Chapter 4
Trick
The paper trail ran out of Deadwood in about a day and a half and pointed at a lake house outside Grand Lake, Colorado, which is not a sentence I expected to say about a dead fence's inventory.
"He was staging it somewhere quiet," Nadia said, feet on the dash, folder on her knees. "Look at the water bill. Somebody ran that house for three weeks in April and the owner's in Portugal."
"How do you know the owner's in Portugal?"
"Because I called the house and the machine says he's in Portugal." She flipped a page. "Fitch had a key. Fitch always had a key. Fitch was the kind of man who thinks a key is the same as being invited."
"You're describing yourself."
"I'm describing a type, Silas."
Nobody has called me Silas since my mother. She'd started doing it around Rapid City, purely because she'd noticed it landed.
We'd been three days in a van by then, which is longer than most marriages get before the first real argument, and ours was about music.
"Absolutely not."
"It's my van."
"It's Deke's van and you've played the same eleven songs since Belle Fourche."
"They're good songs."
"They're the same songs, Silas. There's a man on this one who's very sad about a truck."
"He's sad about his father," I said. "The truck is the vehicle."
"The truck is the vehicle," Nadia repeated.
"...Yeah, okay, I heard it."
"The truck is the vehicle. That's a beautiful sentence, I want it on a shirt—"
"You can pick the next four hours."
She picked, and it was mid-century Hungarian folk recordings, and about ninety minutes in I understood I had been outmaneuvered by a professional and had no recourse.
The house was cedar and glass on a slope of pines with the lake going gunmetal below it, and it was the nicest place I'd ever been and it took her eleven seconds to get us into it.
I counted. I have never in my life been more attracted to anything.
"Eleven seconds."
"It's a Kwikset." She held the door. "It's not even a good Kwikset. If you're going to own a house like this you have a moral obligation to the profession."
"Teach me."
"No."
"Come on."
"Silas, it takes four months and about nine hundred hours and you'd quit in an afternoon, because the first three weeks are just learning what a thing feels like when it's nearly right, and you are a man who has never had to sit with nearly."
"That's a rough assessment."
"It's a flattering assessment," she said. "I'd kill to have never sat with nearly."
The paper was in a crawlspace under the stairs, in a plastic tote, exactly where the water bill said it would be if you understood water bills, which she did and I didn't.
Four inches of it. Ledgers. Photographs with dates on the back. A membership roll from 1948 with eleven names on it, and I read the top one and put the lid back on and sat down on the bottom step for a minute.
"That bad?" she said.
"That's Wolf's grandfather," I said. "And it's not a membership roll, it's a contract, and I'm not reading the rest of it in somebody's crawlspace."
"Fair."
She sat down on the step beside me.
"Whose house is this really?" she said.
"Guy named Hoyt Merrill."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," I said, "it isn't."
Because I'd looked at the mail on the counter, and Hoyt Merrill of Grand Lake, Colorado, got quarterly statements from an entity called Norse Holdings LLC, which is a name that does not appear on any document I have ever been allowed to see, and which sounds exactly like what a man from 1948 would call a thing if he thought nobody would ever be reading his mail seventy years later.
"He's ours," I said. "Somehow. He's some kind of ours."
"So we didn't break in."
"We absolutely broke in."
"But morally—"
"Nadia."
"I'm just saying the olive oil argument may have to be revisited in light of new—"
"The olive oil argument is closed."
"Also there's weather coming."
"Silas, there is significant weather coming, I've been telling you about the weather since Granby."
She'd told me about the weather since Granby. I had responded by singing.
The storm hit at seven and took the power out at seven-forty.
Here is the middle of this book, as far as I'm concerned, and it's not the fight and it's not the god. It's two professional criminals in a stranger's kitchen having an argument about olive oil.
"Absolutely not."
"It's oil, Nadia."
"It's forty-dollar oil."
"How do you know it's forty-dollar oil?"
"Because it's in a tin." She held it up in the candlelight like an exhibit. "Cheap oil is in glass because they want you to see it. Expensive oil is in a tin because light kills it. This man has thought about light."
"We're stealing his family papers."
"We're recovering our family papers—"
"We broke a window in the mudroom."
"You broke a window in the mudroom, I opened the front door in eleven seconds like a professional, and there is a difference between taking something a man will never miss and eating a thing he was saving." She set the tin down. "That's not a legal distinction. That's a manners distinction."
