"That's the job."
"No. The job is the word you put over it so it does not frighten you."
And there it was, the thing I would spend the rest of the night failing to un-see. Under all that granite there was a person, and he looked at me like I was the first warm thing he'd touched in a decade. Not a look I had any business memorizing. I memorized it anyway. I have always been thorough about exactly the wrong things.
For a while after that we only ate, and it was easy in a way I had half forgotten things could be. He asked which of my patients I actually liked, and I gave him Mr. Adley and his imaginary heart attacks, and something crossed his face that I understood, too late, was nearly a smile.
"You are fond of a man who wastes your nights pretending to die," he said.
"He's lonely. The pretending is just how he asks someone to sit with him a while."
He considered that. "That is a generous way to read a liar."
"It's the only way I know how to read anyone. Comes with the territory."
"No," he said. "I have met a great many nurses. Not one of them ever called a liar lonely and meant it as a kindness."
He paid in cash, more than the food was worth, the way men do once they have stopped noticing money at all. We stepped out into the cold and he held the door, and for one breath we were close in the frame of it, close enough that I got all of him at once. He smelled like gun oil and cedar. I smelled like a double shift. Somehow we were the same kind of tired. I thought, with the perfect clarity of the truly foolish, that I could stand in that doorway a good long while.
He walked me up. He did not have to; there was already a man in my hallway. But he did it anyway, and at my door the lock stuck the way it always sticks, and he reached past me and turned it without a word, and then we were both standing in the small warm dark of my entry, not reaching for the light.
"Thank you," I said. "For dinner. For not asking me to perform being fine."
"You never have to pretend with me."
Neither of us moved. The radiator offered its opinion and was ignored. I looked up at him and he looked down at me, and the air did the thing air does in the half second before everything tips, going thick and certain, and I watched him decide something, watched him start to lean in, slow enough to give me every chance to take a step back. I did not take the step back.
The knock hit the door like a slap.
"Boss." Petya, from the hall, and the sunshine had been scrubbed clean out of his voice. "Boss, you need to see this. Right now."
Kolya changed between one heartbeat and the next. Whatever had been in his face went somewhere and a steel shutter came down over the place it had been, and his hand found my shoulder and moved me behind him before I registered it as movement at all. He opened the door.
Petya stood there holding a padded envelope in two gloved hands, the way you hold something that might still be breathing.
"It came in this morning's mail," he said. "We screen everything now, so it never reached her hands. We opened it well clear of her, like you said." He swallowed. "It's not new, boss. Look at the date on it."
Kolya took the envelope and looked inside without letting me see, and his face told me the story a half second before the photograph did. He did not want to put it in my hand. I held my hand out regardless, because not knowing is only another way of being hunted, and after a moment he gave it to me.
It was me. Asleep. In my own bed, in this apartment, shot from outside through the window I had never once thought to cover, because I lived on the fourth floor, and who in their rightmind climbs to a fourth floor? He had. He had found the fire escape, the quiet south side that never groans, and he had stood out there in the dark and aimed a lens at me through the glass. The little date in the corner put it weeks back, before the gifts I knew about, before the locks, before any of them had a name. My mouth was open a little. One hand was tucked under my cheek. I looked young and undefended and utterly unaware that the worst thing in my life was crouched on the iron outside, taking my picture.
Someone had photographed me sleeping. Kolya looked at the picture and the whole room got colder.
He did not raise his voice. He did not crush the envelope or put his fist through the new steel door, and somehow that was the worse thing, because a man who shouts is a man still arguing with what has happened. Kolya had stopped arguing. He laid the empty envelope on the counter with the precise care of someone handling a thing he fully intends to use, and the order he gave Petya was three words of low Russian. Petya went the color of the wall and was gone without a sound. I did not need it translated. Some instructions sound the same in every language.
My hands had begun to shake, the photo trembling between them. I wasn't crying. I was somewhere past crying, in the flat cold country where the body stops bothering to perform its fear and simply holds it. I thought of every night since the gifts began, every hour I had lain awake calling myself paranoid for listening to the dark. I had not been paranoid. I had been right, and being right felt precisely like being prey.
"How long has he been able to do this?" I whispered. I was not really asking Petya, or Kolya, or anyone with a face. I was asking the dark on the other side of the glass.
Kolya took the photograph out of my hands, carefully, the way you take a blade from someone who has no business holding one. When he spoke, his voice had gone to a place I had notheard from him before, past anger, past cold, into something so quiet it stilled the whole room.
"Not anymore," he said. "I will turn this city over before he touches you."
And here is what I learned about myself in that doorway. I believed him. All the way down. A man who had been in my life a matter of weeks, who carried a gun and a body count and a debt he would not explain, told me he would take the world apart before he let it reach me, and I did not doubt a single syllable.
That, far more than the photograph, is what kept me awake until the sky went gray.
8
