ate in September Elaine and I had spent an idyllic afternoon in Brighton Beach. We rode the Q train to the end of the line and walked along Brighton Beach Avenue, browsing in the produce markets, window-shopping, then exploring the side streets with their modest frame houses and a network of back streets, little walks and alleys and paths and ways. The bulk of the population consisted of Russian Jews, many of them very recent arrivals, and the neighborhood had felt extremely foreign while remaining quintessentially New York. We ate at a Georgian restaurant, then walked on the boardwalk clear to Coney Island, watching people hardier than ourselves bobbing in the ocean. Then we spent an hour at the Aquarium, and then we went home.

If we had passed Yuri Landau in the street that day I don't suppose we'd have looked at him twice. He would have looked at home there, as he must have once looked in the streets of Kiev or Odessa. He was a big man, broad in the chest, with a face that might have served as the model for an idealized worker in one of those murals from the days of Socialist Realism. A broad forehead, high cheekbones, sharply angled facial planes, and a prominent jaw. His hair was a medium brown, and lank; he was given to tossing his head to get his hair out of his face.

He was in his late forties, and he had been in America for ten years. He'd come over with his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Ludmilla. He'd done some sort of black-market trading in the Soviet Union, and in Brooklyn he gravitated easily into various marginal enterprises, and before long began trafficking in narcotics. He had done well, but then it is a business in which nobody breaks even. If you don't get killed or imprisoned, you generally do very well.

Four years ago his wife had been diagnosed with metastasized ovarian cancer. Chemotherapy had kept her alive for two and a half years. She had hoped to live to see her daughter graduate from intermediate school, but she died in the fall. Ludmilla, who now called herself Lucia, had graduated in the spring, and was now a member of the freshman class of Chichester Academy, a small private high school for girls located in Brooklyn Heights. The tuition was high, but so were the academic requirements, and Chichester had an excellent record at placing its graduates in Ivy League colleges, as well as women's colleges like Bryn Mawr and Smith.

When he'd started calling people in the business to warn them about the possibility of kidnapping, Kenan had very nearly not called Yuri Landau. They were not close, they barely knew each other, but more to the point Kenan saw Landau as invulnerable. The man's wife was already dead.

He hadn't even thought about the daughter. Still, he'd made the call, and Landau had taken it as confirmation of a course of action he had adopted when he'd first sent Lucia off to Chichester. Instead of letting her take subways or buses, he'd arranged to have a car service pick her up every morning at seven-thirty and collect her in front of Chichester every afternoon at a quarter to three. If she wanted to go to a friend's house the car service would take her there, and she was instructed to call them when she wanted to come home. If she wanted to go anywhere in the neighborhood, she usually took the dog with her. The dog was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and actually very gentle, but looked ferocious enough to constitute a powerful deterrent.

Early that afternoon, the telephone rang in the office of Chichester Academy. A well-spoken gentleman explained that he was an assistant to Mr. Landau and was requesting that the school dismiss Ludmilla half an hour early because of a family emergency. "I've made arrangements with the car service," he assured the woman to whom he spoke, "and they'll have a vehicle waiting in front of the school at two-fifteen, although it probably will not be the car and driver she had this morning." And, he added, if there were any questions she was not to call Mr. Landau's residence; instead she could reach him, Mr. Pettibone, at a number he would give her now.

She didn't have to call the number, because there was no problem following his request. She summoned Lucia (no one at school knew her as Ludmilla) to the office and told her she would be dismissed early. At ten minutes after two the woman looked out the window and saw that a dark green truck or van was parked directly in front of the school's entrance on Pineapple Street. It was quite unlike the late-model GM sedans that normally brought the girl in the morning and took her away in the afternoon, but it was clearly the right vehicle. The car service's name and address was plainly visible in white letters on its side. Chaverim Livery Service, with an address on Ocean Avenue. And the driver, who walked around the truck so that he could hold the door for Lucia, wore a blue blazer the way they always did, and had one of those caps.

For her part, Lucia got into the van without hesitation. The driver closed the door, walked around the vehicle, got behind the wheel, and drove to the corner of Willow Street, at which point the woman stopped watching.

At a quarter to three the rest of the school was dismissed, and a few minutes later Lucia's regular driver showed up in the gray Oldsmobile Regency Brougham in which he had driven Lucia to school that morning. He waited patiently at the curb, knowing that Lucia was routinely as much as fifteen minutes late leaving the building. He would have waited that long and longer without complaint, but one of Lucia's classmates recognized him and told him he must have made a mistake. "Because she was dismissed early," she said. "She got picked up like half an hour ago."

"Come on," he said, thinking she was playing a joke on him.

"It's true! Her father called the office and one of your cars already came and picked her up. Ask Miss Severance if you don't believe me."

