The Fortieth Floor
Vera
On the last Thursday in October, the Russians came in out of the rain at ten past two, and I was the only person on the fortieth floor who understood what they said about the coffee.
“Italian coffee in an American office,” the bald one murmured in Russian as he passed the silver urn. “Somebody should call the police.”
I kept my eyes on my laptop. 2:10 p.m. Mr. Orlov and party arrive, I typed, and my fingers didn’t stop, because that was the job. Sit at the end of the table. Be a girl with a laptop. Be furniture with a pulse. And under the table, on the small spiral notebook resting on my knee, write down every word the Russians said to each other when they thought no one in the room could follow.
Eight days earlier, Marco Ricci had sat down at my mother’s kitchen table in Rogers Park as if he owned the chair. He was so big the table looked like a toy. His face was a map of old scars and broken red veins, and he’d kept his coat on the whole time.
“Your brother owes thirty-eight thousand to a book on Harlem Avenue,” he’d said. “The book belongs to my boss. You speak Russian. You sit in a room for a few afternoons and you write down what you hear. Then your brother owes nothing, and nobody breaks his hands.”
I’d said no. He’d put a photograph of my brother’s left hand on the table, flat on a bar top, with a hammer beside it. Nobody had touched the hand yet. That was the point of the photograph.
I’d said yes.
So here I was. Miss Lane, from the agency, the lawyers called me. Twenty-nine years old, a certified court interpreter for Cook County, sitting at the foot of a walnut table in a law office on LaSalle Street, pretending I knew only one language.
The room was all glass on one side. Rain ran down it in long gray threads, and behind the rain the lake lay flat and dark as a slate roof. On the Italian side of the table sat Giovanni Moretti. Silver hair, eyes so dark they looked burned, a charcoal suit that smelled faintly of cigars even from where I sat. He held a gold pen in his right hand, and every so often he tapped it on the blotter. Three taps. A rest. Three taps. Marco stood behind his chair, huge and silent, like a wall in a tie. Two lawyers flanked Moretti with fat blue binders open in front of them.
The Russians took the other side.
The bald one sat down first, on the left. Late thirties, shoulders like a boxer gone a little soft, his head shaved so smooth it shone under the ceiling lights. A neat black goatee. Warm brown eyes that went around the room once and seemed to enjoy everything they found. He set a tablet on the table and folded his hands on it.
The man beside him didn’t sit so much as arrive in the chair.
He was tall, dark hair cropped close to the skull, a heavy brow, a mouth that looked like it had been closed for years. His eyes were gray and very still. A white scar ran from the left side of his jaw down his neck and into his collar, as if someone had once tried to open him like an envelope. He pulled off his black gloves one finger at a time and laid them side by side on the walnut. Then he took a steel lighter from his pocket, flicked the lid open, clink, let it fall shut, snap, and did it again.
He never lit anything.
The third Russian stayed by the door. He was enormous. Red-blond beard, the sides of his head shaved, rain still beading on his shoulders as if he’d walked here from the river without an umbrella and found the walk refreshing. He looked at the wall above Moretti’s head and nowhere else.
“Mr. Sokolov,” said the senior lawyer, a silver-haired man named Booth. “Thank you for coming in person.”
The bald man repeated it in Russian, word for word. The man with the lighter didn’t nod. Clink. Snap.
So that was the Pakhan. Lev Sokolov. I had heard his name in the courthouse hallways the way you hear about a storm on another coast. Men who did not know Russian said it carefully. Men who did said it more carefully.
Booth turned a page. “Article six. The West Side yards, the routes, and the drivers’ contracts pass to Mr. Sokolov’s companies on signing. Mr. Moretti’s people will vacate within thirty days.”
The bald man translated. His Russian was quick and easy, with the flat vowels of Brooklyn under it. The Pakhan said something short, low, to the window.
“Tell him thirty days is generous,” he said in Russian. “He moved out of my trucks faster than that in the summer.”
The bald man turned to the table and smiled his warm smile. “The Pakhan agrees to thirty days.”
