He picks up his jacket from the chair.
At the door, he stops and looks back at me once, and I look at him, and I think about two heartbeats filling a white room and his hand over mine and the expression on his face that he did not try to hide.
“Go,” I say.
He goes.
I lie in the white room, and I listen to the building around me, the eight men on the floor, Mara two doors down, my father on the way, two heartbeats somewhere inside me that I didn’t know existed this morning, and I look at the ceiling, and I breathe, and I wait for whatever comes next.
36
ROMAN
Her name is Irina Volsk,and she has been cleaning my penthouse three mornings a week for eight months.
Kostya has her in the building’s security office when I arrive back from the hospital. She’s sitting in a chair with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the floor. Fifty-one years old. Gray hair pulled back. The kind of face that belongs behind a reception desk or a church pew, unremarkable in the specific way that makes people useful for certain purposes.
She doesn’t look up when I walk in.
I pull the chair from behind the desk and set it directly in front of her, and sit down. She looks up then, because she has no choice, and I look at her and I wait.
“The chamomile,” I say. “How long?”
Her mouth opens. Closes. “Eleven days,” she says.
“What was it?”
Kostya answers from the doorway. “A muscle relaxant. Naturally derived, high dose. It metabolizes within six hours, which makesit undetectable in standard bloodwork. Enough to produce severe cramping in a pregnant woman, enough to make her believe something was wrong and leave the building.” He pauses. “She added it to the tin in the kitchen cupboard. Every morning, when Mrs. Petrov made her tea, it was already in there waiting.”
I look at Irina Volsk.
She’s looking at her hands again. Her right thumb moves across her left knuckle, back and forth, the movement of someone who needs to be doing something with their body while the rest of them wait.
“Who gave it to you?” I say.
A long silence.
“A man,” she says. “He came to my daughter’s building in September. He said it was harmless. He said nobody would be hurt, that it would just make her feel unwell enough to leave the apartment.” She swallows. “He paid four thousand a month.”
“His name.”
“I only ever had a number.”
I look at her for a long moment.
I think about Elena sitting in my kitchen every morning for eleven days, wrapping both hands around a mug of chamomile that this woman prepared for her. Elena, who switched to chamomile because Mara read something about it being calming during pregnancy, brought a tin over and made it herself the first time.
Elena, who drank it every morning and told me the nausea was getting better and pressed both hands against her stomach, and smiled.
I think about her on her knees on the metal floor of a van in New Jersey.
I think about what eleven days of a muscle relaxant administered to a woman carrying twins might have produced if the timing of Grigori’s arrangement with Marchetti had been different by even forty-eight hours.
I stand up.
“Kostya,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
