I WOKE UP WONDERING if the Russians were the kind of guys who would go to church. Funny, the things your brain worries about. It was Sunday morning, my ears were still ringing from Roscoe's music, and my back was stiff from sleeping in the chair. Nicky had gotten up before me, of course, but he'd stayed quiet. He was sitting over by the window, watching Avery's horse. When I got up, he followed me into the bathroom, and the two of us washed up together. He did not seem to question the bond between us, somehow he accepted what I had such a hard time comprehending. You couldn't write it off, either, couldn't say that it was because he was young and didn't know any better, you couldn't say it was because I hadn't hurt him yet, hadn't let him down. I had already done all of those things, in spades, and yet he still trusted me. And even more than that, Nicky expected me to be the good guy. He had faith in the image of me that he held in his head, and I felt the weight of that faith and those expectations, and I was no longer comfortable being the un-principled rat that I had once been. It was a new experience for me, being the subject of another person's uncritical positive regard, knowing for sure there was another human being out there who worried if I was going to be okay. I suppose I'd never had occasion to think about it before, maybe I'm emotionally retarded, stunted from a lack of water, but in my mind I always associated the word "love" with getting laid, you know, like in rock-and-roll lyrics. I'll tell you, though, those few minutes first thing in the morning, holding Nicky up so that he could make faces at himself in the mirror while he brushed his teeth, the hug that he gave me for no particular reason when we were done, that was worth everything to me. It was what I stood to lose if the Russians won.
Louis went to church that morning. He was already dressed to go when Nicky and I got downstairs. He was wearing a suit that had to be twenty-five years old, but it was clean, his shoes were polished, he was polished too, he was into it, man. He got that light in his eyes that religious people get, you know, and he asked me if Nicky and I wanted to tag along. Hell, no, I wanted to say, but I declined politely. Maybe next time. Eleanor, Louis told me, was having one of her pain spells, and was staying in bed. I promised Louis that Nicky and I would be quiet.
Nicky and I had cereal for breakfast, and then I got him settled in front of Avery's television. I plugged my laptop in and went on-line. I looked at MapQuest, trying to figure out where the Russians had been headed the night before. It looked to me like they had taken the back way toward Calais, as if they had wanted to stay off Route 1. They couldn't be staying far away, so I did a search for motels within a fifty-mile radius. I was surprised how few there were and worried for a while that I wasn't getting them all, but I searched a few different ways and kept coming up with most of the same names. I quit when I was happy with my list. It had about twenty names and phone numbers.
My phone spiel was pretty straightforward. Do you have a Dubrovnic party registered there? Oh, are you sure? Mr. Dubrovnic and his cousin are up there on a fishing trip
. Maybe they registered under hiscousin's name. Oh, gee, you know, I don't remember his cousin's last name. Big guy, though, and Russian. Might have a third guy along
. Nobody like that? Sorry to bother you.
I made a mental note to myself to leave some money with Louis for the phone bill. I was three quarters of the way down the list when I hit pay dirt, sort of. "Oh, yes," the lady said, "I know who you mean. I'm afraid you missed them, though. They checked out this morning."
"Oh, no," I said. It was not too hard to sound distressed. "Oh, this is terrible. I've got to get a message to Mr. Dubrovnic right away, his wife went into labor earlier than expected, and if I don't get ahold of him, she's going to kill him and me both. Did they give you any idea where they were headed?"
She lowered her voice. "Well, they didn't say anything to me, but I did overhear one of them on the phone in the office, making arrangements to rent a cabin somewhere out near Grand Lake Stream. I don't know what good that will do you, though, they didn't leave the phone number."
"Oh, my," I said. "Well, I'll have to figure out something. Thank you so much for all your help."
I was up getting another cup of coffee when Avery's phone rang. It was Bookman, looking for me.
"Louis go to church?" he asked me.
"Yeah."
"Look," he said. "Howevah those Russians sniffed you out, the leak is on yaw end, not mine. Now you listen to me carefully: I don't want any dead Rooskies turning up in my jurisdiction. Do you understand me?"
"Bookman, you got me all wrong."
"Yeah, I 'magine. By the way, what did you hit Hopkins with?"
"My good right hand. Listen, the guy's a nutcase, I got the right to defend myself."
"Relax, I heard all about it. Stupid bahstid looked like a raccoon with a white nose this mawning, two black eyes and a big bandage in the middle of his face. I put him on unpaid leave for taking aftah you. Hop has had this coming for a long time, and I think that when it's all said and done, he'll be the better for it. If he's half the man I believe he is, he'll learn from it, but if you go stirring him up, he won't get the chance. I told him to stay away from you. I'm asking you to do the same."
I was beginning to get the impression that Bookman had a blind spot when it came to Hopkins. They say loyalty is a good quality in a person, but I didn't have much experience with it. "Bookman, I got nothing to prove to Hoppie or anybody else."
"'Hoppie' is one of those red-flag words." I could hear the disapproval in his voice. "Be helpful if you could go along with me on this."
"I am the soul of cooperation." He snorted disgustedly. "Listen, Bookman, I need you to do something for me. I checked around this morning, those two Russians were in a motel up in Calais, but they checked out this morning. The clerk said they rented a cabin up near Grand Lake Stream. Is there some way you could help me out? I'd feel much more comfortable knowing where they are and what they're doing."
He didn't say anything at first, and I wasn't sure if I'd pushed him too far or not. "I'll see what I can do," he said finally, and he hung up.
I didn't know what to think about Bookman. There were too many layers to the guy. He was too good at misdirection for you to take him at face value. He wore that chubby doofus exterior like a jacket, but his eyes belonged to a much different creature. He never told you enough, either, never said exactly what he was after. What had he done with me, that day in his office? He fed me a few scraps of information, and then he sat back and watched me jump to conclusions. I knew the first time I met him that he had to be smarter than he looked. Question was, how much smarter? I believed him, though, when he said that it wasn't him who'd ratted me out to the Russians. He just didn't seem to be that kind of guy.
