Lucas asked Nadya, 'Did you hear anything about the computer?'
'No. The question is traveling through the bureaucracy.'
The Range is the remnant of both an ancient sea and an ancient mountain range, more or less an hour northwest of Duluth; it's the largest iron-ore lode in the U.S. The Range runs from northeast to southwest, and sitting atop it is a string of small iron-mining cities-Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Biwabik, Hibbing. The cities are cold, hardworking, blue-collar, economically depressed, and addicted to hockey.
The town of Virginia was straight up Highway 53 from Duluth, across gently rolling countryside covered with birch and aspen-some of the aspen just beginning to turn yellow-interspersed with blue-and-green-colored fir, spruce, tamarack, and occasional rigidly ordered stands of plantation pine. Lucas drove and Reasons played with the navigation system for a while, and finally said, 'So what?'
'It works when you're trying to find an address,' Lucas said. 'Out on the open highway, it doesn't do much. Tells you what direction you're traveling.'
'Does this cost extra?' Nadya asked.
'A little bit,' Lucas said.
'A lot,' Reasons said.
'If it doesn't help, why do you have it?'
'It looks neat,' Reasons said.
Nadya yawned, and went back to the New York Times, while working methodically through three bottles of spring water. She'd gotten a teensy bit in the bag the night before, drinking two vodka martinis without any rest after the trip. 'Help me sleep,' she'd muttered as Reasons and Lucas steered her out of the elevator down to her door.
She'd complained of dehydration as they were leaving Duluth, so they stopped for the water and the newspapers, and both Reasons, with the Star Tribune, and Nadya, with the Times, took turns reading bits and pieces to Lucas. When they were finished with the paper, Reasons and Nadya began a kind of teasing chatter.
Lucas, looking between them, thought, Hmmm.
Virginia's downtown section was made up of five long blocks of 1900-era red-and-yellow-brick two- and three-story buildings. Inside the five blocks, as Lucas remembered them, you could find anything you needed and most of what you wanted: you could eat American or Mexican, get drunk, acquire a tattoo, wreck your car, get busted, hire a lawyer, and get your car fixed without going off the street. You could get saved by Jesus on a Wednesday evening and then walk a hundred feet across the way and get a dirty magazine; you could buy a Jenn-Air range or a Sub-Zero refrigerator or a used paperback, a homemade quilt or a doughnut, a chain saw or an ice-cream cone or a pack of Gitanes or Players. There was an ample supply of bars, ranging from places where you'd take your aged Aunt Sally to outright dives.
Lucas had always thought it might be the best main drag in Minnesota, and maybe the whole Midwest. He'd visited the place a dozen times between eighth grade and his senior year in high school, as a hockey player, and remembered with some fondness the brutally cold nights after the games when he and a half dozen friends went out looking for underage beer and hot women. They'd never gone home dry, and, as far as Lucas knew, nobody had ever gotten laid, despite expansive and ingenious lies about close calls, about barmaids and Virginia cheerleaders.
They arrived a little before ten o'clock in the morning. He was happy to see the street was still intact.
Spivak's Tap was halfway down the ranks from cocktail lounge to dive. They parked in front, and got out, the sun hot on their backs despite the cool air, and Nadya said, 'More signs.'
'What's this thing you've got for signs?' Reasons asked.
'I have nothing for signs, but there are so many,' she said. 'Most people here, most men, have signs on their shirts. Why do you need so many signs?'
Reasons said, 'Beats the hell out of me.'
Lucas looked up at the front of the bar. 'This guy-his name is Spivak?'
Reasons had called the owner the night before, and told him that they were coming, but not the purpose of the visit. He said, 'Right. Anthony Spivak.'
Nadya asked, 'He will have a toilet here, yes?' and Lucas said, 'Yes,' and they followed Reasons inside.
Spivak's was an unembarrassed beer joint, with clunky plank floors, a long mahogany bar, jars of pickled eggs and pigs' feet, two dozen booths with high backs upholstered in red leatherette, an area near a jukebox where you could dance, if you were so inclined, a couple of stuffed muskies, and an old, six-foot-long painting of a plump pink nude woman behind the bar, holding a strategically placed white ostrich feather. Lucas remembered both the painting and the feather.
Spivak was sitting at the end of the bar with a spiral notebook, a calculator, and a beer. He was a broad, short man, with a square pink face, square yellow teeth, and white hair growing out of his head, ears, and nose. He had a fat nose that looked as though it had been broken a couple of times. A blond woman with tired eyes stood behind the bar, taking glasses out of a stainless-steel sink, wiping them dry with a bar towel. Two guys in ball caps and plaid shirts sat in one of the booths, talking over their beers.
When they walked in, Spivak looked up, closed the spiral notebook, and asked, 'Are you the folks from Duluth?'
'Yeah.' Reasons nodded. He introduced Lucas and Nadya. Lucas raised a hand and Nadya nodded.
'Come on in the back,' Spivak said. They followed him past the rest rooms, which had signs that said setters and pointers, and which had to be explained to Nadya, who then disappeared into Setters; and then into the back, where four long tables were scattered among sixteen chairs in a party room. They took a table and Spivak cleared some chairs and said, 'Could I get you something-on the house?'
'Ah, no, thanks,' Reasons said. 'We needed to talk to you about something that happened up here last week, but we've got to wait until Nadya gets back.'
'She's got an accent,' Spivak said, as they settled in at the table. 'Where she from?'
'Russia.'
'Russia.' The corners of his mouth turned down as his eyebrows went up. 'Huh. She's not a cop?'
'Yeah, she is,' said Lucas. 'She's part of this whole… We'll tell you about it in a minute.' He looked around: 'I used to come here as a kid-it hasn't changed much. Did the can always say Setters and Pointers?'
Spivak said, 'A long time ago, it used to say Bucks and Does, but then in the seventies, some Indian guys said 'Bucks' was racist, so my dad changed it.'
'But bucks means… deer bucks, right?'
'Well, yeah, but, you know, it was the seventies, Jane Fonda, all that,' Spivak said. 'And we used to get quite a few guys from Nett Lake in here drinking, they worked in the mines…'
'Nett Lake is an Indian reservation,' Reasons told Lucas, who said, 'I know.'
Spivak asked Lucas, 'You used to come in here?'
'Yeah, playing hockey. We were always going around looking for beer afterwards.'
'You probably got a few here,' Spivak said. 'Dad always thought that if you were old enough to skate, a little beer wouldn't hurt you. When was this?'
'Late seventies.'
Spivak nodded. 'I would've missed you-I was the sixties. Things were different back then… So are the Wild gonna do anything this year?'
They talked hockey for a couple of minutes, until Nadya came back, and when she was seated, Reasons said to Spivak, using his formal cop explanatory voice, 'About fifteen days ago, a Russian guy came in here and apparently got together with some people at a meeting here in your bar. We'd like to know what you remember about that.'
Spivak frowned. 'A Russian? I don't remember a Russian specifically.'
'He was a tough-looking guy in a leather jacket, heavy five-o'clock shadow, big square head like a milk carton,' Lucas said. 'Looked like a mean sonofabitch.'
'You were sure he was here?' Spivak asked uncertainly.
'We got an American Express card receipt from here,' Reasons said. 'For a hundred and forty-five dollars.'
'Ohhh…' Spivak's eyebrows went up again, but his eyes slid away. 'Yeah. Okay. In fact, they were sitting right
