CHAPTER 8 #2
I see the worn spot for the first time today.
The rug is a Tabriz from the 1830s — I know this because on Saturday, with the run of the penthouse, I lifted the corner and read the small brass tag affixed to its underside in Adrienne's hand.
The rug runs the length of the library and out into the great room.
There is one place on it, three feet inside the library door, where the wool has worn to the warp threads.
It is a roughly oval patch the size of a dinner plate.
The dye there is a paler version of the rest of the rug, the red gone almost to dusty rose.
The worn spot is exactly where Julian is standing.
His right boot heel is on it. He is standing — not at the chair, not at the desk, but in the small worn place — the way a man stands when he is reading by the light from the south window and considering.
Five centuries of his thinking have stood on that spot of wool. The wool has yielded one millimeter at a time, decade by decade, to the place where he puts his right foot when he reads. He will put his foot there again today. He will put it there tomorrow.
He sees me see it. He does not move his foot.
"Quinn. " His voice is the low it goes when he is not raising it. "I would have lost respect for you if you had not tried."
I have to grip the back of the 1740s reading chair.
I do not know my own face for a moment. I had braced for I-am-disappointed-in-you.
I had braced for an alphahole alphabet, every consonant of it.
I had built a small fortified bunker of forensic posture against the moment he would tell me, calmly and at length, what I had cost him.
He has said nine words. He has said the nine words that prove he expected me to do exactly what I did.
He has said the nine words that mean: I see you. I understood you the moment you walked into my office in a gray suit and told me my logistics cost was a screaming red flag. I have known, since then, that you were a person who would test the door. The test is a feature of the person.
I sit. The reading chair takes my weight.
He says, "Sit. " It is two seconds too late, and we both know it, and the corner of his mouth — the considering line — moves by one millimeter.
He moves Volume Eight to the writing desk.
He turns. He walks across the rug, his right boot leaving the worn spot for the first time in this scene, and crosses the library to the wall opposite the south window.
He lifts a small bronze sconce — the sconce is a switch — and a panel behind the bookshelves slides up. Behind the panel a wall monitor, sixty inches, satin-black. I had not noticed it on Saturday because I had not been looking up at that shelf.
He says, "Look at this. " His voice is, again, the low it goes.
He thumbs a small remote that has appeared in his hand from the writing-desk drawer.
The screen wakes. A high-resolution overhead view of my apartment door — the iron hook with the peacoat to the left of the frame, the brass numeral 4B at eye height.
Time stamp at the lower right: 03:55:11 MON 25 NOV.
A man walks into the frame.
He is young. Twenties. Pale-fair skin, very white in the hallway's institutional fluorescent.
Dark hair, neat, parted on the left. Blue eyes, light blue, almost gray.
A small scar at the upper lip, on the right side, the kind of scar a child gets from a fall on a brick step.
He is wearing a navy parka and a watch cap pulled low.
He is carrying a black nylon tool roll. He looks once down the corridor and once up at the camera.
He smiles at the camera. The smile is small and clean. He kneels at my door.
I have never seen this man before. I have, three days ago, been pinning my hair at the nape with the brass pencil in this man's apparent future, in a kitchen he has now stood in.
The door yields in nine seconds. He stands. Two more men come up behind him, hooded, faces averted from the camera. They go in.
Julian advances the footage.
03:57. The three men are in the living room.
They go directly to the writing desk by the window.
The man with the scar at his upper lip is the leader; the other two are perimeter.
The leader leans over the desk. He lifts something with two fingers — a small thin metallic glint — and rotates it once in the light.
The brass pencil. He drops it into the inside pocket of the parka. He stands.
He moves to the wall above the desk. The two photographs of my mother — the one in nursing whites in 1989, the one in the blue dress in 2018 — are in their plain black frames.
He does not take them. He photographs them with his phone.
He photographs them deliberately, slowly, twice each, framing each photograph in the screen of his phone as if he were a museum cataloguer.
