Page 14

I read it twice, standing there, because a part of me didn’t expect it. BEREZIN & ASSOCIATES, gold leaf gone to flakes, fourth floor.

The guard in the lobby is bored down to the bone and reading his phone. I’ve talked my way past a hundred men exactly like him for clients who’d actually signed a contract, so I do it now without a single tremor in my voice, telling him I’m a tax auditor. I can do clipboard energy with no clipboard, it lives in the spine. I say estate filing, I say probate deadline, I say quarterly reconciliation, and I watch his eyes film over on schedule, because there has never lived a man who wanted the second sentence about probate, and he waves me at the elevator to make the first sentence stop.

The suite has been gone through. That’s the first thing, drawers half out, folders pulled and shoved back crooked, a thin drift of loose pages on the floor where someone emptied a cabinet and didn’t bother refiling, the mess of a search that happened months ago and was never tidied because nobody who made it planned to come back. Dust has settled over the whole disturbance, on the toppled files, on a plant dead on its feet by the window, on a calendar still turned to a month that ended seasons ago.

So somebody beat me here. I stand in the wreckage and work out that whoever sorted his estate already came through, took what they came for, and left the rest exactly because they decided it was worthless. That’s the part that quickens my pulse. They were hunting one thing they found it, and they walked out past three cabinets of escrow ledgers and wire authorizations and trust statements in a dead man’s own anxious hand. They left it all because they didn’t read paper the way I read paper. They saw filing. I see a confession nobody bothered to burn.

I crouch and start photographing, and I have to steady a hand on the open drawer for a second, because the wave of pure professional want is almost embarrassing in a room this grim.

The outer door opens.

I hear it before I make sense of it, the door, then footsteps that aren’t bored, two sets, taking their time, coming through reception toward the back room where I’m folded over an open drawer with a phone full of a dead man’s secrets. I get to my feet. Two men block the doorway, and every soft thing I’ve assumed all day goes to ice in one breath, because these are not auditors, not clerks, not anyone with a probate deadline, and the old animal part of me that has never cared about column G finally weighs the room correctly, three full seconds after it would’ve done me any good.

They’re built like the furniture, both of them. One holds his hands loose at his thighs. The other already has a hand inside his coat. When the first one speaks, it’s Russian, a question aimed at me that I can’t translate and don’t need to, because the tone does the whole job. The tone asks what are you. The tone says you should not be in this room. The tone says this is the kind of thing we have a method for.

“I’m an auditor.” It comes out of me about half the size of my normal voice. “Estate work. There’s a probate deadline. I can show you the file, it’s the dullest paper in the building, I’ll bore you unconscious if you let me.”

The second man takes his hand out of his coat, and there’s a gun in it.

I have never had a gun pointed at me. The brain does nothing of use. It doesn’t bargain, doesn’t strategize, doesn’t pull up the exits. It goes white and very quiet and locks onto small stupid particulars, the scratch worn into the slide, the bitten edge of the man’s thumbnail, the dead plant slumped in its pot, while the rest of me understands without a single word that I’ve walked myself hand over hand to the end of the exact thread that possibly killed my best friend, and that I’m about to learn how the last minute felt for her, which is the one fact about Kalliopi I have spent praying I’d never own.

He says something more, steps in close, lifts the barrel to my head. The hammer draws back with a small mechanical click that is, without competition, the loudest sound I have heard in my life. The working part of me, the part that will apparently still be filing reports as the lights go out, thinks that my mother believes that right now I’m watching that stupid reality show she got me hooked on.

The door opens again.

“There she is.”

Adrianos comes in the way he comes into every room, with no hurry anywhere in him, the easy smile already lit, a man arriving a little late to a party he was never anxious about. He doesn’t so much as glance at the gun. He looks at me first, head to foot, checking the inventory, and only when he’s satisfied does he turn the smile on the two men.

“Gentlemen. You’re a long way from Brighton Beach.” His voice is conversational, like he’s found them at a bar and not standing over a woman with a cocked pistol. “She’s with me. Volkov knows I had to bring in a freelancer, so unless the two of you want to explain to him why you put a hole in Kallistratos’s accountant, the gun goes down.”

The gunman says something low in Russian to the other one, and the barrel doesn’t move off me, but his eyes have changed.

The gun comes down. Slowly, and with no grace in it, the man narrows his eyes at us, then waves us out. His eyes are pinned on me the entire time it takes me to walk out of the office. Adrianos puts his hand on my neck to steer, and the heat of that hand is the only thing standing between me and the floor, which I’ll be properly furious about later, when I have the surplus to be furious with.

We go out past the guard, who's discovered something urgent and absorbing on his phone, down the stairs, into the street, and into the back of a car at the curb, with Evander behind the wheel, like it never once pulled away. The door shuts.

My hands start to shake the instant it’s safe to, which is the meanest joke my body keeps in stock, banking all the terror until there’s nothing left to aim it at but my own lap. I press them flat to my thighs to make them stop. His hand is gone from my neck, and I can still feel the print of it there, a warmth the exact shape of his palm, and some malfunctioning back room of my body has put the gun under one heading and that hand under another entirely, and I resent both entries with equal heat.

Adrianos turns to me. The smile is nowhere on him now. Whatever’s underneath it I’ve never seen at full size, and it’s worse than the gun was, because the gun didn’t care whether I lived, but this does.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

9

Adrianos

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“No.” Her hands are pressed flat to her own thighs to keep them still, and she believes I can’t see it. “I’m trying to do the job you abducted me to do. The two keep overlapping, and I’d file a complaint, except the complaint goes to management, and management is the man who put me in the trunk, so it’s a closed loop with no one home at the top of it.”

“You walked into a dead man’s office alone. No call. No name left with anyone. Not one person on this earth knew where you were standing except the two men who put a barrel against your skull.” The car eats a block of Midtown while I bring the words down to level, because level is the only register that touches her and is close to the last one I’ve got. “Tell me you understand what you stepped into. Say it out loud, because from here it looked like you wandered into a public library and were annoyed about the fines.”

“It had a bunch of files that weren’t considered important. Do you have any idea how rare that is in my line of work? Files left alone on the scene. A dead man’s own hand on the page, months of it sitting there because the people who ransacked the place couldn’t read what was under their fingers.” She twists in the seat to face me, and the fear is burning off her now, anger sliding in behind the wheel, because anger is the one that holds her steady. “I found the thing you stole me out of my bed to find. In an afternoon. And the reward is a grown man shouting at me across the back of a car, a man who didn’t think to tell his own driver to watch the door I’d obviously go through.”

“You’re proud.” My voice drops under the engine. “You knelt on the floor of a tomb with a hammer cocked over you, and you’re sitting here proud of the paper.”

“I’m always proud of the paper. The paper is the one part of my life that has never once let me down, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t hand it back because two large men raised their voices and a pistol.”