Archive of Our Own

The room seemed emptier somehow, now that there were two other people in it.

After he arrived at the 1st Precinct police station (white brick, blue door), Ilya was forced to endure a tedious processing procedure during which he was paraded from cubicle to cubicle, fingerprinted and photographed and eventually strip-searched by a series of bored-looking police officers who did not recognize him, then finally led to a small room with pale cornflower-colored walls and yellowing gray tile. There, he was directed to sit at a Formica table and his handcuffs were removed. Then he was left alone. Set vertically into the blue walls around him at regular intervals were large cloth-covered rectangles, and behind his chair was a small mirrored window no larger than the expo window through which the cook passed hot plates to the waitress at the diner near the harbor where Ilya had been sitting when the cops walzed in and calmly arrested him.

The little room was warm. Ilya removed his Prada coat with its sleek black mink fur around the collar and cuffs and dropped sedately into a doze, which deepened into an outright snooze. In fact, he slept hard—until a fist slammed down on the table an inch from his nose. Then Ilya bolted up and out of unconsciousness amidst a chorus of heh-heh-hehs.

There were two black-suited people in the room with him now, a man seated in the chair across from Ilya and a woman standing against the wall behind him. The woman had sandy colored hair and the man had dark hair; otherwise, they were largely indistinguishable—Caucasian, early middle-aged, each with square hard faces and big white American teeth. They wore VISITOR stickers plastered over the breast pockets of their black suits.

“Look at those reflexes,” said the sandy-haired woman.

“You’d think he was a professional athlete,” said the man.

Heh-heh-heh.

Out came two badges: FBI. Ilya found it difficult to remember English names—all those unnecessary vowels—and he had forgotten them both before the badges were stowed away again.

Then there was talking. So much talking! And the opening and closing of beige Manila file folders with papers popping in and out, gliding over the table’s surface to flutter under Ilya’s nose before they dragged back across the table again, and at one point the dark haired agent fanned out an array of ten or twenty glossy pictures that each featured Ilya standing and looking very severe at the harbor, shaking hands with rough wind-chapped men and laughing (I am idiot, Ilya thought with vague dismay), and then he was shown the Certificate of Documentation for the freighter and the Bill of Sale (“Is that your signature?”) and at last the agents were finished showing Ilya each individual strand of the sticky web in which he was hopelessly tangled. Then they grinned at him—Look at you, a feast for spiders.

Ilya sat back, smiling a little, politely. He had wondered how he would feel when he was caught. Now he knew. For Ilya there was no pleasure in life, nothing to live for but shallow pools of feeling and the most fleeting of highs, and beyond the glammer and glitz of money and fame that glittered like Las Vegas on the dome of the desert, there was only a dark barren wasteland with nothing and no one in it. Whatever he did now, his life was over. Alexei had contacts, both legitimate and illegitimate, foreign and domestic; and the FSB had a very long arm. Ilya would never be permitted to languish in an American cell, or to bring shame to Russia by turning stool pigeon in court. No, Ilya’s only option was to act first; he simply needed a little time alone, and he had good lawyers—he would get it. Then, Take me, he would say to death, I’m yours.

Ilya surreptitiously adjusted himself in his seat. “I will have cigarette now,” he said. “Okay?”

The agents exchanged a look as Ilya lit up.

“Listen,” said the dark-haired agent after the barest pause, “we know English is your second language so I’ll explain it to you again and slowly—the DEA knows everything. You and your brother have been turning a nice little business—Columbia to Miami to New York to Russia, and what a little worker bee you are, hockey player by night, drug lord—well, also by night. But the US government is willing to cut a deal, provided you talk.”

No sense in making them suspicious. “And Alexei?” Ilya prompted. “What will happen to him?”

“If we can get him here, he’ll never see the outside of a jail cell again—but we would need your help luring him overseas.”

Ilya wondered if he could manage that. “I can try,” he said, and leaned across the table to motion for the agent’s pen. “We will start now, yes? I will write down all of the names and information I can remember plus anything else you are wanting or not wanting, name of neighbor’s pet dog, name of childhood street, favorite model and her phone number for after-hours investigation, eh?”

Apparently the agents did not appreciate jokes unless they were at Ilya’s expense. They exchanged another look.

“Well,” sandy said at length, “you’ll have to talk to the DEA about all of that. They’re letting us speak to you first as a courtesy. We’re here for something else.”

Ilya closed his grabby-hand and slowly sat back in his chair. “Something else?” he echoed.

The grins were securely back in place. The dark-haired agent shuffled through his files, withdrew a new Manila folder, and began paging through it.

“Do you remember Shane Hollander?” he asked.

Ilya stiffened. He remembered Hollander, barely: white teeth, dark eyes, clear skin, finely shaped hand. Ilya had taken his measure in a single glance: a wolf playing lost lamb. And smug with it.

But Hollander had turned out not to be such steep competition after all—during what was intended to be a sort of celebratory pre-draft family vacation in California (and left alone for the afternoon in their rented cabin), Hollander had, for no reason he ever cared to share, strolled along the hard pack to the cabin next door and slaughtered the family that occupied it, stabbing mom and dad and baby brother, then shooting little sis in the back as she went sprinting toward the frontage road. Dad managed to call 911 before he succumbed, and in the midst of a routine canvas of the surrounding area, a groggy-looking Hollander was arrested when he answered his cabin door still covered in blood.

The case, such as it was, was open and shut—Hollander was nabbed nearly in flagrante delicto with the knife and gun poorly concealed in his trash bin outside, no alibi to speak of, and who could forget the copious amount of evidence smeared around on his clothes? Still, Hollander denied everything, and claimed to have been sleeping upstairs in his rental at the time of the murders.

The murders were international news, covered with a fervor Ilya could never have imagined. Hollander’s face had been everywhere. He pleaded not guilty, stood trial, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. One clip from the sentencing made the rounds, the world and Ilya watching with sick fascination as Hollander, seemingly shocked by the verdict, jerked toward the spectators before the guards came to lead him away, his eyes wide and full of terror.

