'He speaks Ukrainian,' I said.
'He speaks a lot of things,' Epstein said.
I nodded. Epstein finished his scallops.
'They still got Indian pudding here?' he said.
'I think so.'
'Love Indian pudding,' he said.
'Isn't that nice,' I said.
The waiter cleared the table. Epstein ordered Indian pudding with ice cream. I had coffee. Men in suits and women in skirts came in and went out. The huge polished urns behind the service counter gleamed. The window next to us looked out on Winter Place, which was far too small an alley to live up to its name. Cold spring rain made all the surfaces in Winter Place gleam pleasantly. The waiter came back with coffee and Indian pudding. A scoop of vanilla ice cream sat on top of the pudding. Epstein looked at it happily.
'You don't like Indian pudding?' he said to me.
'I do. But not right now.'
'Guy your size,' Epstein said. 'You don't eat enough.'
I nodded. Epstein poked the ice cream with a spoon.
'Too hard,' he said, and put the spoon down. 'Give it a little time.'
Epstein sat back a little and sipped some coffee. He was in no hurry. He was never in any hurry. He had all the time he needed. He'd get to where he was going when he needed to. I was getting tired of waiting for him. Which I knew was also a tactic. What would I say to get him talking? When in doubt, go with what you do best. I shut up. Epstein tested his Indian pudding again, nodded to himself, and took a bite.
'Boots Podolak took over the business of running Marshport,' he said, 'from his father, whose name was Holovka Podolak, who came to Marshport after a long time in the Russian mob and scratched out a living in the Ukrainian neighborhood, known as Strashnyy, which is, by the way, Ukrainian for 'horrible.' Holovka scratched so good and so often that eventually, in the late seventies, he took the city away from the Micks, who had taken it away from the Yankees.'
'It's mostly black Hispanic now,' I said.
'It's been black Hispanic for forty years,' Epstein said. 'But not at the top.'
'Gee,' I said.
'Holovka was mean and smart and had a lot of, ah, Eurasian connections,' Epstein said.
He shoveled in some more pudding.
'And when he passed it on to Boots, the whole thing should have fallen apart, because Boots is a poster child for gene-pool dilution, but Holovka had made an alliance with an Afghani warlord.'
'In Afghanistan?' I said.
'You think there are Afghani warlords hanging around pool halls in Marshport?' Epstein said. 'Yes, an Afghanistan-based Afghani warlord.'
He grinned and went back to his Indian pudding. I waited, drinking my coffee, watching him finish it off. I wondered if the name was politically correct. Shouldn't it be Native American pudding?
'Opium,' I said.
Epstein nodded his head in a congratulatory way.
'Doesn't take you long,' he said. 'Podolak is the exclusive East Coast, U.S.A. distributorship for an Afghani warlord named Haji Haroon.'
'Where'd the connection with Holovka come from?' I said.
'We don't know. We're guessing his father established it before he came to Marshport. We think he spent time there, maybe in his Russian mob days. The Soviets were there for a long time.'
'And didn't it work out good for them,' I said.
Epstein smiled.
'Opium's kind of bulky,' I said.
'Too bulky for distant export like this,' Epstein said.
'So Haji ships heroin.'
'Exactly right,' Epstein said. 'And nicely alliterative.'
'Does Haji supply, ah, management expertise?'
'He does.'
'Afghani?'
Epstein shrugged.
'We don't know,' he said.
'But you know there is somebody keeping an eye on Boots.'
