Chapter 13 #2
He had not eaten since the airport. He had snapped at Stanislav twice, once over the security feed, once over nothing at all, and Stanislav, who had worked St. Petersburg homicide for fifteen years and did not rattle, had simply looked at him with flat gray patience and said, "You should call her," and gone back to his monitors.
He had a glass of his father's scotch in his hand at two in the afternoon and another one already inside him, and he was standing at the tall window of the master suite looking at the bed where he had learned what he was and what he'd thrown away, and he felt completely lost.
He had said the wrong thing. He kept replaying it, slowing it down, watching himself do it.
Stay until they catch him. He had stood in the doorway of his own closet with the only real thing in his life walking out of it, and his whole vast intelligence, the mind that closed nine-figure deals, that read rooms full of oligarchs like children's books, had failed him completely.
The three words had been right there. I love you.
He had thought them so loudly he was amazed she hadn't heard them.
And his mouth had produced a businessman's compromise instead, a hedge, a contingency clause, because years of being a vault did not unlock in a single doorway no matter how badly the man inside it wanted out.
Stanislav appeared in the doorway, silent as always.
"The investigator's report," the big man said, holding out a folder. "You should read it. Today."
"Later."
"Now," Stanislav said, and it was not the tone an employee took.
It was the tone of a man who had decided, somewhere in the last two months, that he worked for this family rather than for this company, and that the distinction gave him the right to push.
He set the folder on the desk. "This is the first time I have ever seen you fall apart over a person.
Do you understand what that means? It means there is finally a person worth falling apart over. Do not lose it. Read the file."
Then he left, and Yegor, chastened by a man he paid, set down the scotch and picked up the folder, and what he read inside it turned his blood to ice.
******
Galina found him there.
She had stayed an extra day, delaying her flight back to St. Petersburg. She came into the room in her traveling coat, a deep forest green today, took in the scotch, the unshaved face and the wreck of her son, and her face tightened into something complicated and fierce.
"Put down the glass," she said.
"Mama,"
"Put it down."
He put it down.
She crossed the room to him, this small straight-backed woman who had buried a husband and survived a son turning to stone, she reached up and she slapped him.
Gently. A light, deliberate tap of her ringed hand against his cheek, more punctuation than punishment, the kind of slap a mother gives a boy to wake him up rather than to wound him.
"You stupid boy," Galina said, and her eyes were bright with tears she was furious about.
"You beautiful, stupid, stone-hearted boy.
A woman with kind eyes walks in off a television and turns you back into a person, my person, my Yegorushka, the boy who cried over the fish, and now you are going to let her go?
"I said the wrong thing, Mama. I had one moment and I said the wrong thing."
"Then say the right thing!" She gripped his face in both hands.
"You think the right words come out clean the first time?
You think your father said the right thing to me, ever, once, in forty years?
No! He said the wrong thing and then he got in the car and he drove through the night and he said the right thing on my mother's doorstep at dawn, and that is why you exist, you ungrateful child!
" She shook him gently. "Go. Get on your plane.
Go to Nashville and stand on that woman's doorstep and say what needs to be said. Go and get her."
Yegor looked at his mother for a long moment.
Then he set down the scotch, and he kissed her forehead, and he went to find Stanislav, because somewhere underneath the wreckage a hard, clear, decisive thing had started to move in him again, and he had a private investigator's most recent report sitting unread on his desk, and a sudden, ice-cold instinct that he had wasted enough time already.
*****
That same night, at a Nashville garage off Dickerson Pike, a tow-truck driver finishing a late shift took a call he'd think about for a long time afterward.
A man had come in around closing. Lean, easy smile, guitar case slung over one shoulder.
Asking real friendly about an address, said he was trying to surprise an old girlfriend, said her family went way back in Nashville, said the name was Boone.
Did the driver know the Boone family? Off Jefferson, maybe?
An old lady, a professor, everybody knew her?
The driver hadn't liked the smile. It had stayed exactly the same the whole time, like it was painted on.
He'd said he didn't know any Boones.
He did, though. Everybody on that side of town knew Mama Boone.
He watched the man with the guitar case walk off into the dark toward Jefferson Street, and something about it sat so wrong in his gut that he picked up the phone and called the non-emergency line, just to say a man was asking strange questions about a sweet old lady's address.
He did not know it would matter.
But it would matter more than almost anything.