The Stingray Shuffle

20

Spider came back to the Sapphire Room after storming out that night. He always came back.

Preston promised not to do the one-armed gag anymore. He always lied.

The Sapphire Room was the Devil’s Island of lounge acts. The gang wanted out. They all had the same agent, and they complained every chance. On a Saturday night in September, they got the phone call. Their agent had come through with an ambitious schedule of engagements cutting clear across the country from the desert southwest to the northeast industrial corridor. The itinerary came over the fax at the Gold Dust Motel.

“These places look worse than the Sapphire Room!” said Spider. They called their agent.

He advised patience. This was résumé-building time. They needed to get some polish from the road, put together recommendations and audition tapes. And if all went well… the agent told them what he had in mind next.

“Shit,” said Preston. “What are we waiting for?”

They hit the highway in Spider’s brown DeVille with bad suspension, pulling a U-Haul, dragging the trailer chain and making sparks. It was tight quarters. Spider, Andy, Saul, Preston, Frankie and Bad Company, shoulder to shoulder in blue tuxedos. They were surprised to discover they actually liked the road. It got in their blood: the gas stations and the greasy spoons and the greasier motels with The Paper Strip of Total Confidence across the toilet seat. They worked the circuit of small hotel bars in second-shelf cities bypassed by the big acts. No interstate travel. Just two lanes across America. The big, open sky and rolling plateaus and tumbleweeds across Arizona and New Mexico, putting in a lot of car time. Preston kept them going with hypnosis stories.

“There was this guy in Switzerland back in the eighteen hundreds who used to hypnotize his wife into becoming completely rigid. And he would set up two chairs and lay her on her back, head on one chair, feet on the other, nothing underneath…”

“I’ve seen that one,” said Andy.

“It gets better,” said Preston. “This guy put concrete blocks on her stomach and invited people from the audience to smash them with sledgehammers.”

“I know what’s coming,” said Spider. “She came out of the trance at the crucial moment?”

“Worse,” said Preston. “One of the volunteers from the audience — he misses the block completely. Kills her.”

“That’s fucked up,” said Spider, lighting a cigarette.

“Still a fun story,” said Preston.

More miles. Texaco road maps, flat tires, bad coffee, farts. But things were looking up, moods improving. They were seeing their country. And they were getting better. Acts began to sharpen during the night-in-night-out lounge march east, Tempe, Tucson, Tombstone. “Any cliff dwellers in the audience tonight? I got a joke for you…” Albuquerque, Carlsbad, Roswell, Lubbock, Abilene, the landscape slowly transforming, cattle ranches and oil derricks replacing the mesas and buttes and UFO people. San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, the Alamo Room, the Lone Star Supper Club, the downtown Galveston Skate-O-Rama, which they would be discussing with their agent.

“Here’s a good one,” said Preston. “This is what got me interested in hypnosis in the first place, and it’s definitely true, completely documented. All the scholars know the details. In the late 1800s, another hypnotist in Europe had regularly been hypnotizing an assistant for stage demonstrations. He usually instructed her mind to leave her body and enter another hypnotized subject, in order to cure ailments. Then she’d leave that person’s body and take the ailment with her.”

“Did it work?”

“The medical part is hocus-pocus, but the power of suggestion is very real. One night, the guy got sloppy or something and instead of telling her mind to leave her body, he told her soul to leave.”

“What happened?”

“Heart attack. Died.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit!”

“We only find it amazing because we’re cynical Americans. We’ve never really accepted hypnosis over here,” said Preston. “The French know all about this.”

“The French?”

“If it can be used for sex, the French are all over it. A hundred years ago, stage hypnotists were screwing everything that moved in Paris. It got out of control. Everybody knew what was going on. The subject dominated French publishing. De Maupassant wrote about it. So did Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers. Then, in 1894, the same year that assistant got killed onstage, George du Maurier kicked the door wide open with his international best-selling novel Trilby, featuring the cowardly-cruel villain Svengali, who exploits his subjects.”

“A hypnotist who exploits his subject?” said Spider. “What a shock.”

Onward, turning north, heavier coats, autumn leaves changing. Knoxville, Lexington, Akron, Wilkes-Barre, Schenectady. The regional accents and politics morphing, but not the clubs, which even had the same names, repeating over and over in a neon Möbius strip: the Flamingo, the Satin Club, the Stardust Room, the Horseshoe Lounge, Fast Eddie’s, the Sands, the Surf, the Algiers, the Copa, the Aladdin, the Riviera, the Flamingo…These were the good times, barnstorming Vegas Nation, laughter again filling their lives, even if it was at someone’s expense from another hypnosis prank. None of them would admit it, but they genuinely began enjoying hanging out together, encouraging each other, going to movies at old Main Street theaters. They went to see Saving Private Ryan in Bridgeport and Preston said asparagus, and Frankie Chan went up to the screen and made shadow puppets during the beach landing, and they all got chased down the street.

With such a heavy schedule, it was bound to happen. Casualties. In Poughkeepsie, they lost Saul Horowitz and his vaudeville tribute to varicose veins, replacing him with Dee Dee Lowenstein “as Carmen Miranda.” Then, in the Tango Room in Scranton, Bad Company was served a footlocker of lawsuits for trademark infringement.

But they were professionals now, no looking back, pressing forward, toward the final prize. The odometer turned over. Spider dialed their agent in New York. “When do we get the replacement musical act for Bad Company?…But they were our anchor on the marquee…. You said to be patient last time….”

The DeVille pulled into their Thursday-night engagement.

Dee Dee Lowenstein finished her Carmen Miranda set. She returned to the corner booth in the restaurant and set her fruit hat on the table.

Spider lit her cigarette. “How’d it go?”

She exhaled. “Fuckin’ morgue.”

Frankie reached for her hat. “Can I have a banana?”

“No, you can’t have a banana! What are you, fuckin’ simple?”

“But you got a whole bunch.”

She pointed at his hand. “Move it or lose it!”

A stranger approached the table wearing a tuxedo and carrying a small musical case. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and read something.

“Can we help you?” asked Andy.

“I’m supposed to meet some people. I’m not sure I have the right place.” He reread the piece of paper.

Andy reached. “Let me see that.”

Spider finished his juggling set and came back to the table.

“How’d it go?”

“Fuckin’ granite. Gimme a cigarette.”

Andy handed the paper back to the new guy. “Yep, you’re in the right place. What’s your name?”

“Bob. Bob Kowolski.”

Andy motioned back and forth. “Bob — the gang…. The gang — Bob.”

“What’s your act, Bob?”

Bob told them.

Frankie lit a cigarette. “Better than nothing.”

The emcee came up to the table and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What’s going on here? We got an empty stage.”

Spider pointed at the new guy. “Looks like you’re up, Bob. Cherry-poppin’ time. Break a leg.”

Bob hurried off with his musical case.

Spider chain-lit a Viceroy. “I didn’t think it was possible, but Bob may just make us long for the days of Bad Company.”

Bob climbed onstage and pulled a stool up to the microphone.

The emcee motioned for a soft spotlight. “Ladies and gentlemen, Caesars Palace of Hoboken is proud to present Steppenwolf!”

Bob leaned to the microphone. “Get your motor runnin’!…” He began playing the pan flute.

A cell phone rang in the corner booth. Spider answered. He mostly listened. He hung up.

“Who was it?” asked Preston.

“Our agent.”

“Jesus, Spider, you’re white as a sheet!”

“That was the call we’ve been waiting for our entire lives.”

“What call?”

“We’ve made it. No more playing dumps like this. We’re going right to the very top.”

“You don’t mean…”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

21

“They’re in a pink Cadillac, for Chrissake!” Ivan yelled into his cell phone. “How hard can it be to find?…Shut up! That was rhetorical!…Look, here’s what you’re going to do. Tell all your hookers and pimps on US 1 to keep their eyes open for a pink Eldorado. They’re out there twenty-four hours anyway. If the Caddy ends up anywhere on US 1 from West Palm to Miami, at least a dozen of your people will see it…. What do you mean, how do I know they’ll end up on US 1? They’re scumbags!”

A metal clanging sound.

Eyelids fluttered in morning sunlight.

Clang, clang.

Lenny sat up in the rigid motel bed and looked around.

Serge was at the sink, shaving, singing Estefan, “…I live for lov-in’ you. Ooooooo, la, la, la — la, la, la, la…”

Lenny rubbed his eyes and went over to the window. He pulled back a burlap curtain. Cars raced by on US 1, past a big sign out front, SAHARA MOTEL. Someone had thrown a brick through the camel. He looked across the bent fence at the source of the clanging, the body shop next door.

“Where are we?”

“Riviera Beach,” said Serge. “My hometown.”

Clang, clang.

“This motel is on the skid,” said Lenny.

“I know. Isn’t it great?” Serge pointed at a wall. “And they still have the original cheesy beach painting from the sixties.” Serge grabbed one side of the frame and began pulling.

“You’re stealing the painting?”

“Yes, this is The Thomas Crown Affair,” said Serge. “Why do they have to bolt these things to the wall?”

Lenny came over and tugged from the other side, and the painting came down along with two drywall anchors and a tiny cloud of plaster dust. Serge reached in his shaving kit and pulled out a travel squeeze bottle and began squirting red liquid on the bedsheets.

“What’s that?” asked Lenny.

“Chicken blood.” Serge squirted the pillowcases and splattered the wall.

“It looks like someone got hacked up in here.”

“Exactly,” said Serge. “Takes their mind off the missing painting. Works every time.” He stuck the bottle back in his shaving kit. “C’mon, we have to check out.”

“I think I need a shower,” said Lenny. “I can smell myself.”

“No time,” said Serge. “We have to get to the hideout.”

“The what?”

“The hideout. We need to lay low until the heat is off.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re on US 1 and this is a very distinctive car. The network of hookers and other human cockroaches has no doubt already been alerted to be on the lookout.”

“So that’s why you covered it with that thing.”

Serge tucked the painting under an arm and picked up the silver briefcase. “Let’s rock.”

They went around behind the motel. Lenny pulled the beige tarp off the Cadillac, and they got in.

Serge made a quick left onto North Thirty-seventh Street and pulled up to the curb in front of a small clapboard house, number 28.

“Is this the hideout?”

“I wish!” said Serge, snapping pictures without getting out of the car. He lowered the camera to change the f-stop. “No, this is Burt Reynolds’s childhood home. His dad was police chief here, and the family used to have a restaurant on Blue Heron Boulevard by the old drawbridge.”

Lenny fired up the morning fat one. “Why are you so into Burt, anyway?”

“Because we’re homeboys. I grew up on Thirty-fifth Street, two blocks over.”

“Far out.”

“Think of it,” said Serge. “Just two streets. Do you have any idea what that means?”

Lenny shook his head.

Serge held his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “It means I was this close to being in Boogie Nights.”

A hooker approached the car. “Hey, sugar.”

Serge pointed at the house. “What time’s the next tour?”

“The what?”

He snapped a couple more quick pictures and looked around the yard, then back at the hooker. “Where’s the historic marker? They’ve put one up, haven’t they? Don’t tell me someone stole it!…Yeah, that has to be it. There’s no way they’d let Burt’s place go unmarked…” He raised the camera again. Click, click.

“Wait,” said the hooker, slowly backing away from the convertible. “This is the pink Cadillac. This is the car!” She quickly pulled a cell phone from her leopard purse.

“We’ve been made!” said Serge, starting up the car. “To the hideout!”

22

Well after midnight on the island of Palm Beach. The streets were empty; the people with five-hundred-dollar sweaters tied around their necks had all gone home. Waiters mopped and turned chairs upside down on the tables at Ta-boo, a popular piano bar on Worth Avenue.

It had been quiet outside, but now the windows shook, and the help looked up to see a purple Jeep Wrangler fly by with a pulsating stereo producing the kind of sound used by surgical instruments to pulverize gallstones. The Jeep continued west, past the showroom windows, Cartier, Tiffany, Gucci, Saks, ten-thousand-dollar purses, framed autographs of Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson, handcrafted figurines depicting the Boer War. Past Via De Mario, Via Roma, Via Parigi, Renato’s and the Everglades Club. Across Hibiscus Avenue, weaving erratically over the yellow center line. But the car was local, and the attention of the police was directed elsewhere, outward, defending the social perimeter from the unwashed mainland people.

The Jeep rounded the corner at South Lake and turned up a winding slab driveway to a private waterfront residence inspired by the Acropolis. The Jeep’s doors opened; two men in loafers got out. Cameron and Brandon, home for semester break from the Ivy League. They had started vacation as a group of four frat brothers, but the other two had been beaten to pâté in a Miami Beach traffic misunderstanding and were respectively undergoing orthodontic surgery and groin reconstruction.

“Don’t forget the beer.”

“Whoops.”

They were fairly good-sized boys, 215 pounds each at the start of the year, now 240 with the anabolics — stars of the sculling team and Greek intramural touch football. Everything was going their way. They had just made it home without a DUI, and that called for a celebration. Time to get out the speedboat.

According to the manufacturer’s literature, the thirty-three-foot Donzi Daytona can reach speeds of a hundred miles an hour, but it was only going sixty when it ran over the pelicans in the darkness under the Royal Palm Bridge and spread a wide wake across the Intracoastal Waterway.

“Do you think we’re going too fast?” Brandon yelled over the wind and spray.

“What?” yelled Cameron. “Go faster?”

He pushed the throttle forward and headed for the next bridge, Flagler Memorial. The draw spans were up and a yacht was coming the other way.

“There’s a bunch of cars stopped up there,” said Brandon. “Can you do a rooster tail?”

“In my sleep,” said Cameron. He slowed and hit a switch, raising the pitch of the propellers, and a small geyser of water shot a couple feet into the air behind the boat.

“This is going to be so great!”

They didn’t go under the draw spans, instead picking a solid span three to the left. When they came out the other side, Cameron slammed the throttle all the way forward, and a giant rooster tail shot thirty feet in the air, up onto the bridge. Ninety gallons of salt water flooded the interior of a convertible BMW, killing the electronics and the engine.

Cameron and Brandon looked back and saw the Beemer’s headlights flicker and go out. They were still giggling as they idled the yellow-and-white boat up to the seawall just past the bridge. That was the thing about Palm Beach — all the best off-limits places were wired tighter than Fort Knox. You couldn’t get near them from the street. A different story from the water.

The brothers only banged the prow of their father’s boat into the seawall four times as they moored and climbed over the wall into the backyard.

“You remember the beer?”

“Yep. You remember the spray paint?”

Brandon rattled the can in his right hand.

Cameron pointed. “There it is!”

“This is going to be so excellent!”

It was a huge yard, and their target of opportunity stood alone in the middle. They stumbled across the grass and giggled some more and began spray-painting something ungrammatical about a rival fraternity sucking donkey dicks.

They finished and stood there looking at the dripping paint. They felt empty. That’s it? This is as fun as it gets? They stood there some more, in case it would change, drinking and smoking, but no luck. Cameron got an idea. What if they broke something? That usually felt good.

They climbed some stairs and smashed a pane in the back door. They found their way around inside from the moonlight coming through the windows. Brandon put a cigarette out on a century-old sofa. “What’s a train car doing out here anyway?”

“Do I look like a fucking conductor? Here — help me break this.”

Legs snapped crisply off the antique divan.

“Let’s go get the baseball bats,” said Cameron.

“Good idea.”

They ran back to the boat. The brothers always took baseball bats with them in case they came across someone in traffic who needed a licking, but they also brought gloves and balls, on the advice of their attorney father, to disprove premeditation.

They found some more Budweiser and decided it would be a good idea to bring that, too. Soon they had returned with the bats and beer, ready for a successful future.

“Hold it,” Cameron said in the middle of the train car. He stopped and peed on something.

