A few weeks after Orli found out she was pregnant, Renee called. Ever get dizzy and fall down the first couple of weeks? She was waking up with night sweats, too. Nothing like that had happened to Orli. Go see your gyno. Who checked her out, sent her to a clinic for scans. Routine, but let’s do it today just to be sure.
By dinner, Renee had her diagnosis: a glioblastoma multiforme, an inoperable brain tumor.
Orli saw her the next day for coffee, which quickly became cocktails, because why not. Renee told Orli the story tightly, coolly, not a single tear, like she was talking about someone else, someone she didn’t know all that well. The cosmic unfairness seemed impossible. Orli instinctively focused on the practicalities, finding an answer.
“Is there anything? There must be something—”
“We all pretend the world doesn’t have teeth, Orli. That it never wants a sacrifice.”
“How’s Jake taking it?” Her husband.
“Haven’t told him.”
For once, Orli’s face betrayed her. “I know it’ll tear him up, but you need to tell him.”
“You think it’s for him I’m not saying?” Renee laughed. “If I don’t”—her voice shrank, the humor gone now—“then it’s not real. You see?”
She was dead eight months later.
—
NOW ORLI WAS THE ONE staring into the world’s maw. Now she understood why Renee had wanted to stay silent, to erase the truth by ignoring it. The logic of a child sticking her fingers in her ears as a tornado shrieked close.
The mansion was silent as she walked through the family quarters. For the first time, the absolute mechanical perfection of the place struck her, the walls skim-coated with nontoxic paint, floors radiant-heated, the air filtered and allergen-free. Everything just so. Did Aaron see her the same way? Another perfect accessory? Did he even know why he wanted her?
The twins slept down the hall from the master suite. She had insisted that they live in the same room. They’d been together inside her, and she wanted to keep them together as long as she could. They lay side by side in their little cedar beds, handcrafted in Sweden for twelve thousand dollars each.
Her life had turned absurd without her notice.
As they often did, the boys had turned in the night to face each other. They were a beautiful pair. Boaz took after her, blond, blue-eyed, snub-nosed, verging on pretty. Rafael was his father’s son, brown eyes, curly hair, even Aaron’s square chin. She kissed them, tasting the faintest sweat on their foreheads. They were all that mattered. She backed silently out of the room before they woke.
She was almost surprised to find Aaron in bed and asleep, not pretending, his breathing steady and even. She edged between the thousand-count cotton sheets, put a hand on his naked hip, slipped her fingers around him, felt him stir.
Whatever desire she had for him was long gone. She squeezed him hard, nothing erotic in the motion, and he yelped, sat up, grabbed for her arm. She slipped out of bed, stood above him, watched without mercy as he tried to gather himself. His skin was looser than she remembered, his hair grayer.
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?” He sat up. The steroids and the workouts gave him a younger man’s muscles, but they couldn’t change his sagging skin. He tried to stare her into submission, but she was used to men staring at her. “I don’t know what Gideon told you—”
All the answer she needed. “It wasn’t Gideon.”
“Just tell me.” He’d never spoken to her this way before, clipped, angry, like she was an employee who’d screwed up.
“That meeting in Tokyo, the Americans set it, Wells and that other one, Shafer, they told me about you and the FSB.”
She realized her mistake as the words left her lips. Better to let Aaron believe Gideon had told her. Now he knew the Americans were moving against him.
“You went to meet Wells?”
“I didn’t know he’d be there, I thought the meeting was real, they set it up.”
“He told you a story and you believed him?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Gideon agreed.”
“No, no, no.” As if she and Gideon had betrayed him rather than the reverse. He padded across the bedroom to his walk-in closet.
“Tell me,” she said to his back, quietly. Though what could he tell her that she didn’t already know? Her anger was fading more quickly than she could have imagined. The poets were wrong. The opposite of love wasn’t hate. It was the absence of hate, and every emotion.
The opposite of love was death.
