22
Lev
The holding room smells like bleach and old concrete. It’s going to be a long night.
Boris starts with names. He works through the list with the patience of a man who has done this many times and knows that silence makes people talk.
I don’t make him wait.
Every name he asks for, I give him. Holding back now would be stupid, and I didn’t walk through those gates to trip at the finish line.
He asks about the Tverskaya distribution chain and I lay it out for him. He asks about the dock supervisor in Saratov and I give him the name, the number, and four years of payroll history. When he moves to the Cyprus accounts, I do the same, including the holding company registered in Astrakhan and the clerk in Gennady’s office who cycles the manifests every six weeks to keep the paper trail fractured.
Boris writes it all down, and every forty minutes he circles back to certain names to see if my answers change. They don’t.
What I can’t shut off is her. Polina is somewhere in this building, and I have no idea where. I know what her face looked like when Boris took my arm. She didn’t reach for me. Not in front of them. That’s what I tell myself to get through this.
The guilt comes in pieces, slipping between Boris’s questions and settling over every answer I give. I set the terms she’s been living under the moment I told Ruslan to take me to her hospital. Every choice she made, she made with less information than I had. She thought we were standing on equal ground, and I let her believe it because the truth would have cost me too much.
The only reason she’s in this compound tonight is because I was a coward about the one part that mattered most. I’ll carry that for the rest of my life, however long that is.
“The Kazan facility,” Boris says. “Walk me through it.”
I give him all four floors, the security rotation, the two men running overnight, the false wall on the second level hiding the real inventory records, the contractor who built it, and the reason he’ll never repeat that job for anyone.
Boris doesn’t react, which means either he already knew or he’s very good at pretending he did. Either way, it doesn’t change what I give him.
When he moves to the financial architecture of my father’s organization, I spend the next hour walking him through the shell entities, the layering that buries ownership behind five intermediaries, and the two banks in Georgia that process settlement. I give him everything.
There’s nothing left for them to find.
Boris circles back. “Gennady. You said he directs the Moscow push. Who does he report to?”
“My father, but never in writing.”
“And your brother?”
“Frol signs the quarterly financials, but he doesn’t know what he’s authorizing. My father keeps him clean on purpose. Frol is the face. You don’t put dirt on the face.”
Boris makes a note and keeps going.
Tony comes in during the fifth hour and doesn’t sit. He drops a folder on the table, opens it to a page, and gives me the flat look of a man who doesn’t offer anything until he has to. “The Volga shipping routes. We cross-referenced what you gave us with port authority records going back eighteen months.”
Boris sets his pen down.
“They match,” Tony concedes. “Down to the rotation windows.”
He turns to the next page, and I give him the account numbers before he asks. He verifies two on his phone and keeps writing. Something in the room has shifted. I can feel it in the way Boris watches Tony. They’ve moved past verification into something more active, which means what I gave them is holding up.
Tony gives Boris a short nod and walks out without another word to me.
Boris asks two more questions, closes his folder, and stands. He doesn’t tell me what conclusion he’s reached. He just leaves. The door shuts behind him, and the room goes quiet.
All I can think about is Polina.
Fuck.
I don’t know what Dmitri said to her once that office door closed, but I know what he’s capable of. His disappointment will cut deeper than his anger. Polina knows how to stand against anger. Disappointment from someone she loves is different.