“That was great! Watch this!” Brandon dropped his trousers.

“You’re going to pinch a loaf?”

Brandon nodded.

“Radical!”

Brandon finished his business and pulled up his pants.

Cameron raised the baseball bat and smashed the arm off an Elizabethan chair.

“Let me see that.” Brandon shattered the cherry top of a library cabinet, gold-edged books spilling. The end of the bat got stuck in the hole through the busted-up wood. He braced his left arm against the cabinet to free the bat. “Hold it a second. There’s something shiny in here.”

He swept the rest of the books off the shelves, and Cameron helped him pull the shelving out. In back was a silver briefcase. They opened it up.

“Holy God!”

They picked up the briefcase and headed out of the train car.

Brandon spun around. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“I heard something.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“Up there.”

They were in the sleeping compartment. The top bunk was down, holding a big pile of blankets.

“I saw it move!”

“I did, too!”

The blankets shifted some more and a sleepy head finally poked out and looked around.

“Dig it!” said Cameron. “Some old bum is sleeping in here!”

“I hate bums!”

“Get a job, bum!”

Movement in a second bunk. Another head poked out. Then a whisper: “Serge, someone’s in the hideout.”

“Look! There’s two of ’em!” said Brandon.

“You know,” said Cameron, picking up his baseball bat and slapping it in an open palm, “they’re trespassing.”

“That’s right,” nodded Brandon, slapping his own bat in his hand.

“We’re going to teach you bums a lesson!”

Serge raised his hand. “Pardon me, but I think you’re making a mistake—”

“Shut up, bum! If you don’t have any respect for yourself, why should we?”

“Yeah! You make us want to puke with your laziness, your begging on street corners…”

“Your rude, unambitious, filthy lifestyle and your disgusting habits…”

“Time out,” said Serge, sitting up and making a T with his hands. He pointed out in the hall. “Which one of you brought the dog in here?”

“What dog? There is no dog,” said Brandon.

“But there’s a big pile of shit on the floor,” said Serge.

“Oh, that’s Brandon’s,” said Cameron.

“Will you shut up, bum?” yelled Brandon. “You interrupted me! Now I can’t even remember what I was saying!”

“You were talking about my disgusting habits,” said Serge.

“Right!” said Brandon. “You sicken us! We don’t want your kind near our island!”

“We’re going to make sure you two think twice before you ever break in here again!”

The pair advanced and raised their bats.

“Don’t even think of asking for mercy, bum!”

They stopped. Brandon tapped Cameron. “Is that a gun in his hand?”

Serge had their undivided attention. Brandon’s and Cameron’s eyes were open as far as they would go, their mouths taped. They were tied to straight-back chairs, wondering what all the pails were for — dozens of open buckets around their feet, filled with some kind of granular material.

Serge sat on the other side of the room, legs crossed, reading a copy of Historic Railroader Monthly. He was a lot more clean-shaven and fit — and armed — than they had expected a bum to be.

Serge looked up. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

They nodded quickly and hard.

“And that lesson,” said Serge, “is that you never really know whom you’re fucking with, so best not to do it at all.”

More nodding in agreement.

Serge patted the briefcase on the floor next to his chair. “And thanks for returning this. The little sucker almost got away from me again.”

He got up and walked over to one of the brick walls, gently touching the surface. “This is a pretty historic place itself. We’re out by the switching yards near the old West Palm depot. The mainland — I’m the local now. This used to be a major warehouse until they boarded it up twenty-five years ago. This room here was a giant humidor used to store cases of cigars that were boxcarred over from the factories in Tampa.” Serge ran his fingers along the doorframe. “It’s held up pretty well. The seals are in good shape. Except we’re not going to keep anything humid. We’re going to do the opposite.”

He picked up one of the granule-filled pails so they could read the side: “DampRid.”

“This stuff is incredible,” said Serge. “Sucks all the damn moisture out of the air. I mean all. If you reside in Florida, you can’t live without it. Until I found this stuff, my shower curtains were mildewed, the cabinets full of mold, all my album covers warped. But no more!”

An empty five-gallon bucket sat near the door. Serge picked up one of the smaller pails of granules and tipped it slowly so the water that had collected in the bottom trickled into the larger bucket. He repeated the process until he had drained all the pails. Then he grunted as he hoisted the big bucket.

“That sure is heavy,” said Serge. “I’ll be right back.”

He dumped the bucket outside the room, then crossed the warehouse and opened a jimmied door to the street. Lenny was under a broken awning, toking a roach down to his fingertips.

“Hi, Serge.”

“How’s lookout duty?”

“No problem except I’m almost out of dope, so I’m trying to conserve.”

“That’s being responsible.” He went back inside.

Serge repeated the pail-emptying exercise a dozen more times over the next twenty-four hours. He also drank two entire eighteen-packs of Perrier. Cameron and Brandon stared in terror as Serge knocked back another bottle and thumbed through his magazine. He set the empty green container on the floor. “You’re looking at me like, ‘Is he crazy or something, drinking so much water?’ No way — you have to make sure you take a lot of fluids in here or you’ll dehydrate, and you don’t want to die like that. It has a way of creeping up on you. Did you know that toward the end, you cry tears of blood?…Hey look! Here’s our train car!” — pointing at a photo in his magazine. “The one we were in last night. It’s called the Rambler. Bet you’re glad you got a chance to see it, huh?”

Serge got up and paced like a cheetah. “Actually, we’re lucky to have that car at all. In 1935, the Florida East Coast Railway sold it off to the Georgia Northern Railroad, along with a bunch of other stuff. Henry would have turned in his grave. They used the Rambler a few years and sold it again, and it eventually disappeared. When people finally realized its historic value, it was nowhere to be found.”

Serge stopped walking and fanned himself with the magazine.

“Damn, it’s hot in here!” Then he smiled. “But it’s a dry heat.”

By the fourth day, there wasn’t any more movement from the two young men. They were technically still alive, able to hear and understand, but that was about it. Serge had moved them up to the top of the warehouse, out on the flat pebble roof, where they now lay naked on top of two ultrareflective silver survival blankets. Serge walked to the edge of the roof and looked down; Lenny was still on lookout, helping a bag lady cross the street. Serge went back to his captives.

“You didn’t actually think I was going to let you die of dehydration, did you?” said Serge, wearing mirror sunglasses and a Miami Dolphins umbrella-hat. “I’m not that kind of guy.”

He sat back down in his lawn chair and tried to find something good on his beach radio. “WPOM ruled when I was in puberty here, Alice Cooper, ‘School’s Out for Summer’ and everything, right up until someone got the bright idea to make it all-news…. WPOM, get it? West Palm? Damn, that’s clever!”

Serge had a little cooler and a canvas beach bag beside his chair. He reached in the bag and pulled out a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic, squirting it on his arms and rubbing. “The key isn’t just the sun-protection factor, but also how well it blocks UV. The opposite would be, say, coconut cooking oil, which would accelerate the sun’s effects….”

The two men listened intently, their nostrils filling with the aroma of coconuts coming off their chests.

“You know, I never finished telling you about the Rambler. Sorry for leaving you in suspense. When we last left our tale, it had vanished from the face of the earth. Then, in 1959, they tracked it down miles from the rails, out on a Virginia farm where it was up on blocks, beaten all to hell, being used ironically enough as a tenant farmer’s house. Must have been a tear-jerking sight, like when those kids found E.T. near death by that creek. Years later, they located the original wheel trucks in Tennessee — talk about your detective work! — and with a lot of time and TLC, they restored it to original condition. So I’m sure you can understand my emotional reaction to all the vandalism, banging my head like that on the side of the car when I saw the graffiti. You wouldn’t have any idea who would do such an inconsiderate thing? It would have to be someone with a really low IQ, judging by the syntax and the reference to Equus asinus genitalia….”

Serge glanced at his wristwatch. “Whoa! I almost forgot. Time to add more salt….”

He picked up an extra-large blue Morton’s canister, walked over to the men and began sprinkling.

“You know what they say: ‘When it rains, it pours.’”

The medical examiner stepped out of the autopsy room and removed his surgical mask.

The homicide investigator got up from a chair in the hall and walked over. “What the hell happened to those two poor kids? The bodies must not have weighed an ounce over eighty pounds.”

“Seventy,” said the examiner.

“I had six cops lose their lunches back there when we found ’em,” said the detective. “What kind of a monster…?”

The examiner pulled off his latex gloves. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I always knew it was theoretically possible, but I’ve never actually heard of it being done to humans.”

“Are you gonna tell me or what?”

“Someone literally turned them into jerky.”

23

A white Mercedes Z310 cruised down US 1. Ivan was driving, pulling sandwiches from a fast-food sack in his lap. “Who had the cheddar melt?”

“Here,” said Alexi.

Vladimir leaned forward from the backseat and tapped Ivan on the shoulder. “Did you know there’s a disproportionate incidence of autoerotic strangulation among hockey players?”

“What?”

Vladimir sat back in his seat. “If you pass out, there’s still a chance you can come back to life, right?”

Ivan glanced at Vladimir in the rearview, then back at the road. “Who the fuck did they send me this time?”

A hand with a sandwich came up from the backseat, next to Ivan’s head. “I asked for no pickles.”

Ivan slapped it away. “Just keep your eyes peeled for a pink Cadillac. A pimp saw them pulling out of the old train depot.”

Serge was driving south on US 1 again. Actually Lenny was driving; Serge was just sitting in the driver’s seat.

“My arm’s getting tired,” said Lenny, steering from the passenger side.

“Just a few more pictures,” said Serge. “I can’t believe how much has changed. The Dairy Belle’s still here, but not much else.” Click, click.

Lenny tried lighting a joint with his free hand but couldn’t get it going. The car began swerving.

Serge lowered his camera and looked over. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“What?” said Lenny, taking the joint out of his mouth.

“You’re driving, for Chrissake!”

They ran a yellow light, followed by a white Mercedes.

“Where are they going?” asked Dmitri.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Ivan.

“They keep changing lanes for no reason.”

“Classic evasion tactic,” said Ivan.

“Woah!” said Lenny. “I almost hit that bus. I think I’m too high to drive.”

Dmitri snapped pictures of the Cadillac with a spy camera. “Did you see how he angled around that bus?”

Ivan nodded. “Must have been trained by Israelis.”

Lenny reached under the seat and yanked a Bud off a plastic ring. “I need a beer to level out.”

“That’s where Indian River Citrus used to be,” said Serge. Click, click, click.

“Those two poor bastards back at the depot,” said Lenny, shaking his head. “On one hand, I feel sorry for them. On the other, we almost lost the briefcase. Did you really have to kill them like that?”

“They handled the briefcase.”

“But only for a second.”

“I told you it was cursed.”

Lenny took a swig of beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and looked up at the sky. “What a great place to live!” The car swerved.

Click, click, click. “That’s where the Publix used to be, and that’s where they tore down the bazaar tower, and they closed Spanish Courts over there and…oh my God!…”

“What is it?”

Serge focused the camera. Click, click. “They bulldozed the porn theater!”

“You’re nostalgic about a porno joint?”

“No, but it used to be the regular Main Street theater back in the sixties when I was going to parochial school. That’s where the nuns took us to see The Sound of Music when it first came out.”

“You were taught by nuns?” said Lenny.

Serge nodded. “That’s how I became an altar boy.”

“Wait a minute. Hold the fuckin’ phone. You were an altar boy?”

“Good one, too. Right up until I was defrocked.” Click, click, click. “There was absolutely no reason for them to expel me from the program like that.”

“This is explaining a whole lot,” said Lenny. “Now it’s all starting to make sense.”

“It was Easter Mass, and we were wearing all those heavy vestments, the cassock and surplice. There were extra stage lights, and the place was packed — really hot. I had never fainted before, so I didn’t know what it felt like. I’m kneeling on the side of the altar ready to ring the bells and everything starts getting dim, and I’m wobbling around on my knees like a duckpin. Then it goes completely black. I’m right on the verge of fainting but for some reason I didn’t. The conditions were just perfect so I remained on that cusp, semiconscious and upright, but lights out. I’m just a kid — what do I know? I think some kind of miracle is going on. I feel around the ground and push myself to my feet and face the congregation. They say the priest was in the middle of the consecration when I raised my arms in the air and yelled, ‘I’m blind! God has made me blind!’ Then I fainted in the Easter lilies.”

The Cadillac sailed through the intersection at Okeechobee Boulevard, then Southern, Lake Worth, Lantana, Hypoluxo, down into Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Deerfield Beach.

“Lenny, you’re from this area. Know any good safe houses?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because I’d like to get this car off the road. It’s probably not a hot idea to keep driving it.”

“Didn’t you say the people were looking for us on US 1?” asked Lenny.

Serge nodded.

“Then why don’t we just switch to a different road?”

“Because I love US 1, and besides, most of the people on lookout are really, really, really fucked up. They can probably correctly make out the color pink, but after that it gets dicey. We drive by them, and maybe they see a Cadillac, maybe they see a giant laughing vulva with whitewall tires.”

Lenny unwrapped a Twinkie. “I don’t see what’s so great about this road.”

“It’s tradition. This is the same road that Magluta took when he was on the run.”

“Who?”

“Magluta, as in the Falcon and Magluta. Augusto ‘Willie’ Falcon and Salvador ‘Sal’ Magluta, local boys made good. Went to Miami High and struck it rich in the coke biz, something like five hundred million dollars, took up speedboat racing before the feds closed in. Magluta jumped bail, and they finally found him right here along this stretch of road, driving a Lincoln Continental, wearing a wig and carrying twenty grand in cash and a fake passport. US 1 has all kinds of character like that.” Click, click, click, Serge snapping photos of condemned motels and discarded malt liquor bottles in piles the size of ancient shell mounds. “I’ll take this any day over the suburbs and your Bed Bath and Beyond.”

“What a horror show,” said Lenny.

“Out here on US 1, life is close to the skin. Anything can happen at any time.” Serge knelt backward in the driver’s seat and took pictures out the rear of the car. Click, click. “This is where the armored car thieves shot it out with the FBI, and the raccoon jumped off that garbage truck and crashed through the windshield of those tourists, and they found the tractor-trailer full of pirated stone crab claws, and the box of Tide detergent fell out the back of a van and split open and three hundred thousand dollars blew all over the place except the local residents told police it was only like eleven dollars.” Click, click. Serge lowered the camera. “Is that Mercedes following us?”

“Don’t fuck with me, man. I’m so high, everything’s following us.”

24

“Shit. That Mercedes is still behind us,” said Serge.

“This car’s getting too hot. Is that safe house you know any good?”

“One of the best,” said Lenny. “Not only that, but a quick phone and they’ll come pick us up, extract us from just about anything.”

“Can they be counted on?”

“Stone-solid. Used ’em dozens of times.”

“I’m impressed. Very good, Lenny…. Dump truck.”

“What?” Lenny looked up. “Woahhh!” He cut the wheel, narrowly missing the truck making a slow left turn, forcing Lenny to make his own hard left across several lanes of braking, blaring cars.

The traffic light turned red; a white Mercedes eased up and stopped at the intersection as the Cadillac disappeared around the corner.

Lenny stepped up to the concession stand. He turned to Serge. “Espresso?”

“Better not.”

“It’s good.”

“Okay.”

“Two espressos, please.”

“You say the safe house is nearby?”

“Real close, but they’re still not answering the phone.”

“Try again.”

Lenny dialed and listened. “I think I’m getting through.”

“Ask them to send the extraction team.”

Lenny nodded. He said a few words in the phone and closed it.

“Well?” asked Serge.

“They’re on their way.”

“That should give us time for a race. I love the races here!”

Serge and Lenny walked down a ramp and through the glassed-in lobby, lines of people at teller windows, the floor covered with torn paper stubs. A big funky sign on the wall, POMPANO BEACH HARNESS RACING.

