Chapter 26
Magda studied the address book, a task that irritated her.
She had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet but had gotten used to the alphabet used for English.
Still, she found reading American handwriting a chore, because everybody seemed to write it differently and carelessly.
She took her time until she could decipher the personal style of Jacob Reinert.
Under the W section, there was no entry for Whitefield.
The man who lived here didn’t need the address, because he lived next to her.
He apparently kept her mail for her, and he didn’t need the house number.
He could look at it from his front porch.
If he’d needed to write something he could leave it with the envelopes he was holding for her.
She supposed he didn’t really need her phone number either, but most people would have written it down anyway.
She leafed through the other pages rather than putting the address book back right away.
There were many people whose names began with S, but the middle of the alphabet was very large in his book.
The O section had lots of people who were Irish—O’Connor, O’Manion, O’Day, O’Malley—and others who were not—Olson, Odette, Offerman, Osherovsky.
But it was the M section that was the thickest. It had Moore, Monroe, Montrose, Mervin, Manke, Michaels, March, Melman, Marx, Marsh, and the flood of Mc and Mac names—McNalley, Mary and Bob; MacIlhenny, Ray and Anne; MacNamara, Sean; McKinney, Karen; McKinley, Dave and Ruth; McKinnon, Carey; McGraw, Ted and Lana; McHale, Don and Nan; and on and on.
She looked for the sort of thing that people with secrets sometimes did: addresses or phone numbers with no name, or symbols or signs on any page, but there were none.
She handed the book to Dmitri and said, “I don’t see anything useful.
You give it a try, and then put it back on this shelf. ”
She was getting tense. What she had learned by coming into this house was that the woman who was calling herself Jane Whitefield was still actively using her house, the place where Magda and Oleg Porchen and the others had caught her a few years ago, and that her neighbor, maybe all her neighbors, were helping her.
She was clearly operating as she had been before, which was a surprising mistake.
Could she have thought that nobody had recovered from her attempt to poison them all?
It didn’t matter. Magda would find out everything Jane Whitefield had been thinking eventually.
But now Magda had a problem. Jane Whitefield was aware they had been waiting for her in her house. She wasn’t going to come walking in to be captured again. She looked around her at her three remaining men.
“Time to go back to her house,” she called out. “Put everything back where you found it.”
She said to Mikhail, “When we’re all out, make sure you leave the back door locked.”
She went back to Jane Whitefield’s house and sat at the kitchen table. The men came in and joined her. She said, “She’s not going to come back while we’re here.”
“What are we going to do?” Dmitri asked.
She said, “We should clean this house, so after we have her, the police don’t find our fingerprints and DNA all over her house. It could take a day or two, so we might as well start while it’s still daylight. We’ll do shifts, with one man watching the street while the rest of us work.”
“Where are we going after this?”
“When Brian Finlay came here, he didn’t know her, or know very much about her. Now he’s been with her for days. He knows what she does for her customers. He’s gone, but he told me the name of the lawyer who sent him to her. She had told him that Jane Whitefield was an old friend.”
They went to work. They had all been soldiers or prisoners in Russia, so they weren’t at a loss when somebody told them to clean.
They got rags and buckets and made sure every surface got rubbed hard, every floor vacuumed and mopped, every window washed, every towel, sheet, or blanket washed, dried, folded, and put away.
A small house was not much of a chore for their combined physical energy.
Magda made sure she was the last one to take the more restful job of lookout, patrolling the house from window to window.
Now and then during her shift as lookout, she passed by one of the others scrubbing some surface.
She was aware that they were probably under the impression that because she was a woman, she was acting out a feminine urge for domestic order.
Magda only cared about not getting arrested.
While she had been keeping watch, she had been thinking about something else.
She’d been thinking about torture and the vulnerability of the human body, and the way the prisoner’s mind worked on the side of the torturer to make the treatment more effective.
Whatever the torturer did first was a promise that other, increasingly terrible things were coming, a proof that the torturer was not reluctant to do worse.
The prisoner’s mind would be conducting a survey of his own body, listing the places where the next damage might be done.
Eyes? Teeth? Genitals? Fingers? Always, the deepest instincts of the human animal to preserve itself intact would be at work.
The deepest part of the mind feared that something would be taken from it permanently—power, capability, mobility, hope.
Karen Alvarez was the lawyer’s name. Magda had some time to think of how she would proceed. It would be like a little play—show her rather than tell her the consequences of resisting. Every no would have a cost, and the price would keep going up.