CHAPTER 12
Siena
By the ninth day the library had stopped being a library.
The county map off his study wall lay pinned flat under four books.
Three legal pads, one for each attack, and a fourth for the things that fit nowhere yet.
I had taken the good pens. Somebody had started leaving coffee at my elbow without being asked.
The house had made a decision about me. Nobody had bothered to tell me what it was.
Kolya gave me everything. I asked for the timeline of the last eight months and it arrived in a box.
I asked who had keys to the east gate and got a list in three different men's handwriting.
Then I asked what Dima had been doing in Vinegar Hill at midnight.
That one took him a long time to say. Dima had been doing a favor for his uncle.
Whatever door he was still holding shut, it was not this one.
So, I worked.
Here was what nobody outside the job understood about diagnosis. Most of the time I was looking at the symptoms trying to lead me to the problem. A shadow on a film was not a tumor. It was where the light did not go. I learned to read the gap and let it tell me what was sitting in it.
I had three attacks and no pattern in them. Different methods. Different places. Different men. I laid the dates out and they made nothing.
So, I stopped looking at the attacks and started looking at everything else.
Dima found me like that, surrounded by paper, at some hour with no name. "You're in my brother's chair."
I looked up. He filled the doorway with one hand braced on the frame. He wore the careful, insulted posture of a large man who has been told to take it easy. Gray under the eyes. Also upright, which I would not have promised anyone when he came in.
"You're supposed to be in bed,"I said.
"I’ve been in bed." He came in anyway, slowly. He lowered himself onto the arm of the couch the way you park a car you are still paying for. "Six days. I’ve memorized every ceiling in this house."
"Your incision opens up and I'm sewing you on a dinner table like your friend Ivan."
"Ivan told me about that." His mouth twitched. He has his brother's face and none of his brother's discipline about using it. "He says Kolya obeyed you."
"I needed pressure held."
"You could have asked anyone in that room."
"He was closest."
"He was closest," Dima repeated, delighted, and then winced.
I didn’t smile. "Sit down properly or go back upstairs," I said.
He sat down properly. He looked at the paper spread over the desk for a while, and the humor went out of him by degrees. "You are hunting the man who shot me."
"Yes."
"Kolya said he had it handled."
"He does. This is what handled looks like."
Dima was quiet. Then he said, "My brother does not let people help him. He has never once let anyone help him. When he took this family he did all of it alone, the whole thing, and he was thirty-four." He turned a page. "I would look at what he is letting you do and I would ask myself why."
I had been asking myself that for days. I had an answer I liked and one I didn’t, and I had been very careful to keep looking at the first one.
"Go to bed, Dima."
He went. He stopped in the doorway first.
"He watches the door you're behind," he said. "Every time he comes into a room, he finds where you are and then he stops looking. You should know that, whatever else you decide about him."
Then he was gone. I was alone with a room full of paper and a piece of information I han’t asked anyone for.
I went back to the puzzle. The mistake, when I found it, took about four minutes to see and eleven hours to trust.
The fourth legal pad had become a second timeline. The attacks were on the other three. This one was for everything around them. Who was where. Who was travelling. Who had dinner with whom, because in this family that is written down somewhere by somebody, the way charts are.
And Yuri was never there.
The night Dima was shot, Yuri was at a restaurant in Brighton Beach. Two vory and a man who owns a shipping company. Nine until half past one. Six people would swear to it.
The night Ivan was knifed, Yuri was at a christening. There are photographs.
The night the man walked through the front door and shot Maksim on the stairs, Yuri was two hours upstate. At his own house. With his own doctor, because his chest had been troubling him. His own doctor. At midnight.
Three attacks. Three alibis. Each one perfect, each one witnessed, each one with a doctor or a priest or a shipping magnate in it.
I sat back on my heels on the floor.
Nobody has an alibi for a night they did not know was coming.
An innocent man could not account for a random Tuesday. Ask anyone in this house where they were the night Ivan got cut. Half of them would say they were asleep and couldn’t prove it. That was what true looks like. True was patchy. True had holes in it.
Yuri had no holes. Yuri had been, on three separate unpredictable nights, in a well-lit room full of respectable witnesses.
He was not covering his tracks. He was building the alibi before the event. Which meant he knew the date because he set the date.
I took it to Kolya at four in the morning because I could not sit on it until a reasonable hour.
Of course he was awake. He sat in his study with the lamp on, the same three pages in front of him he had been reading since midnight. When I came through the door his dark eyes found me. Then he stopped looking anywhere else.
I put the fourth pad on the desk and told him.
He read it twice. He didn’t interrupt. When he finished he set it down with great care. Then he looked at the wall over my shoulder for a long moment.
"Forty years," he said. "I have watched him do that for forty years and I thought it was because he is a careful man."
"He is a careful man. That's the point. Careful is not innocent."
"No." His voice came out lower than he meant it to, and did not quite recover. "It is not."
"So, we have him."
When he looked at me, and I understood that we did not.
"Tell me what a court would do with this," he said.
"There's no court."
"Then tell me what the vory will do with it.
Because in just over five weeks I stand in a room and name a traitor.
In front of men who have known him since before I could walk.
" He rounded the desk. "You have shown me that my uncle has three excellent alibis.
That is what I would have to say out loud.
My uncle was demonstrably somewhere else. You understand how that sounds."
I did. I’d known it since about hour six. I’d been keeping it in the same drawer where I kept everything I don’t want to be true.
"It's not evidence," I said. "It's the shape of the space where evidence would be."
"Yes."
"In medicine that's enough to operate on."
"In my world it is enough to get a young pakhan removed for turning on his father's oldest friend," he said calmly. "I believe you. Understand that. I believe you completely, which is the problem, because I cannot use a thing I believe. I can only use something I can put in a man's hand."
I looked down at eleven hours of work and heard myself ask the question before I had decided to ask it. "Then what breaks the pattern?"
"Say it. You already know."
"A fourth one," I said. "It only becomes proof if it happens again and we know where he is before it does. If we're watching him build the alibi instead of finding it afterward."
"Da," Kolya said.
"That's not a plan. That's waiting for somebody to get hurt."
"Yes."
"Somebody in this house."
He nodded.
I stood in that library before dawn with a man I had married at gunpoint.
I did the arithmetic all the way to the end.
The end of it was that my method required a body.
My method was better if there was a body.
Underneath the horror of it sat a small clean part of my brain that had already started hoping.
The way it hopes for a clear film. Hoping that when it came, I would be close enough to read it properly.
Nine days ago I ran a trauma bay and did not lose people.
I put my hands flat on his desk and waited for that feeling to pass. It did not pass. It settled in and made itself at home.
"I need you to say the rest of it," I said.
"There is no rest of it."
"There is. You've had it since before I walked in here." I made myself look at him. "You're not going to wait for it, are you? You're going to make it happen."
He didn’t answer me.
He didn’t lie to me either. He chose silence instead. And I let the silence be an answer, because the answer I built out of it was one I could live inside.
I built the wrong one.