Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 775 & 776, March/April 2006

Jeremiah Healy is the author of eighteen novels (including a trio of legal thrillers under the pseudonym Terry Devane) and three collections of short stories. He’s a past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the International Association of Crime Writers. His stand-alone thriller, Turn-about, was reprinted in mass-market paperback by Leisure Books in April, 2005. His new story brings back his series P.I., John Francis Cuddy.

1

The woman sitting in a client chair across my desk from me laid her handbag in her lap and said, “First thing, I come to Boston now from Iceland.”

I had to admit, it was an attention-getter.

Then again, so was she. About twenty-five, her eyes shone a pale, haunting blue and her hair a steely blond, drawn back into a ponytail. The facial features leaned to the handsome side of pretty, but to the smart side, too. Her clothes seemed a little summery for even a sunny October day, though. And when she’d entered through the door stenciled with “JOHN FRANCIS CUDDY, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS” and I’d stood to greet her, the top of her head was even with my brow, and I go nearly six-three.

“My names I will spell for you.”

I drew a legal pad toward me and let a pen hover in my hand above it.

She nodded solemnly, as though about to start a prayer. “F-R-E-Y-D-I-S is the first, pronounced fray-dees. In Iceland, we are most named for our father, and so K-A-R-L-S-D-O-T-T-I-R is the last, pronounced karls-dot-tur.”

Simple enough: Karl’s daughter. I wrote down the names, and, since it seemed important to the woman for me to get them right, I read both back to her as well. Then, “Ms. Karlsdottir, what can I do for you?”

She shook her head. “In my country, we have many traditions. One is to use first names and perhaps middle names, so please: If you can call me ‘Freydis,’ and I can call you ‘John Francis’?”

“That would be fine.”

Another nod. “Iceland, you have been there?”

“Never.”

“You should. There is a direct flight — Icelandair — from here to our airport, Keflavik, near to our capital, Reykjavik. Which is aid to a second tradition, from the Vikings of ancient days. Our people will — the word we use is ‘sail’: to go away and come back with skills from job for the enriching of our island, yes?”

“I understand.”

“My father did just so, to England, and his younger friend the same, but the friend, Hogni Ragnarsson, came here.”

“Can you spell that one for me, too?”

Karlsdottir did, and I felt slightly pleased with myself that I’d gotten it right without her, phonetically.

She reached into her bag. “Hogni lives in not so good neighborhood in your Boston, John Francis, so all we have is postal box for address.” Rummaging now. “But when we send him letter, it returns with no delivery.”

Karlsdottir sighed heavily and looked at me with those Alaskan Husky eyes. “Sorry. The ‘jet lag,’ yes? I cannot find the envelope.”

“And, I take it, you cannot find Mr. Ragnarsson, either.”

A bleak smile. “That is true.”

“Freydis, is there a reason you came all this way to look for him?”

She gave me a third solemn nod. “My father is now dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need, please. He was sick with the prostate cancer that went to his bones.”

I’d had an older uncle who’d suffered that particularly cruel and painful passing. “A difficult way to die.”

“There is no easy way, I think. But my father left as — ‘inheritance’?”

“In his will or estate documents?”

“Yes, John Francis. An inheritance to Hogni.”

“And you want to get that to Mr. Ragnarsson.”

“I must. My sister and I are the only family to do this duty, and she is younger and sick herself, in hospital.” Karlsdottir swiped her right index finger under both eyes, like a miniature squeegee for escaping tears. “So, I have the obligation. As a matter of honor.”

I put down my pen. “Freydis, have you tried the Icelandic Consulate here in Boston?”

“There is not one.”

“Our police, then?”

A firm shake of the head now. “When Icelandair woman tells me we have no consulate here, I ask her, what I should do? She tells me police in the United States are not like ours, who function as ‘guides’ for tourists and do not carry with them guns.”

My turn to nod. There wouldn’t exactly be an avalanche of help from the Boston department if Karlsdottir didn’t even know where the guy lived in terms of our police districts.

She said, “The Icelandair woman tells me to find a private investigator. Like you, John Francis.”

“She knows me personally?”

