Page 26 of The Dangerous Dance

"Who says I'm not going to eat it immediately."

"You don't look like someone who eats bread immediately." I set the sourdough down. I look at him. He is in a coat that is marginally more appropriate for the neighborhood than his previous ones, which means either he noticed or someone told him. He looks, in the flat grey morning light of a farmers market in November, like a man who has not been sleeping enough and has decided that this is simply his life now. "You look like someone who puts it in a cabinet and forgets about it until it's developed a personality."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. "That's very specific."

"I'm a specific person."

He pays for the rye. I pay for the sourdough. We move away from the table at the same time in the same direction, which is not coordinated and is therefore natural, which is somehow worse than if it had been coordinated because coordination would be a choice I could examine and this is just — happening.

The market is busy enough to provide the texture of a crowd without being busy enough to make conversation difficult. We walk along the row of stalls — not together, exactly, but covering the same ground in the same direction. I think about how I'd explain this to my handler if he had eyes on me. And I find the explanation I'd give him isn't the one that's true.

"Your assistant was at the coffee cart on Wednesday morning," I say.

He looks at me. "What."

"The woman. Dark hair, tablet, very efficient posture. She bought two coffees and waited for someone and then left when they didn't come." I look at a display of root vegetables without seeing them. "She looked annoyed. She has a specific kind of annoyed face." I pause. "She looked at your building."

A silence. "You've been watching my building."

"I watch most buildings." I pick up a parsnip and put it back. "She's in love with you."

"She's not⁠—"

"She bought two coffees," I say. "She waited twenty minutes. She looked at your building the way people look at places where someone they want is and isn't coming out." I glance at him sideways. "It's not complicated."

He has the expression of a man receiving information he already had and was hoping no one else did. "That's not your concern."

"I'm not making it my concern. I'm making an observation." I stop at the cheese stall and look at the selection with genuine interest because I have strong feelings about cheese that have survived every other complication of this life intact. "Are you sleeping with her?"

"That is absolutely not⁠—"

"I'm asking for operational reasons," I say, which is not true but is defensible. "If she's emotionally unstable in your direction it creates a vulnerability in your⁠—"

"Nadia." He says my name for the first time, and the way he says it stops me in a way I don't immediately account for — flat, direct, carrying a weight that first names carry when someone has been using them privately for a while before they say them out loud. He knows he's done it. I can see him register it. He continues anyway. "It's not operational. Drop it."

I buy the cheese. The kind with the dark rind that I've been eating since I was a child and that somehow tastes exactly the same in New York as it does in Moscow, which is one of the more comforting pieces of consistency I've found in this city.

"She looks at you like you're not paying attention," I say, because I find I can't entirely stop. "And she's right. You're not."

He looks at me steadily. "And what does that have to do with you."

It doesn't. It has nothing to do with me. And the fact that I'm standing at a cheese stall on a Saturday morning pointing out how his assistant looks at him is a data point about my own behavior. I file it under the heading I haven't named yet, because naming it would require acknowledging it.

"Nothing," I say. "You're right. Drop it."

We walk.

"You're going to keep hitting the Italian supply routes," he says, after a moment. It isn't a question.

"I don't know what you mean."

"You do." His voice carries no accusation. Just a fact he'd rather weren't true. "The Bayonne yard. That was your work."

"I'm a dancer," I say.

"You're a great many things," he says. "Dancer is one of them." He looks ahead, at the end of the market row where it opens back onto the street. "The Italians are not going to attribute it to coincidence for long. When they start attributing it correctly, the pressure on me to act becomes significant."

I look at him. "And what does significant pressure on you look like."