My pen moved on my knee. P: “30 days is generous. He ran from my trucks faster in summer.” Under the table, my hand was steady. Above it, I typed Sokolov accepts.
It went on like that. Booth read. The bald man turned it into Russian, perfectly. The Pakhan answered, sometimes with a word, sometimes with a sentence that would have started a fight in any bar in Chicago, and the bald man turned each one into something a priest could have said at a christening.
“Mr. Moretti wishes to remind Mr. Sokolov that he is a guest in this city,” said the second lawyer.
The Pakhan didn’t even look at him. “Tell him the city has changed its mind about who the guest is.”
“The Pakhan thanks Mr. Moretti for his hospitality,” said the bald man.
I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.
I had sat in a hundred courtrooms. I knew what it cost to carry another person’s words across a gap without spilling them. I knew how tempting it was to soften a curse for a judge, to make a frightened witness sound braver than she was. You never did it. Never. The words weren’t yours.
This man did it like breathing. He did it with style. He took each insult, turned it over in his hands, polished off the blood, and set it on the table like a gift. And not one person on the Italian side knew.
Except Marco. Marco’s eyes kept going to the bald man and staying there, the way a dog keeps sniffing at a door.
Then Booth turned another page, and the room changed.
“Article nine,” he said. “The marriage.”
My fingers slowed on the keys. I made them speed up again.
“Mr. Moretti’s daughter, Sienna, age twenty-two, will marry Mr. Sokolov on a date to be set by Mr. Moretti, in a civil ceremony before a priest. The bride will bring as dowry the deeds to the South Loop warehouses. The bride has lived twelve years in the care of the sisters of Sacred Heart and will be delivered—” Booth cleared his throat, as if even he could hear it. “Untouched.”
Delivered. Like a sofa.
I typed it. I typed every word. Bride will be delivered untouched. My stomach turned slowly over, like something in deep water.
Nobody asked if she had agreed. Nobody said her name again. Moretti tapped his pen three times, and the bald man translated, and the Pakhan’s lighter went still in his hand. He didn’t speak. He looked out at the rain for a long moment, and the scar on his neck moved once as he swallowed, and then the lighter started again.
Clink. Snap.
I wondered where she was right now, that girl. Whether anyone had told her. Whether she was sitting in some big cold house looking at the same rain.
Booth went on to money and dates. My head buzzed. And that was why I was watching the Pakhan’s hands instead of my screen when it happened.
Moretti leaned back toward Marco and spoke in English, low, the way you talk in front of a dog. “Look at him. Can’t order a cup of coffee in this country, and he took my yards.”
He hadn’t said it to the table. It wasn’t for the bald man to translate. The bald man didn’t.
The Pakhan’s lighter opened. Clink.
And didn’t close.
The lid hung open between his fingers for one full second. The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The ghost of one, gone as fast as it came. Then snap, a breath too late, and his face was a closed door again.
Nobody else saw it. Moretti was looking at Marco. The lawyers were looking at their binders. The bald man was looking at his tablet.
I saw it.
He had understood. Every word. Before anyone turned it into Russian, before anyone said anything at all.
My fingers had stopped on the keys.
I knew it a heartbeat too late. The silence of my keyboard sounded, in that quiet room, like a dropped glass. I looked up.
The Pakhan’s gray eyes were already on me.
Not on Moretti. Not on the lawyers. On me. Calm and flat and patient, like the eyes of a man looking down at a frozen pond, deciding whether the ice will hold.
I looked down. I typed. Discussion of schedule. Wire timing. I typed it twice. My heart was beating in my ears, in my teeth, in the tips of my fingers on the keys.
“Shall we take ten minutes?” Booth said.
The coffee urn was by the glass wall, next to a basket of tea bags and a plate of little Italian cookies nobody touched. I poured coffee I didn’t want so my hands would have something to do. Behind me the room had broken into small groups. Moretti on the phone in the corner. The Pakhan and the bald man at the far end of the glass, talking low, their backs to the room. Marco by the door, across from the red-bearded giant, the two of them ignoring each other with great effort.
