2025-09-29 00:14:12
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Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty-six
The interview took place in a government building in the Zuidas district, a room with the particular combination of fluorescent lighting and neutral furniture that exists in every official space regardless of country or purpose, designed to be inoffensive and achieving instead a kind of aggressive blankness that Lukas found, after twenty minutes inside it, actively exhausting in the way that environments stripped of all personality tend to be, as though the removal of character required constant small effort to compensate for.There were two investigators. The one who had called to arrange the meeting was a woman named De Waard, somewhere in her mid-forties, who had the patient stillness of someone who interviewed people for a living and had long since learned that the spaces between words often contained more than the words themselves and that the most useful thing you could do with those spaces was leave them open rather than fill them. The other was a younger man named Hoekstra who
Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty-five
The house on the Amstel was exactly as Alexei had described it once in passing, broad-fronted and expensive in the way that old Amsterdam money expressed itself, which was quietly and with the particular confidence of things that had never needed to prove anything to anyone. The door was opened before Lukas had finished climbing the steps, as though someone had been watching for him from inside, and the man who opened it was not one he recognised but who had the bearing of someone employed specifically for situations that required both discretion and physical capability.He was taken upstairs without speaking.Alexei was on his bed, which was a teenager's bed in a room that otherwise looked like it had been decorated by someone who had never met a teenager, all neutral tones and expensive surfaces and very little evidence of a person living in it. The boy was conscious but only partially, his eyes open and tracking Lukas's face with the sluggish effort of someone pushing through water
Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty-four
He read the journalist's message four times before he replied, and what he replied was simply: I need to think about this. Give me twenty-four hours.She wrote back: Of course. But if you're going to do this, the timing matters. Take the time you need.He put the phone down on the kitchen table and made coffee he actually drank this time, standing at the counter looking at the cabinet where he kept his dried herbs in labelled jars, the chamomile and the valerian and the St. John's wort and the dozens of others lined up in the particular order he had established years ago and maintained without thinking, everything organised and purposeful and contained, and he thought about how that organisation had been one of the things he'd built his sense of himself around, the idea that he was a person who understood what things were for and used them accordingly, who read a situation and found the appropriate response within the range his training and ethics had defined, and how thoroughly the p
Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty-two
He read the message eleven times. He knew it was eleven because he counted, because counting was something to do with the part of his mind that needed an occupation while the rest of it tried to work out what came next, and after the eleventh reading the words had not changed and the number of hours had not increased and Alexei's name was still in there, embedded in the syntax like a blade.He called Alexei's number at eleven forty-three.It rang seven times and went to voicemail, the recorded greeting in Dutch with the flat affect of a teenager who had recorded it quickly and had not thought to sound welcoming, and Lukas listened to the whole thing before the beep and then did not leave a message because he could not think of anything to say that was safe to say. He tried again at midnight. Same result. He sent a text that said only call me when you can, deliberately ordinary, the kind of message that could mean anything if intercepted by anyone with an interest in reading it, and he
Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty-one
He walked home.It was not a short walk from the Herengracht to his apartment, forty minutes at least along the canals in the February cold, and he had a perfectly good bicycle locked outside the restaurant and he left it there anyway because he needed the movement, needed his body doing something mechanical and forward-facing while his mind went back over what Volkov had said and tried to find the bottom of it.By the way, Alexei mentioned you've been very helpful with his treatment.He turned it over as he walked, the way you turn over something you've found on the ground that you suspect might be dangerous — carefully, from a slight distance, watching for what it might do. On the surface it was nothing, an ordinary remark, the kind of thing a concerned parent might say to any doctor treating their child. But the surface of everything Volkov said was a performance for an audience that included Lukas himself, and underneath the performance was the thing he actually meant, and what he
Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty-one
He walked home.It was not a short walk from the Herengracht to his apartment, forty minutes at least along the canals in the February cold, and he had a perfectly good bicycle locked outside the restaurant and he left it there anyway because he needed the movement, needed his body doing something mechanical and forward-facing while his mind went back over what Volkov had said and tried to find the bottom of it.By the way, Alexei mentioned you've been very helpful with his treatment.He turned it over as he walked, the way you turn over something you've found on the ground that you suspect might be dangerous — carefully, from a slight distance, watching for what it might do. On the surface it was nothing, an ordinary remark, the kind of thing a concerned parent might say to any doctor treating their child. But the surface of everything Volkov said was a performance for an audience that included Lukas himself, and underneath the performance was the thing he actually meant, and what he
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