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

Chapter 3: October

I didn't sleep, so I worked.

That's the only thing I've ever known how to do with a bad night. When I was twelve and our father left, I balanced our mother's checkbook eleven times in one weekend. When she died I did four years of her medical billing in nine days and found six thousand dollars the hospital owed her estate and gave it to Teddy, because he said he had a plan.

So at three in the morning in a house I couldn't leave, I took the hotel pad off the desk and reconstructed October.

October 2nd: nothing. October 6th: a shift, a double.

October 14th.

October 14th is the day our mother died. It's why the month is a bad one in our family and always will be.

Four years to the day, Teddy called me and said let's go out there, Nor, just us, and he picked me up in a car I didn't recognise and we drove to Rosewood Hill in the rain and stood at her stone for eleven minutes.

And then in the car afterward he took a clipboard out of the back seat.

The plot renewal, he said. Twenty years, they send it to next of kin, they need both of us or it lapses.

I signed three pages in the rain in a parked car at my mother's cemetery with my brother's hand holding the clipboard steady.

I never read them. I have read every document that has crossed my desk for six years, four hundred a day, line by line, and I did not read those three because it was raining and because it was the fourteenth of October and because he was my brother.

I sat on the floor of the blue room at three in the morning and I put my fist against my mouth so nobody in that house would hear me.

* * *

They came for me at ten.

Not Koss. A man I hadn't seen, and I would have remembered him: narrow, fifty-something, glasses on a cord, a leather case under his arm and the manner of an accountant who has been present at things accountants are not usually present at.

"Downstairs," he said. Not to me. To Yelena, standing behind me in the hall. "Is she dressed."

"She's standing in front of you," I said.

He looked at me the way you look at a chair that's in the wrong place.

His name was Sergei Lutz. In eleven days I never once heard anybody in that house use his first name.

* * *

The room downstairs had a long table and no pictures. Koss was already at it. Lutz sat down at his right and opened the case and laid a folder on the wood and squared it with two fingers.

Nobody offered me a chair.

I stood.

"The surety's aware of the instrument?" Lutz said.

"No," said Koss.

"Then I'd advise—"

"Show her."

"Andrei."

"Show her."

Lutz's jaw moved. He turned the folder around and slid it down the table toward me, one push, so it came to rest just short of my hands and I had to reach.

That's a small thing. I want you to understand that the whole of it was small things.

I opened it.

PLEDGE AND ASSIGNMENT OF PERSONAL SURETY

Four pages. The paper was heavy, the kind you use when you want a thing to feel real.

The undersigned, ELEANOR JUNE ASHBY, hereinafter the Surety, in consideration of advances made and to be made to THEODORE MARK ASHBY, hereinafter the Principal, does irrevocably pledge her personal attendance, residence and services...

I read it four times. I read it the way I read a claim.

...and does acknowledge that in the event of default the said pledge shall be enforceable in kind and not in money, the parties agreeing that no monetary tender shall discharge the same.

Enforceable in kind and not in money.

That's the whole book, right there, in eleven words, and a lawyer wrote them and a notary stamped them and I did not read a single one of them because it was raining.

On the last page: 14 October. My signature.

Not a forgery. Not a traced line, not a bad copy. Mine. The E that runs into the l because I've written it too many times, the way I don't lift the pen for the y.

Under it, a notary block. A stamp with a name inside it I have known since I was twenty-two.

GILBERT R. MARCHETTI, NOTARY PUBLIC.

Gil Marchetti did our mother's will. He sat in her kitchen and ate her cake and called her Bernie and cried at the funeral, loudly, in the second row.

"Is that your hand?" Koss said.

I heard my own voice from somewhere near the ceiling.

"Yes."

Lutz made a small satisfied movement, the movement of a man whose paperwork has held.

"But I didn't—"

"That isn't the question," Lutz said. "The question is whether it's your hand."

"It's a cemetery form—"

"It is a personal surety," Lutz said, "executed before a notary, and if it's your hand then the surety is good, and if the surety is good then you are here lawfully, and I would appreciate it if we could conduct the rest of this without—"

"Sergei."

One word. Lutz stopped talking mid-sentence like a radio switched off.

Koss hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't moved. He was looking at the window.

"She reads," he said.

"Sorry?"

"Four times. She read it four times and stopped in the same place twice." He turned his head to me. "Which line."

"'Enforceable in kind and not in money.'"

Something happened behind his face. It wasn't warmth. It was more like a man who's found the thing he came for and doesn't intend to say so.

"Yes," he said.

* * *

"I want to ask you something," I said, "and I want you to remember you said you don't lie in your own house."

"Ask."

"That clause means money can't clear it. Anybody's money. Not mine, not his, not a bank's. It means the only thing that closes this is me, standing in a room you choose, for as long as you say."

"Yes."

"Who writes a clause like that?"

Lutz said, "That's not—"

"Who writes a clause like that?" My voice went up and I hated it, I hated hearing it get away from me in front of the two of them. "Because it isn't a loan. A loan wants to be repaid. That's what a loan is for. Nobody lends four million dollars and then writes it so that they can never, ever get the four million back. That's not a debt, that's a—"

I stopped.

"Say it," said Koss.

"That's a purchase order."

The room was quiet enough that I could hear the man on the lawn with the leaf blower, two hundred feet away, working along the wall.

"Yes," said Andrei Koss. "It is."

* * *

He stood up and came down the length of the table and stopped across from me, and for the first time since the cold storage he was close enough that I had to look up.

"I want you to hear this in the order I heard it," he said. "Your brother came to a man who works for me in October and left with money. That happens. It shouldn't, but it happens, and when it happens I hear about it inside a week, because I hear about everything that leaves this organisation."

"And you didn't."

"I heard about it in June. Four months after it started." He said it evenly, and it was the first time I had heard anything at all in that voice. "Somebody in my house wrote it, moved it, papered it and buried it, and I have been in this business for nineteen years and I did not know."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you'll work it out and I'd rather not be lied to in my own house either." He put two fingers on the folder in front of me. "Turn it over."

I turned it over.

Underneath the four pages there were more. Heavy paper. The same font. The same heading.

PLEDGE AND ASSIGNMENT OF PERSONAL SURETY.

The same Marchetti stamp, over and over, the ink getting fainter where the pad had dried.

Different names.

Anneke Ruzic. Marisa Delgado-Bowen. Sabine Okafor. Katarzyna Wieck. A name in Cyrillic I couldn't read. Three more.

Eight of them. Eight women. Eight dates between February and October.

In the top corner of each one, small, in pencil, in the same hand: a number.

Mine said 9.

"What is this?" I whispered.

"That," said Koss, "is what I've been doing since June."

"There are eight other women."

"Yes."

"What do they have in common?"

He closed the folder.

"Six months ago I could have told you," he said. "Today, only that. There were nine. You're the ninth. And you are the only one of the nine that anybody alive can still find."