“Oh, no. Sorry. You are the most close one to my hotel.”

I’ve received more ringing endorsements. “Look, Freydis, this could become expensive for you.”

“My father was not a rich man, but with my own inheritance from him, several thousand dollars is not the problem.”

“Have you looked in a telephone directory for metropolitan Boston?”

“At your airport. The directory is odd to me, because it has the last names, not the first names, in sequence of alphabet. But no Hogni.”

If our White Pages threw her... I picked up my desk phone. “Let’s see if I can save us some of my time and your money.”

For a change, Karlsdottir didn’t nod, but she did wait politely as a buddy of mine at Verizon confirmed no number for Hogni Ragnarsson, landline or cell, listed or unlisted.

I cradled the receiver. “Do you have any idea where your father’s friend might work?”

“No, John Francis. And I am worried true for Hogni. We have not heard from him in many months now.”

“And that’s unusual?”

“Impossible. Icelanders always maintain contact — with families, with friends — forever.”

Family, duty, honor. Quite a trifecta.

“Okay.” I quoted Karlsdottir my daily rate, which didn’t make her blink. She dipped back into the handbag and found her cash right away.

As Karlsdottir slid two days’ worth of retainer across my desk, though, she fixed me with those haunting eyes. “One more thing, please?”

I took her money. “Yes?”

“I will come with you.”

“With me, Freydis?”

“Just so. In your vehicle, or the trains. The ways you will seek for Hogni.”

“Wouldn’t you rather play tourist?”

Finally, a smile that wasn’t bleak, and pushed her back over the line from handsome to borderline beautiful. “The air flight was on my cost, the hotel is on my cost, and you are on my cost. The weather is good, and if the police cannot guide me in your city, I will go with you.”

I thought, there are far worse ways to spend your day, John Francis.

2

Outside a state office building blocks from mine on Tremont Street, Freydis Karlsdottir said, “We have walked this far, and I cannot enter with you?”

“It’s not that you can not enter. It’s more that my expert inside will get nervous if somebody’s with me.”

Karlsdottir pawed the concrete with her shoe like a bridled horse unhappy to be restrained. “What you do, John Francis, it is perhaps not... ‘legal’?”

“Not exactly. But it’s very efficient, and no one gets hurt.”

She glanced around. “Then I will go back to the small place of graves by the church you called King’s Chapel.”

“I’ll meet you there, Freydis.”

“So, Jimmy, how’re you doing?”

“I’d be doing a lot better, I didn’t think you’re gonna ask me to do what I think you are.”

I rested my rump on the edge of his computer hutch. It’s never been entirely clear to me exactly what Jimmy’s real job is, nor which agency of the Commonwealth he actually works for. But he has a genuine talent for finding all sorts of things via the computer. A good thing, too, because at six-one, one-thirty, and with a dress code like Jughead in the old Archie comics, Jimmy doesn’t make the sort of first impression that would have private companies vying for his services. And he also loves to bet the greyhounds at the Suffolk Downs dog track, which means fresh cash — in this case, some of Freydis Karlsdottir’s retainer — is always welcome.

Jimmy quickly scanned the room — probably for the unlikely presence of a supervisor actually at work — and then cut to the car chase. “All right, Cuddy, what do you want from me?”

I set down a sheet of legal pad, the name “Hogni Ragnarsson” block-printed on it and a fifty-dollar bill beneath it.

Jimmy glanced down. “Screwy name. Swedish?”

“Icelandic.”

“You mean, like the Vikings?”

“Some of them, anyway.”

“What’s this particular Viking done?”

“Nothing, far as I know. But I need a residential or business address for him.”

Jimmy palmed the fifty from under the sheet and swung around to his keyboard. “See what I can do.”

After clacking and tapping for a while, he said, “No record of a driver’s license or car registration.”

“I think Ragnarsson came overseas to work.”

More clacking, the screen on his monitor zipping images left and right and up and down like a video game. “Let’s try the Department of Revenue, then, see if he filed — damnit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Shut up a minute, let me cover my tracks here.”

I’d never seen Jimmy upset with his computer before. It was like watching ice dancers at the Olympics when one seemed to blame the other for a spin-out.

