Page 42 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Obviously he read about it."

"Two years ago. In a book. And has been waiting since then for a machine to say it at." He's watching his son. "This is the longest he has been in a room with strangers since he was six."

I take the seat with my back to the wall. Pure habit — you take the wall, you take the door, you count the exits, and there are three plus the kitchen.

And I look up, and Ilya has taken the other wall seat on the far side of the booth, facing the opposite way, so that between the two of us the whole room is covered and the boy at the jukebox is in both our sightlines.

Neither of us planned that. Neither of us says a word about it.

He catches me noticing, and something happens at the corner of his mouth, and I look at the menu very hard for a while.

We eat badly, and it takes an hour. Sergei gets pancakes at two in the afternoon and considers this the greatest legal loophole ever discovered. The waitress calls Ilya "hon," and he takes it with the gravity of a man receiving a title.

At one point Sergei asks him whether he ever came to places like this as a boy, and Ilya says yes, with his father, on Brighton Beach. There was a restaurant with a green awning that isn't there anymore — and then he stops, visibly, like a man who has walked into a room he didn't mean to open.

Sergei asks what his grandfather was like.

And Ilya says: "Clever. Kind. Both of those were true, and only one of them helped him."

Then, after a beat: "You would have liked him. He would have been unbearable about you."

Sergei goes pink, looks at his pancakes, and doesn't say anything, and under the table his heel starts knocking against the bench in a rhythm I have learned means he is happy and doesn't have anywhere to put it.

At the pumps afterward, Andrei says six words to me.

"You were right about the diner."

"I didn't say anything about the diner."

"You did not disagree." He screws the cap on. "That is the same, from you."

Which is, I'm fairly sure, Andrei Dudin making a joke.

The hotel is outside Salina, Kansas, at nine at night, and it is not a hotel — it's a low, expensive, anonymous building with eleven cars in a lot and a man at the desk who greets Ilya by a name that isn't his and doesn't look at any of the rest of us.

Standing suite on the top floor. Two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchenette.

Four people.

I do the arithmetic in the elevator, and it comes out the same three times, and I decide not to be the one who says it.

Sergei is asleep on his feet by the time we're through the door — twenty-nine hours minus a day of it, and a jukebox, and more human beings than he's seen since he was six. Ilya carries him the last twenty feet, which he does without appearing to think about it, and something about that is worse for me than anything else that has happened today.

He comes back out, stands in the middle of the sitting room, and allocates.

"Sergei takes the far room. Andrei with him."

Andrei nods.

"West is in with me."

There's about a half-second of nothing.

Then Andrei says, "No."

I have been in this man's company for twelve days, and I have watched him take orders about weapons, routes, timings, and a federal agent living in his principal's house, and he has never once said a word about any of it.

"Say that again," Ilya says. Very pleasantly.