“The donuts were perfect,” she says, with mild offense. “That was your own weakness.”
“My weakness,” I agree, pulling on my coat, “has been a recurring theme lately.”
She gives me the one-second almost-smile and holds the door, and we go. “Besides, I would have thought you knew better than to bring up my old hobbies, Molly.”
“Donuts?”
“War crimes.” She grins as my stomach turns.
“Don’t remind me.”
“You brought it up.”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”
12
PAVEL
The meeting is my idea,which means I control the terms.
I have Igor pass the message through the appropriate channels—neutral ground, a restaurant in Midtown that neither of us owns, public enough that no one does anything rash, private enough that the conversation can be real. I’m not naive about what Fedor is. I’m also not naive about what a prolonged conflict costs, in resources and attention and the kind of exposure that invites problems from directions that have nothing to do with either of us. If there is a version of this that ends without bodies, I’m willing to hear it. If there isn’t, I will know that too, and knowing it cleanly is worth the cost of the attempt.
Igor advises caution when I tell him. Not against the meeting itself—he understands the logic—but against expectation. “Fedor spent seven years becoming someone new,” he says, which is a diplomatic way of saying that the man who comes to a peace meeting is not necessarily a man who wants peace.
“I understand this, Igor.” And I go anyway, because I have found that the best intelligence about a man’s intentions comesfrom watching him refuse something, and I want to watch Fedor refuse this.
I arrive ten minutes early, which is my habit. I take the table with my back to the wall and the door in my sightline, which is also my habit, the kind of habit that stops feeling like a choice after enough years and simply becomes the way you move through rooms. Igor takes the chair to my left. We do not discuss what we are watching for. After all this time together, we don’t need to.
What I don’t expect is Yuri Snigir.
I know Snigir by reputation, which is the polite way of saying I know what he is and have always considered him someone else’s problem. He came up under a Georgian operation before Fedor absorbed it, and he brought with him the arrogance of a man who has been promoted past his judgment and has not yet encountered the consequences of that.
He is broad, loud in the way that insecure men are loud, and possesses the type of boldness that exists only because no one has yet removed his reasons for it. He walks into the restaurant twelve minutes late, which is a message, and sits down across from me without greeting, which is another one.
Igor’s stillness sharpens by a degree I would only notice if I knew what to look for.
“Fedor sends his regards,” Snigir says in Russian, with the smile of a man delivering a joke only he finds funny.
“Fedor sends you,” I say. “That is not the same thing as regards.”
Snigir shrugs, broad shoulders lifting and dropping with the elaborate indifference of a performance. He picks up the menu, looks at it, sets it down. Making himself comfortable. Makinga point of making himself comfortable, which is the move of a man who has been told he has leverage and is testing how much. “He’s a busy man. You understand.”
“I understand that he received my proposal and chose not to respond to it personally. That tells me what I need to know about his intentions.”
“His intentions are flexible,” Snigir says. “Depending on conditions.”
“What conditions?”
He reaches for the bread in the center of the table, tears off a piece. “Fedor feels that the situation between you has certain imbalances. Things that were taken from him that haven’t been accounted for.” He chews, unhurried, enjoying the performance. “He’s a reasonable man. He’s open to a conversation about rebalancing.”
“He’s open to a conversation,” I say, “but not open enough to have it himself.”
Snigir smiles again. It doesn’t improve his face. “He wanted to get a sense of where your head is at first. Understandable, given everything.” He leans back in his chair, comfortable as a man in his own kitchen. “You’ve been distracted lately. People notice these things.”
“People notice a great many things that are not their concern.”
