Bookspry

[US + UK] She came for his books. She stayed for the man who kept them.

Vera Isakov has been building a case against the Volkov family for two years — quietly, meticulously, from an eighteenth-floor IRS office downtown. Forty-one years old, divorced, allergic to stillness, and the best forensic accountant her supervisor has ever put on an organized-crime file, she has one weakness she has not yet admitted to herself: she believes numbers are honest because people never are. Numbers are the ...
Show More

[US + UK] She came for his books. She stayed for the man who kept them.

Vera Isakov has been building a case against the Volkov family for two years — quietly, meticulously, from an eighteenth-floor IRS office downtown. Forty-one years old, divorced, allergic to stillness, and the best forensic accountant her supervisor has ever put on an organized-crime file, she has one weakness she has not yet admitted to herself: she believes numbers are honest because people never are. Numbers are the only conversation she can trust.

On a Tuesday morning in June, at ten o'clock sharp, she walks into The Amber Room in Lincoln Square to serve an IRS summons on Alexei Volkov, the family's auditor of record, and the second son of the most carefully vanished pakhan in Chicago history. She expects a man in a suit. She gets a man in jeans and a henley with the sleeves pushed up, who pours her cardamom tea, answers her opening question with the precise data she needed without being asked, and refuses to lie to her — about anything except the one thing that matters.

Alexei Volkov is forty-five years old. He was nineteen when his father caught him stealing and sentenced him to five years of silent penance as the family's financial auditor, and he has been running his father's cipher in his sleep ever since. He knows two things the morning Vera Isakov walks into his restaurant: that the IRS forensic accountant across his booth has traced forty-seven million dollars of his father's obshchak into a Cyprus trust that should not exist, and that his father is not, in fact, dead. The assassination was staged. The money is seed capital. Konstantin Volkov is alive, operating under the name Viktor Saar from a hospice outside Tartu, and the only person in Chicago who can help Alexei prove it without dying for the knowledge is a woman whose job is to put him in a federal cell.

They negotiate across a butcher-block island on Wolcott Avenue, in a booth at his restaurant, at a bench under an apple tree in a Lincoln Square garden his dead mother planted. Information becomes a form of foreplay. Every disclosure is a door neither of them has the authority to close. She knows he is lying about something. He knows she is the only person in the world he might tell the truth to. And the calendar is moving — because Alexei's father is watching, Alexei's brothers are waiting, and the proffer agreement that will end the Volkov empire is a document Vera will eventually have to write with her own hands.

What Vera cannot account for is a man who listens to her the way her father listened to her when she was twelve, who cooks her into his kitchen without asking, and who carries three Soviet-era kopeks in his left pocket the way other men carry rosaries — because the years stamped on them are the years his father stopped being Russian, and he is not going to forget.

What Alexei cannot account for is a woman who reads his father's cipher in one afternoon, refuses his charm, and asks him, across her own kitchen island on a Friday night in June: Is your father alive?

In the Volkov family, silence is inheritance. In the IRS-CID, objectivity is a weapon. In this book, both are negotiable — and the cost of getting it right is a proffer delivered on a Monday morning, a confession spoken on a dock in Wisconsin, and a narrow gold ring carried for thirty-seven years on a chain around a dead mother's neck that a woman named Vera Isakov accepts because, for the first time in her professional life, the numbers and the why have finally arrived in the same room.
Show Less