Nine Minutes

For a second you can't do anything but look at him.

You've seen handsome men. Brooklyn is full of them, in bike lanes and coffee lines, beautiful and twenty-eight and mostly useless. This is something else. He's somewhere in his forties, tall, broad through the shoulders in a way that has nothing to do with a gym, and his black hair has gone silver at the temples like someone dipped a brush in frost and touched him there twice. A close beard with silver in it too. Gray eyes, the color of the ocean you just walked past. A face built for the cover of something expensive, and he wears it like he's forgotten it's there.

Vadim closes the door behind you. You hear him go back down the stairs.

"How do you know my father's name?" you say. It comes out steadier than you feel.

"I check everyone who opens my books." He gestures to the chair across from the empty desk. "Sit, if you like. Or stand. Tea?"

"No. Thank you." You sit, because your legs would like you to. "You checked me."

"Four days ago, when Augustina told me Feinblatt had sent someone young who asked for the water bills." Something at the corner of his mouth moves, not quite a smile. "Nobody asks for the water bills."

"Then you know what I found."

"I know you found something. I'd like to hear it from you." He sits down across from you, one ankle on his knee, and looks at his watch. It's steel, old, a little scratched. "Go."

So you go.

You open the laptop and turn it to face him and you walk him through it the way you'd walk a partner through it, except no partner has ever looked at you like this, like every word is worth the weight of a coin. Kestrel Textile Group. Eighteen months. Three million eight hundred twelve thousand. The invoices that are too pretty. The receiving log that doesn't exist. The water bill, flat. The dryer hours, flat. The trucks' mileage, flat. The payments that come out of an account fed by three other companies, all with the same registered agent at a mailbox store in Bensonhurst.

He doesn't interrupt. That's the first thing that unsettles you. Men like Mort interrupt, men like your landlord interrupt, every partner you have ever presented to has interrupted by slide three. Aleksei Borodin sits with one ankle on his knee, steam ghosting up the window behind him, silver at his temples and nothing at all on his face, and lets you finish.

Then he looks at his watch.

"Nine minutes," he says. "My last accountant took nine months to tell me less."

"Your last accountant should have been fired."

"He retired. He's downstairs, losing at chess." Now there's a smile, brief, there and gone. "Grisha would have liked you. He'd have hated the stickers on your laptop."

You glance down. A cartoon croissant. A bumper sticker that says I BRAKE FOR BALANCE SHEETS. Carys bought you that one as a joke and you've never been able to peel it off.

"Questions," he says. "The three companies that feed the account. Names."

You give them. He nods at two. At the third, Seaway Fixtures, his eyes go still for half a second.

"The registered agent. Did you find a person, or only the mailbox?"

"Only the mailbox. I'd need state filings for a person. I was going to pull them tomorrow."

"Kestrel's bank?"

"A small one in Jersey. I don't have access to their side."

"Who signed the payments on Brightwater's side?"

"Electronic approvals. The login belongs to the holding company. Neptune Avenue Holdings." You watch his face. "Yours, I'm guessing."

"Mine." He doesn't flinch. "And many people's. That's a door with a lot of keys." He uncrosses his legs and leans forward, elbows on his knees, and suddenly he's closer, and you can smell him: cedar from the baths, cold air, something like black tea. "What do you think happened, Ms. Dunne? Not what you can prove. What you think."

Nobody asks you that. Nobody asks what you think.

"I think someone inside built a supplier that doesn't exist and has been paying it for a year and a half," you say. "Someone who knows your systems well enough to make it boring. The best fraud is boring. Nobody looks at boring."

"Except you."

"I like boring. It's where people hide things."

He looks at you for a long moment. The El goes by outside, a long rattling shine of light, and the window shivers in its frame.

"I'd like forty-eight hours," he says. "Before your report goes to your firm."

There it is. You knew there would be a there-it-is. Your stomach drops anyway.

"No," you say.

His eyebrows lift, very slightly.

"My report goes to Mort Feinblatt on Monday morning," you say. "That's the engagement. I'm not going to sit on it, and I'm not going to change it, and if that's why you brought me here, I'll walk back to the train now." Your voice shakes only on now. You hate that it shakes at all.

"Good," he says.

You blink. "Good?"

"Write the truth. I'd expect nothing else." He stands, goes to the samovar, pours a glass of tea he apparently intends to drink himself. "I asked for forty-eight hours so I can start finding out who before your report makes them run. You said no. Monday it is. I'll have to be faster."

"That's it?"

"What did you think I'd do?"

You don't answer. He knows exactly what you thought. He's had a lifetime of people thinking it.

"You walked four blocks in the dark with two men you didn't know to tell me my own company is lying to me," he says, without turning around. "That's either very stupid or very honest, and you're not stupid. I don't punish honest people. I don't have enough of them."

He comes back with the tea and sets it, not in front of himself, but in front of you. A slice of lemon. A sugar cube on the saucer.

"In case you change your mind," he says.

You drink it. It's perfect. You resent that.

At ten he gives you a card. Plain white, heavy stock, nothing on it but a phone number written by hand.

"If anyone else asks you about this before Monday, call me. Anyone. Including people who say they work for me."

"Is that likely?"

"It's possible." He walks you to the top of the stairs. "Vadim will drive you home."

"I'll take the train."

"It's late."

"It's the Q. I've been taking it since I was twelve." You button your coat. "Thank you for the tea, Mr. Borodin."

He looks like he'd like to argue and is choosing not to, which is a strange thing to watch on a face like that. "Aleksei," he says. "Be careful on the platform, Ava."

The old man in the cardigan watches you all the way across the lobby.

The train is half empty and smells like wet coats. You ride it with the laptop hugged to your chest, your reflection in the black window, your heart still going. Your phone buzzes: Carys. Ava r u alive or did the laundromat eat u. text me. You text back a thumbs-up and a towel emoji, because you don't know how to explain the rest of it in a text. Kings Highway. Avenue J. You get off at Avenue H and walk the three blocks to Ocean Parkway, past the closed bagel place and the man who always walks his two pugs at eleven. You wave. He waves.

Your building is a six-story brick prewar with a lobby that smells like radiator dust. Your apartment is on the fourth floor. Carys is at work until two; she's on the line at a place in Williamsburg that serves bone marrow on toast to people who say unctuous.

You come up the last flight of stairs fishing in your bag for your keys.

You don't need them.

Your door is standing open six inches. Where the deadbolt should be there's a neat round hole, the edges bright and raw, little curls of metal on the hallway floor like pencil shavings.