'Now kill something, damn it!' he ordered.
Thomas brought down his next deer, a clean kill through the shoulder and heart. The father was elated. The boy could shoot.
Proficiency with a rifle, marksmanship that was accurate at hundreds of yards, had to be learned young. Then it would never be lost.
'I hate blood sports'' Thomas said absently to her as the car passed out of the wooded regions into farming land.
Leslie looked up from her pad, closed it on the likeness of Grover, and glanced at Thomas with interest.
'Hunting?' she asked, mystified.
He nodded.
'You know how to shoot?'
'I suppose,' he said.
'I haven't for a long time' ' She let it drop and the next two hours of the drive were passed in silence.
Lincoln Tunnel brought them into Manhattan at Tenth Avenue and West Thirty-eighth Street. Thomas turned southward. Five minutes later he'd pulled his car to a halt in front of her building.
The shabby block was remarkably quiet in the early hours of a Saturday afternoon. She realized immediately that only she would be getting out of the car.
'You're not coming up?' she asked.
He shook his head.
'Why not?' Her question was sympathetic, not challenging. She knew the answer. The other man in her life, the one she'd revealed the previous night.
'I don't think it would be a good idea. I need perspective.'
'Perspective on what?'
On you, he thought, but he didn't say it.
'On the case' he said to her.
'Lawyer-client -relationships,' he said, 'shouldn't be at the mercy of personal relationships' She seemed nonplussed, a little hurt, and certainly surprised.
'I … I don't understand the problem' she stammered, apparently more upset than she'd been when disposing of a body off the stern of the ferry. Or when slashing Thomas loose from strangulation in an elevator door.
'The problem he said, 'is you. I'm emotionally involved. And I shouldn't be' 'Ah' she said, her accent apparent even with that single sound.
She lowered her eyes as if embarrassed.
'I see,' she said.
'You didn't know. Until now?'
She shook her head.
'I hacwt been thinking. Not about that.'
'Of course,' he said, as if in resolution. His tone changed.
'I have to get into. my apartment anyway,' he said.
'I have papers there.
Briefs. Books. I have motions that have to be filed for you. Right away, if possible.' He let a few seconds pass.
'In other words' he said,
'I'm still working for you. No matter what.'
'Be careful,' she said.
'In and out of your apartment, I mean.'
He nodded.
'You're precious'' she said. She leaned to him and kissed him on the cheek, a gesture of both affection and gratitude.
He watched Leslie McAdam disappear into the shabby building.
He waited until she raised the window shade upstairs, signaling that she'd passed through the odorous hallway uneventfully.
Then he drove back uptown, wondering if this last case in his legal career would ever make any sense. By Fifty-seventh Street his thoughts were drifting. He wondered how Andrea Parker was getting on with Augie Reid. How long could a man in his fifties hold her? New York was a young man's town, he tried to convince himself .
Part Six
Chapter 26
It was quarter past six when Hearn returned to the Nineteenth Precinct from the downtown headquarters at One Police Plaza.
He strolled casually through the squad room and continued upstairs to the cubicle where he and Shassad shared two desks.
His red hair was disheveled. Half of this thoughts were on his nine-year-old daughter who had the measles. The other half were on the contents of a manila envelope which he carried under his arm.
He arrived at Shassad's desk, found his partner, and tossed the envelope across the desk, where it nearly knocked over a paper cup holding dark lukewarm water and a tea bag.
'Tea?' Hearn asked, seeing the untouched cup.
'It's that idiot in the delil' answered Shassad.
'I ordered coffee with milk. He gives me tea. Tea!' he repeated, playing with the word and trying to sound like an English butler.
'He must think I look like a fairy.' He picked up the envelope.
'What's this?'
'Drop a coin in the slot and see what you get,' said Hearn.
'Or send down a pair of thumb impressions and see what comes back '
Hearn's expression was anxious, yet sober. Shassad instinctively knew that the folder within the envelope contained something new on the Ryder case.
'It's the fingerprint readout for our buddy at 457 Park Avenue South'' added Hearn, sitting down on the edge of his own desk. You like it. I promise ' 'It's about time Shassad answered. He opened the folder and frowned slightly.
'It took a while they told me' Hearn continued, 'because they had to go to a back-date file. The guy who belongs to that thumb died in 1965.
Supposedly.'
Shassad examined ten different fingerprints on the master chart returned to him, ten small black-and-white squares enclosing mazes of gray lines. The left thumbprint matched jacobus's.
But the name? The name on the file was all wrong.
'I can't even pronounce this crap,' said Shassad.
He read. Sergei Sholavsky.
'What the hell's this Sholavsky bullshit?' Shassad mumbled to his partner.
'Jacobus's real name?'
'In a sense,' said Hearn.
'Yes. I think it is.' He paused as his partner glanced through the printout with considerably increasing fascination.
'Aram, fella,' he said, 'do you get the idea about what we're getting into?'
Shassad looked at the front and side profiles of the man named Sholavsky. Then his eyes skipped to the text below.
Sholavsky, it read, was Russian by birth. Born in Minsk a few years after the First World War. A dedicated