“Mom!” he cried, just like a little boy.

Mom herself stood weeping with one hand over her mouth. “It’ll be okay, Shaney,” she called back.

So much for the Rozanov/Hollander rivalry.

That was fifteen years ago. There was the occasional headline—Hollander Appeals Murder Verdict! breathless at first, and then over the years came the wry punchline: (again)! at the end of the headline—but the appeals were always denied (as were the requests to be transferred to a facility in Canada) and as far as Ilya knew there had been no further petition to the court for years.

Now he felt the nastiest of nasty shocks as the mug shot wafted over the table to him. The man in the photograph was not the smiling boy who had once shaken Ilya’s hand, but instead a stunned-looking stranger, rumpled and pale, with eyes like the eyes of a doe frozen in a fatal glare of headlights.

Ilya tore his gaze from Hollander’s face to find the agents watching him steadily, inscrutably, and felt his first real touch of fear—fear and worse than fear, a kind of subsuming and sustained note of irrational terror that rang through him like a struck gong. He contemptuously thrust the photo away.

“What about him?” Ilya demanded.

“The two of you played together, didn’t you?” the dark-haired agent asked.

“Played against. And once. I never saw him again.” Ilya stubbed out his cigarette. “I don’t know him.”

“That’s interesting,” said sandy, “because he sure likes you.”

Heh-heh-heh.

Through the low clanging terror came a discordant chime of irritation. Was there some insinuation there? The Americans were always saying this was a free country—if they had been watching him for some time, if they knew about the—the men—

Ilya drew himself up, offended, but the dark-haired agent only went on:

“I’m not going to bore you with the details, Rozanov, and you don’t have clearance to hear them anyway, but what I can tell you is this—three weeks ago a corpse was pulled from the depths of Lake Superior and subsequently linked to a high-profile missing person case. Luckily for us, the low water temperature kept the body pretty well preserved, and forensics has conclusively determined that our missing person was killed with the gun Hollander used in Joshua Tree.”

A picture of a handgun wafted across the table and was quickly dragged back again.

“You probably know that Hollander has always maintained his innocence,” said sandy, “but he used to be cooperative”—a sotto voce aside—“not that he ever told us where he purchased the gun—“

The dark-haired agent rolled his eyes. “‘Where would I have gotten a gun?’” He mimicked Hollander’s low monotone. “‘I’m Canadian.’”

“At any rate, Hollander stopped cooperating completely about four years ago.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“Since then, he hasn’t said a word to anybody but one of the orderlies at the hospital—and he gives us a loony net routine every time we come by.”

What did she say—net? Or was it nit? Looney nit—was it slang?

“In fact,” sandy continued, “the only time Hollander perks up at all is when a hockey game is on.”

“Call it a special interest.”

“His two passions: hockey and murder.”

Heh-heh-heh.

The gong was ringing again—wah-wah-wah—in time with the clamorous pumping of Ilya’s heart. He could sense something coming.

“The inmates on his…ward, I guess you could say, aren’t allowed to watch TV. Hollander was the walking-comatose—until one of the orderlies brought in a radio and started listening to the hockey games.”

“It’s real sweet.”

Sandy made a gesture with her hand: Picture this! “Hollander sits on the floor, leaning up against his—well, his net.”

Net. The second mention of this net.

Heh-heh-heh.

“You want to know what Hollander does when St. Louis plays?” the dark-haired agent asked.

“His lips move,” sandy answered. “We think he’s sort of muttering silently to himself—you know, providing his two cents, ragging on the ref, the usual.”

“And every time the announcers say your name or you make a good play—“

“He smiles.”

The agents looked at Ilya silently for a beat, their eyebrows raised expectantly. What do you think of that?

Ilya thought nothing. Was he supposed to be impressed?

“So?” he snapped. “Why do I care about murderer cheering for me?”

The agents grinned wolfishly at him with their big white American teeth.

After a night under lock and armed-agent-outside-the door in a dingy little hotel situated directly at if not just a little beyond the Baltimore airport—a hotel at the airport? Even in his rookie season Ilya had enjoyed rooms at JW Marriott Marquis’ and Hilton Waldorf Astorias (the airport hotel had a sign in the bathroom which read—well, it was too bleak to linger on)—Ilya was driven across town and shoved into a large white-paneled van parked outside the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The sandy-haired agent and her dark-haired partner were waiting for him in the van.

“Hockeeey!” sang out sandy, in a pantomime of locker room camaraderie.

She directed him to remove his shirt, which took some time.

At thirty-three, Ilya no longer wore the athletic wear he once favored in his youth. Now he dressed in bespoke Attolini wool and cashmere two-piece suits in colors that complemented his skin and eyes. His wardrobe had been one of Svetlana’s whims, before—before.

Four years ago, Svetlana had been his girlfriend, of sorts. Of sorts because they were not in love, but she lived with him and followed him around during the playoffs and they fucked each other exclusively. Ilya could not sleep without her; he had then been plagued by a clawing feeling in his throat all the time as though the chance to rectify some fatal error in his past was rapidly receding into the middle distance. It was nearly, almost, Too Late. But Too Late for what? Ilya didn’t know.

One night Ilya sat alone against the headboard in his California king bed in his Boston penthouse suite, lit in the glow from the wall sconce mounted at his shoulder and not so much watching television as staring at the television screen, when Svetlana, who had been up moving around the apartment doing who-cared-what, suddenly entered the room, tapped on the touch lamp on her nightstand and switched off the TV. Then she came around to Ilya’s side of the bed and sat down.

The touch lamp had three light settings and the first setting was very dim. The glow radius from the wall sconce did not extend any further than what was essentially a spotlight on Ilya, so Svetlana sat in shadow; Ilya could not see her face, only the curve of one cheek and the roundness of her thick hair twisted up behind her head and held in place by, he knew, an eighteen-carat gold Tiffany pin.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

Ilya was less surprised by the news than by the fact that she had hidden it from him, and skillfully. “Oh,” he said.

