"No."
"Why?"
"Because I did not know what I was reading until the morning at the cabin."
I turn from the window.
She brings two cups to the couch. She puts them on the table. She sits down on one end. I sit on the other.
We are two feet apart.
I drink the coffee.
It is good. It is not the cabin's coffee. It is not West 12th's coffee. It is the third Chemex's coffee, and I am going to learn the difference between her three Chemexes the way a man learns the difference between his wife's moods, which is to say slowly and with a sense of being permanently behind.
I am thinking of the word wife in her loft on a Wednesday evening.
"Tell me about Geneva."
She sets her cup down.
When she speaks, the voice is not the consigliera's voice. The voice is the one that said, "I am yours," with her eyes open in West 12th. The voice is the voice she has under all the other voices.
"Her name was Eleni."
She tells me.
Eleni was her aunt. Her mother Lucia's older sister, by three years. Nadia had spent summers in Geneva as a child. In a small apartment above a travel agency on Rue du Rhône, with brochures of Mykonos and Capri in the window and a kettle always going in the back.
She thought, until she was twenty-five, that her aunt sold vacations.
Her mother, Lucia, died in 2014. She was fifty-two. The circumstances were never fully explained.
The same year, Crane destroyed her career at Treasury. She arrived in Geneva in November with eight thousand dollars in cash, a bag, and her aunt's address.
She slept on Eleni's couch for the first week. She did not ask questions. Eleni did not ask questions. The kettle was always going. On the seventh morning, Nadia woke up to find a Glock 19 on the kitchen table and a note in her aunt's handwriting.When you are ready.
She was ready in three days.
Eleni had been getting people out of bad places her whole adult life. The travel agency was real. Clients came in, vacations got booked. The travel agency was also the architect. Visas. Hotels. Ground contacts in twenty cities. The work that gets a dissident out of Belarus looks exactly like the work that gets a honeymoon couple to Santorini.
Nadia stayed for two years. She learned to suture in Eleni's kitchen. She learned to draw a weapon in the back room of the travel agency. She learned to count to two seconds.
She came back to New York at twenty-seven. The Morettis hired her the same year. She called Eleni every Sunday.
In 2022, Eleni did not pick up on a Sunday.
Nadia found out on a Thursday. A courier she had known for years. A face she did not want to see in her apartment.
Eleni had pulled the wrong person out of the wrong room sometime in the years before Nadia arrived. Someone had cost Kostas Stavros something he never forgave. Stavros's people finally found her in Geneva in the summer of 2022. They wanted to know, before they killed her, whether the niece in New York knew anything.
They held her for six days.
She did not give them the answer.
She says, "I could not bury her."
She does not look at me when she says it. She looks at her cup.
