A Walk Among the Tombstones

Then we spent an hour at the Aquarium, and then we went home.

If we had passed Yuri Landau in the street that day I don't suppose we'd have looked at him twice. He would have looked at home there, as he must have once looked in the streets of Kiev or Odessa. He was a big man, broad in the chest, with a face that might have served as the model for an idealized worker in one of those murals from the days of Socialist Realism. A broad forehead, high cheekbones, sharply angled facial planes, and a prominent jaw. His hair was a medium brown, and lank; he was given to tossing his head to get his hair out of his face.

He was in his late forties, and he had been in America for ten years. He'd come over with his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Ludmilla. He'd done some sort of black-market trading in the Soviet Union, and in Brooklyn he gravitated easily into various marginal enterprises, and before long began trafficking in narcotics. He had done well, but then it is a business in which nobody breaks even. If you don't get killed or imprisoned, you generally do very well.

Four years ago his wife had been diagnosed with metastasized ovarian cancer. Chemotherapy had kept her alive for two and a half years. She had hoped to live to see her daughter graduate from intermediate school, but she died in the fall. Ludmilla, who now called herself Lucia, had graduated in the spring, and was now a member of the freshman class of Chichester Academy, a small private high school for girls located in Brooklyn Heights. The tuition was high, but so were the academic requirements, and Chichester had an excellent record at placing its graduates in Ivy League colleges, as well as women's colleges like Bryn Mawr and Smith.

When he'd started calling people in the business to warn them about the possibility of kidnapping, Kenan had very nearly not called Yuri Landau. They were not close, they barely knew each other, but more to the point Kenan saw Landau as invulnerable. The man's wife was already dead.

He hadn't even thought about the daughter. Still, he'd made the call, and Landau had taken it as confirmation of a course of action he had adopted when he'd first sent Lucia off to Chichester. Instead of letting her take subways or buses, he'd arranged to have a car service pick her up every morning at seven-thirty and collect her in front of Chichester every afternoon at a quarter to three. If she wanted to go to a friend's house the car service would take her there, and she was instructed to call them when she wanted to come home. If she wanted to go anywhere in the neighborhood, she usually took the dog with her.

The dog was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and actually very gentle, but looked ferocious enough to constitute a powerful deterrent.

Early that afternoon, the telephone rang in the office of Chichester Academy. A well-spoken gentleman explained that he was an assistant to Mr. Landau and was requesting that the school dismiss Ludmilla half an hour early because of a family emergency. "I've made arrangements with the car service," he assured the woman to whom he spoke, "and they'll have a vehicle waiting in front of the school at two-fifteen, although it probably will not be the car and driver she had this morning." And, he added, if there were any questions she was not to call Mr. Landau's residence; instead she could reach him, Mr. Pettibone, at a number he would give her now.

She didn't have to call the number, because there was no problem following his request. She summoned Lucia (no one at school knew her as Ludmilla) to the office and told her she would be dismissed early. At ten minutes after two the woman looked out the window and saw that a dark green truck or van was parked directly in front of the school's entrance on Pineapple Street. It was quite unlike the late-model GM

sedans that normally brought the girl in the morning and took her away in the afternoon, but it was clearly the right vehicle. The car service's name and address was plainly visible in white letters on its side.

Chaverim Livery Service, with an address on Ocean Avenue. And the driver, who walked around the truck so that he could hold the door for Lucia, wore a blue blazer the way they always did, and had one of those caps.

For her part, Lucia got into the van without hesitation. The driver closed the door, walked around the vehicle, got behind the wheel, and drove to the corner of Willow Street, at which point the woman stopped watching.

At a quarter to three the rest of the school was dismissed, and a few minutes later Lucia's regular driver showed up in the gray Oldsmobile Regency Brougham in which he had driven Lucia to school that morning. He waited patiently at the curb, knowing that Lucia was routinely as much as fifteen minutes late leaving the building. He would have waited that long and longer without complaint, but one of Lucia's classmates recognized him and told him he must have made a mistake.

"Because she was dismissed early," she said. "She got picked up like half an hour ago."

"Come on," he said, thinking she was playing a joke on him.

"It's true! Her father called the office and one of your cars already came and picked her up. Ask Miss Severance if you don't believe me."

The driver did not go in and confirm this with Miss Severance; if he had, that woman would almost certainly have called the Landau residence, and, quite possibly, the police. Instead he used his own car radio to call his dispatcher on Ocean Avenue and ask him what the hell was going on. "If she needed an early pickup," he said, "then you coulda sent me. Or if you can't get me, at least tell me to skip my regular pickup."

The dispatcher, of course, didn't know what the driver was talking about. When she got the gist of it she

figured out the only thing that made sense to her, that for some reason Landau had called another car service. She might have let it go at that. Maybe all their lines had been busy, maybe he'd been in a rush, maybe he'd picked the child up himself and hadn't been able to call off the scheduled car. But something evidently bothered her, because she looked up Yuri Landau's number and called him.

At first Yuri didn't get what all the fuss was about. So somebody at Chaverim made a mistake, and two cars went instead of one, and the second driver made the trip for nothing. How was that something to call him about? Then he began to realize that something out of the ordinary was going on. He got as much information as he could from the dispatcher, said he was sorry if there had been any inconvenience, and got her off the line.

Next he called the school, and when he spoke with Miss Severance and heard about the call from his assistant, Mr. Pettibone, there was really no question about it. Someone had managed to lure his daughter out of the school and into a van. Someone had kidnapped her.

At this point the Severance woman also figured it out, but Landau dissuaded her from calling the police.

It would be best handled privately, he said, improvising as he went along. "Relatives on her mother's side, extremely Orthodox, you could call them religious fanatics. They've been after me to pull her out of Chichester and send her to some crazy kosher school in Borough Park.

Don't worry about a thing, I'm sure she'll be back in your school tomorrow."

Then he hung up the phone and started to tremble.

They had his daughter. What did they want? He'd give them what they wanted, the bastards, he'd give them anything he had. But who were they? And what in God's name did they want?

Hadn't someone said something just a few weeks ago about a kidnapping?

He remembered, then, and called Kenan. Who called me.

* * *

YURI Landau had the penthouse apartment in a twelve-story brick co-op on Brightwater Court. In the

tiled lobby, two thick-bodied young Russians in tweed jackets and caps braced us as we entered. Peter ignored the uniformed doorman and told the others that his name was Khoury and Mr. Landau was expecting us. One of them rode up with us in the elevator.

By the time we got there, around four-thirty, Yuri had just received his first call from the kidnappers. He was still reacting to it. "A million dollars," he cried. "Where am I going to get a million dollars? Who's doing this, Kenan? Is it niggers? Is it those crazies from Jamaica?"

"It's white guys," Kenan said.

"My Luschka," he said. "How could this happen? What kind of a country is this?" He broke off when he saw us. "You're the brother," he said to Peter. "And you?"

"Matthew Scudder."

"You been working for Kenan. Good. Thanks to both of you for coming. But how did you get in? You walked right in? I had two men in the lobby, they were supposed to—" He caught sight of the man who had come up with us. "Oh, there you are, Dani, that's a good boy. Go back down to the lobby and keep an eye out." To no one in particular he said, "Now I post guards. The horse is stolen so I lock the barn.

For what? What can they take from me now? God took my wife, the dirty bastard, and these other bastards take my Luddy, my Luschka."

He turned to Kenan. "And if I post men downstairs from the time you called me, what good does it do? They get her out of school, they steal her away under everybody's nose. I wish I did what you did. You sent her out of the country, yes?"

Kenan and I looked at each other.

"What's this? You told me you sent your wife out of the country."

Kenan said, "That was the story we settled on, Yuri."

"Story? Why did you need a story? What happened?"

"She was kidnapped."

"Your wife."

"Yes."

"How much did they hit you for?"

"They asked a million. We negotiated, we settled on a lower figure."

"How much?"

"Four hundred thousand."

"And you paid the money? You got her back?"

"I paid."

"Kenan," he said. He took him by the shoulders. "Tell me, please.

You got her back, yes?"

"Dead," Kenan said.

"Oh, no," Yuri said. He reeled as if from a blow, threw up an arm to shield his face. "No," he said.

"Don't tell me that."

"Mr. Landau—"

He ignored me, took Kenan by the arm. "But you paid," he said.

"You gave them an honest count? You didn't try to chisel them?"

"I paid, Yuri. They killed her anyway."

His shoulders sagged. "Why?" he demanded, not of us but of that dirty bastard God who took his wife.

"Why?"

I stepped in and said, "Mr. Landau, these are very dangerous men, vicious and unpredictable. They've killed at least two women in addition to Mrs. Khoury. As things stand, they haven't got the slightest intention of releasing your daughter alive. I'm afraid there's a strong possibility that she's already dead."

"No."

"If she's alive we have a chance. But you have to decide how you want to handle this."

"What do you mean?"

"You could call the police."

"They said no cops."

"Naturally they'd say that."

"The last thing I want is cops here, poking into my life. As soon as I come up with the ransom money they'll want to know where it came from. But if it gets my daughter back… What do you think? We have a better chance if we call the cops?"

"You might have a better chance of catching the men who took her."

"To hell with that. What about getting her back?"

She's dead, I thought, but told myself that I didn't know it, and that he didn't have to hear it. I said, "I don't think police involvement at this stage would increase the chance of recovering your daughter alive. I think it might have the opposite effect. If the cops come in and the kidnappers know about it, they'll cut their losses and run. And they won't leave the girl alive."

"So fuck the cops. We'll do it ourselves. Now what?"

"Now I have to make a phone call."

"Go ahead. Wait, I want to keep the line open. They called, I talked with him, I had a million questions and he hung up on me. 'Stay off the line. We'll get back to you.' Use my daughter's phone, it's through that door. Kids, on the phone all the time, you could never reach the house. I had that other thing, Call Waiting, drove everybody crazy. All the time clicking in your ear, telling this one to hold on, you have to take a call.

Terrible. I got rid of it, got her her own phone, she could stay on it all she wanted. God, take anything I got, just give her back to me!"

I CALLED TJ's beeper and punched in the number on the Landau girl's Snoopy figural phone. Snoopy and Michael Jackson both seemed to play key roles in her personal mythology, judging from the room's decor. I paced, waiting for my call, and found a family photo on the white enamel dressing table, Yuri and a dark-haired woman and a girl with dark hair that fell past her shoulders in cascading ringlets. Lucia looked to be about ten in the photo. Another photo showed her alone, older, and looked to have been taken last June at graduation. Her hair was shorter in the more recent photo and her face looked serious and mature for her years.

The phone rang. I picked it up and he said, "Yo, who wants TJ?"

"It's Matt," I said.

"Hey, my man! What's goin', Owen?"

"Serious business," I said. "It's an emergency, and I need your help."

"You got it."

"Can you get hold of the Kongs?"

"You mean right away? They sometimes hard to reach. Jimmy Hong got a beeper, but he don't always have it with him."

"See if you can get him and give him this number."

"Sure. That's it?"

"No," I said. "Do you remember the laundromat we went to last week?"

"Sure."

"Do you know how to get there?"

"R train to Forty-fifth, a block to Fifth Avenue, four, five blocks to the wishee-washee."

"I didn't realize you were paying attention."

"Shit," he said. "Man, I allus payin' attention. I's attentive."

"Not just resourceful?"

"Attentive an' resourceful."

"Can you get out there right away?"

"Right now? Or call the Kongs first?"

"Call them, then go. Are you near the subway?"

"Man, I always be near the subway. I talkin' to you on the phone the Kongs liberated, Forty-third an'

Eighth."

"Call me as soon as you get out there."

" 'Kay. Somethin' big goin' down, huh?"

"Very big," I said.

I LEFT the bedroom door open so that I could hear the phone if it rang and went back into the living room. Peter Khoury was at the window looking out at the ocean. We hadn't talked much on the drive, but he'd volunteered the information that he hadn't had a drink or a drug since the meeting I'd seen him at.

"So I got five days," he said.

"That's great."

"That's the party line, isn't it? One day or twenty years, you tell somebody your time and they tell you it's great. 'You're sober today and that's what counts.' Fucked if I know what counts anymore."

I went over to Kenan and Yuri and we talked. The bedroom phone didn't ring, but after perhaps fifteen minutes the one in the living room sounded and Yuri answered it. He said, "Yeah, this is Landau," and glanced significantly at me, then tossed his head to get the hair out of his eyes. "I want to talk to my daughter," he said. "You got to let me talk to my daughter."

I went over and he handed me the phone. I said, "I hope the girl's alive."

There was a silence, then, "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm the best chance you've got of making a nice clean exchange, the girl for the money. But you'd better not hurt her, and if you're playing any games they better get called right now on account of rain.

Because she has to be alive and well for the deal to happen."

"Fuck this shit," he said. There was a pause and I thought he was going to say more, but he hung up.

I reported the conversation to Yuri and Kenan. Yuri was agitated, concerned that I was going to screw things up by taking a hard line.

Kenan told him I knew what I was doing. I wasn't sure he was right, but I was glad for the support.

"The important thing right now is to keep her alive," I said. "They have to know that they won't be able to rig the exchange on their terms, without even demonstrating that they've got a living hostage for us to ransom."

"But if you make them mad—"

"They're already madder than hatters. I know what you're saying, you don't want to give them an excuse to kill her, but they don't need an excuse. It's already on their agenda. They have to have a reason to keep her alive."

Kenan backed me up. "I did everything their way," he said.

"Everything they wanted. They sent her back—" He hesitated, and I finished the sentence mentally: "in pieces." But he hadn't shared that aspect of Francine's death with Yuri and didn't do so now. "— sent her back dead," he said.

"We're going to need cash," I said. "What do you have? What can you raise?"

"God, I don't know," he said. "Cash I got damn little of. Do the bastards want cocaine? I got fifteen kilos of slab ten minutes from here."

He looked at Kenan. "You want to buy it? Tell me what you want to pay me."

Kenan shook his head. "I'll lend you what I got in the safe, Yuri.

I'm in the bucket already waiting for a hash deal to fall apart. I fronted some money and I think it was a mistake."

"What kind of hash?"

"Out of Turkey via Cyprus. Opiated hash. What's the difference, it ain't gonna happen. I got maybe one hundred large in the safe. Time comes I'll run back to the house and get it. You're welcome to it."

"You know I'm good for it."

"Don't worry about it."

Landau blinked away tears, and when he tried to speak his voice was choked up. He could barely get the words out. He said, "Listen to this man. I hardly know him, this fucking Arab here, he's giving me a hundred thousand dollars." He took Kenan in his arms and hugged him, sobbing.

The phone rang in Lucia's room. I went to answer it.

TJ, calling from Brooklyn. "At the laundromat," he said. "What I do? Wait for some white dude to come in an' use the phone?"

"That's right. He should get there sooner or later. If you could park yourself at the restaurant across the street and keep an eye on the laundromat entrance—"

"Do better than that, man. I be right here in the laundromat, just another cat waitin' on his clothes.

Neighborhood here's enough different colors so's I don't stick out too much. Kongs ever call you?"

"No. Did you reach them?"

"Beeped 'em and put your number in, but if Jimmy don't have the beeper with him, it's like it ain't beepin'."

"Like that tree in the forest."

"Say what?"

"Never mind."

"I be in touch," he said.

WHEN the next call came in Yuri answered it, said, "Just a minute," and passed it to me. The voice I heard was different this time, softer, more cultured. There was a nastiness in it but less of the obvious anger of the previous speaker.

"I understand we have a new player in the game," he said. "I don't believe we've been introduced."

"I'm a friend of Mr. Landau's. My name's not important."

"One likes to know who's on the other side."

"In a sense," I said, "we're on the same side, aren't we? We both want the exchange to go through."

"Then all you have to do is follow instructions."

"No, it's not that simple."

"Of course it is. We tell you what to do and you do it. If you ever want to see the girl again."

"You have to convince me that she's alive."

"You have my word on it."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's not good enough?"

"You lost a lot of credibility when you returned Mrs. Khoury in poor condition."

