Page 55 of Captured By the Pakhan

Sergei leans forward and puts his forehead against his father's shoulder.

I watch Ilya Yaroslav sit absolutely rigid for about a second and a half with his hands hovering four inches from his son's back, and I think: don't you dare.

Then he puts them down. Flat, the whole weight of them, no delicacy anywhere.

I go and stand at the end of the corridor because I have absolutely no business watching any more of this.

He comes out twenty minutes later and doesn't see me at first.

He gets four steps down the corridor, and then his back goes against the wall, and he slides down it and sits on the floor with his forearms on his knees, and stays there.

I sit down next to him.

Not touching. About six inches. Both of us on the floor of a hallway at half past two in the morning with our legs out in front of us like a pair of teenagers.

He doesn't say anything for a very long time.

"Nine minutes," he says finally.

"Nine minutes."

"You said nine minutes. In the corridor. Eleven days ago, in a house on the other side of the country, you told me nine minutes, and I did not believe you."

"You got the light wrong."

"I got the light wrong."

"And you asked him a question."

"I asked him a question." He puts his head back against the wall. "I have run a company for eleven years. I have negotiated with men who would have killed me for a syllable. I have never in my life been as frightened as I was standing in that doorway, and I could not have told you of what."

I look at the ceiling.

"Of getting it wrong," I say. "Same as everybody."

"Four years."

"I know."

"Four years I stood in that corridor. He is ten, and he has had two hundred of those, perhaps three hundred, and I have been present for almost all of them and inside the room for none." His hands are flat on his thighs. "You did it on your first night."

"That's not the same, and you know it."

"It's the same. It's worse. It took you an hour to be willing, and it took me four years." He turns his head. "How."

"How what?"

"How did you know to do it? On the first night. Nobody taught you that."

And I sit on the floor of a corridor in a house on a hill above the Pacific and consider lying to him, which would be easy, and don't.

"My mother," I say. "After my father. She came apart every night for about two years, and I was twelve, and there was nobody else in the house, so I worked out the pieces of it because I had to. Get low. Kill the light. Give them a job. It's not a technique, it's just — it's what's left when you're too small to do anything else."

He is very quiet.

"Twelve," he says.

"Twelve."