“I want to keep it.” She was very direct, his Svetlana. “At first I wasn’t sure—I thought I had probably waited too long to have a baby and you know my mother had a difficult pregnancy when she was younger than I am, so I didn’t want to say anything to you until I made a decision. But when I went to the doctor and saw the ultrasound, and it—it grabbed me, and it won’t let go, Ilya. I love him—her. Already.”

“Oh,” Ilya said again.

All at once, he knew—it was Too Late to love someone. All along Ilya had thought that love was a token—a knitted hat or a pair of red mittens—tossed out onto the ice and there all the time just waiting to be picked up. Now he understood that love was a shadow, which either caught you or it didn’t.

After a moment, he swallowed away the flavor of ashes and reached out his hand. “If you want, I will play papa,” he said. 

But as the weeks passed, Ilya’s feelings began to change. Tears sprang to his eyes the first time he saw the round bulge of the baby’s head pushing against the swollen skin of Svetlana’s stomach. Let me out! A man came in to paint a forest mural on the spare bedroom—now the nursery—wall, and crib and clothes were purchased and toys accumulated, and at length, Ilya, with a sort of cloud-clearing wonder, thought: So maybe this is the love I have been waiting for.

But then, midway through month seven, Svetlana began to bleed and just like that—so sudden!—the baby came out of her in the penthouse bathroom and it was around ten in the morning with the light shafting sideways through the windows and Svetlana was still bleeding and it was very quiet in the bathroom and Ilya could not find his cell phone and the baby (a boy) was not breathing and there was so much blood and the baby was so still and Svetlana whispered, “The baby isn’t crying, Ilya, why isn’t he crying?” with the blood washing and washing out of her (“He is okay,” Ilya said, “do not worry, he is just resting, I think,” although the baby was very obviously dead and probably had been for some time) and even though Ilya had placed big bunched up towels between Svetlana’s legs, the blood had already soaked through and was now creeping across the floor and there were no traffic noises from below which seemed strange and then Svetlana stopped whispering and closed her eyes so Ilya—deciding to give up on finding their phones—resolved instead to ride down to the lobby to alert the doorman and resolutely climbed to his feet except he was so clumsy that day so he slipped in blood on his way out of the bathroom and cried out as he fell but neither Svetlana nor the baby ever made another sound.

“I’m afraid you will be taken away from me,” Ilya whispered to Svetlana, rolling toward her in bed the night after her baby shower.

Svetlana combed the hair from his damp forehead with her fingers. “Why would I be taken away from you?” she whispered back.

“As punishment.”

“Malyshka—punishment for what?”

Ilya’s throat worked for a long time before he could confess: “For thinking my mother was weak.”

Two weeks after Svetlana’s funeral, Alexei called with his condolences. Then he launched into a business proposition, heavy with threatening innuendo (“You owe me, little brother”) and blistering with premature irritation; apparently Alexei felt either moved or had been encouraged to bring Ilya into the fold despite his clear conviction that Ilya would tell him no.

Ilya sat in the empty nursery with Alexei on speakerphone. Svetlana and baby, dead. Gone. With Mamochka. The forest mural was a cheerful shadow on the wall.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

It was hideously cold in Baltimore, a city like the walk-in freezer in Marleau’s mansion house. There was a little heater chugging away in the van, but sandy appeared to be hogging it while the dark-haired agent shifted from foot to foot, chapping his gloved hands. Maybe they took turns. No turn for Ilya either way; stripped to his waist, his nipples pebbled then shriveled in the frigid air, and by the time the dark-haired agent got the receiver box situated in the small of his back and had taped the wire to its mic-topped terminus just above his clavicle, Ilya’s teeth were audibly chattering.

“Aw, he’s scared,” said the dark-haired agent, who appeared to be shivering himself. “Move over, ass,” he said, rounding on sandy, and shouldered her aside to crouch in front of the heater.

Meanwhile, Ilya frantically clawed his way back into his shirt, which felt like it was woven from Snegurochka’s frosted hair. The agents briefed Ilya in round, as was their custom: as far as anyone in the hospital knew, Ilya was a gopher sent by the FBI bearing a general questionnaire intended to gather data on any murderer with a victim count of three or more.

In reality: “Get him talking and either get him to agree to speak with us or get him to tell you about the gun, or else we’ll try it a different way and you can occupy the cell next door until he starts feeling a little more chatty. Capiche?”

“No—say da. Rozanov is still struggling with English, don’t confuse him with guido slang.”

The temperature inside the hospital (which, other than the slick, bile-colored tile on the floor looked like no hospital Ilya had ever seen before) was equally frigid. The lobby where the director’s office was located felt warm enough, an echoing chamber with rows of big wooden doors and central heat that puffed tepidly from rusty floor vents. But after his audience with Dr. Chilton, Ilya was escorted by an orderly—an inmate? The man wore a faded blue jumpsuit and leered at him—down to the basement, where Hollander was…kept, and the basement was apparently maintained at temperatures intended to court or at least flirt with frostbite.

The basement, Dr. Chilton explained, was reserved for the most dangerous of creatures, the no-hopes, the big loonies (or, like Hollander, the garden variety psychopaths), and there were Rules down there: Don’t approach the bars, don’t pass anything through the bars, don’t—well, actually there were only two Rules. “You know he’s a biter, don’t you?” Dr. Chilton asked.

Yes, Ilya knew.

Shane Hollander had been a resident of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane since 2019, transferred over from San Quentin by court order after he bit out the throat of a guard who made the fatal error of bending over him while he lay restrained on a stretcher in the infirmary. Hollander had been brought to the infirmary after having some sort of fit (a seizure, a breakdown? the details were fuzzy), and at the sight of an exposed neck in front of him, simply lifted his head and severed the man’s carotid artery with one big chomp. The guard subsequently died of massive blood loss, most of which wasn’t lost so much as it was relocated onto Hollander’s face. And what did Hollander do while the blood facial dripped redly off his chin?

