37. Lily
LILY
Rule one of being kidnapped, it turns out, is the same as rule one of nursing. Stay calm, read the room, and never let them see you counting the exits.
They took me across the ice in a snowmobile with a sled behind it. That meant the lodge had no road worth using, and it was the first useful thing I learned all day. I filed it under the same heading as everything else that afternoon. Nobody drives out of here in a hurry.
The building came up out of the gray at about two hundred yards.
It was one of those enormous shuttered places the money used to build up here before the money went somewhere warmer.
Peeled log and river stone, a deck on the lake side you could hold a wedding on, and thirty windows with the shutters still up for winter.
One plume of woodsmoke stood off the chimney.
Somewhere behind the building a generator ran with the particular cough of a machine nobody has serviced in four years.
And across a mile and a half of white, on the other side of all that ice, there was a dark rim of timber with one notch cut into it where a ridge road comes down.
I knew that notch. I'd photographed it eleven days earlier from the other end.
They put me in a chair in the great room. Before the fear had even finished arriving, I did the one thing that was going to matter.
I looked for the biggest window.
There was a wall of them on the lake side.
The one that mattered was tall and old, with the top sash divided into little panes, and it framed the far shore as though somebody had built the whole house around that view.
The man with the scar through his eyebrow came at me with a telephone and told me to sit still and look at the camera.
So I sat still and put my chin up, and at the last half second I let my eyes go one degree to the left.
That's all I had. Four seconds and eight inches of eye movement, and a bet on a man who once stood in the snow while I explained that most people photograph a subject and forget to read the rest of the glass.
Then I sat in that chair with my hands in my lap and started counting.
This is what I had by dark.
There were five men in that house and Kos.
Two worked the deck in rotation. One sat in the kitchen with the radio.
One slept in a bunk room off the hall and came on at six.
Then there was the Fisherman, who didn't rotate and didn't sit down and never once put his coffee where a man could reach across and take it.
Four of the five were bored. Boredom is a tool.
There were three doors. They came and went through the front one.
The kitchen service door had been barred with a broom handle by somebody who didn't understand doors.
A set of glass ones opened onto the deck.
The stairs on the lake side went down to a boathouse, and the boathouse had a door on the water.
Nobody went near it all day. There was a padlock on the inside of it and no key anywhere I could see, and I made a note of that in the place where I keep things.
The generator was outside the kitchen and it ran the lights and one space heater and nothing else. The house telephone was dead. There was one satellite unit on the table by the fire and Kos kept it under his own hand.
I had a chair, a coat, and a paper sack from a diner.
Dragan Kos came in a little after three with the cold on his shoulders. I want to get him down accurately. I've had him wrong in my own head ever since, and the wrongness does him a favor he never earned.
He is not big. He is not loud. He is about sixty, in a good gray sweater and a scarf he had folded rather than tied, with a face like a retired professor of something difficult. When he came into that room, every man in it stopped what he was doing and became a slightly better version of himself.
He crossed to the fire and warmed his hands, and then he turned around and studied me the way a buyer studies a picture in a house he's considering.
"Miss Chen," he said. "Nobody has offered you anything."
"Somebody offered me a needle this morning."
"That was necessary. This is not." He said something over his shoulder and one of them went out and returned with a bottle and two glasses on a tray, actual crystal, out of a shuttered summer house in the middle of a frozen lake.
He poured two and held one out to me. "It is a Barolo, and it has been in that cellar since before any of this began, and it will be vinegar in another two winters. Somebody may as well have it."
I looked at that glass for slightly too long.
What went through my head took about a second and a half, and none of it showed on my face, because my face has been trained by six hundred conversations with families in corridors.
I was seventeen days along. One glass would very likely do nothing at all, and I know the data better than he does, and I wasn't going to take one sip of anything in that house that would make me stupider or slower.
And under all of it sat one fact, like a hand cupped over a candle.
The moment I said the word pregnant out loud in that room, I would stop being a woman in a chair and become a mechanism with two hostages in it.
He had it from the Fisherman already. I knew he had it. A thing a professional reports and a thing a woman confirms with her own mouth are not the same object, and I had no intention of handing him the second one.
"I'll pass, thank you," I said.
"You do not drink?"
"Under a different roof I would have taken the glass out of your hand."
He looked at me for a moment. Then he set the glass down on the table beside me, within reach. A certain kind of man always leaves it inside your arm's length. He took the other one for himself.
"Fate is a discipline," he said, settling into a chair like a man beginning a lecture he has given before.
"People think it means a thing that will happen.
It is not. It is the arithmetic of what has already happened, arriving.
Everything that is going to occur on that ice tonight was decided three years ago in a warehouse on the wrong side of a city you have never seen, and neither you nor I can move any part of it.
I find that restful. Most people find it unbearable. "
There was a pause. That is where the audience normally says something admiring.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"You may ask me anything you like. It costs me nothing to answer you."
"Did the taxidermy come with the place, or is that a personal choice?"
He stopped with the glass halfway to his mouth.
There were seven mounted heads on that wall and a stuffed lynx on the mantel with one glass eye aimed at the ceiling. I'd been staring at that lynx on and off for four hours. Nothing else in that house looked worse off than I did.
"I have rented the building," he said.
"That is a relief. This whole place has serious serial killer Airbnb energy, and I was starting to worry about you."
"What is an Airbnb?"
"It is where a stranger rents you a house with too many antlers in it and then leaves a laminated card about the recycling."
Dragan Kos looked at me. Nobody in that room breathed. The Fisherman, over by the door, developed a sudden interest in the floor, and Kos, who had walked in with his whole afternoon written out, discovered that his audience hadn't read any of it.
"You are not what I was told," he said at last.
"You should ask for a refund on that too."
I should be honest about why I did that, since it reads like courage and it wasn't. Every second that man spent being surprised by me was a second he wasn't doing the thing he had come to do.
A bored guard forgets you. An interested principal watches you.
In a house where somebody eventually has to decide what to do with the woman in the chair, I would far rather be watched than forgotten.
There's also this, and my mother said it first. A person can be frightened and rude at the same moment, and it's one of the few free things left in the world.
He recovered. Men of that kind always recover.
"Let me tell you what is going to happen," he said, "because you are going to be part of it, and I dislike people being unprepared."
"This is the most courteous anybody has been to me all day, and I have been awake since five."
"Three years ago your man burned a deal of mine and cost me two years of work and more money than I care to say out loud.
That is business. I have lost more to weather.
" He turned the glass by its stem. "He also cost me my brother.
Mikhail was in a doorway holding nothing more dangerous than a telephone, and he had no part in any of it. That is not business."
"I know what happened in that doorway."
"You know a version of it." He didn't raise his voice, and something turned over behind his eyes.
"Then he will have mentioned the boy standing at my brother's shoulder.
Twenty years old, no part of any of it, employed to carry boxes up a stair.
" He said it gently, and the gentleness was the worst of it.
"Your man could not reach him in time. He has carried that boy for three years like a stone sewn into the lining of his coat.
I learned of it the month it happened, and I have been sitting with it ever since, the way a man sits with something he is saving. "
The fire popped. Nobody in that room said anything at all.
"So I am not going to kill him tonight," Kos said.
"I am going to bring you out onto that ice in front of him.
And I am going to let him understand, all the way down, that it is happening again, and that it is happening because of what he is, and that his hands are as useless now as they were then. Then we will see what is left of him."
He drank some of his wine.
"After that," he said, "he can have whatever he wants. He can have the drive back or he can have a bullet. It will not matter to him by then. That is what the evening is for."