11. Under His Protection
Eleven
Under His Protection
Evelyn
Misha’s duffel takes nine minutes to pack and I spend four of them negotiating with myself over the blue hoodie, which is dirty at the cuff but is also the only one he will wear when he is somewhere new.
Dirty cuff wins. He sleeps through the entire operation, one arm flung off the mattress, the folk tale book tented open on his chest like he passed out mid-argument with it.
I take the book gently. He does not stir.
The kid can time an intrusion to the second but cannot be woken by a woman zipping a bag eighteen inches from his ear.
Down the hall there are men in the service corridor who were not there this morning, and the front door has started making a heavier sound when it closes, and there is a list somewhere with all the building codes on it that Andrei is checking himself, line by line, because he does not trust anyone else to check it.
I am not scared.
That is the part I keep turning over while I fold the hoodie.
I should be scared. Two men came within seconds of this door tonight, and I got here in four, and my hands were steady the whole time, and now I am packing a child’s chess book and a pair of small socks with dinosaurs on them and my chest is doing nothing at all.
Somewhere in the last three weeks I stopped keeping an inventory of exits.
I know exactly when it happened, too, and it was not the night in the kitchen.
It was a man saying tonight he is safe and not softening it.
Daisy would have a whole speech about this. Daisy would start with the word Stockholm and get worse from there.
I zip the bag and turn out the light.
The North Shore apartment smells like lemon polish and radiator dust and something faintly green from whoever waters the plants in the lobby.
Four rooms, low ceilings, a kitchen you can actually turn around in.
The windows face a stand of bare trees instead of the lake, and the wind comes through them all night with a sound like paper being crumpled somewhere very far away.
There are two men downstairs at all times—one in the vestibule and one in a car—and both of them say good morning like it is a normal thing to say to a nanny with a laundry basket.
There are no orchids anywhere in this apartment. I notice on the first morning and I do not know why I check.
Misha decides, roughly ninety minutes into our exile, that he will use the two days to learn the alphabet backwards. Not the Russian one. The English one, which he says is easier and therefore an appropriate warmup.
“Warmup for what?”
“For later.” He does not elaborate.
By the second morning he can do it in nineteen seconds. He performs it for me over cereal, hands flat on the table, chin up, and then sits back with the expression of a man who has completed a long project and now must confront the rest of his life.
“So what do you do with it?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “There is not really a use.”
“That’s rough.”
He considers this with genuine seriousness, spoon suspended. “It’s fine. Some things you just have.”
I write that on the inside of my skull to take out later, when I am eighty.
Andrei comes the second evening without telling anyone he is coming. I hear the vestibule buzzer and then the elevator and then his key, and Misha is off the couch before I have put down the dish towel.
He is still in the coat, and there is cold coming off the wool of it, and he stands in the middle of a room that is not his—in an apartment where he owns the walls but nothing else—and looks around like a man checking whether the furniture has behaved itself.
“You’re early,” I say.
“I am not expected at all.”
“That’s what early means when you do it.”
The corner of his mouth moves about a millimeter. He hands me the coat. His hands are cold and the ring is cold and I take the coat and hang it up and do not think about either of those things at all.
Dinner is chicken and rice and Misha’s ongoing lecture on why the knight is the only honest piece. Afterward he produces a deck of cards and announces a game he calls Ambush, and I get up to make tea specifically so I can watch this from the safety of the counter.
The rules of Ambush are as follows: whatever Misha needs them to be.
“You cannot play the black one after the red one,” Misha says.
Andrei looks at the card he has just played. “You played the black one after the red one.”
“Because I had the seven.”
“You did not have the seven.”
“I had it earlier.” Misha does not blink. “It counts backwards.”
There is a pause with weight in it. I put the kettle down so the noise does not interfere.
Andrei takes his card back off the table and studies his hand with the attention of a man reading a term sheet. “Then I withdraw my play,” he says, “and I reserve the seven.”
“You can’t reserve.”
“You reserved.”
“I’m the one who knows the rules.”
He loses three hands in a row. Not gracefully, exactly.
He loses them the way he does everything—without commentary, laying his cards down flat and square—and after the third one Misha announces that Andrei is improving, which is objectively untrue, and Andrei says, “Good,” and neither of them looks at me.
I file the whole thing away in the part of me that has stopped pretending I am not paying very close attention.
