Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Nik
The article runs at five-forty-seven AM on a Wednesday. Five-forty-seven is precisely the hour when professional people check their phones before they are fully awake and their defenses have not yet assembled for the day. In Viktor Astrovsky's preferred vocabulary, this is a clean shot.
I read it at my kitchen table with my coffee going cold beside me and my left hand very flat on the surface, pressing down.
Viktor does not name her. He is sixty-two years old and he has been doing this for approximately forty years. He is far too sophisticated to leave a traceable line between the gun and the wound.
The interview is with a Moscow-founded business and culture publication that lands in the inboxes of exactly the kind of people Natasha has built her professional life around impressing - board members, institutional investors, the stratum of Chicago finance and entertainment money that has opinions about bloodlines and considers itself too civilized to admit it.
He speaks at length about the Astrovsky legacy, about what he calls his son's romantic sentimentality, about the post-Soviet transition and the families who navigated it with discipline versus the ones who collapsed under it.
Then, tucked into the third paragraph like a quiet blade between the ribs, comes Alexei Volkov.
Viktor exhumes a dead man's worst five years with the precision of someone who has been keeping the file maintained and ready.
The drinking. The debts, itemized with a thoroughness that is technically sourced to public record and is nonetheless the most vicious deployment of truth I have encountered in a decade of watching my father operate.
The bitterness, the failed ventures, the Brooklyn years described in four sentences that contain not a single factual error and constitute the most thorough character assassination I have ever witnessed. Viktor understands that the cruelest portrait is the accurate one framed at its worst angle.
He reduces Alexei Volkov to his worst chapter and presents it as his biography.
Without raising his voice. In an interview about legacy and discipline.
He does it in a way that will make people nod and say what a shame rather than what a hit, and both assessments will be correct, and the second one is the one that matters.
I call Katya at six-oh-three.
She picks up on the first ring. “Have you read it?” I ask.
“I have,” she confirms. “I’ve been awake since before it ran, phone in hand, expecting your call.
"How bad," I say.
"Bad enough that I have already made tea and am sitting with it in the dark like a person in a film about grief.
" Her voice is steady and careful. "She's going to read it if she hasn't already.
People in her circle will forward it before seven.
Someone will have sent it to Victoria by now. " A pause. "Kolya. Go."
I am already standing.
The December street is cold enough to settle into the chest on the first inhale and not release until you are back inside somewhere. I walk the six blocks to her building at a pace that is not running but is the thing directly adjacent to it.
Gerald, the doorman, sees me coming through the glass. He does not reach for the phone. He waves me through with the unhurried nod of a man who has revised his position on my arrivals and is not making an announcement about it.
The elevator takes thirty-seven seconds. I know because I count them.
She opens the door before I knock a second time.
She is in the Harvard sweats and the paint-thin t-shirt, her hair loose around her shoulders in the configuration that means the armor is not offline but in between shifts.
The brief window between the professional architecture and whatever she is when nobody is watching.
She is holding her phone. The article is on the screen. She has read it enough times that the scroll position has not changed. She is not reading anymore. She is holding it the way you hold evidence of something you already knew and did not want confirmed.
I say nothing. She steps back from the door.
I come in.
The apartment is very quiet. Beethoven is on the windowsill. Billie is somewhere behind the couch. Bowie appears from the hallway with his characteristic sovereign unhurriedness, looks at me once, and goes to sit by the radiator.
She sits on the couch and I sit beside her, close enough that she could reach me if she wanted to and not so close that proximity becomes its own demand.
She looks at the phone in her lap.
"He reduced my father to his worst five years," she says. Her voice is even in the way it goes even when something has penetrated deep enough that the management is happening below the surface rather than on it.
"My father, before your father took everything from him, was a different man.
He taught me to identify birdsong. We used to do it in the park on Sunday mornings.
He would hear something in the trees and he would say slushai, Natashka, listen, and I would hold my breath and try to hear what he heard. " She pauses.
Her thumb moves across the phone screen without purpose. "He had this laugh. I haven't thought about his laugh in years. I'd buried it somewhere under everything that came after. Viktor Astrovsky wrote four sentences about a man's debts and called it a portrait."
I look at the phone in her hands. I think about my father sitting in a hotel suite in this same city, composing an interview with the satisfaction of a man who believes his memory is longer than everyone else's and is usually correct about that.
"My father kept my mother's ballet shoes in a locked drawer for twenty years," I say.
"He destroyed her completely and then he kept her shoes.
He does not know how to love anything without dismantling it first. Possession is the only intimacy he has ever understood.
He kept the shoes because destroying her entirely would have required him to feel the loss, and Viktor does not feel losses. He catalogs them."
She looks at me.
"He did not publish that article because of you," I say.
"He published it because of me. Because I chose you and he needed to ensure you would leave.
If you leave I am punished in a way he can observe and measure, and if you stay he is forced to watch me become something he cannot categorize. " I hold her gaze.
"He is threatened by the version of me that does not require his framework. He always has been. The label was the first version of that. You are the current one." I pause, and I say the next part carefully because it is the most important and I want it to land without polish.
"I am going to see him. Today. I am going to tell him this is finished - that he will not contact you, approach anyone connected to you, or arrange for your family's history to be exhumed and displayed in any publication again.
Not because I can enforce that legally, because I probably cannot, but because I need him to hear it from me in person. That I am not his instrument. That you are not his target."
She is quiet for a moment. "You don't need to fight him for me," she says.
"I know," I say. "I'm doing it for me." I turn fully toward her. "I have been letting Viktor occupy real estate in my life since I was sixteen years old.
Every decision I have made since the label collapsed - the money, the company, the thirteen years of leverage-building, all of it - was the shape of Viktor's shadow. I built an empire in the outline of what he took and called it ambition."
I look at my hands on my knees. "I am done. Not because of the relationship - the relationship is its own separate conversation, and I am not using it as justification. For myself. I am done for myself."
The morning light comes through her windows in the thin, grey quality of December. Beethoven has migrated from the windowsill to the arm of the couch nearest me.
Natasha is looking at me with the expression I have only seen a handful of times - the one that is not managed or performed, just her, fully present, hearing something she did not expect to hear and is not deflecting.
"Tell me when it's done," she says.
"I will," I say.
I stand. I put my coat back on. At the door I turn around and she is still on the couch with her phone in her lap and her hair down and the December light behind her.
She looks like someone who has been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and has just been told that someone else is going to take a turn, and is deciding whether to believe it.
I go before she has to answer that question out loud.
The Langham is twelve minutes by cab. Viktor has been in the Presidential suite since Monday, which I know because my Geneva contact monitors his travel and flags Chicago arrivals.
The lobby is the same as before - curated silence, floor-to-ceiling windows over the river, studied restraint of a space where money has been deployed to eliminate any evidence that the ordinary world exists outside the glass.
Viktor answers the door himself. Either he sent the security detail away or he knew I was coming. With Viktor, both amount to the same thing: he is prepared.
He is in a suit at seven-fifteen in the morning. He has not owned casual clothes since approximately 1987 and considers their existence a personal affront. He looks at me with the expression of a man who expected this visit, who has spent the intervening hours arranging his position accordingly.
I do not sit. I stand in the doorway with my coat on. Sitting would mean settling in, and I am not settling in. I am here to say something and then leave.
"I want you to leave Chicago," I say. "I want you to stop."
"I'm protecting?—"
"You are not protecting anything." My voice is the flat, certain register that has nothing to do with anger and everything to do with a decision fully made. "You are punishing. You have been punishing since my mother died and you could not tolerate that you had caused it."