‘Never heard of them.’ Marko, who is also standing again, makes this sound like it is a significant statement, which it isn’t. He still looks keen to throw Frank out the door.

‘You’ve never heard of Sergei Vasiliev?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have TV, internet?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘And what do you do?’ I ask. The shotgun shot has given me a particular authority.

‘I’m a car salesman. Clean. Had some trouble when I was young, but nothing since. My brother is a different story.’ His anger is gone, and he looks like a different person, maybe even a reasonable person.

‘You want a beer?’

‘What?’ He and Marko say this simultaneously.

‘There’s something going on here, and I don’t know what it is. I think we need to talk.’

‘Oh, fuck off, Dave.’ Marko cannot believe me.

‘I’m serious.’ I go to the fridge, extract three beers, hand one each to the other two, and open one myself. They look at the beer in their hands in wonder. ‘Come on, drink up. Take a seat.’ I push a stool at the now not-so-angry man. His name is Frank Costello, and his brother has been missing for some months. He did a bad deal with the Vasilievs, and they put a contract out on him.

‘So he may not even be dead,’ Marko points out, still not happy with my idea of friendship.

‘He’s dead, all right. They sent me a message. Said there’d be a gift from the Vasilievs. But nothing ever came, except one day I got a note from some Tito guy.’

I’ve finished my drink, but the other two have hardly had a mouthful of theirs. I get out three more, and hand them around. They look at me like I have a problem.

‘So why would you believe Tito and come all the way out here looking for him?’

‘I didn’t know what else to do. Everybody tells me my brother is dead, but there’s no body, and the police have got nothing. Everyone is asking questions. Someone sends you a note saying they’ve got pieces of your brother — you follow it up, don’t you?’ He lets us see the desperate man he is.

‘I guess so.’ Marko finishes his first beer, and seems to be relaxing. ‘The Vasilievs send out gifts after they murder someone?’

Frank shrugs. ‘Apparently.’ He is just Frank now — a car salesman who probably gets ribbed for using too much cologne. Not a bad guy, though. ‘It’s actually pretty hard to get someone killed discreetly. It’s easy to do a drive-by or a shooting on a front porch, you know, in front of your family. But to remove someone, body and all, with no witnesses, is a real art. Most hitmen don’t get the significance of killing someone. It’s just fish in a barrel to them.’

‘You know this how?’ Marko is almost sneering.