“Let’s go out to the grandstand. We absolutely must go to the grandstand,” said Serge. “I love the people, the culture, the smell of the food, the insane betting strategy conversations. We have to go to the grandstand! It’s the only way!”

“What about the briefcase?” asked Lenny, glancing at Serge’s hand. “We don’t want to attract any trouble.”

“Don’t worry,” said Serge. “Not only will there not be trouble, but a parimutuel park is the one place where they want you to arrive with a briefcase full of money.”

Lenny looked around at the numerous other people scattered across the lobby with silver Halliburton briefcases — standard for carrying cash around Florida — each being graciously waited on by track staff.

“Good evening,” said a uniformed man, smiling at the briefcase, then at Serge and Lenny as he opened the door for them.

Serge smiled back. “We absolutely, positively must go to the grandstand.”

“I understand,” said the man.

A fresh night breeze caught them as they headed across the patio. “Forget the grandstand,” said Serge. “I just remembered I hate the fucking grandstand. We’re going all the way down to the railing, where you can see the little pieces of dirt flying off the hooves. We need to be as close to the horses as possible, breathing the same air.”

A dozen hard-core Type AAA personalities had already assembled along the railing when Serge and Lenny took their spot at the end. The starting gate filled up with horses pulling jockeys in small harness carriages.

“I want to place a bet,” said Lenny, opening his racing program. “Number eight sounds good.”

“What’s the name?” said Serge. “It’s all in the name.”

“Entry Withdrawn.”

“Sounds like a winner to me.”

Serge chugged his espresso. “Uh-oh, pole time. You’ll have to wait for the next race to bet.”

A bell rang, the gates flew open. “They’re off!”

Identical descriptions of an unusual pink Cadillac began to crop up in crime scene reports from Tampa to Cape Canaveral to Palm Beach. The all-points bulletin went out with a warning in tall letters: “Call for backup.”

A patrol officer was making routine afternoon rounds in a quadrant west of 95, south of Atlantic Boulevard. He swung through a parking lot on standard auto-burglary sweep. Something caught his eye in the third row. He called for backup.

Police were everywhere. Seven cruisers clustered around the pink car in Section D, Row 3, of the Pompano Beach harness track. Evidence handlers with gloves went through the convertible; other officers questioned the valets.

“Look, Ivan! There’s the Cadillac!” said Alexi.

“The place is crawling with cops!” said Dmitri.

“So it is,” said Ivan. He eased the Mercedes slowly past the end of Row 3, then turned in the VIP parking lot. Five men with bandaged feet got out.

The horses went into the first turn.

Serge was strangely quiet. Lenny noticed the empty, crumpled paper espresso cup clutched in his fist. “Are you okay?”

Serge shook himself vigorously like a dog coming in from the rain.

“What’s the matter?” asked Lenny.

“Can’t you smell it?”

“Smell what?”

“The air. It’s crackling with the electricity of memories.” Serge’s arms went up to the sky, his fingers wiggling like he was feeling two big tits. “It’s overwhelming. I’m not sure I can stand it.”

“You all right?”

“I feel like this every once in a while when I get hit with a memory bolt.”

“Memory bolt?”

“My folks used to come here in 1964. Each time I blink, for a microsecond I see the way it looked back then on the inside of my eyelids…”

Lenny nodded. “I’ve gotten acid like that.”

The horses went into the second turn.

“What triggers it?” asked Lenny.

“Espresso and déjà vu. Like a light afternoon rain at the beach, or the sound of lawn mowers on a hot Saturday morning in July, or just before sunset when I’m on the turnpike and I go through those fucking great tollbooths made of coral, or I’m driving back from Miami International on the Dolphin Expressway, and I pass the Orange Bowl and accelerate for that magical skyline, no longer in control, suddenly finding myself in this crazy interchange, then I’m flying south, faster and faster, up on the raised highway, looking out across the sea of coconut palms and orange roof tiles and crime lights, and I’m pulled down a ramp into the city, vibrant murals on the sides of ethnic corner groceries, billboards in Spanish, kids rolling tires up the sidewalk with sticks, radios playing, flowers blooming — and it’s too much beauty, both my eyes feeling like they’re having simultaneous orgasms, an aching inside because I want to consume it all at once, like Van Gogh in Kurosawa’s Dreams, and I race over the Rickenbacker, through the sea grapes out to Cape Florida, jumping from the car, running along the seawall and screaming out to sea: ‘Touch one splinter of Stiltsville and I’ll rip your carpetbagging nuts off!’ and then I’m usually asked to leave.”

The crowd roared as the horses came out of turn number three. A knot of five husky men hobbled through the harness track lobby.

“Keep your eye out for a silver briefcase,” said Ivan.

“There’s one!” said Dmitri.

“There’s another one over there!” said Alexi.

“And there’s another one!”

“Of course,” said Ivan. “We’re at a parimutuel facility. These guys are good.”

“Ivan! Down by the track!”

The horses rounded the fourth turn, into the homestretch.

Lenny had a two-handed grip on the back of Serge’s belt as he hung over the railing near the finish line. “C’mon, Entry Withdrawn!”

Five men with bandaged feet came out a door on the left side of the building and began moving toward the track. On the right side, up by the grandstands, police officers questioned members of the track’s staff, who pointed at the finish line.

“Whew! What a race!” Serge jumped down from the railing. He saw something out the corner of his eye. “When’s the extraction team due?”

Lenny checked his wristwatch. “Just a few more minutes.”

“Start walking for the exit, real casual.”

25

Ivan pointed across the spectator deck at the Pompano Beach harness track. “They’re heading back to the main building.”

“They’re not the only ones,” said Dmitri, looking over at the cops closing in on Serge and Lenny.

“We have to head them off,” said Ivan. “Walk quickly but don’t run. We still have the advantage. None of them has seen us.”

Serge and Lenny began moving faster as they approached the glass exit doors.

“Walk quickly but don’t run,” said Serge. “They don’t know we’ve seen them.”

Lenny checked his watch again. “The extraction team hasn’t had enough time. We’re not going to make it.”

Serge glanced furtively over his left shoulder. The cops had picked up the pace, too, walking as fast as possible, still trying to look nonchalant, approaching that critical moment when everyone chucks the charade and starts running and pulling guns.

From Serge’s right side, five men with bandaged feet hobbled as fast as they could.

“Now!” yelled Ivan. They broke into a hobbling sprint.

“Now!” yelled Serge. The pair made a run for it.

“Now!” yelled the police sergeant. The cops pulled guns and charged.

Serge and Lenny burst through the exit doors and ran out to the empty curb. “They’re not here yet!” yelled Lenny. Suddenly a black, windowless van skidded up in a fire zone. The sliding side door flew open; Serge and Lenny dove in. The van took off.

Five Russians ran out on the sidewalk, looking around, soon joined by panting police officers.

Ivan scanned the parking lot. No people, no movement…wait, over there. A black van slowly pulled out of the parking lot and disappeared around a corner toward the interstate.

“To the Mercedes!”

Lenny climbed forward into the van’s passenger seat. The driver was a large older woman with a poufy gray hairdo and a goiter. Lenny leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

“Thanks for picking us up, Mom.”

“You know I’m always happy to give you a ride home.”

“Mom?” said Serge. A Chihuahua bounced up from somewhere and landed standing in Serge’s lap, facing him. Serge jerked his head back. “What the—?”

The dog barked.

“That means Pepe likes you,” said Lenny.

“Who’s your friend?” asked the driver.

“That’s Serge,” said Lenny. “He’s…my new employer.”

Serge and the dog were having a staring contest.

“That’s nice.” The driver looked up in the rearview at Serge. “Thanks for giving Lenny a job. He’s a good boy. So what do you do? Work at the harness track?”

Lenny spoke preemptively. “No, we were just out for some fun today.”

The van accelerated down the middle lane of I-95.

“Lenny, you haven’t called for weeks, you haven’t shown up,” said his mom. “You know how worried I get.”

“Any mail?” asked Lenny.

“A little. I put it in your room.”

Serge looked up from the dog. “You live with your mother? You never mentioned anything.”

“I’ll explain later.”

“What’s to explain?” said Serge. “Either you live with your mom or you don’t.”

“Lenny, you’re not ashamed of me, are you?” asked the driver.

Lenny turned around. “Yeah, Serge, I, uh…I live with my mom. But only until I get a little older, you know, until I’m ready.”

“You’re forty-two,” said Serge.

Mom looked in the rearview again. “So what is it you do, Serge?”

“I run my own new-economy entrepreneurship. Involves a lot of driving.”

“Like traveling salesmen?” said Mom. She put on a blinker for an exit ramp. “Lenny, that explains why you were gone so long. You should have told me.”

Lenny leaned over and kissed her cheek again. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“I’m so proud of you.”

The van pulled up the driveway of a single-story concrete ranch house next to the interstate ramp. White, baby-blue trim. The lawn was overgrown, a big teardrop oil stain in the driveway. Three people and a dog headed up the walkway. Lenny’s mom unlocked the front door and they went inside. Serge looked around the living room filled with religious paintings, crucifixes, ceramic Madonnas, votive candles and a Ouija board.

“Serge, don’t waste your money on a hotel tonight,” said Mom. “You can stay in Lenny’s room.”

“Why, thank you, Mrs. Lippowicz,” said Serge. “Let’s see your room, Lenny.”

“Well, it’s not really my room room. I just use it for storage. I rarely stay here.”

“What are you talking about?” said his mother. “You stay here all the time.”

They headed down the hall. Serge stopped in the doorway. “Bunk beds?”

“Mind if I have the top?”

Serge set his briefcase on the dresser and walked over to the closet. “Let’s get started.”

“Get started what?”

“Checking out your stuff.”

“I still have most of it.”

Serge opened the closet door. “Wow, you’re not kidding.”

He started taking down boxes. Lenny lit a joint and went over to the window and exhaled outside, where a Mercedes had been parked a half block up the street for the last ten minutes.

Vladimir leaned over the backseat and pointed at the van in the driveway. “What are we waiting for?”

“I told you,” said Ivan. “We have to be patient. We can’t just rush in there like we usually do.”

“Why not? It’s just some old woman’s house.”

“That’s what a safe house is supposed to look like,” said Ivan. “The doors are probably steel-lined and booby-trapped. All kinds of sophisticated surveillance electronics.”

“I wonder what’s going on in there?” asked Vladimir.

“Probably some big strategy meeting,” said Ivan.

“My turn,” said Lenny, sitting cross-legged on the floor and drawing a card. “‘Remove wrenched ankle.’”

Bzzzzz.

“I’m tired of playing Operation,” said Serge.

“How about Hot Wheels?”

Lenny got out a shoebox of little cars and began laying tracks. Serge got out the Legos.

“What are you doing?” asked Lenny.

“Making the Brick Wall of Death,” said Serge. “Where’s your lighter fluid?”

“I don’t have any lighter fluid.”

“How can we play Hot Wheels without lighter fluid?”

Lenny’s mom sat in the living room reading the Enquirer. Lenny kept walking by at intervals.

Lenny held up a roll of aluminum foil. “Mom, can we use this?”

She looked up and nodded. Lenny headed back to the bedroom.

A minute later, Lenny held up a large cardboard box. “Can we use this?”

She nodded.

A minute later Lenny sprinted by in the background, then ran back to the bedroom with a fire extinguisher. Lenny’s mom put down her paper and went into the kitchen. She slipped on Jeff Gordon pot holders and opened the oven door. She set a ceramic serving dish on the table.

“Dinner’s ready!”

No answer.

She headed down the hall. “I said, dinner’s ready!”

Still no reply.

She stepped into the bedroom doorway. Nobody in the room. Just a big cardboard box in the middle of the floor. The box was covered with aluminum foil.

“I said, dinner’s ready!”

A voice from the box: “Mom! Shhhhh! We have to maintain radio blackout!”

“You can play later,” said Mrs. Lippowicz. “Food’s getting cold.”

The foil-lined top of the cardboard Gemini capsule flipped open, and Serge and Lenny stood up. They followed Mrs. Lippowicz into the kitchen.

“It’s hot, so don’t touch the dish.” She stuck two big serving spoons in the casserole.

Serge got up and held her chair.

“Why, thank you, Serge.”

Lenny began chowing. Serge tucked a napkin into his collar and cleared his throat. Lenny looked up. “Prayer,” Serge whispered.

“Sorry.” Lenny put down his fork, folded his hands and bowed his head.

“May I, Mrs. Lippowicz?” asked Serge.

“Of course. Thank you, Serge.” She turned to Lenny. “Your friend has such nice manners.”

Serge bowed his own head and closed his eyes. “God, please protect us from your followers. Amen.”

They began serving.

“Good prayer,” said Lenny.

Serge piled his plate. “It’s from a bumper sticker.” He took a bite. “This is delicious, Mrs. Lippowicz. You’re an incredible cook.”

“Thank you. It’s tuna noodle casserole with browned Tater Tots on top.”

“The Tater Tots make it,” said Serge.

Mrs. Lippowicz passed Lenny the salt and pepper. “Why can’t you be more like your nice friend Serge?”

Midnight, Lenny’s bedroom.

Serge’s eyes opened in the bottom bunk. Something had awoken him. He looked around, then noticed the bed was vibrating. His eyebrows furrowed in puzzlement. The vibrations increased.

Serge looked up at the bunk above him. The shaking got worse. “What on earth—?”

He tried to sit up, but the bed pitched and knocked him back down.

“Lenny, what the hell are you doing up there?”

No answer. The bed started rocking violently, the bottoms of its four wooden legs rattling and tapping on the floor. Serge grabbed the sides of his mattress and hung on as the bunk began to slowly slide and rotate across the terrazzo bedroom floor like a puck on an air hockey table.

“Lenny! Take it easy! It’s not going anywhere!”

Serge stuck his head out the side of the bed and looked up. The bed bucked again and tumbled him onto the ground.

The rocking stopped.

“Lenny? You okay?”

“I’m pretty thirsty now.”

“No kidding. You were going at it like Chuck Yeager trying to pull an X-15 out of a terminal spin.”

Lenny swung his legs over the side of the bunk and jumped down. “I’m completely awake now.” He went over and opened a dresser drawer and took out a baggie. “And I’m out of weed. We have to go get some.”

“I’m not going to a drug hole, especially not at this hour.”

“How about a restaurant or a lounge? I’m pretty good at connecting on the fly.”

“My choice?”

“Sure.”

“Then I have a historic place in mind.”

Lenny checked the Magilla Gorilla clock on his dresser. Almost one. “Is this place still open?”

“Not even hopping yet.”

Two dark figures came out of the ranch house and walked down the driveway toward the van.

Ivan reached over to the Mercedes’s driver seat and shook Vladimir’s shoulder. “Wake up!”

“Wha — what is it?”

“They’re on the move!”

The Benz fell in line six cars back as the van merged southbound on I-95. They passed the executive airport, then Oakland Park and Sunrise Boulevard, the van accelerating the whole time, changing lanes.

“Keep up with them!” yelled Ivan.

“I’m trying!” said Vladimir.

The van cut left across three columns of traffic and squeezed between a Dodge pickup and the median retaining wall.

“Lenny, we’re not in a lane anymore,” said Serge. “You can’t drive with your head below the dash.”

“Just a sec. My beer rolled under the seat.”

Ivan pointed. “They’re getting away!”

“Hold on,” said Vladimir. He floored it and passed a BP tanker on the right shoulder. The van suddenly accelerated again. It seemed to fake right, then shot to the left and into a tight space that briefly opened between a Lexus and a Probe GT. Then another jump left, swerving a couple times within the lane, braking fast and sliding right again, almost going up on two wheels.

“You’re losing them!” said Ivan.

