36. Sacha
SACHA
For three years I ran from what I am. Kos put a photograph of her in my hands and reminded me. Then he found out why people used to be afraid of that.
I got back to the camp a little after eight with the cold of her side of that bed still on my hands. I put the truck in the shed and did not look at the passenger seat.
Tank came out, did his business at the tree line, came back, and lay down in the doorway with his nose pointed at the road. He has done that since she left it. I do not intend to write about the dog again.
The telephone rang at eleven minutes past eleven.
It was not my sat-phone. It was the one I took off the younger of the two men who came through Gerald. It had lived in my coat for three days doing nothing at all, and it went off on that table like a fire alarm in a church.
It rang twice more while I looked at it. There is only one reason a dead man's telephone rings.
"You are calling a dead man's telephone."
"Good morning, and I am sorry about the hour.
" It was the Fisherman. Friendly, unhurried, exactly the way he is in a diner.
"I am going to hand you to somebody. Before I do, I want to tell you something, and it is not a courtesy to you but a courtesy to me.
She is not hurt. She fought and she lost and nobody laid a hand on her afterward, and if that changes I will telephone you myself. Do you understand what I am saying?"
"I understand that you want to be alive next week."
"That is precisely right," he said, without any offense in it at all, and then there was a shuffle and a door and a different quality of air.
I have never heard Dragan Kos speak before.
I burned his war down and cost him his brother and I have never once heard the man's voice.
It is quiet and it is courteous. He has the accent of an educated man from a place that no longer exists on any map, and he speaks slowly, the way people do when they have never once in their lives been interrupted.
"Aleksandr," he said. "You have made me travel."
"You have my attention."
"I do. That has taken three years and a considerable amount of money, so you will forgive me if I take a moment over it.
" A chair moved somewhere. "I want to be clear at the beginning that this is not about the drive.
I would like it back and I will take it, and it is not why I am sitting in this cold building.
You cost me Mikhail. Do you remember his name, or have there been so many that they blur? "
"His name was Mikhail Kos and he was thirty-four years old. He was in the doorway of a building on the east side and he had a telephone in his hand and not a weapon, and I have never once said otherwise to anybody."
That silenced him for a moment. I had not intended it as a kindness and it landed as one, which tells you something about the two of us.
"Then we are not going to waste the afternoon on it," Kos said. "I have your woman. She is in a chair in a warm room and she is being fed. In a moment you will receive a photograph, and I want you to look at it properly before we discuss anything, so I will wait."
The phone buzzed against my ear.
The screen came away from my ear, and everything in that room stopped.
She was sitting on a folding chair with her coat off and her hands loose in her lap, and there was a paper sack on the floor beside her boot with the top folded over twice.
It was Marge's sack. Her hair was down. There was a mark under her left eye that would be black by evening and a graze along the back of one hand.
Her chin was up. She was not crying, and she was not looking into the lens.
She was looking one degree left of the lens, at the window.
I have watched that woman work for a month.
Once I saw her set a camera on a frozen tree and then move eight inches sideways so a single branch fell where she wanted it.
She does not look off. She never looks off.
If Lily Chen is in front of a lens and her eyes go somewhere else, it is because she has decided that what is out that window is the most important object in the photograph.
So I looked at the window.
It was tall, with a divided upper sash of the kind nobody has fitted since the fifties. Behind the glass, out of focus and gray, lay a mile and a half of open ice with a black line of shore on the far side.
I know that window. I stood in that room three days ago with my glove on the sill, working out which of those panes a man would shoot through.
They had her in the lodge on the far shore.
So I sat down on the edge of that bunk with a dead man's telephone in my hand and let the whole of it go through me.
I have been carrying Danny in a doorway for three years.
I have carried a driver's wife and a boy on a stairwell and everybody else who stood too near me on the wrong afternoon.
I have called that a conscience. It has made me careful and quiet and useless.
And here it was again, exactly as promised. There was another innocent sitting in a chair on account of me. Two of them, if we are being accurate, and we are going to be accurate from here on.
Then a thing happened that I have turned over many times since, and I am going to try to put it down honestly.
The guilt did not go away. It changed direction.
For three years that weight had been sitting on my chest holding me still.
In that shack it got up off my chest and went into my hands, and it stopped being a thing that had happened to me and became a thing I was going to use.
Every name I have carried, every face, all of it went into the same place and came out with a temperature on it.
I have not felt like that since I was twenty-six years old and it very nearly killed me. Three years of my life have gone into making sure I would never feel it again.
I let myself have it. That is the whole of my confession. I stood up and let the worst thing in me come up out of the ground where I had put it. I was not frightened of it and I did not apologize for it. The only thought in my head was that it had finally turned useful.
"Have you looked?" Kos said in my ear.
"It is in front of me."
"Then these are the terms. You will come out onto that lake at dusk, alone, on foot, with nothing on you.
You will come slowly and you will come in the open and I will be able to see you the entire way.
When you reach the middle I will bring her out, and you and I will talk about the drive, and afterward we will see. "
"You will not touch her."
"Not once, and not at all." He sounded almost hurt.
"You misunderstand what I want. I want you standing in front of me on that ice with nothing in your hands.
I want you to watch what happens next, and I want you to have the whole afternoon to think about it first. That is why I have given you until dark.
I am giving you six hours to be afraid, and it is more than you gave me. "
"That is fair."
