When she came back from her lunch she seemed less interested in being friendly than previously, seemed a little frightened of him in fact, which suited Crosetti very well. He spent the rest of the afternoon calling people he knew about places to stay, and trolled the Web sites with the same intent. After work, he went by the likeliest place he had found, a room in a loft near the Brooklyn Navy Yard occupied by a friend from college, a freelance sound engineer, and his girlfriend, a singer. The tenant list was rich in media wannabes and the friend said the Navy Yard was destined to be the next Williamsburg. The building stank of old toxins but was full of pale ocher light from the huge, filthy industrial windows and so reminded him painfully of Carolyn’s place. As he was a sucking-on-a-bad-tooth sort of fellow, this alone was enough to make the sale, and Crosetti walked down the splintery stairs eight hundred dollars poorer and with a date to move in after Thanksgiving. He then followed a difficult multiple bus route back to the A line and the train to 104th Street, Ozone Park.

As he turned off Liberty Avenue onto 106th Street, where he lived, he passed a black SUV with tinted windows. It was not the kind of neighborhood that ran to new, shiny, $40K vehicles, and since he knew every car native to his street, and since Klim’s warning of the previous night instantly sprang to mind upon observing it, Crosetti was, if not exactly ready, not completely astounded by what happened next. As he hurried past it, he heard two car doors pop open and the sound of feet on pavement. He turned and saw two men in black leather coats moving toward him. Both were larger than he was and one was a whole lot larger. They had sweatshirt hoods drawn tight around their faces and their eyes were obscured by large dark glasses, which he thought was an indication of bad intent. Without much thought, Crosetti pulled out his father’s.38 and shot in the general direction of the larger man. The bullet went through this person’s leather jacket and shattered the windshield of the SUV. Both men stopped. Crosetti raised the pistol and pointed it at the head of the larger man. Both men backed up slowly and reentered their vehicle, which flew from the curb with screaming tires.

Crosetti sat down on the curb and put his head down below his knees until the feeling of wanting to faint and to vomit passed. He stared at the pistol, as at an artifact of an alien civilization, and dropped it into his briefcase.

“Albert! What happened?”

Crosetti swiveled around and saw a small gray-haired woman in a pink tracksuit and a heavy pale blue cardigan standing just outside the front door of her bungalow.

“It’s nothing, Mrs. Conti. Some guys tried to kidnap me and I shot one of them and they went away. It’s all over.”

Pause. “You want me to call 911?”

“No, thanks, Mrs. Conti. I’ll call it in myself.”

“Madonna! This used to be a nice neighborhood,” said Mrs. Conti and returned to her kitchen.

Crosetti picked himself up and walked on wobbly legs to his house. An elderly Cadillac hearse shone at the curb, and he regarded it sourly as he walked up the driveway to the back door. He wanted to slip through the kitchen, maybe pour himself a tumbler full of red wine and then up to his room for a nice rest, but no, Mary Peg was there twenty seconds after he had eased the door shut.

“Allie! There you are. I’ve been trying to get you all day. Don’t you respond to messages anymore?”

“Sorry, Ma, I was on the cell a lot.” He took a breath. “Actually, I was looking for dwellings. I think I found a place in Brooklyn, with Beck, you know, from school?”

Mary Peg blinked, nodded, and said, “Well, it’s your life, dear. But the thing I wanted to talk to you about, Bulstrode’s lawyer called here.”

“Bulstrode is dead,” he replied stupidly.

“Yes, but dead people have lawyers too. It’s the estate.” She gave him a closer look. “Albert, is there something wrong with you?”

Crosetti thought briefly of trying to conceal the events just transacted a block away but realized that Agnes Conti distributed information with a velocity that telecom engineers were still struggling to match, and would shortly be phoning to supply the details, real and imagined. He said, “Sit down, Ma.”

They sat in the kitchen, Crosetti had his glass of wine and told his story. Mary Peg heard him out and thought she took it rather well. Actually, she thought, it put her in a somewhat better position than she would have been, given what she now had to relate to her son.

“Ma! What did you do that for?” was Crosetti’s wail. “God! I hate when you pull stuff behind my back.”

“Like stealing your father’s guns and turning my home into an armed camp?”

“That’s not the same thing. It was an emergency,” said Crosetti without enthusiasm. He really wanted to lie down.

“Well, I too thought that some action was required, and since you were unavailable and too busy running away from home, or whatever, to answer messages…”

The sound of a car pulling up in front of the house stopped her short. “Oh, I bet that’s Donna,” said Mary Peg and went to the door. Crosetti poured another glass of wine. As Crosetti drained this, Radeslaw Klim came into the room, freshly shaved in a black uniform jacket and tie, and holding a shiny-peaked black cap.

“Want some wine, Klim?”

“Thank you, but no. I must drive shortly.”

“It’s dark already. They don’t have funerals at night.”

“No, it is not a real funeral. It is for vampires.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, is quite à la mode now, you know, rich young people pretend to be vampires and ride in hearses, and have a party in crypt of a former church. Ah, here is your mother. And this must be the daughter. How do you do?”

Donna Crosetti, or The Donna, as she was known in the family, was a skinny red-haired clone of her mother and an ornament of the Legal Aid Society of New York, a friend of the downtrodden, or a bleeding heart who sprung hardened criminals to run wild in the streets, depending on whether you were talking to her mother or her sister, Patsy. She was the youngest daughter, just a year older than Crosetti himself, and had a more than full measure of the middle child’s sense of cosmic injury, the focus of which had been, from the earliest dawn of consciousness, the slightly younger brother, the Irish twin, the object of hatred and resentment, yet also the creature to be defended from all threats, to the last drop of blood. Crosetti felt exactly the same way and was just as inarticulate about it: a perfect stalemate of love.

Klim introduced himself, shook hands with the rather startled Donna Crosetti, kissed Mary Peg formally on both cheeks, and took his leave.

“Who was that?”

“That’s the new live-in boyfriend,” said Crosetti.

“What?” exclaimed The Donna, who had not been consulted.

“Not,” said Mary Peg.

“Is too,” said Crosetti. “He drives a hearse.”

“At night?”

“Yeah, he says it’s for vampires. How are you, Don?”

“He’s not my live-in boyfriend,” said Mary Peg. “How could you say such a thing, Albert!”

“He is too,” Crosetti insisted, feeling the years slip away in a manner that was unpleasantly quasi-psychotic and comforting at the same time. In a minute Donna would be screaming and chasing him around the kitchen table with a cooking implement in her little fist and their mother would be yelling and trying to stop them and dishing out random smacks and threatening apocalypse when their father got home.

Donna Crosetti glared at her mother and brother. “No, really…”

“Really,” said Mary Peg. “He’s a friend of Fanny’s who’s helping us decipher a seventeenth-century letter Allie found. He was working late on it so I offered him Patsy’s room for the night.”

“Which was three nights ago,” said Crosetti. He wrapped his arms around himself and made kissing noises.