There was a pause. Then, "How interesting. You don't sound very Russian, you know. Nor do the tones of Brooklyn echo in your speech.

There were special circumstances with Mrs. Khoury. Her husband tried to haggle, in the nature of his race. He sliced the price, and we in turn—

well, you can finish that thought yourself, can't you?"

And Pam Cassidy, I thought. What did she do that provoked you?

But what I said was, "We won't argue the price."

"You'll pay the million."

"For the girl, alive and well."

"I assure you she's both."

"And I still need more than your word. Put her on the phone, let her father talk to her."

"I'm afraid that won't—" he began, and the recorded voice of a NYNEX announcer cut in to ask for more money. "I'll call you back," he said.

"Out of quarters? Give me your number, I'll call you."

He laughed and broke the connection.

I WAS alone in the apartment with Yuri when the next call came.

Kenan and Peter were out with one of the two guards from downstairs, looking to raise what cash they could. Yuri had given them a list of names and phone numbers, and they had some sources of their own. It would have been simpler if we could have made the calls from the penthouse, but we only had the two phone lines and I wanted to keep both of them open.

"You're not in the business," Yuri said. "You're some kind of cop, yes?"

"Private."

"Private, so you been working for Kenan. Now you're working for me, right?"

"I'm just working. I'm not looking to be on the payroll, if that's what you mean."

He waved the issue aside. "This is a good business," he said, "but also it's no good. You know?"

"I think so."

"I want to be out of it. That's one reason I got no cash. I make lots of money, but I don't want it in cash and I don't want it in goods. I own parking lots, I own a restaurant, I spread it out, you know? In a little while I'm out of the dope business altogether. A lot of Americans start out as gangsters, yes? And wind up legitimate businessmen."

"Sometimes."

"Some are gangsters forever. But not all. Wasn't for Devorah, I'd be out of it already."

"Your wife?"

"The hospital bills, the doctors, my God, what it cost. No insurance. We were greenhorns, what did we know from Blue Cross?

Doesn't matter. Whatever it cost I paid. I was glad to pay it. I would have paid more to keep her alive, I would have paid anything. I would have sold the fillings out of my teeth if I could have bought her another day. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and she had every day the doctors could give her, and what days they were, the poor woman, what she suffered through. But she wanted all the life she could get, you know?" He wiped a broad hand across his forehead. He was about to say something else but the phone rang. Wordless, he pointed at it.

I picked it up.

The same man said, "Shall we try again? I'm afraid the girl cannot come to the phone. That's out of the question. How else can we reassure you of her well-being?"

I covered the mouthpiece. "Something your daughter would know."

He shrugged. "The dog's name?"

Into the phone I said, "Have her tell you— no, wait a minute." I covered the phone and said, "They could know that. They've been shadowing her for a week or more, they know your schedule, they've undoubtedly seen her walking the dog, heard her call him by name.

Think of something else."

"We had a dog before this one," he said. "A little black-and-white one, it got hit by a car. She was just a small thing herself when we had that dog."

"But she would remember it?"

"Who could forget? She loved the dog."

"The dog's name," I said into the phone, "and the name of the dog before this one. Have her describe both dogs and furnish their names."

He was amused. "One dog won't do. It has to be two."

"Yes."

"So that you may be doubly reassured. I'll humor you, my friend."

I WONDERED what he would do.

He'd have called from a pay phone. I was certain of that. He hadn't stayed on the line long enough for his quarter to run out, but he wasn't going to change the pattern now, not when it had worked so well for him. He was at a pay phone, and now he had to find out the name and description of two dogs, and then he would have to call me back.

Assume for the moment that he wasn't calling from the laundromat phone. Assume he was at some phone on the street, far enough from his house that he'd taken a car. Now he would drive back to the house, park, go inside, and ask Lucia Landau the names of her dogs. And then he would drive around to still another phone and relay the information back to me.

Was that how I would do it?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Maybe I'd spend a quarter and save a little time and running around, and call the house where my partner was guarding the girl. Let him take the gag out of her mouth for a minute and come back with the answers.

If only we had the Kongs.

Not for the first time, I thought how much easier it would be if Jimmy and David were set up in Lucia's bedroom, with their modem plugged into her Snoopy phone and the computer set up on her dressing table. They could sit on Lucia's phone and monitor her father's, and whenever anyone called we'd have an instant trace.

If Ray called home to find out the names of the dogs, we'd be perching on that line, and before he knew what to call the dogs we'd know where they were keeping the girl. Before he had relayed the information to me we could have cars at both locations, to pick him up when he got off the phone and to lay siege to the house.

But I didn't have the Kongs. All I had was TJ, sitting in a laundromat in Sunset Park and waiting for someone to use the phone.

And if he hadn't been profligate enough to squander half his funds on a beeper, I wouldn't even have that.

"Makes a person crazy," Yuri said. "Sitting, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring."

And it was taking its time. Evidently Ray— that was how I was thinking of him, and I had come alarmingly close once already to calling him by name— evidently he had not called home, for whatever reason.

Figure ten minutes to drive home, ten minutes to get the answers from the girl, ten minutes to get

back to a phone and call us. Less if he hurried. More if he stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes, or if she was unconscious and they had to bring her around.

Say half an hour. Maybe more, maybe less, but say half an hour.

If she was dead it could take a little longer. Suppose she was.

Suppose they'd killed her right off the bat, killed her before their first call to her father. That, certainly, was the simplest way to do it. No danger of escape. No concern about keeping her quiet.

And if she was dead?

They couldn't admit it. Once they did there was no ransom. They were far from destitute, they'd taken four hundred thousand from Kenan less than a month ago, but that didn't mean they didn't want more.

Money was something people always wanted more of, and if they hadn't there would have been no first call, and probably no kidnapping.

It was easy enough to pick a woman off the street at random if all you wanted was the thrill of it. You didn't need to get cute.

So what would they do?

I figured they would probably try to brazen it out. Say she was out of it, say she'd been drugged and couldn't focus enough to respond to questions. Or make up some name and insist that was what she'd told them.

We would know they were lying and would be about ninety percent certain Lucia was dead. But you believe what you want to believe, and we would want to believe in the slender possibility that she was alive, and that might lead us to pay the ransom anyway because if we didn't pay there was no chance, no chance at all.

The phone rang. I snatched it up, and it was some jerk with a wrong number. I got rid of him and thirty seconds later he called back again. I asked him what number he was calling, and he had it right, but it turned out he was trying to call someone in Manhattan. I reminded him he had to dial the area code first.

"Oh, God," he said, "I'm always doing that. I'm so stupid."

"I got calls like that this morning," Yuri said. "Wrong numbers. A nuisance."

I nodded. Had he called while I was getting rid of that idiot? If so, why didn't he call back? The line was clear now. What the hell was he waiting for?

Maybe I had made a mistake, asking for proof. If she was dead all along I was only forcing it all out into the open. Instead of trying to bluff it through, he might decide to write the operation off and scramble for cover.

In which case I could wait forever for the phone to ring, because we wouldn't be hearing from him again.

Yuri was right. It made a person crazy, sitting, staring at the phone.

Waiting for it to ring.

ACTUALLY it took only twelve minutes over the thirty minutes I'd figured as an average. The phone rang and I grabbed it. I said hello, and Ray said, "I'd still like to know how you figure in this. You'd have to be a dealer. Are you a major trafficker?"

"You were going to answer some questions," I reminded him.

"I wish you'd tell me your name," he said. "I might recognize it."

"I might recognize yours."

He laughed. "Oh, I don't think so. Why are you in such a rush, my friend? Are you afraid I'll trace the call?"

In my mind I could hear him taunting Pam. "Pick one, Pam-mee.

One's for you and one's for me, so which'll it be, Pam-mee?"

I said, "It's your quarter."

"So it is. Ah, well. The dog's name, eh? Let's see, what are the old standbys? Fido, Towser, King.

Rover, that's always a popular favorite, isn't it?"

I thought, shit, she's dead.

"How about Spot? 'Run, Spot, run!' That's not a bad name for a Rhodesian Ridgeback."

But he would have known that much from the weeks of stalking her.

"The dog's name is Watson."

"Watson," I said.

Across the room, the big dog shifted position, pricked up its ears.

Yuri was nodding.

"And the other dog?"

"You want so much," he said. "How many dogs do you need?"

I waited.

"She couldn't tell me what breed the other dog was. She was young when it died. They had to put it to sleep, she said. Silly term for it, don't you think? When you kill something you ought to have the courage to call it that. You're not saying anything. Are you still there?"

"I'm still here."

"I gather it was a mongrel. So many of us are. Now the name's a bit of a problem. It's a Russian word and I may not have it right. How's your Russian, my friend?"

"A little rusty."

"Rusty's a good name for a dog. Maybe it was Rusty. You're a tough audience, my friend. It's hard to get a laugh out of you."

"I'm a captive audience," I said.

"Ah, would that it were so. We could have a very interesting conversation under those circumstances, you and I. Ah, well. Some other time, perhaps."

"We'll see."

"Indeed we will. But you want the dog's name, don't you? The dog's dead, my friend. What good is his name? Give a dog a dead name, give a dead dog a bad name—"

I waited.

"I may be saying this wrong. Balalaika."

"Balalaika," I said.

"It's supposed to be the name of a musical instrument, or so she tells me. What do you say? Does it strike a chord?"

I looked at Yuri Landau. His nod was unequivocal. On the phone, Ray was saying something or other but the words weren't getting through to me. I felt light-headed, and had to lean against the kitchen counter or I might have fallen.

The girl was alive.

Chapter 19

As soon as I got off the phone with Ray, Yuri fell on me and wrapped me up in a bear hug. "Balalaika,"

he said, invoking the name as if it were a magic spell. "She's alive, my Luschka is alive!"

I was still in his embrace when the door opened and the Khourys came in, trailed by Landau's man Dani.

Kenan was carrying an old-fashioned leather satchel with a zipper top, Peter a white plastic shopping bag from Kroger's. "She's alive," Yuri told them.

"You spoke with her?"

He shook his head. "They told me the dog's name. She remembered Balalaika. She's alive."

I don't know how much sense this made to the Khourys, who had been out on a fund-raising mission when the recognition signals were arranged, but they got the gist of it.

"Now all you need is a million dollars," Kenan told him.

"Money you can always get."

"You're right," Kenan said. "People don't realize that but it's absolutely true." He opened the leather

satchel and began taking out stacks of wrapped bills, arranging them in rows on top of the mahogany table. "You got some good friends, Yuri. Good thing, too, is most of 'em don't believe in banks. People don't realize how much of the country's economy runs on cash. You hear cash, you think drugs, you think gambling."

"Tip of the iceberg," Peter said.

"You got it. Don't just think of the rackets. Think dry cleaners, think barbershops, beauty parlors. Any place that handles a lot of cash, so they can keep an extra set of books and skim half the take out from under the IRS."

"Think coffee shops," Peter said. "Yuri, you shoulda been a Greek."

"A Greek? Why should I be a Greek?"

"Every corner there's a coffee shop, right? Man, I worked for one of them. Ten employees on my shift, six of us were off the books, paid in cash. Why? Because they got all this cash they're not declaring, got to keep the expenses in proportion. If they report thirty cents of every dollar goes through the register, that's a lot. And you know the frosting on the cake? Eight and a quarter percent sales tax on every sale, law says they have to collect it. But the seventy percent of sales they don't report, they can't exactly hand over the tax on that, can they? So it gets skimmed, too. Pure tax-free profit, every penny of it."

"Not just Greeks," Yuri said.

"No, but they got it down to a science. You were Greek, all you gotta do is hit twenty coffee shops.

You don't think they all got fifty grand in the safe, or stuffed in the mattress, or under a loose board in the clothes closet? Hit twenty and you got your million."

"But I am not a Greek," Yuri said.

Kenan asked him if he knew any diamond merchants. "They have a lot of cash," he said. Peter said a lot of the jewelry business was markers, IOUs that passed back and forth. Kenan said there was still some cash in it somewhere, and Yuri said it didn't matter because he didn't know anyone in diamonds.

I went into the other room and left them at it.

I WANTED to call TJ and I got out the piece of paper with all the calls the Kongs had logged to Kenan's phone. I found the number of the laundromat pay phone but hesitated. Would TJ know to answer it? And would it compromise him if the place was crowded? And suppose Ray picked up the phone? That seemed unlikely, but—

Then I remembered there was a simpler way. I could beep him and let him call me. I seemed to be having trouble adjusting to this new technology. I still automatically thought in more primitive terms.

I found his beeper number in my notebook, but before I could dial it the phone rang, and it was TJ.

"Man was just here," he said. He sounded excited. "Just on this phone."

"It must have been someone else."

"No chance, Vance. Mean dude, you look at him an' you know you seein' evil. Wasn't you just talkin' to him? I got this flash, said my man Matt is talkin' to this dude."

"I was, but I got off the phone with him at least ten minutes ago.

Maybe closer to fifteen."

"Yeah, be about right."

"I thought you'd call right away."

"I couldn't, man. I had to follow the dude."

"You followed him?"

"What you think I do, run away when I see him comin'? I don't walk out arm in arm with the man, but he walk out an' I give him a minute an' I slip out after him."

"That's dangerous TJ. The man's a killer."

"Man, am I supposed to be impressed? I'm on the Deuce 'bout every day of my life. Can't walk down that street without you're followin' some killer or other."

"Where did he go?"

"Turned left, walked to the corner."

"Forty-ninth Street."

"Then walked across to the deli on the other side of the avenue.

Went inside, stayed a minute or two, came out again. Don't guess he had them make him a sandwich on account of he wasn't in there that long.

Could of picked up a six-pack. Package he carried was about that size."

"Then where did he go?"

"Back the way he came. Sucker walked right past me, crossed Fifth again, and he's headin' straight back for the laundry. I thought, shit, can't follow him back in there, have to hang around outside until he makes his call."

"He didn't call here again."

"Didn't call nowhere, 'cause he didn't go inside the laundry. Got in his car an' drove off. Didn't even know he had a car until he got into it. It was parked just the other side of the laundry, where you couldn't see it if you were sittin' where I was."

"A car or a truck?"

"Said a car. I tried to stay with it but there wasn't no way. I was layin' half a block back, not wantin' to tag him too close on his way back to the laundry, and he was in the car an' outta there before I could do nothin'. Time I could get to the corner he was around it an' out of sight."

"But you got a good look at him."

"Him? Yeah, I saw him."

"You could recognize him again?"

"Man, could you recognize yo' mama? Kind of a question is that?

Man is five-eleven, one hundred seventy pounds, real light brown hair, has eyeglasses with brown plastic frames. Wearin' black leather lace-up shoes an' navy pants and a blue zip-up jacket. An' about the lamest sport shirt you ever saw.

Blue an' white checks. Could I recognize him? Man, if I could draw I'da drawed him. You put me with that artist you was tellin' me about, we'd wind up with somethin' looked more like him than a photograph."

"I'm impressed."

"Yeah? Car was a Honda Civic, sort of a blue-gray, a little beat up.

Up until he got into it I figured I'd follow him right back to where he's stayin'. He snatched somebody, right?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

"A fourteen-year-old girl."

"Motherfucker," he said. "I knowed that, maybe I tag him a little closer, run a little faster."

"You did fine."

"What I think I do now, I check out the neighborhood some.

Maybe I see where he park his car."

"If you're sure you'd recognize it."

"Well, I got the plate number. Be a lot of Hondas, but not too many got the same license plate."

He read it out to me and I jotted it down and started to tell him how pleased I was with his performance.

He didn't let me finish. "Man," he said, exasperated, "how long we gonna go on this way, with you bein'

stone amazed every time I do somethin' right?"

"IT'S going to take us a few hours to get the money together," I told him when he called again. "It's more than he has and it's going to be difficult to raise it at this hour."

"You're not trying to lower the price, are you?"

"No, but if you want the whole amount you'll have to be patient."

"How much do you have now?"

"I don't have a count."

"I'll call in an hour," he said.

* * *

"YOU can use this phone," I told Yuri. "He won't be calling for the next hour. How much have we got?"

"A little over four," Kenan said. "Less than half."

