Page 52 of Sigma
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.’”
It’s the poem I was reading, quoted verbatim.
He smirks at me. “You’ve pigeonholed me as a criminal, I presume.”
“Well, aren’t you?” I lean on the lectern without touching the book itself.
He shrugs. “Perhaps. Some of the things I do are outside the law. But not all. And those things are not all I am.” He eyes me thoughtfully. “In fact, I am only a recently entree into the world of organized crime.” A pause. “Well, my involvement in it, at least. The majority of my fortune was, I discovered, gained through crime.”
“What do you mean, you discovered?”
He leans against the railing, arms outstretched along the top. “It’s a long story.”
I gesture around us. “I have nothing but time, it seems.”
A wry smile twists his lips, and he sighs. “Do you really wish to know? Truly?”
I find that I do. Why? I couldn’t begin to fathom the psychology that’s going into my curiosity. “Yes,” I say, choosing to omit any attempt at an explanation.
He doesn’t ask for one. He spends a moment considering. “I grew up alone.”
“An only child?”
That doesn’t surprise me.
The curve of his lips is not a smile, or not one of amusement or joy. “Well, yes, but that isn’t what I meant.” Another pause. “I meanalone. My mother was frequently gone. As a child, all I knew was that Mother was working. That’s what I was told. I lived at the top of a high-rise in Athens, cared for by anau pairnamed Gemma. She would prepare my meals and see that I ate them. There was a tutor, a dour old Russian named Koslov. I didn’t know any other name for him, just Koslov. He was unkind, strict, and unpleasant. He smelled of cigarettes and vodka.” He looks away, gazing into nothing. “Koslov would come at nine in the morning, and drill into me lessons of mathematics and science and literature. It was a very…medieval…way of learning. As if I was the heir to some throne, meant to have this old-world education in the classics. There was no sense of the fact that I was but a child. It wasn’t merely reading and writing and adding, it was readingAeneidfrom a seventeenth-century translation, and algebra, and geometry when most kids my age were at recess and studying basic world geography and reading age-leveled primers.”
“That sounds…unpleasant.”
“I was certain I’d done something to anger my mother. Even though I barely saw her. She would come some weekends. Usually, I would wake up Saturday morning and there she would be, dressed as if she’d just come from a nightclub, smelling of booze and men and blood and cordite. I only know the latter two smells now that I’m an adult myself. Then, it was just the smell of Mother. She would behave as if it was all perfectly normal. ‘Why good morning, Polly,’ she would say. Polly.” A derisive snort. “I hated that name. It felt like she thought I was a parrot. Or a girl.” He sighs. “She would always bring me presents. The latest toys, video game consoles, a larger TV, stacks of comic books.” Another of those wry, unamused smirks. “When I neared adolescence, the stacks of comics was replaced by stacks of American pornography magazines.Hustler, Playboy, Penthouse.”
I blink. “Really?”
A shrug. “It was her way. She had no conception of normality. She would give me some of her drink. Or more usually, pour me my own. As if I was an adult and we were having a meeting, even though I was ten or eleven. She would talk to me, talkatme. Just rambling. If she decided to shower, she would strip down in front of me.” A pause. “But she was gone again as suddenly as she would appear. I would go to bed with her drinking in the living room, and when I woke up Sunday morning, she was gone.”
“Your father?” I ask.
His eyes narrow. “I’ve never known a single thing about him. Nor shall I ever. He is a nonentity.”
Case closed.
He continues, after a moment. “That’s what I mean by alone, Corinna. Gemma would be there, but she was distant. She did not foster affection between us. She looked at her job as merely keeping me alive, seeing to my physical needs. Koslov saw that I was educated—looking back, frightfully well educated. He even taught me the rudiments of Greek and Latin. But I had no friends. No companions. I rarely left the home. Once a week, Koslov would walk with me, a few blocks this way and that, drilling me in Latin conjugations or verbally solving math problems, or quoting long sections of literature at me.”
I shake my head, unable to comprehend such a life. “So, it was just you and two adults neither of which was your parent, in a condo, alone, all day every day?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get to play or watch TV?”
He rolls a shoulder. “Koslov instructed me from nine to four. After four, I was on my own. Gemma often left for long periods of time, shopping I suppose, or visiting friends. I was alone much of my life. I played with my toys, watched TV, played video games, and read books.”