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“You’re a weather system. There’s a cold front rolling through, the visibility’s dropping, a grown man’s entire mood is crossing my workspace and fogging the glass. Go be atmospheric in a different wing.”

“It’s my office.”

“It became my crime scene around the time you signed the lease in trunk space.”

I keep my back to him, because turning is how he wins, and I can feel him behind me weighing whether to press it. He doesn’t, choosing restraint instead and at a volume you’re meant to hear. I’m aware of him the whole time, where he is in the room, how close, the heat off him when he passes behind my chair, all of it tracked by some idiot back office in my body that’s been malfunctioning since a bar bathroom and shows no sign of coming back online.

He comes back twice more. The second time he sets a glass of water at my elbow, and his hand is right there beside mine on the desk for a second, close enough that I get the heat off his skin before he’s gone, and my whole arm reports it like a fire alarm for a candle. I drink the water once he’s out of the room, because I’m parched and there’s no one left to refuse it in front of.

By evening I have the first name.

It surfaces the way they do, not a flash, a pattern that finally sits still long enough to be read. One intermediary in the early years, before the artist found his hands, before the routing went clean. A clumsy move from when the theft was young, and someone was still learning to disappear. A law firm’s escrow account, used once as a stepping stone and never again, and the signature authority on it, that quarter, eight years buried, is a name I’ve never met.

Berezin.

I print it. The printer in the corner is the only thing in this office that makes an ordinary human noise, and I carry the page over, because paper is real in a way a screen will never be, and because I want his face the instant he reads it.

“You need to talk to this man.” I set it down. “He’s your earliest leak. Before whoever’s doing this learned to be careful, they ran money through an escrow account he held. He did it, or he knows who did, and either way he’s the nearest thing to a witness you have. He’ll give you more in an hour than these records will give me in a month.”

He looks at the page and goes still, the kind that isn’t rest, his thumb stopping dead on the edge of the paper, a slow breath drawn through his nose.

“He won’t,” Adrianos says.

“He will if you ask him the way you asked me. A trunk, a chandelier, the whole hospitality package.”

“He’s dead.”

I blink. “How?”

“A friend of mine shot him.” He squares the page to the desk’s edge without seeming to know his hand is doing it. “For reasons too complicated for tonight.”

A friend of his. Shot him. The earliest name in a theft that’s already in the ground with Kalliopi, and the one man who could’ve explained it took a bullet from someone inside Adrianos’s own circle, and here I sit in that circle in borrowed clothes with the records glowing behind me and my prints fresh on the single thread that has killed every person who’s touched it.

I thought he was the danger. One man. Looking at his face now, I know it’s bigger than him, and I’m already in it.

7

Adrianos

“That transaction’s eight years old,” I tell her. “The man it points to died this year, and not in a way I can put in front of you tonight. Go back in and find me a thread that’s still live.”

She doesn’t move for the door. The printed page sits where I set it, squared to the edge of the desk, Berezin’s name facing up between us, and she’s reading my face, going over it for the line that won’t reconcile, because I gave her a corpse and then told her he was a fresh one, and she’s already wondering why a name from this year would put a hairline through me.

“You want a current one,” she says. “Which tells me this old account connects to something that’s still running. A dead transaction wouldn’t make you flinch. A live trail would.”

“I’ve no use for the dead one. Bring me a name that still breathes.”

“Fine. I’ll get you a live name.” She sets two fingers on the page and squares it to the desk’s edge, the small correction of a woman who can’t leave a crooked thing crooked. “But you went still when you read this one. I pulled him out of the records an hour ago, and I still don’t know what he is. You knew the second you saw the name. That’s the part I want explained.”

“Later.”

“You say later like it means never.” She goes, and I let her have the exit line, because taking it back would only tell her I wanted it.

The room empties of her and the quiet comes in behind, and the quiet is worse company than she is. A day of her has trained my ear to the printer, to the low feud she runs with the screen, to the muttering she does at a number that won’t behave like she’s disappointed in it personally. Strip that out, and I’ve got the apartment I had last week. Last week the boy was alive on the other side of an ocean, and I was too deep in money I couldn’t find to answer a photograph of a harbor at dawn. I drop the thought before it can finish, because finished thoughts are where the cold lives, and I’ve a phone ringing to thank for it.

It’s Volkov calling. I take it at the glass.

“Nazarov.”