Page 111 of The Dangerous Dance

He tells me at half past nine, when the wine is almost finished and the city has gone to its late evening frequency, that there is a studio three blocks away.

I look at him.

"Not the one you use. A different one. Older. I don't think it's been active in years but the building is sound and the floors—" He pauses. "The floors are good. I looked."

"You looked."

"Last week. When I was thinking about tonight."

I hold his gaze. He holds mine.

"Under cover of night," I say.

"Under cover of night," he agrees.

"The detail."

"Knows I'm taking you for a walk. Which is true. The walk happens to go past a building that happens to have an unlocked side door."

"You unlocked the side door."

"Last week. When I was looking at the floors."

I look at him for a long moment.

"All right," I say.

The city at half past nine has a specific quality — cold enough to mean it, not cold enough to be cruel, the streets in that particular state of having finished with the evening rush and not yet arrived at the deep night version of themselves. We walk the three blocks with two of his men at a distance that I've calibrated over the last week as approximately forty feet, which is close enough to be useful and far enough to be something other than surveillance.

The building is on a corner. Old brick, three floors, the kind of building that was built for something and has been various somethings since. The side door is where he said it would be.

Inside is dark until he finds a light — not overhead fluorescents but a row of work lights along one wall that someone installed for a different purpose and which produce a warm lateral light that is, for the studio space on the ground floor, almost exactly right.

The floor is good.

He wasn't wrong about the floor. Old wood, sprung in the way of floors built for this purpose, with the specific quality that you feel through the soles of your feet before you think about it. I stand in the center of the studio space and I look at the floor and I look at the walls, which have mirrors that are dusty but intact, and I look at the barre along the far wall which is real and solid and the right height.

"How," I say again.

"The building belongs to someone who owed Conor a favor. The favor has been called in."

I look at the barre.

I look at him.

He is standing near the door with his hands in his coat pockets and the specific expression of someone who has done the thing they planned to do and is now waiting to see what the thing produces. He looks, in the work light against the old brick, like himself — not the Don, not the man in the meetings, just the man who cooked his grandmother's pasta and listened to me talk about the Black Sea and went to look at a studio floor last week.

I take off my coat.

I go to the barre.

I don't perform.

That's the thing I decide before I begin, which is the decision that makes everything else possible — that this is not a performance, that there's no mirror I'm looking for faults in, that what I'm doing in this studio on this night is the thing that ballet is before it becomes anything else, which is just moving in the way a body that has been trained to move can move when it isn't being watched by itself.

I work through a sequence I've known since I was fourteen, one of the first combinations my second teacher gave me that I never forgot because it has a specific quality — it's harder than it looks and when you do it right you feel it in the place where physical and something else meet.

Tonight it takes me.