Someone came up beside me and took a paper cup.
The bald man. He smelled of rain and cigarettes and some expensive soap. He chose a tea bag with great care, dropped it into the cup, and filled it from the hot-water tap. He didn’t look at me. He looked at his tea.
“Your fingers stopped, little stenographer,” he said softly, in Russian.
“My hand cramped,” I said.
In Russian.
It came out of me before my brain caught up, smooth and natural, in my mother’s Leningrad vowels. I heard it leave my mouth. I heard it land.
The bald man stirred his tea with a little wooden stick. He didn’t look surprised. He looked like a man who has just had a good card turned face up, exactly where he expected it.
“Of course,” he said, in English now, warm and friendly. “Long day. Try the cookies. They’re terrible.”
He walked back to his chair with his tea. He sat down beside the Pakhan. He didn’t say anything to him. He didn’t have to. The Pakhan didn’t look at me again, not once, for the rest of the afternoon, and somehow that was worse.
I don’t remember the last hour. I know I typed. I know the pages filled with words. I know that on the notebook under the table, where I was supposed to write down everything the Russians said, I wrote nothing at all. My pen just sat there on the paper, making a small blue dot where I’d pressed it and forgotten.
At five o’clock Booth closed his binder. The Pakhan put on his gloves, one finger at a time, and walked out without a word to anyone. The giant followed him. The bald man went last, tablet under his arm, and he nodded to me on the way past, politely, the way you’d nod to a waitress.
I waited until the hall was empty. Then I packed my laptop and took the elevator down to the garage.
Level P3 was cold and smelled of wet concrete and oil. The lights buzzed. My mother’s old blue Corolla sat at the end of the row where I’d left it, small and faithful.
A man was leaning against the trunk.
He was smoking. The tablet was tucked under his arm, and the end of the cigarette glowed orange in the gray light, and his bald head shone under the lamp like something polished for church.
“Vera Andreyevna Lane,” he said. “Twenty-nine. Court interpreter, Russian and English, Cook County. Lives in her mother’s apartment on Farwell Avenue, three blocks from the lake. Her mother made the best pelmeni in Rogers Park, people say.” He blew smoke at the low ceiling. “I’m sorry she died. They say it was fast. That’s something.”
My keys were in my hand. I held them so tight the teeth bit my palm.
“Who are you?” I said.
“Tonight? I’m the man who decides what you heard.” He pushed himself off my car and dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, neatly. “Yuri Orlov. Get in. You’re driving.”
“And if I scream?”
He tilted his head toward the ramp. Far up it, at the turn, a huge shape stood in the shadows with rain still on its shoulders.
“Then my friend comes down,” Yuri Orlov said, “and he is much worse at conversation than I am.”
Rules of the Car
Yuri
Two hours earlier, while the lawyers poured coffee and pretended to be friends, Lev had stood at the glass with his back to the room and spoken to the rain.
“The girl with the laptop,” he said in Russian. “She stopped typing.”
I came to stand beside him with my tea. Below us the city was a gray smear, the river a darker line through it. “Girls stop typing. Their hands get tired.”
“She stopped when I forgot myself.”
That turned my head. In eleven years at his left shoulder I had seen Lev Sokolov bleed, lie, bury men, and once, in a Brighton Beach kitchen, eat an entire cake out of grief without tasting it. I had never once heard him say he forgot himself.
“Moretti made a joke,” he said. “It was funny. I let it reach my face.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough.” He flicked the lighter. Clink. “Find out who she is. What she heard. Who she tells.”
“And then?”
He let the lid fall. Snap. “Then we’ll see.”
Uvidim. I had heard him say it before. Sometimes it meant a man got a second chance. More often it meant the man stopped needing chances at all.
So I went to the coffee urn and dropped a word in Russian at her feet, the way you drop a coin to see who bends for it. She bent. She answered me in a voice like my grandmother’s old radio from Leningrad, soft round vowels, the kind you don’t hear in Brooklyn anymore, and for one second I forgot what I was doing there.
