“I will not answer questions about specific incidents,” she says, not unkindly. “But I will tell you that Pavel does not do these things for pleasure. He does them because his world has a specific logic, and in that logic, mercy without limit is weakness, and weakness gets people killed. Often the wrong people.” She pauses. “This does not make it comfortable information. I understand that.”
It does not make it comfortable information. The man who traces the line of my jaw with his thumb, like he’s memorizing it. The man who has, according to my eleven o’clock rabbit hole, almost certainly made decisions I can’t let myself think about in too much detail without the maple glaze situation getting significantly worse.
“How do you do it? How do you just—know all of this, and make coffee, and organize my inbox?”
Vet tilts her head slightly. “How do you think?”
“I have no idea. That’s why I’m asking.”
She’s quiet for a moment, in the considering way that means she’s deciding how much to give me. “I didn’t always make coffee and organize inboxes. I did other work for Pavel for a long time. Overseas. I told you this.”
“The operations.”
“Yes. But more specifically than that.” She looks at me evenly. “I did wetwork.”
It takes me a second to figure this out. “Like a cleaning service? Because I feel like that would actually make a lot of sensegiven how organized you are, and I say that with complete appreciation of what you’ve done here?—”
“It’s not cleaning,” Vet says, with the patience of a woman who has explained many things to many people. “It means I was an operative. Specifically, the kind that is sent when the goal is that a particular person is no longer a problem.” She pauses, watching my face. “Permanently.”
The office is very quiet for a moment.
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
“So you?—”
“Yes.”
I look at her. She looks at me. The pink donut box sits between us on my desk, cheerfully indifferent to the conversation happening around it.
“Okay.” I need a moment, and okay is what comes out when my brain is buffering. “Okay. And now you’re—here. Organizing my inbox.”
“It’s a significant lifestyle change,” she agrees, with the faint dry gravity that passes for humor in Vet’s register.
I take a breath. “So what—you just decided to retire?”
“I decided that I had done enough of that kind of work,” she says, which is a careful sentence, the kind that has been considered before being offered. “Pavel understood. He found me a new position.” A small pause. “One that does not involve skinning men.”
My stomach hosts a twirling parade up to the back of my throat. I hold up one hand. “I’m going to stop you there.”
“I was not going to elaborate.”
“Okay. Good. Great. Let’s maintain that boundary. Forever.” I press both palms flat on my desk and look at the middle distance for a moment.
The nausea has migrated from my stomach to somewhere more general, a full-body awareness of the world I’ve been living inside for the past several years, which I have managed by keeping it largely abstract, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep it abstract as the details accrue.
Skinning? What do you even use to do that? I imagine a fish knife would work, maybe a vegetable peeler?—
Oh god. I have got to stop thinking about this, or I’ll projectile vomit the coffee gone sour in my stomach.
Vet, to her credit, says nothing. She simply sits, unhurried, and lets me work through it, which is one of the things I appreciate most about her and am also, at this moment, mildly resenting.
My voice crackles. “Can I tell you something?”
“You can tell me anything.”
“I know that.” I do, which is the strange part. Of all the unexpected developments of the past several months, the one I did not see coming was that the person I could say absolutely anything to would turn out to be a former operative who organizes my inbox with worrying precision. “He had me go to his penthouse last week. Made me take a cab, pay cash, walk the last two blocks, check if I was being followed.”
