“What kind of insurance?”

“You know Hamilton from my squad, yes?”

Danny nodded. Jerry Hamilton. Jersey Jerry. A goon; all that separated him from a prison cell was a badge.

“I know Hamilton.”

“Good. Keep your eyes peeled tonight and be on the ready.”

“For what?”

“You’ll know it when it happens, believe you me.” McKenna stood and slapped at the white dust on his pants. It had been falling steadily since the explosion. “Now go and clean yourself up. You’ve got tracks of blood running down your neck. You’ve got this dust all over you, you do. Covering your hair, your face. Look like one of them Bushmen I’ve seen in the picture books.”

CHAPTER eighteen

When Danny arrived at the restaurant, he found the door locked and the windows shuttered.

“It’s closed on Sundays.” Nathan Bishop stepped out of a darkened doorway into the weak yellow light cast by the nearest street-lamp. “My mistake.”

Danny looked up and down the empty street. “Where’s Comrade Fraina?”

“At the other place.”

“What other place?”

Nathan frowned. “The other place we’re going.”

“Oh.”

“Because this place was closed.”

“Right.”

“Have you always suffered Mongoloidism, or did you just come down with it?”

“Always.”

Nathan held out his hand. “Car’s across the street.”

Danny saw it now—an Olds Model M, Pyotr Glaviach behind the wheel looking straight ahead. He turned the key, and the rumble of the heavy engine echoed up the street.

Nathan, walking toward the car, looked back over his shoulder. “You coming?”

Danny hoped McKenna’s men were somewhere he couldn’t see, watching, not boozing it up in a bar around the corner until they decided to stroll on over to the restaurant and make whatever move they had planned. He could picture it—Jersey Jerry and some other thug with a tin shield, both of them standing outside the darkened restaurant, one of them looking at the address he’d written on his own hand, then shaking his head with a five-year-old’s befuddlement.

Danny stepped off the curb and walked toward the car.

They drove a few blocks and then turned onto Harrison as a light rain fell. Pyotr Glaviach turned on his wipers. Like the rest of the car, they were heavy things, and the back-and-forth slap of them found Danny’s chest.

“Quiet tonight,” Nathan said.

Danny looked out at Harrison Avenue, its empty sidewalks. “Yeah. Well, it’s Sunday.”

“I was talking about you.”

The restaurant was called Oktober, the name appearing solely on the door in red lettering so small that Danny had passed it several times over the last couple of months without ever knowing it was there. Three tables inside, and only one of them was set. Nathan led Danny to it.

Pyotr threw the lock on the front door and then took a seat by it, his large hands lying in his lap like sleeping dogs.

Louis Fraina stood at the tiny bar, speaking rapidly on the phone in Russian. He nodded a lot and scribbled furiously in a notepad as the barmaid, a heavyset woman in her sixties, brought Nathan and Danny a bottle of vodka and a basket of brown bread. Nathan poured them each a drink and then raised his in toast. Danny did the same.