35. Margot
MARGOT
Icomplimented a killer's bookshelf. It was that or scream, and screaming seemed rude.
Daniil had spent the entire drive trying to talk me out of a car I was already sitting in, which is the least effective place on earth to talk anyone out of anything.
I had told him, back in the safe house, in the exact terms I had made him agree to, that I was finished being protected out of my own story.
My grandmother had spent her whole life as a secret other people kept for her.
I was not about to authenticate her from the back of a van.
So we walked into the lion's study together, and the lion turned out to be a small old man with a blanket over his knees and a wall of books behind him that stopped me dead in the doorway, terror and all, because I am who I am and I cannot help it.
"Is that a first-edition Akhmatova?" I said, before hello, before survival, before one word of the reason I had come.
Beside me, I felt Daniil's soul begin the slow business of leaving his body.
"It is," the old man said, and he sounded pleased, as though we were two strangers who had drifted into each other at an estate sale and not a reckoning with a body count.
"You have a good eye. Most people who come into this room look first for the exits.
You looked at the shelf. Sit. There is tea.
My associate will have warned you that I judge a person by the way they pour it. "
"He mentioned the tea thing." I sat, because my knees had stopped taking my calls.
"For the record, I'm going to pour it badly.
I get a tremor when I'm terrified, and I am currently very terrified, so please don't read my whole future in the spillage.
Also, and I'm aware this is not why I'm here, but your Anna Karenina is the Garnett translation, which is a tragedy when the Pevear is right there on the same shelf, so at some point we do need to talk about your priorities. "
Daniil made a small sound to my left, the sound of a man watching a person he loves walk cheerfully onto a frozen lake. The old man ignored him entirely. Something moved at the corner of his mouth that on an ordinary face would have become a smile.
"Honesty," he said. "The girl announces her own tell before I can go looking for it, and then critiques my library.
Your grandmother did precisely that, though not with a library.
She would tell you her weakness out loud, so that you could never enjoy discovering it.
It made her a terror to sit across a table from. "
"You knew her." It was not a question, and it came out of me before I could decide whether it was safe to want the answer.
"I knew the keeper," he corrected, gently.
"Which is not at all the same as knowing the woman, and that is the whole design of a keeper.
I knew a pair of steady hands and a silence I could bank on.
I never once learned whether she took sugar.
" He set his catalogue aside. "You are about to tell me, though.
It is why you are useful to me, and precisely why you are dangerous.
So. Show me the archive, Margot Ellis. Convince an old man that his entire life has been a lie. "
I had brought the book. Not the proof, the book, the one that raised me, because the proof was already sitting in his hands, and paper can be forged, but a whole life cannot.
I opened it to the margins and showed him the three colors of ink, thirty years of my grandmother reading the same pages over and over, and I explained how the cipher only ever speaks in the words she had marked in all three, and then I did the one thing no forger alive could have done.
I read it to him. Out loud. Cold, without notes.
A column of Grigori's stolen accounts lifted straight out of Akhmatova's grief, one triple-marked word at a time, because I have known this book since I was seven and could find my way through it blind.
Halfway through, the old man set down his tea.
By the end he had stopped looking at the page altogether.
He was looking at me the way you look at a door you had not known was cut into a wall you thought you owned.
He tried to trap me exactly once. When I had finished, he raised one finger and pointed to a line at random, somewhere on the page I had not touched, and asked me, very mildly, to read that one too, cold, because a person reciting a memorized passage cannot survive being pulled off the script.
So I read it. It gave up a date and a name in Prague, and I watched him recognize both, and I watched him arrive at the thing I needed him to see, which was that there was no script, that the book was answering me the way it had spent thirty years answering my grandmother, and that the only way on earth to counterfeit what I was doing would have been to be raised by the woman who built it.
He did not try to trap me a second time.
"That is the proof," I said, and my voice had quit shaking somewhere in the middle of it, because the reading was the single thing in that room I was not afraid of.
"But you didn't bring me here for it. You already had the proof.
You brought me here for her. So here she is.
" And then I told him. Not the keeper. Josie.