“They’re just too good.”

The van fishtailed as it came out of a banking maneuver. A fierce spray of suds shot around the inside of the vehicle, covering the windshield.

“Lenny, I told you not to open the can. It was bulging.”

“I didn’t think it had been shaken up that much.” Shooting streams of beer hit both of them in the face.

“Get it out of here!”

Lenny cut off a honking Bronco and rolled down the window.

“They’re going for the exit,” said Vladimir. “Stay close.”

“They just threw something out the window…. It just exploded…” Vladimir swerved around it.

“Foaming diversionary device,” said Ivan, nodding with respect. “Israelis.”

The Mercedes swung back in time to take the same exit and made a skidding left turn through the yellow light at the bottom of the ramp. They stayed with the van when it turned on Federal Highway and again when it grabbed the St. Brooks Memorial Causeway. Then, suddenly, nothing.

“Where’d they go?” asked Vladimir.

“Shit,” said Ivan. “He’s probably heading for a meet in one of the beach motels. That’s standard.”

Vladimir raced up the bridge over the Stranahan River, then slowed as they coasted down the far side, everyone looking around. Rippled reflections of white condo lights in the Intracoastal Waterway. Red and green running lights from sailboats.

They came off the bridge. Vladimir pointed. “There it is! There it is!”

They pulled up the hotel driveway, got out and headed across the valet parking lot. Ivan walked up to the van and looked through the windshield at the valet ticket hanging from the rearview. “It’s for one of the restaurants, not the hotel, so that narrows it. Igor, Dmitri — you wait here with the van, in case they come back. The rest of you, follow me!”

The inside of the elevator was brass. Ivan and the others couldn’t place the Muzak as they rode up to the top of the hotel. The doors opened into the big revolving rooftop bar with a raised, obstructing bandstand in the middle. Ivan directed them to split into two groups and go in opposite directions to sweep the place. They met back up on the far side, empty-handed.

“This is the only restaurant left open. They must have stopped in a rest room or something,” said Ivan, taking a chair at one of the few empty cocktail tables. “We’ll wait.” He turned and looked out the window, down at his men waiting by the black van.

Serge and Lenny watched the numbers climb inside their elevator car.

“I thought it was going to be a new place,” said Lenny. “We come here all the time.”

“How can you get too much of Pier 66?” said Serge. “If it was good enough for Travis McGee.”

“I can’t believe they detained us in the security office like that just because you were taking all those pictures.”

“History-haters.”

The elevator doors opened as a cell phone rang at the Russians’ table. Ivan answered it. Serge and Lenny headed around the opposite side of the bar.

“Yes, we received the flowers, Mr. Grande…. That was a very thoughtful gesture…. No, still no sign of the money, but I’ve got this feeling….”

Serge and Lenny grabbed two chairs. Serge laid the briefcase on top of the cocktail table. “Now watch carefully. This was the infamous Sea of Hands Play.”

Serge used a finger to draw a diagram in the dust on the side of the metal case.

“The date: December twenty-first, 1974. But it seems like just yesterday. The stage is set. The Dolphins are leading twenty-six to twenty-one with thirty-five seconds left. Looks like they’re on their way to a third straight Super Bowl title. But they were about to get bitten by the Snake.”

“The Snake?”

“Kenny ‘the Snake’ Stabler, quarterback of the Oakland Raiders, a diabolical little shit from Mobile, Alabama.” Serge drew some more on the briefcase. “The clock is ticking. The Dolphins secondary is all over the mighty Fred Biletnikoff. Stabler has no place to throw. The Miami linesmen are closing. The heat is too much!…” Serge’s finger zigzagged in the dust. “The Snake lunges forward into the pocket and rolls left. But the legendary Dolphin defensive end Vern Den Herder stays with him, gaining fast from behind! Vern dives and tackles Stabler around the knees, and the Snake goes down! Dolphins win!”

“Wow,” said Lenny.

“But wait! What’s this?” said Serge, making an arc with his pinky. “As Stabler is halfway to the ground, he throws the ball toward the end zone. It could never even politely be called a pass. It was a desperation release, like someone flinging a bag of dope out a car window.”

“What happened?”

Serge drew three X’s and one O. “A trio of Dolphins surround the lone Raider receiver. Eight hands reach for the ball, the now famous Sea of Hands. But the two that come down with the pigskin belong to Oakland’s Clarence Davis…” Serge furiously erased everything on the briefcase fast with both hands. “…Touchdown! Oakland wins! The Dolphin Empire crumbles!”

He pounded the briefcase with his fists — “Why! Why! Why!” — then his forehead.

“Why! Why!…”

“So you were kinda into that game?” asked Lenny.

“Stabler might as well have stabbed me through the heart with one of the yardage poles!…Lenny?…Lenny, are you listening?”

“Why’s that guy at the bar looking at me?”

“Probably because you’re looking at him.”

“He looks familiar. Doesn’t he look familiar to you?”

“No.”

“Of course! I know who it is! That’s the drummer for — — .”

Serge studied the man some more. “You know, you might be right.”

Lenny waved for their waitress. “Who’s that guy at the bar?”

“The drummer for ——.”

“I knew it! I’m getting an autograph.” Lenny grabbed a napkin and went to the bar. “Aren’t you the drummer for — —?”

The man killed a whiskey on the rocks and smiled. “Yes, I am.”

“Can I get your autograph?”

“Sure thing.” He took the napkin from Lenny and wrote his name.

“Thank you.” Lenny stuck the napkin in his pocket. “Mind if I sit here?”

“Go ahead.”

“Man, I can’t believe I’m meeting you! I loved you guys! Whatever happened to the band?”

“We’re still together.”

“Maybe it’s because you don’t have any new albums.”

“We’ve released one every year.”

“I don’t really go in record stores a lot. You guys should start touring again.”

“We tour all the time.”

“…Gee, sorry…. Well, anyway, I love you guys!”

“Thank you.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Sure.”

Lenny waved over at Serge. “Buy this guy a drink. And can I get one, too?”

Serge got out his wallet.

Three drinks later, they were all back at Serge’s table.

“Serge, do you know who this guy is?”

“You told me.”

“I did? Well, let’s buy him a drink!… I’ll take one, too.”

Two more. Lenny turned to the drummer. He put his thumb and index finger together and put them to his lips and sucked. Then he raised his eyebrows in a question.

The drummer nodded.

“You get high?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Yeah, wanna get high?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

They got up from the table and headed for the men’s room.

“Uh-oh,” said Serge. “Here we go.”

Lenny checked the stalls. No one there. He met the drummer back at the sink and rubbed his palms together in anticipation.

“Okay, break it out,” said the drummer.

“What do you mean?”

“Break out your shit.”

“I don’t have any shit. I thought you had it.”

“You said, ‘You wanna get high?’”

“So?”

“So that’s the guy that’s supposed to have the shit.”

“No, no, no,” said Lenny. “You said, ‘Let’s go.’ That’s the guy with the shit.”

“Usually, but you said the other thing first, and that’s the thing that counts, first.”

“I’ve been doing this for a while, thank you.”

“So you don’t have any shit?”

“No!”

They sighed and left the men’s room.

“How’d it go?” Serge asked as they sat back down.

“Miscommunication…. Wait! I almost forgot! I have some emergency money in my sock. Let’s buy some dope!”

“Great!” The drummer got his own money out. “How much you got?”

Lenny pulled crumpled bills from his sock and piled them on top of the briefcase. “Looks like forty-three dollars. How much you got?”

“Sixty,” said the drummer. “That ought to cover us. A quarter’s still a hundred, right?”

“Last time I checked.”

“You’re not a cop, are you?”

“You kidding?”

“I’m a target, you know. They’re always looking for high-profile busts to get on the news.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So you’re not a cop?”

“Not remotely.”

“Okay, we’ll meet right here in, say, an hour?”

“Here in an hour?”

“Yep. You sure you’re not a cop?”

“Yep, you sure you’re the drummer for ——?”

“Yep.”

“Then it’s all set.”

“Let’s do it!”

“We’re on!”

They sat there staring at each other.

“Well?” said the drummer.

“Well what?”

“Why are you just sitting there?”

“I thought you were going.”

“I thought you—”

“Shit.”

“But you were the one who said, ‘Let’s buy some — ’”

“Stop,” said Lenny, shaking his head. “This is getting way, way too complicated. Let’s back up and start over.”

“Okay.”

They each grabbed handfuls of money off the briefcase and stuck it back in their pockets.

“How much you got?”

“Forty-three dollars. How much you got?…”

Serge smacked himself in the forehead. He slid the briefcase off the table and set it down on the floor between his leg and the wall. Except he unwittingly set the briefcase on the ledge of the wall. The bar was revolving. The ledge was not. The briefcase began rotating away.

“I know this pot dealer with a scar…” said Lenny.

“I know him, too!” said the drummer.

The briefcase kept moving, rotating past the legs of unsuspecting customers. Table after table, typical south Florida hotel bar culture, three airline pilots from Ithaca, pharmaceutical salesmen hooked on their own samples, a Dutch tour group, headhunters, plastic surgeons, food photographers, four motivational speakers in town for a seminar on how to make one hundred thousand dollars a year repairing cracks in windshields with a simple tube of adhesive. The briefcase kept going, past the legs of two men sipping goblets of vodka and grapefruit juice.

“You’ve gone into another printing!” Tanner Lebos told Ralph Krunkleton. “Have you seen the new cover?”

Tanner passed the glossy prototype across the table to Ralph, who noticed some additional words across the top: New York Times Bestseller!

“It made the bestseller list?” asked Ralph.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“I didn’t see anything in the papers.”

“That’s because they only print the top ten or fifteen titles.”

“What number am I?”

“One hundred ninety-four.”

“That’s on the list?”

“The list is actually thousands long. Theoretically, every book is on the list, but for the sake of integrity, we cut it off at five hundred….”

“We have honor.”

“You know, I just reread the book,” said Tanner. “I’d forgotten a lot of it. It’s even better than I remembered.”

“Thanks.”

“Like that character the urinal guy. How’d you think that up? What an imagination!”

“Imagination nothing. I did that. I was on a roadtrip in college. This was before credit cards. I ran out of money and couldn’t get back….”

The briefcase kept going, more legs. Conventioning oncologists, conventioning lapidaries, conventioning Mary Kay sales leaders with pink cars in the garage. Another quarter of the way around the bar, under another table, a heated discussion, Russian accents.

“Dammit!” said Ivan. “We were this close to that money! This close!…”

Still rotating, more legs. Diamond dealers on sabbatical, gigolos on the make, Panamanian strongmen, Brazilian bombshells, American tragedies. The briefcase went past the legs of five women with five glasses of Sex on the Beach.

“I can’t believe you haven’t finished The Stingray Shuffle,” said Rebecca.

“I’ve been busy,” said Sam.

“You won’t believe what happens to the five million dollars.”

“Don’t give it away!”

Teresa stood and took a snapshot out the window. “So this is Travis McGee’s old stomping ground.” Another snapshot. “Let’s read a Travis book next.”

“Let’s not and say we did,” said Sam.

“What are you talking about?” said Maria. “They’re great!”

“The women are always objects,” said Sam. “In fact, the more I read, I’m not even sure I like Travis.”

That rocked the whole table.

“What?” said Maria. “You mean, you wouldn’t have slept with Travis?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I would have,” said Paige.

“I’d have slept with Meyer,” said Rebecca.

“Ewwwwww!” said the other four.

The briefcase kept going, more legs, litterbugs, bookworms, social butterflies, midlife counselors, postmodern sculptors, premature ejaculators.

Serge looked up. “Oh no.”

Two large-chested men in black suits, black shirts and pointy shoes. They walked quickly toward Serge’s table, coats over their arms concealing something.

Serge’s eyes locked on the men. His right hand slowly reached for the pistol in his waistband, his left felt blindly under the table and grabbed the handle of the briefcase as it came rotating by. “I knew this would happen,” he whispered to himself. “I knew they were bound to send someone sooner or later.”

The men were twenty feet away, then ten. Serge cocked the pistol under the table. The men turned and climbed onto the musicians’ bandstand. They pulled a flute and a mandolin from under their coats and began playing Kenny G.

Serge fell back in his chair with a breath of relief. He set the briefcase back down, not on the ledge this time.

“…We meet back here in an hour, okay?” asked Lenny.

“How will I know who you are?” asked the drummer.

“I’ll be wearing this shirt.”

Serge smacked his forehead again.

“What’s the matter with your friend?” asked the drummer.

“I need some air,” said Serge. He picked up the briefcase and headed around the curved side of the bar and pressed the elevator button. He overheard conversation fragments behind him. “…Nyet!” “Vladimir!”

Hmmm, Serge thought, Russian mob….

He walked back to his table and handed Lenny the briefcase. “I need you to hide in one of the stalls with this and wait for me.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Ivan.

“What is it?” asked Dmitri.

“I think it’s him. Dummy up!”

Serge approached the table. “Hi guys. You the Russian mob?”

The Russians reached under the table for ankle holsters. Ivan discreetly waved them off. He turned to Serge. “No, we’re with Amway.”

“Right,” said Serge, winking. He pointed. “What happened to your feet?”

“Amway accident.”

“Mind if I join you?” Serge pulled up a chair before they could object. “I have a proposition for Amway.”

A half hour later, everyone was laughing, shaking hands and slapping backs. Serge stood. “Then it’s all set?”

“All set.”

“Sunday at midnight,” said Serge. “You remember the place?”

“We remember.”

26

Serge sat with Lenny at the bar in the B&H Deli near Cape Canaveral. Lenny dialed a number on his cell phone. No answer. He hung up and dialed again. It began ringing again. He turned to Serge.

“I still don’t understand why we had to pay for a taxi from Pier 66 when we had the van.”

“I told you already. Because they were going to ambush us in the parking lot. That’s standard. Didn’t you see the two guys waiting for us?”

“But I thought you made a deal with them.”

“I did. We’re still on.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’d never make it in the business world.”

Lenny hung up and dialed his cell phone again. He put the phone to his ear.

“Will you stop that?” said Serge. “You’ve been doing it all night. It’s getting on my nerves.”

“I have to reach the drummer for ——. He’s supposed to get me some weed.”

“I hate to tell you this, but it’s not going to happen.”

“But he’s got my forty-three dollars.”

“Write it off as the stupidity tax.”

“No way,” said Lenny. “The drummer for —— would never rip me off.”

“Lenny, he’s not trying to screw you by not coming through. It’s because he’s hapless, just like you.”

“He’s not coming back?”

Serge put his arm around Lenny’s shoulder. “It’s a cruel world.”

“I don’t believe you.” Lenny hit a series of numbers again on his cell phone. No answer.

Serge swung around to face the barstool on his other side and began hitting on an off-duty stripper…. Well, not really hitting on.

“Did you know that after every successful liftoff, the launch team eats the exact same thing — biscuits and beans?”

“Don’t talk to me,” said the dancer, lighting a Camel.

“It’s tradition!” said Serge. “You look like a bright girl. Ever think of going out for the space program?”

“You’re drunk.”

“Drunk with enthusiasm for life!” said Serge, hoisting a briefcase onto the bar.

Lenny punched numbers on his phone. “Why doesn’t he answer?” He dialed again. “Hold on! Someone’s picking up!”

A woman’s sleepy voice answered. “Mmmm, uh, hullo…?”

“May I speak to the drummer for ——?”

Serge and the stripper heard the yelling from Lenny’s phone. “What are you, a fucking comedian?…(Click.)”

Lenny closed the phone with a stunned look. “The drummer for —— gave me the wrong number.”

“Lenny, this is how bad you’ve gotten. Almost everyone else goes out partying and they wake up the next morning and look in their wallet and say: ‘Where the hell did all my money go?’ But you’re such a mess you invert the paradigm. People get wrecked and run into you and the next morning they go, ‘Where’d all this money come from?’ Do you understand what I’m getting at here?”

