On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 16: The Italian Restaurant

Two days after the gala, Nathaniel asked me to walk with him.

Not a meeting. Not a strategy session. He appeared in my office doorway at six-fifteen on a Sunday evening — I had been in on a weekend, which he apparently had also, though neither of us had arranged to be — and said: "There's a place in the North End. I go when I need to think. Come, if you want." Then he left, the way he left all rooms, without waiting to confirm that anyone was following.

I closed my laptop. I came.

The walk from Cross Tower to the North End was twenty minutes in October, along the waterfront, past the tourist shops that had already shuttered for the season and the working piers that never did. He did not make conversation as we walked. He walked the way he did everything — with complete intention and no apparent effort — and I matched his pace without adjusting my stride, because the stilettos were in my bag and I was wearing the flat shoes I kept in my desk drawer for late-night floor sessions, and for once the ground felt entirely solid beneath me.

It was the most comfortable I had been in his company. I noted this as a liability and kept walking.

* * *

The place was a trattoria on Hanover Street, old enough to have photographs on the walls that were not decorative, small enough that the owner knew Nathaniel by name and put us at the corner table in the back without being asked. The tablecloths were checked red-and-white. The candles were in wine bottles. It was the sort of establishment that had survived four decades in an expensive city by refusing to be anything other than exactly what it was, and I recognized in that refusal something I found harder to define than admire.

We ordered without ceremony — he had a pasta e fagioli and a glass of red without looking at the menu, and I asked for the same because it was past six and I had not eaten and I did not have the energy to perform preferences. He noticed that I'd deferred. He did not comment on it.

"You said your grandmother taught you to dance," I said, after the food arrived.

He looked up. The question was slightly outside the register of our usual exchanges — neither professional nor the careful personal probing we occasionally permitted — and I watched him decide whether to answer it on that register or bring it back down to something flatter.

He answered it honestly. "She was my mother's mother. Genevieve Ashford. She died in November 1992, when I was eleven." He turned his fork in the bowl. "On my birthday."

"You mentioned that."

"Did I." He seemed faintly surprised. "I don't usually."

"November eighth," I said. "The tato on your chest."

A short silence. He set down his fork.

"You're very observant," he said.

"It's the job."

"Is it." He looked at me steadily. "The Roman numerals. VIII.XI. You read them correctly."

"I read most things correctly," I said. "Given enough time."

He was quiet for a moment. The restaurant noise moved around us — the particular warmth of a small room in October, other people's conversations, the clink and scrape of a kitchen that knew what it was doing. Outside, somewhere in the direction of the harbor, a foghorn moved through the dark.

"She was the only person in my family who was kind without wanting something for it," he said. He said it with the precision of someone who had examined the statement from multiple angles and confirmed its accuracy. "When she died, I was left with the understanding that that particular quality was finite in the world. That the supply had been depleted somewhat." He picked up his fork again. "I was eleven. It's a complicated theology for eleven."

"Most honest theologies are," I said.

He looked at me across the table — the quality of attention that I had catalogued a dozen times now, that complete and unhurried regard — and something in it shifted slightly. Not softer. More open, the way a door is more open when it has been moved two inches rather than closed.

"You talk like someone who lost something early," he said.

"Most people do," I said. "If they're paying attention."

He did not push further. He had this quality consistently — he heard the shape of what was not being said and chose to leave it its shape. I did not know yet whether it was discipline or instinct or some amalgamation of both. I was still compiling the evidence.

* * *

We were almost finished when I noticed the woman.

She was at a table against the opposite wall, alone, drinking a glass of something amber and reading nothing — just sitting with the particular self-possession of someone who did not require entertainment or company and was not performing the lack of need for either. She was tall even seated, with dark hair cut straight across her jaw and pale green eyes that had been moving, at intervals I had clocked without meaning to, toward Nathaniel.

Not the way women looked at Nathaniel Cross at galas, with the calculating warmth of social ambition. Something else. Something familiar in the way a navigator was familiar with a route she'd charted before and was watching someone else attempt.

When Nathaniel excused himself toward the back of the restaurant, the woman set down her glass. She looked at me directly, which was the first time, and she did it with the complete absence of performance that told me she had been waiting to do exactly this.

She rose. She crossed the room without hurry. She stood at the edge of the table and looked at me with those pale green eyes that seemed to be reading something slightly to the left of my face, something I was not aware of presenting.

"You have something I recognize," she said. Her voice had a trace of an accent — Eastern European, Russian perhaps, worn smooth by decades of American air without being erased. "It has nothing to do with him. It's yours. It was yours before tonight."

I looked at her. "I don't know what you mean."

"No," she said. "Not yet." She placed a card on the table. Cream stock, simple font, no logo. Mistress Mischa. The Verdant Club. A number. "When you're ready to understand it, call me. There's no obligation and no judgment. Just — " she paused, the way people paused when they were choosing precision over fluency — "a conversation, if you want one."

She went back to her table. She picked up her glass. She did not look at me again.

I turned the card over. The reverse was blank.

Nathaniel returned. He sat down. He looked at the card in my hand and then at me, with a look I could not read at all — which was rare enough that I recorded it.

"Someone you know?" I said.

"No," he said. He said it in a tone that was technically truthful and entirely opaque, and I had enough experience with technically truthful answers to recognize one.

I slipped the card into my jacket pocket. We finished dinner. We walked back along the waterfront separately, which was not a decision either of us articulated.

* * *

At home, I set my bag down on the kitchen counter and stood there in the kitchen in my coat for longer than I needed to before I took it off.

I retrieved the card from the pocket. Held it under the kitchen light.

Mistress Mischa. The Verdant Club.

The woman had looked at Nathaniel the way a cartographer looked at a coastline she had mapped once, from a different angle, in different weather. Not with longing. With knowledge. The kind you only have after you have taken the measure of something from close enough to matter.

I thought about what that implied. I let the thought develop to its conclusion without blinking.

Then I thought about the way Nathaniel had said no — in a tone that was technically truthful and entirely opaque — and looked at the card in my hand, and understood that there was something in his life that I had not yet seen, that he had not yet shown me, that a woman with pale green eyes and a cream business card apparently had some relationship to.

And I understood that my plan — the plan that was four hundred pages of dossier and five years of preparation and a name I had given myself and a face I had rebuilt — my plan had been made without accounting for this. Whatever this was.

I put the card in the drawer by the kitchen phone, where I kept things I wasn't ready to act on.

I looked at the drawer for a moment.

Then I went to bed, and I did not sleep, and in the morning the card was still in the drawer, and I was still the same person who had put it there, which was the most honest assessment I could make of the situation until I understood more.

I would understand more the following evening, in the penthouse on Millennium Tower, in a room I was not supposed to find.