Chapter Thirteen–Elena
I put my seatbelt on and looked out the window and counted the minutes.
The security arrangements for the visit had been Viktor’s production entirely.
He had spent forty minutes with me the previous morning covering what he called parameters, which was a word that in his usage meant rules, which in the context of my current life meant the conditions under which you are permitted to approximate freedom.
Sofia would meet me at a location Viktor had selected.
The location was a bar three blocks from the Golovin casino, which Viktor had presumably selected because it was within the perimeter of spaces he could secure with existing infrastructure and minimal additional personnel.
I would have two hours. Gregor and a second man named Pavel would be within visual range at all times.
I would not take alternate routes, make additional stops, or engage with anyone outside of the approved meeting.
I had agreed to all of it with attentiveness.
I had also, in the week since Mikhail had given me permission to arrange the visit, spent three days memorizing a different set of routes entirely.
This was the part I was not thinking about directly.
I had found, over the course of the last several weeks, that the things I could not afford to think about directly were better managed in the oblique register–approached from the side, kept in the peripheral vision rather than the center, acknowledged as existing without being fully examined.
If I examined the thing I was about to do, I would not be able to do it, and the thing I was about to do was the only remaining option I had for ending this with anything intact.
Stop cooperating.
That had been the decision on the bathroom floor, and I had kept it.
Gregor parked on the approved block. I got out and did not look at him and walked into the bar.
***************
Sofia was already there.
She was in the corner booth, which she would have chosen deliberately because Sofia always chose corners and always faced the door, a habit she had developed over three years of working the Vegas hospitality circuit and encountering enough situations that required rapid assessment of exits.
She looked up when I came in and was on her feet before I could blink.
She crossed the bar and held me for a long time without saying anything, which was how I knew she had been frightened.
Sofia processed fear by not showing it until it was over, and then she showed it in reverse–the relief arriving after the fact as all the emotion that hadn’t been expressed during.
I felt her exhale against my hair. I held her back.
“You’re okay,” she said. It was not entirely a question.
“I’m okay.”
She pulled back and looked at me with specific attention. I held her gaze and let her look and did not manage my expression because managing my expression with Sofia was a project I had never successfully completed and was not going to start now.
She looked at me for a long moment.
“You’re not okay,” she said.
“I’m—”
“You’re safe. Those are different things.” She sat us both down and put her hands flat on the table in the way she did when she was anchoring herself to the practical facts of a situation. “Tell me what you can tell me.”
I looked at her. At the sharp eyeliner and the red lips and the expressive face that had been one of the first things I had recognized as trustworthy when we met, the face of a person who communicated what they were feeling because concealment didn’t interest them.
“The marriage is real,” I said. “He—Mikhail—he’s—” I stopped.
How to say it. “He’s not cruel. What I thought he’d be.
” A pause. “It’s complicated. But I’m not in danger from him. ”
Sofia absorbed this. “The loan sharks?”
“Gone. The debt is—” I paused. “I’m managing it. No pressure anymore.”
“How?”
“Sofia.”
She pressed her lips together. “Right. Right, I know.” She looked at me. “And you? Not the situation. You.”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was the most accurate available answer.
“Are you—” She stopped, reformulating. “Does he know you? Not Elena Golovina, the official marriage. Does he know you?”
I thought about the library. The storm outside and the fire inside and his arm around my shoulders without conditions, without agenda, simply because the space between us had needed to be smaller. I thought about the small dining room and Mariya’s borscht and the balcony lovemaking.
“More than anyone has,” I said quietly. “Which is–it’s complicated.”
Sofia looked at me for a long moment. Her expression did something I hadn’t anticipated–not the concern I had expected, or not only that. Something more complicated. Something that looked like it had access to information I hadn’t given her.
“Lena,” she said.
Her tone was worried. Then she sighed.
“Okay, I trust you. Okay, you know him better than I do. Okay, whatever you’ve decided I believe you decided it for the right reason.
” She pressed her hands over mine once more and then released them.
“But I need you to hear me.” She waited until I was looking at her directly.
“If you need out–any kind of out–you call me. Day or night. I don’t care what’s happening. You call me first.”
“Sofia—”
“Promise me.”
I looked at her. I thought about what I was about to do after I left this bar, the meeting I had memorized the location of, and the thought of Sofia knowing about it and being pulled into proximity with it produced something cold in my chest.
“I promise,” I said.
We sat for the remainder of the hour talking about the things we talked about–the show, which Sofia told me had been magnificent in the two weeks since opening and was selling out the second tier without discounts, which made both of us briefly happy.
She told me about Daniela, who had been promoted to lead position in my absence, and about a new waitress who reminded her of herself at twenty and who she was therefore aggressively mentoring.
She told me about the small disasters of ordinary life–a parking ticket, a leaking kitchen tap, a disagreement with the upstairs neighbor about music volume–and I received every item of this inventory with the specific gratitude of someone being shown evidence that ordinary life continued its operations even when their own had become extraordinary.
When I stood to leave, she held me one more time. Tighter than the first time.
“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” I said into her shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, with the voice she used for things she was choosing to believe rather than things she was certain of. Which was not nothing. Sofia’s choices to believe were not made carelessly.
I walked out of the bar’s back door and turned left. I did not look for Gregor.
*****************
The route I had memorized took twelve minutes at a walking pace.
Three blocks south, two east, through the service alley behind the hotel complex that the casinos used for deliveries and which had therefore the particular invisibility of a space that existed for logistics rather than people–no cameras on the alley itself, the coverage directed at the loading bays rather than the throughway.
I had worked this out from the security briefing Viktor had given me about the broader area around the casino, which had been intended to tell me where I should not go and had also, incidentally, told me where I could go without being seen.
I walked quickly. I kept my pace even and my chin up and I did not think about what I was walking toward.
Instead, I thought about what it meant that Mikhail’s people were close enough to the arrangement to have specifics, and what it meant for the timeline of the investigation I had been watching from the inside for two weeks.
He was close.
He was not going to let me get to him before the investigation got to me.
The meeting location was a parking structure three blocks east of the service alley.
Second level, northeast corner. I had been given it in a message before the phone went dead, passed through the channel I hadn’t fully closed, delivered with the particular efficiency of people who understood that operational communications should not require memory aids.
I went up the staircase.
He was waiting.
Bykov, in person, for the first time.
I had constructed a version of him from his voice–the flat, patient delivery, the specific register of controlled menace–and the physical reality was consistent with the construction in the way that things were occasionally consistent when you had been paying close enough attention.
He was perhaps fifty, compact, the particular kind of stillness that communicated experience rather than temperament.
He was not alone; two men flanked him at the appropriate distance, the arrangement of people who expected the conversation to be unpleasant and had positioned themselves accordingly.
He looked at me.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected your presence here.”
“I’ve been trying to stay alive,” I said. “The household went into lockdown after the attack. Security doubled. Everything went through Viktor’s direct clearance.” I said it evenly. “There was nothing to pass that wasn’t already known.”
His expression did not change. “You could have found a way.”
“I found a way to meet you now,” I said. “Which cost me more than you understand and which I will not be able to repeat.” I held his gaze. “I’m out. I’m telling you directly so there’s no ambiguity about the message. The arrangement is finished.”
The quiet that followed was the specific quality of quiet that existed in spaces where men with controlled menace were deciding whether to apply it.
“The debt—” he began.
“I’ll continue to service it. I accept.
“Volkov is not finished with Golovin,” he said.
“I know.”
“The next move will require access that only someone inside the household can provide.”