“First, he starts babbling, Oh god, oh no, I’m sorry,” the dark-haired agent told Ilya, jostling for his spot in front of the heater again, “and then, when everybody rushed in, Hollander burst out laughing. And I mean streaming-silent-tears he was laughing so hard, just screaming and howling while the nurses tried to get a tourniquet on the poor sod’s neck.”

In the days following Hollander’s fifth murder, his slow-motion nosedive at last reached terminal velocity.

“After that, Hollander just shut down,” sandy recalled, chapping her hands and glaring at the dark haired agent. “He experienced an extended period of what you might consider skill regression, and was ultimately transferred here for treatment. He has recovered—somewhat—in the last few years, but he’s become…erratic.”

“Unhinged is the word you want.”

A few more years were added onto Hollander’s hundred-year sentence, big whoop, and he had been confined to the Violent Ward at BSHCI ever since. 

As Ilya stepped out of the van and onto the icy concrete below, he turned to look through the open door at the agents huddled inside.

“What did Hollander do with flesh?” he asked.

“What?”

Ilya tugged on his black calfskin gloves. “You say he bite guard throat out—what did he do with bite?” He raised his eyebrows. “Swallow?”

The sandy haired agent just stared at Ilya, but the dark-haired agent leaned back in his seat and grinned. “No,”—he raised his own eyebrows suggestively—“he spit.”

The big iron gate at the foot of the basement stairs rolled closed behind Ilya with a tremendous crash. The leering inmate had left him—he wasn’t allowed past the final step. Now Ilya saw the basement wasn’t a basement so much as it was a subterranean hall, outfitted like an ogre’s dungeon with dark grey brick on the walls and bare concrete on the floor. Above him were long fluorescent bulbs hanging on wires from the ceiling but many of the bulbs were burnt out and the light came primarily from the cells themselves, which were mercilessly flooded with brightness.

Another orderly—this one in white, so definitely not an inmate then—stood waiting in a sort of open cage at the mouth of the hall, leaning on a counter covered in papers and computer monitors and clipboards and keyboards and also canisters of mace and a rack of batons, a half-eaten granola bar, and a little red portable radio. The orderly was a big man with brown skin and equally brown eyes; his brown eyes were intelligent and gentle and very calm.

“You’re here for Mr. Shane, right?” he asked.

Ilya pursed his lips and nodded. By now the chill had crept into his bones again and he was afraid that if he spoke his teeth would chatter.

The big orderly looked him over. “Don’t worry,” he said kindly, “Mr. Shane almost always plays nice with strangers. He saves his worst treatment for the people he cares about—been trying to scare away his mother for years now. Nice lady.” He grinned good-naturedly. “But either way, I’ll be watching, so if you need anything, or if he gets upset, just signal to me.”

“I am cold, not scared,” Ilya curtly informed him.

“Uh-huh,” the man said, grin fading. “Well, he’s in the last cell on the left. Watch the bars. Oh, and if he touches the net, try not to react.” The loony net again! “He likes to get a rise when he can.” And he turned to one of the computer monitors without another word.

The moment Ilya stepped beyond the orderly’s station, he began to smell urine.

He was aware, dimly, that as he passed each successive cell, figures stirred in their depths and looked at and even called after him but he tuned out the jailbird sounds with no trouble at all after years of experience with unwanted crowds. Actually, Ilya was largely unbothered because he was preoccupied—his mind either couldn’t or wouldn’t maintain its hold on the task at hand. Awake in the airport hotel bed the night before, Ilya had tried very hard to think of what he would say to Hollander, tried to recall details from Hollander’s early life—a subject of much breathless conjecture in 20/20 special that aired after his sentencing—wracking his brains for anything that might be used to draw him into conversation, but then…instead…

Ilya found himself noticing how scratchy the sheets were, and ah! That stinging sensation in his ankle, were there bugs hiding in the mattress? Hollander! The visit to see Hollander!

Ilya just had to get it over with, this final errand, and then he could get busy dying—speaking of, what method—

Now Ilya certainly needed to plan, and quickly, but he was stuck on something the sandy-haired agent had said—a cell next to Hollander’s. But it smelled like piss in here. Ilya did not think he could live all the time smelling piss. Maybe you got used to it. Probably you did. Was Hollander no longer able to smell the piss? That was worse than smelling it somehow.

Ilya abruptly realized he had reached the end of the hall and was standing in front of Hollander’s cell. He froze and swung around, tensing so violently his shoulders shot past his ears.

Hollander’s cell was as garishly lit as all the others. It contained a cot, a steel table and bench-chair both bolted into the concrete, and a cylindrical sink/toilet combination that squatted in one corner. The front of the cell was enclosed with the customary set of dark iron bars, but now Ilya understood the source of agents’ amusement—two feet beyond the bars was a nylon net stretched from floor to ceiling and fastened in place with big metal clips. Extra security, Ilya imagined, to prevent the rabid felon from lunging through the bars for a second chomp.

The rabid felon himself sat on the cot with his back against the wall of his cell, staring vacantly at the floor. There was a book in Hollander’s right hand, his place marked near the end with one finger between the pages, but he didn’t look like he would be doing any further reading—not today or any other day. In his face was a conspicuous lack; the total absence of animation or intelligence or human spark.

He did not move as Ilya’s shoulders lowered and he straightened himself up…and he still didn’t so much as twitch as Ilya swallowed and blinked and braced himself. No response when Ilya cleared his throat and scuffed his foot on the concrete and glanced at his Rolex either. Hollander just went on staring at the floor.

Well, OK. Maybe Ilya would speak first.

“Shane Hollander,” he gravely intoned. Then he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Hollander did not appear to have heard him.

