“Detective,” Wesley added. “This could be the biggest thing I’ve ever accomplished in my whole life. Please call us.”

“You may be sure,” Viktor said, “that I shall personally call you. I am not going home tonight until I have a talk with Mr. Farley Ramsdale and his friend who calls herself Olive O. Ramsdale. And if you wish, you can go now and look for them at tweaker hangouts. Perhaps we do not have enough to tie them into crimes but we do not have to just sit back and cool our toes.”

Now Ilya was lecturing Cosmo as she would a child, and he sat there with a cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers, taking it gladly, a man bereft of ideas.

“Understand me, Cosmo, and trust,” she said. “Olive is gone and Farley will not get out of his car in the junkyard of Gregori. He will not, because of you. Do not think all people are as stupid as…” She stopped there and said, “You must kill him in his car. Outside the yard.”

“Ilya, I cannot find no place to hide myself outside. It is open road and no cars parked on the road at night. Where can I hide myself?”

“Think on it,” Ilya said. “Use the brain. After you kill him you take him away in his car. You park one mile away. You leave. You go back to the yard and get our car.”

Interrupting, “How must I get back to the yard? Call taxi?”

“No!” she said. “You do not! You want police to find out that taxi takes somebody from a scene of dead body to the junkyard of Gregori? Goddamn, Cosmo!”

“Okay, Ilya. Sorry. I walk back.”

“Then you and me, we drive to Dmitri. You have some diamonds in your pocket. Not too many. You give diamonds to Dmitri. His man inspect diamonds. You say, please bring money downstairs to the nightclub. Give to Ilya. I shall be sitting at the bar. He give me money, I go to ladies’ room and get the remaining diamonds from where I hide them in a safe place. Lots of people around in the nightclub. We shall be safe.”

“But Ilya,” Dmitri said. “You forget about ATM money.”

“No, I do not forget. You must tell Dmitri mostly truth.”

“Ilya! He shall kill me!”

“No, he wants ATM money. You tell him we know where to find Olive. You tell him we shall find her tomorrow. We shall get money and kill her. We shall bring half of money to Dmitri like our deal say we do.”

“He shall be very angry,” a despairing Cosmo said. “He shall kill me.”

“Dmitri wish to kill someone? Tell him to kill his goddamn Georgian who give us a goddamn car that don’t run!”

“Then, what we do tomorrow? We cannot find Olive. We cannot get money to Dmitri.”

“The Americans have saying, Cosmo. I am not for sure what each word mean but I understand the idea. Tomorrow we get the fuck out of Dodge.”

The Oracle was having a bad night. The lieutenant was off and he was watch commander, so he had to deal with the angry phone call from the lawyer, Anthony Butler.

“Mr. Butler,” he said, “the detectives have gone home, so if you’ll just call back tomorrow.”

“I have been waiting all day for your detectives!” the lawyer said. “Or rather my daughter has. Do you know she was given a date rape drug at a place called Omar’s Lounge?”

“Yes, I’ve pulled the report and looked it over as you requested, but I’m not a detective.”

“I talked to your nighttime detective twenty minutes ago. The man’s an idiot.”

The Oracle didn’t argue with that one but said, “I will personally make sure that the detective commander knows about your call, and he will send someone to your office tomorrow.”

“The man Andrei who tried to drug my daughter knows she got in the wrong car. He probably knows the police were called. And how do we know that he’s not a friend of the Iranians? Maybe he can identify them. What if this was a filthy little plot involving Andrei and the Iranian pigs? I’m shocked that nobody has been to the Gulag to at least identify this Andrei.”

The Oracle said, “If he’s really the manager of the Gulag, he’s got a good job and he’s not going anywhere. He’ll be there tomorrow. And being an attorney, you must understand how impossible it would be to prove that she’d been given a drug last night.”

The lawyer said, “I want to know if the man has a history of this sort of thing. Sara is my only child, Sergeant. A security officer from our corporation is going to accompany me and my daughter to the Gulag this evening, and she’s going to point him out if he’s there, and we’re going to get his name and address. I intend to make the bastard’s life a misery with or without the help of detectives from Hollywood Station.”

“No, no, Mr. Butler,” the Oracle said. “Don’t go to the Gulag and stir things up. That’ll just end up a real mess for everyone. Tell you what, I’ll go there myself tonight and talk to the guy and get all the necessary information that the detectives can act on. How’s that?”

“You give me your personal guarantee, Sergeant?”

“You have it,” the Oracle said.

After he hung up, the Oracle called 6-X-76 to the station while he read through the report in its entirety. This was the kind of petty crap that wore him down more than anything, that made him feel old.

Whenever anybody asked him how old he was, the Oracle always answered, “I’m the same age as Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, and Dustin Hoffman.”

He’d always figured that ageless images of Hollywood stars would somehow mitigate what the mirror was showing him: jagged furrows running down his cheeks and encircling his neck, a sagging jawline, deepening creases between his hazel eyes.

But the trick didn’t work anymore. Many of the young coppers would say, “Who’s Warren Beatty?” Or ask what movie Jane Fonda ever played in. Or say, “Jack Nicholson’s the dumpy old guy that goes to the Laker games, right?” He opened the desk drawer and swallowed a dose of antacid liquid from the bottle.

When 6-X-76 entered the watch commander’s office, the Oracle said, “This so-called kidnapping at Omar’s Lounge is a piece of shit, right?”

“A smelly one, Sarge,” Budgie said. “The woman insisted on a kidnapping report. She threatened lawsuits. She called a TV news crew, but I didn’t hear anything more, so I guess they also figured it was a piece of shit. Her old man’s some kind of politically connected lawyer, according to her.”

“He just called.”

“She’s an actress,” Fausto said, and at Hollywood Station that explained a lot.

The Oracle nodded and said, “Just to keep the peace I’ll run up to the Gulag later tonight and get Andrei’s name and address so that when her daddy calls, the detectives can pacify him. We don’t need any more personnel complaints around here.”

“What time you going?” Fausto asked.

“In a couple hours.”

“We’ll meet you there and take you to Marina’s.”

“What’s that?”

“New Mexican restaurant on Melrose.”

“I’m not rich enough for Melrose.”

“No, this is a little family joint. I’ll buy.”

“Is there a rehab for Tex-Mex addiction? I’ve got permanent heartburn.”

“Whatever you say.”

The Oracle hesitated and said, “Home-made tortillas? And salsa fresca?”

“I been hearing good things,” Fausto said.

“Okay, I’ll call and let you know when I’m at the Gulag,” the Oracle said.

“Catch you in five, Fausto,” Budgie said, obviously going to the bathroom.

When she was gone, the Oracle said, “I’m doing car assignments for the next deployment period. How do you feel about Budgie?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“You didn’t want to work with a woman, but you did me a favor. I don’t wanna ask for a favor two months in a row if you still feel the same way.”

Fausto didn’t speak for a moment. He looked up at the ceiling and sighed as though it were a tough decision and then said, “Well, Merv, if you’re on the spot again and need me to help out…”

“We’re so shorthanded that figuring out deployment is awful hard these days,” the Oracle said. “It would make things easier for me.”