Page 86 of Babies for the Boss
“I stopped thinking about where they go. At some point in the early years, I stopped following the chain past the transaction. I told myself that was professional—that the point of sale was my business and the use was someone else’s business, and the separation was clean, and I maintained it.” I look at the face of the daughter Igor is holding, at the pale eyes and the small features of a person who has been in the world for four days and is entirely without defenses against it. “I’ve been thinking about where they go.”
“Pavel—”
“I know the arguments. I’ve made them myself. If we don’t supply, someone else will. The market exists independent of our participation. The demand doesn’t disappear because we exit the supply chain. It’s a valid argument. I also know that I can’t look at this face”—I gesture at the one Igor is holding—“and think about other, just as innocent faces. The ones those guns reach eventually.”
Igor is quiet for a moment. “This is not a small change.”
“I know.”
“The gun operation is a significant revenue stream. Extracting from it cleanly takes time, and there will be questions from the network about why, and Fedor’s people—whoever helped him escape prison—will read it as weakness.”
“We have managed harder things. Someone else’s perception is not my priority.”
He looks at me across the room, and there is something in his face that is not opposition. He’s taking the full measure of what is being said and where it’s coming from. “What else?”
“Anything that reaches children.” I fold my arms, wondering who I was that I let it go on this long. “That’s the line. I’m not going fully legitimate—that’s not realistic, and it’s not what I’m saying. Adults making decisions about their own risks in a world that has risks, that’s one thing. But any part of the operation that could put what we do in a child’s path—” I stop. Look at the baby in Igor’s arms. “That’s over.”
The room is quiet.
Igor looks down at the baby he’s holding, and she has gone back to sleep with the complete commitment that is their primary mode of existence, evidently. He looks at her sleeping face for a moment with the expression he has been wearing around them—the expression of a man being reminded.
“The gun operation will take months to exit without causing riots,” he says. “If we move carefully and manage the narrative correctly, we can frame it as a strategic pivot rather than a withdrawal. There are legitimate security contracting operations that would absorb several of the key relationships without raising questions.”
“Work up the transition plan. Take whatever time you need. I want it done right, not fast. There is no room for error on this.”
“Which other operations are you looking at?”
I brief him on my thoughts, and Igor is quiet for a moment. I watch as he adjusts to the new version of the organization, so different from the one he willingly joined. “This is going to require some difficult assessments.”
“Yes.”
“There will be parts of the operation that we cannot clean up quickly or quietly.”
“I know.”
“And you are prepared for what that transition looks like? The relationships that will be disrupted, the?—”
“Igor.” I look at him across the room. “I spent years building something that I am now looking at from the outside for the first time, because there are two people in this house who are going to grow up in the middle of it, and I cannot—” I stop. “I cannot be the reason that what they grow up in could hurt them. Their friends… other children.” I let the silence sit for a moment. “I am certain of this pivot, but it will be a long and arduous journey. I know that.”
He looks at me for a long moment with the full assessment, and then he nods. Once, definitively. “Alright. Then we begin.”
The baby in his arms shifts, makes the small sound that precedes waking, and then settles back into sleep. Igor looks at her face with something that is not quite a smile and is not quite the absence of one. Fascination, perhaps.
“She has your nose.” He transfers her to me, and I receive her weight and settle her into the crook of my arm. “It’s a better nose on her than on you.”
I look up at him.
“Objectively,” he says.
“Get out of my study.”
He smirks a little, stands, straightens his jacket, and moves toward the door with the contained dignity that is his permanent condition. At the door, he pauses. “For what it’s worth. This—what you’ve decided this morning. I think it’s right.” He looks at the baby in my arms for a moment, and at me. “I think it’s been coming for a while. I think they made it impossible to avoid.” He leaves.
The way we keep track of time changes at the behest of consequential people. Caesar. Jesus. Galileo. Kelvin. There was the perception of time before these people, and the perception of time after them.
I think about the man I have been, the man I’m four days into being, and the distance between them, which is both larger and smaller than I would have predicted. The distance is not the dramatic rupture it might appear from outside, but a shift in orientation—the same man, standing in the same place, finally looking in the right direction.
She opens her eyes again.