“You know I saw Cheung yesterday.” He stepped out of the closet wearing a gray T-shirt and the silk boxers he favored. How had he ever seemed anything but ridiculous to her? “He wants to help us.”
“Us, you and the Russians?”
“I don’t know exactly what Wells told you. But yes. I’ve talked to the Russians.” He sounded almost bored, like she was wasting his time. “They’ve offered us citizenship.”
So Wells and Shafer had told the truth. But Aaron’s confirmation made the prospect less real instead of more. Like a camera crew was about to jump out of the closet shouting Surprise!
“Live in Siberia?”
“Diplomatic passports. We could live anywhere.”
“You think the Americans will respect that? If they know you’re working for the FSB?”
“This isn’t the Americans. It’s Wells and his friends—”
“They said they’re working officially this time, Aaron.”
“They’re lying.”
Orli thought of all the men she’d seen in Tokyo, the hotel suite, the way they’d convinced her agent to play along. Tiffany was no fool, she would have insisted on talking to someone at CIA headquarters before agreeing. “I don’t think so.”
“Either way, they can’t do anything about it, not unless the President is ready go public with everything. If he was going to do that, he would have already. I’m not worried about the Americans. The FSB can handle them.”
“When were you going to tell me? When we landed in Moscow?” Like she was a child. She’d believed he respected her for more than her looks. Maybe he’d believed it, too. They’d been wrong, both of them.
“Don’t you see? It would solve everything.”
What she saw was that he’d lost his mind, caught himself in a fantasy world, pretending as always he could push reality aside by sheer force of will. Not this time. This time, reality wasn’t going anywhere.
“You think you can dream the Russians away?”
“What are you talking about, Orli? Let me play this out, it’s working—”
“Sure. Anything else you want to tell me?”
He looked at her in apparent sincerity. “I don’t think so.”
“The girl? The one you gave Cheung.”
“There wasn’t any girl. I mean, yes, but she was a decoy. Nothing happened to her—”
“How old? Gideon called her a child.”
“Gideon never saw her, and I didn’t, either. That’s the truth, Orli. Never even met her. She was Vietnamese, she’s already back in Hanoi. We worked out a plan, they promised—”
“Oh, they promised. What was her name?”
He reached for her. She raised her hands.
“Tell me you know her name, Aaron.”
“I made the best choice I could, Orli. For us.”
“I’m taking Boaz and Rafael to Tel Aviv.”
“Not now.”
The certainty in his voice unsettled her. He was telling, not asking.
“The boys need a father. A man in their lives. And we need to be together.”
“Remember. When this started. You said I could leave anytime?” No. She didn’t need permission. She tried again. “Keep the prenup, the money—” His billions didn’t matter, they were as tainted as everything else
. “We’re going home. Where we belong.”
“We belong together, Orli, we’re a family. You’re not thinking clearly. Buvchenko will tell you himself, how it’s going to work. The Russians need me, they need me as much as I need them. We’re in this together.”
“So we’re all partners, you and me and Buvchenko?”
“Mamma! Mamma!” A cry from down the hall. Rafael. He usually woke first.
“Go check on our son, give me five minutes.” He grabbed her forearm, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to remind her that even at twice her age he was far stronger than she. He pushed her toward the door, slammed it closed.
She wanted to believe she was still on the plane, sleeping. But the finger-shaped welts already rising on her arm said otherwise, the cause-and-effect peculiar to reality.
—
BOTH BOYS WERE STIRRING NOW. Seeing them, she realized she’d been a fool for fearing she’d ever use again. Heroin had been a cheap and bright and ultimately useless pleasure. Her love for these two brought her joy without end. She didn’t want to take them from Aaron, but he couldn’t undo what he’d done. He would understand.
Even if he didn’t, he couldn’t keep her, this was Hong Kong, not Saudi Arabia, she wasn’t a prisoner, she wasn’t his property. Maybe he wouldn’t let her use the Dreamliner, maybe she and the twins would fly commercial for a change. The thought made her smile, and Rafael sensed the change in her mood.