The woman who alphabetized the spice rack and cried at commercials with dogs in them and hand-sold melancholy novels to the loneliest readers on the block, and who sat on the most dangerous secret in this city for decades while patiently teaching her granddaughter that the most frightening thing in the building was the cat.
I told him she was funny. I told him she was afraid every single day and did all of it anyway.
I told him she died old and tired in her own bed, having beaten a man who puts people in the ground for sport, and that she never once let me catch sight of the war she was fighting, because she wanted me to have a childhood instead of a vigil.
He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, there was something in his voice I had not braced for, something with real weight sitting behind it.
"You have made her a person to me," he said.
"Which is a cruelty, and I suspect you know it is, because now when I move against Grigori I will be avenging someone, and not merely correcting an old error in a ledger, and vengeance is a far worse master than order.
You have made this personal for a man who has worked very hard, all these years, to keep it from ever being personal.
" He looked at me for a long moment, and the grandfather went out of his face, and what was left underneath it was the thing that had run this city while I was learning to read.
"You understand that I could make the whole of this simpler by making you vanish.
The proof loses the one voice that can vouch for it.
Grigori keeps his uses. My life stays comfortable.
You have walked in here and handed me every good reason to lay you down beside your grandmother's secret. "
This was the part where a sensible woman is afraid, and I was, but underneath the fear was the cold clear thing the folder had planted in me, the thing that keeps doing arithmetic while the rest of me is screaming.
"You could," I said. "But you won't. Because you grow tomatoes.
" He went absolutely still. "Daniil told me.
The glass house. The one honest thing you get to make before you die.
A man who needs a single honest thing that badly does not make his last important decision the crooked one.
For thirty-four years you have spent a dead friend's money and called it your own genius.
I'm the way out. I'm the one chance you get to end the story on the true version of yourself.
You are not going to shoot the only person alive who is offering you that, in order to protect a man who spills your tea. "
Somewhere to my right, Daniil had gone so still he might have been mistaken for one of the dead poets on the shelf.
I did not look at him. Looking at him would have told the old man that I had something to lose, and I had decided, walking in, that for the length of one hour I was going to be exactly what my grandmother had been: a woman with nothing on the table but the truth, and not one visible hostage to fortune anywhere in the room.
The most dangerous man in Chicago sat and looked at a bookseller who had just turned his own tomatoes into a knife, and for one very long moment I did not honestly know whether I had won the room or ended my life, which I have since learned is the exact sensation of winning a room at this altitude.
Then he laughed. A real one, dry and startled and rusty at the hinges, the laugh of a man who has not been surprised by another human being in years.
"Andrei would have liked you," he said. "He was fond of people who had done their reading.
" He picked his tea back up, which I would only understand afterward was the whole verdict, the small domestic signal that I was going to walk out of that house on my own two feet.
"I will move against Grigori. Not today, and not tomorrow.
At the hour that costs my house the least and costs him the most, which is a sum you will have to trust me to work, because it is the one thing in this room I do better than you. "
And then, as Daniil and I got to our feet, he said the thing whose true size I would not understand until much later.
"Margot Ellis. You walked into my house and you made me feel something, which no one has managed to do in a decade, and you did it deliberately, to move me, and it worked.
That is a debt. I dislike debts. One day, when you least expect it and most require it, I am going to repay this one, and you are going to let me, because the only thing worse than a Pakhan who owes you is a Pakhan who does not.
" He had already returned to his seed catalogue.
"Now take your surveillance man home before his heart stops entirely.
He has not drawn a full breath since the moment you insulted my Tolstoy. "
We did not speak on the way out. Daniil walked me through the place with his hand at the small of my back, steering me past doors I was glad I could not see behind, and he did not exhale until the front door closed and the cold hit us both like the flat of a hand and I was still, impossibly, alive and upright on the steps of a killer's house with my grandmother's whole truth finally spoken out loud in daylight.
"You insulted his Tolstoy," Daniil said, in the voice of a man reciting the charges at his own funeral.
"The Garnett is genuinely a war crime," I said, and I started to laugh, the shaky, unhinged laugh of somebody who has just remembered she gets to keep being a person, and Daniil almost, almost smiled.
The Pakhan agrees to move, on his timeline. We barely reach the street before Luka calls: Grigori knows about the meeting. He's making his last move now.