19. Ilya
Ilya
Iknow before I open my eyes, because the house is the wrong temperature.
A door has been open somewhere for a while. Not long — an hour, perhaps less — but long enough that the air on this floor has changed, and I have slept in defended buildings for twenty-five years and my body notices that before my mind is available to be consulted.
The bed is empty.
That isn't, in itself, information. She gets up. She walks the house at night the way other people breathe, and there have been four occasions in six weeks where I have woken at three and found her standing at a window downstairs with a glass of water, looking at nothing.
I put a hand flat on the sheet on her side.
Cold.
Not four minutes ago. Not twenty.
I am on the stairs before I have made a decision about anything, and the front door is shut, and the alarm panel in the hall reads ARMED in small green letters, which it should, and which is the first genuinely frightening thing that happens to me tonight.
Because it should read ARMED, she would arm it behind her. She would arm it behind her because she has spent six weeks watching this house get worse at protecting itself, and because there is a boy asleep upstairs, and she would not leave a door open even on her way out.
She has been gone long enough to think about it.
I go through the house at speed.
Kitchen, terrace, pool house, the study — the study door is locked, and the keypad log reads clean, which I will discover in eleven hours to be a lie, but at four in the morning I look at a clean log, and I move on.
The garage. Two vehicles. Neither missing, and both sets of keys in the box, which is somehow worse.
Sergei's room, which I open silently and look into for about two seconds, and he is asleep on his front with one arm off the side of the bed, and everything in me unclenches for approximately a second, then goes tighter than it was.
And then I go back upstairs, into her room, turn the light on properly, and stand in the middle of it.
Her bag is here.
That's what stops me. Her bag is here, and the clothes I bought her are hanging up, and the weapon Andrei logged out to her is sitting on the nightstand in its holster with both spare magazines squared beside it.
She left the gun.
She has taken nothing that came from me.
I stand in the middle of that room and understand exactly what I am looking at, because it isn't a girl fleeing a house. A woman escaping a house takes the weapon. It is a woman closing an account.
Andrei is in the doorway. I have no idea how long he has been there.
"Gate," he says. "One twenty-two. She walked out of it."
"Walked."
"On foot. Down the service stair to Rennick and then east, which is the direction with no camera for six hundred meters.
" He is fully dressed. He has been fully dressed since the moment he woke.
"She used the pad. The code is Sergei's — the boy's own code, the one he was given for the pool gate, which nobody has ever changed. "
"Two hours and thirty minutes."
"Two hours and thirty-one."
I stand in the room.
"Grigor is on the road with two vehicles," Andrei says.
"There are four hire counters in the city that will take cash, and I have men at three of them.
The bus terminal on Alameda, the Hollywood terminal, and Union Station are covered.
If she is moving on foot within a five-mile radius, we will have her inside two hours. "
"She isn't within five miles."
"No," Andrei agrees. "She isn't."
"She has been planning this for how long?"
He doesn't answer immediately, and that is how I know.
"Andrei."
"She asked the boy how the gate works," he says.
"Yesterday afternoon. On the terrace, in the sun.
He told her about the code and about the reader and about the blind spot on the left post that I have been asking Grigor to fix since April.
" His face doesn't move. "He came and told me about the conversation last night.
He was pleased with himself. He thought he had been helpful to her. "
And that is the moment.
That is the actual moment, and it isn't the cold sheet, and it isn't the gun on the nightstand — it is a ten-year-old boy going to bed pleased with himself.
Something goes off inside my chest, and I put my hand onto the doorframe.
"Ilya."
"I need a moment."
"You do not have—"
"I need a moment."
He goes. He goes and closes the door, and I stand in a room in a house on a hill with my hand flat on a doorframe, and for approximately 90 seconds I am not a Pakhan, a chief executive, or a father.
I do not break anything. I want the record to show that. I have broken a great deal of furniture in my life, and I do not break one thing in that room; the effort of not doing it leaves me shaking.
Then I straighten up, put my face back on, and find the letter.
It's on Sergei's pillow. It has been there since one twenty-two in the morning, four feet from a sleeping child, folded once, with his name on it in block capitals.
I sit on the floor of my son's room in the dark with a piece of paper I have no right to read.
I read it.
Sergei —
I said you'd hear it from me and not from an empty bed, and I've broken that, and I'm not going to pretend I haven't. It's the only promise I've made you, and I broke it on purpose. You should know that.
Here is why, and it's the truth, because I told you I don't lie to you: something happened that means I can't stay in your house. It isn't about you. I need you to read that part twice. It isn't about you; it isn't something you did, and it isn't something you could have stopped.
You already know everything I taught you. You don't need me for it. Five things you can see, four things you can hear, and it works when you do it for yourself — you did it in the diner in Indiana without anybody telling you, and I've never said how much that impressed me.
Ask your father to do it with you. He's terrible at it, and he'll get better. He wants to be in that room more than he wants anything, and he is the bravest man I've ever met about everything except that door.
Go outside. Swim in the ocean. Be unbearable about hydrofoils to somebody new.