"Not enough."

"I don't know," he said. "One way to look at it, who else are they gonna sell her to? If you tell him this is all we got, take it or leave it, what's he gonna do?"

"The trouble is you don't know what he's likely to do."

"Yeah, I keep forgetting he's a lunatic."

"He wants a reason to kill the girl." I didn't want to stress this in front of Yuri, but it had to be said.

"That's what got them started in the first place. They like killing.

She's alive, and he'll keep her alive as long a she's their ticket to the money, but he'll kill her the minute he thinks he can get away with it, or that he's lost his shot at the money. I don't want to tell him we've only got half a mil. I'd rather show up with half a mil and tell him it's the whole thing, and hope he doesn't count it until we've got the girl back."

Kenan thought about this. "The trouble is," he said, "the cocksucker already knows what four hundred thousand looks like."

"See if you can raise some more," I said, and went off to use the Snoopy phone.

THERE used to be a number you called at the Department of Motor Vehicles. You gave your shield number and told them the plate you wanted to trace and somebody looked it up and read it off to you. I no longer knew that special number, and had a feeling it had long since been phased out. Nobody answered the listed number for DMV.

I called Durkin but he wasn't at the station house. Kelly wasn't at his desk, either, and there was no point in paging him, because he couldn't do what I wanted him to do from a distance. I remembered when I'd been in to pick up the Gotteskind file from Durkin and pictured Bellamy at the adjacent desk, having a one-sided conversation with his computer terminal.

I called Midtown North and got him. "Matt Scudder," I said.

"Oh, hey," he said. "How you doing? Joe's not around, I'm afraid."

"That's okay," I said. "Maybe you can do me a favor. I was riding around with a friend of mine and some son of a bitch in a Honda Civic clipped her fender and just plain took off. Most flagrant thing you ever saw."

"Damn. And you were in the car when it happened? Man's a fool, leaving the scene of an accident. Most likely drunk or on drugs."

"I wouldn't be surprised. The thing is—"

"You got the plate? I'll run it for you."

"I'd really appreciate it."

"Hey, nothing to it. I just ask the computer. Hang on."

I waited.

"Damn," he said.

"Something the matter?"

"Well, they changed the damn password for getting into the DMV

data bank. I enter like you're supposed to and it won't let me in. Keeps saying back 'Invalid Password.' If you call tomorrow I'm sure—"

"I'd love to move on this tonight. Before he gets a chance to sober up, if you follow me."

"Oh, definitely. If I could help you—"

"Isn't there someone you can call?"

'Yeah," he said with feeling. "That bitch down in Records, but she'll tell me she can't give it out. I get that crap from her all the time."

"Tell her it's a Code Five emergency."

"Say that again?"

"Just tell her it's a Code Five emergency," I said, "and she'd better give you the password before you wind up with circuits backed up all the way to Cleveland."

"Never heard that before," he said. "Hang on, I'll give it a shot."

He put me on Hold. Across the room, Michael Jackson peeked at me through the fingers of his white glove. Bellamy came back on the line and said, "Damn if it didn't work. 'Code Five emergency.' Cut right through the bullshit. She came up with the password. Lemme enter it.

There you go. Now what was that license number?"

I gave it to him.

"Let's just see what we get. Okay, didn't take long. Vehicle is a Eighty-eight Honda Civic two-door, color is pewter… Pewter? Man, why can't they say gray? But you don't care about that. Owner is— you got a pencil? Callander, Raymond Joseph." He spelled the last name.

"Address is Thirty-four Penelope Avenue. That's in Queens, but where in Queens? You ever hear of Penelope Avenue?"

"I don't think so."

"Man, I live in Queens, and it's a new one on me. Wait, here's the zip. One-one-three-seven-nine. That's Middle Village, innit? Never heard of no Penelope Avenue."

"I'll find it."

"Yeah, well, I guess you're motivated, aren't you? Hope nobody in the car was hurt."

"No, just a little body damage."

"Nail him good, leaving the scene like that. Other hand, you report it and your friend's insurance rates go up. Best thing might be if you and him can work something out private, but that's probably what you got in mind, huh?" He chuckled. "Code Five," he said. "Man, that really lit a fire under that girl. I owe you for that."

"My pleasure."

"No, I really mean it. I run into problems with this thing all the time. That's gonna save me a lot of major headaches."

"Well, if you really figure you owe me—"

"Go ahead."

"I just wondered if he had a sheet, our Mr. Callander."

"Now that's easy to check. Don't have to call a Code Five 'cause I happen to know that entry code.

Hang on now. Nope."

"Nothing?"

"Far as the state of New York is concerned, he's a Boy Scout. Code Five. What's it mean, anyway?"

"Let's just say it's high level."

"I guess."

"If you get a hard time," I heard myself say, "just tell them they're supposed to know that a Code Five supersedes and countermands their standing instructions."

"Supersedes and countermands?"

"That's it."

"Supersedes and countermands their standing instructions."

"You got it. But don't use it on routine matters."

"God no," he said. "Wouldn't want to wear it out."

FOR a moment there I'd thought we had a bead on him. I had a name now, and an address, but it wasn't the address I wanted. They were somewhere in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn. The address was somewhere in Middle Village, in Queens.

I called Queens Information and dialed the number given to me.

The phone made that sound they've developed, somewhere between a tone and a squawk, and a recording told me the number I had reached was no longer in service. I called information again and reported this, and the operator checked and told me that the termination of service was recent and the listing had not been deleted yet. I asked if there was a new number. She said there was not. I asked if she could tell me when service had been terminated and she said she couldn't.

I called Brooklyn Information and tried to find a listing for a Raymond Callander, or an R or RJ

Callander. The operator pointed out that there were other ways to spell that last name, and checked more possibilities than would have occurred to me. Spelled one way or another, there were a couple of listings for R and one RJ, but the addresses were way off, one on Meserole in Greenpoint, another way over in Brownsville, none of them anywhere near Sunset Park.

Maddening, but then the whole case had been like that from the beginning. I kept getting teased, making major breakthroughs that didn't really lead anywhere. Turning up Pam Cassidy had been the best example. From out of nowhere we'd managed to produce a living witness, and the bottom-line result of that was that the cops had taken three dead cases and shoved them all into a single open file.

Pam had provided a first name. Now I had a last name to go with it, and even a middle name, all thanks to TJ with an assist from Bellamy.

I had an address, too, but it had probably stopped being valid at about the time the phone was disconnected.

He wouldn't be all that hard to find. It's easier when you know who you're looking for. I had enough now to find him, if I was able to wait until daytime, and if I could allow a few days for the search.

But that wasn't good enough. I wanted to find him now.

IN the living room, Kenan was on the phone, Peter at the window.

I didn't see Yuri. I joined Peter, and he told me that Yuri had gone out to look for more money.

"I couldn't look at the money," he said. "I was getting an anxiety attack. Rapid heartbeat, cold damp hands, the whole bit."

"What was the fear?"

"Fear? I don't know. It just made me want to do some dope, that's all. You gave me a word-association test right now, every response'd be heroin. A Rorschach, every ink-blot'd look like some dope fiend bangin'

himself in a vein."

"But you're not doing it, Pete."

"What's the difference, man? I know I'm gonna. All it is is a question of when. Beautiful out there, isn't it?"

"The ocean?"

He nodded. "Only you can't really see it anymore. Must be nice living where you can look out at water. I had a girlfriend once, she was into astrology, told me that's my element, water. You believe in that stuff?"

"I don't know much about it."

"She was right that it's my element. I don't like the others too much. Air, I never liked to fly. Wouldn't want to burn up in a fire or be buried in the earth. But the sea, that's the mother of us all, isn't that what they say?"

"I guess."

"That's the ocean out there, too. Not a river or a bay. That's just nothing but water, straight on out, farther than you can see. Makes me feel clean just to look at it."

I clapped him on the shoulder and left him looking at the ocean.

Kenan was off the phone, and I went to ask him how the count stood.

"We got a shade under half of it," he said. "I been calling in every favor I got coming and Yuri's been doing the same. I got to tell you, I don't think we're going to find a whole lot more."

"The only person I can think of is in Ireland. I hope this looks like a million, that's all. All it has to do is get past whatever rough count they give it on the spot."

"Suppose we shoot some air into it. If every pack of hundreds is short five bills, you got a tenth again more packs."

"Which is fine unless they pick one pack at random and spot-count it."

"Good point," he said. "First glance, this is going to look like a good deal more than what I handed over to them. That was all hundreds.

This has about twenty-five percent of the total in fifties. You know there's a way to make it look like a lot more than it is."

"Bulk it up with cut paper."

"I was thinking with singles. The paper's right, the color, everything but the denomination. Say you got a stack, supposed to be fifty hundred-dollar bills, total of five grand. You dummy it up with ten hundreds

on top and ten on the bottom and fill in with thirty singles. 'Stead of five grand you have a little over two grand looking like five. Fan it, all you see is green."

"Same problem. It works unless you take a good look at one of the dummied-up packets. Then you see it's not what it's supposed to be, and you know right away, no argument, that it was phonied up that way to fool you. And if you're a nut case to begin with, and you've been looking for an excuse to murder all night long—"

"You kill the girl, bang, and it's over."

"That's the trouble with anything flagrant. If it looks as though we're trying to screw them—"

"They'll take it personally." He nodded. "Maybe they won't count the stacks. You got fifties and hundreds mixed, five thousand to a stack, half that in a stack of fifties, how many stacks are we talking if we come in at half a mil? A hundred if it's all hundreds, so call it a hundred and twenty, thirty, something like that?"

"Sounds right."

"I don't know, would you count it? You count in a dope deal, but you've got time, you sit back, you count the money and inspect the product. Different story. Even so, you know how the big traffickers count? The guys who turn upwards of a mil in each transaction?"

"I know the banks have machines that can count a stack of bills as quickly as you can riffle through it."

"Sometimes they use those," he said, "but mostly it's weight. You know how much money weighs, so you just load it on the scale."

"Is that what they did at the family enterprise in Togo?"

He smiled at the thought. "No, that was different," he said. "They counted every bill. But nobody was in

a hurry."

The phone rang. We looked at each other. I picked it up, and it was Yuri on the car phone, saying he was on his way. When I hung up Kenan said, "Every time the phone rings—"

"I know. I think it's him. When you were out before we had a wrong number, some guy who called twice because he kept forgetting to dial two-one-two for Manhattan."

"Pain in the ass," he said. "When I was a kid we had a number that was one digit off from a pizzeria on Prospect and Flatbush. You can imagine the wrong numbers we got."

"Must have been a nuisance."

"For my parents. Me and Petey, we loved it. We'd take the fucking order. 'Half cheese and half pepperoni? No anchovies? Yessir, we'll have it ready for you.' And fuck 'em, let 'em go hungry. We were terrible."

"Poor bastard in the pizza place."

"Yeah, I know. I don't get many wrong numbers these days. You know when I got a couple? The day Francey was kidnapped. That morning, like God was sending me a message, trying to give me some kind of a warning. God, when I think what she must have gone through.

And what that kid's going through now."

I said, "I know his name, Kenan."

"Whose name?"

"The one on the phone. Not the rough half of their rough-and-smooth act. The other one, the one who does most of the talking."

"You told me. Ray."

"Ray Callander. I know his old address in Queens. I know the license plate on his Honda."

"I thought he had a truck."

"He's got a two-door Civic, too. We're going to get him, Kenan.

Maybe not tonight, but we're going to get him."

"That's good," he said slowly. "But I have to tell you something.

You know, I got in on this because of what happened to my wife. That's why I hired you, that's why I'm here to begin with. But right now none of that means shit. Right now the only thing matters to me is this kid, Lucia, Luschka, Ludmilla, she's got all these different names and I don't know what to call her and I never met her in my life. But all I care about now is getting her back."

Thank you, I thought.

Because, as it says on the T-shirts, when you're up to your ass in alligators you can forget that your primary purpose is to drain the swamp. It didn't matter right now where the two of them were holed up in Sunset Park, didn't matter if I found out tonight or tomorrow or never.

In the morning I could hand everything I had to John Kelly and let him take it from there. It didn't matter who brought Callander in, and it didn't matter if he did fifteen years or twenty-five years or life, or if he died in some side street at Kenan Khoury's hands or at mine. Or if he got away scot-free, with or without the money. That might matter tomorrow. It might not. But it didn't matter tonight.

It was very clear suddenly, as it really should have been all along.

The only thing of importance was getting the girl back. Nothing else mattered at all.

YURI and Dani came back a few minutes before eight. Yuri had a flight bag in either hand, both bearing the logo of an airline that had vanished in mergers. Dani was carrying a shopping bag.

"Hey, we're in business," Kenan said, and his brother beat his hands together in applause. I didn't start clapping, but I felt the same excitement. You'd have thought the money was for us.

Yuri said, "Kenan, come here a minute. Look at this."

He opened one of the flight bags and spilled out its contents, banded stacks of hundreds, each wrapper bearing the imprint of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

"Beautiful," he said. "What'd you do, Yuri, make an unauthorized withdrawal? How'd you find a bank to rob this hour of the night?"

Yuri handed him a stack of bills. Kenan slipped them from their wrapper, looked at the top one, and said, "I don't have to look, do I? You wouldn't ask me if everything was kosher. This is schlock, right?"

He looked closely, thumbed the bill aside and looked at the next one. "Schlock," he confirmed. "But very nice. All the same serial number? No, this one's different."

"Three different numbers," Yuri said.

"Wouldn't pass banks," Kenan said. "They got scanners, pick up something electronically. Aside from that, they look good to me." He crumpled a bill, smoothed it out, held it to the light and squinted at it.

"Paper's good. Ink looks right. Nice used bills, must have soaked

'em with coffee grounds and then ran

'em through the Maytag. No bleach, hold the fabric softener.

Matt?"

I took a real bill— or what I assumed was a real bill— from my own wallet and held it next to the one Kenan handed me. It seemed to me that Franklin looked a little less serene on the counterfeit specimen, a little more rakish. But I would never have given the bill a second glance in the ordinary course of things.

"Very nice," Kenan said. "What's the discount?"

"Sixty percent in quantity. You pay forty cents on the dollar."

"High."

"Good stuff don't come cheap," Yuri said.

"That's true. It's a cleaner business than dope, too. Because who gets hurt, you stop and think about it?"

"Debases the currency," Peter said.

"Does it really? It's such a drop in the bucket. One savings-and-loan goes belly-up and it debases the currency more than twenty years' worth of counterfeiting."

Yuri said, "This is on loan. No charge if we recover it and I bring it back. Otherwise I owe for it. Forty cents on the dollar."

"That's very decent."

"He's doing me a favor. What I want to know, will they spot it?

And if they do—"

"They won't," I said. "They'll be looking quickly in bad light, and I don't think they'll be thinking of counterfeit. The bank wrappers are a nice touch. He print them, too?"

"Yes."

"We'll repackage them slightly," I said. "We'll use the Chase wrappers, but we'll take six bills out of each stack and replace them with real ones, three on the top and three on the bottom. How much have you got here, Yuri?"

"Two hundred fifty thousand in the schlock. And Dani's got sixty thousand, a little over. From four different people."

I did the arithmetic. "That should put us right around eight hundred thousand. That's close enough. I think we're in business."

"Thank God," Yuri said.

Peter eased the wrapper off a bundle of counterfeit bills, fanned them, stood looking at them and shaking his head. Kenan pulled up a chair and began removing six bills from each packet.

The phone rang.

Chapter 20

"This is tiresome," he said.

"For me too."

"Maybe it's more trouble than it's worth. You know, there are plenty of dope dealers around, and most of them have wives or daughters. Maybe we should just cut and run, maybe our next client will prove more cooperative."

It was our third conversation since Yuri had come back with the two flight bags full of counterfeit money.

He had called at half-hour intervals, first to suggest his own agenda for making the transfer, then to find something wrong with every suggestion I made.

"Especially if he hears how we cut before we run," he said. "I'll carve young Lucia into bite-size pieces, my friend. And go looking for other game tomorrow."

"I want to cooperate," I said.

