“Fine. I’ll pick you up and put the rug under you and set you down on it. And if you kick it away again, I’ll repeat. I’ll spend all day doing it if I have to. I enjoy holding you in my arms. I think you enjoy it, too.”
She glares and stands up. I put out the rug. She sits on it with distaste. I open the bottle.
“No, thank you.”
I pour two glasses anyway. I always have perfect control over my emotions in the field, no matter the danger. Always cool. But here in this room with her in my shirt after so long, I feel nearly crazy to touch her. Just to be near her.
I arrange the sweets and pastries on a plate. I set a colorful cloth napkin in front of her. It’s an Indian-style print. Tanechka loved such prints.
“How’s the hunt for your brother going?” She gazes into the fire. “Any new leads?” She knows about the fake professor’s house with the cage. It was a main subject of conversation when Aleksio and the gang were over for dinner that first night.
“We’re very close, lisichka. But we have to move slowly. It’s frustrating.” I tell her about how our investigator is pretending to be an author. I tell her about the man behind the desk who controls the filings. “A little man playing little power games.”
She hasn’t moved to take a treat, so I set a lemon wedge and two jelly stars on a small plate. The lemon wedge has a sugared lemon on the top of it. She always picked it off and ate it first.
“A little man behind a desk stops you.” She turns the plate clockwise, but doesn’t touch the treats. “Let me guess; you wish so badly you could beat it out of him.”
“I wish it so badly.” I kick off my shiny dress shoes and sit next to her, letting my toes warm by the fire. “But I can’t. We have this lead, this head start that’s ours to exploit. We can’t draw attention to it, or we might squander it.”
She takes her lemon wedge and looks at the top of it.
“Bloody Lazarus’s organization gains in power every day,” I continue. “They outnumber us by hundreds of men. We have money now, yes, but they have the empire and the connections our father built. They have strong warriors who are accustomed to working together. If they knew where our poor bratik was, they could swoop in and take him out from under us. They could pluck him from a supermax prison with a word.”
She picks the sugared lemon off the fluffy pastry. Only half comes up, but she puts it in her mouth and sucks with keen concentration. Then she breaks off a corner and eats it.
My fucking heart soars. Tanechka loves food. Back when we were together, she had more meat on her bones than this nun. Better for fighting, better for fucking. Still, she’s beautiful to me. When we were together I’d always be holding her hand, touching her arm. I loved the feel of her skin. Sometimes I couldn’t believe she was mine.
“Drink your champagne,” I say, taking a sip from my own glass, though it’s not my kind of drink.
“I really would rather have water. Or tea.”
“Maybe so, but you’ll drink champagne instead. Jesus lets you drink wine, doesn’t he?”
She stares at the fire. “It’s not about that.”
“You’ll drink it, Tanechka, or I’ll climb on top of you and press your hands above your head and dribble it into your mouth little by little.”
“I’ll close my lips.”
“You think I can’t get around that?”
In truth, I probably can’t, but she doesn’t know. There are some advantages to her lack of memory.
“I’ll stretch out warm on top of you and make you drink, little by little. Maybe I’ll tie your hands. You always loved that.” I take a sip. “It’s a slightly perverted way to drink champagne but very erotic.”
She eyes her glass. If only I could get her to take a sip, the battle is half-won. She won’t stop. It’s how she is.
“You’ll enjoy the way I help you drink it,” I say. “I’ll move on top of you in a way that you’ll find very pleasurable.”
She takes up her glass, finally—and sips.
Yes.
She holds it in front of her face, regarding it with just a tinge of wonder. Staring at the bubbles. Pink champagne. An old friend. Does she remember the taste?
“See? It’s hardly strong at all.” I take a lemon wedge and break off part. “You first had this champagne in Hotel National off Red Square. I wore my best suit—not like this one, but a fine one, the sort to fool people who see such things. We knew how to blend, you and I. You wore a pink skirt suit—you called it your Taylor Swift outfit. You had a picture of her, and you’d style your hair like hers when we would go out pretending to be American newlyweds, our favorite cover.”
I stare at the bubbles in my own glass, remembering.
“The time you first tasted this, we were in the hotel bar hoping to pick up a trail on somebody. We had rings. We had the look right, but we didn’t know what to order for drinks.” I fight to keep my face neutral as she sips again. “We knew that vodka would give us away as Russians. ‘What would Taylor Swift drink?’ you whispered to me. You ordered pink champagne to go with your outfit. I had a Manhattan.”