Page 57

The wall clock ticks behind me, and paper shifts beneath my hand. Alexei walks to the open window and lights a cigarette. The cold air does little to clear the smell. Smoke hangs over old wood, bitter coffee, and dust warmed by the lamps.

A map of Moscow covers the board on the wall. Red pencil marks connect the hospitals, clinics, warehouse, and delivery routes. Customs papers lie beside pharmacy reports, while eleven admissions files sit beneath the Blacklist records Leonid found in my father’s estate. Together, they show how carefully the whole operation was made to look normal. I struggle to take in the scale of it.

My father’s name is buried among false patients, stolen drugs, and people who used the dead as tools.

I drag the page closer. “This isn’t even a good copy.”

Alexei takes one last drag, crushes the cigarette in the ashtray, and moves beside me. “How do you know?” He rests one hand on the table.

“The pressure is wrong.” I trace the first letter without touching the ink. “My father pressed harder at the start of his last name, and the final line always dropped lower. This person copied the shape but missed the way he wrote.”

Alexei turns the page toward the lamp and studies the signature. “Could they have copied an old one?”

I open the next file and find the same slant on a tax form from twelve years ago. “They did,” I say. “They took it from his company records.”

My hands begin to shake.

I push one folder aside, then another. Company papers, old warehouse leases, deals with suppliers, and bank forms cover the table. My father signed some of them while I was still in medical school, when he believed good papers, patience, and a firm handshake could protect a business.

He owned a medium-sized logistics company that moved machine parts, packaged food, and building supplies between Moscow and the cities to the north. He wasn’t rich enough for newspapers to know his name, but he earned enough that my mother never had to fear the end of the month.

We had a warm apartment, summer trips to the Black Sea, a piano I never learned to play, and books stacked on every flat surface because he bought anything I paused beside.

My mother stayed home and kept our lives running. She knew which teacher I disliked before I said a word, when I needed quiet, and when I was pretending to be fine. I never thought of it as being watched. It felt like being known.

On Sundays, my father made tea and breakfast while my mother read the newspaper aloud. They argued over the crossword until I threatened to leave the table, and neither of them believed me.

I was their only child. I never wondered whether they wanted me. They gave me everything I needed and enough of what I wanted that I never learned to measure the difference.

My father died first, and my mother followed less than a year later. Afterward, there was no one left who remembered my childhood with me.

One of my father’s subsidiaries still owned a warehouse near Yaroslavl, even though the company hadn’t traded in years. Someone revived that company and used it to manufacture the debt against me. Now they’ve forged my father’s name and burned the home I made for my son.

The papers he left behind were supposed to settle his affairs. Someone has turned them into proof that I owe men I’ve never met.

I flip through the files faster.

“Stop.” Alexei catches one folder before I tear the spine.

I yank it back. “Don’t.”

“You’re missing pages because you’re angry.” His voice stays even.

“I know how to read when I’m angry.” I pull the stack of hospital records Yuri printed toward me. “I learned from surgeons.”

The clock reads eight fifty-three. Mrs. Wentworth has sent two people to remind us about dinner, and the last one gave up and left a tray on the sideboard.

I don’t notice it until Alexei crosses the library and lifts the silver cover.

“Chicken, bread, soup, and enough cold food to survive a siege,” he says, inspecting the bowls. “Mrs. Wentworth has lost faith in us.”

He takes a piece of roast chicken and eats it while he carries the tray back. The smell of warm potato soup should wake my appetite, but my stomach remains silent.

Alexei places some chicken on half a slice of black bread and sets it beside my hand. “Eat while you destroy your father’s filing system.”

“I’m sorting it.”

“Then consider this standard preservation protocol.” He nudges the plate closer.