Run! Do Not Look Back!

Chapter 2

An interview for AR Businessmen Magazine

The room was too bright. Three cameras, two lights, one magazine editor sweating through his collar.

Leonid Belov sat in the middle of it, one ankle over his knee, his coat still on. He hadn't looked at the interviewer once since he came in. He looked at the wall behind him, as though something there was more interesting.

His assistant stood at his left, tablet against her chest.

(Interviewer: Mr. Belov, thank you for... we understand you returned from Europe only three hours ago. Is there a problem with...)

"Mr. Belov will answer business questions only," the assistant said.

The interviewer blinked. "Of course. I just thought..."

"Business questions only."

He swallowed and turned a page. (Interviewer: Then, if I may, what does business mean to you?)

The silence went on so long that the cameraman shifted his feet, while glancing at his assistant for assistance.

Leonid's eyes moved, slowly, to the interviewer's face. They stayed there for three seconds. It felt much longer.

"People," he said.

That was all.

(Interviewer: People... in what sense, sir? Could you...)

Leonid looked at his watch.

(Interviewer: Is there a plan to expand into...)

He stood. The chair rolled back without a sound. He buttoned his coat and walked out, and no one in the room dared to breathe until the door closed.

Leonid

Attention isn't admiration. First it's curiosity, then it's entitlement. I don’t enjoy giving people either.

That night I wanted to be nobody. I took off the suit, put on something plain, and drove until the city ran out of lights I recognized. I stopped at a small bar in Patriarch Ponds. Quiet. Poor lighting. A place nobody would think to look for me.

Almost empty. Good.

I sat at the counter. The bartender was holding a glass up to the light, scratching at a spot with his thumb. Thin wrists. Faded shirt. A face that looked like it hadn't slept properly in years.

"Whiskey. Straight."

He turned around.

Most people stare. I've learned to measure it. Hunger, ambition, fear. Which one it is tells me how to deal with them.

He had none of those. He looked at me like he'd already known me and had forgotten from where.

I didn't like that.

He poured quickly, hands steady even though the rest of him wasn't. His eyes kept coming back to me. Not boldly. Carefully. The way you check a stove you aren't sure is off.

I drank. I let the silence stay. It tells you more than talking does.

I caught him looking. I looked back. He dropped his eyes to the cloth in his hand and I watched the color climb his neck.

Interesting.

He was trying not to look at me. Trying hard.

I finished the glass. Paid.

My phone buzzed. A message from my assistant. I read it once. Then again.

The corner of my mouth moved. I corrected it.

When I looked up, his eyes were on my mouth.

I nodded once and left.

Maksim

It's strange how easily a stranger can move into your head and live rent free.

My life was heavy enough. I didn't need this. I didn't need him. He was probably straight. Probably married. Probably just a rich man having a bad night in a bar he'd never think about again.

The second the door closed, my coworkers swarmed me.

"Maks. Maks. Do you know who that was?"

"A customer," I said.

Zhenya, who's worked the floor longer than I've worked anywhere, actually laughed. "A customer. Listen to him."

They told me his name like it was a legend. Leonid Belov. A family that moved money the way governments move, quietly, permanently. Political history. Cultural influence. Loyalty bought and buried deep.

"He's basically royalty," Zhenya said, and slapped my back so hard I dropped the cloth.

I laughed it off. I laughed it off through the rest of my shift, down the metro stairs, up the five flights to my apartment, and into bed, where I lay on top of the blanket in my coat and counted the cracks in the ceiling.

I didn't sleep.

On the third night, I looked him up. On my cracked phone, with the screen dimmed and my back to the wall, like I was committing a crime.

There was nothing.

No scandals. No lovers. No blurry photo outside a restaurant with a hand on someone's back. His social media read like a quarterly report. Conferences. Handshakes.

That kind of privacy doesn't happen by accident. It's built, like a wall. Someone spends a lot of money to keep a man that clean.

It bothered me more than it should have.

A week passed. Then another.

I kept pouring. I kept nodding. My hands stayed busy and my voice stayed low. But every time the door opened, my stomach jumped before I could stop it. A woman shaking snow off a fur collar. Two men arguing about a yacht. A delivery boy with a box. Never him.

One night, a commercial came on the TV above the bar while I wiped down the wood. Some calm, deep voice-over.

Then the voice said, "Whiskey. Straight."

I stopped moving.

It was nothing. A line in an ad. A man in a recording studio somewhere had said the same two words, and someone had paid him for it.

But my body didn't care. My skin went hot, then cold. My knees felt strange.

What is wrong with you? I don't get obsessed with men who don't even know my name.

And yet.

I took down a rocks glass. I poured two fingers of the good whiskey, the one I'm not supposed to waste on staff. I set it on the bar where he had sat, centered it on a coaster, and turned it a quarter inch so the light caught the amber.

I told myself it was habit. Muscle memory. Too many nights of pouring the same thing for the same kinds of men.

No one came to claim it.

I left it there for a long time, pretending to wipe the counter, while my eyes kept sliding back. The whiskey looked different when no one touched it. Almost like it was accusing me.

A laugh came from the back room, and I flinched. The spell broke. I slid the glass off the counter and poured it down the sink when nobody was looking.

This means nothing.

People pass through. Faces blur. That's how a bar works. That's how everything works if you stand behind a counter long enough.

I counted bottles. I checked the stock list. I did everything that needed my hands and none of my thoughts.

It didn't help.

When my shift ended, I locked up and walked toward the metro. In the dark window of a closed shop, I saw a thin man in a thin coat with snow in his hair, and I barely recognized the look on his face.

Hope.

It didn't suit me.

I slept badly again.