The Man in the Stairwell

You fall asleep at four with his phone on the pillow beside your face and the conversation still glowing on the screen.

You don't remember exactly how it ended. You remember that you typed more than you meant to, and that his replies came slower than yours, like every word had to pass inspection first. You remember the last thing you sent, and the way you stared at the ceiling afterward, embarrassed and warm.

In the morning, the screen is dark, and the house smells like coffee and something buttery.

You follow the smell downstairs and find, instead of your husband, his mother.

Larisa Belova sits alone at the end of a long table in a breakfast room made almost entirely of glass. The lawn rolls down to the water beyond her like a painting she paid for. She's in cream silk, reading the Wall Street Journal, and she doesn't look up when you come in.

"He's gone to Red Hook," she says. "He leaves at six. He has always left at six. Sit, there's tea. Coffee if you must."

You sit. A woman in a gray uniform sets a cup in front of you, and a plate of tiny pancakes with sour cream, and you thank her in Russian, and she smiles at you with real warmth before she slips away.

Larisa lowers the paper an inch. Her eyes are pale gray, like her son's. On her they look like frost on a window.

"Your Russian is good."

"I interpret for a living."

"I know what you do." She folds the paper with precise creases. "I know a great many things about your family, Ava. I know your mother had beautiful taste and your father has none. I know your sister was a pretty, silly girl who said yes to my son in March and then embarrassed us in front of every family in Brooklyn."

You put down your fork. "My sister is missing."

"Your sister is a coward." She says it calmly, the way someone reads a weather report. "Girls like her always come back. When the money runs out. When the boy, whoever he is, gets bored."

Whoever he is. You file that away. You've sat through enough depositions to notice when a person offers a detail nobody asked for.

"I'm not here to fight you, Mrs. Belova."

"No. You're here because you're the same dress size." She smiles. It's a lovely, cold smile, and you have the sudden certainty that she has used it to end other people's afternoons. "Don't misunderstand me. It was well done, what you did. Brave, even. But my son has a great deal to carry, and you are one more thing. Try not to be a heavy one."

She rises, gathers her paper, and leaves you alone with the pancakes and the painting of the sea.

You eat two pancakes out of spite. They're very good, which makes it worse.

"She's like that with everyone," Inessa says in the car. You've given up on driving separately; it seemed silly, and Inessa drives like she's been trained by people who expect to be chased. "First year I worked here she called me 'the girl with the braid.' To my face."

"How long have you worked here?"

"Four years." Inessa changes lanes without signaling and somehow nobody honks. "She calls me Inessa now. You'll get there. Probably by your twentieth anniversary."

You almost laugh. "There won't be a twentieth anniversary."

Inessa glances at you in the mirror and says nothing, which is somehow louder than saying something.

"Can I ask you a question?" you say. "Do you know where my sister is?"

"No."

"Does he?"

A pause. Very small. "You'd have to ask him."

The Firebird is closed on Mondays. You let yourself in the side door with your old key and climb the narrow back stairs to Nika's apartment, Inessa a step behind you.

You want the passport. You don't know why. You just know you don't want it sitting in that drawer where anyone could take it, as if it were evidence of something you aren't ready to name.

The stairwell is dim. One bulb out. You're halfway up when you realize the door at the top is open an inch.

You stop. Inessa's hand closes gently around your arm.

Somebody is coming down.

He freezes on the landing when he sees you. Late twenties, a mess of dark curls, a jaw that hasn't been shaved in days, beautiful in the wrecked way of men in old movies who have just lost something. He's wearing a work jacket with a patch on the chest. His eyes are red-rimmed.

He stares at you, and his whole face changes. Hope, wild and desperate.

"You're her sister," he says. "You're Ava."

"Who are you?"

He comes down two steps, fast, and Inessa moves in front of you so smoothly you don't even see her do it.

"Is she with you?" His voice cracks. "Is she safe? Please. I just need to know if she's safe. Did she call you? Did she say anything about me?"

"Stop there," Inessa says.

"I'm not going to hurt anybody, I just..."

"Stop. There."

He doesn't. He comes down one more step, hands reaching out, and Inessa's gun is suddenly in her hand, low and steady, pointed at the floor in front of his feet.

He goes white.

"I'm sorry," he says, to you, not to her. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be here."

And he turns and bolts back up the stairs, through Nika's apartment, and you hear the window at the back screech open and the fire escape clang under his weight, and then he's gone.

Inessa doesn't chase him. She stands very still with the gun lowered, listening, until the clatter fades. Then she holsters it, and breathes out, and looks at you.

"You know him?"

"No." Your heart is going so hard you feel it in your teeth. "Do you?"

"Maybe." Her jaw is tight. "Stay here."

She goes up first. You go up anyway.

Nika's apartment has been searched, but gently, the way someone searches when they don't want anyone to know. Drawers closed a little crooked. The closet door open. The bed, still made, has a dent in it, as if someone sat on the edge for a long time.

The top dresser drawer is open. Her passport is still there.

He saw it, you think. He saw it and left it.

On the floor by the door, where he must have dropped it when Inessa drew, is a business card. Heavy white stock, navy letters.

ZORIN FUEL & MARINE
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn
Yakov Zorin, Marine Engineer

Inessa sees the name over your shoulder and goes very quiet. You know the name too. Everyone in Brighton Beach knows it. Zorin is the name your father uses when he wants to scare a waiter into working harder.

"Zorin," you say. "Like Fyodor Zorin?"

"His son." Inessa is already pulling out her phone. "I need to call Dmitri."

You turn the card over in your fingers.

On the back, in blue ink, in a hand that shook while it wrote, someone has scrawled four words and underlined the last one twice.

She never made it to me.