7. Nora
NORA
By the end of the week I’d learned that a funeral home runs on one rule, and the rule is simple. You never let the two kinds of guest meet.
There’s the kind who comes in the front, in black, to bury someone the ordinary way, with lilies and a program and a cousin who drinks too much at the reception.
The other comes to the back, before dawn, in a panel van, with no name and no paperwork and a reason nobody says out loud.
Nevsky and Sons served both, and the whole art of the place was the wall between them.
Six months in, I’d gotten good at the wall.
I could feel a front-door family and a back-door delivery drifting toward each other across a day’s schedule the way you feel two cars closing on a blind intersection, and I moved people the way a good hostess works a difficult party, so the grieving never glimpsed the disappeared and the disappeared never troubled the grieving.
Some days it was the most honest work I’d ever done.
Nobody I lied to at Nevsky’s ever ended up worse for it.
On the afternoon it nearly came down, we had one of each at the same time, and Pasha in charge of the labels.
Upstairs, in the good parlor, the Hendricks family was burying a grandfather who’d died the way the rest of us only hope to, old and asleep and square with everybody. There were thirty mourners, a slideshow, and a widow named Ruth who kept patting my arm and calling me a comfort.
Downstairs, in the cold room, we had a delivery that had come in before light with a hole in it the coroner would have wanted a long conversation about.
Pasha’s job was to keep the two straight, one clipboard for the Hendricks and one for the thing in the basement, and Pasha, God love him, is a young man who once got genuinely confused about which of his own hands was which.
So when the transport crew arrived for the afternoon pickup, and Pasha handed them a clipboard, and I looked up from Ruth Hendricks’s tear-damp face and saw that the clipboard was the wrong color, I understood we had about ninety seconds before a grieving family watched an unmarked van try to load their grandfather’s problem in place of their grandfather.
I did what I do. I stood, I took Ruth’s hands in both of mine, and I told her the slideshow had a technical fault and that she absolutely had to come approve the music before we began, right now, this way, through this door, away from that one.
“You’re an angel,” Ruth said, letting me steer her.
“I’m an operations manager,” I said, which was the truest thing I’d told anyone all week.
Ruth wanted to talk about the music, so we talked about the music, in the little side room with the fake stained glass, while forty feet away the wall between her afternoon and ours held by a thread and a terrified boy with two identical clipboards.
She told me her husband had proposed to her at a bowling alley.
I told her that was beautiful, and I meant it, and I also kept one ear on the hall, counting footsteps, which is the whole of my life in a single sentence.
Behind me, Pasha was re-labeling two deliveries at a speed I have otherwise only seen in men defusing bombs, whispering wrong one, wrong one under his breath like a prayer, until the right van finally pulled away with the right cargo and nobody in the Hendricks family ever learned how close their afternoon had come to a different one.
Pasha found me after, gray-faced, still holding both clipboards like they might go off. “I had a system,” he said. “Blue for the front, white for the back.”
“Pasha, these are both white.”
He looked at them. He looked at me. “The printer ran out of blue.” I told him to go sit down before he filed us all into a federal prison.
Nobody thanked me. I’ve made my peace with that.
The best work I do leaves no fingerprints, which is a sentence that means something a little different depending on which of my two employers you ask.
Some nights I honestly couldn’t have said which of the two I was working for, and the not-knowing had quietly stopped feeling like a crisis and started feeling like the weather.
I was still wired in those days, out of habit and out of Danny, a recorder riding my ribs that hadn’t caught a usable word in weeks.
Mikhail hands me true things that mean nothing and false things I can’t tell from the true, and I carry all of it home to a man who, it was starting to look, might not need me to.
I called Vance from the alley behind Nevsky’s, which is the one place on that block with no cameras I don’t run myself.
“They lost a fourth,” I said. “A man named Pyotr. Didn’t come home a couple of nights ago.”
“Pyotr Volkov,” Vance said. “The dispatcher. Yeah, we’ve got that.”
I hadn’t said Volkov. I hadn’t said dispatcher. I’d handed him a first name and a fact, and he’d handed me back a surname and a job I never mentioned.
“How’d you have his last name before I gave it to you?” I kept my voice easy, the way you keep everything easy when the floor shifts a quarter inch under your feet and you don’t want anyone watching to see you adjust.
“It’s in the roster file, Nora. We’ve been mapping the Morozov org for a year.” He let a pause open, as easy as mine. “You’re not the only source I run in this city.”
