CHAPTER 24
Siena
That last one was eleven days before Kolya's father died.
I found the other two working backward through the ledger with a highlighter and a headache. Then I went looking for what had happened around them.
March of this year: the old pakhan.
Three men. Nine years apart, four years apart. All senior. All finished by somebody patient.
The garage rent was paid six days early on each occasion. That was what a careful man did when he expected to be busy on the fifteenth and wanted no errand outstanding.
I sat back and looked at what I had drawn.
That was not a hit list. That was a career. Yuri had been doing this since at least 2015, at roughly one every four years. The four since June were never a change of character. It was a change of schedule. That suggested a deadline.
I wrote that at the top of the page and underlined it twice.
Then I stopped looking at how they died. I started looking at the locations.
Ruslan Bek was shot leaving a restaurant.
There were nine people in the front of that house at the time.
Two of them went to hospital. One of those two was a waiter with a round in his thigh, twenty-two years old.
I sat in that council room at half past eleven at night, reading a nine-year-old file about a waiter's thigh.
The word in the file was incidental.
That was the word they used. wo incidental injuries at the Bek shooting, both non-fatal, both civilians.
Incidental.
I’d been in this world for four and a half weeks. I’d learned what a pakhan was and what a skhodka was and how to say good morning to nine men on a door. I watched a man put his hands where I told him to on a kitchen table. I stopped noticing the guns.
When I read that word in that file at half past eleven at night, I was sixteen years old again.
We went to that restaurant because Bea had a thing at school and my mother wanted somewhere with a tablecloth for once. It was the second week of August. She wore a coat she loved.
The men came in behind me. Thenthe noise, and the floor.
My mother was hit twice. One in the shoulder, which did not matter. One under the left clavicle, which did something I would spend a career learning the name of.
I got her onto her back. I put both hands where the blood was coming from and I pressed. I weighed a hundred and ten pounds. I pressed until a paramedic put his hand on my shoulder and told me I could stop.
She died on the floor between two tables while I held her.
Nobody in that restaurant had come for us. They came for a man three tables away and they got him. My mother was standing up to go to the bathroom.
Two civilians hit. Both non-fatal, in that file. One fatal, in mine.
Incidental.
I sat in that council room with a nine-year-old file about a different shooting in a different restaurant. And I understood that was a line about my mother.
It arrived as a temperature rather than a thought. The room went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the room. My hands went to the edge of the table. I sat there a while, being sixteen.
Then I got up. I got a glass of water. I put the Bek file back in order. I wrote the word incidental on a fresh page with a question mark after it. I had nothing better to do with it.
I went and stood in the corridor outside my husband's study for about ninety seconds.
He was on the telephone. His flat voice, the one he uses on men who owe him things echoed with harsh Russian edges.
I had my hand up to knock.
I need to tell you why I don't lose patients was poised and on my tongue.
That was all. Not the date, not the anniversary, not the promise I made him in the dark. Just the reason under the reason, finally, out loud, to the one person who has never asked me for it.
He said a word in Russian, sharp, and then, "No. Fourteen days. Tell him forteen days."
I took my hand down.
I went back to the council room.
I worked until three. I found two more anomalies in the fund, and a fourth date I couldn’t match to anything. I made a clean list of everything I had. At the top of it, underlined twice, was the sentence I still believed is the most useful thing in this house:
He has been doing this for nine years and he has never once been careless. So he will not become careless. He will be made careless, or we lose.