Chapter 21
Lex
Eleni’s Door
Seventeen minutes.
Maeve is in the passenger seat.
She’s not asked me what’s happening. She got dressed in ninety seconds. She put on jeans and one of my sweatshirts and her boots, and she didn’t stop to put on socks, and she got in the SUV, and she didn’t ask, because she’s read my face and the face is the answer.
Her hands are pressed flat against the tops of her thighs.
She’s holding them there to stop them shaking. I can see the tendons in her wrists from the dashboard light because she’s pressing down hard enough that the skin on the backs of her hands has gone white at the knuckles.
I do not speak.
I can’t. If I open my mouth, the speech that comes out will be one of two things.
It will either be a sentence I cannot afford to say in front of her, which is ‘it is one of two emergencies, and either one of them I will not survive,’ or it will be the Greek prayer my grandmother taught me at six years old, which has no English translation and which my mouth has not formed in twenty-six years.
I continue to drive.
Maeve looks straight ahead. The dashboard light is on her face.
She’s the woman she’ll be at the end of this hour, a woman who has just been told her daughter is in trouble.
And she’s also the woman she was three hours ago, which was the woman who told me she would do this every time.
The two women are sitting next to me in the same passenger seat.
At minute eleven, I reach across the console.
She lets me take her hand.
I hold it for the rest of the drive. Neither of us speaks. The hand is cold and steady.
? ? ?
Konstantinos security is already in the lobby of the Beacon Street building.
Six men. Petrov mobilized them the moment he made the call. Two extras Cormac sent last night are still here, the nightshift two from before midnight, standing with the pre-dawn six. They part to let us through. None of them speaks. They have been told what has happened.
The face of every man in the lobby is the face of a man whose family business has just had its sanctuary breached. A face I have seen exactly twice in fifteen years.
Cormac O'Brien is in the elevator vestibule.
He’s come from Brookline at high speed in his own vehicle.
He’s wearing the coat he wears when he’s not slept.
His face is that of an Irish brother arriving at the family’s worst hour, the face of a man who is not a Konstantinos but who has, somewhere along the way, decided he’s going to be in the building when this happens.
"Lex."
"Cormac."
"Just got off the phone with Ronan. He’s on a flight. He’ll be here by tonight."
Ronan, who is in Galway with our mother, who has not left Ireland in four years. Ronan doesn’t come to American problems. However, Ronan, who has, at six in the morning, Galway time, decided to come to this one.
"Tell him not to–"
"He’s on the flight. He’s not asking permission."
I nod once.
Cormac steps aside. We go up.
The door of Mama's apartment is open.
Petrov is in the doorway. He steps aside. His face is the face of a man who was on the perimeter when the breach happened on the inside, and he is, in his own architecture, going to spend the rest of his life in the corner of his mind where he’s filed this morning.
Inside the apartment.
The lamp by the couch is on. Mama is on the couch.
She’s in her bathrobe, the navy one she’s worn for ten years, and she’s holding a kitchen towel folded into a square against the side of her head above her left ear.
The towel is white. The towel is no longer entirely white.
There is a small dark stain on the carpet at her feet where the bleeding was bad before someone put the towel in her hand.
She’s sixty-eight years old.
She looks eighty.
She’s also looking at the door, waiting for me, and when she sees me, her face does what I have not seen since the morning my father didn’t come home.
"‘Yiagáka mou,’" she says. The word breaks in her mouth. "Lex. ‘Lex.’"
She starts speaking in Greek before I have crossed the room.
Fast. Fractured. Sentences breaking off and starting again.
‘They came in through the kitchen window. Three men. They were professional. They knew where the safe was. I gave them the code. I would have given them anything.’ Pause.
‘I tried to get to the panic button. They had a hand on my mouth before I was on the second step.’ Pause.
‘They put a bag over my head. I woke up on the floor.’
Pause.
Then, broken: ‘Sygnómi. Sygnómi. Sygnómi.’
‘I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.’
Maeve, beside me, doesn’t speak Greek.
She doesn’t need to speak Greek.
She’s been reading my face for the eleven seconds since I walked through the door, and she’s, in the way Maeve does, assembled the entire situation from the architecture of the room without anyone having to translate.
The empty bedroom door at the end of the hallway is open.
The crib that has been in that room since 1987 has a small impression of a sleeping child still in the sheets.
Nora is not in the apartment. Maeve crosses the room.
She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t look at Petrov.
She goes to Eleni, and she sits down on the couch beside her, and she takes the towel out of Eleni's hand.
She replaces Eleni's hand with her own, holding the towel against the side of my mother's head, and she puts her free arm around Eleni's shoulders, and she pulls Eleni against her.
And Eleni, my sixty-eight-year-old Greek mother who has carried two breaches in her life and is now carrying a third, breaks against the shoulder of the woman she met for the first time yesterday afternoon.
Maeve's hands are not shaking.
They have stopped shaking by going completely still.
She holds my mother. She doesn’t look at me.
She’s doing what she’s doing because it is what is needed, and she’s also the woman who has made a vow to me in a borrowed sweater in a Charlestown safe house.
The same woman whose daughter is gone from this apartment is sitting on the couch, holding my mother.
I turn to Petrov.
"Tell me."
Petrov speaks in the operational voice. The voice he was using when he made the call. The voice doesn’t waver.
"Three men. In and out in three minutes and forty seconds.
They came in through the kitchen window.
They defeated the alarm contact. No triggered alert.
They knew the camera blind spots. They knew which bedroom.
They knew the safe location. They took eight thousand dollars in cash and the spare key to Mrs. Konstantinos's safety deposit box, both decoys.
They took your daughter. They left no body, no shell casings, no evidence except the broken alarm contact and a single fiber on the windowsill that the lab will run when we get it. "
"How long ago?"
"Two hours twelve minutes when I called you. Two hours forty-one minutes now."
"Cameras outside."
"Compromised. Looped sixteen seconds before the breach. Came back online twelve minutes after they were gone. The loop is the kind of loop that requires access to the building's security feed."
"Petrov?"
"Yes."
"The federal Marshals' detail had Mama's apartment schedule."
"Yes."
"Andreev specifically."
Petrov is quiet for one full second. Then he says, "Andreev was the one who suggested the rotation timing. He proposed it to the Marshals' lead at 4:30 PM yesterday afternoon."
I close my eyes for half a second. I open them. I look at Petrov. I do not raise my voice. No need.
"Find them."
Petrov says, "I'm working on it. Forty minutes ago."
? ? ?
My phone buzzes.
Text. Unknown number.
I open it. A photograph. My daughter.
Nora is in a car seat I do not recognize.
The car seat is in a vehicle I cannot identify from the angle.
She’s in her dinosaur pajamas. Her hair is on one side from sleep.
She’s holding Brontos, or Brontos is on her lap, and she’s holding the trunk.
Her eyes are open. Her face is the face of a child who has been woken up in the middle of the night by people she doesn’t know and is, with the quiet, fierce gravity of a child under three, trying to assess whether she’s in trouble.
She’s alive.
She’s alive. She’s in a car seat. She has Brontos. She’s alive.
The text under the photograph is one line.
‘Mr. Konstantinos. We have your daughter. We will be in touch.’
I look at the photograph for one full second.
Then I cross the room. I sit down on the arm of the couch beside Maeve and Mama. I hold the phone where Maeve can see the screen.
I do not speak. I do not need to.
Maeve looks at the photograph of her daughter.
Maeve doesn’t scream. Maeve doesn’t cry. Maeve looks at me.
She says, very quietly, in the voice she uses for courtrooms, only quieter and steadier than I have ever heard her use it, "Lex, bring her home.”