“Fabulous.” Decker smiled in the dark. “That’s the spirit! Let’s opt for fun while our hearts are still beating.” He kissed Rina long and slow, feeling a tightening below the waist. But he decided to ignore it. “Good night, darling. I love you.”

“Love you, too.” Rina closed her eyes, was just about to drift off when she heard him speak.

“… off chance that Micky Novack will call tomorrow night.”

“Huh?” She was groggy. “Who’s Mick—oh, the cop. What did you just say?”

“I said, that there was a teeny, tiny off chance that Novack might call me tomorrow night. When I left him, he was investigating the possibility that Ephraim might have attended some twelve-step program meetings for Jewish addicts. If he gets a tip on that, he said he’d call me. Then maybe we’d go out together and interview the members of Ephraim’s chapter… if Novack gets a lead.”

“I just thought you washed your hands of the entire thing.”

“Only if he gets a lead, Rina.”

“But you’re not obsessed.”

“No, I’m not. Obsessed would be if I went out to the meetings without a lead and started asking questions myself. That would be obsessed. Do you see the difference?”

“Yes.”

“Are you just agreeing with me to shut me up?”

“Yes… I mean, no.” Rina lifted her head and kissed her husband’s lips. “Good night, Peter.”

She pulled the cover over her face. She fell asleep to the background noise of his muted grumbling.

9

A teeny, tiny off-chance call, huh?

Not that Rina had actually said anything. She hadn’t needed to say anything. She had simply given him one of those looks. The actual verbalized question had been: “Do I change the airline tickets?” Decker answered with an offended “No, of course not,” and left before she could see him blush.

They were walking on Broadway—Novack and he—passing the upper Seventies. The street was wide, but even so, cars were backed up from traffic light to traffic light, the area teeming with life and all the young people who frequented what the Upper West Side had to offer. There were scores of cafés and restaurants, lots of bars, and lots of stores—not the outrageously priced boutiques on Fifth or Madison, but drugstores and bookstores and liquor stores and grocery markets. The night was cold and damp, but Decker had brought along gloves and an overcoat—an old heavy wool thing that he had purchased twenty-five years ago when he and his first wife went to London on vacation in the wintertime: Off-season prices were all he could afford. The trip had been miserable, but he had been warm.

Novack was wearing a black ski parka. “While you were praising God at Shabbat services, I was working. Course that’s my job. I just wanted to assure you that we’re not all yutzes out here.”

Decker’s expression was surprised. “Why would I think that?”

“The toilet-bowl thing,” Novack said. “I had it checked out. There was recent splatter on the rim. I shoulda thought of it myself. Course it’s a lot easier to be smart when you’re working on one case as opposed to twenty, and your city ain’t under siege.”