Ilya tried again—“Shane Hollander,” he rumbled. But again he ran out of steam and, slowly heating with panic, involuntarily blurted out, “I am come for visit!” His voice squeaked a little on the last word.

Finally, a response! Hollander’s head moved…slowly…slooowly…up…up…then tuuuuurned…

The hair on the nape of Ilya’s neck stood on end when Hollander looked at him.

If Hollander had aged at all in the intervening years, Ilya could detect no sign of it; his skin was fine and pale and unlined—save for the old freckles, of course, his dusting of summers long past. Hollander did appear a little thinner than he had been in 2008 although not morbidly so, and now his overlong fringe fell around his temples, but otherwise he was unchanged. Ilya felt himself warming under his clothes.

“Remember me?” he said weakly.

Hollander retrieved what looked to be a faded photograph from the cot, stowed it between the pages of his book (something in French, Ilya saw, Candide?), placed the book down on his cot, and stood up.

Then his gaze duly returned to Ilya.

Fifteen years ago, Ilya now recalled, Hollander had not helped own his case. On the news and in court, Hollander was blank-faced, dull-eyed, robotic, off-putting, monotone. He went stiff at the mention of his victims—“My deepest condolences to anyone affected by the tragedy in Joshua Tree,” he said, and looked bored. Flat affect, said news pundits. The word sociopath was bandied around.

Now Ilya had to tense his calf muscles to prevent himself from recoiling. Hollander’s dark eyes were cool, as cold and empty as the ice in the early hours of the morning when the training center was deserted and there were only the fluorescent lights overhead for company. Yes, Ilya found it easy to believe that Hollander had killed someone—someones.

For a long moment, Hollander stood still, studying Ilya as though he were trying to place him. Then the fingers on his left hand, hanging loosely at his side, curled in and began to tap rhythmically against the pad of his thumb—index-middle-ring-pinkie-ring-middle index—

“Ilya Rozanov,” Hollander croaked, his voice harsh from disuse. He cleared his throat, politely covering his mouth with his free hand, and gave it another shot. “Ilya Rozanov, what are you doing here?”

Ilya could almost hear the agents in the van outside exhaling and pumping their fists – Yes! Good news for him. But Ilya only felt himself continuing to heat, sweat pricking under his armpits. He forced himself to shrug. “Oh well, I was in neighborhood…”

A cheap joke but Hollander snorted, and with the snort he appeared to return dustily to life, an echo of the smiling boy who had once shaken Ilya’s hand, almost visibly dusting off the shoulders of that old suit—teenager-in-alley-in-Saskatchewan—stretching his still powerful arms and cracking his neck as he tugged on his long-unworn second skin, mindful of the tatters but the tatters were more like big pulls, frayed holes, and the holes showed when he smiled; now Illya saw the lines of age. Smiling, Hollander looked older, sadder.

Still, he was handsome. Gorgeous. Ilya felt his beauty strike him in his head and chest and between his legs.

Hollander’s still-tapping hand slid shyly into the hip pocket of his jumpsuit. “No really,” he said, smiling crookedly at Ilya. “To what do I owe the pleasure? I’m a big fan, you know.”

Ilya just stared. ”I came to…ask…advice,” he said at length.

Hollander raised his eyebrows. “Advice?”

Speak, idiot! “You say you are fan.” Ilya compressed his lips and fastidiously readjusted his gloves, glad to focus on anything other than the Adonis in front of him. “Then you know I am…not so good lately.”

This, at least, was true, although not so good was an understatement. So was lately. Since Svetlana’s death, Ilya had been contemptuously traded and traded again. Now he was a St. Louis Seahorse, a seahorse! Пиздец!

“Harder to fight as fish than Boston bear maybe.”

Comprehension finally dawned. “Oh—hockey? You want my—“

Hollander began to laugh quietly, or tried to anyway. He appeared to have forgotten how, and only made a series of little huffing exhales that sounded as though they pained him.

“My—my rival—come to ask—“

Ilya stood looking at his left shoulder until he stopped making those awful humorless wheezing noises.

“Are you wearing a—what do they call it—a wire?” Hollander asked, swiping at his eyes.

Ilya went rigid. “Why do you ask that?” he snapped.

“Because I’m not stupid.”

Hollander glanced away from Ilya and his face went blank again, but his eyes no longer held the glazed expression Ilya had observed when he first approached the cell. Now Hollander’s gaze tracked around the room—an intelligent gaze that moved like a pacing panther. A caged panther.

“Ummmm yeah, okay,” Hollander said, a low hum, as he met Ilya’s eye once more. “Okay.” His tone said, I can run with this, let’s play. “Do they have something on you? The cops, I mean—well, probably not the cops.”

He frowned, then his intelligent face brightened and turned wry.

“Those ghouls. It’s Starling and Graham, right? They sent you, didn’t they?”

Ilya was sweating now. “Mister smart guy,” he drawled, trying to buy himself some time. He had fucked it already, but it hardly seemed to matter. Hollander’s gaze was like a blacklight on him, and Ilya felt as though all his surface grime had become imbued with a fluorescent glow. What other filth could Hollander see?

“Well, I was always pretty bright,” said Hollander, “and there’s not much to do here except think. Hey—don’t worry about the wire, Rozanov, I don’t mind.”

He must have seen something in Ilya’s face. But he didn’t appear deterred—actually, he looked pleased. Even charmed. Both of his hands were in his pockets now, and a little smile played around his lips. As he stood looking at Ilya, he began to rock slowly from side to side, feet planted, his head, then his body moving in a fluid almost dreamy sway.

Ilya felt his body aching to copy the movement, to sway in time with Hollander until they were synched. What was happening to him?

“A few years ago, my mom mentioned you sent her a fruit basket after – after my sentencing,” Hollander said softly. “That was nice of you.”

“Well, I am nice guy,” Ilya sniffed. His heart banged away in his chest.

