Maxim took that personally.
Good.
We work through the list together over ten days. Some conversations. Some negotiations that go the way negotiations go when one party has nothing to offer and knows it. By the eleventh day, Pavel brings me the final confirmation, and I read it, sign off on it, and close the file.
On the twelfth day, my phone rings. A man named Ivanov, who runs a mid-level operation out of the northern district and has been carefully neutral in every conflict I’ve had for the past decade. He doesn’t call me. We have an understanding that doesn’t require phone calls.
He’s calling now.
“I heard about the Malikov situation,” he says.
“Did you?”
“I heard it was thorough.”
“It was.”
A pause. “I wanted to personally convey that no one in my network had any involvement.”
“I know that, Ivanov.”
“Good. I just wanted it said directly.”
“Appreciated.”
He hangs up.
Three more calls come in over the following two days. Different men, different operations, same essential message delivered in different words. I take each call and say very little and let the silence do the work. By the end of the week, the silence has said everything that needs saying.
No one touches my family.
That’s the message. It doesn’t need to be repeated.
Maxim comes to dinner on the Friday after the last call. He sits across from the twins and lets Mila explain at length why the flower arrangement on the table is superior to last week’s flower arrangement and listens with the expression of a man genuinely trying to understand the difference between marigolds and dahlias.
Alexei waits until Mila finishes and then asks Maxim if he wants to see the new section of the train track he’s been building in the playroom.
“After dinner,” Maxim tells him.
“You said that last time, and then you had to leave.”
“I’m not leaving tonight.”
Alexei studies him. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
After dinner, Maxim spends forty minutes on the playroom floor with the train set while I stand in the doorway and watch. He’s not performing interest. He’s actually interested, asking real questions, letting Alexei correct him when he gets the engineering logic wrong, which happens several times and which Alexei handles with the patience of someone who has accepted that not everyone immediately understands track gradients.
When the twins are in bed, Maxim finds me in my study.
He sits down and looks at me for a moment. “You’re different.”
“People keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.” He leans back in his chair. “You’re not going to lose yourself in this, are you? The family. The domesticity. You’re still going to be able to run the operation.”
“I’ve been running the operation every day for the past two weeks. Simultaneously.”
