Reamde

Another detail she elected not to share: Wallace had almost certainly gotten the virus from Uncle Richard’s computer, spread via the thumb drive.

“So Wallace used this add-on,” Ivanov said, using air quotes, “and got infected by this virus.”

“Completely innocently, yes,” Zula said. During the first part of her lecture she’d been surfing on a burst of energy that had carried her most of the way through, but in the last ten minutes or so, exhaustion had come over her, and she had slowed down and begun to mumble her words and to begin sentences she didn’t know how to end. Now, she dimly realized that the upshot of all she’d said, in Ivanov’s mind, might be that Wallace had screwed up and deserved to be punished. This now left her almost paralyzed.

To her own considerable surprise and then shame, she began crying. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands.

“I am eediot!” Ivanov exclaimed. “I am stupidest man in world.” He stood up. Afraid that he was going to come over and comfort her, Zula tensed and forced herself to hold it in for a moment. She dared not look up. Through her tears and her fingers she could see Ivanov’s polished shoes moving around. He stepped out of the room. She let go of a train of little gasps and sobs, mixed now with self-anger and frustration that she was being such a stupid girl. She hadn’t cried in a serious way since her mother’s funeral.

Ivanov was back in the room after no more than fifteen seconds. She could hear his footsteps behind the sofa. She flinched as something limp and heavy fell across her shoulders. “What is wrong with you?” Ivanov wanted to know. He was addressing Peter. She realized that Ivanov had grabbed Peter’s arm and draped it over Zula’s shoulders and was now tamping it down into place like wet cement in a form. She got it under control then, certainly not because Peter had his arm around her shoulders but because of a kind of humor, albeit very dark, that was in the situation: the man Ivanov, whoever and whatever he was, jetting in from Toronto to give Peter lessons in how to be chivalrous to his girlfriend, and Peter trapped, unable to explain that they had just broken up.

Ivanov scattered orders to everyone in the room. People went into motion; phones were unfolded. Zula sat up straight, pushing back against the weight of Peter’s arm, and Peter, terrified of what would happen to him if he disobeyed Ivanov, left it where it was, a dead weasel draped over her shoulders.

“Only thing I actually believe is that someone fucked me,” Ivanov announced, with the customary nod of apology toward Zula. “You know any Russian? Kto Kvo. A saying of Lenin. It means ‘who whom?’ Today I am the whom. The one who is fucked. I am dead man. As dead as him.” He nodded toward the adjoining room. Zula heard her lungs filling with a gasp. Ivanov continued, “That is not question. Question is manner of my death. I have some time remainink. Maybe a fortnight. Would like to spend it well. It is too late for me to die gloriously. But I can die better than him.” Another nod. “I can die as a who, not as a whom. I can show my brothers that I was fighting for them to very end, in spite of khorrendous losses. I think they will understand this. I will be a forgiven dead man instead of a smashed insect. Only thing I need is: who is the who?”

Peter finally took his arm off Zula, who sat up fully straight and regarded Ivanov directly. Ivanov looked back at them—but mostly at her—with an interested expression. As if this were a highly formal, academic sort of drawing-room inquiry. “Do you understand question?”

“You want to know who did this to you?”

“I would use different verb but yes.”

They all sat there silently for a few moments. They could hear the engine of a vehicle starting down below, they could hear men talking on phones.

“You want the identity of the Troll. The person who created the virus,” Peter said.

“Yes!” Ivanov snapped, faintly irritated.

“And if we can give you that information, then … we’re cool?”

“Khool?” Ivanov demanded, clearly in no mood to be negotiating—if that was what this was called—with Peter.

“I mean, then it’s good? Between you and us?”

Now, kind of an interesting moment.

Though the whole situation was laden with implicit threat, Ivanov had not lifted a finger, nor intimated that he ever would, against Peter or Zula. His eyebrows went up and he regarded Peter, now, in a new light: as a man who had just, in a manner of speaking, issued a threat against himself. Volunteered that he owed Ivanov something and that consequences would be due him if he failed to deliver.

Ivanov made a little shrug, as if to say, The thought had never crossed my mind, but now that you mention it … “You are most generous.”