“I always wanted to thank you, so thank you.” Hollander looked at Ilya from under his lashes and continued to sway.

Flirting—behind a biter-net and a row of cold iron bars. For Ilya, it was always men like Hollander, handsome just like him, compact of frame, muscled, with fresh good looks; five minutes in his presence and Hollander had him up against the boards, was crashing into him, slam, slam, slam, crunching his ribs and bloodying his mouth with a few doe-eyed glances flavored by delicious freckle seasoning. Except, there was something off about the picture. Standing as he was with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, all Hollander needed to do to convey Innocence was to start whistling. And yet…his eyes were all wrong. There was something in his stare that was bleaker, blacker than Ilya remembered.

Ilya didn’t buy the act. He thought the effort was sincere: Hollander wanted him to buy it, he was using every ounce of his energy to convey Shane Hollander—but the combined effect struck Ilya as only the shadow of Shane just visible through a pane of pebbled glass. Hollander was someone else now, someone he was trying to hide.

He was also still patiently watching Ilya through the fan of his pretty lashes.

“I stand here all day and say nothing and I think you would still wait on me just like that,” Ilya said sourly.

Annoying, to know he was being duped and to flush with fever anyway.

“Well, I’d probably sit down at some point, but yeah. I’m pretty short on entertainment in here.”

“I am entertaining you?”

Hollander nodded, smiling a little.

“Well, feeling is not mutual. For a psychopath, you are pretty boring.”

Hollander’s smile widened. “You’re an asshole,” he said. But in a flash, his smile dropped, and he started forward, one hand lifting from his pocket as though he meant to stop Ilya from leaving.

Ilya hadn’t moved. “What?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You think hockey player will be offended by the word asshole? Child in street call me worse than that.”

“Oh—well, good. I mean – not good, but—“ Hollander’s sway had become a kind of vibratory jitter, a crack in the boyish facade. He hugged himself and frowned. “You don’t have to leave yet, do you?”

Ilya looked around. “Am I leaving?”

“No, it’s just that – I only get ten minutes with my parents so… Sorry.”

Hollander rubbed the back of his neck, a fetching blush rising under his freckles. Helplessly, Ilya imagined petting Hollander’s flushed lower lip, smearing his mouth open with his palm and pressing his thumb inside to feel the silky heat of his tongue, or kissing him—Hollander looked like he would like to be kissed.

“I’m embarrassed for you to see me like this,” Hollander said.

“How am I seeing you?” Ilya’s voice was hoarse.

Hollander’s hands opened helplessly, and he made a gesture that encompassed the cell. “I was better back at San Quentin,” he explained. “I wasn’t…” he trailed off.

“Wasn’t what?”

“A murderer.” Hollander offered him an apologetic smile.

Ilya knew that smile—it was the same smile Hollander had shot him after Canada won the Prospect Cup. Ilya’s fever faded as suddenly as it had struck. He was tired of Hollander’s performance.

“Oh yeah? What do you call slaughtering entire family then?” Ilya sneered. “Big game hunting?”

A shadow glided over Hollander’s face, as Ilya knew it would—Good, let me see the real you—then his chin dropped to his chest and he glared at Ilya from under his brow. “You know I didn’t kill that family,” Hollander said.

The force in his voice struck Ilya hard. “How do I know? I don’t know you.”

“But you played me once. You know how I operate.”

Hollander took a step forward. “That guy you played on the ice—I was good, I know I was, precise, methodical, strategic—do you really think that guy could ever be so sloppy? And anyway, where would I have even gotten a gun, I’m—“

“Canadians have guns!”

“Not when they’re seventeen-year-old suburban kids! I know—I know you think I cracked under pressure, Rozanov, I read the headlines back then, but I know as much about the death of that family as you do.”

“Me?” Ilya regretted starting this fight. He heard the shrill note in his voice and abruptly realized he could feel the frigid air again.

He took a few shuffling steps toward Hollander and deliberately lowered his voice. “What do I know about killing?” he hissed, back on the boards and tasting blood. “I am not feral person biting people in neck!”

Hollander reared back. He was very close to the bars now—so was Ilya. Ilya realized it at the same moment Hollander appeared to. They stood two feet away from each other as separated by the suddenly flimsy bars and the nylon net. Hollander’s dark eyes glittered as they traveled the short distance.

“What do you want, Rozanov?” he asked, his voice lowering to match Ilya’s volume. “Why did they send you here?“

The clanging gong sensation from the interrogation room had returned. All of that seemingly innocent swaying…like a python hypnotizing his prey, drawing him closer, closer…

Ilya held himself rigid. “They think you are…withholding information about gun,” he managed. “You know this?”

Hollander’s icy gaze skated away. “Starling came by last week but I didn’t listen much before I scared her off.” Then his nose wrinkled as if he had just heard, and he glanced back at Ilya. “What about the gun?”

“Was used to kill somebody before family. Important somebody. Last month they found.” English was becoming more difficult with emotion. He cursed in his head, fluently, in Russian.

A thoughtful hum. “Must be a really important somebody.” Hollander’s head swung around again. “You’re upset,” he said suddenly.

“No.”

“Your face is pretty red.”

“Is not.”

There was nowhere to go, the light from the cell stark in the hall around him. Ilya felt hot under it, undefended and exposed and the light was in his head now, glaring and inextricable somehow from Hollander’s cold dark eyes. Ilya turned to glance over his shoulder. There had to be…there! There, directly against the wall, was a shelf of shadow, just large enough for a man to stand in comfortably—provided he didn’t mind the feeling of cold stone against his back. Would Hollander notice if Ilya began to back away from him? Probably. Not probably. Yes.

“You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” Hollander asked, narrowing his eyes.

No, not afraid, not exactly. Or not only afraid. Ilya couldn’t find the word then, didn’t know the words maybe, not in English, but he was disconcerted, stricken.