I started thinking about the Russians again. Obviously they knew I was up here, but they didn't seem to know exactly what I looked like or what my name was. They couldn't know where I was staying, either, or they'd be coming through Avery's door already. They had Rosario, but he couldn't give them a lot, he only knew me by the street name I used in Brooklyn. I had to assume they were pretty good, though, because they'd bagged Rosey and broken him, and that could not have been easy. It's one of the bad things about being a crook: you make a big score, all of a sudden you're a target, the headhunters start coming after you, including the ones you thought were your friends. Hey, what are you gonna do, call the cops? I started getting antsy, started watching through the windows and shit.
"Hey, Nicky, you want to go for a walk?"
We stopped at the Subaru first and slathered ourselves with bug spray. I strung my binoculars around my neck and we started up the hill behind Avery's house. Two gulls flew overhead, one chasing the other. The pursuer was a great black-backed gull. They're easy to spot because they're bigger than the other gulls, plus, as you might guess, their backs and the tops of their wings are black. Usually. I mean, you might get one that's all white, and you might get one with gray wings, but this one was basic black. The other one was probably a herring gull, white body, gray on the back and the wing tops, but I couldn't be sure, because there are a dozen or so other kinds of gulls that can look almost exactly the same, ring-billed gulls, glaucous gulls, Iceland gulls, lesser black-backed gulls in a gray phase, forget about hybrids, and the immature gulls all look the same to me. Gulls are a pain in the ass. You have to go on small differences: either black or white on the wing tips, pale spots in the wing feathers when seen from below, small black bands on the tail, maybe a black ring on the beak, or a red spot, all while the son of a bitch is running for his life, wheeling and diving to evade the bigger one chasing him. The black ones will kill and eat the other gulls sometimes, grabbing them in midair and shaking them hard enough to break their necks.
Nicky was getting used to my fixation with birds, and he stopped next to me. We watched the two gulls until they were out of sight. "Why is the big one chasing that other one?" he wanted to know.
"The small one probably caught a fish, and the big one is trying to take it away from him."
"That's not fair. Why doesn't he go catch his own fish?"
"I don't know. Maybe he's no good at catching fish. Maybe the fish hide when they see him coming."
"He should go catch his own."
"Yeah, you're right." He seemed satisfied with that answer, and we went on up the hill. It's hard not to think of what animals do in terms of good and bad. It's a mistake to do that, they say, animals just do what they do, there's no morality involved. Nobody says why it doesn't work the other way around, though. I knew what the Russians were gonna do if they caught me, and it had nothing to do with some abstract set of rules about the politics of coercion. It was just who they were, what they did. No less true, I suppose, when I got the money to begin with, or when the guys I stole it from got it before me. Everything depends on where you're standing when the shit goes down.
Nicky and I messed around up in Louis's woodlot for an hour or so. We stayed away from the hole where the red oak had gone down, went farther up the hill into the woods. You could see where Louis had dropped a tree here and there, and there were piles of small branches lying around, making their slow way back down into the dirt. Louis didn't cut his firewood the way I imagined most people did, start with the closest trees to his house and work his way back, chopping down everything thicker than a pencil. He took one here and another one there, left the better-looking ones standing. I could hear a woodpecker drilling for his lunch but I couldn't spot him, he kept moving around. Kept his distance. Smart bird.
After a while we came back down the hill. I stopped Nicky just inside the tree line and glassed Avery's house. There was someone in the pasture next to Louis's house, next to the horse. "I wonder who that is," I said, mostly to myself.
"That's Eddie," Nicky said.
"Eddie? Oh, you mean Edna. How do you know?"
"She comes over during the day sometimes when you're gone. She helps out when Mrs. Avery isn't feeling good."
"Wow, Nicky, you got good eyes. Let's wait up here for just a minute, okay?"
"Okay, Poppy."
I watched her through the glasses. She was wearing construction boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. If I had met her in the city, I might have assumed that she batted from the other side of the plate, but up here in the boonies, it's tougher to tell. I was used to people who wore clothes for what they said, but out here, people wore them for what they did.
"We going down?" Nicky was getting restless.
"Yeah, we are," I told him. "Just one more minute." My paranoia was in full bloom, and I wanted to make sure she was alone. I didn't know what difference it made, but I tend to listen to these inner voices.
Nicky tugged at me. "C'mon, Poppy."
"All right, let's go." If there was anyone inside the house, they weren't going to come out carrying a sign to let me know who they were, anyhow. We headed down the hill. Nicky, who had been showing signs of fatigue in our last half hour in the woodlot, started bouncing up and down next to me.
"Can I go? Can I run, Dad?"
"Don't fall and hurt yourself." He turned and grinned at me, patted me once on the hip, for luck, I guess, and tore off down the hill. The horse must have heard him comingshe raised her head to look. Edna turned then and saw us. By the time I got down there she had Nicky up on the horse's back, and he was grinning so hard I thought his face was gonna break. I didn't go into the pasture with them, but leaned on the outside of the board fence and watched. Edna said something to Nicky, and he nodded, patting the horse's neck. She came over and stood next to me, inside the fence.
"Hi," she said. "What did you do to Hoppie?"
"Well," I said, "we had to have a conversation about nonaggression and mutual respect. Man, I gotta say, the grapevine up here is pretty muscular."
"Yeah, no kidding," she said. "Really, what happened?"
"I went to hear Roscoe's band. Hop was there, and he was tanked. Just as well, I guess, it made him easier to handle. He came after me, and I had to dissuade him."