Lenny nodded.

“Good.”

“So how do I get my forty-three dollars back?”

Serge turned to the stripper and slapped the top of his briefcase. “Guess what’s in here.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Five million dollars! You know what I’m going to use the money for? Want me to tell you?”

“No.” She blew out a big stream of smoke.

“It’s been my lifelong dream. I’m going into space!”

“Goodie for you.”

“Haven’t you read the Dennis Tito articles? Everything’s for sale now in the former republic. Tanks, bombs, Fabergé eggs. I met some mobsters in Lauderdale. Turns out they also do some work for the Russian space agency. The deal’s all set up. We make the swap at the rendezvous tonight. I give them the money and they give me my space suit, to show good faith. Then I fly out to the Baikonur Kosmodrome, go through six months of intense training, blast off on a Soyuz, and next thing you know I’m in the International Space Station helping mice copulate in zero gravity.”

She stubbed out her cigarette. “Buy me a drink.”

“Don’t have any money.”

“Thought you said you had five million.”

“They might count it.”

“Your whole story’s horseshit,” she said. “I’ve fucked people in the space program, and they won’t even give me a damn launch viewing pass. There’s no chance you could bribe your way onto the Space Station.”

“Not through NASA, but it’s a totally different culture over in Russia,” said Serge. “They’re Communists, which means it’s all about money.”

Serge stood with Lenny in the dark at the rendezvous point, checking his illuminated wristwatch: 12:01 A.M. “Where can they be?”

“How can I get my forty-three dollars back?”

“Sometimes you just have to let go.”

A slight breeze came off the ocean. A twig snapped.

“Ivan?” Serge whispered. “Is that you?”

Out of the distant shadows came a silhouette, then a second, a third, a fourth, and finally five dark forms stood abreast thirty yards away.

“You got the money?”

“Right here,” said Serge, tapping the briefcase.

“Put it on the ground.”

“Where’s my space suit?”

“It’s in the car.”

“Forget it,” said Serge. “First I get my space suit, with my name over the pocket. Spelled right. That was the arrangement.”

“You really are crazy.”

“No space suit, no deal.”

The five pulled automatic weapons. “The deal’s changed,” said Ivan. “Put the money on the ground and step away.”

Serge pointed at them. “Hey! You’re not really with the Russian space program!”

Bullets began flying.

“I’m hit!” Lenny yelled, going down and gripping his leg. Serge grabbed him by the armpits and pulled him to cover. Bullets pinged off the missile they were slouched behind in the Rocket Garden at Kennedy Space Center.

“Stop it! Stop shooting!” yelled Serge. He ran out from behind the rocket and threw himself across the front of the Titan, spreading his arms wide, a human shield. “I’m begging you! This is our history!”

Ivan grinned. He turned and fired at a Juno II.

“No!” screamed Serge.

Then an Atlas-Agena got it right between the tail fins.

“Please!” yelled Serge. “Anything!”

Ivan walked over to the next rocket and pressed the muzzle of his gun against the first stage.

“Hand over the briefcase or the Mercury-Redstone gets it!”

Serge felt down in the zippered leg compartment of his royal blue jumpsuit. He wrapped his fingers around the antique grenade, his ace in the hole. He looked up at the rockets. They were bound to take shrapnel. Too risky. He removed his hand from the pocket.

“Okay! Okay!” said Serge. “Just don’t shoot!”

He took the briefcase by the handle and twirled himself in a circle three times like a discus thrower and let the briefcase sail. The moonlight caught the metal finish as it tumbled through the air. It landed a few feet in front of the Russians. Vladimir ran up, flipped the latches and raised the lid. He looked over his shoulder at Ivan. “It’s all here.”

“Good,” said Ivan, looking up at Serge and breaking into a smile. “Now you die!”

The foot pursuit was slower than a three-legged race, Serge helping Lenny limp along, the Russians hobbling after them on bandaged feet. Serge and Lenny took off across the visitor concourse. The Russians fanned out to form a net and flush them into the courtyard. They encircled the pavilion and cased the IMAX theaters, Gift Gantry and Nebula Café. But they were no match for Serge, who knew the grounds of the space center like a womb. Soon it was quiet again; the Russians stood bunched together on the lawn, in front of a giant viewing window at the welcome center, scratching their heads with their guns.

There was a tremendous crash. A shower of broken glass sprayed the Russians, who ducked and shielded their faces as a moon buggy flew through the shattered window, sailed over their heads, and began bounding away. The Russians started shooting, but the vehicle had already made it to the edge of the Merritt Island Wildlife Sanctuary and disappeared into the swamp grass. The Russians ran for their Mercedes.

The moon buggy may have been a tourist attraction replica, but it was fully functional, with the same big moon tires and moon suspension — about the only vehicle around that could handle the spongy bog terrain of the sanctuary. The Mercedes’s back wheels spun into the muck before it had gone twenty feet.

Two EMTs loaded an empty stretcher and closed the back doors of an ambulance parked in front of an emergency room in Titusville.

A moon buggy pulled up.

“Can you give Major Nelson here a hand?” said Serge, getting Lenny out of the rover. “He usually sees Dr. Bellows.”

The EMTs helped Lenny through the automatic glass doors. One of them came back out as Serge started up the moon buggy. “Hey! Wait a minute!”

“Big problem at the Cape,” said Serge, waving and pulling away. “They need me.”

The Moon Hut restaurant, “Where the Moon People Dine,” is a Cape Canaveral institution.

Built in the Sputnik era, the small-town diner sits near the ocean at the bend in A1A where the road swings west from Cocoa Beach toward the Kennedy Space Center. It opens before dawn every morning, when NASA workers and civilian contractors jam the place. The neon sign out front depicts a thatched hut sitting on the Sea of Tranquillity. The diner has two themes. Space flight and country arts and crafts. The traditional American menu has an unexplained number of Greek dishes. Everyone eats at the Moon Hut. Astronauts, politicians, movie stars.

A waitress led five big men and a briefcase over to a table.

Ivan took a seat next to a blastoff photo. Dmitri sat down under a spinning loom.

“Be right back with your water.” The waitress left.

Ivan peeked over the top of a laminated menu, then ducked back down. “That’s Annette Bening.”

“Where?” asked Dmitri, turning around.

Ivan smacked him with his menu. “Don’t look!”

“Why not?”

“Everyone looks!”

“What’s she doing here?”

“Getting coffee to go.”

“If that’s Annette, where’s Warren?”

“Must be in the car with the kids. They’ve settled down, you know.”

The five men were peeking over the tops of their menus when the waitress returned.

“Is it too early for the flaming Greek cheese?” asked Ivan.

She shook her head no.

“Flaming Greek cheese. Five,” said Ivan. “And five coffees.”

She collected the menus.

“Excuse me,” Ivan whispered. “Is that Annette Bening?” He tilted his head slyly toward the register.

“I don’t know,” said the waitress. She turned to the front counter. “Hey, Annette!”

The woman at the register looked around.

“That’s her,” said the waitress.

Coffee arrived, then cheese. A phone rang. Ivan flipped it open.

“Good morning, Mr. Grande…. Yes, I have good news…. That’s right, we’ve got the you-know-what.…We’re at the Moon Hut…. No, the Moon Hut…. No, you get breakfast here…. Because it’s America…. Excuse me a minute, they’re setting the cheese on fire…. No, I haven’t been drinking….”

The waitress came to refill coffee. Ivan put a hand over his cup.

“…No, that won’t be a problem, Mr. Grande…. A submarine?… Yes, I’ve seen them…. No problem, ask for Yuri. I’m writing the name down now…. That’s in New York, right?…I understand completely…. We won’t let you down….”

Ivan closed his phone and stood up. “Waitress? We’ll need this to go.”

In the very back of the Moon Hut, in the history room, a waitress prepared to refill a glass of ice water. “That won’t be necessary,” said Serge, standing up and taking out his wallet.

27

It may have been December 30, but nobody told Palm Beach.

The mercury hit eighty by noon. The BBB was using a Krunkleton paperback again as a bar-hopping guide. They nursed ten-dollar drinks in the back of the Breakers.

Paige stared down at an angelfish swimming under her napkin. An orange-and-purple damsel swam the other way through coral. “I’ve heard of bars that had aquariums, but I’ve never been in one where the bar actually is an aquarium.”

“The Kennedys used to jog over there,” said Teresa, looking out the huge windows behind the bar as sea foam rolled in from the Atlantic.

“What a beautiful day,” said Maria.

“Just one more day left until the new year,” said Rebecca, raising her drink. “Here’s to a new year with old friends.”

Glasses clinked.

“What are your resolutions?” asked Maria.

“You know what? I’ve had it with resolutions!” said Rebecca. “No more resolutions!”

“That sounds like a resolution.”

“I have an idea,” said Teresa. “Let’s make antiresolutions.”

“I want to eat something fat at midnight,” said Paige.

“C’mon, let’s think big,” said Teresa.

“Let’s do something crazy,” said Rebecca.

“Yeah,” said Maria. “Really irresponsible.”

Teresa stood and grabbed her purse. “Come on.”

“Where?” said Maria.

“I don’t know yet.”

They headed back through the hotel lobby, stopped by the front desk and began going through the rack of tourist brochures. Teresa picked up and put down pamphlets. “Dreher Park Zoo, nope; Norton Gallery, nope; Clematis Concert Series, nope; Polo Club, definitely nope…”

“Wait a minute,” said Maria, slowly opening a brochure with a silver Amtrak train on the cover. “Look at this.”

“What is it?”

“A mystery train. New York to Miami. Departs New Year’s Day.”

“What’s a mystery train?”

“You know, they act out whodunits, passengers participate.”

“Oh my God!” said Maria, folding over the pamphlet and holding it out to the others. “Look at the book they’re going to perform.”

“The Stingray Shuffle!” said Teresa. “That’s too much of a coincidence.”

“We’re meant to get on that train,” said Rebecca. “We’ll kick ourselves if we don’t go.”

“It’s only two days away,” said Sam. “We don’t have tickets, we don’t have plans…”

“Exactly,” said Teresa. “It’s so impulsive. We’ll get oneway plane tickets, see the ball drop in Times Square like we always wanted, then take the train back the next day.”

“Hold everything,” said Maria, pointing out something else in the brochure. “Look at this list of celebrities onboard.”

“No way!” said Rebecca.

“That seals it,” said Teresa. “Now we really have to go.”

Teresa fished in her purse for the valet ticket. “So we’re finally going to catch up with him.”

“I still can’t believe we’re actually on this plane,” said Maria.

“Look at that sunset,” said Rebecca.

They all leaned and stared out the left windows as the sun left a scarlet stripe across the bed of clouds. They could see another jet, miles away and tiny, moving across the horizon in the same direction.

Seat 24B in that other plane was ticketed to passenger Serge A. Storms, who leaned across the businessman traveler in the window seat next to him to take twenty pictures of the setting sun. Click, click, click…

The sun finally disappeared and Serge sat back in his seat. “Thanks for letting me do that. I think I got some great shots. It’s important to record every sunset I can.”

The businessman looked at Serge a second, then went back to his book.

“Yes, sir! Flying to the Big Apple! Goin’ to Gotham! Matriculatin’ to Manhattan! New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice…”

The man took a deep breath and put his book down.

“I love flying but I hate airlines!” Serge told the man. “Who can keep all the fares and discounts straight? Frequent flyer miles, three hundred and nine dollars if you order fourteen days in advance, two fifty-nine if you stay over a Saturday, one nineteen provided you don’t get off the plane…”

The man looked at Serge another moment, then picked up his book again.

“Oh, trying to read, eh? Don’t let me distract you.” Serge faced forward for thirty seconds. “So what are you reading?”

The man turned the book over and showed Serge the cover.

“Ralph Krunkleton?” said Serge. “I love Ralph Krunkleton. Read all his stuff back in school. Personally, I think that’s his best book, balances surrealism with traditional murder mystery machinations. But don’t worry, I won’t give away the ending.”

The man smiled politely and went back to reading. Serge stared forward another thirty seconds. Then he leaned over and whispered the ending.

The man dropped the book in his lap in exasperation.

“What?” said Serge. “I just did you a favor. That’s the big mistake people make reading Krunkleton. They get all caught up in the suspense plot. Now you can concentrate on the prose, lyrical language selection and social nuances. And don’t forget the five million dollars that’s floating around. You’ll never guess who gets it…. Oh, I just told you. Sorry.”

The man put the book away.

“Good idea,” said Serge. “They’re preparing the serving cart. You wouldn’t want to spill anything.” Serge lowered his tray and folded his hands on it and smiled. Then he started tapping his fingers. He stuck his head out in the aisle. “What’s taking them so long?”

He reached up to the overhead console and twisted a nozzle. A blast of cold air began blowing the man’s hair around. He turned slowly toward Serge.

“Whoops, wrong one.” Serge twisted the nozzle shut and twisted another, then closed his eyes and stuck his face up in the chilly stream. The man picked up an airline magazine.

Serge opened his eyes and turned off the vent. He pressed other buttons. Lights flashed on and off the magazine the man was trying to read.

“Need a reading light?” asked Serge. “Don’t want to ruin your eyes.” Lights continued flashing on and off.

“Here comes the cart! I love the cart!” said Serge. “All the choices — so hard to decide. There’s the spicy Bloody Mary mix and orange juice and soda. They only pour half the can in those little cups, but you can ask them to leave the whole can. That’s what I do.”

Serge leaned into the aisle and looked forward toward Row 11. The sleeve of a tropical shirt and the bandaged foot were still there. He leaned back.

The attendant came to their row, and the businessman handed her eight dollars. “Scotch. Double.”

“Coke,” said Serge. “Please leave the can. And can I have one of those huge, huge bags of peanuts — I haven’t eaten in days! Ha, ha, ha, ha…”

He turned to the man. “Oh, a drinker, eh? It’s weird how times changed about that. One day you’re Mr. Sophistication, and the next you’re a social leper with a stigmatizing disease….”

The man chugged his scotch and set the glass on his tray next to two empty airline miniatures.

“You might want to go easy on that stuff,” said Serge. “I don’t mean to preach, but there are all kinds of new federal aviation rules about in-flight behavior. You don’t want to annoy other passengers.”

Serge stood and got a box down from the overhead compartment. He sat and placed it in his lap. “Want to see my trains?”

Serge opened the box of model railroad equipment. “See? That green-and-orange engine there is The City of Miami. I painted it myself. Here, hold this….” Serge rummaged through the box, cabooses, tracks, water towers. “…There she is! This baby is precisely to scale. It’s Flagler’s personal car, the Rambler. Built her from scratch. Hold this….” More rummaging. “And this is the observation car from The Silver Stingray. That’s one of the great trains that take the snowbirds to Florida. Hold this….” He picked up a passenger car, looked in the windows, put it back down. “You should have seen them at the X-ray machine when this baby went through. About ten people crowded around the screen. They took the box off to a special area and had a dog sniff it.” Serge grinned impishly. “It was partly my doing. I arranged some of the metal tracks and trains in the shape of a machine gun, just to keep them on their toes. I have to make sure I’m safe when I fly…. Darn it, did I remember to pack my diesel?…” More rummaging.

The man spoke for the first time. “You know, the rest rooms on these things have all kinds of levers and buttons and secret compartments.”

Serge stared at him a moment, then quickly grabbed all the trains from the man’s arms, repacked the box and returned it to the overhead. He got up and trotted toward the back of the plane.

Twenty minutes later, a stewardess had Serge by the arm and escorted him back to his seat over his protests. “I told you, I wasn’t trying to disable the smoke detector. I was exploring….”