"Your actions don't show it."

"We have to meet face-to-face," I said. "You have to have an opportunity to inspect the money and we have to be able to assure ourselves that the girl is all right."

"And then you people come down on us. You can have the whole area staked out, God knows how many armed men you can put together.

Our resources are limited."

"But you can still create a standoff," I said. "You'll have the girl covered."

"A knife at her throat," he said.

"If you want."

"The edge of the blade right up against her skin."

"Then we give you the money," I went on. "One of you holds on to the girl while the other makes sure the money's all there. Then one of you takes the money to your vehicle while the other still holds the girl.

Meanwhile your third man is posted where we can't see him, covering us with a rifle."

"Someone could get behind him."

"How?" I demanded. "You'll be in place first. You'll see us arrive, all of us at the same time. You'll have the drop on us, that's to offset the numerical edge we've got. Your man with the rifle will be able to cover your withdrawal, and you'd be safe anyway because we'd have the girl back by this point and the money would be in the car with your partner, and out of our reach."

"I don't like the face-to-face business," he said.

Nor, I thought, could he rely too strongly on the third man, the one covering his retreat with the rifle.

Because I was virtually certain there were only two of them, so there wouldn't be any third man. But if I let him think we figured their strength at three, maybe it would make him feel a little more secure. The value of the third man lay not in the covering fire he could lay down but in our belief that he was there.

"Say we set up fifty yards apart. You bring the money halfway and then return to your lines. Then we bring the girl halfway and one of us stays there, knife at her throat, as you said—"

As you said, I thought.

"— while the other withdraws with the money. Then I release the girl and she runs to you while I back off."

"No good. You have the money and the girl at the same time and we're on the other side of the field."

Around and around and around. The operator's recorded voice cut in, asking for more money, and he dropped a quarter in without missing a beat. He wasn't worried about having calls traced, not at this stage. His calls were lasting longer and longer.

If I'd been able to reach the Kongs early on, we could pick him up while he was still on the phone.

I said, "All right, try it like this. We set up fifty yards apart, just as you said. You'll be in place first, you'll see us arrive. You'll show the girl so we can see you've brought her. Then I'll approach your position carrying the money."

"By yourself?"

"Yes. Unarmed."

"You could have a gun concealed."

"I'll have a suitcase full of dough in each hand. A hidden gun's not going to do me much good."

"Keep talking."

"You check the money. When you're satisfied, you let the girl go.

She joins her father and the rest of our people. Your man takes off with the money. You and I wait. Then you take off and I go home."

"You could grab me."

"I'm unarmed and you've got a knife, a gun, too, if you want. And your sharpshooter is behind a tree covering everybody with the rifle. It's all going your way. I don't see how you can have a problem with it."

"You'll see my face."

"Wear a mask."

"Cuts the visibility. And you'd still be able to describe me even if you didn't get that good a look at my face."

I thought, fuck it, let's throw the dice.

I said, "I already know what you look like, Ray."

I heard his intake of breath, then a stretch of silence, and for a minute there I was afraid I'd lost him.

Then he said, "What do you know?"

"I know your name. I know what you look like. I know about some of the women you killed. And one you almost killed."

"The little whore," he said. "She heard my first name."

"I know your last name, too."

"Prove it."

"Why should I? Look it up for yourself, it's right there on the calendar."

"Who are you?"

"Can't you figure that out for yourself?"

"You sound like a cop."

"If I'm a cop, why isn't there a pack of blue-and-whites lined up in front of your house?"

"Because you don't know where it is."

"Try Middle Village. Penelope Avenue."

I could almost feel him relax. "I'm impressed," he said.

"What kind of cop plays it this way, Ray?"

"You're in Landau's pocket."

"Close. We're in bed together, we're partners. I'm married to his cousin."

"No wonder we couldn't—"

"Couldn't what?"

"Nothing. I should bail out now, cut the bitch's throat and get the hell out."

"Then you're dead," I said. "An all-points goes out nationwide in a matter of hours, with you on the hook for Gotteskind and Alvarez, too.

Do the deal and I guarantee I'll sit on it for a week, longer if I can.

Maybe forever."

"Why?"

"Because I won't want it to come out, will I? You can go set up shop on the other side of the country.

Plenty of dope dealers in L.A. Plenty of fine-looking women out there, too. They love to go for a ride in a pretty new truck."

He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "Go over it again.

The whole scenario, from the time we arrive."

I went through it. He interrupted with a question from time to time and I answered them all. Finally he said, "I wish I could trust you."

"Jesus Christ," I said. "I'm the one who has to do the trusting. I'll be walking up to you unarmed with a bag of money in each hand. If you decide you don't trust me you can always kill me."

"Yes, I could," he said.

"But it's better for you if you don't. It's better for both of us if the whole transaction goes off just the way it's scheduled to. We both come out winners."

"You're out a million dollars."

"Maybe that fits in with my plans, too."

"Oh?"

"You figure it out," I said, leaving him to puzzle out my own interfamilial secret agenda, some strategy I must have for getting the upper hand on my partner.

"Interesting," he said. "Where do you want to do the switch?"

I was ready for the question. I had proposed enough other sites in earlier phone calls, and I'd been saving this one. "Green-Wood Cemetery," I said.

"I think I know where that is."

"You ought to. That's where you dumped Leila Alvarez. It's a distance from Middle Village, but you found your way there once before. It's nine-twenty. There are two entrances on the Fifth Avenue side,

one around Twenty-fifth Street, the other ten blocks south of there.

Take the Twenty-fifth Street entrance and head south about twenty yards inside the fence. We'll enter at Thirty-fifth and approach you from the south."

I laid it all out for him, like a war-games tactician re-creating the Battle of Gettysburg. "Ten-thirty," I said. "That gives you over an hour to get there. No traffic at this hour, so that shouldn't be a problem. Or do you need more time?"

He didn't need anything like an hour. He was in Sunset Park, a five-minute drive from the cemetery. But he didn't need to know that I knew that.

"That should be time enough."

"And you'll have plenty of time to set up. We'll enter ten blocks south of you at ten-forty. That gives you ten minutes lead time, plus the ten minutes it'll take us to walk up to meet you."

"And they'll stay fifty yards back," he said.

"Right."

"And you'll come the rest of the way alone. With the money."

"Right."

"I liked it better with Khoury," he said. "Where I said 'Frog' and he jumped."

"I can see where you would. Twice as much money this time, though."

"That's true," he said. "Leila Alvarez. Haven't thought of her in a while." His voice took on an almost

dreamy quality. "She was really nice. Choice."

I didn't say anything.

"Lord, she was frightened," he said. "Poor little bitch. She was really terrified."

WHEN I finally got off the phone I had to sit down. Kenan asked me if I was all right. I said I was.

"You don't look so hot," he said. "You look like you need a drink, but I guess that's the one thing you don't need."

"You're right."

"Yuri just made some coffee. I'll get you a cup."

When he brought it I said, "I'm okay. It takes it out of you, talking to that son of a bitch."

"I know."

"I tipped my hand some, let him know some of what I know. It started to look as though that was the only way to get him off the dime.

He wasn't going to move unless he could control the situation completely. I decided to show him he was in a little weaker position than he realized."

Yuri said. "You know who he is?"

"I know his name. I know what he looks like and the license number of the car he's driving." I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling his presence on the other end of the telephone line, sensing the workings of his mind. "I know who he is," I said.

I explained what I'd worked out with Callander, started to sketch out a diagram of the terrain, then realized that what we needed was a map. Yuri said there was a street map of Brooklyn somewhere in the apartment but didn't know where. Kenan said Francine had kept one in the glove box of the Toyota, and Peter went downstairs for it.

We had cleared off the table. All of the money, repackaged to hide the counterfeit bills, was packed into two suitcases. I spread the map on the table and traced a route to the cemetery, indicating the two entrances on the graveyard's western border. I explained how it would work, where we'd set up, how the exchange would be made.

"Puts you right out in front," Kenan observed.

"I'll be all right."

"If he tries anything—"

"I don't think he will."

You can always kill me, I'd told him. Yes I could, he'd said.

"I am the one who should carry the bags," Yuri said.

"They're not that heavy," I said. "I can manage them."

"You make a joke, but I am serious. It is my daughter. I should be out in front."

I shook my head. If he ever got that close to Callander, I couldn't trust him not to lose it and go for him.

But I had a better reason to offer him. "I want Lucia to run to safety. If you're there she'll want to stay with you. I need you here," I said, pointing to the map, "so you can call to her."

"You'll tuck a gun in your belt," Kenan said.

"I probably will, but I don't know what good it'll do. If he tries anything I won't have time to get it out. If he doesn't I won't have any use for it. What I wish I had is a Kevlar vest."

"That's the bulletproof mesh? I heard it won't stop a knife."

"Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It won't always stop a bullet, either, but it gives you a sporting chance."

"You know where you can get one?"

"Not at this hour. Forget it, it's not important."

"No? It sounds pretty important to me."

"I don't even know that they've got guns."

"Are you kidding? I didn't think there was anybody in this town doesn't have a gun. What about the third man, the sharpshooter, guy hiding behind a tombstone covering everybody? What do you figure he's doing the job with, a fucking Wham-O slingshot?"

"That's if there is a third man. I was the one who mentioned him, and Callander was bright enough to follow my lead."

"You think they're doing this with two guys?"

"They only had two when they kidnapped the girl on Park Avenue.

I can't see going out and recruiting an extra person for an operation like this. This is lust murder that developed a commercial hook to it, not an ordinary professional criminal operation where you can go out and put a string of men together. There are some witnesses who would seem to indicate the existence of a third man in the two abductions that were witnessed, but they may just have assumed there was a driver, because that's the way you would expect people to do it. But if you only had two people to start with, one of them would double as the driver.

And that's what I think happened."

"So we can forget the third man."

"No," I said. "That's the aggravating thing about it. We have to assume he's there."

I went into the kitchen for more coffee. When I came back Yuri asked how many men I wanted. He said, "We have you, me, Kenan, Peter, Dani, and Pavel. Pavel is downstairs, you met him coming into the building. I got three more men ready to come, all I got to do is tell them."

"I can think of a dozen," Kenan said. "People I talked to, whether they had money to kick in or not, everybody said the same thing. 'You can use a hand, tell me, be right there.' " He leaned over the map.

"We can let them get in position, then bring in a dozen more men in three or four cars. Seal up both exits, plus the rest of them, here and here. You're shaking your head. Why not?"

"I want to let them get away with the money."

"You don't even want to try for it? After we've got the girl back?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it's crazy to get into a firefight in a graveyard at night, or shoot at each other from cars careening around Park Slope. An operation like that's no good unless you can control it, and there are too many ways this one can slip out of control. Look, I sold this by setting it up as a standoff, and I did a good job designing it that way. It is a standoff. We get the girl, they get the money, and everybody goes home alive. A few minutes ago that was all we wanted out of the deal. Is that still how we feel?"

Yuri said it was. Kenan said, "Yeah, sure, it's all I ever wanted. I just hate to see them get away with anything."

"They won't. Callander thinks he's got a week to pack his valise and get out of town. He hasn't got a week. It won't take me that long to find him. Meanwhile, how many men do we need? I think we're fine with the people we've already got. Say three cars. Dani and Yuri in one, Peter and… is it Pavel in the lobby downstairs? Peter and Pavel in the Toyota, and I'll ride with Kenan in the Buick. That's all we need. Six men."

The phone rang in Lucia's room. I answered it and spoke to TJ, who was back at the laundromat after having no luck looking in driveways and at curbs for the Honda.

I went back to the living room. "Make that seven," I said.

Chapter 21

In the car Kenan said, "I figure the Shore Parkway and the Gowanus. That sound okay to you?" I told him he knew more about it than I did. He said, "This kid we're picking up. How's he fit into the picture?"

"He's a kid from the ghetto who hangs out in Times Square. God knows where he lives. He goes by his initials, assuming they're his initials and he didn't find them in a bowl of alphabet soup. He's been a big help, believe it or not. He put me on to the computer wizards, and he saw Callander tonight and got the license number."

"You think he's gonna do anything for us at the cemetery?"

"I hope he doesn't try," I said. "We're picking him up because I don't want him wandering around Sunset Park being resourceful when Callander and his friends are on their way home. I'd like to keep him out of harm's way."

"You say he's a kid?"

I nodded. "Fifteen, sixteen."

"What's he want to be when he grows up? A detective like you?"

"That's what he wants to be now. He doesn't want to wait until he grows up. I can't say I blame him. So many of them don't."

"Don't what?"

"Grow up. A black teenager living on the streets? They've got the average life expectancy of a fruit fly.

TJ's a good kid. I hope he makes it."

"And you really don't know his last name."

"No."

"You know what's funny? Between AA and the streets, you know a hell of a lot of people without last names."

A little later he said, "You get any sense of Dani? He a relative of Yuri's or what?"

"No idea. Why?"

"I was just thinking, the two of them riding around in that Lincoln with a million dollars in the backseat.

We know Dani's got a gun. Say he pops Yuri and takes off. We wouldn't even know who to look for, just a Russian guy with a jacket that don't fit him too good. He's another guy with no last name. Must be a friend of yours, huh?"

"I think Yuri trusts him."

"He's probably family. Who else you gonna trust like that?"

"Anyway, it's not a million."

"Eight hundred thousand. You gonna make me a liar for a lousy two hundred thousand?"

"And almost a third of it's counterfeit."

"You're right, it's hardly worth stealing. We're lucky if these two jokers we're meeting are willing to haul it away. If not it goes in the basement, save it for the next Boy Scout paper drive. You want to do me a favor? When you're up there with a suitcase in each hand, you want to ask our friends a question?"

"What?"

"Ask 'em how the hell they picked me, will you? Because it's still driving me nuts."

"Oh," I said. "I think I know."

"Seriously?"

"Uh-huh. My first thought was that he was in the dope business on some level or other."

"Makes sense, but—"

"But he's not, I'm almost certain, because I had somebody run a check and he hasn't got a criminal record."

"Neither have I."

"You're an exception."

"That's true. How about Yuri?"

"Several arrests in the Soviet Union, no serious jail time. One bust here for receiving stolen goods but the charges were dropped."

"But nothing involving narcotics."

"No."

"All right, Callander's got a clean slate. So he's not in the dope business, so—"

"The DEA was trying to make a case against you a while ago."

"Yeah, but it didn't get anywheres."

"I was talking to Yuri before. He said he backed out of a deal last year because he sensed that some agency was trying to trap him with a sting. He had the sense it was federal."

He turned to look at me, then forced his eyes front and swung out to pass a car. "Jesus Christ," he said.

"This a new national law-enforcement policy? They can't make a case against us so they kill our wives and daughters?"

"I think Callander worked for the DEA," I said. "Probably not for very long, and almost certainly not as an accredited agent. Maybe they used him once or twice as a confidential informant, maybe he was strictly office help. He wouldn't have gone very far and he wouldn't have lasted very long."

"Why not?"

"Because he's crazy. He probably got into it because of a low-grade obsession about dope dealers.

That's an asset in that line of work but not when it's out of proportion. Look, I'm just going on a hunch.

There was something he said on the phone when I told him I was Yuri's partner. It was as if he was starting to say that explained why they hadn't been able to rope Yuri in."

"Jesus."

"It's something I can find out tomorrow or the next day, if I can get a hook into the DEA and see if his name rings a bell with them. Or take an unauthorized dip into their files, if my computer geniuses can swing it."

Kenan looked thoughtful. "He didn't sound like a cop."

"No, he didn't."

"But the guy you described wouldn't really be a cop, would he?"

"More like a buff. But a buff with the Feds, and fixated on the subject of narcotics."

"He knew the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine," Kenan said,

"but I don't know what that proves.

Your friend TJ probably knows the wholesale price of a key."

"I wouldn't be surprised."

"Lucia's classmates at this girls' school, they probably know it, too.

Kind of world we live in."

"You should have been a doctor."

"Like my old man wanted. No, I don't think so. But maybe I should have been a counterfeiter. You meet a nicer class of people. At least I wouldn't have the fucking DEA on my back."

