13. Touch Her and Die
Thirteen
Touch Her and Die
Evelyn
Misha is explaining why the Sicilian Defense is a moral position and not just an opening when the SUV door opens.
Two men. They do not hurry, which is the part that turns my stomach.
Hurrying would mean improvisation. These two step onto the sidewalk the way men step onto a stage they have already rehearsed—one moving wide toward the curb and one closing in front of us so that the space I have to walk through becomes the space they have agreed to give me.
Misha’s hand tightens in mine. His mitten is damp at the thumb because he chews it when he’s thinking, and I feel that dampness through my glove, and that small stupid detail is what I hold onto.
“Miss Marsh.” The taller one has a scarf tucked under his coat collar, neat as a napkin. “Orlov cannot protect what he does not acknowledge. You understand this. He has not put your name on anything.”
Three blocks from the building. There is a coffee shop across the street with a woman in the window laughing at her laptop. Traffic. A bus grinding at the light. All that ordinary noise and it might as well be happening on television.
“You’ll carry a message,” he says.
“I don’t carry things,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than it has any right to, which is either courage or shock and I genuinely cannot tell which.
He starts to say something else and then he stops, because the sidewalk has changed.
I do not see them arrive so much as I feel the geometry shift: a man in a gray coat coming from the corner ahead at a walking pace that is not a walking pace, and behind us, close enough that I have no idea how long he has been there, another one, hands out of his pockets.
They do not run. Nobody says a word. The taller man looks at the one on the corner for maybe a second and a half, and then both of them are back in the SUV and the door shuts with that expensive muffled thump and the vehicle pulls into traffic like a man leaving a party he was never really invited to.
The bus at the light exhales. My knees decide, belatedly, to have opinions.
“Eleven,” Misha says.
“What?”
“I counted. From when the door opened to when it closed.” He looks up at me, entirely composed, cheeks red from the cold. “Eleven seconds. That’s not very long for something that felt long.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
I do not tell him that I was counting too. That I had gotten to nine and stopped because I could not remember what came after nine.
Andrei is in the elevator lobby when we come through the brass doors. Not standing near it. In it, occupying it, coat still on, and he crosses the marble before the door has finished swinging shut behind us.
He goes to Misha first. Crouches, one knee, in that suit, the way he did the day Gregor put a hand on me. He takes Misha’s chin between two fingers and turns his face toward the light and looks at him. Not at his eyes. At all of him, the way you’d check a coat for a tear.
“Nobody touched me,” Misha says. “It was eleven seconds.”
“Eleven.” Andrei nods slowly, like this is a professional observation from a colleague. “That is precise.”
“I have a watch now. I mean, I don’t. But I have an internal one.”
“Go and hang your coat properly. Not the hook by the shoe rack. The one that is yours.”
Misha goes. Andrei stands and his hands come down on my shoulders and stay there, and his eyes go over me the way they went over the boy—throat, wrists, the sleeve of my coat, the whole inventory—and I understand with absolute clarity that he is checking for damage before he permits himself to feel anything about it.
Ruslan is very interested in his screen.
The lilies on the desk smell like a funeral, which is not helping.
“Nobody put a hand on me,” I say. “They talked. That’s all.”
“What did he say.”
“That you can’t protect what you haven’t acknowledged.”
Something moves across his face and is gone before I can name it. He takes out his phone without letting go of me, which requires him to shift his grip to my left shoulder and hold it, and I notice he does not stop touching me while he speaks.
“Kostya. Vashenko’s location, confirmed, within the hour.
Not reported. Confirmed.” A pause. “The school-run detail doubles. Two on the pavement, one ahead at the corner, and I want the corner covered from the moment they leave the building, not from the moment they leave the school.” Another pause. “Yes. Now.”
His voice never once rises. His signet ring stays exactly where it is against the phone, not moving, not tapping. I have learned to read that stillness the way other people read shouting, and I have never seen him this frightening, and I have never seen him this completely here.
He puts the phone away. His thumb moves once against my collarbone through my coat.
“You are going upstairs,” he says. “And I am going to be angry somewhere else.”
The Akhmatova is open on the kitchen counter at a page I have read four times without absorbing a word when he comes in at eleven.
Misha has been asleep for two hours. Kostya’s people have walked the building twice, and the door to the service corridor makes a heavier sound now than it did in October, and I have made tea I have not drunk.
Andrei sits on the stool across from me. He does not pour whisky, which is new.