Only one second. Then I remembered, and I smiled, and I told her the cookies were terrible.
She drove like a woman taking an exam. Both hands on the wheel. Mirrors every five seconds. Her mother’s blue Corolla smelled of pine air freshener and old paper, and the heater blew a thin warm breath at our knees that never quite won.
“In my car,” she said as we came up out of the garage into the rain, “we speak English.”
I almost laughed. “My Pakhan has a rule for his cars too. Only Russian.”
“Well, this isn’t his car.” Her chin came up. “It’s mine. It’s fourteen years old and the radio only gets one station, but it’s mine.”
“English, then.” I settled back into the seat, which was too small for me, and watched Viktor’s headlights fall in behind us on Wacker Drive. “Who sent you into that room, Vera Andreyevna?”
I expected a lie. I had a few ready to take apart. Instead she told me everything, fast, as if it had been pressing on her chest for eight days. Marco Ricci at her kitchen table. Her brother Pasha, twenty-four, who bet on hockey the way some men pray, and who owed thirty-eight thousand dollars to a bookmaker on Harlem Avenue. A picture of the boy’s hand spread on a bar, and a hammer waiting next to it.
“I’m a terrible spy,” she said. “I answered you in Russian over a plate of cookies. They should give me my money back.”
“They didn’t give you any money.”
“Then they should give me my brother back.” Her knuckles were white on the wheel. “Are you going to hurt me, Mr. Orlov?”
“Not tonight.”
She took the curve onto Lake Shore Drive a little too fast. On our right the lake was black and wild, waves breaking white over the rocks and throwing spray across the empty bike path.
“That’s not very comforting,” she said.
“It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be true.” I held out my hand, palm up. “Your notebook.”
She didn’t argue. She reached into the pocket of her coat, steering with one hand, and gave it to me. A cheap spiral notebook, the cover bent from her knee. I turned on the little reading light above the mirror and opened it.
She had written down everything. Every word Lev said in Russian, in a small neat hand, with the time beside it. Tell him thirty days is generous. Tell him the city has changed its mind about who the guest is. Beside some of them she had written my English version in brackets, and after one, The Pakhan thanks Mr. Moretti for his hospitality, she had drawn a tiny question mark, as if she couldn’t help herself.
I turned the pages to the end of the session. Booth’s voice reading the marriage article. Money. Dates.
Then one blue dot, pressed deep into the paper, and nothing after it.
“What did you write,” I said, “when Moretti made his joke?”
“Nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know what I saw.”
It was a lie. A good one, too, plainly told, with her eyes on the road. I let it sit in the car with us for a mile.
“What did you see, Vera?”
She looked at me then, quickly, and back at the wet road. In the yellow light from the streetlamps I could see a scatter of freckles across her nose, and a tiny chip at the corner of one front tooth, and a pencil pushed through the knot of her dark-blond hair. A red wool scarf. Gray-green eyes, tired and stubborn.
“I saw a man flick a lighter,” she said.
I closed the notebook.
Something happened in my chest then that I didn’t have a word for in either of my languages. It was the feeling you get when a lock you have been working at for an hour suddenly turns. She had seen it. She knew. And she had decided, alone, at the foot of a table full of guns, to write down a blue dot instead.
“You make him sound like a choirboy,” she said quietly. “Your Pakhan. You take everything he says and wash it.”
“I make him sound like a man who wants to see Christmas. So does Moretti, whether he knows it or not.” I tapped the notebook against my knee. “Two years they bled each other over those truck yards. Men in the river every week. You read the papers?”
“I read them.”
“Somebody has to carry the words from one side to the other without lighting a fire. That’s me. I’m the bridge.” I shrugged. “A bridge doesn’t get opinions. It just doesn’t fall down.”
“And if a word is ugly?”
“Then I carry it in my mouth until it’s pretty. Or until it’s nothing.” I turned to face her. “You know the job. You do it in court.”
“In court we never change a word.”
“In court nobody shoots the interpreter.”