“Jesus,” he said finally. “That was close.”

“Can you explain it in English?”

“At your level of software comprehension? Let’s just say that the Commonwealth’s tax collectors put in a new burglar alarm, and it almost caught me climbing in their back window.”

“Can you keep going?”

“Yeah, but not with Revenue. You say maybe the guy worked, let’s try the Eye-Ay-Bee.”

As in IAB, or Industrial Accident Board, the state agency that processes employee claims for injuries suffered on the job.

More clacking and tapping, but slower this time around, as if Jimmy didn’t want to trip another alarm.

“Ah,” he said, “now we’re cooking.”

I bent over his shoulder toward the monitor’s screen. “Construction-site accident.”

“Four months ago.”

Which might explain the incommunicado status that worried Karlsdottir. “I don’t see an address for our boy.”

“No,” said Jimmy with a smug edge in his voice, “but here’s one for the construction company’s headquarters, the construction site itself, and even the poor Viking’s lawyer.”

Jimmy doesn’t like to print things from his computer for me, so I began taking down the information on the sheet of legal paper. “You’re worth your weight in gold, my man.”

Jimmy sniffed. “You don’t mind, I’ll take my height in gold.”

When I returned to the cemetery outside King’s Chapel, I didn’t see Freydis Karlsdottir, so I went through the massive, fortress-like doors and into the stark little church itself. I spotted her about six rows up, just sitting as opposed to kneeling, so I moved alongside her pew.

She looked up, but not startled. “It is like a church in Iceland, this.”

“How so?”

“White, clean. And... simple. A place to be reminded that one person is perhaps not so important in the world.”

“Interesting observation.”

Her eyes changed focus. “You found data about Hogni?”

“Indirectly. We need to go for a drive.”

The beaming smile as she rose from her bench. “I like you for my guide, John Francis.”

3

From the passenger’s seat in my old Honda Prelude, Freydis Karlsdottir said, “I do not understand why we go first to construction place and not to lawyer?”

I maneuvered around some orange traffic cones, which, since Boston’s “Big Dig” road-and-tunnel project began, have become as much a part of our local scenery as the cobblestones at Quincy Market. “Even my computer expert couldn’t find a residential address for Mr. Ragnarsson in the Massachusetts official records. Before I approach a lawyer who might be suspicious of us, I’d like to have a little more background on your father’s friend.”

In my peripheral vision, I caught a frown. “Hogni’s inheritance would be ‘suspicious’ to his lawyer?”

Now I looked over, noticing that her English was improving as she used it more with me. “In this country, Freydis, people are wary of unexpected gifts. Not in Iceland?”

The bleak smile. “So many of us there know each other — are ‘related’ by distant blood to each other — that we have few surprises.” Even the bleak smile faded now. “An expression on our island is, ‘Who are his people?’ which means the man’s family history. We are much guided by our history.”

I dredged up what I could from a college course on European History. “Here in the United States, we learned about your Leif Ericsson discovering North America before Christopher Columbus.”

A grunt, which took me a moment to realize stood for Karlsdottir’s laugh. “Only a very small part of this history, John Francis. Iceland held its first parliament, avoided civil war over religions, and discovered North America, all before the year one thousand after Christ.”

Deciding my own heritage didn’t pose a real comeback to that, I concentrated on my driving.

Karlsdottir warmed to her subject. “We have our sagas, books of ancient days in an institute of culture, to tell the stories of such things, the pages to be read through boxes of glass. Our men of Iceland left to explore in their ships, with atgeir and sax.”

“Sorry?”

“Ah, no. I should be sorry. The ‘sax’ is a sword, short with only one side made sharp.”

I thought of a pirate’s cutlass.

“And the atgeir is... when you put the blade of the hatchet on a short-also spear?”

“Halberd, I think is the word in English.”

A nod. “Hal... berd. Good. But when our men are away, the women must grow strong to work the farm, even to become war chieftains to defend the home.”

“Makes sense.”

