“At some point a couple years later, business motives no doubt, Igor took a dislike, went up to Pound Ridge, introduced piranhas into the Doctor’s swimming pool.”

“And they all became best friends forever?”

“The message was conveyed, the Doctor ceased and desisted whatever it was and has been very well-mannered since then. So I’ve come to think of Igor as a benevolent mobster for whom real estate is only a sideline.”

•   •   •

THEY TAKE A MEETING in the ZiL, on its way through Manhattan from one piece of monkey business to another.

“Sure, blast from past, part from Stinger missile launcher. Battery-coolant receptacle cap.”

“You used to get shot at with Stingers,” March is thoughtful enough to point out.

“Me, my friends, nothing personal. After Afghanistan, Stingers stayed there with mujahedeen, went on black market, many got bought back by CIA. I arranged a few deals, CIA didn’t care how much they spent, you could get up to $150,000 a pop.”

“That was a long time ago,” Maxine sez. “Are there any of them still around?”

“Plenty. Worldwide, maybe 60, 70,000 units plus Chinese knockoffs . . . Not so much in U.S., which makes this one interesting. Mind my asking—where’d you find it?”

March and Maxine exchange a look. “What could hurt?” Maxine supposes.

“Actually the last time somebody said that . . .”

“You know you want to tell me,” Igor beams.

They tell him, including a quick synopsis of the DVD. “And who videos this?”

Turns out Reg and Igor have also done some business. They met in Moscow around the peak of the Russian-baby-adoption craze in the U.S., when Reg was taping eligible babies to help pediatricians stateside to advise prospective parents. Because of the potential for fraud here, the idea was not to have these babies just sit there and pose for close-ups but actually do things like reach for objects, roll or crawl around, which meant some direction or at least wrangling from Reg. “Very sympathetic young man. Great appreciation for Russian cinema. Always at Gorbushka Market buying up kilos of DVDs, piratstvo, of course, but no Hollywood movies, only Russian—Tarkovsky, Dziga Vertov, Lady with Little Dog, not to mention greatest animated film ever made, Yozhik v Tumane (1975).”

Maxine hears spasmodic sniffling and looks in the front seat to find Misha and Grisha both with tears in their eyes and quivering lower lips. “They, ah, like that one too?”

Igor shakes his head impatiently. “Hedgehogs, Russian thing, don’t ask.”

“This writing on the battery cap, what’s it say, can you read it?”

“Pashto, ‘God is great,’ maybe legit, maybe CIA forgery to look like mujahedeen, covering up some caper of their own.”

“Well now that you’ve brought it up, there’s another . . .”

“Let me read your mind. Spetsnaz knife, right?”

“With the flying blade, that allegedly did in Lester Traipse—”

“Poor Lester.” A strange mixture of compassion and warning in his face.

“Uh-oh.” Yet another relationship here, it figures. “The knife story is a frame-up, I gather.”

“Spetsnaz don’t shoot knives through air at people, Spetsnaz throw knives. Ballistic knife is weapon for chainik, with no throwing skills, afraid to get close up, wants to avoid gunshot noise. And—” pretending to hesitate “—blade they took out of Lester, OK, my distant cousin works downtown at Police Plaza, he saw it in property room, guess what. Fucking podyobka, totally, ain’t even Ostmark blade, maybe Chinese, maybe cheaper. Let’s hope someday I tell you more, but it still ain’t what Flintstones call page right out of history. Too much payback to deal with right now.”

“Whatever you feel comfortable sharing, of course, Igor. Meantime, what are we supposed to be doing about the other weapon? The hi-tech one on the roof? Suppose there’s a clock on this?”

“Mind letting me watch DVD? Simple nostalgia, you understand.”

26

Cornelia rings up and as previously threatened wants to go shopping. Maxine is expecting Bergdorf’s or Saks, but instead Cornelia hustles her into a cab and next thing she knows they’re headed for the Bronx. “I’ve always wanted to shop at Loehmann’s,” Cornelia explains.

“But they never let you in because you . . . have to be accompanied by somebody Jewish?”

“I’m offending you.”

“Nothing personal. Little history, is all. You realize, I hope, that this is not the Loehmann’s of legend. That one moved, back in, I don’t know, late 80’s?”

When Maxine and Heidi were girls, the store was still on Fordham Road, and every month or so their mothers would take them up there to learn how to shop. Loehmann’s in those days had a no-returns policy, so you had to get it right the first time. It was boot camp. Gave you discipline and reflexes. Heidi took to it as if in a previous life she had been a rag-trade superstar. “I feel like I’m weirdly home, that this is who I really am, I can’t explain it.”

“I can,” Maxine said, “you’re a compulsive shopper.”

For Maxine it was less cosmic. The changing room was short on privacy, what people liked to call “communal,” crowded with women in different stages of undress and attitude trying on clothes half of which didn’t fit but nevertheless offering free fashion advice to whoever looked like they needed it, meaning everybody. Like the locker room back at Julia Richman without the envy and paranoia. Now here’s this pearl-wearing WASP wants to drag her back into it all again.

The new Loehmann’s has been moved northward, into a former skating rink, it seems, almost to Riverdale, right up against the relentless roar of the Deegan, and Maxine has to struggle not to let out a scream of recognition—same endless aisles of heaped and picked-over garments, same old notorious Back Room as well, stuffed, she bets, with the same buyers’ mistakes and horror-story prom gowns with sequins shedding everywhere. Cornelia, on the other hand, the minute she steps in the store, is under its spell. “Oh, Maxi! I love it!”

“Yes, well . . .”

“Meet you by the registers, say around one, we’ll go have lunch, OK?” Cornelia disappearing into a miasma of whatever formaldehyde product retailers put on garments to make them smell this way, and Maxine, feeling not exactly claustrophobic, more like flashback-intolerant, wanders outside again, into the streets, at least to see what’s what, and then remembers that only a little way up the Deegan, just over the Yonkers line, is Sensibility, the ladies’ shooting range she’s just mailed in another year’s membership dues to, and that for this excursion to Loehmann’s she has somehow remembered to bring along the Beretta.

Hey. Cornelia will be hours. Maxine finds a cab letting off a fare, and twenty minutes later she’s all signed in at Sensibility, on the firing line in goggles, earplugs, and head muffs, with a convenience-store cup full of loose rounds, blasting away. Let the gamer have his zombies, Han Solo his TIE fighters, Elmer Fudd his elusive rabbit, for Maxine it has always been the iconic paper target figure known to cops as The Thug, here rendered in fuchsia and optical green. He has the look of an aging juvenile delinquent, with one of those shiny high-fifties haircuts, a scowl, and a possibly nearsighted squint. Today, even with his image cranked all the way back to the berm, she manages to place some nice groups in his head, chest, and, actually, dick area—which long ago may have been an issue, though after a while it seemed to Maxine the number of trouser wrinkles the artist shows radiating from the target’s crotch could be read as an invitation to shoot there as well. She takes some time practicing double taps. Pretends briefly—only a bit of fun, you know—that it’s Windust she’s shooting at.