Page 66 of Night of Shadows
She’s sixty-eight years old.
She looks eighty.
She’s also looking at the door, waiting for me, and when she sees me, her face does what I have not seen since the morning my father didn’t come home.
"‘Yiagáka mou,’"she says. The word breaks in her mouth. "Lex. ‘Lex.’"
She starts speaking in Greek before I have crossed the room.
Fast. Fractured. Sentences breaking off and starting again. ‘They came in through the kitchen window. Three men. They were professional. They knew where the safe was. I gave them the code. I would have given them anything.’ Pause. ‘I tried to get to the panic button. They had a hand on my mouth before I was on the second step.’ Pause. ‘They put a bag over my head. I woke up on the floor.’
Pause.
Then, broken: ‘Sygnómi. Sygnómi. Sygnómi.’
‘I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.’
Maeve, beside me, doesn’t speak Greek.
She doesn’t need to speak Greek.
She’s been reading my face for the eleven seconds since I walked through the door, and she’s, in the way Maeve does, assembled the entire situation from the architecture of the room without anyone having to translate. The empty bedroom door at the end of the hallway is open. The crib that has been in that room since 1987 has a small impression of a sleeping child still in the sheets.
Nora is not in the apartment. Maeve crosses the room.
She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t look at Petrov. She goes to Eleni, and she sits down on the couch beside her, and she takes the towel out of Eleni's hand. She replaces Eleni's hand with her own, holding the towel against the side of my mother's head, and she puts her free arm around Eleni's shoulders, and she pulls Eleni against her.
And Eleni, my sixty-eight-year-old Greek mother who has carried two breaches in her life and is now carrying a third, breaks against the shoulder of the woman she met for the first time yesterday afternoon.
Maeve's hands are not shaking.
They have stopped shaking by going completely still.
She holds my mother. She doesn’t look at me. She’s doing what she’s doing because it is what is needed, and she’s also the woman who has made a vow to me in a borrowed sweater in a Charlestown safe house. The same woman whose daughter is gone from this apartment is sitting on the couch, holding my mother.
I turn to Petrov.
"Tell me."
Petrov speaks in the operational voice. The voice he was using when he made the call. The voice doesn’t waver.
"Three men. In and out in three minutes and forty seconds. They came in through the kitchen window. They defeated the alarm contact. No triggered alert. They knew the camera blind spots. They knew which bedroom. They knew the safe location. They took eight thousand dollars in cash and the spare key to Mrs. Konstantinos's safety deposit box, both decoys. They took your daughter. They left no body, no shell casings, no evidence except the broken alarm contact and a single fiber on the windowsill that the lab will run when we get it."
"How long ago?"
"Two hours twelve minutes when I called you. Two hours forty-one minutes now."
"Cameras outside."
"Compromised. Looped sixteen seconds before the breach. Came back online twelve minutes after they were gone. The loop is the kind of loop that requires access to the building's security feed."
"Petrov?"
"Yes."
"The federal Marshals' detail had Mama's apartment schedule."
"Yes."
