Page 41 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Because we have twenty-eight hours and I have read everything the Bureau has written about you," Ilya says, "and none of it tells me one single thing worth knowing."

"That's the pitch?"

"That is not a pitch. That is a complaint about the quality of the file."

I look out the window for a while at Pennsylvania going past.

"A vet," I say eventually.

"A veterinarian."

"For about two years. Then somebody explained the part where animals die in front of you, and I revised the plan." I shrug. "Then I wanted to be a lawyer, because my father was, and then he was killed by people in your business, and I wanted to be the person who put them in prison. So I suppose I did become one. It just went sideways somewhere in the middle."

He drives for a while.

"That is the first thing you have told me about yourself," he says, "that you were not compelled to."

"Don't get comfortable."

But I do.

That's the problem. He asks about six things over four hours — the last time I took a holiday, whether I can swim, what I do on the four days a year I'm not working — and I answer about half of them, badly, sideways, with the important parts filed off. I keep waiting for the moment when it becomes an interrogation, but it doesn't come.

He doesn't ask about the Bureau. He doesn't ask about the file, or Louis, or what I'd do with ninety days' worth of what I've seen in his house. Not once.

And around Ohio I work out that he isn't building a profile at all. He genuinely wants to know, and he has no idea how to want that out loud, so it comes out sounding like an interview because interview is the only register he has.

He's bad at this, I think, with something in my chest going sideways. He's actually bad at this. He's doing it anyway.

We stop for fuel outside Toledo, and he comes around the back of the car while the pump runs, standing next to me, close, both of us watching the numbers climb, and neither of us says anything for two full minutes.

His shoulder is about four inches from mine.

I do not move away, and neither does he, and by the time the pump clicks off, my heart rate is doing something unrelated to the drive.

The diner is in Indiana, and it happens by accident.

Sergei is hungry, and there is nowhere for two hundred miles that isn't a service plaza, and there's a place off the ramp with eleven cars in the lot and a hand-painted sign, and Ilya looks at it for about three seconds and pulls in.

"Andrei will not like this," I say.

"Andrei does not like anything."

Here is the thing about Sergei Yaroslav in a public building.

He has not been in one in over a year. I know this because he told me, matter-of-factly, the way he tells me everything. And for the first ninety seconds inside that door he is a small, rigid child holding onto the hem of his own sleeve with both hands, taking in eleven strangers and a jukebox and a woman calling an order through a hatch, and I can see it building behind his eyes.

I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades.

"Booth," I say. "Corner one. Go on."

He goes. He sits. He counts things without being told — I watch his lips move — and by the time the menus come down he's got both hands flat on the table, and he's breathing.

Then he sees the jukebox.

Fifteen minutes later my professionally paranoid principal's son is standing in front of a Wurlitzer feeding it quarters that Ilya keeps producing from his coat, playing songs recorded forty years before he was born, and narrating — telling us both, at length and with total confidence, how the mechanism selects the record.

"He read about it," Ilya says quietly.