CAGED IN CRIMSON

CAGED IN CRIMSON chapter 3

Chapter Three

Mara

I did not sleep.

This is not a dramatic statement — I mean it practically, precisely. I sat on my couch

from two-thirty in the morning until the October light began seeping around my curtains at

seven, and I worked through every option I had, and I was doing work, not catastrophising.

The distinction mattered to me then and still matters to me now, because I want to be clear that

I was not passive in this. I was thinking with everything I had.

Option one: call the police. This required more analysis than it seems. I had translated

documents suggesting that an organisation with significant reach had been responsible for the

disappearance of multiple people. I did not know the scope of that reach. I did not know

whether it extended into local law enforcement. I did not know what bringing a police report

would trigger. And even a successful arrest — of a man who had sat in my armchair in the

dark and been nothing but honest with me — would not address the people he'd described as

preferring simpler solutions. The people who presumably still existed regardless of what

happened to Nikolai Vaskov.

Option two: Elena. God, I wanted this option. Elena was careful, thorough, had handled

dangerous investigations before. She had contacts and resources and the kind of journalist's

instinct for self-protection that comes from years of practice. But I had seen what happened to

journalists who handled stories like this carelessly, and I had already said too much to her

— 19 — once, and I was not willing to put her name into this situation.

Option three: run. Which required money I didn't have and a destination that wasn't

already known to people who had been watching me for weeks and knew the details of my

kitchen window.

Option four: do nothing. Decline the conversation, lock the door, refuse to engage. This

option assumed that inaction was the same as safety, which everything I knew about the

situation suggested was not true.

By five in the morning I had arrived, with the methodical exhaustion of someone who

has eliminated everything else, at the thing I'd been resisting looking at directly: there was one

option with a real probability of survival, and it was not one I would have chosen. But choices

are not always about preference. Sometimes they are about arithmetic.

I was still sitting on the couch with Dostoevsky asleep across my feet when the knock

came at seven precisely.

One knock. Certain. The knock of someone who had never doubted they would be let in.

I opened the door.

He looked exactly as he had at two in the morning — suit, composed, that particular

quality of self-containment that I was beginning to understand was not performance but

genuine. He was the same at seven as he had been at two, which told me something. People

who perform control slip when circumstances change. He didn't slip.

He looked at me — at my clothes from yesterday still on, at the cup of tea I'd made at six

and not drunk, at whatever the night had done to my face — and something in his expression

shifted almost imperceptibly. Gone before I could name it.

'You didn't sleep,' he said.

'I was thinking.'

'Yes.' Almost to himself. 'I know.'

— 20 — 'You know everything, apparently,' I said. The edge in my voice was real. I wasn't going

to hide it.

'Not everything.' He paused. 'May I come in?'

'You didn't ask last time.'

'Last time I needed you to understand the situation clearly. This time I'd prefer a

conversation between people who are both choosing to have it.'

I stepped back. He came in and looked around my apartment with an attention that I had

begun to recognize — the way he looked at things, complete and without pretense of

indifference. He was looking at my apartment the way I would look at a new text: getting the

measure of it.

'I have conditions,' I said.

He sat in the armchair — my armchair, the one he'd occupied for forty minutes the night

before, with the ease of someone who had established residency. 'Tell me.'

'My cat. Her name is Dostoevsky. She's twelve years old and she has a thyroid condition

that requires medication twice a day and a vet appointment in three weeks. She needs to be

cared for properly.'

'Agreed.'

'Not left in an empty apartment. Properly.'

'She'll be better cared for than she has been,' he said. Not unkindly. Just factually. 'What

else.'

'My clients need to not worry about me. I'm not going to tell you I need to contact them

myself — I understand why that's not possible. But whoever handles my communications

needs to be credible. I have long relationships with some of these people. They know how I

write.'

'I have a Russian-English translator on staff who's worked in the same specialties you

have. She'll study your past communications. It will be credible.'

— 21 — 'She,' I said. 'All right.' I looked at him directly. 'I want information. Not reassurances —

actual information about what's happening and how this ends. I understand there are things

you won't tell me. I want the things you will.'

'Yes.' No qualification. No 'we'll see.' 'What else.'

'Elena Marsh. My neighbor. She is not involved in this in any way. She asked me once if

something was wrong and I said no and she let it go. She needs to stay out of this.'

'She's not my concern,' he said. Then, more quietly: 'She won't be touched.'

'Your word on that.'

He looked at me steadily. 'My word.'

I believed him. That was the strangest and most clarifying thing — I believed him. Not

because I was naive about what he was or what his organisation had done, but because he had

been honest with me about every difficult thing, and dishonesty about this would have been

easier.

'Where are you taking me?' I asked.

'A house. Two hours from the city. In the countryside — old stone house, grounds,

gardens. You'll have your own rooms. A workspace. Your work forwarded to you through the

agency so your income continues. Access to the grounds during daylight.' He paused,

choosing words with the precision of someone who understood that words had structural

properties. 'It will be comfortable. That's not a euphemism. I mean it literally.'

'And the door,' I said. 'On my rooms.'

'Will lock from the outside. Yes.'

'And you'll have the key.'

'Yes.'

'And I can't leave.'

'Not until the situation is resolved.'

— 22 — I looked at him. At this man who had broken into my apartment twice, who had been

watching me for weeks, who was proposing to take me to a house in the countryside and keep

me there, and who had been completely, uncomplicatedly honest about all of it.

'You're very calm about the ethics of this,' I said.

'I'm not calm about the ethics of it,' he said. Something moved briefly across his

expression. 'I'm clear about the arithmetic. Those aren't the same.'

'The arithmetic being that the alternative is worse.'

'For you. Yes.'

I stood in my kitchen doorway and looked at my apartment — at the books on every

surface, the desk in the corner with its organised chaos, Dostoevsky asleep on the radiator

cover in a patch of morning sun. At my life, small and specific and mine.

'Pack a bag,' he said. 'One hour.'

I went to my bedroom. I packed with the methodical attention of someone who intends

to function wherever they end up — work clothes, comfort clothes, the medications I needed,

the small things that make a strange space inhabitable. My grandmother's copy of Eugene

Onegin, the one with her annotations in the margins. Two notebooks. My good pens.

I packed as though I were leaving for an assignment in a foreign city. Because that was

the only frame that made it bearable, and because Dostoevsky was watching me from the bed

with enormous yellow eyes, and I needed to not come apart in front of my cat.

'I know,' I told her.

She blinked. She had always been a philosophical creature.

I picked up the carrier. I went back to the living room. Nikolai Vaskov was standing at

my window looking down at the street, and when I came in he turned and looked at me and

whatever he saw in my face made something shift in his.

'Mara,' he said.

— 23 — 'Don't,' I said. 'Just don't.'

He was quiet. He picked up my bag. He held the door for me, which was such a bizarre

formality under the circumstances that I almost said something, and then I decided not to,

because some battles are not worth the words.

We went.

~ ✦ ~