20. Margot
MARGOT
Turns out the man I'd been writing about could actually drive through a hail of bullets. Ten out of ten. Would not recommend.
The place he brings me to sits on the third floor of a building that has decided, as a matter of policy, to be forgettable.
There is no name on the buzzer and nothing at all on the walls.
There is a couch, a table, two chairs, a bed tucked behind a half wall, and a window he checks the street from twice before he will let me sit down, and after that he never once puts his back to it.
The apartment is the man himself translated into square footage, and I notice as much, and I file it away, because filing things is the only muscle I have left that still answers when I call it.
My hands will not stop. I have them wrapped around a mug of tea he made without asking, the way you press a blanket on someone in shock, and they tremble against the ceramic in a fine, steady shiver that has nothing left to do with cold.
An hour ago a man came around the hood of a car with a knife.
An hour ago I watched Daniil answer him.
I keep reaching for the thing I am supposed to feel about that and coming back instead with the enormous animal gladness of being alive, which even now I understand I will be ashamed of later.
He has still not answered the question I put to him in the car. He let it sit in the dark the whole silent drive, and now he stands across the small room with his coat still on, weighing how much of himself he can afford to hand over.
"You promised me the true answer," I say. "Not the useful one. I have been remarkably patient, for a woman who learned tonight that the man she has been kissing fights like a documentary about organized crime."
"I am security." He says it plainly. "That part was never the lie. I keep people and things from being taken, and I am very good at it, and I have done it a long time, for the kind of men who need such work done and do not put it on a business card."
"For the mob," I say.
"For men who would find that word both accurate and beneath them.
" He lets the pause settle before he goes on.
"Your grandmother kept something that belongs, in the way these men reckon belonging, to them.
She hid it so well that they had very nearly stopped looking.
Then you wrote a book, and you set one true sentence inside it that you were never meant to know, and you woke them all the way up. "
"The oranges are late," I say, and I watch it land on him, the phrase out of chapter nine that I was so proud of inventing and apparently did not invent at all.
"You did not invent it. You inherited it. That is a different thing, and the difference is the reason there are men in this city tonight who would give a great deal to watch you stop breathing."
"So those pages are what they want."
"Those pages are a record. A ledger, kept by people who do not survive being written into one.
While they exist, and while you are the woman holding them, you are the most dangerous person in this city and by a wide margin the least safe.
" He holds my eyes. "Do you understand what I am telling you? "
"You are telling me my grandmother was a criminal." My voice does something unforgivable on the final word.
"I am telling you your grandmother was careful, in a world that bills carelessness in coffins. Whatever else she was, she spent forty years keeping you clear of it. She very nearly finished the job."
"Birdie," I say, and the name comes out with a jolt, because in all of this I have not once thought of her, and the guilt of that is immediate and total. "She wasn't there tonight. She left at six. But she opens in the morning. She has a key. If those men go back to the shop and she is…"
"She is safe." He says it before I can finish building the horror.
"A friend of mine put a car outside her building an hour ago.
He will be bored to tears by morning, and Birdie will never know he was there.
Your assistant sells paperbacks and reviews them to a telephone.
She is no use to anyone hunting you, and they know it.
It is you they want, because it is you the pages answer to. "
"You had someone watching Birdie within the hour," I say slowly. "You move very fast, for a man who fixes locks."
"I make calls," he says, which explains precisely nothing, and by now I know the shape of his non-answers the way you know a coastline in fog.
"How long have you known?" I ask. "That I was in danger. That any of this was ever real."
He is quiet for a moment, and the quiet carries a weight I cannot place. "Longer than you have," he says. "That is the honest answer, and it is the most of it I can give you tonight."
"That is not very much."
"No," he agrees. "It is not. But it is true, which is more than I have handed most people, and more than you should count on getting from me twice."
And here is the part I will not say aloud, not to him, not to Birdie, not to the sensible woman I play in interviews.
While he stands in the lamplight explaining that my whole life has had a trapdoor in the floor of it, some mutinous furnace in my chest is quietly cataloguing how steady his voice stays, how he has not once looked away, how the worst night of my life feels survivable purely because he has set himself between me and the glass.
I have sold this exact feeling by the word.
I never once guessed it would arrive wearing the face of the man explaining how I might die.