“Mamma.” He blinked open his wide brown eyes. “Mamma.”
“Raffy.” She scooped him up, thinking now about how she could get out of Hong Kong, what to leave and take—
Aaron walked in, iPhone in hand.
“Mikhail Buvchenko would like to speak to you.”
She took the handset, ended the call, threw the phone past him into the hall as hard as she could. It smacked the wall and her husband looked at her dead-eyed, as her agent had that day in Paris.
“We’re going.”
“You’re going nowhere.” He stood in the doorway. In her arms, Rafael screamed “Mamma! Mamma!” with big gasping sobs.
She tried to push past. He didn’t move. “You want to desert me, I can’t stop you, Orli. The boys, they stay.”
She reached for Boaz. The boys were big now, but she could carry them both—
“Have fun trying to get them out of Hong Kong without passports.”
She stopped moving like a cartoon character mid-frame, one foot in the air. Even infants couldn’t travel without passports. The twins had had theirs since they were three months old. Rafael’s photo made even the crustiest immigration officers smile, he was curly-haired and wide-eyed and grinning toothlessly like a little old man.
She put him down in his Swedish bed, pushed past Aaron, ran for their bedroom. She kept the passports in her nightstand with her own, they’d been there the day before when she went to Tokyo. She was sure, she’d seen them when she grabbed hers.
Gone.
She rifled through the drawer, pulled it out and tipped it over, a thief in a hurry, scattering change and phone chargers and a dusty spare tampon. Down the hall, Rafael screamed, and now Boaz had picked up the chant, Mammamammamamma—
She ran to them. She felt fear beneath her rage, like she had stepped off a forest path into a hidden swamp, the ground soft, sucking at her shoes, tugging them off. She was alone, no one to throw her a rope or a branch, she needed to slow down, no panic, or before she knew it, the mud would take her, a strange slow-motion death—
Instead of hitting her husband, her first instinct, she reached for Rafael and picked him up. She turned for Boaz, but Aaron grabbed him first. They stood on either side of the beds, patting their sobbing children, a temporary truce. Holding Boaz seemed to soothe both son and father. Aaron had always been a good dad in an old-school way, not much of a diaper-changer or a bottle feeder, but he loved the kids and they loved him.
The stress is making him crazy, that’s all. He’s afraid to lose them. She wanted to ask about the passports, but challenging him wouldn’t help. Anyway, she knew where they had to be. Besides the vault in the panic room, he had a safe in his walk-in closet. He must have hidden them when she was in here with Rafael.
Every beautiful woman had experience dealing with irrational men. “Let’s figure this out.” She made her voice quiet, soothing. “Together.”
“Everything’s going to be okay.” His voice mirrored hers, soft now, almost tender.
“I just think, wouldn’t it be better to wait for you in Israel. You’ll be a hero when you come back—” She stopped, knowing she was laying the honey on too thick.
“We left together and it’s better if we come home that way. Besides, you can’t expect me to trust my kids to a junkie.”
One word, and the quicksand was waist-deep. She didn’t know what to say, what he knew, how he knew. No one knew.
“You think I didn’t check you out before I proposed? Your little habit.”
“I don’t have a habit, Aaron. Never did.”
“I worried about it. But the psychiatrist I talked to, she said she thought it was thrill-seeking. Environmental, I think that was the word. A fancy shrink word for you being bored, hanging out with idiots with more money than sense.”
More money than sense. He’d actually just said that. Oh, the irony. She held her tongue.
“You were so beautiful, I liked you so much, I figured it was worth the chance. You know me, I like to gamble. Anyway, I started paying your dealer so that if you ever called him again, I’d know.”
