milk to wash down the doughnuts?'
'Oh, sure,' and Janet darted away to get a carton of milk.
Bob and Carol Spivak came in, two walking fireplugs, twin brother and sister. They both looked at Carl Walther, and then Bob stooped to kiss his mother, who burst into tears again, finished her first doughnut, and took a second.
Nancy Witold Spencer came in: 'Hi, Mama.' She didn't speak to her father or look at him, but he said, weakly, 'Hi, Nance.' She nodded, a bare acknowledgment: they'd had a financial falling-out over a loan to her dance studio.
'Everybody got a seat?' Rick asked.
Everybody had a seat; the men, in plaid cotton shirts and blue jeans, the women in jeans and pastel blouses and cardigans with the sleeves pushed up. Leon Witold, working his way through a doughnut, said, 'Boy, them are good, gimme a little more of that coffee, will ya, Janet?' They were using small paper cups and she gave him a refill and he said, again, 'Boy, them are good doughnuts. I gotta get down here more often.'
'We could use the business,' Rick Svoboda said.
'Ah, bullshit, Rick, you're richer 'n Bob Dylan.' Bob Dylan had been born and raised in Hibbing, and was the local standard for obscene wealth.
'I sure wish.' After arranging the chairs, Svoboda took an electronic box out of a paper sack, pulled out an antenna, and walked around checking for bugs. He didn't find any. He never had; the only thing he'd ever detected was transistor radios. 'Okay, guys-Marsha called for this and she is going to tell us what happened last night.'
'First things first,' Leon Witold said. 'I want to know about Carl, before we talk.'
Grandpa Walther cleared his throat and said, 'When it was time to decide, Grandma and I told him about the early days, and he was a good student. He wanted to hear. So we told him. You know Jan and Ron were breaking up, and Carl was living with us, so he began to… understand that something else was going on. That things were not exactly as they seemed. So, when he was far enough along, we told him: five years ago. And he is a believer. A believer on his own. A good boy. We haven't forced it on him.'
Carl was nodding during this, and he said, 'I made up my own mind.'
They all looked at him for a moment and then Leon said, 'I hope to God that's the truth, because you could hang all of us. And your mom, for that matter.'
'She's not one of us,' Carl said.
'But she knows, and anyone who knows would be in as deep as the rest of us.'
'If the kid is in, he's in,' said Rick Svoboda. 'Can't go back now.' He looked at Carl for a moment, then nodded, and turned to Marsha Spivak. 'So tell us what happened with Anton.'
Marsha Spivak started leaking tears again and muttered around, trying to find a start, and then she sighed and lifted her heavy head and said, 'Yesterday, the police came. They knew about the meeting in the back. Anton tells me that they had a receipt from this Russian, who has so many names now that I can't keep track. Remember the Russian puts all the drinks on the American Express. So stupid. Why? Why? Why did we let him do that?'
'He wanted to put it on the card so he'd have the extra unaccountable cash to go to Wal-Mart.' Svoboda said.
'But he said he had all that money…'
'Not his money. He had to account for it,' Svoboda said. 'He was chipping off a couple hundred bucks, and probably a few more here and there. The stupid thing wasn't putting it on the card-the stupid thing was keeping the receipt.'
'He didn't know he was going to die,' Leon Witold said. 'But to get back to Anton…'
Marsha Spivak dabbed at her eyes: 'He told them nothing. They went away, they knew nothing. They knew only what they had on the receipt, that the Russian paid for drinks. Anton tells them that he'd never seen anybody before, he thought they were fishermen stopping on the way to the border.'
Grandpa Walther nodded. 'That's reasonable, anyway.'
'Of course it is.' Spivak sniffed. 'They went away, but then this other man came. He sat in the bar late, the last one, and when Anton says it's closing time, he says that he wants to talk, that he is from Russia. So Anton locks the door and turns out the lights and they go in the back and when Anton turns around, this man has a gun. He makes Anton throw a rope over a beam and put it around his neck, and then he makes him stand up on a six-pack of beer bottles-beer bottles! Anton says, 'No!' and the man shoots him in the ear, and Anton must stand on the beer bottles. The man wants everybody's name, but Anton, he tells him nothing. He says he knows no names. The man says he will leave him on the beer bottles. Anton says he knows no names. And then, the man has a radio and he hears the police are coming and he kicks the beer bottles out and Anton is hanging by the neck and the man goes running out, and another man comes in and lifts up Anton and then the police come and cut the rope and they take him to the hospital…'
She started weeping again and finally Svoboda said, 'He never saw the guy with the gun before?'
'No. Never.'
'It all comes back to the fuckin' Russians,' Leon Witold said. 'We never should have met with that guy. I hope to hell nobody here had anything to do with that murder down in Duluth.' His eyes scanned across the room and stuck for a moment on Grandpa Walther.
'Don't be stupid,' Nancy Witold Spencer said. 'We're not operators. It must be from Russia, somehow.'
'She's right,' Rick Svoboda said. 'There's something going on in Russia that we don't know about. The first guy didn't even know for sure who we were, how many there were, who the families were.'
'He knew about me,' Grandpa Walther said.
'You're the only one,' Svoboda said. 'The question is, how did this second man get to Anton? Why didn't they go back to Grandpa?'
'Maybe they will.' Leon Witold said.
Marsha Spivak opened her mouth to say something, but Grandpa jumped in: 'We've been thinking about this,' Grandpa said, 'And we do have an answer, Carl and I. There was a story in the newspaper about the Russian killed in Duluth, this accident, this…'
'Wasn't no accident,' Leon Witold snorted.
'Whatever it was,' Grandpa said impatiently. 'Moshalov, Oleshev, whatever his name is, is killed. We know he did not come from an official office: he was working outside the apparat. So the apparat sends its own investigator, this Rusian policewoman. I believe she must have a shadow. The story said the state police, and the Duluth police, were cooperating with the Russian. If they went to Anton, and he told them nothing, then maybe the Russian shadow went to Anton to see if Russian interrogation might work.'
'Anton tells them nothing,' said Marsha Spivak.
Grandpa turned to her. 'Did the police say who this other guy is, who helped Anton?'
Carol Spivak shook her head, answering for her mother. 'No. They won't release his name because the crazy man is still on the loose. They say he was walking past the back of the business when the crazy man came running out the back, and he saw Anton hanging there, and he ran in and lifted him and then the police came.'
Carl frowned: 'That's sounds weird.'
Grandpa Walther nodded: 'We should all ask. We should all listen. People will be talking.'
'The main problem, as I see it, is that we have cops all over the place, asking questions. Probably the FBI and the CIA, too,' Rick Svoboda said. 'They have Anton's name, and they must suspect something. First there's the meeting, then the Russian gets killed, then Anton gets hanged. We have to believe that they will come after him.'
'He will say nothing,' Marsha Spivak said vehemently. Her son and daughter nodded, but Janet Svoboda said, 'What if this shadow, whoever he is, catches one of you and… you know. What if they catch Carol, and then they call Anton and say, 'We'll cut her throat if you don't answer.' You think Anton wouldn't answer to save his daughter's life?'
They had nothing to say about that, and Carol Spivak lightly pinched her Adam's apple with two fingers, as if closing a cut.
Wanda Wit old said, 'The big question now is, what do we do? We have no contact with Russia, everybody was swept away. We thought it was done.'
'It's not done,' Grandpa insisted. 'How many times do I have to tell you, the party is…'
'Not time to argue about that,' Janet Svoboda said, cutting him off. 'What do we do? Do we just sit?'
