Chapter 5
Nadia
He was still there when I came down the lawn, which I'd half hoped he wouldn't be, because I had been telling myself for four minutes that I'd seen a fisherman.
The dock was wet and the boards gave under me and he didn't turn around until I was ten feet away.
"Mrs. Loveless," he said.
"Don't."
"It's on a document."
"So's my blood type, you don't get to open with it."
He laughed, and I want to be honest about this because I'm honest about very little: it was the best laugh I'd ever heard. Warm all the way down. The laugh of a man who thinks you're the funniest thing that's happened to him in a decade and might well mean it.
The suit was charcoal and perfect. The lake fog came up to his knees and stopped there, going around him, the way water goes around a piling.
"You're the good suit," I said.
"He calls me that?"
"That's what he calls you."
"That's marvelous." He put his hands in his pockets. "Fifteen years and he's never once said my name, do you know that? Not out loud. It's the most disciplined thing about him."
"What's your name?"
"You know it."
"I want to hear you say it."
"No, you don't," he said pleasantly. "You want to have made me say it. That's a different appetite, and it's the one that gets people hurt. Ask me something you'd use."
"Fine. Are you actually here? If I'd brought him down with me—"
"Then this would have been a fisherman in a bad hat," he said. "Which, incidentally, is what you're going to tell him. I'm not making you do that. I'm just good at this."
I hated him so much my back teeth ached.
"What do you want?"
"Sit down. It's a long one and you've had four hours of sleep."
I sat down on the edge of the dock. He sat down next to me. In the suit. On wet boards. It did not get wet, and I made myself notice that and then made myself stop looking at it, because looking at it was how you lost the thread.
"How many jobs have you run," he said.
"I don't count."
"Two hundred and nine."
"Okay."
"How many have gone wrong?"
I opened my mouth.
Then I closed it.
"Take your time," he said pleasantly.
Because the answer was none.
Two hundred and nine jobs, thirteen years, four passports, and the worst thing that had ever happened to me was Reno, and Reno hadn't gone wrong — Reno had gone wrong for Pepper.
I had walked out of Reno. I had walked out of everything.
There was a night in Tulsa where a man had a gun on me in a stairwell and the fire alarm went off, and I'd told that story for years as a funny thing about my luck.
"That's not possible," I said.
"It's extremely possible. It's just expensive."
"Say it plainly."
"You were never a thief who got good," he said. "You were a hand being moved."
The lake made its noise.
"Every close call that broke your way. Every door that was unlocked.
Every man who looked left instead of right.
" He shrugged, and there was no cruelty in it, which was the worst part; he might as well have been explaining a bus route.
"Weber in Fargo doesn't remember where he got that routing data because there's nothing to remember.
It was in his stack. It has always been in his stack. "
"Why."
"Because you needed to steal from that charter, on that Thursday, so that you would be standing in that particular parking lot when Silas Loveless walked out of it with a clipboard."
"Why," I said again, and my voice did something I didn't authorize.
He looked out at the water.
"You know what's happening to him," he said. "He told you last night. In front of the fire. He said it's failing."
"It's not failing," I said. "Is it."
"No."
"It's moving."
"There she is." He sounded so proud of me that I wanted to put a hand through his face.
"It's not decaying. Nothing I make decays.
It's transferring. It's been transferring since the minute you two were in a room together, and it's about sixty percent of the way across, which is why he can't read you and why he believed you about the phone and why his president's eye has gone quiet on both of you. "
"Sixty percent."
"Give or take. It's not a faucet."
"To me."
"To you." He turned his head. "You've felt it.
Three days ago you looked at a man named Gunnar Sloat and found the exact center of him in a sentence and a half, in front of eleven people, when it wasn't in your interest to do it at all.
That wasn't your skill. Your skill is a good ear and a bad childhood. That was mine."
I thought about Gunnar's face going brick-colored. I thought about how the words had come out before I'd chosen them.
"So it just — finishes," I said. "On its own. There's nothing for me to do."
"There's one thing."
"There it is."
"You have to take it," he said. "Not passively. That's the whole design. A gift like this has to be accepted, because otherwise it isn't a gift, it's a weather event, and I'm not a weather event, I'm an artist."
"And if I don't."