Karlsdottir nodded. “If in ancient days someone did a crime of violence, the family of the victim takes the blood vengeance. Later days, the criminal was made ‘outlaw,’ to receive no food or water, horse or aid from any other Icelander. Three years for less crime, forever if bad crime. But now, even for beating of wife or taking of children for sex, no real punishing for ‘outlaw.’”

I thought about Boston’s horrendous priest-rape scandals, somewhat resolved by recent settlements totaling nearly a hundred million dollars. “Modern civilization has a blind spot about some things, Freydis, but eventually, justice kicks in.”

“Justice.” She turned to me, then turned back. “Perhaps, John Francis.”

“Hey, you can’t come through that gate without a hard hat. And a pass.”

There was a slight Southern lilt to the man’s words. Outside the open gate in the chain-link fence, Freydis Karlsdottir turned to me, a confused expression on her face. “What is... ‘pass’? Like for the entering of airplane?”

“Stay here, and let me handle it.”

I walked halfway to the burly black guy who’d challenged us, in a hard hat himself. Despite the dusty bluejeans and a torn flannel shirt, he held a clipboard in one hammy hand, and I drew the impression of a foreman, not a laborer. “This young lady and I would like to ask some questions.”

“Don’t have time for questions, man.” He waved the clipboard at the skyscraper-in-progress behind him that was producing one hell of a symphony. Assuming jackhammers, welding equipment, and nail guns were your idea of orchestral instruments. “Got an ‘unparalleled tower of luxury condominiums’ to build.”

If the guy was cynical enough to quote company hype, a bluff might work. “Look, it’s about one of your workers who got injured here. You can answer my questions now, conveniently, or traipse into a lawyer’s office for a few days of depositions. Your choice.”

A disgusted expression for me, then an appraising one as he looked to Karlsdottir. “It’s the guy from Iceland, right?”

“Good guess, Mr...?”

“Monroe. Lionel Monroe.”

I took out my leather ID holder and showed him the laminated copy of my investigator’s license.

Monroe shook his head. “Mr. Cuddy, anything like this is supposed to go through the office folks first. They say okay, then I can talk to you.”

Seemed a reasonable policy, though not very helpful for my purposes. “It’s not about the comp claim. We’re just trying to locate Hogni Ragnarsson.”

“Hogni,” with a grunted laugh, nearly like Karlsdottir’s. “All the whites on this site who make fun of Afro first names like ‘Latrell’ or ‘Deoncey,’ and this guy’s is ‘Hogni.’” Another look at Karlsdottir. “She family of the man?”

“No. Just trying to give him something from a friend of his.”

Monroe used the thumb of his free hand to push back the cuff of his shirt. “Watch says I got five minutes, but outside the gate, or the boss’ll have my ass for a ‘significant safety violation.’”

We moved shoulder to shoulder back to where Karlsdottir waited.

I said, “This is Mr. Monroe, and—”

He cut me off with a sidelong look as he spoke to her. “Hogni, he told me you Icelanders like first names, right?”

The beaming smile from my client, and I sensed we had Monroe won over.

She said, “Yes. And Freydis is mine.”

Karlsdottir stuck out her right hand, and, after slapping his palm against a bluejeaned thigh, he shook with her.

“Then I’m Lionel. Now, what can I tell you?”

“Where Hogni now lives in your city?”

Monroe continued ignoring me to focus on her. “Don’t know, Freydis. I recollect that he used a post-office box,” another wave of the clipboard back toward the building, “but I never ran into him outside the site here.”

The P.O. box might at least indicate Ragnarsson’s local neighborhood. “Lionel, do you—”

He snapped his head toward me this time. “I told Freydis she could use my first name, not you.”

Didn’t want to lose him. “Sorry, Mr. Monroe.”

“I mean, like, it’s their custom to use first names, not ours, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay.” Monroe huffed out a breath and returned to Karlsdottir. “Let me tell you all I know about Hogni, and then you both be on your way.”

“Yes?” she replied, in a tone that implied she was also trying to keep him talking.