"You have manners."
"I have rules," she said. "Everybody's got rules. Yours are all about who you'll do it to. Mine are about what's already been paid for."
I looked at her across a kitchen island in a house neither of us had any business standing in.
"What do we eat, then," I said.
"There's a chest freezer in the garage with six pounds of ground beef in it and a bag of frozen corn from what I'd estimate is the Obama administration. Nobody grieves for corn."
We ate hamburgers cooked in a fireplace on a rack that was definitely not for that, with candles we'd found in a drawer, and drank a bottle of red she'd inspected and pronounced "aggressively middle," and the rain came off the lake and hit the deck doors like gravel.
"Tell me about Kansas City," I said, halfway through the second burger, because I'm an idiot.
"No."
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"You said no." I shrugged. "That's a complete sentence. I've heard about eleven of them in my whole life and I've learned to treat them like an endangered species."
She looked at me over the fire.
"That's the strangest thing about you," she said.
"Which part."
"You don't push. Everybody pushes. Every man I've ever worked with, every man I've ever slept with — you say no and they go quiet and then forty minutes later there it is again from a different angle, sanded down."
"That's because they thought no was the opening bid."
"And you don't?"
"I know what an opening bid sounds like," I said, "because I've made about four thousand of them, and that wasn't one."
She turned her glass in her hands for a while.
"Kansas City is the one," she said. "That's all you get tonight."
"That's more than I asked for."
"That's the trick, isn't it." She pointed the glass at me. "You don't push and then people hand it over. That's not restraint, that's a technique."
"It's both," I said. "That's the awful part. There's no version of me where it's only one."
She was barefoot with her hair down and a stranger's blanket around her shoulders and she was laughing at something Ozzy had texted, and I thought, in a totally clinical way, the way you'd note a symptom:
Oh, no.
"Okay," she said. "Question."
"Ask it."
"What do you want out of this marriage that isn't the marriage."
The fire moved around. Somewhere in the house something ticked as the temperature dropped.
I've had fifteen years of exits. I know eleven ways out of that question and four of them are funny.
"I'll trade you," I said.
"For what."
"The one you're ashamed of."
She went very still.
"How do you know there's one I'm ashamed of?"
"Because you told me you're not ashamed of stealing," I said, "and nobody says that unless there's a specific thing they are ashamed of that they've built a fence around."
Nadia set her glass down.
"You first," she said.
So I told her.
All of it. Nebraska, the courthouse, the flicker in the light every eleven seconds, the man in the suit, the compliment. Renata and the Days Inn and the gas station outside Rockford. The rules I built. Wolf in the parking lot in Sioux Falls saying say something that isn't true.
And then the part I hadn't said out loud to anybody, including Wolf, including myself, most days.
"It's failing," I said.
"Failing."
"Fifteen years, every room, every time. And now it's coming apart, and the first place it came apart was you.
You lied to me in that parking lot in Dickinson about a phone, some nothing lie, and I believed it like a civilian.
" I turned the glass in my hand. "And I can't work you.
At all. I've tried. I tried on Tuesday, I'm sorry, I tried three separate times and you didn't move an inch. "
"I know you tried on Tuesday."
"You do not."
"The thing about the motel and the two rooms," she said. "You wanted the one room and you built a whole budget argument."
"...Yeah."
"Silas, it was a terrible budget argument."
"It was pretty bad."
"You said 'per diem.' Twice."
"I panicked."
She laughed, and then she stopped laughing, and she pulled the blanket tighter and looked into the fire for a long time.
"Kansas City," she said. "Six years ago."
"Okay."
"There was a man named Aldo Renwick. He ran a construction supply company, and he was insured to the gills, and the whole job was designed around the insurance — you take the thing, the carrier pays, nobody real loses anything. That's my rule. That's the fence I built."
"What happened."
"He wasn't insured to the gills. He'd let it lapse in March to cover payroll and he was too proud to say so out loud, and I never checked, because I'd already decided what kind of man he was.
" Her voice stayed absolutely level, which was how I knew.
"He lost the company. Nineteen people. And I found him, Trick, that's the — I found his fear in forty seconds like I always do, and his fear was that everybody would find out he wasn't as solid as he looked, and I used that, and then I proved him right. "
"Where is he now."