"Counterfeiting? You'd have the Secret Service."

"Jesus," he said. "If it's not one goddamn thing it's another."

"THAT the laundromat? There on the right?" I said it was, and Kenan pulled up in front but kept the motor running. He said, "How are we on time?" then glanced at his watch and the dashboard clock and answered his own question. "We're fine. Running a little early."

I was watching the laundromat, but TJ emerged instead from a doorway on the other side of the avenue and crossed over, getting in the back. I introduced them, and each claimed to be pleased to meet the other. TJ shrank back against the seat and Kenan put the car in gear.

He said, "They get there at ten-thirty, right? And we're due ten minutes later, and then we work our way up to where they're waiting. Is that about right?"

I said it was.

"So we'll be face-to-face across no-man's-land about ten minutes of eleven, is that about how you figure

it?"

"Something like that."

"And how long to make the trade and get out? Half an hour?"

"Probably a lot less than that, if nothing goes wrong. If the shit hits the fan, well, it's another story."

"Yeah, so let's hope it doesn't. I was just wondering about getting back out again, but I guess they don't lock the gates until midnight."

"Lock the gates?"

"Yeah, I woulda guessed it'd be earlier, but I guess not or you would have picked someplace else."

"Jesus," I said.

"What's the matter?"

"I never even thought of that," I said. "Why didn't you say something earlier?"

"Then what would you do, call him back?"

"No, I guess not. It never occurred to me that they might lock the gates. Don't cemeteries stay open all night? Why would you have to lock them up?"

"To keep people out."

"Because everybody's dying to get in? Jesus, I must have heard that one in the fourth grade. 'Why do they have a fence around the cemetery?' "

"I guess they get vandals," Kenan said. "Kids who tip over the gravestones, take a shit in the floral urns."

"You think the kids can't climb fences?"

"Hey, man," he said. "I'm not setting the policy here. It's up to me, all the graveyards in town'll be open admission. How's that?"

"I just hope I didn't screw up. If they get there and the gates are locked—"

"Yeah? What are they gonna do, sell her to white slave traders in Argentina? They'll climb the fence, same as we'll do. Matter of fact, they probably don't lock it before midnight. People might want to go after work, pay a late call on the dear departed."

"At eleven o'clock?"

He shrugged. "People work late. They got office jobs in Manhattan, stop for a couple of drinks after work, they have dinner, then they go to wait half an hour for the subway because they're like some people I know, they're too cheap to take a cab—"

"Jesus," I said.

"— and it's late by the time they get back to Brooklyn and they say, 'Hey, I think I'll go over to Green-Wood, see if I can find where Uncle Vic is planted, I never liked him, I think I'll go piss on his grave.'

"

"You nervous, Kenan?"

"Yeah, I'm nervous. What do you fucking think? You're the one's gotta walk up to a couple of stone killers armed with nothing but money.

You must be starting to sweat."

"Maybe a little bit. Slow down, that's the entrance coming up. I think it's open."

"Yeah, it looks like it. You know, even if they're supposed to lock up, they probably don't get around to it."

"Maybe not. Let's drive once around the entire cemetery, all right?

And then we'll find a place to park near our entrance."

We circled the cemetery in silence. There was no traffic to speak of, and there was a stillness to the night, as if the deep silence within the cemetery fence could reach out and suppress all sound in the vicinity.

When we were just about back where we'd started TJ said, "We goin' in a cemetery?"

Kenan turned aside to hide a grin. I said, "You can stay in the car if you'd rather."

"What for?"

"If you'd be more comfortable."

"Man," he said, "I ain't scared of no dead people. That what you think? That I scared?"

"My mistake."

"Your mistake is right, Dwight. Dead folks don't bother me."

DEAD people didn't bother me much, either. It was some of the live ones that worried me.

We met at the Thirty-fifth Street gate and slipped inside right away, not wanting to draw attention on the street. For now, Yuri and Pavel were carrying the money. We had two flashlights among the seven of us.

Kenan took one of them. I had the other, and I led the way.

I didn't use the light much, just flicked it quickly on and off when I needed to see where I was going.

This wasn't necessary most of the time. There was a waxing moon overhead, and a certain amount of light from the streetlamps on the avenue. The tombstones were mostly of white marble and they showed up well once your eyes were accustomed to the dimness. I threaded my way among them and wondered whose bones I was walking over. One of the papers had run a story within the past year or so on where the bodies were buried, an inventory of gravesites of the rich and famous throughout the five boroughs. I hadn't paid too much attention to it, but I seemed to recall that a fair number of prominent New Yorkers were interred at Green-Wood.

Some enthusiasts, I'd read, make a hobby of visiting graves. Some take photographs, others make rubbings of tombstone inscriptions. I couldn't imagine what they got out of it, but it doesn't sound that much nuttier than some of the things I do. Their pursuit only brought them out in the daytime. They weren't stumbling around in the dark, trying to keep from tripping over a chunk of granite.

I soldiered on. I stayed close enough to the fence to see the street signs, and I slowed down when I got to Twenty-seventh Street. The others drew closer, and I gestured for them to fan out a ways without advancing any farther north. Then I turned toward where Raymond Callander was supposed to be and pointed my flashlight out in front of me, triggering the trio of flashes we'd agreed on.

For a long moment the only answer was darkness and silence.

Then three flashes of light blinked back at me, coming from a little right of dead ahead. They were, I calculated, something like a hundred yards from us, maybe more. It didn't seem that far when someone was running with a football under his arm.

Now, though, it looked much too distant.

"Stay where you are," I called out. "We're going to approach a little closer."

"Not too close!"

"About fifty yards," I said. "The way we arranged."

Flanked by Kenan and one of Yuri's men, with the rest of our party not far behind, I covered about half the distance separating us. "That's far enough," Callander called out at one point, but it wasn't far enough and I ignored him and kept on walking. We had to be close enough so that someone could cover the transfer. We had one rifle, and Peter had been entrusted with it, having proved a good marksman during a six-month hitch a while back in the National Guard. Of course that was before a lengthy apprenticeship as a drunk and a dope addict, but he still figured to be the best shot in the group. He had a decent rifle with a scope sight, but the scope wasn't infrared so he'd be aiming by moonlight. I wanted to keep the distance down so that he could make his shots count if he had to.

Although I wondered what difference it made to me. The only reason he'd start shooting would be if the players on the other side tried a cross, and if they did they'd take me out in the first minute of the opening round. If Peter started firing back at them, I wouldn't be around to know where the bullets went.

Cheering thoughts.

When we'd cut the distance in half I signaled to Peter, and he moved off to the side and selected a shooting stand for himself, propping the rifle barrel on a low marble grave marker. I looked for Ray and his partner and could only see shapes. They had drawn back into the darkness.

I said, "Come out where we can see you. And show the girl."

They moved into view. Two forms, and then as the light got better you could see that one form was made up of two persons, that one of the men had the girl in front of him. I heard Yuri's intake of breath and just hoped he'd keep his cool.

"I've got a knife to her throat," Callander called. "If my hand slips—"

"It better not."

"Then you'd better bring the money. And not try anything cute."

I turned, hefted the suitcases, checked our troops. I didn't see TJ

and asked Kenan what had happened to him. He said he thought he might have gone back to the car. " 'Feet, do yo' stuff,' " he said. "I don't think he's crazy about graveyards at night."

"Neither am I."

"Listen," he said, "whyntcha tell them we're changing the rules, the money's too heavy for one person to carry, and I'll walk up there with you."

"No."

"Gotta be the hero, huh?"

I can't say I felt terribly heroic. The weight of the suitcases kept me from being particularly jaunty. It looked as though one of the men had a gun, not the one holding the girl, and it looked as though the gun was pointed at me, but I didn't feel in danger of being shot, not unless someone on our side panicked and got off a round and everybody just let fly. If they were going to kill me, they'd at least wait until I'd brought them the money. They might be crazy but they weren't stupid.

"Don't try a thing," Ray said. "I don't know if you can see it, but the knife's right at her throat."

"I can see."

"That's close enough. Put the bags down."

It was Ray holding the girl, holding the knife. I knew his voice but I would have made him from TJ's description, which was right on the money. His jacket was zipped so I couldn't see the lame sport shirt, but I was willing to take TJ's word for it.

The other man was taller, with unkempt dark hair and eyes that looked in the half-light like a pair of holes burned in a bedsheet. He wore no jacket, just a flannel shirt and jeans. I couldn't see his eyes but I could feel the anger in his stare and I wondered what the hell he thought I'd done to provoke it. I was bringing him a million dollars and he was itching to kill me.

"Open the bags."

"First let the girl go."

"No, first show the money."

The pistol Kenan had insisted on giving me was in the small of my back, its barrel wedged under my belt, its bulk concealed by my sport jacket. There is no terribly adroit way to draw it quickly from that position, but I had my hands free now and could go for it.

Instead I knelt and unfastened the snaps on one of the cases, lifting the lid to show the money. I straightened up. The man with the gun started forward and I held up a hand.

"Now let her go," I said. "Then you can examine it. Don't try to change the ground rules now, Ray."

"Ah, sweet Lucy," he said. "I hate to see you go, child."

He let go of her. I'd barely had a chance to look at her, half-shadowed by his body. Even in the darkness she looked pale and drawn. Her hands were clutched together at her waist, her arms tight against her sides, her shoulders hunched. She looked as though she was trying to present the smallest possible target to the world.

I said, "Come here, Lucia." She didn't move. I said, "Your father's over there, darling. Go to your father.

Go ahead."

She took a step, then stopped. She looked very unsteady on her feet, and she was gripping one hand tightly with the other.

"Go on," Callander told her. "Run!"

She looked at him, then at me. It was hard to tell what she was seeing because her gaze was unfocused, vacant. I wanted to pick her up, toss her over my shoulder, run back to where her father was waiting.

Or tug my jacket aside with one hand, draw the gun with the other, and drop both of the bastards where they stood. But the dark man's gun was pointing at me, and Callander also had a gun in his hand now, a companion piece for the long knife he was still holding.

I called out to Yuri, told him to call her. "Luschka!" he cried.

"Luschka, it's Papa. Come to Papa!"

She recognized the voice. Her brow contracted in concentration, as if she was struggling to make sense out of the syllables.

I said, "In Russian, Yuri!"

He replied with something that I certainly couldn't understand, but it evidently got through to Lucia. Her hands unclasped and she took a step, then another.

I said, "What's the matter with her hand?"

"Nothing."

As she drew alongside me I reached for her hand. She snatched it away from me.

There were two fingers missing.

I stared at Callander. He looked almost apologetic. "Before we set the terms," he said, by way of explanation.

There was another burst of Russian from Yuri, and now she was moving faster, but hardly running. She couldn't seem to manage more than an awkward shuffle, and I wasn't sure how long she could sustain even that much.

But she stayed on her feet and kept going, and I stayed on mine and looked into the barrels of two handguns. The dark man stared silently at me, still a study in rage, while Callander watched the girl. He kept the gun pointed at me but he couldn't keep his eyes from turning to her, and I could feel how much he wanted to swing the gun, too, in her direction.

"I liked her," he said. "She was nice."

* * *

THE rest of it was easy. I opened the second suitcase and stepped back a few paces. Ray came forward to inspect the contents of both cases while his partner kept me covered. The bills got only a cursory examination. He flipped through half a dozen packs, but he didn't count any of them, or make a rough count of the number of packets. Nor did he spot the counterfeits, but I don't think anybody on earth would have.

He closed the cases and fastened their clasps, then drew his gun again and stood aside while the dark-haired man came to pick up both of them, grunting with the effort. It was the first sound he had made in my presence.

"Take one at a time," Callander said.

"They ain't heavy."

"Take one at a time."

"Don't tell me what to do, Ray," he said, but he put down one of the suitcases and went off with the other.

He wasn't gone long, and neither Ray nor I spoke in his absence.

When he got back he hefted the second case and pronounced it lighter than its fellow, as if this meant we'd cheated him on the count.

"Then it should be easier to carry," Callander said patiently. "Go ahead now."

"We oughta plug this cocksucker, Ray."

"Another time."

"Fucking dope-dealing cop. Oughta blow his head off."

When he had gone Callander said, "You promised us a week. Will you keep your word on that?"

"Longer if I can."

"I'm sorry about the finger."

"Fingers."

"As you prefer. He's difficult to control."

I thought, But you were the one who used the wire on Pam.

"I appreciate the week's lead time," he went on. "I think it's time to try a change of climate. I don't think Albert will want to come with me."

"You'll leave him here in New York?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"How did you find him?"

He smiled faintly at the question. "Oh," he said, "we found each other. People with specialized tastes often find each other like that."

It was an odd moment. I had the sense that I was talking to the person behind the mask, that our circumstances had provided a rare window of opportunity. I said, "May I ask you something?"

"Go ahead."

"Why the women?"

"Oh, my. Take a psychiatrist to answer that, wouldn't it?

Something buried in my childhood, I suppose.

Isn't that what it always turns out to be? Weaned too early or too late?"

"That's not what I meant."

"Oh?"

"I don't care how you got that way. I just want to know why you do it."

"You think I have a choice?"

"I don't know. Do you?"

"Hmmm. That's not so easy to answer. Excitement, power, just sheer intensity— words fail me. Do you know what I mean?"

"No."

"Have you ever been on a roller coaster? Now I hate roller coasters, I haven't been on one in years, I get sick to my stomach. But if I didn't hate roller coasters, if I loved them, then that's what it would be like." He shrugged. "I told you. Words fail me."

"You don't sound like a monster."

"Why should I?"

"What you do is monstrous. But you sound like a human being.

How can you—"

"Yes?"

"How can you do it?"

"Oh," he said. "They're not real."

"What?"

"They're not real," he said. "The women. They aren't real. They're toys, that's all. When you have a hamburger are you eating a cow? Of course not. You're eating a hamburger." A slight smile. "Walking down the street she's a woman. But once she gets in the truck that's over. She's just body parts."

A chill ran the length of my spine. When that happened my late aunt Peg used to say a goose must have just walked over my grave. A funny expression, that. I wonder where it came from.

"But do I have a choice? I think I do. It's not as though I'm driven to act out every time the moon is full. I always have a choice, and I can choose not to do anything, and I do choose not to, and then one day I choose the other way.

"So what kind of choice is it, really? I can postpone it, but then the time comes when I don't want to postpone it any longer. And postponing just makes it sweeter, anyway. Maybe that's why I do it. I read that maturity consists of the ability to defer gratification, but I don't know if this is what they had in mind."

He looked to be on the point of further revelation, and then something shifted within him and the window of opportunity slammed shut. Whatever real self I'd been talking to ducked back behind its protective body armor. "Why aren't you afraid?" he asked, petulant. "I've got a gun on you and you act like it's a water pistol."

"There's a high-powered rifle trained on you. You wouldn't get a step."

"No, but what good would it do you? You'd think you would be scared. Are you a brave man?"

"No."

"Well, I'm not going to shoot. And let Albert keep everything? No, I don't think so. But I think it's time for me to melt into the shadows.

Turn around, start walking back toward your friends."

"All right."

"There's no third man with a rifle. Did you think there was?"

"I wasn't sure."

"You knew there wasn't. That's all right. You got the girl and we got the money. It all worked out."

"Yes."

"Don't try to follow me."

"I won't."

"No, I know you won't."

He didn't say anything more, and I thought he had slipped away. I kept walking, and when I'd gone a dozen steps he called after me.

"I'm sorry about the fingers," he said. "It was an accident."

Chapter 22

"You quiet," TJ said.

I was driving Kenan's Buick. As soon as Lucia Landau had reached her father's side, he had scooped her up in his arms and slung her over his shoulder and hurried back to his car, with Dani and Pavel taking off after him. "I told him not to wait around," Kenan had said.

"Kid needed a doctor. He's got somebody lives in the neighborhood, guy'll come to the house."

So that had left two cars for the four of us, and when we reached them Kenan tossed me the Buick's keys and said he would ride with his brother. "Come on out to Bay Ridge," he said. "We'll send out for pizza or something. Then I'll run you two home."