“We’re not a union shop here, and your Hogni was big and strong enough, I thought we could use him. Went fine for maybe a week. Matter of fact, he went on about how in Iceland everybody works, account of it’s your way. Two, three jobs even, stuff being so expensive on an island because everything’s got to be imported. Hogni told the boys stories about eating horse steaks and smoked eels and — what did he call it? Oh, yeah: ‘wind-dried puffin,’ that cute little bird looks kind of like a duck crossed with a penguin.”

“Our tradition from ancient days.”

Another huff. “Then one morning I hear him on our coffee break, asking the other guys questions about what happens, you get yourself hurt on the job. And, what do you know, next afternoon, Hogni takes himself a fall. I saw it, would have hurt anybody, but before the end of the week, man’s filing for workers’ comp, claiming he can’t move on his leg.”

Like a huge pigeon, Monroe bobbed his head forward. “Freydis, I’m sorry if he’s a friend of yours, but I don’t think that ‘work ethic’ stuff from back home sunk into Hogni too well.” Now to me. “Okay, that’s it.”

“Not quite, Mr. Monroe.”

“Say what?”

“Do you remember the local post office where Mr. Ragnarsson rented his box?”

A final huff. “No. You can call the company office and ask, but I’ll tell you now, they won’t give it out.” Lionel Monroe turned away from us. “‘The privacy rights of our employees are paramount.’”

Back in the car — and the bumper-to-bumper traffic — I said to Karlsdottir, “You must be pretty tired, the jet lag and all.”

She blinked a few times, then rubbed the heels of her hands over both eyes. “For true, but also we must see Hogni’s lawyer, yes?”

“We’re a little late in the day for that, Freydis. Can I buy you dinner — or whatever other meal your body clock’s telling you it wants?”

“My body... clock?”

“Do you feel like lunch instead of dinner?”

“Ah. No, John Francis. My... body clock makes the sound for dinner.”

“‘Chimes.’”

I sensed the confused look without turning toward her. “The sound a clock makes on each hour. We say it ‘chimes.’”

The silhouette in profile of her solemn nod. “A lovely word. It is to the ear as the sound it describes.”

I agreed, though I thought we might save “onomatopoeic” until the morning.

“You are a good guide for restaurants as well, John Francis.”

I’d brought her to Silvertones, a restaurant and bar roughly halfway between her hotel and my office, so I could leave the Prelude in a parking space I rent behind the building. Silvertones is in a cavernous basement and serves mainly comfort food, but it’s well prepared by the husband-and-wife team who run the place, and not knowing much about Icelandic fare beyond “horse /eel/puffin,” I’d hoped Karlsdottir could find something on their menu that she’d like.

Over a second glass of wine, and halfway through our meals, my new client hooded her eyes, I thought at first from fatigue. Then she said, “The African man at the construction fence. He stood... above you?”

I recalled the “first-name” exchange. “Stood up to me, Freydis.”

“Just so.” A sip from her glass. “Confrontation. But what made him offended?”

How to provide her a short version? “Africans first came to this country as slaves, kidnapped from their villages over there.”

“This I know of.”

“Their white masters here would give them first names, but broke up — separated — families to sell them. At auction.”

Karlsdottir’s eyes grew wide. “As in a... place of market?”

“Yes.” Fast forward. “More recently, there were many aspects of discrimination, and one was for a white person to call a black person by a first name instead of ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ and the last name.”

“As though still the black person is a... slave?”

“Or that would be the insult the black person would assume.” I tried to lighten things a little. “Different in your country, eh?”

“As to the tradition of first name, yes.” The bleak smile, and she seemed to really be crashing on our differential in time zones. “About the slavery and the race, not so different, perhaps. In ancient days of the Vikings, my people raided and pillaged in their boats to the south, bringing women — and girls — of Ireland back to our island, as slaves and forced wives. And my father told me that when NATO first came with an Air Force base at our Keflavik just fifty years past, the Iceland government required no black soldiers be sent to us. But we have grown. One family in twenty in my country — the word is ‘adopt,’ yes? — the Vietnam people who leave by boat after your war there is over.”

And it had been my war, all right. But one in...? “Freydis, five percent of your population adopted those children?”

