Four daysafter Roman brings me home from the Kessler facility I am sitting on the couch in the main room with a blanket over my lap. There’s a cup of chamomile going cold on the table in front of me that I haven’t touched because I can’t look at chamomile right now without thinking about eleven mornings of a woman standing in my kitchen putting something in it. So I’m just looking at it and not drinking it when Roman comes in from his study and sits down across from me and looks at me looking at the cup.
“Ask me,” he says.
I look at him. “What?”
“Whatever you have been sitting with for three days. Ask me.”
I look at the cup for another moment. Then I look at him.
“Who were those men?” I say. “The ones in New Jersey. The ones who took me.” I pause. “Who are you, Roman? Really. Because I have been working for you for two years and I have been married to you for weeks and I have been carefully not asking this question for all of it and I’m done not asking.”
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he leans forward, elbows on his knees, and he says, “My father brought me to a building on 48th Street when I was sixteen years old. He stood me in the lobby and he told me to look around. He said this is what we are.” He pauses. “I didn’t understand what he meant until I was twenty-nine. The night the man who ran our organization put a key in my hand and told me it was mine.”
I look at him. “What organization?”
“The Bratva,” he says. “Russian organized crime. I am the Pakhan. The head. Every operation, every decision, every man who works under this name answers to me.”
The room goes very quiet.
I stand up.
I don’t mean to stand up, my legs just do it, and I take three steps toward the window and I stand there with my back to him and I look at the city and I think about two years of correspondence I managed, names on documents, meetings I scheduled, the men who came through his office, the calls I routed, the things I carefully did not examine.
I turn around.
“The council,” I say. “That is not a business council.”
“No.”
“Kostya.”
“My right hand since before I took the position.”
“The men at our wedding. Pavel. Gregor.”
“They have been with me for years.”
I press both hands against my stomach, the babies there, real, present, and I look at Roman sitting across from me with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on me, steady, giving me the time I need to process it, and I think about the man in the wire-rimmed glasses asking me for a name from inside the Petrov organization and the terror of not knowing what I was in the middle of.
“The men who took me,” I say. “They were asking me for a name. Someone inside your organization who had been coordinating with them.” I look at him. “Was that real?”
“Yes. His name was Renko. He has been dealt with.”
“Dealt with,” I repeat.
Roman holds my gaze.
“Have you killed people?” I say.
He doesn’t look away. “Only when they deserved it.”
I stand there, and I look at him, and I think about that answer, the flatness of it, the complete absence of apology in it. I wait for the fear to arrive, and it does, a cold fear, but underneath it is something else that I did not expect. Two years of carefully unexamined suspicion confirming itself. The feeling of a picture whose edges I have always been able to see, finally showing me its center.
I start pacing.
I can’t help it. I walk to the window and back and to the window again. I say, “Oh my god,” at least twice, and Roman watches mefrom the couch without moving, and I stop in the middle of the room, and I look at him.