She went quiet. The wipers beat back and forth. Far out on the black water a single light blinked, a buoy or a boat, and then the rain hid it.
I tore the pages out of her notebook, every page with Lev’s words on it, folded them twice, and put them in the inside pocket of my coat. She watched me do it and said nothing.
“Here is what you tell Marco,” I said. “The Russians talked about trucks. The Pakhan was rude about the coffee. He complained about the thirty days. That’s true, and it’s harmless, and it smells like work.”
“Marco will know it’s thin.”
“Marco has a nose. He doesn’t have ears. Give him something to sniff, and he’ll go away happy.” I let my voice go flat, so she would understand the next part was not a joke. “And if you give him anything else, Vera Andreyevna, anything at all, the next man who waits by your car will not smoke. He will not talk. He will not tell you the cookies are terrible.”
She shivered. I watched it go through her, shoulders to wrists, and I made myself keep watching.
“I understand,” she said.
“Good.”
She turned off Lake Shore Drive into the narrow streets of Rogers Park. Old brick buildings, wet trees, a Russian grocery on the corner with a hand-painted sign. She parked in front of a three-story walk-up on Farwell Avenue and turned off the engine, and the silence came into the car like cold water.
Viktor’s car slid to the curb behind us and waited, lights off.
She didn’t get out. She sat with her hands still on the wheel.
“The girl,” she said. “The bride. Sienna. Does she know?”
I hadn’t expected that. Of all the questions in her, I hadn’t expected that one first.
“I don’t know,” I said, and it was true.
“Twelve years with nuns, and then delivered.” She said the word as if it tasted of rust. “Like a sofa. Nobody in that room even asked if she said yes.”
“Nobody in that room was ever asked anything.” I opened my door. Rain came in at once, cold on my head. “Good night, Vera Andreyevna.”
She leaned across the seat before I could close the door. Her face was close to mine in the small light, and I smelled her shampoo, something green, and the wet wool of the scarf.
“He understood Moretti,” she said, very low. “Didn’t he? Every word.”
I said nothing. I let the rain say it.
“That’s a yes,” she said, “in every language I know.”
Then she got out, and locked her mother’s car with the key because the button didn’t work, and climbed the steps of the walk-up without looking back. I stood in the rain on Farwell Avenue and watched until the third-floor window lit behind a lace curtain.
Viktor drove. I sat beside him and called the Nest on the secure line, and Lev picked up on the first ring, which he never does.
“Well?”
I gave it to him in Russian, clean and in order. Moretti’s ear. Marco Ricci holding a brother’s debt over her. A court interpreter, a good one. She had written down every word Lev said and every sweet thing I had turned it into.
“And mine?” Lev said. “My English?”
I looked at the wet street ahead. The truth was in my coat pocket, folded twice. The truth was a blue dot.
“She wrote nothing about it,” I said. “She says she saw a man flick a lighter.”
The line was quiet for so long I thought the storm had cut it. Then:
“Moretti signs in three weeks. Until he signs, nothing touches that room. She keeps her seat. She writes what you tell her to write. And you watch her, Yura. Every day.”
“I’ll watch her.”
“If she’s Moretti’s ear,” Lev said, in the same even voice he uses to order coffee, “if one word of mine reaches him through her, she goes in the lake. You found her. You’ll do it yourself.”
The wipers went back and forth. Viktor kept his eyes on the road.
“Da,” I said.
Lev hung up.
I sat with the dead phone in my hand. I had said da to Lev Sokolov ten thousand times. I had said it in burning warehouses and hospital corridors and at gravesides. It had always been the easiest word I owned.
Viktor glanced at me once, which for Viktor is a speech.
“You liked her,” he said.
“I like everybody.”
“No,” said Viktor, and turned back to the road.
Behind us, on a quiet street by the lake, a light went out on a third floor. I had just promised my Pakhan I would drown a woman, and the only thing I could think about was how her voice had sounded in Russian, saying my hand cramped, as if she had been waiting her whole life for someone to ask.