“I tell you before, John Francis: We believe in family. And courage, to do the right thing. I carry the name of a woman from the Saga of Eirik the Red. That Freydis was pregnant but joined battle with her men against the Native Americans who fought us in your ‘new world,’ yes? When the natives attacked her, she lifted the sword of a killed Viking, pulled her clothing down to display one of her breasts, and hit the side of the blade against it.” Karlsdottir mimed smacking herself there with the palm of her right hand. “The natives run away from Freydis then.”

The things you learn. But Karlsdottir now used her hand to stifle a yawn, and I thought it was time to call it a night. “Can I walk you to your hotel?”

A tired, but beaming, smile. “Please, yes.”

I settled our tab, and we climbed up Silvertones’ internal stairs to the street. Two more blocks, and we were at the entrance to her hotel.

Karlsdottir turned to me and said, “In the duty-free shop, I purchased a bottle of brandy. Would you share some with me?”

“In your room?”

“Just so, John Francis.”

“I don’t think we should.”

The eyes hooded again, though differently. “My name is Freydis, but I am not pregnant, and I will not defend myself with a sword.” Now the trace of her beaming smile. “Also, I am not so tired as you may think.”

“I’m flattered. And honored, Freydis. But even if you were not a client, I lost my wife to cancer, and I still grieve for her.”

Those ghost eyes welled with tears. “Grieve I know of, John Francis.” She turned halfway to the entrance. “So, I go to my bed, and you go to yours.”

Yes, but not yet.

The cemetery staff is pretty good about leaving the gates open at night, so that people with demanding work schedules can still visit. I walked up the hillside to her row and then to her stone, knowing I could find it even on a starless night.

No flowers, John? I guess the honeymoon really IS over.

I looked down at the etched letters that would forever form “MARY ELIZABETH DEVLIN CUDDY,” even though the absence of light made them unreadable. “I tried, Beth. The florist shops were all closed.”

What made you so late?

I told her.

The woman comes all the way from Iceland to find this “Hogni,” but she doesn’t have the envelope with his P.O. box on it?

“She couldn’t find it, and besides, there are other ways.”

I don’t know, John. Doesn’t feel right somehow.

I looked down at the harbor. A police boat was out with its distinctive blue running lights, but otherwise a quiet autumn evening.

“Well,” I said, “worst thing, I’m helping a stranger keep a promise to her dad.”

My poor widower and his sense of “promise.”

I thought back to Freydis Karlsdottir’s “brandy” offer, and now it was my turn to nod solemnly.

4

“What’s that?” I said the next morning, still behind the wheel, Freydis Karlsdottir not allowing the teenaged doorman outside her hotel to help with a rectangular wooden case — about long and wide enough to hold a croquet set — that she clutched to her chest.

“Part of Hogni’s inheritance.” Karlsdottir inclined her head to the trunk of the Prelude. “We can put this in your boot?”

I’d long ago disabled the lid release next to the driver’s seat, so I had to get out to open it, the doorman doing his best to keep a straight face over the old fart in the old car picking up this exotic beauty of a hotel guest.

After Karlsdottir laid the case carefully into the trunk and we were on our way, she turned to me. “If you have the mobile telephone, John Francis, we call Hogni’s lawyer first?”

I slipped my right hand into the side pocket of my suit jacket and flashed the little Nokia at her. “We could. However, I’ve generally found that it’s best to surprise people.”

“Surprise.” The beaming smile as she turned forward again. “Perhaps not in Iceland, but in America, ‘surprise’ works good, yes?”

The lawyer’s office proved to be a flat-faced storefront in a four-story building on the main drag of East Boston, a traditionally Italian-American neighborhood that had become a mixing pot — if not melting pot — of first-generation immigrants from a number of different countries, even continents. As I parked on the opposite side of the street and we got out of the car, a Delta airliner on its landing path roared low enough over our heads that you could almost expect tire tracks on the roof of the Prelude.

Karlsdottir reflexively ducked and blurted out something that wasn’t recognizable. Then, “I hope we are near to your airport.”

“Very close.”

She looked around at the evident, if modest, apartments above the commercial level. “How do the people sleep with such noise?”

I thought about smaller, slower planes rattling the window frames of my family’s rowhouse in South Boston when I was growing up. “It’s an acquired skill.”