There was a toy he had seen in an expensive toy store on Fifth Avenue—in the midst of searching out a big brown bear for little baby—that was shaped like a shadow box with a clear acrylic window on one side and little silver pins sticking out of the other. If you pushed your hand into the pins, you could look through the window to see the three-dimensional shape of your hand imprinted in the pins. Ilya felt like his entire body had been pressed into that toy, that he had been transmuted into the shape of himself, a figure made entirely out of cold metal pins.

“Not afraid,” Ilya croaked and subtly shifted backward with his left foot.

Hollander tracked the movement. “Everybody’s afraid of me now,” he said in a low mournful monotone. “Even my mom.”

Ilya’s gaze was drawn by a glinting on Hollander’s lower lashes. There were tears in his eyes, and they sparkled as his face plaster-set into rigid lines. He was beautiful—he was—terribly beautiful; and his expression had filled with hate.

Ilya tensed.

“Didn’t Dr. Chilton tell you the Rules, Rozanov?” Hollander said softly, his lip lifting away from his teeth.

“Don’t approach the bars”—faster than Ilya would have believed possible, Hollander shot his hand through the net and grabbed the bar next to Ilya’s head which resounded with a hard thump as it met the meat of his palm—“and don’t piss me off.”

Ilya sprang back from him. At the far end of the hall, the big orderly stood up and looked questioningly at Ilya.

“Tell Barney to sit down,” Hollander commanded.

But Ilya didn’t dare look away from him. He had landed awkwardly as he lunged away, and remained in a cringing kind of crouch. Hollander stood over him with his hand clutching the bar, his looming figure bisected into diamond shards by the net hung in front of him. A fierce light shone behind his face, but it was not the light of competitive fury Ilya had seen on the ice in Saskatchewan; no—the ice was broken now and he was in pieces.

“It’s okay, Rozanov,” Hollander said in a soft, nearly melodic voice, “you should be scared. Most people are afraid of ghosts—of dying. I was.”

The net in front of him trembled from the current of his breath.

“Do you know what happens when you die?” Hollander asked. “You just…reach the end. The end of everything you were or thought you were or wanted to be, the end of past, present, future. Death is annihilation, deprivation of everything forever, endlessly. I used to think that no one deserved to die—the punishment was too harsh. But then, fifteen years ago, somebody killed me.”

He stepped forward against the net and it drew taut around his body. Ilya stepped back from him.

“At first, I drove myself around the bend trying to understand—why me? And what kind of person could stab a baby and shoot a little girl? But after I—I”—Hollander’s mouth twitched as he stepped forward once more—“bit Officer Fredricks—“

His lips twitched again, as though he were fighting a smile. “After that, I thought: killing’s not so hard. Anybody can do it, even a walking corpse like me.”

Hollander stepped forward again and once more Ilya stepped back. Now the net bulged grotesquely around his body, biting into the fabric of his jumpsuit and digging into his skin.

“Killing kills you,” Hollander said. “I believe that. But I was already dead, so killing just made me deader.”

He pushed against the net, leaning his body weight forward until he stood on his toes. The orderly was coming now, Ilya could see him moving up the hall out of the corner of his eye. He took another step back from Hollander.

“I think the rules are different for dead people, don’t you, Rozanov?” Hollander went on, still in that terrible soft taunting voice and still he struggled forward, headfirst. “We’re on our own plane, far away from the living”—he widened his already wide eyes at Ilya as if to say, Like you—“so what we do during our afterlife is our own business, right? I don’t want to live anymore; I gave that up a long time ago.”

The round bulge of his head strained against the swell of the net; he turned his chin until the mesh framed one single staring black eye, which seemed to protrude sickeningly toward Ilya.

“I just want my murderer to join me,” Hollander whispered. “I want it more than anything—I need it.”

The words burned through Ilya. He had backed almost completely across the hall and was nearly in the shelf of shadow; he could feel it like a shroud hung behind him.

“I need him,” Hollander whispered and this time the admission went straight to Ilya’s cock. “We’re both dead, we just need to cross over. He can come with me, Rozanov—we’ll go together.”

“I want to go with mama,” Ilya wept, turning to look over his shoulder and heaving instantly with guilty sobs. “I want to go with her…!”

His father caught him by the shirt and jerked him back from the slick balcony railing. Sleet fell in Ilya’s open mouth and when his father shook him his vision blurred with a wintery mix of tears and ice.

“Idiot!” his father cried.

And then they were inside, Ilya down on his hands and knees and dripping melting snow on the rug while Alexei watched silently from the doorway.

“Listen to me, Ilya,” Papa said, crouching to grip Ilya by the chin. “Your mother was weak. She gave in to death and let him beat her. She lost because she was weak and that is what it is to lose—it is death.”

As the sound of the big orderly’s approaching footsteps reached them, Hollander released the bar and stepped back, and the net relaxed and fell away from him, leaving fine thin red lines on the skin of his face and neck. His manner shifted; apparently knowing the orderly would soon overhear if he couldn’t already, Hollander’s voice flattened out and became casual again.

“That’s a nice necklace,” he said calmly, easily. “Where is it from?”

Ilya stood on the lip of the shadow, shuddering compulsively. “My Mamochka,” he croaked. He did not mean to use the term with Hollander and flinched.

“Is your mother back in Russia?” Hollander asked. The question was innocent, but Ilya thought he heard the slightest note of mocking in his tone.

“Ty znayesh', gde ona,” Ilya said harshly. You know where she is.

Do I? Holland's eyes seemed to say. He was laughing at Ilya, laughing behind the blank mask of his face—and the blacklight shining across the hall could see that Ilya’s cock was thick in his pants even as the blood on his hands glowed eerie green—

Ilya took one final trembling step back.

“A family, Alexei?” Ilya cried, unable to bear it any longer, rounding on Alexei in the living room of his empty apartment. “A family?”

It was a cataclysm of horror. A family! A mama and papa and baby and a little girl…

Alexei leaned against the window glass, hands in his pockets, staring down at the courtyard below. “My contact didn’t know who booked the neighbor cabin,” he said. “It was a family. Bad luck.”