Misha goes down at nine. He wants two pages, gets three, and is out before the wolf shows up.
The kitchen has one lamp and a table that seats four badly.
Andrei sits across from me with tea he does not drink, both hands around the mug, sleeves pushed up.
In the penthouse the silence is engineered.
Here the radiator knocks and the wind works the trees and somewhere below us a car door shuts, and all of it makes the quiet between us a lot louder.
“I will be fifty-five in March,” he says.
I set my mug down. “Okay.”
“That is not a small number beside twenty-three.”
“It’s not, no.”
He looks at me the way he looked at the cards. “You are supposed to argue.”
“You didn’t ask me a question.” I turn the mug a quarter turn. “You made a statement about arithmetic. The arithmetic is correct. Congratulations.”
Something behind his face gives, just slightly. “I am not going to pretend my world is uncomplicated. What happened outside that pantry door two nights ago is not an aberration. It is the shape of the thing.”
“I know what the shape of the thing is. I’ve read the ledgers.
My father wrote half of them.” I say it evenly and it still costs something.
“You’re not warning me. You’re giving me an exit and hoping I don’t take it, and you’d rather do that than ask me to stay, because asking is the part you can’t do. ”
He does not deny it. He turns the mug once against the table, and the ring does not touch anything, and I notice that he is keeping it still on purpose.
“What did it cost you,” I ask, “to stop hoping for a life outside all this?”
He is quiet long enough that the radiator gets a full sentence in.
“I stopped asking that question so long ago,” he says, “that I would have to excavate to find the answer.”
“Then I think you should start digging.”
“That is a young thing to say.”
“It’s an accurate thing to say. Those aren’t opposites.” I lean back. “You grow orchids on a roof, Andrei. You didn’t build that room for the syndicate. You built it because some part of you kept an appointment nobody else knew about.”
I have never said the orchids out loud. Not once, not in three weeks, not when he handed me a book with pencil on the title page. It lands on the table between us and stays there.
He does not deflect. He does not look away, and he does not change the subject, and he does not perform anything, and that stillness is the most naked I have ever seen him—much more than in the kitchen.
“You opened the wrong door,” he says.
“I did.”
“You never said.”
“You never locked it after that.” I hold his eyes. “Not on the nights I was awake.”
His thumb moves once against the ceramic. That is all. And then he says, in the accent that only comes out when he has stopped managing it, “Drink your tea. It is going cold.”
Kostya confirms the last access point sealed at one the following afternoon, and by three we are back in the penthouse hallway with two duffels and a chess book and a boy who goes straight to his room to check that his drawings are where he left them.
The apartment smells like it always smells—cold stone and something faintly citrus from whatever Mrs. Petrov uses on the marble—and after two days of lemon polish and radiator knock it lands like walking into a museum after hours.
I set the bags down. Andrei is still in the hallway. He has not moved toward the study, which is where he goes, always, within ninety seconds of coming through that door.
He crosses to me instead.
He takes my face in both hands, and his palms are warm this time, and the signet ring rests along my jaw exactly where it rested at two in the morning six weeks ago, except that it is three in the afternoon and the light off the lake is coming through the windows flat and gray and enormous and there is nowhere in this hallway to hide anything.
He kisses me like it is a decision he made before the elevator.
I get a fistful of his shirt. He makes a sound low in his throat, barely anything, and one hand slides back into my hair, and I taste tea and cold air, and I am aware, in a distant administrative way, that a boy is fourteen feet away arranging drawings, and that this is a Tuesday, and that this man has never once touched me anywhere the day could see it.
That is the part that takes my knees out. Not the mouth. The daylight.
He pulls back an inch. Does not let go of my face.
“Well,” I say, and my voice comes out wrong.
“Yes,” he says.
Behind us, at the end of the hall, someone clears his throat.
Kostya is standing at the mouth of the corridor with a laptop under his arm and his eyes fixed on a point six inches above my head, which is the most tact I have ever seen a man deploy while holding a computer.
“I’ve found something in Yuri’s communication logs,” he says. “You need to see it now.”
Andrei’s hands come off my face. Not fast. But the thing behind his eyes shuts like a steel shutter coming down over a window, and the man who kissed me in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon is simply gone, and what is left is looking past me at Kostya and already walking.