We crossed the street to the Law Offices of Michael A. Nuzzo. His picture windows were pasted with decals reading “SE HABLA ESPAÑOL” and what I guessed were similar messages from several other languages. Inside the doorway stood three desks and as many young women behind them forming their own miniature United Nations. The placards in front of them were printed with “ITALIAN,” “SPANISH,” and “CAMBODIAN,” small cribs of clear plastic holding business cards nearby. Ringing the floor space around the reception area were four-drawer file cabinets. Lots of them.

The first two women were on the telephone, leaving the third — staffing the Cambodian station — to look up at us from a computer screen.

A professional smile before, “May I help you?”

I said, “We’d like to see Mr. Nuzzo, please.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“No,” I showed her my ID, “but he’ll want to see us nonetheless.”

The smile wavered, but she took my license holder in one hand while she hit a number on the telephone pad with her other. Swinging in the swivel chair away from me, she spoke softly into the receiver, then nodded and turned back. “That door.”

There were only two at the back of the reception area, and one had the familiar symbol for a unisex restroom. Karlsdottir followed me to the second, and I knocked just as its handle turned.

The door swung inward, showing a background of manilla files stacked in teetering towers on the floor and against two walls. The short man looking up at me was about forty, with black hair beating a retreat above his temples, leaving a little tuft of wayward strands at the crown and a moat of scalp around it. Nuzzo wore a dress shirt and suit pants, but no tie, and his belly sagged over his belt. In his hand he had a cell phone.

“What’s this all about?”

“Sorry,” I said. “You on a call?”

He looked down at the cellular. “No, the damned thing’s not working. Won’t even tell time.”

I stuck out my hand. “John Cuddy.”

He shook it without obvious enthusiasm. “Michael Nuzzo.”

“And this is my client, Ms. Freydis Karlsdottir.”

He seemed to appraise the tall woman whose shadow loomed over him. “Well, come on in.”

Nuzzo had to move another pile of files from one of his own client chairs to give both of us places to sit. As we did, he moved around his desk and dropped the useless cellular on top of it. “What can I do for you?”

“We’re looking for a friend of Ms. Karlsdottir’s father.”

“What makes you think I know him?”

“Him,” not “this person” or other ambiguity. “You represent the man on a workers’ compensation claim.”

“Hey,” gesturing toward the files, “you got any idea how many comp cases I do a year?”

It seemed a bit of a non sequitur, but I’ve always felt you learn more by letting attorneys in any speciality talk. “You want to tell us?”

Nuzzo gave me a sour look. “When I got out of law school fifteen years ago, you could make a good living off comp. Hell, in ‘ninety-one, there were over forty thousand claims filed with the Commonwealth statewide. Then Governor Willie may-he-burn-in-hell Weld, a blueblood who never did manual labor a single day in his life, got the legislature to cut benefits from sixty-seven percent of the weekly wage to sixty, and the benefit period from five years down to three. And now there’s less than half as many claims filed as back in ‘ninety-one.”

Karlsdottir broke in with the question I was about to ask. “But you must keep a list of all workers you help and the place they live, yes?”

Nuzzo stared at her. “Confidential.”

That seemed a little overprotective, since we’d already told him we knew he represented our boy. “Hogni Ragnarsson.”

The lawyer didn’t flinch or even squint at the unusual name. “Confidential.”

Karlsdottir leaned forward in her chair. “I have from my father an inheritance for Hogni.”

Nuzzo perked up. “Inheritance?”

I said, “The reason we’re trying to find Mr. Ragnarsson.”

“Well—” a pursing of the lips — “you could make out a check to me, and I could pass it on to him.”

“If you represent the man,” I said.

Nuzzo shot me another sour look.

Karlsdottir shook her head. “I must give this to Hogni for my family. It is a matter of honor.”

Nuzzo stood up. “Then I guess this conference is over.”

My client started to speak, but I squelched her by rising also. “Thanks for your time.”

“Don’t mention it.”

As we left his office, I put a finger to my lips so that Karlsdottir would hold her peace. On our way past the Cambodia desk, I thanked the woman while plucking one of Nuzzo’s business cards from its plastic crib.

