Alexandra Primakov had been a lawyer by trade, and for the first half of her adult life she’d settled into a properly structured life in London with regular hours at the law firm of Berg & DeBurgh and a steady stream of lovers she kept at arm’s length. It suited her, always knowing where she would be, and when, fifteen years ago, her father convinced her to abandon her life of stability to join his intelligence operation hidden in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the United Nations, her one demand had been that she would stay in London.
For she was of two minds. On the one hand, she was, and would always be, Yevgeny Primakov’s daughter, and like him she would always be attracted to the grand aims of the Library; at the same time, though, she was the daughter of the late Ekaterina Primakov, for whom stability and repetition had been the only route to happiness. These two influences cursed her with a mild schizophrenia, and she knew she would never really be satisfied with the choices she made. A man or a dog? As soon as she chose a mutt from the animal shelter, she would begin to wonder about the man who might have taken its place. Oddly, the idea of getting both never occurred to her, and this was one of the many reasons that, by her forties, she had neither.
From a small rented office in the Overseas Development Institute on Blackfriars Road, she took care of the legal intricacies of international intelligence from a structured place. She did travel, of course—the librarians sometimes got into trouble, and when it couldn’t be taken care of remotely she would fly to Kuala Lumpur or Kinshasa in order to assess the situation and approach officials with the legal weight of the United Nations behind her. A couple of days in too-warm offices sitting across from small-minded bureaucrats, and then she was back in her Hampstead flat, toying with the perpetual dilemma of either buying a dog or finding a husband.
So when Milo, six years her senior, called from Manila to ask her to take over the Library’s Zürich office “just for a few days,” she resisted.
“Can’t they run it themselves?” she asked.
“Probably,” Milo said, “but I don’t think it would look good.”
“They’re not children.”
“You’re right,” he said, “but if something goes wrong, I’d rather have you there, in the apartment, with Tina and Stef.”
There it was. He wasn’t asking her to come as a necessary part of the Library but as the comforting auntie for his family. She tried not to be insulted but was anyway, and thinking about the kind of husband her brother had become convinced her that she had never really wanted to marry. A dog it was. As soon as she got back from Zürich she would visit the RSPCA.
So she’d flown down on a morning Swissair, and Noah waited in a Library Mercedes to drive her to the Weavers’ two-floor apartment in Oberstrass, half of an old Habsburg villa on Hadlaubstrasse. It was good to see Tina. She’d always gotten along with her brother’s wife better than she’d ever gotten along with him, and when she’d met their spunky daughter she’d seen a little of herself in young Stephanie. That, perhaps, was when she’d started to consider the idea of a family, but never strongly enough to actually do anything about it. And by now, at forty-two, her chances, rightly or wrongly, felt like they were slipping away.
Though she stayed in the guest bedroom and took breakfast with Tina and Stephanie, most of her time was spent at the office in Escher Wyss, on the other side of the Limmat River. It was a large second-floor apartment with a kitchen and five rooms. One was full of electronics, a second full of documents, while the third acted as Milo’s—and now her—office. There was a fully appointed bedroom and another office used by the two reference librarians, Kristin and Noah. Kristin was previously an assistant for the Canadian ambassador to the UN, and Noah, back in 2005, had been a mathematician her father had found working for a French environmental group. Kristin was in her midthirties, Noah in his fifties, Alexandra the buffer between them.
She missed her little office in the ODI, and the silence, and the way that there was no one to push back against her decisions. Here in Zürich, young Kristin seemed suspicious of her very presence, often saying, “Why don’t we wait until Milo gets back?” Noah was less contrary but felt the need to show that he was the person in the room with the most knowledge. For example, when a request came in from a librarian in Cairo for permission to cultivate a source in Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate, Noah delivered a lengthy soliloquy on the history and extent of the Mukhabarat’s use of dangles to flesh out foreign spies. Kristin listened intently and finally said, “Why don’t we wait until Milo gets back?”
And Alexandra thought, I’m going to get a big dog.
In her downtime, which she was surprised to find there was a fair amount of, she read reports and watched videos from New York of the First Consultation of the Liechtenstein Initiative, the first in a series of UN meetings aimed at doing precisely what its full title said: the Liechtenstein Initiative for a Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking. The UN wasn’t known for ambiguous titles, not even for the individual presentations: Timea Nagy’s “Follow the Money,” Kofi Annan’s “Fighting Child Slavery—A View from the Frontlines,” and the antitrafficking organization Polaris’s “How Do Traffickers Use the US Financial Services Industry?”
That evening, she taught Stephanie how to kill someone by slamming the heel of her hand up into the base of the nose, pushing bone and cartilage directly into the brain. Before leaving in the morning, Stephanie tried it out again, shoving her wrist high.
“What’s that?” Tina asked.
“Self-defense,” Alexandra said quickly.
“In case Halifa gets rough,” Stephanie said as she grabbed her bag.
“You’re not hitting anyone,” Tina said, serious. “Hear me?”
Flipping through Nexus messages, Stephanie said, “I hear ya.”
Once she was gone, Alexandra apologized, but Tina blew it off. “Milo’s already showed her plenty. If she wasn’t so well behaved, she’d be in jail for murder.”
As much as she liked Tina, Alexandra found her enigmatic. How could she have stayed with Milo, particularly through their New York years, when she learned that Milo had hidden his entire history from her? The best she could figure was that Tina maintained an intensity of loyalty bordering on the psychotic. She’d even given up a career as an administrator in an actual library in order to live obscurely in one of Europe’s duller banking capitals, where the uptight young men had taken to proto-fascist haircuts—long on top and shaved around the sides.
“I never thought I’d like it in Zürich,” Tina said over coffee. “But I do—it’s calm, you know?”
“Not boring?”
“I used to dream of boredom.”
Boredom as the big dream. But wasn’t that the kind of life Alexandra, too, loved most? Predictable, repetitious. Her little ODI office and men she never kept long enough to fuck with her schedule.
“It wasn’t always easy,” Tina said reflectively. “You know, I read this interview with Simone de Beauvoir. The paradox of life, she said, is that you spend all your time trying to be rather than just exist. But eventually, you look back and realize that you never actually succeeded. All you did was exist. Life isn’t some solid thing that builds up behind you. It’s just a series of days that vanish one after the other.”
“Jesus,” Alexandra said. “That’s depressing.”
Tina raised her coffee cup and smiled. “No, Alex. It’s freeing.”
The conversation was interesting enough for Alexandra not to hurry to the office, instead settling in for a long talk that shifted to the framework of feminism that Tina had grown up with. “Is it wrong,” she asked, “that I’m only really at peace when I know my daughter is safe and healthy? No,” she said, answering herself. “It’s not.”
“And when she leaves home for good?”
“Then I guess I find something else.”
It was midday when Alexandra finally drove across the Limmat, the conversation still swirling in her head even as she reached the building in Escher Wyss and typed her code to get inside. She made her way up the narrow stairs leading to another keypad-protected door, behind which she found Noah clambering out of his overpriced desk chair and hurrying over to her.
“We just got a report in from Algiers,” he said.
“Something wrong with Milo?”
“Uh, no,” Noah said. “But he needs to hear about this.”