Page 21 of Night of Shadows
“He’s standing. On foot.”
"Two layers between us."
Lex nods once. Lex closes the notebook. Lex says, "Continue surveillance. Do not engage. I want eyes on him for forty-eight hours minimum."
Petrov leaves the way he came in.
My head stays down. It stays down for another few minutes after Petrov is gone, because I have spent three days holding the wall, and I am not going to break it now over a name. But the name has gone into my memory, and I won’t forget it.
Maksim Orlov
Who he is, what he does. I have no idea. I know, however, that the name caused Lex to close a notebook and sit very still for half a second before he said ‘when,’ and I know that Lex Konstantinos is not a man who needs half a second.
I also know that the half-second was not the kind of half-second a man takes when a name is unexpected. It was the kindof half-second a man takes when a name is expected and has finally arrived.
I filed that, too.
The question stays unasked that night. It stays unasked the next morning. I have spent three years building my own column in my own spreadsheet about the man who is currently sleeping ten feet from my daughter, and I have learned that the things I file do not need to be opened on the day I file them.
I go back to my wheat-motif trademark dispute.
I file the name.
? ? ?
At 7:30 that night, Nora is in the bath.
"Mama," she says.
"Yes?"
"Can Lex read it?"
I look at her. Her face is small and serious. She’s two years and ten months old, and she has, in the small amount of time she’s known him, decided this— without consulting me, or him. She’s decided it the way she decides everything. She’s thought about it, arrived at a conclusion, and is reporting it.
"Why?" I ask, carefully.
She thinks about it. "Because his voice is good for it."
I look at her. I look at the book in her hands. I look at the door of her room, which is six feet from the desk in the small office where Lex is on the phone.
"All right," I say. "I will go ask him."
"Okay."
She arranges Brontos. She arranges her blanket. She prepares for the bedtime story the way she prepares for anything, with a small ceremony.
I close her door and go down the hall, where I knock on the door of the small office.
"Lex," I call out.
"Yes, Maeve?”
"Nora has asked if you will read her bedtime story tonight."
There is a pause on the other side of the door. The pause lasts several seconds, followed by a “Ok.”
"Are you sure?"
