7. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I tell her at breakfast. We have a dinner this evening. Seven thirty. She should be ready by seven.
She looks at me across the table. “What kind of dinner?”
“Business.”
“Whose business?”
“Mine.”
She puts her coffee down. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting before seven thirty.” I fold the newspaper. “Marta will bring you something to wear.”
She opens her mouth, and I stand up and leave the room because the conversation is finished and we both know it, and I’ve learned in the past week that the cleanest way to end a conversation with Nina Morozov is to simply leave it.
The dress Marta brings her is dark green. I chose it three days ago when I decided we would be attending this dinner.
I also decided everything about tonight three days ago, the table, the guests, the seating arrangement that puts Nina directly across from Leonard Haas, who is the most perceptive man in any room he enters, and the one whose opinion of her matters most to me tonight.
I don’t tell her any of this.
In the car, she sits on her side, and I sit on mine. Anton drives, and Rico says nothing in the passenger seat.
Nina looks out the window at the city moving past, and she asks me two questions.
Who will be at the table, and what do they know about her?
I answer the second one.
Four people, a dinner, nothing she can’t handle.
She looks at me when I say that last part and says nothing, which means she’s deciding whether it was a compliment or an instruction.
It was both.
The restaurant is the kind of place that doesn’t have its name on the door. I have always found it efficient.
We are shown to the private room in the back, where Leonard and his wife are already seated, and across from them, Silas Croft, who runs the East Coast side of a real estate portfolio I have been considering acquiring, and his wife, whom I have met twice and remember nothing about.
She comes through the door, and I watch the table find her. Leonard’s wife first lifts her head from her menu and stays up. Then Croft, who has been mid-sentence, drops the end of it. Leonard last, unhurried, but he looks.
Nina moves to her chair without acknowledging any of it, and I can’t tell whether she doesn’t notice or simply doesn’t care.
Within ten minutes, she has stopped looking and started working, her attention narrowing from the room to the people in it, one by one, the way a camera pulls focus.
She gives Leonard’s wife most of herself in the first twenty minutes, which is the right call because Leonard watches his wife’s instincts about people the way other men watch balance sheets.
She’s measured with Croft, warm without being open, and she asks him one question about his portfolio that makes him sit up slightly and answer for four minutes straight, which tells me she did her research on him before we left the house, which means she used the laptop access I gave her more strategically than I gave her credit for.
She didn’t use it to contact anyone. I would know.
She used it to prepare for a dinner she had six hours notice for.
I eat my food and say almost nothing for the first hour and a half because I’m not here to perform. I’m here to watch her, and watching her is more interesting than anything else at this table, including the conversation, which is good.
Leonard is the one who tests her.
He does it the way intelligent people test other intelligent people, not with aggression but with precision, slipping a reference into the conversation so smoothly that a less attentive person wouldn’t notice it was a test at all.
He brings up an article, one of Nina’s pieces, a financial fraud case out of Brussels, and he frames it as dinner conversation, something he read recently, terribly interesting, the kind of journalism you rarely see anymore.
Then he looks at Nina and says he always wondered what the journalist must have known that didn’t make it into print.
The table waits.
Nina picks up her wine. She looks at Leonard with an expression that is perfectly pleasant and completely unreadable, and she says that good journalism is mostly about what you choose not to print.
That the story on the page is only ever half the story, and that the other half is the judgment call you make at two in the morning when you decide what the public actually needs to know versus what would simply make for a better read.
Leonard looks at her for a moment. “And which half did you enjoy more?” he asks.
“The half nobody sees,” she says. “Obviously.”
Leonard smiles. It’s the smile of a man who has found what he came to dinner to find, and he picks up his own wine, and the conversation moves, and Nina turns to say something to Croft’s wife, and the moment closes.
I wait until Leonard glances at me, which he does, briefly, the way he does when he’s registering something he did not expect.
I look back at him, and I say, “She’s better than her work suggests, which is saying something.” I say it the way you state a fact about the weather, no weight on it, nothing that invites a response, and I pick up my fork and continue eating.
Leonard nods once.
Croft nods once.
The table recalibrates and moves on, and nobody makes anything of it, and Nina doesn’t look at me, and I don’t look at her, but I’m aware that she heard it, and I’m aware that she’s deciding what to do with it, and I find I am comfortable letting her decide.
The dinner ends at ten. We say our goodbyes in the lobby, and Anton is already at the curb, and the night air is cold in the way New York is cold in the early part of the year, sharp and immediate.
Nina gets in the car, and I get in after her.
The city moves past the windows, and the car is warm, and I’m aware of her the way I have been aware of her every moment since she walked into the church.
At some point, she turns her head, and I’m already looking at her.
We stay like that for longer than is strictly necessary, and neither of us looks away.
Her eyes are steady on mine, and there’s nothing performing in them, no challenge, no question, just the same quality of attention she gives everything she has decided is worth her time.
I have decided I like being worth her time.
The estate gates appear. Anton slows, guiding us through as gravel crackles softly beneath the wheels.
She looks back at her window. I look at mine.
We get out. We go inside. She takes the stairs without looking back. I stay in the hall until I hear her door.
I go to my study. Pour a drink. Don’t turn the light on.
The dinner worked. The right people were watching and they saw what they needed to see. That’s the whole of it.
I think about the car instead.
I pour another.