CHAPTER 18
Kolya
By Sunday I had counted the room three times and it came out the same.
Timofey dead. That was a vote gone. The two undecided vory had stopped taking my calls, which is its own kind of answer. Aleksandr Baranov would speak against me and be believed, because he is old and has survived everything. Andrei was still mine, and Andrei is mine while I am winning.
Three and a half weeks out. On the arithmetic I had, I lost.
I did the leak first. Seven men had been in that room.
Ivan did it quietly over three days. He is very good at this and takes no pleasure in it, which is why I use him.
He came back with nothing a man could hold.
One of the seven had a brother inside. Another had been visiting a woman in Bay Ridge on nights he had told me he was elsewhere.
A third had money that did not sit right.
Three men with reasons, and no proof against any of them.
"Do you want them watched?" Ivan said.
"All three."
"And if it is none of them?"
I did not answer him, because it didn’t change what I was going to do.
I could not win the skhodka by defending myself. There was no defence. My brother was in a gutter. My enforcer was knifed. My brigadier was shot at a school gate. An Orlov peace party was face down in my own yard. Every one of those as true and every one of those was mine.
The only thing that emptied a room like that was a traitor with his hand caught.
And Yuri had shown me on Thursday exactly how careful he was. Three months of alibis. And when he finally moved, he did it by sending another man's people into my yard and letting me pull the trigger.
A man that careful didn’t make a mistake.
He has to be made to reach.
I knew what he would reach for. He had told me in front of the whole council, in his soft voice, twenty days ago. There is also the matter of the woman.
So I built it.
I took the Orlov collapse and I used it.
That was the first piece. With the truce dead and their crews in the street, every man in my house understood the same thing.
My wife could no longer move the way she had.
Nobody questioned a change. Nobody thought it was strange.
The war did that work for me and I did not have to say a word.
Then I made her visible.
I put her name on things. She had been reading the obshchak ledger in a library.
I had it moved up to my father's council room on the third floor.
Four men were told to bring her whatever she asked for.
I let her sit in that chair twice more with the door open.
I mentioned, to two of the three men Ivan was watching, that my wife was close to something in the accounts.
I didn’t have to lie. Every word was true. I simply put a true thing where a particular pair of ears would find it. That was the method I learned from the man I was aiming it at. I was aware of that the entire time.
Then I loosened the walls.
Not enough for anyone to notice. She had a detail of four; I made it three, and moved the third to the car rather than the door. I approved her Tuesday visit to the hospital. I stopped arguing about the pharmacy and the market and the two hours she spent walking when a thing would not resolve.
She took every inch of it as ground she had won.
She thanked me for none of it, because she thought she had taken it. She was pleased with herself. She sat in that council room with the door open and a pen in her teeth. For the first time since the night I brought her here, she was at home in my house.
I had made her a lamp and hung her in a window, and she thought she had been given a room.
Ivan came to me on Wednesday night.
He shut the door, which he has done perhaps four times in nine years. He stood in front of my desk and did not sit.
"The detail," he said.
"What about it?"
"You took a man off the door."
"I moved him to the car."
"Kolya," he said my name carefully. "I have carried out your orders for nine years and I have never once asked you what you were doing."
"I know."
"I am asking."
I could have told him to get out. He would have gone. I could have given him the operational reason. A wife guarded like a bank cannot be reached, and therefore cannot be used. He would have taken it, and left, and been unhappy for a week.
Instead, I told him the truth, because I owed him that and because I wanted one other man alive to know it.
"I am going to let him come at her," I said. "Close enough to be caught."
Ivan did not move.
"She does not know," he said.
"No."
"You will not tell her."
"Nyet."
"Because she would let you." His voice did not rise. "That is why. She would say yes, and stand where you put her, and then it would be a thing the two of you did. And you would not be able to carry it alone afterward."
I had been managed by the best liar in this city my entire life and never once been read like that.
"Get out, Ivan."
He went to the door. Then he stopped with his hand on it.
"My mother's brother did a thing like this once. To keep everyone alive." He did not turn round. "It worked. Everyone lived. He was never in the room with any of them again."
Then he left.
I sat there a long time.
Yuri is going to reach for her whether I arrange it or not.
He said it in front of eleven men. He had killed four times to get to me.
There was no version of the next four weeks in which he left my wife alone.
If I locked her in a room he’d wait. If I put her on a plane he’d follow.
The only question that had ever been on the table was whether, when it happens, my hand was closer than his.
Every word of that was true and I checked it a hundred times.
Underneath it, in a place I did not look at for eleven days, was the other sentence.
And it is the only thing left that wins me the room.
Both were true. This wasn’t a choice between good and bad. It was an action supported by two reasons; one clean and one murky.
She came up at midnight with the ledger under her arm and a smear of ink on the side of her hand.
"I've got something," she said. "It's small. It's a rental garage in Gravesend. Paid out of the fund for nine years, and nobody in this house can tell me what's in it."
"Show me tomorrow."
"It's not nothing, Kolya."
"I know it isn't." I took the ledger out of her hands and put it on the table and put my hands on her instead. "Tomorrow."
She laughed, which she only started doing this week, and let me take the pen out of her hair.
Later she fell asleep against my shoulder, in the middle of a sentence about municipal leases. I lay in the dark and listened to the house.
I was as gentle with her that night as I had ever been with anything in my life. It wasn’t the plan. I’d made my peace with the plan; a man did what the room requires and I would build it again tomorrow.
I wished I could take back the tenderness.
Because I knew exactly what I had put in the window, and I held her anyway. I let her sleep on me in a house I had opened four inches. Opened for the specific purpose of letting a wolf get its nose in.