Serge reluctantly sat down. He thought a second. He reached under his seat for his camera.

The businessman was typing on his laptop. He could feel Serge’s eyes drilling into the side of his head.

“Listen…” said Serge.

The man sighed and closed his laptop.

“I’d like to take some more pictures again when we land. Will that be okay? If it isn’t, I’ll understand. Life is so fleeting I want to capture every moment. I’ll just set the motor drive on automatic and let ’er rip.”

The Boeing 737 banked over Long Island for its approach. The landing gear went down. Serge leaned across the man again and pressed his lens to the pressure window. Click, click, click. “I’m getting goose bumps.” Click, click, click. “This is just like that U2 song…. You like U2?… Of course! Everybody does!… It was a cold and wet December day when we touched the ground at JFK…” Click, click, click.

The Boeing taxied up to the terminal. Serge unlatched the overhead bin. “I only take carry-ons. Checking your luggage is playing with fire….” He turned, but the businessman was already halfway up the aisle.

“Hey!” Serge yelled. “We forgot to exchange phone numbers….”

28

New York City. Manhattan. East Side.

Eugene Tibbs was blue. That was his job.

He had always been blue.

He was blue back in his days on the Mississippi Delta, in those cotton fields, and he was blue in Memphis, on Union Avenue, recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio. He was blue after selling his soul to the devil late one night at the crossroads. And he was blue because he didn’t sell his soul for talent and fame but for a sandwich. That’s what cheap liquor will do to you. That’s what the blues does to you.

Tibbs sat in the last car of the 4-5-6 subway line as it clattered and sparked under Grand Central Station. Well after midnight, Eugene was alone in the car, reading a paperback by Ralph Krunkleton. He looked out the scratched window at a group of laughing people in the seedy yellow light on the Fifty-first Street platform. They couldn’t fool him. They were blue, too. He could tell. He knew the blues.

Tibbs had just returned from Florida. More like fled. He had been let go from a steady run at Skipper’s Smokehouse, the legendary blues joint on Tampa’s north side. His last night there had started blue enough, but there was trouble waiting down the tracks for Tibbs. He sat in a chair onstage, wearing a neat black tuxedo and cradling his faithful hollow-body Epiphone guitar, Gertrude. That’s when trouble walked in the door.

Eugene performed as Blind Jelly Doughnut, and his sunglasses were so dark he could safely watch a solar eclipse. They made him bump into things, and people thought he really was blind and his music, therefore, the bluest of all. If you were blind and not blue, something was wrong.

But even with the sunglasses, Tibbs recognized the man who came in the club that night. He’d recognize him anywhere, and it might as well have been the devil himself, wanting to talk about that sandwich. Damn the blues.

The man came right down to the stage and took a seat at a cocktail table in the front row. He set his glass of ice water down and pulled out a notepad. It was that damn Atkins fellow from Alabama, the blues historian who’d been stalking him for an interview. The man just wouldn’t take no.

It unsettled Tibbs seeing him sitting there, quietly confident, watching, waiting for a slip — the man could ruin everything. It became a war of nerves. Eugene broke out in a sweat. After the third song, he began to cough. The man in the front row stood and silently offered Tibbs his glass of water.

“Thank you,” said Eugene, taking the glass.

The man jumped back and pointed. “He can see! He can see! I knew it!”

The audience was horrified, houselights came on, a scuffle broke out. Eugene barely escaped, running three blocks and ducking into an adult theater. He peeked out the window at the mob running past the theater with torches and clubs. Don’t mess with the blues.

Tibbs caught the first flight back to New York. He took a bus to the Port Authority Terminal, then tried to use the subway, but he didn’t have the right change. When you’re blue, you never have the right change. That’s the way it works. Rock and roll gets the limos. The blues makes you walk. It was another dozen blocks across the Village back to his loft apartment in SoHo, next to the nineteenth-century carriage house on Crosby Street where Billie Holiday used to live.

At times like these, Eugene liked to read himself to sleep with his favorite author. He picked up a paperback, the one with the stingray on the cover. It was his favorite author because his books were always in the bargain bin. Eugene opened the book to a folded-over page and lay down on the cold mattress in his skivvies. But tonight, the book did not make him sleepy. It spoke to him. He got out of bed, dressed, put on his boots. He stuck the book in his back pocket, scratched around a dresser drawer for correct change and headed back to the subway.

That’s where he was now, in the last car of the 4-5-6, standing up, approaching the Eighty-sixth Street station. It was almost five a.m. when he reached Park Avenue. The Upper East Side was still and dark except for puffs of steam from the grates that drifted slowly across the empty street. There wasn’t much time left before the garbage trucks would come. Eugene began grabbing Glad bags of trash off the stoops of million-dollar apartments, taking as much as he could carry and running two blocks to Central Park and into the woods. He began sorting through the trash, the lion’s share worthless to him. But shortly after sunrise, he had what he’d come for: six empty bottles of the most expensive cologne from Saks and Blooming-dale’s. He jammed them into his jacket and headed for a drugstore on Seventy-ninth.

Soon he was climbing out of the subway on Bleecker Street with four bags from Rite Aid. Back in his apartment, he spread the contents on the floor. Economy sacks of green mints, red-and-white hard-candy mints, peppermint patties, Tic Tacs, mouthwash, a big pouch of disposable Bic razors, shaving cream, combs, Aqua Velva, toenail clippers, files, No Doz, Sominex, a two-liter bottle of generic cologne and a large pickle jar of discontinued condoms.

He poured the generic cologne in the designer bottles from Park Avenue, then packed everything into an old briefcase he’d pulled down from his closet. He got out his paperback again, to make sure he’d done everything just the way the character in the book had. Then he lay back in his bed and waited.

Limos arrived at the curb outside the Hotel Carlyle on East Seventy-seventh.

Eugene Tibbs approached on foot from the south. He was wearing the tuxedo from his blue days and carrying his briefcase. He made one last stop at a print shop.

“Yes, I’d like your Fifteen-Minute Instant Business Card Special.”

“What do you want them to say?”

He pulled the paperback from his pocket, opened it to a dog-eared page and pointed at something he’d underlined. “This right here.”

“You got it.”

“And can I have my change in ones?”

Fifteen minutes later, he left the print shop and walked the last few blocks to the Carlyle. A long line spilled out of the café. Inside was a hospitality industry ant farm: service people moving in all directions, maître d’, greeters, coat checkers, table captains, waiters, water pourers. Tonight there was also an armed guard because Woody Allen was playing the clarinet. Eugene still couldn’t believe anyone would pay the sixty-dollar cover charge. He decided he’d never understand white people.

Eugene walked past the coat line.

“Excuse me,” said the guard. “Where are you going?”

Eugene produced a business card from his jacket. The guard studied it and handed it back. “Go ahead.”

Eugene stuck the card back in his jacket and wound his way through the hotel to the men’s room. He set the briefcase on the counter next to the sink and opened it. He removed the contents, setting out mints and aftershave and cologne in precise arrangement. Then, the final touch: the tip basket with a few ones from Eugene’s own wallet.

Three hours later, Eugene counted up his tips. The paperback had been right — there must be five hundred dollars here. Eugene heard the rest-room door opening, and he stashed the money in his pocket.

A small, redheaded man with a clarinet case walked into the men’s room. He finished his business; Eugene handed him a paper towel.

“Do you need anything, sir?”

The man looked around to see if anyone else was there, then pointed.

“Mint?”

The man shook his head.

“Condom?”

He nodded.

Eugene opened the jar. “How many?”

“Five…no, six.”

The man stuffed the foil pouches in his instrument case, threw a twenty in the tip basket and left quickly.

That was just the beginning. Eugene Tibbs pulled down five grand in the next month, making two- and three-night stands at the Four Seasons, the Waldorf, Tavern on the Green, constantly rotating to avoid suspicion. There were enough four-star restaurants and hotels in Manhattan that he could change locations every night and not run out for the rest of his life. As long as Eugene didn’t deviate from the plan in his paperback, everything went smoothly. Oh, sure, there was the occasional skepticism, but the book had anticipated that. Eugene compiled a list of restaurant owners’ names from the department of health, and he called ahead each night to ask the name of that evening’s maître d’.

“Nobody told me about this!” said the maître d’ at Sardi’s, studying Eugene’s business card.

Eugene didn’t say anything, just stood there holding his briefcase like he was bored, staring at caricatures of Liza and Anthony Quinn.

“And I’ve never heard of your company either.” The maître d’ read the card again: Big Apple Urinal Guys — restaurants, hotels, weddings, bar mitzvahs. Bonded, references.

The maître d’ turned the card over. He saw two names in pencil: his own and that of the restaurant’s owner.

“Where’d you get these names?”

“My boss. Those are the people I’m supposed to ask for if there’s any trouble.”

The maître d’ began to perspire. He stuck a finger in his collar to loosen it. He picked up the phone under the brass lamp on the reservation podium and dialed the number on the card. He got Eugene’s answering machine. “…Big Apple Urinal Guys, we’re not in…”

The maître d’ hung up. His Adam’s apple stuck out.

Eugene remembered what the book had said. There’s a point in conflict resolution when the next person who talks loses. You’re ready to play with the big boys when you can recognize that moment.

The maître d’ coughed. “I, wait, uh…”

“I won’t need an escort,” said Eugene, moving past the man for the men’s room.

The money rolled in. The Essex House, Trattoria, the Brasserie. Eugene experimented by wearing his dark sunglasses and offering paper towels in the wrong direction, but the increase in sympathy tips was offset by people who waved a hand in front of Eugene’s face and then took money out of the basket.

He couldn’t complain. The hours and money were great — it was working out just like it did for the character in his paperback. Eugene was making a fortune as the Wildcat Urinal Guy.

It being New York, however, the scheme did have limits. One night in a regional French bistro on Amsterdam Avenue, Eugene learned the hard way that the mob had a hand in the urinal guy rackets on the West Side, and he was toilet-dunked by two guys in sharkskin suits. He got home and found his loft apartment had been tossed.

So he stuck to midtown and the East Side. He began taking other precautions he’d learned about in his paperback. When he left his apartment each day, he lightly sprinkled talcum powder on the doorknob and some more in front of the threshold, only enough to notice if you looked. He went out on the fire escape and taped a human hair across the base of the window.

A week went by without incident. He was working Rockefeller Center that Friday when he was approached by a capo in La Cosa Nostra. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Eugene was a pro by now, and the mob had taken notice. They’d also become increasingly unsatisfied with their own soldiers assigned to urinal duty — guys whose heart wasn’t in it, slouching against the sink in Naugahyde jackets, smoking, listening to Knicks games on transistor radios.

“Excuse me, could I have a mint?”

“You want a mint? Sure, I’ll give you a mint. I’ll shove it up your fuckin’ ass, you fuckin’ douche bag!”

For some reason, the mob wasn’t seeing a lot in tips. Not the kind of money Eugene was making. They proposed a split. Eugene would be allowed to expand into their territory. He’d return a piece of his action from Hell’s Kitchen, and they’d give him a taste of Little Italy and protection from the crazy Jamaican gang that was already running a wicked urinal guy operation in Jersey and Queens.

Business boomed. Le Cirque, the Ritz-Carlton, the River Café. In the middle of an eight-hundred-dollar night in the Russian Tea Room, he pulled the paperback out of his pocket again and smiled at the cover. Eugene decided that if he ever got the chance, he’d make sure he thanked Ralph Krunkleton in person.

29

December thirtieth in New York is no time for shorts and tropical shirts. The Russians stood rubbing their arms in the cab line outside JFK.

“Screw this,” said Ivan. “I know a trick.”

They went back inside and followed the arrows to curbside check-in. They waited until a taxi dropped off a fare, then sprinted outside.

“Manhattan!” yelled Ivan.

“It’s against the rules. I’m supposed to go back to the pickup zone and wait at the end of the line…” The driver stopped and looked around quickly. “Get in!”

They pulled away from the airport. Ivan looked out the window and saw a giant metal sphere flickering through the trees, the old ’64 World’s Fair globe in Flushing Meadows. He sat back in his seat and noticed a thin ribbon of incense smoke by the dashboard, but it was no match for the foul human smell. Strange, mystical music came from the radio. The driver had oily hair and a scraggly beard.

Ivan leaned to the partition. “Are you an immigrant?”

“No. College student.”

The driver made an unexpected turn, and Ivan was pitched against the door. A recorded message came on in the backseat. “This is Paul O’Neill of the New York Yankees asking you to hit a home run for safety. Please buckle up.”

They entered the Midtown Tunnel under the East River and came out in Manhattan. Then the fun. Thrills, spills, the driver bench-testing axle strength, better than any amusement ride back in Orlando. They headed north, their taxi joining a sea of yellow cabs weaving up the Avenue of the Americas. The Russians saw there were lanes painted in the road, but that was clearly part of an ancient custom from some long-forgotten people.

The taxi screeched to the curb, tossing the Russians into the partition. “There she is,” said the driver. “The famous Warwick. The Beatles used to stay there. And Cary Grant lived in one of the rooms for twelve years…”

The Russians dashed into the building and stomped their feet for circulation as they waited at the registration desk. They took hot showers and had the bell captain send up a clothier. They checked the time. Four hours until the meeting Mr. Grande had set up with Yuri.

“I’m hungry,” said Vladimir.

“Me, too,” said Dmitri. “But I’m tired of all this American food.”

Five smartly dressed men in new fur coats walked down West Fifty-seventh. The one carrying the silver briefcase gestured, and the rest followed him into a restaurant under a red sidewalk canopy. The Russian Tea Room.

“Get a load of this place,” said Alexi, slowly turning around. Bright red carpet and red leather banquettes, gold firebirds on the walls, gold on the ceiling, and gold samovars on the counters, for tea. The Moscow skyline carved in ice.

“Incredible,” said Vladimir, studying a scale model of the Kremlin.

Ivan watched a sturgeon swimming in a fifteen-foot revolving aquarium shaped like a bear. “Everyone back home should get a chance to see America. We certainly don’t have anything like this where we come from.”

They waited in the lounge for their table. The bartender came over. “What’s your pleasure?”

“What should we get?” Dmitri asked the others.

“When in Rome…” said Ivan.

“Manhattans?” said Dmitri.

“Try the Russian Quaalude,” said a stockbroker three stools down.

“Never heard of it,” said Ivan. “What’s in it?”

“Not sure,” said the broker, turning to the bartender. “Hey Bob, what’s in a Russian Quaalude?”

“One second,” said the bartender, walking to a wall phone by the stemware.

Alexi got nervous and stood up. “Who’s he calling?”

“Relax,” said Ivan. “This is America. He’s on the bartender hotline.”

The man hung up and returned. “Frangelica, Baileys, vodka, layered in that order.”

“Five,” said Ivan.

The bartender grabbed a bottle of vodka by the neck. “I was a technical adviser for the movie Cocktail.” He swung the bottle up quickly like he was going to twirl it in the air but didn’t release, for liability reasons. “The trick to twirling bottles is to pick ones with only a little liquor left. The cast tried to twirl full bottles. Liquor flew everywhere. Had to edit it out.”

Dmitri whispered to Ivan: “You meet everybody in New York.”

Their table was ready when they finished the drinks. They all got the hot borscht and Stroganoff, except Dmitri.

“How’s the chicken Kiev?” he asked the waiter. “I hate it when it’s tough.”

The waiter said it wasn’t.

Sevruga caviar and gazirovannaya vodka arrived, then the main course. The men ate with gusto as they admired winter paintings above their booth by Surikov and Kustodiev. Dmitri poked his chicken with a gold fork. “It’s tough. I knew it.”

In the back of the restaurant, a visitor from Florida sat alone, sipping tea, reading a paperback.

The check arrived. Ivan patted his full stomach. “We better get going for the meeting. Who has to take a leak?”

