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“Discretion,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“All right.” He closes his fist over the key, but doesn’t put it on his ring or in his pocket. He just holds it. “Then I’ll come and go at hours that suit you. You won’t have to let me in.”

“Yeah.”

Neither of us moves.

The heating ticks. Somewhere on the street, a truck backs up with its alarm sounding. Through the half-open blinds, the three-o’clock light has gone thin and yellow, already finished before it starts.

“Go home, Kieran,” he says.

It’s the first time he’s used my name.

I go down four flights and out past the sewing machine place, where a man in an apron is running a treadle on a bench with the door open to the cold. The smell of oil comes out onto the street.

The truck starts on the second turn, like it always does. I pull onto the quay road with the harbor on my left, gantries standing over the container stacks. The heater takes eleven blocks to warm up, as always.

Somewhere behind me, a man is holding my key in his fist.

I’m at the light on Weyburn before I realize that I haven’t thought about the man in the gray coat since the second floor.

6

Vera doesn’t make me wait, which is how I know.

Her assistant waves me straight through at eight fifteen on Saturday morning. Vera stands at the window with a cup in her hand, coat still on. She turns before I’m fully in the room.

“You went to Leonard yesterday afternoon,” she says.

“I did.”

“He told you to speak to me, and you spoke to him instead. Then you drove back across town and told your client the matter was closed.” She sets the cup down on the sill. “Sit.”

I sit.

“I sent him,” she says.

The heating in this building is too good. It always has been. She keeps the third floor at seventy-four degrees in December. In nine years, I’ve never sat in this chair without wanting my coat off. I leave it on.

“Thursday evening, after your report,” she says. “I asked him to be in the lobby at midnight, stand when Kieran came in, say nothing, and then leave. Which he did, to the second. He’s very good, Leonard. He does exactly what he’s asked, and no more.”

“The account is on schedule. There was no trigger.”

“There was no trigger. That’s correct.”

“Then I’d like to understand the purpose.”

“The purpose is that a man who hasn’t been reminded starts to believe the reminder isn’t coming.” She takes the glasses off the chain, folds them, and then places them on the desk. That’s when I stop expecting to win anything today. “He accepted terms in one sitting. He’s done every single thing you’ve asked for three weeks. That’s not calm, Marek. That’s a man who’s decided he can live inside this. I don’t want him living inside it. I want him aware of it.”

I have an answer, and it won’t survive contact. I give it anyway.

“I told him nobody will go near his brother while he cooperates. Yesterday, I told him Roth wouldn’t approach him again.”

“Neither of those was yours to say.”

She says it without any change of temperature. That’s the whole of the correction; she doesn’t soften it.