We were stopped at a traffic light when TJ told me I was quiet, and I couldn't argue with that. Neither of us had said a word since we got in the car. I still hadn't shaken off the effect of the conversation with Callander. I said something to the effect that our activities had taken a lot out of me.

"You was cool, though," he said. "Standin' up there with those dudes."

"Where were you? We thought you were back at the car."

He shook his head. "I circled around 'em. Thought maybe I could see this third man, one with the rifle."

"There wasn't any third man."

"Sure made him hard to see. What I did, I made a big circle around

'em and slipped out the place they came in. I found their car."

"How did you manage that?"

"Wasn't hard. I seen it before, it was the same Honda again. I backed up against a pole an' kept an eye on it an' the dude without no jacket came hurrying out of the graveyard an' threw a suitcase in the trunk.

Then he turned around an' ran back in again."

"He was going back for the other suitcase."

"I know, an' I thought while he's gettin' the second suitcase, I could just take the first one off his hands.

Trunk was locked, but I could open it same way he did, pressin' the release button in the glove compartment. 'Cause the car doors wasn't locked."

"I'm glad you didn't try."

"Well, I coulda done it, but say he come back and the suitcase ain't there, what he gonna do? Go back and shoot you, most likely. So I figured that wasn't too cool."

"Good thinking."

"Then I thought, if this here's a movie, what I do is slip in the back an' hunker down 'tween the front an'

back seats. They be puttin' the money in the trunk an' sittin' up front, so they ain't even gone look in the back. Figured they go back to their house, or wherever they gone go, an' when we got there I just slip out an' call you up an' tell you where I'm at. But then I thought, TJ, this ain't no movie, an' you too young to die."

"I'm glad you figured that out."

" 'Sides, maybe you don't be at that same number, an' then what do I do? So I wait, and he come back with the second suitcase, throw it in the trunk, an' get in the car. An' the other one, one who made the phone call, he come an' get behind the wheel. And they drive off, an' I slip back into the cemetery an'

catch up with everybody. Cemetery's weird, man. I can see havin' a stone, tells who's underneath it, but some of 'em has these little houses an' all, fancier than they had when they alive. Would you want somethin'

like that?"

"No."

"Me neither. Just a little stone, don't say nothin' on it, but TJ."

"No dates? No full name?"

He shook his head. "Just TJ," he said. "An' maybe my beeper number."

BACK on Colonial Road, Kenan got on the phone and tried to find a pizza place that was still open. He couldn't, but it didn't matter.

Nobody was hungry.

"We ought to be celebrating," he said. "We got the kid back, she's alive. Some celebration we got here."

"It's a draw," Peter said. "You don't celebrate a tie score. Nobody wins and nobody shoots off firecrackers. Game ends in a tie, it feels worse than losing."

"It'd feel a lot worse if the girl was dead," Kenan said.

"That's because this isn't a football game, it's real. But you still can't celebrate, babe. The bad guys got away with the money. Does that makes you want to toss your hat in the air?"

"They're not in the clear," I put in. "It'll take a day or two, that's all.

But they're not going anywhere."

Still, I didn't feel like celebrating any more than anybody else did.

Like any game that ended in a tie, this one left an aftertaste of missed opportunities. TJ thought he should have stowed away in the back of the Honda, or found some way to follow the car back to where it lived. Peter had had a couple of chances to drop Callander with a rifle shot, times when there would have been no danger to me or to the girl. And I could think of a dozen ways we could have made a try for the money. We'd done what we set out to do, but there should have been a way to do more.

"I want to call Yuri," Kenan said. "Kid was a mess, she could barely walk. I think she lost more than her

fingers."

"I'm afraid you're probably right."

"They must have really done a number on her." He jabbed at the buttons on the phone. "I don't like to think about that because then I start thinking of Francey, and—" He broke off to say, "Uh, hello, is Yuri there? I'm sorry. I got the wrong number, I'm really sorry to disturb you."

He broke the connection and sighed. "Hispanic woman, sounded like I woke her out of a sound sleep.

God, I hate when that happens."

I said, "Wrong numbers."

"Yeah, I don't know which is worse, to give or to receive. I feel like such an asshole disturbing somebody like that."

"You had a couple of wrong numbers the day your wife was kidnapped."

"Yeah, right. Like an omen, except that they didn't seem particularly ominous at the time. Just a nuisance."

"Yuri had a couple of wrong numbers this morning, too."

"So?" He frowned, then nodded. "Them, you think? Calling to make sure if somebody was home? I suppose, but so what?"

"Would you use a pay phone?" They looked at me, lost. "Say you were going to make a call that would just play as a wrong number. You weren't going to say anything and nobody would take any notice of the call. Would you bother to drive half a dozen blocks and spend a quarter in a pay phone? Or would you use your own phone?"

"I suppose I'd use my own, but—"

"So would I," I said. I grabbed my notebook, looking for the sheet of paper Jimmy Hong had given me, the list of calls to the Khoury house. He had copied out all the calls starting at midnight, even though I had only needed the ones from the time of the initial ransom demand. I'd had the slip earlier that day, I'd looked for the laundromat phone number with the intention of calling TJ there, but where the hell had I put it?

I found it, unfolded it. "Here we are," I said. "Two calls, both under a minute. One at nine-forty-four in the morning, the other at two-thirty in the afternoon. Calling phone is 243-7436."

"Man," Kenan said, "I just remember there were a couple of wrong numbers. I don't know what time they came in."

"But do you recognize the number?"

"Read it again." He shook his head. "Doesn't sound familiar. Why don't we call it, see what we get?"

He reached for the phone. I covered his hand with mine. "Wait," I said. "Let's not give them any warning."

"Warning of what?"

"That we know where they are."

"Do we? All we got's a number."

TJ said, "Kongs might be home now. Want me to see?"

I shook my head. "I think I can manage this one by myself." I took the phone, dialed Information. When the operator came on I said,

"Policeman requiring directory assistance. My name is Police Officer Alton Simak, my shield number is 2491-1907. What I have is a telephone number and what I need is the name and address that goes with it. Yes, that's right. 243-7436. Yes. Thank you."

I cradled the phone and wrote down the address before it could slip my mind. I said, "The phone's in the name of an A. H. Wallens. He a friend of yours?" Kenan shook his head. "I think the A stands for Albert.

That's what Callander called his partner." I read off the address I'd written down. "Six-ninety-two Fifty-first Street."

"Sunset Park," Kenan said.

"Sunset Park. Two, three blocks from the laundromat."

"That's the tiebreaker," Kenan said. "Let's go."

IT was a frame house, and even in the moonlight you could see that it had been neglected. The clapboard badly needed painting and the shrubbery was overgrown. A half-flight of steps in front led up to a screened-in porch that sagged perceptibly in its middle. A driveway, concrete patched here and there with blacktop, ran along the right-hand side of the house to a two-car detached garage. There was a side door about halfway back, and a third door at the rear of the house.

We had all come in the Buick, which was parked around the corner on Seventh Avenue. We all had handguns. I must have registered surprise when Kenan handed a revolver to TJ, because he looked at me and said, "If he comes he carries. I say he's a stand-up guy, let him come. You know how this works, TJ? Just point and shoot, like a Jap camera."

The overhead garage door was locked, the lock solid. There was a narrow wooden door alongside it, and it too was locked. My credit card wouldn't slip the bolt. I was trying to figure out the quietest way to break a pane of glass when Peter handed me a flashlight, and for a second I thought he wanted me to smack the glass with it, and I couldn't think why. Then it dawned on me, and I pressed the business end of the flashlight up against the window and switched it on. The Honda Civic was right there, and I recognized the plate number. On the other side, harder to see even when I angled the flashlight, was a dark van. The plate was not where we could see it and the color was impossible to determine in that light, but that was really as much as we had to see. We were in the right place.

Lights were on throughout the house. There were signs that the house was a one-family dwelling— a single doorbell at the side door, a single mailbox alongside the door to the porch— and they could be anywhere inside it. We worked our way around the house. In back, I interlaced my fingers and gave Kenan a boost. He caught hold of the windowsill and inched his head above it, hung there for a moment, then dropped to the ground.

"The kitchen," he whispered. "The blond's in there counting money. He's opening each stack and counting the bills, writing numbers on a sheet of paper. Waste of time. It's a done deal, why's he care how much he's got?"

"And the other one?"

"Didn't see him."

We repeated the procedure at other windows, tried the side door as we passed it. It was locked, but a child could have kicked it in. The door in back, leading to the kitchen, hadn't looked much more formidable.

But I didn't want to crash in until I knew where they both were.

In front, Peter risked drawing attention from someone passing by and used the blade of a pocketknife to snick back the bolt of the porch door. The door leading from the porch into the front of the house was equipped with a sturdier lock, but it also had a large window which could be broken for quick access.

He didn't break it, but looked through it and established that Albert wasn't in the living room.

He came back to report this, and I decided that Albert was either upstairs or out having a beer. I was trying to figure out a way for us to take Callander silently and then figure out Phase Two later on, when TJ

got my attention with a fingersnap. I looked, and he was crouched at a basement window.

I went over, stooped, and looked in. He had the flashlight and played it around the interior of a large basement room. There was a large sink in one corner, with a washer and dryer next to it. A workbench stood in the opposite corner, flanked by a couple of power tools. There was a pegboard on the wall

above the workbench, with dozens of tools hanging on it.

In the foreground was a Ping-Pong table, its net sagging. One of the suitcases was on the table, open, empty. Albert Wallens, still wearing the clothes he'd worn to the cemetery, was sitting at the Ping-Pong table on a ladderback chair. He might have been counting the money in the suitcase except that there wasn't any money in the suitcase and it was a curious activity to conduct in the dark. But for TJ's flashlight, there was no light in the basement.

I couldn't see it, but I could tell there was a length of piano wire wrapped around Albert's neck, and it was very likely the same piece of wire that had been used to perform a mastectomy upon Pam Cassidy, and perhaps upon Leila Alvarez as well. In the present instance it had not been as surgically precise, having encountered bone and cartilage instead of the unresisting flesh it had met before. Still, it had done its work. Albert's head had swelled grotesquely, as blood had been able to flow in but not out again. His face was a moon face turned the color of a bruise, and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets. I had seen a garrote victim before so I knew right away what I was looking at, but nothing really prepares you for it. It was as awful a sight as I had ever seen in my life.

But it did lower the odds.

* * *

KENAN had another look through the kitchen window and couldn't see a gun anywhere. I had a feeling Callander had put it away.

He hadn't brandished a gun in any of the abductions, had used it in the cemetery only to back up the knife at Lucia's throat, and had rejected it in favor of the garrote when he dissolved his partnership with Albert.

The logistical problem lay in the time it took to get from any of the doors to where Callander was counting his money. If you went in the back or side door, you had to rush up half a flight of stairs to the kitchen.

If you went in in front, from the porch, you had to go all the way to the rear of the house.

Kenan suggested we go in quietly through the front. There'd be no creaking stairs that way, and the front door was the farthest from where he was sitting; as engrossed as he was in his counting, he might not hear the glass break.

"Tape it," Peter said. "It breaks but it doesn't fall on the floor. Lot less noise."

"Things you learn bein' a junkie," Kenan said.

But we didn't have any tape, and any stores in the neighborhood that would carry it had long since closed. TJ pointed out that there was sure to be suitable tape on the workbench or hanging above it, but we'd have had to break a window to get to it, so that limited its usefulness.

Peter made another trip to the porch and reported that the floor in the living room was carpeted. We looked at each other and shrugged. "What the hell," somebody said.

I boosted TJ up, and he watched through the kitchen window while Peter broke the glass in the front door. We couldn't hear it from where we stood, and apparently Callander couldn't hear it, either. We all went around to the front and in the door, stepping carefully over the broken glass, waiting, listening, then moving slowly and quietly through the still house.

I was in the lead when we got to the kitchen door, with Kenan right at my side. We both had guns in our hands. Raymond Callander was seated so that we were seeing him in profile. He had a stack of bills in one hand, a pencil in the other. Lethal weapons in the hands of a good accountant, I understand, but a lot less intimidating than guns or knives.

I don't know how long I waited. Probably no more than fifteen or twenty seconds, if that, but it seemed longer. I waited until something changed in the set of his shoulders, showing that an awareness of our presence had somehow reached him.

I said, "Police. Don't move."

He didn't move, didn't even turn his eyes toward the sound of my voice. He just sat there as one phase of his life ended and another began.

Then he did turn to look at me, and his expression showed neither fear nor anger, just profound disappointment.

"You said a week," he said. "You promised."

THE money all seemed to be there. We filled one suitcase. The other was in the basement, and nobody much wanted to go get it. "I'd say for TJ to go," Kenan said, "but I know how he got in the cemetery, so I guess it'd spook him too much to go down there with a dead body."

"You just sayin' that so I'll go. Tryin' to psyche me out."

"Yeah," Kenan said. "I figured you'd say something like that."

TJ rolled his eyes, then went for the suitcase. He came back with it and said, "Man, it stinks pretty powerful down there. Dead people always smell that bad? I ever kill somebody, remind me to do it from a distance."

It was curious. We worked around Callander, treating him as if he weren't there, and he made such treatment easier than it might have been by staying put and keeping his mouth shut. He looked smaller sitting there, and weak and ineffectual. I knew him to be none of those things, but his blank passivity gave that impression.

"All packed up," Kenan said, fastening the hasps of the second suitcase. "Can go right back to Yuri."

Peter said, "All Yuri wanted was to get his kid back."

"Well, tonight's his lucky night. He gets the money, too."

"Said he didn't care about the money," Peter said dreamily. "The money didn't matter."

"Petey, are you saying something without saying it?"

"He don't know we came here."

"No."

"Just a thought."

"No."

"Whole lot of money, babe. And you been takin' a bath lately. That hash deal's gonna go down the tubes, isn't it?"

"So?"

"God gives you a chance to get even, you don't want to spit in His eye."

"Awww, Petey," Kenan said. "Don't you remember what the old man told us?"

"He told us all kinds of shit. When did we ever listen?"

"He said never to steal unless you can steal a million dollars, Petey. Remember?"

"Well, now's our chance."

Kenan shook his head. "No. Wrong. That's eight hundred thousand, and a quarter of a mil is counterfeit and another hundred and thirty thousand is mine to start with. So what's that leave? Four-something.

Four-twenty? Something like that."

"Which gets you even, babe. Four hundred this asshole took off of you, plus ten you gave Matt, plus expenses, comes to what?

Four-twenty? Goddamn close to it."

"I don't want to get even."

"Huh?"

He stared hard at his brother. "I don't want to get even," he said. "I paid blood money for Francey and you want me to steal blood money from Yuri. Man, you got that fucking junkie mind, steal his wallet and help him look for it."

"Yeah, you're right."

"I mean for Christ's sake, Petey—"

"No, you're right. You're absolutely right."

Callander said, "You paid me with counterfeit money?"

"You simple shit," Kenan said, "I was beginning to forget you were here. What are you, afraid you'll get picked up trying to spend it? I got news for you. You ain't gonna spend it."

"You're the Arab. The husband."

"So?"

"I was just wondering."

I said, "Ray, where's the money you got from Mr. Khoury? The four hundred thousand."

"We divided it."

"And what happened to it?"

"I don't know what Albert did with his half. I know it's not in the house."

"And your half?"

"Safe-deposit box. Brooklyn First Mercantile, New Utrecht and Fort Hamilton Parkway. I'll go there in the morning on my way out of town."

Kenan said, "You will, huh?"

"I can't decide whether to take the Honda or the van," he went on.

"He's kind of spaced, isn't he? Matt, I think he's telling the truth about the dough. The half in the bank we can forget about. Albert's half, I don't know, we could turn the house upside down but I don't think we're gonna find it, do you?"

"No."

"He probably buried it in the yard. Or in the fucking cemetery or someplace. Fuck it. I'm not supposed to have that money. I knew that all along. Let's do what we gotta do and get outta here."

I said, "You have a choice to make, Kenan."

"How's that?"

"I can take him in. There's a lot of hard evidence against him now.

