not Bogdan, maybe the boy. He has never said.”
I don't say anything at all.
"She had been quiet for two days," Andrei says.
"Not unusual. She was often quiet. But it was a different quiet, and I noticed it, and I did nothing about it, because it was not my business what the Pakhan's wife was quiet about.
" He turns the bottle again. "That morning I was told to keep Sergei downstairs.
Not by her — by no one. By myself. It was my own decision because I did not like the quiet, so I put him at the kitchen table with a puzzle and told him to stay.
"And then a man came to the gate about a delivery."
The sun is fully up now. Somewhere down the hill a car goes past.
"Ninety seconds," he says. "Perhaps a hundred. I went to the gate, and I dealt with a man about a delivery, and when I came back the chair was empty, and he was already up the stairs, and I heard him on the landing before I heard anything else."
"Andrei—"
"He got there first." His voice does not change at all.
"He got to that door before I did, and it was not locked, and by the time I reached the top of the stairs he had already opened it.
He had been standing there for some seconds.
I do not know how many. I have thought about how many for four years. "
I sit on a step in California, a bottle of water warming in my hand.
"Ilya thinks I broke the door," Andrei says. "He has thought that for four years because that is what I told him, and it is not untrue — I did break it, afterward, going back in for her. But the door his son opened, his son opened himself. Because I was at a gate."
"That's not—"
"Don't." He looks at me for the first time. "Don't say it is not my fault. I know exactly what part is mine to carry. I’m telling you why I can’t stand in that room."
"Because he saw you carry her out."
"Because he saw me arrive too late," Andrei says. "The carrying is nothing. He does not flinch when he sees me because of what I was holding. He flinches because in his head I'm the man who comes up the stairs afterward."
We sit there for a while.
"Does he know you know?" I ask.
"I do not think a ten-year-old thinks like that. I think he knows only that his chest goes tight when I enter a room. He is polite enough to be ashamed of it." He caps the bottle. "But that’s what makes it the worst thing anybody has ever done to me."
I take a breath.
"You should tell Ilya."
"No."
"Andrei—"
"Ilya has one man in this world he does not have to check." He stands up, and he's himself again, closed and enormous and done with this. "If I take that from him this year, he has none."
I let it go for now.
Because I've got about four days before I stop letting it go, and both of us know it.
"Andrei. The kitchen. The cereal."
He stops halfway to the door.
"You said I was the woman in the house."
"I did."
"You meant it."
"I did." He doesn't turn around. "I was raised by a woman who fed nine people every day of her life on nothing and did not consider it an insult to be asked. I didn’t understand that it was different with you until after I said it.
And by then you had thrown a pan at me, which I felt was proportionate. "
"And now?"
"Now I have watched you go up a hill in the dark and come back down it," Andrei says, "and I do not think anything at all about what you should be. I think about what you did."
"Is that an apology?"
"No." He opens the door. "It's better than one. An apology is words about the past."
Then, from the doorway, with his back still to me:
"He has smiled four times since Kansas. In eleven years I have counted the total for a whole year, and it was six." A pause. "I'm telling you this so that you understand people are watching, and that some of them are on your side, and that this is not necessarily a comfortable thing to be told."
He's gone before I can find anything to say to that.
Thursday, I see a car I’m beginning to recognize.
Grey sedan, four doors, parked on the residential street that runs below the property — the one the staff stair comes down onto, two hundred meters from our gate and forty from the bottom of that stair.
I've seen it twice before, once on Monday and once the week we arrived.
Same car. Same street. Different parking space each time, which is the tell — a resident parks in the same spot out of habit. Somebody working a position moves so nobody notices their shape.
There's a man in it.
I take Sergei inside, hand him to Karina with an instruction and a look, and go and find Andrei on the terrace.
"Grey Impala on Rennick. Man in the driver's seat, been there ninety minutes."
He doesn't ask if I'm sure.
"Plates."
"Couldn't read them from up here."
"Then we read them from down there," Andrei says, and goes to get his coat.
Here's how you do this, and both of us know it without a word: you walk toward it like two people who live on this hill and are going for a walk, and you do not split until the last thirty meters, and then you split.
We're forty meters away when he sees us.
I watch him see us. Head comes up, hand moves, and he does the single most informative thing available to him.
He doesn't drive away.
He gets out.
That's what tells me. A watcher runs — a watcher's whole job is not being here — and this man opens his door and steps out onto the street and stands beside his own vehicle with his hands where I can see them, which is not what a criminal does.
It's what a cop does.
"Ma'am—"
Andrei hits him.
Not hard, and not with everything, and I'd argue afterward that it was the correct call, because the man's hand had gone toward his hip and neither of us was going to gamble a hundredth of a second on what was in it.
He takes him into the side of the car and has both wrists behind him in about a second and a half, and I've got the door open and the glovebox and the console and the seat pocket in eleven seconds flat.
There's a camera with a long lens. There's a laptop. There's a cup of cold coffee, a sandwich wrapper, and a bottle he's been using because he can't leave the position, which tells me he's been on this street a great deal longer than ninety minutes.
And there's a badge. I hold it about four inches from my own face, examining it closely.
It's real.
Nine years. You know the stock, you know the weight, you know the way the seal sits under the laminate, and this is not a print job out of a garage in Van Nuys — this is a genuine credential belonging to a genuine special agent out of a field office I could drive to in forty minutes.
"Federal," I say.
Andrei's grip changes.
"Then we have a problem," he says.
"We have a bigger one." I turn the camera on and thumb through the back of the roll, fast, and my stomach goes somewhere unpleasant. "Andrei. These aren't of the house."
There are perhaps four hundred frames on this card, and I go through eighty of them in about twenty seconds, and there is not one photograph of Ilya Yaroslav on it.
Not one of Sergei. Not one of Andrei, or the gate, or the vehicles, or a single thing about this property that a man investigating the Bratva would need.
They're of me.
Me on the terrace. Me on the beach steps with a towel. Me at the market on Vermont, from behind, holding a bag. Me in the pool house doorway at seven in the morning with my hands wrapped.
Dated. Timestamped. Going back eleven days.
"Ask him," I say, and my voice comes out from somewhere a long way off, "how long."
Andrei asks him. Andrei asks him in a way I'm going to think about later.
"Since Utah," the man gets out. "Since — Christ — since the eighth, we picked you up on 15 outside Cedar City—"
"Picked me up. Who's we?"
"I don't—"
"Who is running you?"
"I get a number." He's talking fast now, and he isn't lying; I've watched too many people lie.
"I get a number and a schedule, and I file to an address.
It's compartmented, it's got a case code, I don't get a name — lady, I don't get a name, I'm four years in, they gave me a car and a code and told me not to file locally—"
And then the second vehicle comes around the corner at the bottom of Rennick.
Fast. Black, and it doesn't slow at the junction, and Andrei has me by the arm and off the road behind the parked cars before I have finished registering it.
It stops. Two men get out. They put our man in the back seat with a hand on his head, and they are gone in under nine seconds, and neither of them so much as looks up the hill at us, and the whole street is quiet again with a grey Impala standing empty and its driver's door open.
I stand behind a parked car with my heart going and the camera still in my hand.
Eleven days of photographs.
Nineteen days since Cedar City.
A federal agent with a real badge, working out of a compartmented file with no name on it, running surveillance on a woman whose face is on a wire in every field office in this country.
"He has been looking at you for nineteen days," Andrei says, very quietly, beside me.
"Yeah."
"There is a warrant with your name on it."
"Yeah."
"He has known where you sleep for eleven of those days."
"Yes."
"Then why," Andrei says, "has nobody come to arrest you?"