I Was the Payment for My Brother's Debt · Nadia Voss

Chapter 1: What My Brother Owed

My brother came to my office at 9:40 on a Tuesday, and by six that evening I had been handed to a man as payment.

I want to be exact about the times. The times are the only part of that day nobody has ever tried to talk me out of.

I reconcile claims for Halloran Medical Billing. Third floor, forty-one desks in one room with no walls in it. It's not a job anyone dreams about. It's a job where you find the eleven dollars that went missing between a hospital and an insurer, and you find it four hundred times a day, and either you're good at it or you're not there.

I'm good at it. That matters later.

Teddy came through the glass doors without stopping at reception. Dee looked up from the station next to mine and said, "Nora. Isn't that your brother?"

He had two men with him.

They weren't dressed like anything. That's the part nobody believes. No suits, no coats out of a film. One of them was wearing a grey fleece with a fuel company logo on the chest, and he stood four feet behind my brother with his hands loose at his sides, and every person on that floor stopped typing anyway.

"Nor." Teddy crouched down by my chair so we'd be at the same height, which is a thing he does when he wants something. "You have to come with me."

"I'm working."

"It's Mom's estate. There's a paper you have to sign, it's a whole thing, it has to be today."

Our mother has been dead four years and there is no estate. There was an apartment with a reverse mortgage on it and a cedar box of costume jewelry.

I knew he was lying. I want that on the record too.

I stood up and took my coat off the back of the chair, because forty people were watching and my brother was crouched by my desk with two men behind him, and the fastest way to stop being looked at was to leave.

The man in the fleece picked up my bag for me.

That was the first one. That was the first small thing. I said thank you.

At the desk Marisol asked me to badge out and the second man said, "She won't need it," and I heard myself say sorry to Marisol, as though I'd forgotten a form.

I badged out anyway. I put the lanyard in the tray. It made a sound like a coin in a dish.

* * *

They drove me west, out past Dunmore, into the rail yards.

Teddy talked the whole way. He talked about a guy he knew in Tampa and a thing that was going to come through in January and how the cold snap had wrecked the timing, and I sat with my bag on my knees and watched the grain elevators go by and did not ask a single question, because I have known my brother for twenty-six years and I have learned that questions are how he gets his hooks in.

We stopped at a cold storage plant. Verrick, the sign said. Doors nine through fourteen standing open onto a loading floor with white fog rolling out of them along the concrete.

There was an office up a set of steel stairs, with windows looking down over the floor.

There were eleven men in it.

I counted. It's what I do.

* * *

Nobody touched me. I need to keep saying that, because when I tell this part people always assume there was a hand on my arm, and there wasn't, not once, not that whole day. It was worse than a hand on my arm.

Teddy put three things on the table. My passport. My birth certificate. A brown folder with a rubber band around it.

I looked at my passport lying on a table in a cold storage office and understood that it had been in his hand since before he walked into my building. That he had gone into my apartment. That he had a key because I gave him a key, in March, when he had nowhere.

"Teddy."

"Just — Nor. Just stand there. Just don't do anything for ten minutes."

Then the room changed.

I felt it before I saw anything. Eleven men in a small room and all of them stopped shifting their weight at the same moment.

A man came up the stairs.

He wasn't the biggest one there. That's the thing I remember. He was maybe six foot, dark coat, grey at the temple, and he moved like somebody who has never in his life had to hurry to be first through a door.

Nobody said his name. Not once, not that whole day. In this city you don't say it in a room that has a window in it. My mother wouldn't say it in her own kitchen. She'd say him, and tip her chin at the wall, and change the subject.

Andrei Koss stopped at the end of the table and looked at the folder without picking it up.

"Four million," he said. "One hundred and ninety thousand."

Teddy made a noise.

"Say it."

"Four million one hundred and ninety thousand," my brother said.

"Since when."

"Since — October."

"Since October." Koss took his gloves off, one finger at a time, and put them in his pocket. "You brought your sister."

"You said—"

"I said bring what you pledged." He looked up.

He looked at me for the first time and it was not the way a man looks at a woman. There was nothing in it at all. It was the look of somebody checking a serial number against a manifest.

"Nora Ashby."

"Yes."

"Do you know what your brother signed?"

"No."

"He does."

Teddy was staring at the table.

I heard my own voice come out flat and reasonable, my work voice, the one I use on insurers. "I don't know what this is. Whatever he owes you, he owes you. I'm not part of it."

The room was very quiet.

"You are," Koss said.

And that was all. He didn't explain it. He didn't threaten me. He said two words and went back to reading the wall calendar over my brother's shoulder, and eleven men waited, and I understood that the sentence had already been passed somewhere else, months ago, in a room I was never in.

I picked up my bag.

I walked to the door.

Nobody stopped me. Nobody moved. The man in the fleece opened the door for me and held it, politely, and I went out onto the steel landing and down the stairs and across the loading floor with the cold fog coming over my shoes, and out into the yard.

The yard gate was closed. It was a rolling gate, chain link, twelve feet, with a truck parked across it.

There was a man sitting on the truck's front bumper eating a sandwich. He looked up at me and nodded, friendly, the way you nod at a neighbour.

I stood in that yard for four minutes.

Then I walked back across the loading floor and up the stairs and into the office, and every single one of them had gone on with what they were doing, and not one man looked at me when I came in, and that is the moment. Not the passport. Not the number.

That. Walking back in by myself.

"Nora," Teddy said. "Please."

Koss put on his gloves.

"Take your coat," he said to me.

* * *

The house was forty minutes east, past the water, behind a wall with nothing written on it.

I was in the second car. Koss was not in it. I have thought about that a great deal since — that he didn't ride with me, that he had no interest in what my face was doing.

A woman was waiting under the portico when we pulled in. Fifties, cardigan, reading glasses pushed up into grey hair, a phone in one hand and a set of keys in the other.

"Miss Ashby. Yelena." She said it like a receptionist. "You're in the blue room, first floor, the bathroom is your own. Have you eaten?"

"I want to make a call."

"You can make calls. Your phone stays with me tonight and you'll have a different one in the morning, and the number in it will be yours." She held the door. "Come in, please, it's cold."

I came in. The hall was black stone and there was nothing on the walls.

"There are three rules in this house," Yelena said, "and I say them to everyone on the first night, including the men, so don't take it personally."

"All right."

"You're not on the ground floor after eleven at night. Not for water, not for anything — there's a kettle in your room."

"All right."

"You don't ask the staff questions about the house. Not because it's a secret. Because they'll answer you, and then it's on them."

She stopped, and turned, and for the first time she looked at me like a person instead of an arrival.

"And you do not answer a door," she said. "Not the gate. Not the front. Not the kitchen. If somebody knocks — you walk away from it. You don't call out, you don't look through the glass, you don't stand near it. You walk away and you find me."

"What happens if I answer a door?"

Yelena put my phone in her cardigan pocket.

"That one isn't a rule about the house," she said. "That one's a rule about you."

* * *

I did not sleep.

At 2:14 in the morning, somebody knocked on the front door.