"You surprise me."
"I have spent three years agreeing with you about what I am," I said. "It is the only subject the two of us have never disagreed on."
There was a pause on that line.
"The Fisherman tells me there are two of her to trade for," Kos said.
I put my thumb on the edge of that table until the nail went white.
"She is lying to protect herself," I said. "She is a clever woman and she has read your file better than your own men have."
"She may be. It is not important." A shrug came down the line, and this is the man, entirely. "Whatever she is carrying and whatever she is not, she is warm, and I have all afternoon."
"At dark, then," I said. "On the ice, and I will come alone."
"You will come on foot, and you will come in the open."
"You have my word."
I hung up on Dragan Kos, and then I gave myself exactly one minute with my hands flat on that table and my eyes shut, and I used it to be a man with something to lose.
Then I called Alexei.
"You are up early," he said.
"They have her."
Everything in his voice changed. I have known that man eleven years and I have heard him afraid twice, and this was the second one.
"Say it properly."
"They took her out of Cutter's Hollow this morning. Kos has her in the lodge across the water and he has put me on the ice at dusk, alone, on foot, in the open. I have six hours and I have already decided what I am going to do with them."
"Sacha, listen to me. Dmitri has been sitting in a motel outside Duluth for three days with four men and two cars, because you told him to keep off your ground until you called. I can have them moving in fifteen minutes. That is still four hours, and five if the weather turns on the county."
"Four hours is after dark."
"Then put the rest of it in words, because I am not going to guess at this and then live with the guess."
This is the sentence I have been walking away from for three years, and it came out of me in a deer camp with my coat already half on.
"I am done going to ground," I said. "Tell Nikolai.
I am not moving again, I am not changing another name, and I am not spending one more winter making myself small enough to survive.
This ends tonight, on my water, with my hands.
I am asking the family for men, and if the answer is no I am going anyway, and I want that part said out loud so nobody has to be embarrassed later. "
There was a silence on that line about two seconds long.
"Nikolai said yes to you three days ago and he has not changed his mind," Alexei said. "You did not have to ask twice. You have never once had to ask twice." Then, away from the phone, in the other language, he said four words, and I heard a chair go over.
The next voice was Dmitri. He is the size of a door and he has the enthusiasm of a very large child.
"Sasha, it is me." He has called me that since I was nineteen and I have never been able to stop him. "We are coming, and we are four hours out, maybe less. I will bring the good bag."
"Bring the good bag."
"I am bringing the good bag." He sounded delighted about it. "Do not start without me."
"I am going to start without you."
"He is going to start without me," Dmitri reported to the room, sadly.
Alexei came back on with his mouth close to the receiver.
"I want it noted," he said, "for whatever record exists of any of this, that my instruction to you was to lie quiet, touch nothing, and be nobody at all.
It held for three weeks. I now have five men in two vehicles driving to a frozen lake in the north woods because you have started a war over a travel nurse. "
"Yes, all of that is true," I said, opening the ammunition can with the phone under my jaw. "Drive faster."
Then I hung up and went to work.
The rest of it goes down plainly, because the plainness is the point. There was no ceremony to it. A man does not become anything at a moment. He simply stops declining to be it.
I dug the drive out of the ground. It has been under a flat rock at the base of a dead birch four hundred yards behind that shack for three winters, in a length of pipe with the ends waxed, and it came up dry.
Two years of that man's business in his own careful hand, every port and every buyer and every man who would take him apart in a room he does not control if his name ever came out of it.
At breakfast it had been my life expectancy. By noon it was ammunition.
The rifle came apart on that table and went back together, and I did not have to watch my hands do it.
I loaded five magazines and taped two of them together the ugly way, which I have not done since a stairwell in another country.
I took the boy's tobacco tin and turned it into something that does not need writing down, and it went into the left pocket of my coat.
The snowshoes went on the truck, with the coil of line and the chisel and the pole. So did the small bag I have not opened in three years, which holds the tools of my actual trade, and not one of them is a firearm.
I wrote out a page of what I know about the lodge and burned it after I had it by heart.
There is the deck that faces my slope. There is the boathouse under it, with a water door nobody has turned a key in since the summer people went home.
And there is the rifle I left in those rafters in oilcloth three days ago, because I was certain a professional would choose that building.
I have been preparing that ground for a man who has never seen it. He has walked into it and sat down in the one building I have already been inside.
The springs run the whole length of that east shore, and there is a seam out there no stranger alive can read. Kos has ordered me onto that lake in the open, where he can watch me the entire way.
He has no idea what he has asked for.
At two o'clock I put water down for the dog, let him out one more time, and shut him in the shack with the bar across the door. He did not like it, and he made his opinion known through two inches of pine.
"You have got a job," I told him, which is what she told him. "Be here."
Then I stood in the yard with the truck running and did the last thing, which was to look at the photograph one more time. I did not look at her face. I looked at her eyes, going one degree left, at a window she had decided was the most important object in the room.
She had put my map into my hand from inside a locked building with a stranger's camera in her face. She had done it in the four seconds available to her, with no guarantee that I would ever look at the thing properly.
That woman has never once been rescued in her life. She keeps trying to hand people the tools to do it.
For three years I ran from what I am. Kos has just reminded me exactly what that is. So I stopped running, picked up the tools I swore I would never touch again, and went to work. He wanted the fixer. He was about to get him.