I started paying your dealer? He’d gone mad, she saw. From fear or the wish to escape what he’d done, the choices he’d made, or some insistence that he couldn’t lose, or all three. Or maybe he’d always been mad and she hadn’t known. Either way, the conversation had turned inside out. They couldn’t talk about how he was holding their kids hostage, or spying on China for the Russian government, or had played pimp for a ten-year-old girl, because he had out of nowhere made her years-old drug use the issue.
“I know you’re scared, Orli, but we’re all right. I’m not going to tell you these Russians are nice people, but they need me now.”
“Let me just take the kids to Tel Aviv, Aaron.” She put a hand on his shoulder, an obvious trick, but one that had worked for her before. She stroked his arm, tried to remember what she’d liked about him. “You’re right, I’m scared. I’ll feel better there.”
His phone rang. He shook her off and hurried into the hall.
“No, Mikhail, sorry. She’s right here.” He came back, pushed the phone on her. The phone’s screen was broken, spiderweb-shattered like a bad-luck mirror. Nevertheless, she took it. Let Aaron believe she was listening. Being reasonable, as he would say. She would accept the humiliation if it calmed him down, brought an end to this bizarro world where she was an addict and he was the defender of their realm. Then maybe she could find a way out. Maybe the Israeli consulate could issue replacement passports secretly. Maybe she could ask the Hong Kong police for protection. At least they knew part of the truth.
“Orli. Your husband says you’re upset.” Buvchenko’s English was better than she expected, accented but understandable. He made the word upset seem ridiculous, a euphemism for premenstrual. “May we meet?” Like he was a barista offering a free refill.
“No, thanks.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere, I’ll come to you—”
She couldn’t listen any longer, and she feared what Aaron might do if she hung up again. She passed the phone back to her husband. “Yes . . . Fine . . . We’ll wait. I think that makes sense for everyone, too.” He hung up. “He’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
“Aaron, you can’t be serious.”
“We should get ready.”
—
THE MINUTES PASSED in something like a trance. She was awake, conscious. Yet her will was g
one. She watched herself pull on her clothes, tell the nannies to give Boaz and Rafael breakfast. She remembered the feeling from her heroin days. But the drug’s detachment came with euphoria, like her brain was too busy enjoying itself to work. This morning she felt only dread.
She wondered if she should call Wells, but her phone had vanished. Probably in the closet safe with the passports. Anyway, what she’d told Wells the night before still held. She couldn’t count on the Americans. They would use her to get to Aaron. Once she gave him up, they’d discard her. She couldn’t trust Gideon, either. If he hated what Aaron had done so much, why hadn’t he told her? Some leftover loyalty to her husband.
In the end, the fear of making another bad choice overwhelmed her. In what seemed like no time at all, she found herself standing next to Aaron in the mansion’s driveway as a white van rolled inside, one of the tall ones that tradesmen used. The two gate guards stood a few meters behind them. She didn’t know where Gideon was. She suspected Aaron had given him an errand, sent him outside the mansion for a few minutes so he wouldn’t be here when these men came.
The van made a quick U-turn so its nose faced the gate. Even before it stopped, its back doors swung open. Three men were inside, Buvchenko and the two FSB operatives whose photos Wells had shown her. The FSB men squatted on their heels like monkeys, monkeys with pistols. Buvchenko sat on the edge of the van’s cargo compartment and waved them closer, deeper into the quicksand.
“Aaron. I believe you have something for me.”
Aaron pulled a gray thumb drive from his pocket, gave it to Buvchenko. In turn, Buvchenko passed it to the Russian squatting to his left, then handed Aaron a thumb drive of his own. “For your next meeting.” He looked at Orli. “My God. As beautiful as your pictures.”
She cursed at him, softly, in Hebrew.
“Let me tell you that Aaron is doing excellent work for us and we intend to keep our bargain. However, if you insist on interfering, I can’t guarantee the safety of your family.”
There it was. “These are your partners?” she said to Aaron. “Threatening my children?”
The Wolves Page 26