Page 81 of Captured By the Pakhan

Bogdan isn't here. Bogdan is in California with my son, which was my instruction and which I would give again, so what I get instead is a woman named Pham who works out of a clinic in Bladensburg, takes cash, and has been doing this for nineteen years.

She puts me on a dining table under a light and works for about forty minutes.

"Through and through," she says eventually. "You are extremely lucky, which I say to everyone, and in your case it is actually true. It has gone through the muscle wall and out. Nothing in the abdominal cavity, or you would be a different color by now." She is threading something. "You are going to feel like a horse has kicked you for three weeks. Do not lift anything, do not run, and do not, under any circumstances, do whatever it is you are obviously about to go and do."

"Understood."

"That was not agreement."

"No," I say. "It was not."

Grigor is on the couch with his leg elevated and a great deal of morphine and is arguing with somebody about a football match that finished four years ago.

Andrei stands in the kitchen doorway, doesn't sit down, and doesn't speak for a long time.

"Say it," I tell him.

"Sacha had two daughters."

"I know."

"Vitali's mother is in Rostov and doesn't know yet, and I will telephone her tomorrow, because you cannot and it is my job." He is very still. "Yeremey told you it was a door with a sign on it."

"Yes."

"I told you at the service corridor."

"Yes."

"And you went in anyway, because it has been a few days now, you have not slept, and because there is a woman somewhere between here and California with no telephone." His voice doesn't rise at any point. "Two men are dead in a card room in Maryland tonight, Ilya, and they didn't die because Claudio Danesi is clever. They died because you were in a hurry."

I lie on a dining table in a rented house and take it, because every word is true and because there is nobody else left alive who would say it.

"Yes," I say.

Andrei blinks.

"...Yes?"

"You are correct. All of it. I made the decision, the decision was bad, and the reason it was bad is the reason you've just given." I get an elbow under me, and Pham puts a hand on my shoulder, and I stay where I am. "You may put it in front of me again whenever you like. You may put it in front of me in ten years. I won't argue with you about it once."

He looks at me for a long moment.

"That," he says, "is worse than if you'd argued."

"I know."

I call Yeremey at one in the morning.

He answers before it rings twice, which means he has been sitting with the telephone in his hand since ten.

"How many?"

"Two. Sacha and Vitali."

A long breath on the line.

"You?"