CAGED IN CRIMSON

CAGED IN CRIMSON part 2

PART TWO: THE STAYING

— 27 — Chapter Five

Mara

Day one: I mapped the space. Every room accessible to me, every window and its

distance from the ground, every lock, every hinge. The windows in my bedroom: twelve feet

to a stone courtyard. The sitting room window: fourteen feet to a flagged path. Survivable

with a good landing, probable injury, no ability to run afterward. Not viable.

The garden: accessible from a side door in the east wing that was, as he had said,

unrestricted during daylight. The garden backed onto what appeared to be a forest — national

forest, I would learn later, thousands of acres of it in every direction. The drive to the village:

forty minutes on foot across open country in October. Possible if the weather held. Not an

option I was ready to use yet.

I mapped because having a map of a place made it less frightening. That's a practical

truth that I've found useful my whole life. Uncertainty is harder to manage than difficulty.

When you know what you're dealing with, you can decide what to do about it.

Day two: He came himself with coffee. Knocked. Waited.

This surprised me more than it should have. I had expected to be managed — meals slid

under the door, notes communicated through intermediaries, the kind of careful distance that a

man in his position would logically maintain from someone in mine. Instead: a knock, and

when I opened the door, Nikolai Vaskov with coffee in two cups, wearing a different suit from

yesterday, looking at me the way he always looked at me — completely, without pretending to

look elsewhere.

'May I come in?' he asked.

'You have the key,' I said.

'I have the key to the room,' he said. 'That's not the same as permission to enter it.'

— 28 — I stepped back. He came in and put one of the cups on my desk and sat in the chair by the

window — not my desk chair, not anywhere that suggested claim — and looked at

Dostoevsky, who was regarding him from her position on the windowsill with the specific

expression of a creature deciding whether to be offended.

'She's considering you,' I said.

'I can see that.' He looked at my cat with something that wasn't quite amusement but was

in that neighborhood. 'What's the assessment method?'

'Unknown. She's not transparent about her criteria.'

'Sensible.'

I sat at my desk and drank the coffee and tried to determine what to do with the fact that

this man had brought me coffee in my captivity and was now having a conversation about my

cat's personality with the ease of someone who had known me for years.

'I want to ask you something,' I said.

'Ask.'

'Why are you here yourself? You have staff.'

He looked at me for a moment. 'Because this is my responsibility.'

'Responsibility,' I said. 'That's a careful word.'

'I'm a careful man.'

'What does the responsibility consist of, exactly?'

Another pause. Longer. 'Making sure you're all right,' he said. 'Checking in. Answering

questions I can answer.'

'You kidnapped me,' I said. 'And now you're making sure I'm all right.'

'I told you in the café,' he said quietly. 'The two aren't mutually exclusive.'

— 29 — I looked at him. He looked back. And I thought about that statement — the two aren't

mutually exclusive — and all the things it implied about the way he understood the world and

his place in it.

'I'll ask you things,' I said. 'And you'll answer what you can.'

'Yes.'

'Starting with: how long?'

He was quiet for a moment. 'I don't know precisely. The situation has variables. A few

weeks, probably. Possibly longer.'

'Possibly longer,' I repeated.

'I'll know more in ten days.'

'All right.' I turned back to my desk. 'Thank you for the coffee.'

He stayed for another twenty minutes, reading one of my books — taken from the shelf

without asking, which I found I didn't mind — while I worked. Then he left.

He came back that evening. Not with coffee — with a question. He stood in the doorway

of my sitting room and asked: 'Do you need anything? For the work, or otherwise.'

'A better dictionary,' I said. 'The one on the shelf is an older edition. And a lamp for the

desk — the overhead is too harsh for evening.'

Both appeared the following morning.

Day four: I began going to the garden. The October air was cold and smelled of

woodsmoke and turned earth and the specific mineral quality of places that have been wet for

centuries. The garden was spectacular in a way that had nothing to do with human intervention

— not manicured, not curated, but structured in its bones with everything else allowed to find

its own way. Roses gone to hip. Herbaceous borders brown and architectural. A gravel path

circling the whole perimeter that someone had kept clear while everything else went its own

direction.

— 30 — Dostoevsky came with me. She was not an outdoor cat, but she reconsidered the terms of

her indoor existence in the face of this much interesting ground.

I walked the garden for an hour and thought about language. About the documents and

what had been in them. About a man who brought me coffee and asked permission to enter my

room and talked about my cat with the easy attention of someone who was genuinely

interested in what was in front of him.

Day six: He joined me in the garden.

I heard him on the gravel behind me and turned, and he was there in shirtsleeves in the

cold, jacket off, collar open, looking more like a person and less like a category than I was

used to seeing him. He fell into step beside me without asking if I wanted company.

'You tend this yourself?' I asked.

'When I'm here. There's a man from the village for the heavy work.'

'Do you come here often?'

'When I can.' He looked at the garden with the expression he brought to things he

actually cared about — the quality of attention different from social observation. 'It's the only

place I completely stop.'

'Stop what?'

'Performing.' He said it flatly. Like a fact. 'My work requires a great deal of —

management. Of presentation. This house is where I don't do that.'

'And yet you brought me here.'

He was quiet for a moment. 'Yes.'

'Why not somewhere else? A safe house. Somewhere more—'

'Managed?' The word had an edge. 'I thought about it.'

'And?'

— 31 — He didn't answer. We walked in silence to the end of the path and turned back, and the

silence was not uncomfortable, which surprised me. I had not expected to be comfortable in

silence with him. I had not expected to be comfortable with him at all.

'Your mother,' he said. 'She was from the Petrogradsky district.'

I stopped walking.

'Vasilyevsky,' I said carefully. 'Not Petrogradsky.'

'My mistake.' He glanced at me. 'My grandfather was from Petrogradsky. I confused

them.'

'Your grandfather,' I said. 'Russian.'

'Originally. He came west in the sixties. Not legally.' He paused. 'He brought very little

with him. Some clothes, some money he'd saved, a copy of Pushkin that fell apart before I

inherited it. And the language. The language he kept intact.'

I looked at him sideways. At the profile of him, the broken nose, the silver at the

temples. Thinking about a man with a grandfather who'd fled westward with Pushkin and

illegal savings, and what the path from that beginning to this one looked like.

'Do you speak it?' I asked. 'Russian.'

'When I choose to.' He met my eyes briefly. 'It sounds different in my mouth than it does

in yours. Yours has the sound of someone who was taught it with love.'

The observation — precise, unguarded, completely unexpected — stopped my breath for

a moment.

'Yes,' I said. 'I suppose it does.'

We walked back to the house in silence and he held the door for me and I went inside

and went to my rooms and sat on my bed and pressed my hands flat on my knees and told

myself, very firmly, to maintain perspective.

It was excellent advice. I did not take it.

— 32 — ~ ✦ ~