Nadia
The thing about ballet that people who haven't done it seriously don't understand is that it is not graceful.
The grace is the final product, and the final product is built on something that is decidedly not graceful.
It is repetition past the point of comfort and well into tedium, the specific pain of a body being asked to hold positions it was not designed to hold, the relationship between a dancer and a mirror that is less aesthetic appreciation than clinical fault-finding.
You stand at the barre and you repeat the same sequence until it stops being something you do and starts being something you are, and the moment it becomes the latter is not satisfying in the way people who watch ballet imagine.
It is just the new floor. The new place from which to begin finding faults.
Petya runs her studio the way my first teacher ran hers in Moscow — without sentiment, with a specific contempt for anything that prioritizes appearance over foundation.
She is sixty-something, compact, with grey hair pulled back so severely it appears to be a structural decision, and she watched me for forty minutes on my first day before saying a single word.
What she said was: your left hip is compensating for something and you've let it go too long.
Then she turned away and let me work on it, which was more useful than anything elaborate she might have said.
I like her.
Dara comes to the studio three days a week, which is less than me but still substantial.
She danced seriously until she was seventeen, when a knee injury made the path she was on no longer viable, and she's maintained enough of it to be a convincing cover and to be, on her good days, genuinely beautiful to watch.
Today she is having a good day, which I can tell because she's stopped monitoring herself in the mirror and is just moving.
I watch her for a moment and think about what it means to stop monitoring yourself. To trust the body to do the thing it knows how to do without the mind inserting itself every four counts to audit the result.
I have not figured out how to do that. In ballet or in anything else.
We work for two hours. Petya corrects my hip three times and on the fourth instance simply stands behind me and places her hands on the joint without speaking, adjusting the angle with the pressure of her palms, and I feel what she's been telling me in a way I couldn't quite access through verbal instruction.
Afterward, Dara and I sit on the studio floor with our backs against the mirror and our water bottles between us and the particular quiet of physical exhaustion, which is one of the cleanest kinds of quiet I know.
"You're somewhere else today," Dara says.
"I'm here."
"Your body is here." She drinks her water. "Where's the rest."
I press the cold bottle against the back of my neck. "I have a meeting tonight."
She doesn't ask with whom. We have developed, over six years, a finely calibrated system of what to ask and what to leave alone. "How long."
"Shouldn't be more than two hours. It's the secondary warehouse on the north side." I keep my voice neutral. "Different from last week."
"Different how."
"Different location. Different approach. The objective this time is to leave something rather than start something." I watch a piece of rosin dust move across the studio floor in a draft from under the door. "A listening device. Calibrated to pick up any conversation within forty feet."
Dara says nothing for a moment. "And your handler wants this done."
"My handler wants this done by the end of the week."
"That's not what I asked."
I look at her. Her expression is the careful one, the one she uses when she's distinguishing between supporting me and agreeing with me, which she has always been precise enough to keep separate. "Viktor wants faster results," I say. "He's called twice this week. The tone is — not relaxed."
"Viktor's tone is never relaxed."
"It's less relaxed than usual." I stand, because sitting on a cold studio floor for too long is one of the things that costs you later.
"He reminded me what my father built. What his reputation was.
What I represent in terms of that legacy.
" I roll my left shoulder. "The implication being that my father would not have been caught at a warehouse by the target of the operation. "
Dara looks up at me. "Your father was killed at forty-four," she says, with a precision that isn't cruelty but is absolutely not softness either. "His methods produced a specific outcome. Viktor invoking his legacy is Viktor managing you, not honouring him."
I absorb this. I don't respond directly, which Dara knows means I'm filing it somewhere to be examined later. "I'll get the device placed tonight. Viktor gets his results, the timeline moves forward, we move on to the next phase." I pick up my bag. "It's fine."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
She stands as well, dusting rosin from the back of her leggings with the philosophical air of someone who has accepted that the studio floor is always going to win. "Just be careful tonight. The Irish will be watching that location after last week."
"I know." I sling my bag over my shoulder. "That's why I'm going in differently."
She looks at me for a moment longer than the conversation requires. Then: "I'll keep the light on."
"You always do."
I pick up the tail at twenty past nine.
I'm three blocks from the apartment, on my way back from getting food, which is a genuinely mundane reason to be on the street at twenty past nine and therefore the best possible reason — there is nothing that reads as innocent as someone carrying a paper bag that smells like takeout.
I have my coat, my scarf, my hair down. I look like a young woman who lives in the neighborhood and is coming home with dinner.
The tail is behind me on the opposite side of the street, and he is good.
Much better than the men Vito's people use, which I know because I've made a study of that particular style of surveillance.
He doesn't mirror my pace exactly — he's slightly variable, which is correct technique.
He doesn't look at me directly in the windows I'm using to watch him.
He has changed, I believe, some element of his outer layer in the last thirty seconds — a hat, maybe, or the way a collar sits — which suggests training that goes beyond amateur.