They went downstairs to the men’s room. After finishing business, Ivan set the briefcase on the floor and turned on the ornate gold faucets. The others lined up at adjacent sinks and turned more gold faucets.

Eugene Tibbs handed out paper towels.

Ivan lifted the lid off a jar. “Mint?”

“Take as many as you want.”

The Russians each took one of the round, hard, red-and-white mints. They liked those.

Ivan threw a five in the tip basket and picked up his briefcase.

The Russians started across midtown on foot, the temperature dropping fast. They picked up the pace, passing twenty consecutive windows with pictures of restaurant owners and Giuliani. Icy gusts blew down the Seventh Avenue canyon. More windows, more pictures. Pauly Shore, Ron Howard, Julie Newman, Goldie Hawn, Kim Basinger, Mike Tyson, Damon Wayans.

Ivan pointed across the street at a blue-and-yellow sign, LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN. “We’re getting close.”

They went around the south side of the Ed Sullivan Theater, over to Fiftieth Street and down the stairs into the subway.

“Where is it?” asked Alexi.

“Not sure,” said Ivan, reading his own scribbling on a Moon Hut matchbook.

“You said we were supposed to meet Yuri and make the submarine deal at a clandestine KGB document drop station.”

“That’s right. It’s disguised as a little subway bakery — bagels and stuff for morning commuters.”

Dmitri looked across the subway platform. Nobody else except a man in a trench coat playing the tenor sax in a rueful way that made people want to forgive Third World debt. A deep rumbling noise grew out of the darkness at the end of the platform, then a bright light. A late train on the 1-2-3-9 roared out of a tunnel and stopped. The doors opened. Nobody got on or off. The doors closed. The train left.

Vladimir studied a map on the wall. “I think that was the red line.”

A gravelly voice: “Are you looking for Siberia?”

The Russians turned around. A homeless face poked out of the shadows from a dark corner of the platform.

“What’d you say, old man?”

“You looking for Siberia? That Commie place?”

The Russians glanced at each other. The document drop station was a tightly guarded Soviet secret. Just great. Even the bums knew about it. And he was calling it Siberia, adding insult.

“I’ll tell you for a dollar,” said the bum.

Ivan handed him a folded George Washington.

“Go over this platform and around to the other train. Don’t worry if you think you’ve gone too far — just keep going. It’s way down in the bowels of this thing. You’ll find it, just keep going down….”

They started walking away. Ivan stopped and turned and called back to the old man. “How do you know about this place? It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“It is a secret,” said the bum. “But the in-crowd knows about it. They’re always coming by to check it out, usually on the weekend if there’s nothing else to do.”

“It’s become idle amusement?”

“Pretty much,” said the bum.

“Wonderful,” said Igor.

The Russians went farther down into the subway. And down. And down.

“Where the hell is it?” asked Vladimir.

“He told us to just keep going,” said Ivan, trotting down another flight of stairs. “If we…hold it, what’s that?”

They saw a dark glass door and approached slowly. The door had a little sign. In small, plain black letters: SIBERIA. Ivan thought he heard something. “Is that music?”

Next to the door were several large windows, also dark, wallpapered from the inside with newspaper clippings. The Russians began reading the articles, all about the discovery of a Soviet document drop station. Their hearts sank. Ivan continued reading: in the mid-nineties, someone had leased the shop for a pub, and they started knocking out interior walls for more space. That’s when they found all the KGB documents and Russian passports and rubles inside the studwork. The clippings said the station was traced to a Soviet agent known as Yuri, who had fled long before the FBI swarmed the place. Other articles chronicled the new, literally underground, coolest bar of the moment that had since sprouted at the location. One story explained that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority doesn’t allow bars in the subway, but this specific location fell in a jurisdictional crack because of complex subterranean rights with foreign corporations in the area of Rockefeller Center.

“There goes the rendezvous,” said Ivan. He took several deep breaths of subway exhaust. “What the hell — let’s get something to drink.” He opened the door.

Inside was a dive’s dive, like if the producers of Animal House rejected a set for being too slovenly. Nobody picked up the empties, which collected on tables with cigarette butts and got knocked over and rolled under broken chairs and sofas. There were two undependable jukeboxes, a novelty photo machine, and cases of Amstel and Red Stripe stacked high against walls with profane graffiti. Behind the bar, a row of Russian military hats hung from the shelf that held the liquor bottles, over a picture of Hillary and the owner.

The bartender yelled over the Clash on one of the jukes: “What can I get you guys?”

The Russians began draining longnecks.

“…The shareef don’t like it…”

Ivan heard a familiar voice. He turned around. In the darkness, at one of the tables, a squat old man made a sales pitch to a pair of Juilliard students. He held up a painted wooden figure, twisted it apart at the middle, and took out a smaller figure. Then he twisted that one apart and took out an even smaller one, and so on until he had six figurines of descending size lined up across the table. The man gestured proudly.

“Twenty dollars is a lot of money,” said one of the students. “I don’t know.”

“What’s not to know?” said the man. “These are genuine Romanov nesting dolls. Almost a century old, worth a fortune. This is the bargain of a lifetime!”

“Then why do you have them? How can you sell them so cheap?”

“I told you, after the breakup, the whole country’s for sale. You name it, I can get it. Rocket launchers, cadaver parts, tsarist dinnerware…”

“No, thanks,” said the students, getting up and leaving.

“Wait! Let me show you how they reassemble….” The man desperately pieced the dolls back together. “That’s the genius of these things. That’s the whole beauty…” His voice trailed off. “…shit.”

“…Rock the casbah!…”

Ivan walked up from behind. “I hear you’re the sorry bastard I’m supposed to see about a submarine.”

Yuri turned around and his eyes lit up. “Comrade!” They gave each other big, slapping bear hugs.

Ivan gestured around the room. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

“It’s a crazy story,” said Yuri. “After the big Soviet collapse, there was no money. The KGB got behind on the rent, evicted. They wouldn’t even bring me home — just cut me loose over here.”

“They laid you off?”

“Can you believe it? And after all the microfilm I smuggled in my ass for those guys. I said I’d appeal. They just told me to take a powder — a cyanide powder, and they laughed. Personally, I don’t think that was very professional.”

“But what are you still doing here?” asked Ivan. He pointed back at the articles in the window. “They said you had fled. Nobody knew where you went.”

“Yeah, I heard that, too. Isn’t that weird? I’ve never left. Even when the FBI was here. I kept tapping them on the shoulders and asking if there was anything they wanted to know, but they just told me to stay out of the way and went back to tearing out the walls with demolition saws. I even tried to get asylum. Back when the Cold War was hot, you got asylum, you were set. Nice house, credit cards. Today, if you used to be KGB, you can’t get arrested. The CIA won’t return my calls. The people who own this place keep me around like a novelty, all my drinks are free. I can’t complain. Speaking of which: Bartender! Stoli!”

The bartender placed six shots on the table, the surface of the clear liquor vibrating as another subway train thundered by on the other side of the wall.

“So this place went from being a document drop to a bar?”

“Not directly. After the Kremlin lapsed on payments, it first became a hip-hop kung fu video store. They had these stereo speakers pointed out the door at top volume twenty-four hours, and passing commuters heard all this crazy urban martial-arts screaming: ‘Eeeeeee-yahhhhh, motherfucker!’ Jesus, was I glad to see that go. I couldn’t hear myself think in here. I was trying to get résumés out at the time. The Canadians were hiring in the Tribeca office.”

“The Canadians spy on the United States?”

“Not really, but they like to keep a few nominal cells active for national pride. They have this big inferiority thing, or so I’ve heard. They gave me an interview, and I told them I knew how to kill with a single sheet of typing paper, but they said they weren’t interested unless I could hit Céline Dion, and then they laughed. Again, not funny.”

Ivan nodded with empathy. “I hate to mix business, but there’s this matter about a sub.”

“We’re all set for delivery,” said Yuri. “It’s a Perestroika Class attack submersible, one of the small ones but still nuclear, with beverage holders, so you’re getting your money’s worth. We sail in February from the North Sea, at four knots through the NATO array of hydrophones. But I wouldn’t lose sleep. Even if we get caught, it’s no biggie. Nobody cares anymore — all the rules are new. We’ve still got hydrogen bombs, but who knew the Internet would be the thing? Suddenly, rock doesn’t crush scissors. ‘Hey, we can blow you up!’ ‘So what? Your bandwidth stinks.’ We’re like organ-grinders to these people.”

The bar’s owner walked up to the table. “Hey, Yuri! I see you brought some of your Russian friends. I sure hope you’re not doing any spying! Ha, ha, ha, ha…” The owner walked away, still laughing.

“See?” said Yuri.

“What I wouldn’t give for a poisoned umbrella,” said Dmitri.

Ivan lifted the briefcase and set it on the table.

Yuri smiled. He cracked his knuckles and licked his lips, then turned the briefcase around to face him. “This is what I’ve been waiting for.” He flipped the latches and dramatically opened it with the lid facing the others.

Ivan was still smiling, but Yuri’s expression changed. He looked up. “What is this, some kind of sick joke?”

“What do you mean?” said Ivan. “It’s all there. Five million dollars!”

“Very funny.” Yuri spun the briefcase around.

“What the hell’s all this crap?” said Ivan. “Cologne, mints, condoms…”

The bar shook again as the subway rumbled by. It was late, only two people in the train: Eugene Tibbs in the first car, heading home with his silver briefcase, and in the last car, a tourist from Florida named Serge.

30

A sheet-covered body lay on the sidewalk outside a pizza parlor.

“Roll film!”

The location crew from Law & Order panned over the body and up to the actors talking on the curb.

Cars began honking and swerving as five Russians ran through the middle of traffic on Broadway, sprinting up the sidewalk past Jerry Orbach, hopping over the body and disappearing around the corner.

“Cut! Cut!” yelled the director.

The Russians crossed the street again, running up Fifty-seventh and back into the Russian Tea Room. They dashed down the stairs and burst into the men’s room. Empty.

They ran back up the stairs toward the dining room.

The maître d’ blocked their path. “Do you have a reservation?”

The maître d’s head bounced on the steps as he was dragged back down the stairs by the legs. They pulled him into the men’s room and slapped him around.

“Who’s the urinal guy?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Punch.

“Who’s the urinal guy!”

“I don’t know!”

They upended him and shook him by the ankles. Pocket change and silverware clanged on the tiles. A business card fluttered to the floor. Ivan picked it up.

“Big Apple Urinal Guys,” said Ivan. “Who’s that?”

The maître d’ shrugged upside down.

“There’s no address. Only a phone number.”

“You can use the reverse directory,” said the maître d’.

“How do you do that?”

“Just call the phone company.”

The N-R line squealed into the subway station below Houston Street. Eugene Tibbs stood up and grabbed a handrail. Tibbs’s shift back in the Russian Tea Room had started like all the others, but the ending was a bit different. Tibbs had finished counting his tips and went to pack up his supplies for the night. He grabbed his briefcase from under the sink and opened it.

His blues were cured.

Tibbs slammed the lid shut and hurried out of the Tea Room. He’d been a paranoid mess ever since. He knew someone would come after the money, and they wouldn’t ask politely. Even if he gave it back, he was still dead. Only one option: leave the city as fast as possible and retire in millionaire’s style. He couldn’t stop shaking and looking over his shoulder. Why couldn’t he be cool like Ralph Krunkleton? What would the real urinal guy do in a jam like this?

The train doors opened, and Eugene stepped out of the car onto the Houston Street platform. He was quiet and alone. Then movement. Eugene’s head snapped to the left. Way, way down at the opposite end of the platform, someone stepped out of the last car.

Tibbs stared at the man, standing there casually, reading a newspaper like he had nothing to do. The man looked up from the paper at Tibbs and looked back down quickly.

Uh-oh. Don’t panic. Where did you see this once? Adrenaline spun the memory Rolodex in Eugene’s head. Yes, I remember now. The French Connection. Tibbs took a single step backward, through the still-open door of the subway car.

At the other end of the platform, Serge looked up from his paper as Tibbs disappeared back into the train. So that’s it, thought Serge. He wants to play French Connection. Well, two can tango! He took a step backward into his own car.

Tibbs stuck his head out of the train. The platform was empty again. Perspiration increased. He took a step out of the car and stared down the platform.

Serge’s head popped out of the last car. He saw Tibbs. He stepped back on the platform. Tibbs jumped back into the first car. Serge jumped back into the last car. Tibbs jumped out again. Serge jumped out. On, off, on, off.

The subway system put an end to the game. The train’s doors closed, and it pulled away into the tunnel.

Just Tibbs and Serge alone on the platform. They locked eyes. Eugene blinked. He took off running for the stairs up to Houston Street. Serge sprinted after him.

Eugene tripped and went sprawling on the steps. Mints, Bic razors, business cards everywhere. He turned around. Serge was gaining. He got up and started running again, coming out of the subway and reaching the street. Car noises, food smells. He evaluated each direction, then took off west.

Serge ran up the steps, grabbing a business card and reading it on the run.

They galloped all over lower Manhattan, through the Village and SoHo. Serge was faster, but Eugene knew the turf, running through restaurant kitchens and up service lifts. He crossed Bleecker Street and turned south, but Serge was still there, a block back.

A yellow taxi-van drove five women up Hudson Street, a recorded message playing in back: “This is Mary Wilson of the Supremes asking you to Stop! In the name of safety! Please buckle up.”

“Pull over,” said Teresa. She checked the address against her paperback. “This is the place.”

The BBB got out in front of the White Horse Tavern.

Rebecca pointed at the sidewalk. “Dylan Thomas bought it right there. The permanent hangover.”

They stared at the pavement.

“Should we be feeling good about this?” asked Sam.

A tanker truck was parked at the corner, next to a crane dangling an array of metal wands over a vintage Checker cab.

“Look,” said Teresa. “They’re shooting a movie.”

A technician turned on the rain machine, and the wands began to drizzle on the taxi.

“Roll film!”

Two people got out of the cab and kissed passionately.

Five Russians sprinted up the sidewalk. They ran through the rain, vaulted the hood of the cab and knocked over the embracing couple.

“Cut! Cut!”

The book club took a step back off the sidewalk as the Russians stampeded past them and disappeared into the darkness.

“Now we’re seeing the real New York,” Maria said cheerfully.

The Russians finally arrived at the address they had gotten from the reverse directory, using the urinal guy’s business card. They stared up at the grimy brick building, and it reminded them of the factories back in Leningrad. But they had heard Americans liked to spend a lot of money to live in depressing places. They walked quietly up the stairs and came to a landing with two doors.

“Which one?” asked Alexi.

“Take your pick,” said Ivan. “If it’s wrong, we’ll just try the other.”

Alexi stuck a lock pick in the handle. The door opened easily, as if by itself.

“Don’t be shy,” said a smiling woman with a glass of Chardonnay, holding the inside doorknob. The loft was cavernous, full of people in tank tops and black turtlenecks, nibbling fondue and sushi. Three spotlights lit up a large, blank canvas propped in the middle of the room. The stereo was extra loud, playing a synthesized mélange of electronic buzzes, beeps, chirps and sirens, the newest Nihilistic German discotheque music designed to make people think, “Gee, it’s got a great beat to dance to, but what would be the fucking point?”

The Russians mingled. More wine, more raw fish, more knocks at the door. The Eurotrash arrived. Someone rang a tiny brass bell; the crowd quieted and gathered around the canvas. The Russians strained for a better view from the back. A naked man came out of the bathroom spooled in Saran Wrap. He walked to the middle of the loft, produced his penis from the layers of plastic and whizzed on the canvas.

The crowd applauded to show they were hip, but not too much, to show they were hip.

Alexi turned to Ivan. “I think we have the wrong apartment.”