You were the best part of the worst thing that ever happened to me.
— R.
I sit on the floor for a long time.
Then I fold it back on its own crease and put it exactly where it was, and I go out and close the door, because there is a version of this morning where I take that letter away and tell him she went in the night and said nothing, and I consider it — I want to be honest about that.
I stand in a corridor at half past four in the morning and seriously consider stealing my son's letter.
Then I go and sit on the stairs and wait for him to wake up.
He finds it at ten past seven.
I hear him — the movement, then the pause, then the sound of paper — and I am at his door before he has finished the first read, and he doesn't notice me arrive.
He reads it twice. She asked him to, and he does.
Then he sits on the edge of the bed with the letter in both hands and doesn't cry, which is worse, and says:
"She left."
"Yes."
"Because of me."
"No." I come into the room. "Sergei — no. Look at me. It isn't—"
"I told her about the gate." His voice cracks straight down the middle. "She asked me, and I told her, and I told Andrei about it afterward because I thought I'd been helpful, and she asked about the blind spot, and I told her about the post and I—"
And then he does cry, all at once, the way something gives way.
I do not know what to do.
I have never known what to do. Six years in a nursery I was not welcome in, and four years in a corridor, and here is my son coming apart at the edge of a bed with a piece of paper in his hands, and each impulse I have is telling me to explain something to him.
So I do the only thing I actually know how to do, which is the thing she taught me on a floor in a room in his house days ago.
I get down. All the way down, onto the floor beside the bed, so I am lower than he is.
I do not say it's all right, because it isn't.
"Two hands," I say.
He looks at me, wrecked.
"Two hands, Sergei. Count them."
"...two."
"Two. Five things you can see."
He gets to four, stops, and can't find the fifth, and I wait and do not supply it because she never supplies it.
"You," he says finally.
"Me." I keep going despite the crack in my voice. "Four things you can hear."
We do it three times. It takes about eleven minutes, and at the end of it he is breathing, and I am sitting on the floor of his bedroom with my back against the frame, and he comes down onto the floor beside me, puts his head against my arm, and stays there.
"She's not coming back," he says.
"I don't know."
"That means no."
"It means I don't know," I say, "and I am not going to lie to you, because she didn't."
He thinks about that.
"She wrote about you," he says. "In the letter."
"I know."
"You read it?"
"I read it. I should not have, and I did, and I am telling you rather than letting you find out." I look at the wall. "You may be angry about that. You would be entitled."
Sergei considers this with total gravity, as he does everything.
"It's okay," he decides. "She'd have wanted you to read that part."
We sit on the floor until nearly nine.
Yeremey calls at four in the afternoon, and I take it standing at the glass, and he knows within about six words.
"What's happened?"
"She's gone."
A pause on the line, and when he speaks again the entire register has changed — no lightness anywhere in it.
"How long?"
"Fifteen hours."
"On foot?"
"On foot, through the front gate, at one twenty-two this morning.
She took nothing. She left the weapon." I watch the water.
"Yeremey, she has no vehicle, no identification, no telephone, and forty-one dollars that she stole from a drawer in New York six weeks ago and has kept in a coat pocket ever since, and I know that because I have seen her count it twice. "
"Ilya—"
"And there is a man with a real badge who has been photographing her for nineteen days and reporting to a case code with no name on it," I say. "So she is out there without one single protection in this world, being looked for by the one man who requires her to be found."
The silence goes on for some time.
"Then I am going to tell you the rest of it now," Yeremey says, "rather than in an hour, because it is worse in the light of that."
"Go on."
"I have the room in Maryland. Third Thursday, six days from now, and it is exactly as I described — private floor, no detail inside, six tables." Paper moving. "But I have also finished the family, and Ilya, I need you to hear the whole of it before you say anything.
"His grandfather came out of Palermo in 1931.
The name on the boat was Danesi, and it has been Danesi since, but it is a cadet branch of a New York house you have been dealing with, indirectly, for eleven years.
He isn't an FBI man with an Italian family.
He is an Italian who has been building a federal career for twenty-two years, and there are four other men in three field offices with his fingerprints on their promotions. "
I put my hand flat on the glass.
"How long has he known who I am?"
"That is the part I have spent two days on, and I am now confident," Yeremey says.
"He doesn't know who you are. He has never known who you are.
He has four cities, a supply chain, a nickname, and a very great deal of money spent — and eight months ago he took a chair above a task force to find out, and the only thing he has ever recovered from you is four sheets of Gulf routing that his own man carried out of a house upstate. "
"And the woman."
"And the woman," Yeremey agrees quietly. "Who walked into that corridor by accident, and stayed, and got caught, and who has been in your house for six weeks."
I close my eyes.
"She is the only lead he has ever had," I say.
"She is the only lead he has ever had. And as of one twenty-two this morning she is walking down a road in California on her own, in the open, with forty-one dollars.
" A breath. "Ilya. He doesn't want her arrested.
He never did. He wants her found — and now she has done the single most useful thing she could have done for him, which is to leave the only place on earth where anybody was standing between the two of them. "