He's got his dead partner in the basement, and the van in the garage is going to be full of fibers and blood traces and God knows what else.

Pam Cassidy can ID him as the man who maimed her. Other evidence will tie him to Leila Alvarez and Marie Gotteskind. He ought to be looking at three life sentences, plus an extra twenty or thirty years tacked on as a bonus."

"Can you guarantee he'll do life?"

"No," I said. "Nobody can guarantee anything when it comes to the criminal justice system. My best guess is that he'll wind up at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Matteawan, and that he'll never leave the place alive. But anything could happen. You know that. I can't see him skating, but I've said that about other people and they never did a day."

He thought it over. "Going back to our deal," he said. "Our deal wasn't about you taking him in."

"I know. That's why I'm saying it's your choice. But if you make the other choice I have to walk first."

"You don't want to be here for it."

"No."

" 'Cause you don't approve?"

"I don't approve or disapprove."

"But it's not the kind of thing you would ever do."

"No," I said, "that's not it at all. Because I have done it, I've appointed myself executioner. It's not a role I'd want to make a habit of."

"No."

"And there's no reason why I should in this case. I could turn him over to Brooklyn Homicide and sleep fine."

He thought about it. "I don't think I could," he said.

"That's why I said it has to be your decision."

"Yeah, well, I guess I just made it. I have to take care of it myself."

"Then I guess I'll be going."

"Yeah, you and everybody else," he said. "Here's what we'll do. It's a shame we didn't bring two cars.

Matt, you and TJ and Petey'll take the money to Yuri."

"Some of it's yours. Do you want to take out the money you lent him?"

"Separate it out at his place, will you? I don't want to wind up with any of the counterfeit."

"It's all in the packages with the Chase wrappers," Peter said.

"Yeah, except it all got mixed around when this dickhead here counted it, so check it out at Yuri's, okay? And then you'll pick me up.

Figure what? Twenty minutes to Yuri's and twenty minutes back, twenty minutes there, figure an hour. You'll come back here and pick me up on the corner an hour and fifteen minutes from now."

"All right."

He grabbed a bag. "C'mon," he said. "We'll take these out to the car. Matt, watch him, huh?"

They left, and TJ and I stood looking down at Raymond Callander.

We both had guns, but either of us could have guarded him with a flyswatter at this point. He seemed barely present.

I looked at him and remembered our conversation in the cemetery, that minute or two when something human had been talking. I wanted to talk to him again and see what would come out this time.

I said, "Were you just going to leave Albert there?"

"Albert?" He had to think about it. "No," he said at length. "I was going to tidy up before I left."

"What would you do with him?"

"Cut him up. Wrap him. There's plenty of Hefty bags in the cupboard."

"And then what? Deliver him to somebody in the trunk of the car?"

"Oh," he said, remembering. "No, that was for the Arab's benefit.

But it's easy. You spread them around, put them in dumpsters, trash cans. No one ever notices. Put them in with restaurant garbage and they just pass as meat scraps."

"You've done this before."

"Oh, yes," he said. "There were more women then you know about." He looked at TJ. "One black one I remember. She was just about your color." He heaved a sigh. "I'm tired," he said.

"It won't be long."

"You're going to leave me with him," he said, "and he's going to kill me. That Arab."

Phoenician, I thought.

"You and I know each other," he said. "I know you lied to me, I know you broke your promise, that was what you had to do. But you and I had a conversation. How can you just let him kill me?"

Whining, querulous. It was impossible not to think of Eichmann in the dock in Israel. How could we do this to him?

And I thought, too, of a question I had asked him in the graveyard, and I fed his own remarkable answer back to him.

"You got in the truck," I said.

"I don't understand."

"Once you got in the truck," I said, "you're just body parts."

WE picked up Kenan as arranged at a quarter to three in the morning in front of a credit jeweler on Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from Albert Wallens's house. He saw me behind the wheel and asked where his brother was. I said we'd dropped him off a few minutes ago at the house on Colonial Road. He was going to pick up the Toyota, but changed his mind and said he'd go straight to sleep.

"Yeah? Me, I'm so wired you'd have to hit me over the head with a mallet to put me out. No, stay there, Matt. You drive." He walked around the car, looked in back at TJ, sprawled across the rear seat like a rag doll. "Past his bedtime," he said. "That flight bag looks familiar, but I hope it's not full of counterfeit money this time."

"It's your hundred and thirty thousand. We did our best. I don't think there's any schlock mixed in."

"If there is it's no big deal. It's just about as good as the real stuff.

Your best bet's the Gowanus. You know how to get back on it?"

"I think so."

"And then the bridge or the tunnel, up to you. My brother offer to take my money into the house with him, keep an eye on it for me?"

"I felt it was part of my job to deliver it personally."

"Yeah, well, that's a diplomatic way to put it. I wish I could take back one thing I said to him, telling him he had a junkie mind. That's a hell of a thing to say to a person."

"He agreed with you."

"That's the worst thing about it, we both of us know it's true. Yuri surprised to see the money?"

"Astonished."

He laughed. "I'll bet. How's his kid?"

"The doctor says she'll be all right."

"They hurt her bad, didn't they?"

"I gather it's hard to separate the physical damage from the emotional trauma. They raped her repeatedly and I understand she sustained some internal injuries besides losing the two fingers. She was sedated, of course. And I think the doctor gave Yuri something."

"He should give us all something."

"Yuri tried to, as a matter of fact. He wanted to give me some money."

"I hope you took it."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know why not. It's uncharacteristic behavior on my part, I'll tell you that much."

"Not the way they taught you at the Seventy-eighth Precinct?"

"Not at all what they taught me at the Seven-Eight. I told them I already had a client and I'd been paid in full. Maybe what you said about blood money struck some kind of chord."

"Man, that makes no sense. You were working and you did good work. He wants to give you something, you ought to take it."

"That's okay. I told him he could give TJ something."

"What did he give him?"

"I don't know. A couple of bucks."

"Two hundred," TJ said.

"Oh, you awake, TJ? I thought you were asleep."

"No, just closed my eyes is all."

"You stick with Matt here. I think he's a good influence."

"He be lost without me."

"Is that right, Matt? Would you be lost without him?"

"Absolutely," I said. "We all would."

I TOOK the BQE and the bridge, and when we came off it on the Manhattan side I asked TJ where I could drop him.

"Deuce be fine," he said.

"It's three in the morning."

"Ain't no gate around the Deuce, Bruce. They don't close it up."

"Have you got a place to sleep?"

"Hey, I got money in my pocket," he said. "Maybe I see if they got my old room at the Frontenac. Take me three or four showers, call down for room service. I got a place to sleep, man. You don't need to be worryin' about me."

"Anyway, you're resourceful."

"You think you jokin' but you know it be true."

"And attentive."

"Both them things."

We dropped him at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street and caught a light at Forty-fourth. I looked both ways and there was no one around, but neither was I in a hurry. I waited until it changed.

I said, "I didn't think you could do it."

"What? Callander?"

I nodded.

"I didn't think I could either. I never killed anybody. I've been angry enough to kill, one time or another, but anger passes."

"Yes."

"He was like nothing, you know? A completely insignificant man.

And I thought, how am I going to kill this worm? But I knew I had to do it. So I figured out what I had to do."

"What was that?"

"I got him talking," he said. "I asked him a few questions, and he gave little two-word replies, but I kept at it and I got him talking. He told me what they did to Yuri's kid."

"Oh."

"What they did to her and how scared she was and all. Once he got into it he really wanted to talk. Like it was a way for him to have the experience again. See, it's not like hunting, where after you shoot the deer you get to stuff the head and hang it up on the wall. Once he was done with a woman he was left with nothing but memories, so he welcomed the chance to take them out and dust them off and look at how pretty they are."

"Did he talk about your wife?"

"Yeah, he did. He liked that he was telling it to me, too. Same as he liked giving her back to me in pieces, rubbing my nose in it. I wanted to shut him up, I didn't want to hear that, but fuck it, you know? I mean, she's gone, I fed her to the fucking flames, man. It can't hurt her no more. So I let him talk all he fucking wanted, and then I could do what I had to do."

"And then you killed him."

"No."

I looked at him.

"I never killed nobody. I'm not a killer. I looked at him and I thought, no, you son of a bitch, I am not gonna kill you."

"And?"

"How could I be a killer? I was supposed to be a doctor. I told you about that, right?"

"Your father's idea."

"I was supposed to be a doctor. Petey'd be an architect because he was a dreamer, but I was the practical one, so I'd be a doctor. 'Best thing in the world to be,' he told me. 'You do some good in the world and you make a decent living.' He even decided what kind of doctor I should be.

'Be a surgeon,'

he told me. 'That's where the money is. That's the elite, top of the heap. Be a surgeon.' " He was silent for a long moment. "So all right," he said. "I was a surgeon tonight. I operated."

It had started to rain, but it wasn't coming down hard. I didn't switch on the windshield wipers.

"I took him downstairs," Kenan said. "In the basement, where his friend was, and TJ was right, it stank something awful down there. I guess the bowels let go when you die like that. I thought I was gonna gag, but I didn't, and I guess I got used to it.

"I didn't have any anesthetic, but that was okay because he passed out right away. I had his knife, big jackknife with a blade about six inches long, and there were all sorts of tools on the workbench, anything you could possibly need."

"You don't have to tell me, Kenan."

"No," he said, "you're wrong, that's exactly what I have to do is tell you. If you don't want to listen that's something else, but I gotta tell you."

"All right."

"I cut his eyes out," he said, "so he'd never look at another woman.

And I cut his hands off so he'll never touch one. I used tourniquets so he wouldn't bleed out. I made 'em out of wire. I took his hands off with a cleaver, wicked fucking thing. I suppose it's what they used to, uh—"

He breathed deeply, in and out, in and out.

"To dismember the bodies," he went on. "I opened his pants. I didn't want to touch him but I forced myself, and I cut off his works

'cause he wasn't gonna have any further use for 'em. And then his feet, I chopped his fucking feet off, because where's he got to go? And his ears, because what does he have to listen to? And his tongue, part of his tongue, I couldn't get it all, but I gripped it with a pliers and pulled it out of his mouth and cut off what I could, because who wants to hear him talk? Who wants to listen to that shit? Stop the car."

I braked and pulled over, and he opened the car door and vomited in the gutter. I gave him a handkerchief and he wiped his mouth and dropped it in the street. "Sorry," he said, pulling the door shut.

"I thought I was done doing that. Thought the tank was empty."

"Are you all right, Kenan?"

"Yeah, I think I am. I believe so. You know, I said I didn't kill him but I don't know if that's true. He was alive when I left but he could be dead by now. And if he isn't dead, shit, what's he got left? It was fucking butchery, what I did to him. Why couldn't I just shoot him in the head?

Bang and it's over."

"Why didn't you?"

"I don't know. Maybe I was thinking eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

He gave her back to me in pieces so I'll show him piecework. Some of that, maybe. I don't know." He shrugged. "Fuck it, it's done. He lives or he dies, so what, it's over."

I parked in front of my hotel and we both got out of the car and stood awkwardly on the curb. He

pointed to the flight bag and asked if I wanted some of the money.

I told him his retainer more than covered my time. Was I sure? Yes, I said. I was sure.

"Well," he said. "If you're sure. Give me a call some night, we'll have dinner. Will you do that?"

"Sure."

"Take care now," he said. "Go get some sleep."

Chapter 23

But I couldn't sleep.

I took a shower and got in bed, but I couldn't even find a position I was able to stay in for more than ten seconds. I was too restless even to think about sleeping.

I got up and shaved and put on fresh clothes, and I turned on the TV and made a circuit of the channels and switched the set off again. I went outside and walked around until I found a place where I could have a cup of coffee. It was past four and the bars were closed. I didn't feel like drinking, I hadn't even thought of a drink all night long, but I was just as happy the bars were closed.

I finished my coffee and walked around some more. I had a lot on my mind and it was easier to think it through if I was walking.

Eventually I went back to my hotel, and then a little after seven I caught a cab downtown and went to the seven-thirty meeting on Perry Street. It broke at eight-thirty, and I had breakfast at a Greek coffee shop on Greenwich Avenue and wondered if the owner would skim the sales tax, as Peter Khoury had said. I took a cab back to the hotel. Kenan would have been proud of me, I was taking cabs left and right.

I called Elaine when I got back to my room. Her machine picked up and I left a message and sat there waiting for her to call back. It was around ten-thirty when she did.

She said, "I was hoping you would call. I've been wondering what happened. After that phone call—"

"A lot happened," I said. "I want to tell you about it. Can I come over?"

"Now?"

"Unless you have something planned."

"Not a thing."

I went downstairs and took my third cab of the morning. When she let me in her eyes searched my face and she looked troubled by what she found there. "Come in," she said. "Sit down, I made coffee. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," I said. "I didn't get to sleep last night, that's all."

"Again? You're not going to make a habit of this, are you?"

"I don't think so," I said.

She brought me a cup of coffee and we sat in her living room, she on the couch and I in a chair, and I started with my first conversation the previous day with Kenan Khoury and went all the way through to our last talk, when he dropped me at the Northwestern. She didn't interrupt, nor did her attention wander. I took a long time telling it, not leaving anything out, and reporting occasional conversations essentially verbatim. She hung on every word.

When I was done she said, "I'm overwhelmed, I think. That's quite a story."

"Just another night in Brooklyn."

"Uh-huh. I'm surprised you told me all of it."

"I am, too, in a way. It's not what I came here to tell you."

"Oh?"

"But I didn't want to leave it untold," I said, "because I don't want to have things I don't tell you. And that is what I came here to tell you.

I've been going to meetings and saying things to a roomful of strangers that I don't let myself say to you, and that doesn't make sense to me."

"I think I'm scared."

"You're not the only one."

"Do you want more coffee? I can—"

"No. I watched Kenan drive off this morning and I went upstairs and went to bed, and all I could think about was things I haven't said to you. You'd think what Kenan told me might keep a person awake, but it didn't even enter my mind. There was no room for it, it was too full of a conversation with you, except it was a very one-sided conversation because you weren't there."

"Sometimes it's easier that way. You can write the other person's lines for them." She frowned. "For him.

For her. For me?"

"Somebody had better write your lines, if that's how they come out when you make them up yourself.

Oh, Jesus, the only way to say it is to say it. I don't like what you do for a living."

"Oh."

"I didn't know it bothered me," I said, "and early on it probably didn't, I probably got a kick out of it, if you go all the way back to the beginning. Our beginning. And then there was a period when I didn't think it bothered me, and then a stage where I knew it did but tried to tell myself it didn't.

"Besides, what right did I have to say anything? It's not as though I didn't know what I was getting into.

Your occupation was part of the package. Where did I get off telling you to keep this and change that?"

I went to her window and looked across at Queens. Queens is the borough of cemeteries, it overflows with them, while Brooklyn has only Green-Wood.

I turned to face her and said, "Besides, I was scared to say anything. Maybe it would lead to an ultimatum, choose one or the other, quit turning tricks or I'm out of here. And suppose you didn't pick me?

"Or suppose you did? Then what does that commit me to? Does it give you the right to tell me what you don't like about the way I live my life?

"If you stop going to bed with clients, does that mean I can't go to bed with other women? As it happens I haven't been with anybody else since we started keeping company again, but I've always felt I had the right. It hasn't happened, and once or twice I made a conscious choice to keep it from happening, but I didn't feel committed to that course. Or if I did it was a secret commitment. I wasn't about to let either of us know about it.

"What happens to our relationship? Does it mean we have to get married? I don't know that I want to. I was married once and I didn't much like it. I wasn't very good at it, either.

"Does it mean we have to live together? I don't know that I want that, either. I haven't lived with anybody since I left Anita and the boys, and that was a long time ago. There are things I like about living alone. I don't know that I want to give it up.

"But it eats at me, knowing you're with other guys. I know there's no love in it, I know there's precious little sex in it, I know it has more in common with massage than with lovemaking. Knowing this doesn't seem to matter.

