CHAPTER 30 Nadia
Nadia
The at-home date is his idea, which surprises me.
Not because I didn't think him capable of the idea — I've revised most of my early assessments of him significantly in the last two months, including the ones about what he's capable of when he decides to do something.
What surprises me is the specificity of it.
He doesn't say I thought we'd have a nice evening or let's do something different tonight.
He says, on a Thursday morning before he leaves for the compound: "Tonight.
No briefings, no files, no Viktor. Just — tonight. "
And he says it with the specific quality of someone who has been planning it and is now committing to the plan out loud, which means he's been thinking about it while also managing a war on two fronts and a vote and Marco and Declan and the four-now-two-man security detail and everything else that constitutes his current life.
"All right," I say.
"Seven," he says.
"I'll be here," I say, and then I remember I'm always here, which produces the expression at the corner of his mouth, and then he goes.
He comes back at six forty-five, which is earlier than seven, which means he left the compound before the day was entirely done rather than letting the day run until it was finished.
I know what this costs — I've been in the operational rhythm of this house long enough to know the relationship between what time he gets back and what the day required — and the fact that he left early is its own kind of statement.
He has things.
Not elaborate things. Not the performed version of a date that announces itself through volume.
He has a paper bag from somewhere that smells like bread and something warm, and a bottle of wine that he sets on the kitchen counter with the ease of someone who chose it because he knew it was good rather than because he needed it to perform goodness, and something wrapped in brown paper that he sets on the table and doesn't explain.
"What's that," I say.
"Later," he says.
"That's not informative."
"It's meant to be sequential. Bear with me."
I look at the brown paper package.
I look at him.
"Later," he says again, with the specific patience of someone who has made a plan.
I bear with him.
He cooks.
This is the second surprise, because in the operational rhythm of the house, cooking has been largely my domain — not because he can't, but because I've been here and he hasn't.
Tonight he comes into the kitchen with the specific authority of someone who knows what they're doing in a space and does not require assistance, and he puts me on the other side of the counter with a glass of wine and he cooks.
He makes something Italian, which I expected, which turns out to be the kind of Italian that came from someone's grandmother rather than from a recipe — the kind where the process is instinctive and the result is simple and better than the simplicity suggests it should be.
Pasta. A sauce that starts with olive oil and takes its time.
"Your grandmother," I say.
He looks up. "What."
"This is your grandmother's recipe."
He looks at the pan for a moment. "She cooked the way people cook when food was something you made because you had to, not something you made because you enjoyed it.
Which paradoxically made it better than food made for enjoyment.
" He stirs. "She died when I was twelve.
Declan and I used to go to her house every Sunday. "
"And she made this."
"Every time," he says. "Different in some way every time, because she cooked by feeling rather than measurement. But always — this."
I drink my wine and I watch him cook and I think about a grandmother in a kitchen on Sundays and two boys and what it means to carry something like that forward into a life that went the direction his went.
"Tell me about her," I say.
He tells me.
We eat at the kitchen table with the lights low and the city outside doing its evening thing, and he talks — not the operational version, not the briefing register, just the actual version of a man telling someone things about himself.
His grandmother. A summer he spent in Galway when he was fifteen that he describes with the specific nostalgia of someone who didn't know while it was happening that it would become the thing he measured other summers against. A book he read on a train to Cork when he was twenty-two that he says changed how he understood what loyalty was supposed to mean.
I tell him things in return. Not because he asks — he doesn't ask, he creates the space and lets me decide what to put in it.
I tell him about my mother, who is still alive in Moscow and who I haven't called enough, who trained as an actress before she married my father and who has the specific quality of someone who learned early that performing the right emotion is sometimes more efficient than finding the actual one.
I tell him she loves me imperfectly and consistently.
I tell him about a summer I spent on the Black Sea when I was eight, before everything, when my father was still the man who played chess with me in the evenings and the rest of it was still somewhere in the future.
He listens the way he listens — entirely, without performing it.
When dinner is finished he clears the table and brings the brown paper package and sets it in front of me.
I look at it.
"Open it," he says.
I open it.
Inside is a pair of ballet slippers. Not new — not the stiff, unloved quality of something bought without knowledge.
These are the right kind, soft leather, the right width, broken in slightly at the toe box in the way of slippers that have been touched and handled enough to understand their purpose.
They are, in the specific technical sense, exactly right.
I look at them.
"How," I say.
"Petya. I called the studio. I told her I needed a pair for someone whose size I knew and whose level I knew." He pauses. "She was more helpful than I expected."
"Petya is never more helpful than expected."
"She made an exception. She asked if it was for the dancer with the hip problem and I said yes and she said to make sure you were working on it and she selected these herself."
I look at the slippers in my hands. At the specific rightness of them. At the fact that he called Petya.
"You went to a lot of trouble," I say.
"It wasn't trouble. It was a phone call."
"That's the kind of thing you say when you don't want to be thanked for the trouble."
He looks at me with the expression that is adjacent to the actual smile. "There's one more thing."
"Liam—"
"Put them on."
He tells me at half past nine, when the wine is almost finished and the city has gone to its late evening frequency, that there is a studio three blocks away.
I look at him.
"Not the one you use. A different one. Older. I don't think it's been active in years but the building is sound and the floors—" He pauses. "The floors are good. I looked."
"You looked."
"Last week. When I was thinking about tonight."
I hold his gaze. He holds mine.
"Under cover of night," I say.
"Under cover of night," he agrees.
"The detail."
"Knows I'm taking you for a walk. Which is true. The walk happens to go past a building that happens to have an unlocked side door."
"You unlocked the side door."
"Last week. When I was looking at the floors."
I look at him for a long moment.
"All right," I say.
The city at half past nine has a specific quality — cold enough to mean it, not cold enough to be cruel, the streets in that particular state of having finished with the evening rush and not yet arrived at the deep night version of themselves.
We walk the three blocks with two of his men at a distance that I've calibrated over the last week as approximately forty feet, which is close enough to be useful and far enough to be something other than surveillance.
The building is on a corner. Old brick, three floors, the kind of building that was built for something and has been various somethings since. The side door is where he said it would be.
Inside is dark until he finds a light — not overhead fluorescents but a row of work lights along one wall that someone installed for a different purpose and which produce a warm lateral light that is, for the studio space on the ground floor, almost exactly right.
The floor is good.
He wasn't wrong about the floor. Old wood, sprung in the way of floors built for this purpose, with the specific quality that you feel through the soles of your feet before you think about it.
I stand in the center of the studio space and I look at the floor and I look at the walls, which have mirrors that are dusty but intact, and I look at the barre along the far wall which is real and solid and the right height.
"How," I say again.
"The building belongs to someone who owed Conor a favor. The favor has been called in."
I look at the barre.
I look at him.
He is standing near the door with his hands in his coat pockets and the specific expression of someone who has done the thing they planned to do and is now waiting to see what the thing produces.
He looks, in the work light against the old brick, like himself — not the Don, not the man in the meetings, just the man who cooked his grandmother's pasta and listened to me talk about the Black Sea and went to look at a studio floor last week.
I take off my coat.
I go to the barre.
I don't perform.
That's the thing I decide before I begin, which is the decision that makes everything else possible — that this is not a performance, that there's no mirror I'm looking for faults in, that what I'm doing in this studio on this night is the thing that ballet is before it becomes anything else, which is just moving in the way a body that has been trained to move can move when it isn't being watched by itself.