The Witness

brigadiers sits now in a cell.”
    “He won’t talk.”
    “This doesn’t worry me. He will say nothing, as Yegor will say nothing. The American police?
Musor.
” He dismissed them as garbage with a flick of the wrist. “They will never break such as these. Nor would they break you if we were not able to convince the judge on the bail. But this girl, she worries me. It worries me, Ilya, that she was there and lives. It worries me that Yakov had no knowledge she and the other were there.”
    “If I hadn’t been delayed, I would have been there, and would have stopped it. Then there would be no witness.”
    “Communication, this was a problem. And is also been dealt with.”
    “You said to keep an eye on him, Papa, to stay close to him until he could be disciplined for stealing.”
    Ilya shoved up, yanked off his sunglasses. “I would have cut off his hand myself for stealing from the family. You gave him everything, but all he thinks of is more. More money, more drugs, more women, more show. My cousin.
Suki.
” He snarled the word for traitor. “He spits in our faces, again and again. You were good to him, Papa.”
    “The son of your mother’s cousin. How could I not do my best? Still, I had hopes.”
    “You took him in, him and Yakov.”
    “And Yakov has proven himself worthy of that gift time and again. Alexi?” Sergei shrugged. “Chicken shit,” he said with half a smile. “Now he’ll be fertilizer. The drugs. He was weak for them. This is why I was strict with you and your sisters. Drugs are business only. For drugs—that is the root—he steals from us, betrays us and his own blood.”
    “If I’d known, I’d have been there, to watch him beg like a woman. To watch him die.”
    “The information on his arrest, on the deal the bastard made with the cops, only came to us that night. He had to be dealt with quickly. I sent Yakov and Yegor to check his house, to see if he was there. So perhaps he was dealt with too quickly. Mistakes were made, as the Americans say. You’ve not been one to whore with Alexi in the past. His taste was always less refined than yours.”
    “I was to stay close,” Ilya repeated. “And the girl, she was intriguing. Fresh, unspoiled. Sad. A little sad. I liked her.”
    “There are plenty of others. She’s already dead. Now you’ll stay for supper. It will please your mother, and me.”
    “Of course.”

6
     
    T WO WEEKS PASSED, THEN THE START OF ANOTHER . E LIZA beth could count on one hand the number of times she’d been allowed to leave the house. And never alone.
    She was never alone.
    She, who’d once longed for companionship, now found the lack of solitude more confining than the four walls of her room.
    She had her laptop. They’d blocked her access to e-mail and chat boards. Out of boredom and curiosity, she hacked through the blocks. Not that she planned to contact anyone, but it gave her a sense of accomplishment.
    She kept that small triumph to herself.
    She had nightmares, and kept them to herself as well.
    They brought her books, and music CDs. She only had to ask. Devouring the popular fiction and music her mother so strongly disapproved of should have given her a sense of freedom. Instead, it only served to highlight how much she’d missed, and how little she knew of the real world.
    Her mother never came.
    Every morning John and Terry relieved the night shift, and every evening Bill and Lynda relieved them. Sometimes they made food; breakfast seemed to be John’s specialty. For the most part, they brought it in. Pizza or burgers, chicken or Chinese. Out of guilt—and partially out of defense—Elizabeth began to experiment in the kitchen. Recipes were just formulas, as far as she could see. The kitchen a kind of laboratory.
    And in experimenting, she found an affinity. She liked the chopping and stirring, the scents, the textures.
    “What’s on the menu?”
    From her seat at the table, Elizabeth glanced up as John walked in. “I thought I might try this stir-fry chicken.”
    “Sounds good.” He got himself coffee. “My wife does stir-fry to trick the kids into eating vegetables.”
    She knew he and his wife, Maddie, had two children. A seven-year-old boy, Maxfield, named for the painter Maxfield Parrish, and Emily—for Emily Brontë—age five.
    He’d shown her pictures, the ones from his wallet, and told her funny little stories about them.
    To personalize himself; she understood that. And it had, but it also forced her to