"And it gets in the way. I called you this morning and you called back an hour later. And I wondered where you were when I called, but I didn't ask because you might say you were with a john. Or you might not say it, and I'd wonder what you weren't saying."

"I was getting my hair done," she said.

"Oh. It looks nice."

"Thanks."

"It's different, isn't it? It does look nice. I didn't notice, I never notice, but I like it."

"Thank you."

"I don't know where I'm going with this," I said. "But I figured I had to tell you how I felt, and what's been going on with me. I love you.

I know that's a word we don't speak, and one reason I have trouble with it is I don't know what the hell it means. But whatever it means, it's how I feel about you. Our relationship is important to me. In fact its importance is part of the problem, because I've been so afraid it would change into something I won't like that I've been withholding myself from you." I stopped for breath. "I guess that's it. I didn't know I was going to say that much and I don't know if it came out right, but I guess that's it."

She was looking at me. It was hard to meet her gaze.

"You're a very brave man," she said.

"Oh, please."

" 'Oh, please.' You weren't scared? I was scared, and I wasn't even talking."

"Yes, I was scared."

"That's what brave is, doing what scares you. Walking into those guns at the cemetery must have been a piece of cake in comparison."

"The funny thing is," I said, "I wasn't that fearful at the cemetery.

One thought that came to me was that I've lived long enough so that I don't have to worry about dying young."

"That must have been comforting."

"Well, it was, oddly enough. My biggest fear was that something would happen to the girl and that it would be my fault, for doing something wrong or not taking some useful action. Once she was back with her father I relaxed. I guess I didn't really believe anything was going to happen to me."

"Thank God you're all right."

"What's the matter?"

"Just a few tears."

"I didn't mean to—"

"To what, to reach me emotionally? Don't apologize."

"All right."

"So my mascara runs. So what." She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. "Oh, God," she said. "This is so embarrassing. I feel so stupid."

"Because of a few tears?"

"No, because of what I have to say next. My turn now, okay?"

"Okay."

"Don't interrupt, huh? There's something I haven't told you, and I feel really stupid about it, and I don't know where to start. All right, I'll blurt it out. I quit."

"Huh?"

"I quit. I quit fucking, all right. My God, the look on your face.

Other men, silly. I quit."

"You don't have to make that decision," I said. "I just wanted to say how I felt, and—"

"You weren't going to interrupt."

"I'm sorry, but—"

"I'm not saying I quit now. I quit three months ago. More than three months ago. Sometime before the first of the year. Maybe it was even before Christmas. No, I think there was one guy after Christmas. I could look it up.

"But it doesn't matter. I could look it up if I ever want to celebrate my anniversary, the way you celebrate the date of your last drink, but maybe not. I don't know."

It was hard not saying anything. I had things to say, questions to ask, but I let her go on.

"I don't know if I ever told you this," she said, "but a few years ago I realized that prostitution saved my life. I'm serious about that. The childhood I had, my crazy mother, the kind of teenager I turned out to be, I think I probably would have killed myself, or found somebody to do it for me. Instead I started selling my ass, and it made me aware of my worth as a human being. It destroys a lot of girls, it really does, but it saved me. Go figure.

"I made a nice life for myself. I saved my money, I invested, I bought this apartment. Everything worked.

"But sometime last summer I started to realize that it wasn't working anymore. Because of what we have. You and I. I told myself that was meshugga, what you and I have is in one compartment and what I do for money is way over there, but it got harder to keep the doors of the compartments shut tight. I felt disloyal, which was strange, and I felt dirty, which was something I never really felt hooking, or if I did I was never aware of it.

"So I thought, well, Elaine, you had a longer run than most of them, and you're a little old for the game anyway. And they've got all these new diseases, and you've had a scaled-down practice the past few years anyway, and just how many executives do you figure would throw themselves out of windows if you hung it up?

"But I was afraid to tell you. For one thing, how did I know I wouldn't want to change my mind? I figured I ought to keep my options open. And then, after I'd told all my regulars I was retired, after I sold my book and did everything but change my number, I was afraid to tell you because I didn't know what it would do. Maybe you wouldn't want me anymore. Maybe I'd stop being interesting, I'd just be this aging broad running around taking college courses. Maybe you'd feel trapped, like I was pressuring you into marriage. Maybe you'd want to get married, or live together, and I haven't ever been married but then again I haven't ever wanted to be. And I've lived alone ever since I got out of my mother's house, and I'm good at it and I'm used to it. And if one of us wants to get married and the other doesn't, then where are we?

"So that's my dirty little secret, if you want to call it that, and I wish to God I could stop crying because I'd like to look presentable, if not glamorous. Do I look like a raccoon?"

"Only the face."

"Well," she said. "That's something. You're just an old bear. Did you know that?"

"So you've said."

"Well, it's true. You're my bear and I love you."

"I love you."

"The whole thing's very fucking Gift-of-the-Magi, isn't it? It's a beautiful story and who can we tell?"

"Nobody diabetic."

"Send 'em right into sugar shock, wouldn't it?"

"I'm afraid so. Where do you go when you slip away for mysterious appointments? I assumed, you know—"

"That I was going to blow some guy in a hotel room. Well, sometimes I was getting my hair done."

"Like this morning."

"Right. And sometimes I was going to my shrink appointment, and—"

"I didn't know you were seeing a shrink."

"Uh-huh, twice a week since mid-February. A lot of my identity is bound up in what I've been doing all these years, and all of a sudden I've got a lot of crap to deal with. I guess it helps to talk to her." She shrugged. "And I've gone to a couple of Al-Anon meetings, too."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, how would you know? I didn't tell you. I figured they could give me tips on how to deal with you.

Instead their program is all about dealing with myself. I call that sneaky."

"Yeah, they're devious bastards."

"Anyway," she said, "I feel stupid for keeping it all to myself, but I was a whore for a lot of years, and candor's not part of the job description."

"As opposed to police work."

"Right. You poor bear, up all night, running around Brooklyn with crazy people. And it's going to be hours before you get a chance to sleep."

"Oh?"

"Uh-huh. You're my only sexual outlet now, do you realize what that means? I'm likely to prove insatiable."

"Let's see," I said.

AND, later, she said, "You really haven't been with anybody else since we've been together?"

"No."

"Well, you probably will. Most men do. I speak as one with professional knowledge of the subject."

"Maybe," I said. "Not today, though."

"No, not today. But if you do it's not the end of the world. Just so you come home where you belong."

"Whatever you say, dear."

" 'Whatever you say, dear.' You just want to go to sleep. Listen, as far as the other's concerned, we can get married or not get married, and we can live together or not live together. We could live together without getting married. Could we get married without living together?"

"If we wanted."

"You think so? You know what it sounds like, it sounds like a Polish joke. But maybe it would work for us. You could keep your squalid hotel room, and several nights a week you'd put on Call Forwarding and spend the night with moi. And we could… you know what?"

"What?"

"I think this is all something we're going to have to take a day at a time."

"That's a good phrase," I said. "I'll have to remember that."

Chapter 24

A day or so later, an anonymous tip led officers of Brooklyn's Seventy-second Precinct to the house Albert Wallens had inherited upon his mother's death three years before. There they found Wallens, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed construction worker with a record of sexual offenses and minor assault charges. Wallens was dead, with a length of piano wire fastened around his neck. In the same basement room they also found what appeared to be the mutilated corpse of another man, but thirty-six-year-old Raymond Joseph Callander, whose employment history included a seven-month hitch as a civilian employee with the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, was still alive.

He was removed to Maimonides Medical Center where he regained consciousness but was unable to communicate, making simple cawing sounds until his death two days later.

Evidence discovered in the Wallens house, and in two vehicles found in the adjacent garage, strongly implicated both men in several homicides which police at Brooklyn Homicide had recently determined to be linked, and to be the work of a team of serial killers. Several theories sprang up to explain the death scene, the most persuasive of which suggested that there had been a third man on the team and that he had slain his two partners and made his escape. Another conjecture, given less credence by anyone who had seen Callander or read his injury report at all closely, held that Callander had gone completely out of control, first killing his partner with a garrote, then indulging in a fitful orgy of self-mutilation. Considering that he'd somehow managed to divest himself of hands, feet, ears, eyes, and genitalia, "fitful" would barely begin to describe it.

Drew Kaplan represented Pam Cassidy in her negotiations with a national tabloid. They ran her story, "I Lost a Breast to the Sunset Park Choppers," and paid her what Kaplan called "a high five-figure price."

In a conversation conducted without her attorney present, I was able to assure Pam that Albert and Ray were indeed the men who had abducted her, and that there was no third man. "You mean Ray really did himself like that?" she wondered. Elaine told her there are some things we aren't meant to know.

ABOUT a week after Callander's death, which would have made it sometime around the end of the week following our trip to the cemetery, Kenan Khoury called me from downstairs to say that he was double-parked out front. Could I come down and have a cup of coffee or something?

We went around the corner to the Flame and got a table by the window. "I was in the neighborhood," he said. "Thought I'd stop by, say hello. It's good to see you."

It was good to see him, too. He was looking well, and I told him so.

"Well, I made a decision," he said. "I'm taking a little trip."

"Oh?"

"More accurately, I'm leaving the country. I cleaned up a lot of loose ends the past few days. I sold the house."

"That quickly?"

"I owned it outright and I sold it for cash. I sold very cheap. The new owners are Korean, and the old guy came to the closing with his two sons and a shopping bag full of money. Remember Petey saying it was a shame Yuri wasn't a Greek, he coulda raised so much cash that way? Man, he shoulda been Korean. They're in a business don't know from checks, credit cards, payrolls, taxes, nothing. The whole business is conducted in green. I got the cash, they got clear title, and they damn near gave birth when I showed 'em how to use the burglar alarm. They loved that. State of the art, man. They oughta love it."

"Where are you going?"

"Belize first, to see some relatives. Then Togo."

"To go in the family business?"

"We'll see. For a little while, anyway. See if I like it, see if I can stand living there. I'm a Brooklyn boy, you know. Born and raised. I don't know if I can hack it that far from the old neighborhood. I might be bored to death in a month."

"Or you might love it."

"No way to know unless you try, right? I can always come back."

"Sure."

"It's not a bad idea to leave now, though," he said. "I told you about that hash deal, right?"

"You said you didn't have much faith in it."

"Yeah, well, I walked away from it. I had a lot of money in it, too, and I walked. I didn't walk, you'd have to talk to me through bars."

"There was a bust?"

"There was indeed, and they had an invitation with my name on it, but this way even if the guys they caught roll over, which I'm sure they will, they still got no real case against me. But what do I need with the bullshit of subpoenas and all that, you know? I've never been arrested, so why don't I get the hell out of the country while I'm still a virgin?"

"When do you leave?"

"Plane leaves from JFK in what, six hours? From here I drive out to a Buick dealer on Rockaway Boulevard and take whatever he'll give me for the car. 'Sold,' I'll say, 'provided you throw in a ride to the airport,' which is like five minutes from there. Unless you want a car, man. You can have it for like half of Blue Book just to save me the aggravation."

"I can't use it."

"Well, I tried. Did my part to try to keep you out of the subways.

Would you take it as a gift? I'm serious. Run me out to Kennedy and you can have it. The hell, if you don't want it you can take it straight over to the car lot yourself, make a few dollars on the deal."

"I wouldn't do that and you know it."

"Well, you could. You don't want the car, huh? It's my only remaining loose end. Past few days I saw some of Francine's relatives, told 'em more or less what happened. I tried to leave out some of the horror of it, you know? But you can only sweeten it up so much and you're still left with the fact that a good and gentle and beautiful woman is dead for no fucking reason at all." He put his head in his hand.

"Jesus," he said, "you think you're over it and it comes and takes you by the throat. Point is I told her folks she had died. I said it was a terrorist thing, it happened overseas, we were in Beirut, it was political, crazy people, you know, and they bought it, or at least I think they bought it.

Way I told it, it was quick and painless, the terrorists were killed themselves by the Christian militia, and the service was private and unpublicized because the whole incident had to be hushed up. Some of it's more or less parallel with the truth. Some I wish was true. The quick and painless part."

"It may have been quick. You don't know."

"I was there at the end, Matt. Remember? He told me what they did to her." He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. "A change of subject,"

he said. "You seen my brother at any of your meetings lately?

What's the matter, that a delicate subject?"

"In a manner of speaking," I said. "See, AA's an anonymous program, and one of the traditions is that you don't tell someone not in the program what gets said at a meeting, or who does or doesn't attend. I stretched a point before because we were all involved in a case together, but as a general thing that's probably not a question I can answer."

"It wasn't really a question," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"I guess I just wanted to feel things out, see what you knew or didn't know. Fuck it, there's no way to ease into this. I got a call from the police the night before last. See, the Toyota was registered in my name, so who else would they call?"

"What happened?"

"They found the car abandoned in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge."

"Oh, Jesus, Kenan."

"Yeah."

"I'm very sorry."

"I know you are, Matt. It's so fucking sad, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is."

"He was a beautiful guy, he really was. He had his weaknesses, but who the fuck doesn't, you know?"

"They're sure that—"

"Nobody specifically saw him go over, and they didn't recover a body, but they told me the body might never be recovered. I hope it never is. Do you know why?"

"I think so."

"Yeah, I bet you do. He told you he wanted to be buried at sea, right?"

"Not in so many words. He told me how water was his element, though, and how he wouldn't want to burn up or be buried in the earth.

The implication was clear, and the way he talked about it—"

"Like he was looking forward to it."

"Yes," I said. "Like he longed for it."

"Ah, Jesus. He called me, I don't know, a day, two days before he did it. If anything happened to him would I make sure he was buried at sea. I said yeah, sure, Petey. I'll book a stateroom on the QE

Fucking Two and slip you out the porthole. And we both laughed, and I hung up and forgot about it, and then they call me up and they found his car on the bridge. He loved bridges."

"He told me."

"Yeah? When he was a kid he loved 'em. He was always after our father to drive over bridges. Couldn't get enough of 'em, thought they were the most beautiful thing in the world. One he jumped off, the Brooklyn, that does happen to be a beautiful bridge."

"Yes."

"Same water under it as all the others, though. Ah, he's at peace, the poor guy. I guess it's what he always wanted, you come right down to it. The only peace he had in his life was when he had smack in his veins, and aside from the rush the sweetest thing about heroin is it's just like death. Only it's temporary. That's what's good about it. Or what's wrong with it, I guess, depending on your point of view."

AND a couple of days after that I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. It was Mick.

"You're up early," I said.

"Am I then?"

"It must be six in the morning there. It's one o'clock here."

"Is it," he said. "My watch stopped, don't you know, and I called in the hope that you could tell me the time."

"Well, this must be a good time to call," I said, "because we've got a perfect connection."

"Clear, is it?"

"As if you were in the next room."

"Well, I should fucking well hope so," he said, "as I'm at Grogan's.

Rosenstein got everything cleared up for me. My flight was delayed or I'd have been in hours ago."

"I'm glad you're back."

"No more than I. She's a grand old country, but you wouldn't want to live there. But how are you keeping? Burke says you haven't been around the saloon much."

"No, not much at all."

"So why don't you get yourself down here now?"

"Why not?"

"Good man," he said. "I'll put up a pot of coffee for you and crack the seal on a bottle of Jameson. I've a great store of tales to tell."

"I have a few of my own."

"Ah, we'll make a night of it, won't we now? And go to the butchers' mass in the morning."

"We might do that," I said. "It wouldn't surprise me."

The End

Acknowledgments

I am pleased to acknowledge the substantial contributions of the Writers Room, where much of the preliminary work on this book was done, and of the Ragdale Foundation, where it was written. Thanks, too, to George Cabanas and Eddie Lama, and also to Jack Hitt and Paul Tough, who introduced me to the Kongs. And, finally, to Sarah Elizabeth Miles, who swears she'll do anything— anything!— to get her name in a book.

About the Author

The prolific author of more than fifty books and numerous short stories, Lawrence Block is a Mystery Writers of American Grand Master, a four-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus Awards, and the recipient of literary prizes from France, Germany, and Japan.

Block is a devout New Yorker who spends much of his time traveling.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24