So I do the thing I do when a feeling swells past what I can hold, which is to hunt down a smaller problem I am equipped to win. I get up on legs that mostly cooperate, and I open his cupboards one after another, and I conduct an audit, and the audit is damning.
"New crisis," I announce. "This is a safe house. I will grant you that it is extremely safe. But a woman cannot live on tap water and a sleeve of crackers that expired under a previous administration. Where do you keep the coffee?"
"There is no coffee."
"I am going to need you to say that again, slowly, with a full understanding that everything between us now depends on your answer."
"There is instant."
"Instant." I hold the jar aloft like evidence entered at a tribunal. "You drove me through live gunfire tonight, and you will forgive me, but this is the part that feels like the real betrayal."
"It came with the apartment." And he almost smiles. I watch the whole doomed effort of it cross his face and lose. "I do not use it. I do not sleep enough to require permission from a bean."
"That is the single saddest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I have written thirty-one novels about sad men.
" I am negotiating in earnest now, because this is the one room in the building where I still know where the walls are.
"Here are my terms. When this is finished, and no one is shooting at me, you will take me somewhere Mateo would grudgingly approve of, and you will drink a real coffee made by a real human being, and you will admit to me that it is better.
Those are my conditions for continued cooperation. "
"Those are a great many conditions," he says, which is exactly what he said on the sidewalk with the bullets flying, and hearing it now, in a warm room where no one is dying, is the first thing all night that makes me laugh instead of shake.
The laugh knocks something loose, and underneath it is the decision I have been circling since he folded me into that car.
I am not built to hand my safety to another person.
I have spent my whole life as the one who locks the door and checks it twice and leaves the right half of the bench empty rather than trust it to somebody who might not come.
And now here stands a man who guards his own last name like a loaded thing, and I am about to give him the say over whether I live.
"I don't trust you," I tell him, and I mean it, and I also do not. "You lie the way other people breathe. You have been lying to me since the night you walked in and bought Josie's poems. I would be a fool to trust you."
"Yes," he says, and does not argue, which is the most convincing thing he could possibly have done.
"But I trust that you want me alive. I can see that one plainly.
Whatever else is a lie, that is not." I set the jar of dreadful coffee down like a gavel.
"So here it is. For now, I will do what you say.
I will stay where you put me. I will not go running into the street to make a point.
For now. That is the deal, and it expires the instant you give me a reason. "
"For now," he repeats, and something shifts behind his face that I have not been trained to read, and I decide it is relief, because relief is what I want it to be.
I do not know that I have just handed the whole of my safety to the one man alive with the most tangled possible reason to keep me breathing and never, ever tell me the truth.
I only know that his shoulders come down by half an inch, and that I am the one who did that, and that I am absurdly proud of it, God help me.
"What happens now," I ask. "Not the reassuring version. The real one."
"Now we turn the thing they want into the thing that keeps you alive, instead of the reason you die.
" He says it the way he says everything that matters, quietly.
"The pages are a leash. Held in the right hand, they point the other way.
I intend to be the right hand. It will take a few days, it will not be quiet, and you will be safe for exactly as long as you do what I say. "
"And then I go home."
He does not answer that. It is the first question all night that he simply lets fall to the floor between us, and I am too tired to make him pick it back up.
Instead I ask the smaller thing, the one I can survive the answer to. "Will you be here? If I wake up."
"I will be here," he says, and out of every sentence he has handed me tonight, the true ones and the false and the ones that are half of each, it is the only one my whole body agrees to believe.
Then the adrenaline drains out of me all at once, the way it always does, as though someone has found the plug, and the room tips gently on its axis and I understand that I am going to be unconscious whether I sign off on it or not.
He gives me the bed behind the half wall and takes the chair by the window, arranged around his own watchfulness like a man who has forgotten how to set it down.
I am far too tired to argue the floor plan.
I lie in a stranger's bed, in a safe house with no coffee and a dangerous man keeping watch at the glass, and by every law I know I should be frightened.
I have been frightened all night. Now, absurdly, I am not.
I am a thing my body has not permitted me to be in a very long time, which is off duty.
Someone else is watching the door. Someone else is counting the cars on the street.
For the first time since Josie died, the noticing is allowed to stop, because someone even better at it than I am has quietly taken the shift.
Half-asleep, I admit it. "I feel safer with you than I ever have. Like you've been looking out for me for years." He says nothing. I mistake the silence for modesty.