I watch the needle as it moves in and out, in and out. “I’ll never be able to forget him, Yael. The face. The way the knife—Jesus!”
“Sorry.” She wipes away the blood with a tissue. “Be sure not to forget the part where you won.”
“Yes, by crippling him.”
“By doing what you had to.” She puts down the needle and ties the stitches off. “Finished. It will hurt like hell; then it will itch like hell. Resist the urge to scratch.”
“So don’t you feel guilty, even a little?”
She places a wide adhesive bandage over the wound. Her fingers are very gentle. “Justice isn’t some abstract thing, Gwendolyn. What you did tonight, that’s what it looks like. Ugly and mean.”
*
Against every probability, I sleep well. But the whole night long, strange dreams come and go, vivid nightmares in which somehow I’m just passing through, not afraid at all. In the morning, I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling over my cot, trying to remember them.
In the kitchen, I find Yael is already up, reading a French-edition Vogue at the table and drinking coffee. When she sees me, she rises and pours me a cup.
“Sleep well?” she asks.
“Strange dreams,” I say.
“To be expected. Your mind is trying to grapple with it, the new you.” She opens a drawer beneath the counter, removes a small booklet, the cover crimson red, and tosses it onto the table in front of me. “Speaking of.”
“What’s this?”
“Call it a graduation present. It came a few days ago, but I was saving it.”
I turn the booklet over and see Rossiskaya Federatsiya in embossed gold Cyrillic letters at the top, followed by Russian Federation in roman letters. It’s a Russian passport that looks and feels very real. I open it and recoil when I see a photo of me staring back.
Though the face is mine, the name isn’t. Sofia Timurovna Kozlovskaya, it says. The birthdate, printed in official type, makes me twenty-two years old.
“Who—who is this?”
“It’s you,” Yael says. “Turn to the next page.”
I do, and see an official-looking visa with the logo of the European Union, complete with silver-colored, holographic seal.
“A work visa,” she says. “You can take up residence anywhere from Ireland to Greece and be legal.”
“But who is”—I turn to the previous page—“Sofia Timurovna Kozlovskaya?”
“Sofia, the real Sofia, was a stripper who died of a heroin overdose in Munich two years ago. What you’re holding in your hands is not a fake. It’s her passport, only with your picture.”
“How did you get this?”
“Maybe the cop who finds her gets paid, maybe a friend of ours makes it disappear from her belongings,” she says. “I don’t work that side of it, so I don’t know. Point is, what you have there, it’s gold. Anyone in my profession would kill for a passport that bulletproof.”
I drop the dead woman’s passport to the tabletop. It feels so ghoulish, so wrong.
Yael opens the drawer again and pulls out a thick packet of papers folded down the middle. She sets it on the table next to the passport. “Sofia’s information,” she says. “Birth certificate, school transcripts, a biography of her parents, information on the city where she grew up. As for the rest of her life, that’s up to you to invent.”
“What do you mean?”
“First rule of a cover identity: Go native when you can. Second rule: The believability of your story is in the details. Study these documents and fill in the holes. What’s her favorite color? Who were her childhood friends? How old was she when her dog got hit by a car?”
I open the packet and scan over the documents. I turn to her father’s death certificate: cirrhosis of the liver, when Sofia was only fourteen. Father’s employment record: a rubber factory outside the city of Armavir in southern Russia. Her school records: high marks in German, low marks in math. The information is all very real, very tragically specific.
“Take the morning,” Yael says. “Write down your biography. Then memorize it.”
“But doesn’t Sofia have a death certificate?”
“Conveniently misplaced. It’s Russia. Things like that happen.”
“What if someone starts digging deeper?”
“No backstory is perfect.” She settles into the chair at my side. “So you make it up. Improvise.”
I close my eyes—the new me.
“Now get to work,” Yael says as she takes my hand and squeezes it hard. “Start making a life for yourself, Sofia.”
*
My breath pulses against the window in a circle of fog that expands and retreats, expands and retreats. With my finger, I draw a little face in it, but then Yael makes a sound that means stop it and so I do. Just as she has instructed me, I keep one eye on what’s in front, and one eye on the side mirror of the little Volkswagen to see what’s behind. I’m ordered not to say anything unless I notice something out of the ordinary. But everything feels out of the ordinary now, and I wonder if I’ll recognize it when it comes. An Arab man peeks his head out of a video store and looks around, then pulls back inside. A woman in a full burka walks past pushing an empty laundry cart, then comes back the other way a minute later, the cart still empty. What’s ordinary here?
Yael’s breathing is calm, flat, like she’s sleeping, but she’s trained herself to do that. There’s tension on her face as she keeps an eye on her own mirror where she can see the door of the tabac a half block behind us.
We’ve been here for about an hour now. The sun is nowhere, invisible above featureless gray clouds. I have to squint at my watch to see it’s only five in the afternoon.
My mouth feels dry and pasty, and I ask her if we should get some coffee or something. No, she says, it would look suspicious, two women drinking coffee in a car. More suspicious than two women sitting in a car doing nothing? I ask.
“Let’s have a little quiz,” Yael says. “Where were you born?”
“Novokubansk.”
“What was your father’s name and profession?”
“Timur Naumovitch Kozlovsky. Supervisor at a rubber factory.”
“Before that?”
“Lieutenant in Spetsnaz.”
“And what is Spetsnaz?”
“Russian special forces.”
We continue the quiz to the slow rhythm of the windshield wipers cutting across the glass every few seconds. I close my eyes, trying to see all the facts and names and places in my memory. Then I hear Yael hiss, “Là-bas!”
My eyes snap open, and I turn. Over where? I follow the direction of Yael’s squinted eyes to a pale, skinny man in jeans and an Adidas track jacket standing under an awning across the street from the tabac. He has a mane of thick black hair that needs cutting and a scraggly attempt at a beard.