Chapter Eight
Maggie stares out her bedroom window and watches the guests arrive.
A long tent-like walkway has been put out between the helicopter landing pad and the front door.
The snow, which was still falling, is strategically gone, though she has seen no one shovel it away.
She’d asked Ivan Brovski how they cleared it away.
“Heat coils under the ground,” he told her.
But of course.
Other guests are pulling up in big black cars, either stretch limos or oversize SUVs. The men wear tuxedos. The women wear formal gowns.
Maggie’s bedroom is, no surprise, larger than most apartments. Ivan had shown her the way to her room. The first thing he’d done when they arrived was open her walk-in closet with, she estimated, somewhere between thirty and forty outfits.
“All in your size and style,” Ivan informed her, “including…”
He gestured to the three formal gowns suitable for, well, a ball.
Maggie shook her head. “I’m not even surprised anymore.”
“I assume you like them.”
She did. Very much. She pulls out a navy blue dress nearly identical to the one she’d worn at Johns Hopkins a few days ago. Same shoes in her size too. “Weird,” she says. “I have this same outfit at home.” Then it dawns on her: “But you already knew that.”
Ivan shrugs. “Not me, personally. But yes, artificial intelligence made the selections—a new software program that scours the internet for all your photos and videos, sees what you wear to various events, and creates a wardrobe based on what it believes is your taste.”
“Terrific.”
But there is no way they could have done all this in, what, twelve hours?
Someone has been watching her.
For how long?
“There are a few nice diamond pieces on the bureau. Tasteful, I’m told. Feel free to borrow them.”
“Okay.”
“How about if I stop by at eight? We can go to the ball together.”
She nods. He leaves. Maggie remembers what Nadia said about bugs and cameras.
Not much she can do about it, she supposes.
The room is fully stocked with a potpourri of dream products—Chanel perfume, Christian Dior makeup, every top-of-the-line skin product imaginable, all touting promises of youth via peptides and collagens.
She takes a shower, letting the hot water steam up the room just in case of cameras, throws on a robe, lies in bed.
She closes her eyes. No time for a nap. Instead, Maggie starts visualizing and even acting out the surgery.
Her father had told her about Colonel George Hall, a Vietnam War combat pilot who spent over seven years in the notorious Hanoi Hilton prison.
To maintain his sanity in the face of starvation and torture, Colonel Hall imagined himself playing golf in his tiny cell.
He would feel the sun on his face, smell the green grass, take each swing with care.
He would see the ball go up in the air, watch it land on the fairways and greens of his favorite courses.
Supposedly he did this every day and actually improved his game just through this visualization.
Maggie didn’t know if that last part was exaggeration or myth, but that didn’t matter.
She got it. She lies back now, closes her eyes, raises her hands into the air, and uses the scalpel to make the first incision.
In her mind’s eye, she goes through the entire operation—
her own virtual world of surgery. She does this a lot—or used to when she was licensed. It is her way of both meditating and preparing.
At eight p.m., there is a knock on the door. Maggie opens it. Ivan’s eyes widen when he sees her all dressed up. He swallows back whatever comment he was about to make about her appearance, and says, “You chose the navy.”
“Yep.”
“It suits you.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you ready?”
Ivan looks stiff and uncomfortable in his tuxedo, the bow tie wrapped tourniquet-like around his neck.
The house is oddly silent when they leave the bedroom.
It’s not until they leave the wing that she starts to hear voices, occasional laughter, string music.
They stay on the third floor and enter the ballroom from a balcony above it.
The ballroom is polished white marble with gold leaf.
It is huge, the approximate size of a college basketball arena.
Relief carvings of baby angels, a look Maggie never understood, line the ceiling’s perimeter.
There are probably three, maybe four hundred people mingling below.
As she heads down the stairs, Maggie notices what appear to be food stations, a worldwide tour de cuisine on steroids.
She wanders around and, for a moment, lets herself be a guest. She tries the abalone with liver and uni dipping sauce from Sushi Yoshitake, a three-star Michelin restaurant in Tokyo’s Ginza district.
Lung King Heen, another three-star Michelin restaurant in Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel, offers a scallop and prawn dumpling.
Talula’s from Asbury Park provides pizza slices with Calabrian soppressata and local honey.
Fromagerie Cantin, the renowned Parisian cheese shop, offers Aisy Cendré, a semisoft cow’s milk cheese buried in oak ashes for a month.
A voice interrupts her midbite. “I know it’s a cliché, what with being here in Russia, but you have to try the caviar.”
