10. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
Rico puts the folder on my desk and I tell him to have Nina come to my study.
She takes eleven minutes, which means she finished whatever she was doing before she came, thereby making the point that my schedule is not her schedule. I let it go. I have bigger things to manage than eleven minutes.
She comes in without knocking, drops into the chair across from my desk like she has been sitting in it her whole life, and looks at me. “What do you want?”
“Saturday. The Hartwell Foundation gala at the Met. Black tie. We leave at seven.”
“I’m busy on Saturday.”
“You’re not.”
She tilts her head. “How do you know what I am on Saturday?”
“Because Saturday is four days away and your calendar is on a laptop that runs through my network.” I slide the folder across the desk. “Rico put together a brief. Everyone who will be in the room, what they do, what they owe, what they want. Read it.”
She looks at the folder. Looks at me. Picks it up. “You made me a dossier.”
“I made you useful. There’s a difference.”
She opens it and starts reading, and I go back to the contracts on my screen because I don’t need to watch her read. I can hear her—a page turning every forty seconds, and then slower when something catches her, and then fast again.
“Croft is going to be there,” she says without looking up.
“Yes.”
“You closed the acquisition.”
“Tuesday.”
She turns a page. Stops. “You could have told me.”
“I just did.”
She looks up at that, and for a second I think she might actually smile, and then she doesn’t. She closes the folder, stands up, and says she needs shoes because Marta’s taste runs conservative. She leaves before I can tell her I already handled the shoes three days ago.
The door closes behind her, and I look at the contracts on my screen and read the same paragraph twice without taking it in.
The days between Wednesday and Saturday pass at an unusual pace.
She reads the brief twice. It comes back with notes in the margins, her handwriting small and exact, two corrections and a question mark next to a name I find worth thinking about.
She files a piece on Thursday morning. I read it before she comes downstairs, and I don’t bring it up because my question about the last one is still sitting between us, unanswered.
Thursday dinner, she laughs.
I say something about a meeting that went badly in a way that was almost funny, and she laughs before she can stop herself, quick and real, and then she looks at me like she’s annoyed the laugh got out.
I keep talking. She settles back in her chair. We finish dinner.
I think about that laugh more than I should on the way upstairs.
Saturday, she comes down at five to seven.
Black dress, long, hair up. She stops at the bottom of the stairs. Anton opens the door, and we go.
In the car, she opens the brief one more time and reads it in the dark the whole way there, using the city lights when they’re enough and her phone screen when they’re not.
She puts the brief away two blocks from the Met.
At the top of the steps, she takes my arm.
Inside, she works the room. I stay close enough and far enough, and I watch her give a senator’s wife the full weight of her attention for seven minutes, and I watch the woman come away from it looking like she won something.
I get pulled into three separate conversations in the first hour. Business, all of it, the kind of thing that requires my full attention and gets about half of it.
The other half is on Nina moving through the room, forty feet away, and the way she handles each person she meets, different for each one, calibrated and exact, never the same twice.
Then I see her go still.
It’s subtle. Anyone else in the room would miss it. Her body does not change, her expression does not change, she keeps talking to the woman in front of her, but something behind her eyes goes flat and focused, and I follow her eyeline to the man at the bar.
Daniel Reiss.
He sees her at the same moment, and he picks up his drink and moves to the other side of the room. I watch him go. I look back at Nina.
She has already returned her full attention to the woman in front of her, as if nothing happened, as if Reiss is not currently on the other side of the room deciding how far to stay from her for the rest of the evening.
I will know everything about Daniel Reiss’s current business by Monday.
In the car home she is quiet.
Not the quiet she uses when she’s angry or when she’s thinking about the estate or when she’s deciding whether to push back on something I said.
A different quiet. Inward. Something from the room is still with her, and she’s not ready to put it down yet, and it’s not my business to ask.
I look at her once.
She’s looking out the window, chin up, jaw set, and she’s sharp even in profile, sharp even in the dark and the quiet, and I look back at the road and think that I have sat across from a great many people in rooms that mattered and very few of them have ever made me want to know what they were thinking the way she does constantly and without effort.
We pull through the gates.
She gets out, goes up the steps, and inside without looking back. I stand by the car in the cold for a moment, and Rico says nothing beside me, which is why he has lasted fifteen years.
I go inside.
Upstairs, somewhere, a laptop opens.
I go to my study and pour a drink, and I already know I will read whatever she writes in the morning before she comes downstairs, and I already know it will be worth reading, and I already know that is not all I am looking forward to.