"Then it stalls where it is. Sixty percent out of him, forty into you, and nobody has a working one, and you both spend the rest of your lives being ordinary people who are extremely wanted by extremely organized parties.
" He brushed something off his knee. "That's not a threat.
I want to be scrupulous. That's just arithmetic. "
"Can I ask you something," I said.
"Please."
"The 1948 thing. The papers in the crawlspace."
"Not mine." He said it instantly and with what sounded like distaste. "That's the grey coat. Different temperament entirely. He does terms. Consideration, delivery, a schedule of payments — it's like watching a man do his taxes for eternity."
"But you know what's in it."
"I know the shape of it."
"Tell me."
"No," he said pleasantly.
"Why not?"
"Because you'd use it, and it'd work, and then this would be about that, and I've spent fifteen years on this one." He looked genuinely put out. "I'm not going to have my joke stepped on by a man in a grey coat with a filing system."
"You're jealous of him."
"I'm aesthetically opposed to him," said the good suit.
"And if I do take it."
"Then you become the most dangerous woman in nine states," he said, "and I get to watch, and Silas Loveless becomes an ordinary man."
The word sat there.
"Ordinary," I said.
"Say it back to yourself slowly. You'll get there."
I got there.
Fifteen years of everybody believing him. Fifteen years of sheriffs and customs officers and rival charters and the man in Portal who thinks he's a godfather. Fifteen years of men agreeing to things in rooms because Silas Loveless was standing in them.
And every one of those people, on the same Tuesday, waking up.
"He wouldn't survive the week," I said.
"He'd survive the week. He's likable." The good suit tilted his head.
"He wouldn't survive the month. Do you know how many men in this region have made a decision they didn't understand at the time because he was talking?
He's the reason there was no war after the Ash Company folded.
He is load-bearing, and the second he isn't, everyone who was ever moved will go back and find the seam and know. "
"Give me a number," I said. "How many."
"How many what?"
"How many people are walking around this region right now who made a decision because Silas Loveless was in the room."
He thought about it. Actually thought — head tipped, eyes moving, a man doing sums he enjoyed.
"Two thousand three hundred and some," he said. "That's just the load-bearing ones. If you count every bar tab and every traffic stop and every woman who agreed to a second drink, you're into six figures, but most of that's noise."
"Names."
"You want names?"
"I want to know how bad it is."
"All right." He held up a hand and started folding fingers down.
"A sheriff in Ward County who declined to execute a warrant in 2019.
A federal contractor in Minot who let a shipment go through on a Thursday.
Four men from the Ash Company who agreed to fold instead of fight, which — you should understand — is the only reason there are still nine of them and not zero.
A woman named Renata in Chicago, who's fine, who's happily married, who has never once been able to explain a weekend. "
"Stop."
"A customs officer in Portal, North Dakota," he said, "who has believed for eleven years that Silas Loveless is his nephew's godfather. He named a boat after him."
"He named a boat—"
"The Silas Anne," said the good suit. "It's forty feet.
It's on a lake in Manitoba. There are photographs, Nadia, there's a photograph of that boat on that man's refrigerator and he looks at it every morning while he pours his coffee, and on the day the pressure comes off he is going to stand in his kitchen and look at that photograph and understand. "
I put my head in my hands.
"That's monstrous."
"That's carpentry," he said. "I don't do monstrous. Monstrous is unstructured."
I sat on the dock in a stolen shirt with my heart going and did the only thing I know how to do, which is look for the soft spot.
And there wasn't one.
Not because it was hidden. Because there was nothing there to be afraid with. It was like reaching into a coat pocket that went all the way through.
"No," I said.
"No?"
"No. I'm not taking it. Find another hand to move."
And he smiled at me with enormous affection.
"Nadia," he said. "You've already said yes four times."
The lake went very quiet.
"That's not—"
"May the ninth, in the parking lot, when you told him a true thing without being asked.
That's an acceptance of terms. May the eleventh, in the annex, when the judge asked you and you paused for four seconds and then said I do — that's a second.
May the thirteenth, when you got in a van after being told explicitly that you didn't have to.
And last night, at eleven-forty, when you said I believe you to a man whose entire function is to be believed. "
"Those aren't—"