herself.'
'Without Jerry,' Nadya added, the gloom settling back.
'Without Jerry, but with some money,' Lucas said. 'Jerry had a lot of insurance coverage. She'll be okay.'
Nadya sighed and stretched and yawned and finally said, 'Maybe you're right.'
'Of course I am,' Lucas said. 'I've seen it a lot. Best thing to do: get away from it if you can.'
Maisy Reynolds was two minutes out of the shower, looking good in a cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and tight riding jeans; she smelled like Irish Spring soap. 'I'm getting ready to go to work. If you guys keep coming around, I'll probably get fired. They're really mad about what you're doing. About Anton.'
'How long have you worked for him?' Lucas asked, as he and Nadya followed her into her trailer. The place smelled like celery and carrots and beer. She pointed them at a tiny dinette, and Nadya and Lucas settled into chairs. Lucas took his laptop out of his briefcase and set it on the tippy Formica-topped table.
'Six years. He's not a bad guy. He's paternal, I guess you'd say. A little bit cheap, but you can talk to him. He doesn't mess with your tips.'
'How about his kids?'
'The son is just like his dad. The daughter's an asshole.'
'But this job, it must be good enough, if you can keep horses and a nice house,' Nadya ventured.
'Thank you, honey, for the 'nice house,' ' Reynolds said, looking around the kitchen. 'Sometimes in the winter, when we get an ice storm, I feel like I'm living in a beer can… You guys want some carrot juice? I got some fresh.'
'No, thanks,' Lucas said, grinning at her. 'It's made out of vegetables.'
'I would like,' Nadya said. 'The vegetables in your restaurants are not so good.'
'Better in Russia?' Reynolds asked, interested.
'I should say so,' Nadya said. 'Also better in France, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Italy, in Israel.'
'I can believe that. Most of our vegetables are designed so they're cheap to ship,' Reynolds said, as she took a blender pitcher from the refrigerator. 'But these are fresh and old-fashioned, right out of the garden, fertilized with genuine horse shit.'
Lucas brought up the photograph of Burt Walther. Walther was outside his house in Hibbing, looking toward the camera, but not at it. He seemed to be looking at a van driver, while the photo was taken from the back of the van. Lucas turned the computer toward Reynolds, who was pouring the juice. She handed a glass to Nadya, and they both looked at the photo over their glasses. Reynolds sipped and said, 'Jeez, it kinda looks like him…'
Lucas had the picture up in Photoshop Elements, and he put the zoom tool on the old man's face and clicked a couple of times, enlarging it. Reynolds half crouched, looking straight at the screen, and finally said, 'That's the guy. That's definitely him. Who is he?'
'Rather not say right at the moment,' Lucas said. He turned the computer around and shut it down.
'Okay. Spy stuff,' Reynolds said. 'Is this the thing that's gonna get me fired?'
'We won't tell if you don't,' Lucas said.
'This juice, it is excellent,' Nadya said. 'From horse shit? I should try this when I get home. We have much horse shit in Moscow.'
The Walthers lived in a small house in a working-class neighborhood of Hibbing. Most of the neighbors had gone to vinyl siding, but the Walthers had stuck with the original gray-shingle siding, with white trim gone gray and flaky with age. The small lawn was neatly kept; a sparse foot-wide flower bed, with burgundy petunias, lay along the front wall under the picture window. A detached garage leaned disconsolately away from the wind; an old bulk-oil tank stuck to the back of the house like a metal leech.
Lucas had called Andreno as they rolled into town, and was told that he'd been down the street for twenty minutes. 'The old man's there-he went out to his mailbox.'
When Lucas turned the corner, following the MDX's navigation system through town, he saw the blue-painted mailbox and pulled to the curb beside it. He saw Andreno's van parked up the street, where Andreno could see both Walther's house and the garage behind it.
'When I knock, stay behind me,' Lucas said.
'Yes?' She said it with a question mark.
'In case he's a nutso Russian spy and comes up shooting. Knocking on doors is the most dangerous thing we do.'
She stopped smiling when Lucas took his.45 out of its holster, racked a shell into the chamber, and, leaving it cocked, clicked on the safety before slipping it back in its holster.
'Let's go,' he said.
Burt Walther was standing in the picture window. Lucas saw him as they started up the walk and said out of the side of his mouth, 'There he is.'
Walther was wearing a generic gray sweatshirt and pleated khaki pants. He had his hands in his pockets as he watched them come up the walk, and as they approached the front door, he moved toward it, opening it as they came up to the stoop. Lucas had his ID in his left hand as the door opened. Walther stuck his head out, looked at them with blue-eyed uncertainty, and said with a question mark, as Nadya had, 'Yes?'
'Mr. Walther. My name is Lucas Davenport, and I'm an investigator with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We're investigating the death of a Russian seaman in Duluth, and we need to talk to you about it.'
'Duluth?' The old man-and Lucas could see he was very old-was uncertain, unfocused; his sweatshirt was worn and pilled around the neck, and his khakis were wrinkled and worn.
'The killing of Rodion Oleshev, although he may have told you his name was Moshalov.'
'His name?' The old man grappled with the concept.
Lucas thought, Ah, shit, and glanced at Nadya.
Then the old man rallied and said, 'Come in, I suppose. I don't have any food. My wife makes cookies sometimes but we don't have any now…'
They followed as he tottered back inside. An aging color television was stuck in the corner of a room and an old lady was sitting in a wheelchair, staring at it. She didn't look at them.
'Mrs. Walther?' Lucas asked.
No reply. Walther said, 'She's not so well, today. You want me to go to Duluth? I can't go, there's nobody to stay with Melodie…'
'No, no, we don't want you to go anywhere…'
The ensuing interview was jagged, uninformative. Walther claimed that he hadn't been to Virginia for two years. Then he agreed that he might have been, but couldn't remember exactly when, how he got there, or what he did. He didn't remember Oleshev, the Svobodas, or the Witolds. He remembered Anton Spivak, though, and Spivak's Tap, and began a wandering reminiscence of the last time he'd been to Spivak's.
He'd gone with a man named Frank, he said, after a Hibbing-Virginia football game in which Walther's son had played right guard. Lucas realized a few seconds into the account that the game had taken place in the fifties or sixties, and that he was talking about the son who'd died in the car accident. He tried to interrupt, but Walther took such great pleasure in the story-his son had picked up a fumble out of the air and had run it back for a touchdown, and it turned out that the fumbler was a Spivak, which they didn't learn until they were laughing about it in the bar-that Nadya shushed Lucas and made him listen.
When the story was finished, they tried to press on, asking about the hospital where he'd been born.
'My parents came here with a boat, the whole boat all to the same place. From New York to Minnesota on the train. They were called the Vilnius Boat, because they gathered at Vilnius for their tickets. Vilnius is in…' His mind wandered away. Then, 'They all came over on the same boat, and then the farms failed because of the winter, and everything died. People starved and the mines were opening and the boat came to Hibbing. The whole boat. They went to work in the mines, the men.'
They asked about Roger: Roger made him happy-a good boy, worked hard, he'd be a success in this life. He was studying to be an accountant at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and had a scholarship to play hockey…
'I thought he was thirty or forty-something,' Lucas said.
The old man looked puzzled, struggled with it for a moment, then sat up, his eyes suddenly sharp, sniffed, and with a new alertness, said, 'I've got to change Melodie.' And it became apparent from the odor that he did-if he
