Chapter 18
NORA
Aman who has ordered people killed over a phone call spikes a fever like a toddler, the whole thing arriving at once, and he denies it's happening right up until he can't stand.
I find out because Dima finds me in the kitchen late at night, and Dima has stopped being funny. He only goes quiet like this when something is really wrong.
"He's sick," Dima says. "He won't say it. He's been in his study since four pretending the room is cold. It's not cold. I checked the thing on the wall."
"The thermostat."
"The thermostat. It says seventy-two. He's wearing a coat." Dima rubs the back of his neck, and under all the noise he usually carries he looks about nineteen. "He doesn't get sick. In thirty-three years I've seen him sick maybe twice. Both times something was very wrong."
I go down the hall, open the study door without knocking, because I learned in the first month that knocking gives him time to arrange his face, and I want the real one.
He's at the desk with a coat on. His color's gone bad, gray under the tan, and there's sweat at his hairline he hasn't wiped because wiping it would mean admitting it's there. He looks up at me with eyes that are working a half-second slow.
"I'm fine," he says.
"You're gray."
"It's the light."
"Isaak, it's the same light that's been in here for a year.
" I cross the room and put the back of my hand against his forehead before he can dodge.
He's burning, the kind of hot you feel through your own skin like a stove left on.
"You're cooking. How long have you been sitting here telling yourself it's the room? "
"I have a call at eleven."
"You have a fever of about 103, plus a wife who's going to win this." I take the coat by the collar. "Up. Bed. Now, or I get Dima. You know he'll carry you and narrate it."
He goes, which tells me everything. He lets me steer him down the hall with a hand flat on his back. The heat coming off him scares me more than I let my face show, and halfway there his weight leans into me by an inch he'd never allow if he were well.
"You're enjoying this," he says, hoarse.
"I'm enjoying you doing what I say for once. It's a different thing."
I call Dr. Anand because Dima won't stop hovering, and because 103 is a real number.
She comes within the hour, unbothered, in jeans, a doctor who's been called to this house at worse hours for worse reasons and stopped being impressed by any of it.
She's brisk and dry. She treats the pakhan of the LA Bratva exactly like a patient, which I've never seen anyone do.
"Flu," she says, after the thermometer, the light in his eyes, a few questions he answers in single words.
"The real one, not the word people use for a cold.
It's going around. He'll be wretched for a day, maybe two, then fine.
" She packs her bag. "Fluids. Rest. He won't do either, so that's your job.
" She looks at me a beat longer than the sentence needs.
"You holding up all right? You look a little run-down yourself. "
"I'm fine. Long week."
"Mm." She doesn't push it. She tells me what to watch for, what number means call her again, and she lets herself out like she was never here. The look she gave me sticks, but I leave it alone, because the man in the bed is the emergency tonight.
He's bad through the night.
Not dangerous-bad, Anand was right, but miserable, shaking under three blankets and then throwing them off, his body fighting something it isn't used to losing to.
I sit on the edge of the bed and make him drink water in small sips he resents.
Somewhere past two he stops being careful, the fever burning the guard right out of him, and he talks.
"There was a winter," he says, eyes shut, "after the money went. Before the money came back. Dima was small. I gave him my share so he'd stop crying from hunger and I told him I wasn't hungry." A long pause, his throat working. "I was so hungry, Nora."
"I know," I say, even though I didn't, even though my chest is doing something I'm going to deal with later.
"Nobody fed me." His voice has gone to a place it doesn't go when he's well, flat and young. "I fed him. That's the arrangement. I feed people. People don't feed me."
"I fed you a sandwich," I say. "A few weeks ago. You ate it."
His eyes open, fever-bright, finding me in the dark. "You did."
"So that's not true anymore. The arrangement." I push the damp hair off his forehead, and he lets me, too sick to stop it. "Drink your water. Stop saying sad things at me at two in the morning, it's not fair, I can't be funny back when you're this pathetic."
The corner of his mouth moves, not all the way, the most he can manage sick. "There she is."
"Drink."
He drinks. He sleeps, finally, hard. I sit in the chair by the bed instead of going to my own room. I watch a man who makes grown soldiers go quiet when he enters a room breathe like a kid with the flu. I think about a winter, a boy giving away his food, and I don't sleep much either.
Dima's in the kitchen when I come out at dawn for coffee, sitting at the island in the dark, not eating for once.
"He sleeping?" he says.
"Finally. Fever broke around four." I start the coffee, then remember I can't stand the smell of it lately, and make tea instead, blaming the week. "He'll be unbearable by noon. He always is when his body lets him down, he takes it personally."
"He told you about the winter." Dima says it like he already knows. "He only does that sick. The food thing."
"He gave you his share." I sit across from him. "He told me he wasn't hungry."
"He was so hungry." Dima turns a spoon over, not looking at me.
The noise that's usually all over him has gone quiet and old.
"I was a kid. I believed him for years. Big brother's just not hungry.
It took me until I was grown to understand what he did, and by then he'd built the whole rest of himself out of it, the never-needing, the everyone-has-a-price.
" He finally looks up. "Nobody fed him back, Nora.
Not once. Not our mother, God rest her selfish soul, not a single person in forty years. "
"I fed him a sandwich," I say. "He looked at it like it was a trap."
"Of course he did." Something cracks open in Dima's face, hope he's trying not to show me because showing it might jinx it.
"Keep doing it. Whatever you're doing. He came out here happy and I made fun of him for it.
But I drove home last night, couldn't sleep either, because I have spent my whole life waiting for one person to feed my brother and mean it.
" He clears his throat, hard, and the clown comes back down over it like a shutter.