Out on the sidewalk, Karlsdottir tugged on my coat sleeve. “John Francis, why did you not—”

I motioned her to move with me beyond the angles of sight allowed by the picture windows. Then I took out my cell phone and dialed that buddy of mine at Verizon again while crossing the street toward the Prelude.

“Who do you call?”

I shook my head as I heard my friend pick up. “It’s John Cuddy.”

“Twice in one day?” came back from a transmitting tower somewhere.

“Another favor, yeah. Right about now, there’s a call going out on—” I glanced down at Nuzzo’s card and read off the ten-digit office number — “and I need to know the address it’s going to.”

“Cuddy, you make a better enemy than a friend.”

“I’ll wait patiently.”

As I did, we reached my car, and Freydis Karlsdottir treated me to her beaming smile.

5

It took us less than five minutes to reach the address, also in Eastie, that my friend gave me. The number belonged to the pay phone in a rooming house, one that had seen better days, that we were pulling up outside now.

“Hogni is like me,” said Karlsdottir, giving another solemn nod. “He goes to the professional most close to him.”

I set the parking brake as my client said, “Please, to open the boot?”

As we both moved around to the back of the car, Karlsdottir added, “John Francis, already you have been such a good guide to me. I should see Hogni alone, yes?”

I keyed the lid, but she reached in before I could help her take the wooden case out. “Hey, Freydis, we’ve come this far together, I’d like to meet the guy.”

Karlsdottir clutched the case to her chest, nodding uncertainly now.

We began walking up the path to the rooming house’s front door. About halfway there, it flew open, and a tall, redheaded man burst onto the stoop, looking down at the steps and limping down them, too, with a duffel bag in his left hand. The door — maybe on a spring — slammed behind him as he hit the path and looked up to see us.

And to freeze.

Which is when I found myself on my knees, registering that I’d been struck over my right ear, the pain expanding geometrically through my skull. As I lost even that precarious balance and pitched forward, I managed to get my palms out in a modified push-up to break the rest of the fall, ending up on all fours and low to the ground.

Karlsdottir’s voice above me said, “John Francis, I am so sorry.”

The redheaded man yelled her first name, then a string of what I guessed to be Icelandic.

With that, Karlsdottir strode around and in front of me, tossing a short, broad sword toward his feet and brandishing an axe on a short handle with a spear point at its business end.

In English, “cutlass” and “halberd.”

Karlsdottir yelled back at Ragnarsson, “Hogni,” and then her own indecipherable statement.

He dropped the duffel bag, but made no move for the sword, instead limping backward with his hands up in “stop” signs and baying in Icelandic.

She advanced on him in a herringbone pattern, first angling left, then right, the halberd held with both hands like a batter in baseball stalking a pitcher who’d just plunked him at the plate.

Ragnarsson, cringing and babbling now, tripped over the last step of the stoop and fell backward, his head nearly at the closed door, crying out in pain but also, I thought, pleading.

It did him no good.

Karlsdottir arrived over him and brought the axe down as if she was felling a horizontal tree, the blade, on impact, making a sickening thock as Ragnarsson fell silent.

I closed my eyes, thinking I’d just witnessed an example of what “smote” means.

When I opened my eyes again, Karlsdottir was kneeling in front of me, her hands empty, but Ragnarsson’s blood spattered over them as well as over her face and clothes.

“Freydis...?”

“John Francis, true I am sorry. But Hogni in Iceland did rape on my young sister while he was to be caring for her in his house, as I was caring for my father in ours. My sister is in mental hospital forever from the attack of Hogni, yet the courts ordered him to jail for no time. And so he comes here, to escape me.” Karlsdottir’s eyes drifed northeastward. “I promise to my father as he dies I will take blood vengeance for my sister, because I am the only one of our family who can do just so.”

I shook my head, the consequent pain nearly blocking my words. “But the inheritance...?”

Freydis Karlsdottir’s bleak smile. “In our tradition, inheritance and vengeance are two sides of the same road, John Francis.”

I think I said, “A matter of honor,” just before blacking out.