We sit there for a while. The refrigerator hums behind the wall. Somewhere below us the heat comes on with two knocks in the pipes and then thinks better of it.
Then he slides something across the marble toward me.
It is a key. Old brass, worn bright at the bow, the kind of key that has been carried in a pocket rather than kept in a drawer.
I know what it is before he says anything. I put my hand flat on the counter beside it and do not pick it up.
“The night you found the roof,” he says, “I had left it unlocked. I was called back inside in the middle of something and I did not go back to it. I understood afterward that it had been open. I locked it.” He turns the key a quarter turn on the marble with one finger, so the bow faces me instead of him.
“That was the last night I locked it against you.”
“You locked it every night. I heard you.”
“I locked it. Not against you.” He looks at me and does not soften anything. “This is yours. It has been yours since the night I put the book on your table. I have been carrying it since then, which is a thing I would prefer not to have said out loud.”
Under my ribs there is a pull, sharp and low, that has nothing to do with fear.
“For how long,” I say.
“That is the wrong question.”
“It’s my question.”
“It is permanent.” He says it in the flat voice he uses for terms that are not being renegotiated.
“Not while you work here. Not while things are as they are. Not conditional on anything, including tonight, including whether you stay, including whether you decide in three weeks that this life is not one you want. It is a key to a door. It is yours.”
I close my hand around it. The metal is warm from his pocket, and that is the detail that undoes me—more than the words, more than the sidewalk, more than any of it. He has been carrying it against his body for weeks.
“Andrei.” I have to say it twice because the first time nothing comes out. “Is asking me to stay the same thing as wanting me to stay?”
He does not answer immediately. He looks at the counter and then at the window where the lake is only a darker piece of dark, and when he speaks the accent is all the way through it, the one that comes out when the armor is off and he cannot be bothered to file it down for anyone.
“Three weeks after you came, I was on a board call. London. Nine men waiting on a sentence I had begun.” His thumb moves along the edge of the marble.
“I stopped in the middle of it. I could not continue because I was humming, and the thing I was humming was not mine. It came into my house through the kitchen door and it did not belong to me and I have not been able to get it out since.” He raises his eyes.
“So no. It is not the same thing. I have wanted you to stay since that morning. The asking has taken considerably longer.”
I get off the stool.
I have thought about this in the abstract, in the dark, in the specific and mortifying way I think about things at two in the morning. Every time, it has been him crossing the room. He is the one who catches wrists. He is the one who decides.
I cross the room.
I put my hands on either side of his face because I want to know what that feels like—the scar under my left palm, the rough of a day’s growth along the jaw—and I kiss him.
I have never done this first. Not once. And he goes utterly still, the way he does in the half second before he makes a decision that costs him something, and for one long, terrible, glorious moment I am kissing a statue and thinking about how much I would like the floor to open.
Then his hands come up.
One at my waist and one behind my head, and the ring is cold along the back of my neck, and he makes a sound against my mouth that is not a word in any language, and the stool scrapes back on the tile because he stands up into it.
He tastes like tea gone cold. He kisses me like he is behind on something.
My hip hits the counter. The Akhmatova slides and I do not care and neither, apparently, does he.
When he pulls back it is only far enough to put his forehead against mine, and we stay there breathing badly, and neither of us says anything clever, which is possibly the greatest achievement of my adult life.
“Moya zvezda,” he says, very low.
“I still don’t know what that means.”
“I know.”
At six the next morning I go down the hall in socks with the key in my fist.
The lock turns easily. Someone has kept it oiled. The warmth reaches me first, wet soil and green air and that faint sweetness underneath, and then the light, which at this hour comes off the lake the color of skim milk and lies flat across every leaf.
The orchids are there, white and pale gold, ranked on their staging, each pot turned a quarter degree so the blooms face the glass. There is a watering can with a dented spout and a pair of scissors on a shelf and a folded cloth, worn soft, that he must use on the leaves. There is one chair. One.
Nobody has ever stood here except him. I know that the way I know my own name.
This is not a room that has been shown to anyone, and it is not a room that was built to be given, and he gave me the key to it anyway and then told me it was not conditional so that I could not hand it back as a bargaining chip.
I stand among them until my feet go cold on the tiles. Then I lock the door behind me, put the key in my pocket, and go down and make Misha’s eggs soft and his toast in triangles, and I do not say a single word about where I have been.