“Since when?” I asked, and heard the small hunger in the question a moment too late, the part of me that needed to know whether I was being doubled or quietly replaced.
“Since always. You know the drill.”
I did know the drill. That was the problem. I knew it by heart, and what he’d just done wasn’t anywhere in it.
He’d meant the line to settle me. It did the opposite.
There’s always an innocent version. I’ve built my whole life out of innocent versions, and I know exactly how thin they wear.
There could be another asset. There could be a tap on a phone, or a cop somewhere doing patient, honest work.
Any of them could be true. I stood in that alley and believed none of them, and I couldn’t have told you the reason, only that a man a step ahead of your own reporting is getting it from somewhere, and every somewhere I could name was worse than the one before it.
I put it with the other things I’d promised to deal with once the world stopped moving.
The pile was getting tall. And there was a worse thought under the wrongness, the one I wouldn’t look at straight.
If Vance had another way into this house, then half the risks I’d taken were insurance the Bureau never needed.
I’d spent my whole career being indispensable, because it’s the only real leverage a woman in my position ever gets.
The idea that I might be redundant, that I’d maybe been redundant for months while I dressed the danger up as necessity, sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.
The club kitchen after close is the only warm room in that building that doesn’t want something from me.
I was at the steel counter eating cold pelmeni straight from the pan, because Baba Vera leaves a batch for whoever looks hungriest and tonight that was plainly me, when Mikhail came in for water and found me there with my guard down somewhere around my ankles.
“You keep late hours,” I said. It was rich, coming from the woman eating cold dumplings at his counter after midnight.
“The house is quieter once everyone in it has gone to sleep.” He didn’t sit.
“I do my best thinking in rooms other people have already left.” It was the closest thing to a confession I’d ever heard out of him, and he’d made it about furniture.
That’s his whole method. He hands you something true, wrapped in something that sounds like nothing, and by the time you’ve got it unwrapped he’s already moved on to the water pressure.
“I heard about Nevsky’s,” he said. “The Hendricks and the four a.m. arrival, an hour apart.”
“Handled,” I said. “Nobody met anybody they shouldn’t have.”
“I know. It’s why you still have a job.” He filled a glass at the tap, unhurried, a man who has never once been in a hurry to be anywhere.
“Pasha put a delivery tag on a living cousin at a viewing last year. The man walked out and hasn’t come back.
Not from fear. From offense. He mails a card every holiday to remind us that he is, as of this writing, not deceased. ”
And there it went.
It came up out of me before I could get a hand on it, the real one, the loud one, the laugh I’d kept locked down for six months because in the field a real laugh is a confession.
It rang off the steel and the tile and filled the whole room, and I heard exactly how big it was, and I reached on instinct to fold it back down where it lives.
He was watching me, not smiling, the way you watch a thing you’ve been trying to get a clean look at for a long time and have finally caught standing still in good light.
I’ve faked a hundred laughs on the job. He got the real one by accident, and looked at it like it was contraband he intended to keep.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Put it away.” He set the glass down. “You do that. You catch it and you fold it up and you file it somewhere no one can reach. Leave it out. It’s the only thing in this house that isn’t for sale.”
I stood there with a fork of cold dumpling and nothing to say, because he’d just described the one thing I do that I have never told a living soul I do, the folding, the filing, the careful daily labor of being smaller than I am.
He’d watched me do it and handed it back to me, gentle, like it was nothing, like he hadn’t just reached inside me and moved something that wasn’t his to touch.
I put my guard back up. It came slower than it used to.
He didn’t push. He drank his water, said goodnight, and left me alone with a cooling pan and the ringing quiet where the laugh had been.
I stood there a long while, understanding that I’d just given a target something I have never once given a friend, and that he’d known enough about me to ask for it by name.
That night, in the apartment the Bureau rents and doesn’t own, I did the thing I’ve done every night for six months to keep myself level. I counted.
The count held the days left in the operation, and the days until I hand Vance something that sticks, and Danny walks free, and I vanish into a life where nobody watches me eat, no one leaves me food in a warm pan, and I owe a man like Mikhail Morozov exactly nothing.
The number wouldn’t come.
I went looking for it, the little countdown I’d run every night since I first walked into the Cygnet, the clock that told me this was temporary, that I was a tourist here, that these people were a file and not a life.
It wasn’t there. Somewhere in the last few weeks I’d stopped winding it, and I hadn’t even noticed it stop.
“I stopped counting the days,” I said out loud, to the dark, just to feel the weight of the words in my mouth.
It should have scared me more than it did.