The voice has a decidedly haughty American prep school accent to it.
Maggie turns. The handsome man offers her a boyish aw-shucks grin.
His tuxedo looks sculpted on, graceful, draping exactly where it should be and fitted where it shouldn’t.
The midnight-black fabric seems to absorb light more than reflect it.
No need for a flashy tie or patterned cummerbund when you’re seemingly fitted by a deity, just the shine of onyx studs against the pure white of his starched shirt.
He looks soft, pampered, privileged.
As the man and his polished shoes glide toward her, Maggie notices a moistness in his blue eyes, perhaps from drink.
“I’m Charles Lockwood,” he says with a crooked grin, sticking out the unblemished, manicured hand.
She hesitates, not sure whether she should give her name. He picks up on it.
“And you’re Doctor Maggie McCabe,” he says for her.
His stubble is curated and on point. His black hair is long and wavy, the kind of unruly and ungroomed that often requires too much product. It all works in its own way, she presumes. Charles Lockwood cuts a striking figure, which is clearly the intended effect.
“Have we met?”
“No, but I knew your husband a bit. I’m terribly sorry.”
“How did you—?”
“I dabble”—Lockwood lifts a manicured hand and shakes his fingers—“in cardiothoracic surgery too.”
“No one ‘dabbles’”—she imitates his finger gestures—“in cardiothoracic surgery.”
“Fair enough. I don’t say this with false modesty, but next to your husband? Yes, I dabble. Marc seemed a good man, maybe even a great man, I don’t know. But he was the greatest surgeon I’d ever seen.”
Maggie feels her throat start to close. She pushes on. “So what brings you to Russia, Doctor Lockwood?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Yeah, but I asked first.”
“Probably the same reason you’re here,” he says.
“Hey, Charles, there you are!”
Two giggling women, both young and blonde and straight out of an influencer’s social media page, call out to him in Russian and approach on either side.
One takes one arm. One takes the other. Both look at him adoringly.
Charles replies to them in Russian. Both women pout, let their grips slip, and sulk away.
Charles turns back to Maggie and gives her a what-are-you-gonna-do shrug of the shoulders, palms up.
“Yeah, I don’t think we’re here for the same thing,” Maggie says.
He chuckles. “Sorry about that,” he says.
“Don’t let me keep you from your friends.”
“They’ll be around later.”
“I bet. You speak Russian?”
“I dabble.”
“Dabbling seems to be your modus operandi.”
Charles Lockwood gives her what he is sure must be the most winning smile. “I spend a lot of time here. I enjoy the lifestyle.”
“That lifestyle being?”
“A tad hedonistic. Nothing wrong with fun, Doctor McCabe, is there?”
She tries not to frown. “None at all.”
“Perhaps you and I can get together during your visit.”
“Yeah, no, I don’t think so.”
“Come now, Doctor McCabe, there is always time for a little fun along with our fundraising. Where are you staying?”
She ignores his question. “What’s that about fundraising?”
His expression says he knows that she’s dodging. “That’s not why you’re here?”
“No, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“For?”
“A medical startup specializing in cutting-edge longevity treatments.”
Again with the cutting edge, Maggie thinks.
Lockwood peers over her head. “Have you met our host?”
“Yes.”
Charles Lockwood makes a face to indicate he’s impressed. “Have you seen Mr. Ragoravich at the party?”
“It’s a ball, not a party.”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind.” Maggie’s eyes scan the ballroom. “No, not yet.”
“I’m hoping to meet Oleg Ragoravich tonight.” Charles Lockwood turns his attention back to her. “Your turn.”
“Turn?”
“Why are you here, Doctor McCabe?”
“Maggie.”
“Why are you here, Maggie?”
“I can’t really talk about it,” she says.
“Why not?”
She shuts him down with a face.
“Oh, my bad. I won’t push.” He throws up his hands in mock surrender.
Again, Charles Lockwood probably thinks it’s a charming move on his part, and maybe for others, it is.
Maggie hates this kind of faux charisma, the playboy blend of privilege and drink and good genes and people around you telling you that you are God’s gift.
Then Lockwood says, “Is Trace Packer here too?”
Maggie doesn’t bother hiding her surprise. “You know Trace?”
“Let’s just say we partied a few times together in our day.”
“I bet.”
“Trace knows how to party.” He looks around. “I figured you’re both here to fundraise.”
“Our charity closed down.”
“I’m aware,” Charles Lockwood says.
“You seem aware of a lot of things.”