Eugene Tibbs stood panting at the corner of Broadway and Houston, looking back up the street. Finally lost him. He returned to his apartment, sluggishly climbing the stairs. Nihilistic music thumped from the apartment next door. Eugene stuck his key in the knob.

Inside the apartment, the Russians heard Tibbs’s key. “Someone’s coming!” They packed themselves in a closet. Lots of jostling, “Shhhh!” “No, you ‘Shhhh!’” They got settled in and peeked out through the slats in the accordion door.

Tibbs was ready to turn the doorknob when he noticed something. The talcum powder on his knob was smudged. He looked at the landing and saw footprints in the fine layer of white powder. Eugene tiptoed back toward the steps. He stopped when he heard someone at the base of the stairs. He slipped over to the landing’s window and climbed out onto the fire escape.

“What’s taking him so long?” asked Alexi. They slowly opened the closet door and ventured out. The place was a shambles. Drywall kicked in, wiring torn out, down feathers everywhere from slit pillows, jars of stuff dumped on the kitchen floor.

“Do we have to make such a mess every time we look for something?” said Ivan.

Alexi held a flowerpot in each hand and smashed them together. “We’re looking for something?”

Serge made it to the top of the stairs. “Two doors, hmmm. Eenie, meenie, miney moe.” He stuck a bobby pin in the lock.

“Someone’s coming!” The Russians piled back in the closet.

Serge opened the door. “Anybody home?” He turned on the lights and looked around at all the dumped-out drawers and broken stuff. “I could never live like this.”

He walked around the room, pawing through clothes, checking behind paintings.

“What’s he doing?” asked Vladimir.

“Shhhh!” said Ivan, peeking out the slats, strips of light across his face.

Serge was checking under sofa cushions when he heard the doorknob. “Uh-oh. Someone’s coming.” He jumped into a second closet on the opposite side of the room and peeked through the slats.

The knob turned and the door creaked open. In walked five huge men in tuxedos with waist-length dreadlocks — the crazy Jamaican gang from Queens in a turf war over the urinal guy rackets. They had gone to the mattresses with the Sicilians over control of the West Side, and guess who got caught in the middle?

“Hey mon — anybody home?” The Jamaicans walked through the loft with TEC-9 machine guns at their sides.

Ivan peeked through the slats and whispered out the side of his mouth: “Silencers.”

The Russians screwed suppressors on their pistols.

The last Jamaican stopped and stood still. The others turned around. He held a finger to his lips, then pointed at the closet. They raised machine guns.

“Hey mon! Looks like nobody’s home.” The Jamaicans clicked their safeties off. “We’ll just have to come back another time.”

The front door of the loft crashed open, and in rushed a crew from the Balboa crime family assigned to protect Tibbs. They opened fire on the Jamaicans. The Jamaicans shot back. The Russians let ’er rip through the closet door at the Jamaicans and the Italians, who both fired back at the closet in a confusing burst of triangulated fire. Music pounded through the walls.

The Jamaicans ripped off long, puttering bursts of small-caliber fire, the Russians blazed with nine-millimeter rounds, the Balboa crew rat-a-tat-tatted with fifty-caliber tommy guns. Serge sat down in the bottom of his closet and pulled a coat over his head.

Two of the Rastafarians were hit immediately, and they went down spinning, their machine guns still firing, strafing the walls, the lighting fixtures and the Russians’ closet. Three of the Russians were hit, then two of the Balboas, then another Jamaican, lead flying everywhere. A burst of bullets cut through the kitchen, a line of bottles on the counter blowing up in succession: ketchup, olives, A.1., jerk sauce. The windows blew out; a sink faucet got hit and geysered. The closet door splintered above Serge. He covered his ears and gently rocked back and forth, singing to himself: “…I woke up in a SoHo doorway, a policeman knew my name…”

The shooting finally stopped. The room was still except for thumping German music. Nothing but a thick cloud of smoke, the smell of cordite, a spraying faucet and a swinging lamp that finally snapped and crashed. Almost everyone dead or dying. Ivan was left with just a flesh wound in the thigh, under a pile of dead Russians in the closet. He pushed them off, one by one, like sandbags, and finally pulled himself free. He fell through the closet door into the room.

There was a moan from the middle of the loft. One of the Jamaicans was coming around, pushing the fallen lamp off his head. Ivan limped toward him. The Jamaican saw the Russian coming and tried to get up, but couldn’t. He dragged himself across the floor, begging. Ivan kicked him in the stomach, then the head. He picked up the Jamaican and slammed him into the door that connected the apartment with the adjacent artists’ loft. The door gave way.

The Jamaican came crashing into the unit next door, distracting the crowd from a man in a pope costume defecating on the Sinead O’Connor CD box set.

Ivan entered the room next, kicking the Jamaican across the floor. He snatched a steaming fondue pot off the table.

“Pull your pants down! Now!”

The crowd applauded.

31

Eugene Tibbs knew he was past the fail-safe, his life forever changed. He couldn’t return to his apartment. He had to get out of town right now, no looking back.

But which way? La Guardia, JFK, Newark, Grand Central Station? Every pore in his skin wide open. A clock ticked in his head.

Penn Station was the closest. Eugene made his way into Chelsea and north on Seventh Avenue, people pushing racks of clothes across the street. Eugene spun around. What was that? Everywhere he looked, he saw enemies. Is there something odd about that guy feeding the pigeons? That woman eating a sandwich in the park? The man pushing a shopping cart with a ten-foot ball of aluminum foil? His legs felt like lead; he forced them to carry him to Thirty-fourth Street.

Tibbs entered the train station and began browsing brochures. Where to go? It had to be far, far away. California? Arizona? Oregon? He found an attractive pamphlet with palm trees and went to the Amtrak window.

Serge was on stakeout across the street from Tibbs’s crib.

He kicked himself for losing Eugene’s trail. This was his only chance. All he could do was hope that Tibbs came back, but he knew his chances were slim. He sat on a bench reading an article in the Post about Mariah Carey’s secret source of inner strength. Serge turned the page and looked up at the SoHo loft. He still couldn’t believe the police hadn’t arrived yet. He had expected the place to be crawling, TV trucks, gawkers, the unit sealed off. All that gunfire — hadn’t anyone called the cops? Actually, they had, but it was to report loud German party music that had drowned out the shooting.

The cops weren’t anywhere to be seen, but Serge soon realized he had other company. Watching the apartment from the corner across the intersection were Ivan and a Jamaican, nursing hangovers. The pair were the newest toasts of the avant-garde art community, and the revelry had lasted till dawn. They even scored. Now they were paying for it, huddled in the cold over Starbucks.

The Jamaican’s name was Zigzag, and he and Ivan had just gone into business together. With everyone else dead, there was no point continuing to fight. The deal was sealed when Ivan got the dawn phone call: The Colombians had just assassinated Mr. Grande by placing a bomb in his riding mower.

Serge had never been good at waiting. He was pacing manically now, and Ivan and Zigzag picked him up on their radar. Serge finally came to the end of his rope. He ran across the street, cars honking. He marched right up the stairs, kicked in the door and started going through Eugene’s stuff as if the room wasn’t full of bodies.

Ivan and Zigzag looked at each other.

“Come on!” said Serge. “There’s got to be a clue where he’s going! An address book with relatives! Anything!…”

The phone rang. Serge stared as the answering machine clicked on. “You’ve reached Big Apple Urinal Guys…”

Beeeeep.

“This is Amtrak calling to confirm your reservation on The Silver Stingray, departing for Miami tomorrow at noon…”

Serge casually walked back down the stairs, feigning an expression of futility. He sauntered around the corner until he was out of sight, then took off sprinting.

Ivan and Zigzag looked at each other again and shrugged.

Serge loping across the garment district. Thirty-seventh Street, Thirty-sixth, Thirty-fifth, flying through racks of clothes being wheeled across the street, people yelling and shaking fists. He ran past a pretzel wagon stand, which exploded, throwing a Bruce Willis stunt double through the air and into a parked car.

Serge stopped and helped him up. “Are you okay?”

“Cut! Cut!”

Serge took off again, charging down the steps at Penn Station and running to the Amtrak window.

“Miami, please.”

Serge carefully tucked the ticket in his wallet and went over to the main concourse to check out the giant schedule board with the latest arrival and departure info.

“What do you want to do tonight?” asked Maria.

“It’s Monday,” said Rebecca. “Woody’s playing clarinet at the Carlyle.”

“That’s a great idea!” said Teresa.

“I’m not sure I want to see Woody Allen,” said Sam.

“Why not?”

“Because of what he did to Mia.”

“We don’t know Mia,” said Rebecca. “What’s she ever done for us?”

“He slept with her daughter, for heaven’s sake!”

“It’s not a sex show,” said Teresa. “He’s just going to play the clarinet.”

“Mia went with the Beatles to see that Maharishi guy,” said Rebecca. “And she married Sinatra and played the on-screen mother of Satan.”

“So?” said Sam.

“The whole thing was shaky.”

“There it is,” said Maria. “There’s the schedule board.”

The BBB walked across the Penn Station concourse and stopped in front of the big board.

“That’s our train, The Silver Stingray,” said Teresa. “Leaves in twenty hours. Let’s find the departure platform so we’re not late when it’s time to go.”

“What about Woody Allen?” asked Rebecca. “Are we going or not?”

“Excuse me,” said a man’s voice. “Did I hear you say you’re going to see Woody Allen?”

A limo pulled to the curb on the seven thousand block of Park Avenue.

The Café Carlyle doorman had a smile and white gloves. “Good evening, ladies.” The women checked their coats and the maître d’ led them to a table under muted frescoes. He bowed and left.

“Look how intimate the seating is,” said Rebecca, gesturing at an empty chair beside a piano just feet away. “He’s going to be sitting right there!”

Sam leaned and whispered to Teresa: “I can’t believe we let him come along.”

“Shhh! He’ll hear you.” They looked over and smiled at Serge, who was setting up a miniature digital recorder under a napkin to bootleg Woody.

A round of drinks arrived. Then a few more.

“Let’s check out guys,” said Rebecca. “Oooo, I like that one over there.”

“Which one? The overaged hippie?”

“No, the business type in the turtleneck. I’d sleep with him.”

“You would?”

“Sure, if I knew I wouldn’t catch anything and wouldn’t get pregnant again, and knew that he would still respect me and call, but not call too much and get cloying and possessive. And if he doesn’t have a wife, and doesn’t lie to me if he does, because I wouldn’t want to wreck another woman’s home, and…”

“In other words, in some fantasy astral plane in a parallel universe,” said Teresa.

“Right,” said Rebecca.

“Okay, Rebecca’s an easy lay. Who else?”

“I’d do that guy over there,” said Maria.

“The cheap Tom Selleck?”

“That’s the one.”

“Same terms as Rebecca?”

“Except that he also can’t smell bad after an hour or two. Or bob his head in the car to some song that he tells me perfectly captures the kind of person he is. Either of those two things, and it’s no Big O for Maria.”

“Are you talking about Charlie?”

“How’d you know?”

“I warned you not to go out with him, but did you listen?”

“Yuk is not a warning.”

“I’m starting to not want to date anyone who’s eligible,” said Paige.

“I know what you mean,” said Maria. “It’s like availability automatically disqualifies them. If they’re single and never been married, they’re either playboys or have some kind of psychological defect that prevents them from forming healthy relationships, like a private sexual ceremony you only find out about when you’re innocently going through his dresser and find the baby pacifiers and vibrating butt plugs and he accuses you of spying…”

“Charlie again?”

“Did I use any names?”

“And if they’ve been married and gotten divorced, what did they do to deserve it?” said Paige. “You don’t want to hire someone who’s just been fired…”

“And if she was the bad unit in the marriage, then his judgment is suspect…”

“The only decent ones are married, and if they fool around, what does that say?…”

“That means the only guys worth considering are widowers…”

“And you can’t go out with them because it’s way too depressing. Every few minutes some little thing reminds them of their dead wives, like a certain brand of perfume or a car horn, and they either stare off for an hour or cry real loud in a crowded restaurant.”

Sighs.

“So,” Sam said to Serge with overt contempt. “What’s with the tape recorder?”

“Preserving the show for future historians.”

The chemicals were undergoing a tidal shift in Serge’s head. He was now a man of mystery, currently involved in some kind of high-stakes smuggling game with the Russians. And these women…well, a good female agent will use any weapon at her disposal; Serge was determined not to let any of them lure him into the classic espionage “honey trap.”

Sam snickered. “You’re a historian?”

A historian was as good a cover as any. Serge nodded.

A tipsy Rebecca leaned toward Serge, brushing her shoulder against his. “Wow, a historian. I’ll bet that takes years of study and hard work.” Rebecca looked around at the others, and she could see it in their eyes: Slut!

This Rebecca could be the Mata Hari, thought Serge. But then, so could any of them. Watch your step.

A small redheaded man took the stage. Serge pressed a button on his recorder.

The Dixieland jazz began whimsically and slow but built with reckless precision. At one point, Serge had an uncontrollable urge to ask if he could sit in on trombone. Why not? It was a chance of a lifetime. But that would risk his cover because he didn’t know how to play the trombone, and national security had to come first.

Rebecca leaned cozily into Serge again. “Can you believe what this is costing?”

“Believe it,” said Serge. “You got your sixty-dollar entertainment charge, eighteen dollars for the appetizer if you want to cheap out, drinks, cab fare, coat check, tips. It never ends! Russell Baker was right. In New York, you hemorrhage money!”

The women smiled and tapped along with the music. With the exception of Sam, they were all starting to fall for Serge, so dashing and charming and funny — no clue he was crazier than a whirligig beetle — sitting there bouncing jauntily and playing the “air clarinet.”

An hour later, the room erupted in applause as Mr. Allen packed up his instrument and left the stage. White noise of conversation filled the room. Serge asked where the women were from, and they told him.

“Really? I’m from Florida, too!” he said. “What about family?”

“Most of our kids also go to school there,” said Teresa, “but a couple are out of state.”

“You have kids?” said Serge. “Pictures!”

Teresa opened her wallet and handed it to Serge. “He’s a fine one!…Okay, the rest of you!”

The others dug out wallets except Sam, who finally got moving after an elbow from Maria. Serge carefully lined the photos up on the table like a collection. “That sure is a blue-ribbon crop. You must be mighty proud parents! What do your husbands do?”

“We don’t have any.”

“Not anymore.”

“Irresistible women like yourselves?” said Serge. “Available?”

“Please!” Sam said under her breath.

“So you’re all single moms?” asked Serge.

They nodded.

“What the heck is this, a club or something?”

They nodded again.

“Well, you got all my respect. Single moms are my heroes. No tougher or more important job in America today, that’s a fact! I was raised by a single mom. I didn’t really think about it much at the time, but looking back — what she must have gone through! You may not know it to look at me today, but I was quite a handful.”

Sam muttered again.

“Did you say something?” asked Serge.

She smiled. “Nope.”

“Anyway, hats off to you. The country can’t do enough — Congress should come up with a medal!…”

His stock with the gals was going through the roof. “…If it was up to me, you’d get hazardous-duty pay, yes sir!…”

Rebecca looked at the others. “He has to come with us!”

“Yes, you have to!”

“We’ve got a limo.”

“How can a man say no to such lovely ladies…”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Sam. “No offense, but we don’t know anything about him.”

“She’s right,” said Serge. “I’m a complete stranger you’ve just met in New York. God only knows what I’m capable of.”

“Who are you kidding?” said Rebecca. “You look so normal.”

“It’s the normal-looking ones you have to worry about,” said Serge. “You’re not going to end up in a sex dungeon because you went off with a wacky-looking guy.”

Rebecca laughed and put a hand on Serge’s shoulder. “You’re so funny!”