many days ago was it? Seventeen? No, eighteen. You don’t look like a man who spent eighteen days in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest.”
His eyes twinkled. “I’ve always been a fast healer.”
“I’m looking for a boy. My nephew—”
“Adam,” Yuri said. “You’re looking for Adam. He’s here.”
“He is? Where? Is he okay?”
“Yes. He’s fine. He’s using the bathroom in back. Maria is fixing him a sandwich and some borscht. He’ll be out in a minute. Have a seat, please.” Yuri gestured with his hand toward a chair.
Nadia glanced at the chair and spotted Adam’s knapsack and bag against the wall beyond it. A wave of relief washed over her. Instead of sitting, though, she remained standing. Something Yuri had said sounded wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it hit her.
“You said, ‘We knew you’d figure it out.’ Who’s ‘we’?”
Feet shuffled. A curtain parted. A tall, gangly man with a round face and a shock of red hair came into the room. He stopped beside Yuri, bowed, and smiled.
“Good morning, Nadia,” he said, as though they were friends.
Nadia mumbled a greeting in return. She didn’t recognize him, but something about him looked disturbingly familiar. She’d seen that shock of hair somewhere before. It was the stuff of nightmares, the kind that caused her to wake up in the middle of the night elated that she’d only been dreaming. Except in this case, he’d been all too real…
“The big old American sedan,” Nadia said. “You were the shooter. The supposed shooter, I should say.”
“This is my old friend,” Yuri said, “Simon Stanislavski.”
“Blanks,” Simon said. “I was shooting blanks.”
“Why?” Nadia said.
“We had to motivate you,” Yuri said.
“Excuse me?” Nadia said.
“We had to motivate you to go to Kyiv,” Yuri said. “If there wasn’t the promise of untold millions, whether in cash or from the sale of a formula, would you have gone to Kyiv?”
“What?” Nadia said.
Yuri said, “If you got letters in November and January, the way your mother did, and learned your long-lost uncle was alive, a long-lost uncle who was the most notorious thief and con man the country ever knew, would you have packed your bags and gone just because he asked you to?”
Nadia tried to process everything they were saying and form a logical conclusion, but her brain didn’t seem to want to go there.
“Damian sent letters to your mother in November of last year and in January. He was honest. He said he was dying and he had a boy, a good boy, for whom he wanted a better life. Your mother never answered. It was no surprise. Damian was a thief. People thought he was long dead. And who wants a boy from Chernobyl?”
“No one wants a boy from the Zone,” Simon said.
“So he wrote a third letter. This time he talked about having some information that could change the fate of the free world. And he asked us to lure you in. To lure you into the con.”
“We were members of his crew in Kyiv back in the day,” Simon said.
Yuri said, “We’re two of the three who got away.”
Nadia collapsed into a chair. She stared at the geometric pattern of the wood grain in the table. The pattern seemed to be moving in a circle for her benefit.
“You’re saying that everything that happened on Seventh Street was an act,” she said. “A ruse just to pull me in. You said, ‘The sale of a formula.’ Not the formula. A formula. Which suggests there is no real formula. That it was all just a sick game of some kind. That everything I went through was for nothing. For nothing at all.”
The men exchanged gratified looks with each other and turned to Nadia.
“No,” Yuri said. “Not for nothing. It was most definitely for something. It was for someone.”
“No one wants a boy from the Zone,” Simon said. He stepped over to the bar and reached up into a storage rack for glasses.
“What?” Nadia said.
“No one wants a boy from the Zone,” Simon said.
“That’s not entirely true,” Yuri said.
Simon raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“There is a country.”
“Really? Where is this country?”
“North of the equator and just south of heaven.”
“What’s so special about this country?”
“It takes everyone,” Yuri said. “Everyone has a chance to prosper.”
“Everyone? You really mean everyone? Does an Arab have a chance?”
“Yes.”
“Does a Jew have a chance?”
“Yes.”
“Does a black man have a chance?” Simon said.
“A black man can become president.”
“What about a boy from the Zone?”
“Even he may have