Alexei had sent his own family out for the afternoon when Ilya barreled in, fresh from the airport and wild-eyed. The floor at Ilya’s feet was littered with children’s toys, a train, a Barbie doll with no hair.

Ilya hugged himself. “I wanted you to break his legs,” he choked out.

In fact, Ilya had said, I want Hollander to go away and leave me alone. He meant, an injury that put him out of commission for a season. That was all. He thought Alexei knew that.

“Leg breaking didn’t work so well for Tonya Harding.” Alexei shrugged. “Now nobody is looking any further. You never have to worry about him again.”

“I don’t? What if the police are not convinced? Your contact was sloppy—where would Hollander have gotten a gun? He is Canadian!”

“Canadians have guns, Ilya,” Alexei pointed out.

“Oh god,” Ilya clutched at his hair and wailed. The horror continually broke over him, seizing at his insides like the fatal contractions of some dying organ. Alexei’s dispassion sickened him to his soul.

“Don’t you understand what you have done?” Ilya rasped. “You have ruined us, Alexei, killed us…We are damned to hell now.”

At last, the first sign of human emotion from Alexei—and it was rage. “You will greet the devil first if you continue talking like this!” he snarled, whirling from the window. “It is done! And you will not tell a soul! This was what you wanted. You said you could not lose to him again. Not ever. That if you did you would die. You asked for this.”

Ilya sank down into the sofa with a moan. Oh mamoctka, he thought as he dropped his head into his hands, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I didn’t know…

Ilya’s back met the stone wall and the shadow fell over him, cutting the glare all at once and soothing his smarting eyes. Hollander knew.

He knew.

For how long?

Ilya abruptly remembered the microphone taped to his chest. What had the agents thought of Hollander’s little speech? The ravings of a rabid dog, or would they begin to wonder…? Ilya’s strength was gone.

He blinked hard in the shadows, and, with sick trepidation, lifted his gaze to Hollander’s face. But Hollander’s expression was no longer mocking at all; it was tender. Concerned.

“Hi Barney,” Hollander said, still staring at Ilya.

The big orderly—Barney, apparently—had stopped between them in the middle of the hall. In one large fist, he held a baton, but loosely, as if he were only carrying it through to some alternative destination and had decided to conduct some unrelated business before he got there.

“I told you to stop monkeying around with that net,” said Barney, eyeing Hollander mildly before he turned to study Ilya, who stood half-collapsed against the wall.

“Are you scaring your guest, Mr. Shane?” Barney asked.

Hollander looked chastened. He self-consciously passed both hands over his face, soothing away the red marks. “I hope not,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to, anyway.” And that sorry-I’m-a-murderer smile was back.

“Uh-huh,” Barney said. To Ilya, “Maybe you'd better sit down.” He stretched out a hand, but Ilya shifted out of reach and forced himself upright.

“I think maybe I will go instead,” he croaked.

Ilya seemed to feel rather than see Barney survey Hollander from his peripherals, surreptitiously checking to see how he would swallow this news.

Hollander swallowed it just fine. “Yeah, okay,” he said, nodding and straightening up a little himself. “That’s probably best.”

“You go.” Ilya nodded woodenly at Barney. “I will follow.”

Barney gave him an inscrutable look, but in the end, only shrugged and turned back toward the basement stairs. “Your lunch tray will be down pretty soon, Mr Shane,” he tossed over his shoulder as he ambled away.

Hollander anxiously watched him go. Ilya thought he knew pretty well who the radio on the counter belonged to, and who tuned in to the hockey games at night.

“Before you go, Rozanov,” Hollander said haltingly, turning back to Ilya and stooping to catch his eye, “I want you to tell them—tell them I’ll work with you. I have information, good information. About the gun. But I’ll only give it to you. Tell them, Rozanov.”

When Ilya forced himself to look at Hollander again, he saw an apology in his face.

Ilya stiffly ducked his chin toward his collar. “They will hear,” he croaked.

Hollander’s eyes seemed to get hung up on Ilya’s throat. “Next time…” he said faintly, staring. “Next time…no wire. Tell them that, too.”

“I will.”

But as Ilya took his first scuffing step up the hall, Hollander’s gaze jumped back to his face. “I feel like I know you,” he whispered suddenly. Hollander’s voice was fierce, and his grip tightened on the net. “Is that weird?”

Why would it be? You have thought of almost no one else for the last fifteen years.

But Ilya, at his wits’ end, couldn’t find it within him to reply and so only smiled helplessly, reflexively, a smile borne of hysteria. Hollander apparently couldn’t read the strain in his face and grinned back at him, and just like that, there he was—not an fading echo or a glimpse behind glass but the real deal, the smiling boy in the alley in Saskatchewan, arrested at the moment his life should have begun, frozen in the moment it ended—Ilya’s second oldest enemy, and his first.

“See you soon,” Hollander said.

When he blushed under his freckles, Ilya understood—he didn’t know after all.

Hollander didn’t know that Ilya had killed him. He was just crazy.

“Yes,” Ilya said. “Soon.”

As Ilya turned and walked up the hall, passing through the pools of light and shadow along the way, he saw that he had only been half right four years ago— love was there all along just waiting to be picked up, but it was not shelf-stable; love had an expiration date, and if you waited too long, it went off, went sour, until all that remained of love was its contaminated shadow—which might look full of promise at first, might flatter or whisper of warm bellies and full hearts—but in the end simply caught you in the only embrace that was ever destined to last.

I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Ilya told Hollander in his head as he passed the orderly station, but I am here now. I promise I will help you out of your cage. Then I will tell you a secret.

We’ll go together, moya lyubov.

The big gate at the foot of the stairs rolled open for him and closed again with another resounding crash and the shadowed bolt behind him thunked as it slid home.

Come take me, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov thought. I am yours.