He is still, however, following me.
I don't change my pace. This is important. The moment a target changes pace in response to a tail, the tail knows they've been made, and knowing they've been made changes what they do next. I want him to think he's invisible for exactly as long as it takes me to decide where and how this ends.
I turn right at the corner, which takes me into a slightly busier block — a bar on the near side with people standing outside despite the cold, a restaurant with its door propped open and warm light and noise spilling out. Coverage. Movement. Multiple points of exit and entry.
He follows me around the corner. Still good. Still variable.
I stop to look at my phone, which gives me six seconds of still target — and a stationary target is a surveillance problem because a tail must also stop or risk closing distance — and in those six seconds I confirm that he is now on my side of the street, approximately twenty-five feet back, stopped in front of a closed storefront and doing an adequate impression of a man checking his own phone.
Good technique. Not good enough.
I go into the restaurant.
Not through the main entrance, which faces the street, but through the bar side door, which requires cutting through the covered alley between the restaurant and the bar next door.
It is dark in the alley. It smells like city and cold and the kitchen exhaust from the restaurant's ventilation.
I move through it in fifteen seconds and come out on the parallel street on the other side of the block, which means I've crossed through the building without entering it in any way a camera on the main entrance would capture.
I walk two blocks east. Then I double back on a street that runs behind the tail's last known position, which takes me along a route that means I am now, briefly, following him rather than the other way around.
He is standing outside the restaurant entrance looking at his phone with the particular expression of someone who is recalibrating because what they expected to happen didn't. He's already on his phone, calling it in, and his posture has the frustration of someone reporting a failure to someone who is not going to be pleased.
I walk past him on the opposite side of the street.
He doesn't look up.
Viktor calls at eleven.
"I picked up a tail tonight," I say, before he can open. "Costello's man. I lost him."
Silence. Then: "Explain."
"He was good. Better than the men I've seen on Italian assignments.
But he closed distance when I stopped, which gave me the make, and I went through a building.
" I keep my voice even, factual, the way my father taught me to report.
Information first, always. Interpretation after.
"There's something else. He put a tracker on me at the first warehouse.
I've been carrying it in my coat lining. "
"Since when."
"Since the night of the warehouse. I found it during the fight.
I leave it in my coat while I operate, then collect it before I return home.
He thinks he has eyes on me. He doesn't." I pause.
"I'm telling you now because the tail confirmed it — he's running parallel surveillance.
He's resourceful. He's watching me. And he doesn't know I know either of those things. "
Another silence. Longer this time, and I can feel Viktor reassessing — the particular quality of a man moving pieces around a board in his head, deciding what this information changes.
"You should have told me sooner," he says.
"I needed to confirm he didn't have other surveillance before I flagged it. Reporting a tracker I'd found and then having it turn out there were three more would have been unhelpful."
"And now you've confirmed."
"Now I've confirmed." The apartment is quiet.
Dara's light is visible under her door. I'm standing in the kitchen in my coat because I haven't taken it off yet, and the cold from outside is still on me, and I am very tired in the specific way of someone who has been performing two different versions of themselves for the past week.
"The listening device will be placed tomorrow night. I'll have results for you by Friday."
"And Costello."
"Being managed," I say.
"He let you go once. He may not be inclined toward patience a second time."
"He's not holding women," I say. "Not anymore.
I know his history. I know why he won't." I say it with confidence, because I do know this, and because it is the thing I've built my operational approach around — his specific guilt, his specific need to be a different kind of leader than he's been.
But there is a small and inconvenient part of me that knows I'm also using it as reassurance about something else, some other question about him that I'm not ready to look at directly.
"Don't rely on sentiment," Viktor says. "Men like Costello have histories. Histories end."
"I know."
"The device by Friday, Nadia."
"The device by Friday."
He hangs up.
I stand in my kitchen for a moment longer. I take my coat off and hang it on the back of a chair and stand there with it in my hand before I put it down.
The tracker is in the coat lining. A small, clever thing. The size of a button.
He put it on me during the thirty seconds he had me on the warehouse floor, which means his hands were doing two things at once, which means he was thinking past the immediate problem to the next one even while the immediate problem was still happening.
I sit down at the kitchen table. I press my thumb against the coat lining until I can feel the small hard shape of it through the fabric.
He thought ahead. He planned for the possibility that letting me go would mean losing me, and he prepared for it before he made the decision.
That is not the behavior of a man acting on sentiment.
That is the behavior of a man who is, underneath whatever guilt or history or changing values he is carrying, still very good at this.
I should be more worried about that than I am.
I leave the coat on the chair and go to bed.
I think about the tracker for longer than I should, and then I think about his face in the dark warehouse, and then I make myself stop thinking about either of those things and close my eyes.
Friday, the device. Then the next thing, and the thing after that.
One step, then the next. My father's voice, steady and specific.
One step, Nadenka. Anyone can manage one step.
I close my eyes.
I almost sleep.