"Anyway. He's still a disaster. The bowl cut was worse than I described. "
"I want pictures."
"Oh, there are pictures."
By the next afternoon the fever's broken and he's furious about all of it.
I find him in the worst possible place, which is the pool.
The estate pool is the long lap kind, glass-tiled, set on the terrace where the December sun comes off the water in hard white shards.
He is doing laps. A man who twelve hours ago couldn't hold down water is cutting the pool end to end like he's being chased, because Isaak Radulov doesn't rest, he overrides, and a body that scared him by failing has to be punished back into line.
The dogs are at the pool's edge losing their minds, Borscht pacing the whole length tracking him, Pelmeni barking at the splash like it's a personal insult. The air smells of chlorine and hot stone. Waffle is asleep on a folded towel in the one strip of shade, supervising nothing.
I should make him stop. I came out here to make him stop.
Then he reaches the near end and stands up out of the water. I forget the speech.
He comes up the steps with the water sheeting off him, and the December light catches every part of it.
The breadth of his back as he turns, the long muscles working under wet skin, the water running down the groove of his spine and off the low cut of his hips.
There's the scar I know now, the old one low on his ribs, paler than the skin around it, slick and shining with pool water.
His forearms when he pushes his hair back, the veins standing up under the wet, the tan going lighter where the sun doesn't reach. He's breathing hard, his chest still going. A drop runs off his chin, down the center of his chest, and I track the whole way of it like it owes me money.
I have a husband who looks like this and I am still, on some days, pretending I married him for the ranch.
"You're staring," he says, not turning around, reaching for a towel.
"You're recovering from the flu by drowning yourself. I'm supervising."
"I'm fine."
"You said that yesterday with a coat on at seventy-two degrees." I toss him the other towel because the dogs have claimed his. "How was the swim? Murder anybody?"
"Lev. A meeting this morning." He scrubs the towel over his head, and now he does turn.
The front of him is worse than the back.
His chest, the flat of his stomach, the wet trunks low on his hips with the drawstring gone loose.
I keep my eyes on his face. It takes conscious effort.
I resent him for it. "A man owes us money and would rather explain than pay.
I came out here so I wouldn't drive to Glendale and explain it back to him. "
"So the pool is anger management."
"The pool is cheaper than the alternative." He drops onto a lounger, finally still, the fever-flush and the swim-flush hard to tell apart. "Lev wanted to talk about your father instead."
The licorice goes still in my hand. We don't talk about my father, Isaak and I. It's the one room in the house we both keep locked.
"What about my father?" I say, careful.
"Lev's been turning the case over. The way it was done." He's watching me close now, the way he watches a thing he's not sure he should be saying, which means he's decided to say it anyway. "He doesn't think it was us. Bratva, I mean. Any of the families."
"You've told me that. You've said it since the porch."
"I have. Lev saying it's different. Lev doesn't say things to make me feel better, he's never tried, it would never occur to him." He works the towel over one arm. "He looked at how your father was found. The scene. He says it's wrong for us. Too arranged."
He doesn't stop watching my face while he says the rest. "A man in our work leaves a thing like that plain, a message anyone can read, or he leaves nothing at all.
He doesn't dress it up as a robbery and then dress the robbery up as a message.
That's somebody who learned how a killing looks off a screen, not from doing it.
His exact words were, it's amateur work. Tidy. Like the books at the ranch."
The chlorine, the hot stone, the dogs all go very far away.
That phrase. The same one my husband used on his terrace about Brandon's missing ten million, the night Dima sat there with a drink and called it tidy, too tidy, learned off a screen. I am not supposed to have heard that. I heard it through a cracked door I was pretending to be asleep behind.
Tidy. Like the books at the ranch. Twice now, two different men, the same three words about two different crimes. The only thread between them is a ranch my father ran and a man who once promised to modernize it.
I keep my face still, the rancher's-daughter face, the one that doesn't let a buyer see the bottom drop out.
"Huh," I say.
"It's nothing yet." Isaak's watching me too closely.
"Lev gets ideas. Most of them are about gold.
" He doesn't believe it's nothing, I can hear that he doesn't. He's giving me the soft version because I've gone somewhere behind my eyes and he can see it.
"Nora. Whoever did it, it wasn't mine. That's the only part I needed you to have. "
"I know." And I do know, I've known for a while, it's the one thing about this marriage I stopped doubting somewhere around a kill-pen mare. "I believe you."
It comes out simpler than I mean it to, and he takes it simple. For a second the man forgets to be sick or angry or guarded. He just looks at me like I've handed him something he can't afford and can't give back.
"Say that again," he says, low, the fever-rough still in it.
"Don't get weird. You're convalescent." I stand, because if I stay on that lounger I'm going to put my hands on him in ways Dr. Anand hasn't approved and we'll both have to explain ourselves.
"Inside. Drink something that isn't pool water.
I'll make soup. You'll eat it, because the arrangement changed and you don't get a vote. "
He gets up. He follows me in, dripping, the dogs streaming after both of us. At the door he stops, like there's a thing he wants to say, a wall between him and saying it.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing." He looks at me a beat too long. "Thank you. For the night. The water. The coat thing." He says it like each word costs him a tooth. "I don't know how to be on this side of it."
"I know you don't." I hold the door. "That's why I'm not going anywhere. Now move, you're dripping on the good floor, and I am not explaining to Vera why the marble's wet."
He moves. But I catch it, the thing that crosses his face before he hides it.
It isn't gratitude. It's the look of a man who'd hand me his whole life if I asked.
He won't say so. He's waiting for me to say it first. I carry it inside with the words I'm not supposed to know, sitting cold in my chest beside it.