He puts the phone away. He moves to the bookshelves.
He runs a finger along the spines. He pulls out a Donna Tartt and shakes it once for loose paper. Nothing falls. He puts the book back. He nods at the perimeter. They leave together at 04:08:34.
Julian freezes the frame at 04:00:00. The man with the scar at his upper lip is at the desk, the brass pencil mid-lift. He has been caught in the moment of the theft.
Julian says, low, "The man with the scar at his upper lip is Konstantin Voss's principal enforcer.
He has, at this hour, your brass pencil.
I expect he will arrange for it to appear on this desk inside the next ten days.
That will be the message. The message will be: I was in your home this morning.
I am in his home now. I can be anywhere. "
I do not move. The reading chair holds me.
My pulse is in my throat at a rate I cannot count by the second hand of a watch.
I name what I am feeling. I am not afraid for me.
I am afraid for the pencil. The pencil is the wrong thing to be afraid for.
The pencil is a thing my mother handed me in the kitchen of a hospital on a March morning two years before she died.
The pencil is — the pencil is in the pocket of a vampire in a parka, on the way to a meeting with a man who turned in fourteen hundred and two.
I am also afraid for the man at the writing desk in front of me, who has stepped back from the wall monitor and put his right boot on the worn spot of the Tabriz again, because he is thinking.
He is thinking. His face has gone very still.
The brand under his sleeve, I cannot see; he has told me, at the kiss yesterday in his speech that was not a speech but a sentence, that the brand pulses cold when his control slips.
He is not slipping. He is, instead, doing the cold mathematics of a man who has been doing cold mathematics for five hundred years.
He is counting moves. He has eight, maybe ten. He is sorting them.
"Show me again," I say.
He plays the footage again.
I watch the man with the scar at his upper lip.
I watch the lift of the pencil. I watch the photographs being photographed.
I watch the books being checked for the loose paper.
I watch the perimeter. I make myself watch the exit.
I watch the iron hook on the inside of the door, where my peacoat hangs crooked because they have brushed past it on the way out, the right shoulder pulled lower than the left.
"Again," I say.
He plays it again.
The third time I see something I had missed.
At 04:06, the leader pauses at the small sage-green velvet armchair.
He puts a hand into the cushion. He pulls something out.
It is a long fold of paper — a brochure.
He lifts it. The camera is too far to read the front of the brochure but the shape is unmistakable to me: it is the brochure for Hartwell Meadows, the memory-care facility outside Albany, where my father lives.
I keep the brochure folded into the cushion of the armchair because the brochure is the address from which I mail the monthly check. The man with the scar at his upper lip lifts the brochure. He reads it. He puts it back. He smooths the cushion. He turns away.
He has my father's address.
I sit very still in the 1740s reading chair. My fingers are loosely curled in my lap. The wool of the trousers is cold against my thighs. The pencil in my right pocket presses against the bone of my hip with a small precise pressure that I have known since I was nine years old.
I say, "His name."
Julian says, "I do not give you names of men I am going to kill. The naming is mine. Forgive me. I will tell you the names of the men I have decided not to kill."
I say, "Konstantin Voss."
He says, "Yes."
"He has my father's address."
"He has the address. He will not approach a memory-care facility on a federal-care registry without a council vote, and the council will not give him a vote on the back of a January Sunday visit.
He has the address as a piece of pressure.
He has used the photographs of your mother in the same way.
He has been a very tidy man for six hundred and twenty-two years. He does not waste a step."
"Will you tell me what to do."
"No. I will tell you what I will do."
The line lands. The line is, again, the wrong shape for an alphahole alphabet.
I had a small bunker built for I will protect you and you will stay where I put you.
He is not in the bunker. He is on the worn spot of the Tabriz with the wall monitor behind him and Volume Eight unread on the desk, and he is going to tell me, as he would tell Adrienne, what he will do.