Page Forty

Oksana is behind her register when the bell over the door jingles, and she takes one look at who walked in behind you and puts down her pen.

"Zakharin," she says.

"Pani Hrytsenko." Mikhail inclines his head with real courtesy, almost a bow. "It's been a long time."

"Not long enough." But she doesn't say it with heat. She looks at you, then at the ring on your hand, and her eyebrows climb toward her gray bun. "Oh, ditko. What did you do?"

"I got married this morning," you say.

Oksana says something in Ukrainian that you're fairly sure is a prayer, or a curse, or both.

"Nobody makes trouble in my banya," she tells Mikhail, pointing a thick finger at his chest. "Not your father, not your cousin, not you. Your mother knew that. Her son should know it too."

"I know it," he says quietly. "That's why I'm glad it's here."

It's the first time you've heard him mention his mother. Oksana's face does something complicated. Then she jerks her chin toward the back. "Locker room's empty till four. Go."

The men's locker room is cedar and tile and old steam, warm as breath. The radiators clank. Somewhere a faucet drips into a drain with the patience of a metronome.

Locker nine. You turn your father's key. His robe is still folded on the shelf, his sandals beneath it, and between them the green ledger exactly where you left it.

You hold it against your chest for a second. Then you turn and hold it out.

"Terms," you say.

"Your terms."

"You read it here. It doesn't leave this room. You don't photograph it. When you're done, it goes back in the locker, and I keep the key."

"Agreed."

"And you tell me what you see," you say. "All of it. Not the parts you think I can handle."

Something flickers in his face. "Agreed," he says again, and takes it.

He sits on the long cedar bench under a single bulb. You sit beside him, not touching, close enough to read over his arm.

He goes through the early pages fast. You watch him recognize things. A shell company here, an address there. A dry breath that might be a laugh when he hits a laundromat in Cicero. He turns a page with a familiar name, and his jaw tightens, and he turns it without a word. You note the page number. Twelve. You'll ask later.

"You decoded all of this," he says. "In a night."

"It's a cipher he taught me when I was nine. He used to leave notes in my lunchbox." Your voice wobbles. You make it stop. "I can read everything up to thirty-eight. After that it's a different system. I couldn't break it."

He turns to thirty-nine.

He stops.

You watch him scan the page, and then the next, and the next. Strings of capital letters and numbers. A word here and there that might be a name. His finger moves down a column, very slowly, the way your father's used to when something didn't balance.

"This isn't a cipher," he says. "It's shorthand. Lake shipping shorthand. These are vessel call signs." He touches one. "This is a port code. Thunder Bay. This one is Duluth. These are dates." His finger moves again. "And this is a ship's name, written backwards."

He turns to page forty.

And stops breathing.

You see it happen. His whole body goes still, a stillness so complete it's like a building holding its breath before a demolition. His eyes move down the page once, twice. Then his hands begin to shake.

Not a tremor. Shaking. The pages rattle faintly against each other in his long fingers, and he can't seem to stop them, and he sets the ledger flat on his knees and presses both palms on it as if it might fly away.

"Mikhail."

"Give me a moment."

His voice is wrong. Rough. You wait. The faucet drips. The radiator clanks.

"Zinaida," he says at last. He touches a word that you'd read as AIDANIZ. "My grandmother's name. My father named a ship after his mother. A lake freighter. Iron ore and grain, officially. Out of the Calumet River." His finger moves. "These are her sailings. Every one, for six years. Dates, ports, the agent who meets her at each end. And these numbers aren't tons." He swallows. "They're people."

The cedar room goes cold around you.

"What?"

"My father moves people, Ava." He says it to the page, as if he can't look at you while he says it. "Women, mostly. Some men. People who were promised a job in a hotel or a restaurant or a factory, who paid everything they had for a way into this country, and who were then sold to whoever paid the most. Across the lake. Through the locks. Never on paper. Never the same route twice." His thumb presses into the column. "Except someone wrote it down."

Your father. Your father wrote it down.

"I didn't know," you whisper. "I swear to God, I didn't know what it was."

"I know you didn't." He finally looks at you, and his eyes are wet and furious and very, very far away. "Neither did he, at first. I think he figured it out. I think that's why he started writing this part in a different code."

"How do you know all this?"

He's quiet for a long time.

"Five years ago," he says, "my mother left my father. Thirty-two years of marriage, and she packed one suitcase and went to her sister in Riga. Everyone said it was a woman, or money, or that she'd lost her mind. She called me from the airport. She told me what she'd found in his office. What the Zinaida carries." His jaw works. "She died eight months later. Cancer. She'd known for a year and never told him. She told me. She made me promise."

"Promise what?"

"That I'd end it."

He looks down at his hands, still flat on your father's ledger, still not quite steady.

"I've spent five years doing it," he says. "Quietly. One contact at a time. A shipment that never arrives. An agent in Duluth who suddenly retires to Arizona. A captain who finds religion. My father thinks he has a run of bad luck and a traitor somewhere in the family. He's right about the traitor." A ghost of a smile, terrible and tired. "But I could never find the schedule. He kept it in no computer, no file, nowhere. Only in the head of the one man he trusted with numbers."

Your father. The man who cried at Field of Dreams.

"That's why you signed," you say slowly. "Last night. In my kitchen."

"I signed because I wanted my father's books where my father couldn't reach them," Mikhail says. "And because you were locked in a bathroom. In that order, at first. I won't pretend otherwise." He closes his eyes briefly. "But I didn't know what was in them." He opens them, and closes the ledger, gently, the way you'd close a door on someone sleeping. "I didn't know this page existed until five minutes ago."

He holds it out to you. His hands are still trembling.

"You didn't bring me your father's books, Ava," he says. "You brought me my father's routes. I've been hunting this page for five years."