CHAPTER 23
Kolya
Dima waited until I was alone, which meant he had been planning it.
He came into the study with two glasses and the good bottle. He shut the door behind him with his foot and sat down without being asked. He moved like a man carrying a weight under his coat.
"You look like hell," he said.
"Thank you."
"I mean it clinically. Your wife says it too. She has a word for what you are doing but she will not say it in front of you."
He poured for both of us. We drank one in silence, which is the only ceremony my family has ever had.
Then he said, "The detail on Siena is three men."
I did not answer.
"It was four in two weeks ago." He turned his glass on the desk. "One is in the car now instead of at the door. And on the Tuesday she goes to the hospital, the man in the car parks on the far side of the street. That puts a lane of traffic between him and her for about eleven seconds every week."
I underestimated my brother his entire life. It was the single most consistent error of my adulthood. "You have been counting."
"I have been lying in a bed for a month with nothing to do but watch this house." He drank. "So yes. I have been counting."
"It is a war, Dima. Everything is thinner than it was."
"The house detail went up. The garage went up. There are two men on my door and I am a grown man who has been shot precisely once." He put the glass down. "Everything got thicker except the one thing standing between my brother's wife and a man who has killed four people this season."
"Say the rest of it," I said.
"No. You say it." He leaned forward. "Because I have been building a version in my head where I am wrong, Kolya. I would like you to hand me that version. I want it very much. Give me one and I will take it and go back upstairs and never mention this again."
I could have. I looked at my brother, who I have known since the hour he was born, and I did not give the real answer to him.
"There is no version," I said.
He sat back. For a while he said nothing at all. Most people missed that move because he is loud until he is not.
"You are using her as bait."
"Yes," I answered.
"Does she know?"
"No."
"Kolya." His voice cracked in the middle of my name. "She opened my chest with her hands. On a table, at two in the morning, when nobody knew who I was and there was nothing in it for her."
"I’m aware."
"Are you?" He stood up. "Because I have gone over it and I cannot make it fit you. Our father would have done this. Our father would have done this and slept. I have made my peace with that. He is dead and I loved him, and both of those are allowed to be true. But you don’t do this."
"Then you haven’t been paying attention."
"I have been doing nothing else for a month."
I stood as well, because I was not going to have this sitting down. "He killed our father."
"I know what he did."
"He shot you in the street and left you in a gutter.
He sat at the funeral with his hand on my shoulder.
In twenty days he takes everything our family has ever built.
And I have nothing to put in front of the vory that they will accept.
A tape will not do it. An alibi will not do it. He is too careful."
"So, make him careless."
"Yes."
"With your wife."
"With the only thing on earth he wants badly enough to reach for."
I heard how it sounded.
Dima looked at me for a long moment.
"Do you know what the difference is between you and him?
I have thought about this a great deal, lying up there.
" He picked his coat up off the chair. "Cruelty is not it.
You are both capable of anything. It is that Yuri has never once had to lie to himself about what he is doing.
He decides, and then he does it, and he sleeps. "
He went to the door.
"You have been in this room for six weeks constructing a sentence you can live inside. You will find one. You are cleverer than he is." He opened it. "Which makes you slower than him, Kolya. It does not make you different."
"Dima."
"Tell her," he said, without turning round.
"Do it for yourself, because she would let you.
She would stand exactly where you put her and be better at it than any of us.
You know that. That is why you have not asked.
" Then he did turn. "Tell her because on the other side of this you are going to want somebody in the room with you.
And there is exactly one person alive who might still be in it. "
He left me my father's bottle and went upstairs. I sat down and did not pour another.
Then, I went to find her.
I had it all arranged enough to share aloud. I knew the most painful parts and how I’d reply when Siena asked specific questions. I got as far as the door of the council room.
She was at the table with the ledger and three pads and her hair up in a pen. Beside her sat a cold plate of food she had not touched. She didn’t eat when she is close to something.
She looked up. Her whole face changed. "Ivan says you were with Dima. Is he all right?"
"He is well."
"Good." She pushed a page across the table without waiting for me to sit.
"Look at this. The Gravesend garage was paid on the fifteenth for nine years.
Every month, the fifteenth, except three.
And on those three it's the ninth, and each of those three is a week I already have marked for something else. "
Her blue eyes shone with excitement.
"Kolya, I think he's been using the fund's calendar as a diary. I think we can date what he did by when he paid for it."
She smiled at me and my entire plan fell apart because of it.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Show me all of it tomorrow. Eat something."
"Kolya—"
"Tomorrow, milaya."
I went out and stood in the corridor for a while.
Dima was right about all of it. I knew he was right while he was saying it. I kew it when I chose her happiness over the truth. I knew I’d choose her even when it was the wrong chice.