The driver did not go in and confirm this with Miss Severance; if he had, that woman would almost certainly have called the Landau residence, and, quite possibly, the police. Instead he used his own car radio to call his dispatcher on Ocean Avenue and ask him what the hell was going on. "If she needed an early pickup," he said, "then you coulda sent me. Or if you can't get me, at least tell me to skip my regular pickup."

The dispatcher, of course, didn't know what the driver was talking about. When she got the gist of it she figured out the only thing that made sense to her, that for some reason Landau had called another car service. She might have let it go at that. Maybe all their lines had been busy, maybe he'd been in a rush, maybe he'd picked the child up himself and hadn't been able to call off the scheduled car. But something evidently bothered her, because she looked up Yuri Landau's number and called him.

At first Yuri didn't get what all the fuss was about. So somebody at Chaverim made a mistake, and two cars went instead of one, and the second driver made the trip for nothing. How was that something to call him about? Then he began to realize that something out of the ordinary was going on. He got as much information as he could from the dispatcher, said he was sorry if there had been any inconvenience, and got her off the line.

Next he called the school, and when he spoke with Miss Severance and heard about the call from his assistant, Mr. Pettibone, there was really no question about it. Someone had managed to lure his daughter out of the school and into a van. Someone had kidnapped her.

At this point the Severance woman also figured it out, but Landau dissuaded her from calling the police. It would be best handled privately, he said, improvising as he went along. "Relatives on her mother's side, extremely Orthodox, you could call them religious fanatics. They've been after me to pull her out of Chichester and send her to some crazy kosher school in Borough Park. Don't worry about a thing, I'm sure she'll be back in your school tomorrow."

Then he hung up the phone and started to tremble.

They had his daughter. What did they want? He'd give them what they wanted, the bastards, he'd give them anything he had. But who were they? And what in God's name did they want?

Hadn't someone said something just a few weeks ago about a kidnapping?

He remembered, then, and called Kenan. Who called me.

oOo

YURI Landau had the penthouse apartment in a twelve-story brick co-op on Brightwater Court. In the tiled lobby, two thick-bodied young Russians in tweed jackets and caps braced us as we entered. Peter ignored the uniformed doorman and told the others that his name was Khoury and Mr. Landau was expecting us. One of them rode up with us in the elevator.

By the time we got there, around four-thirty, Yuri had just received his first call from the kidnappers. He was still reacting to it. "A million dollars," he cried. "Where am I going to get a million dollars? Who's doing this, Kenan? Is it niggers? Is it those crazies from Jamaica?"

"It's white guys," Kenan said.

"My Luschka," he said. "How could this happen? What kind of a country is this?" He broke off when he saw us. "You're the brother," he said to Peter. "And you?"

"Matthew Scudder."

"You been working for Kenan. Good. Thanks to both of you for coming. But how did you get in? You walked right in? I had two men in the lobby, they were supposed to—" He caught sight of the man who had come up with us. "Oh, there you are, Dani, that's a good boy. Go back down to the lobby and keep an eye out." To no one in particular he said, "Now I post guards. The horse is stolen so I lock the barn. For what? What can they take from me now? God took my wife, the dirty bastard, and these other bastards take my Luddy, my Luschka." He turned to Kenan. "And if I post men downstairs from the time you called me, what good does it do? They get her out of school, they steal her away under everybody's nose. I wish I did what you did. You sent her out of the country, yes?"

Kenan and I looked at each other.

"What's this? You told me you sent your wife out of the country."

Kenan said, "That was the story we settled on, Yuri."

"Story? Why did you need a story? What happened?"

"She was kidnapped."

"Your wife."

"Yes."

"How much did they hit you for?"

"They asked a million. We negotiated, we settled on a lower figure."

"How much?"

"Four hundred thousand."

"And you paid the money? You got her back?"

"I paid."

"Kenan," he said. He took him by the shoulders. "Tell me, please. You got her back, yes?"

"Dead," Kenan said.

"Oh, no," Yuri said. He reeled as if from a blow, threw up an arm to shield his face. "No," he said. "Don't tell me that."

"Mr. Landau—"

He ignored me, took Kenan by the arm. "But you paid," he said. "You gave them an honest count? You didn't try to chisel them?"

"I paid, Yuri. They killed her anyway."

His shoulders sagged. "Why?" he demanded, not of us but of that dirty bastard God who took his wife. "Why?"

I stepped in and said, "Mr. Landau, these are very dangerous men, vicious and unpredictable. They've killed at least two women in addition to Mrs. Khoury. As things stand, they haven't got the slightest intention of releasing your daughter alive. I'm afraid there's a strong possibility that she's already dead."

"No."

"If she's alive we have a chance. But you have to decide how you want to handle this."

"What do you mean?"

"You could call the police."

"They said no cops."

"Naturally they'd say that."

"The last thing I want is cops here, poking into my life. As soon as I come up with the ransom money they'll want to know where it came from. But if it gets my daughter back… What do you think? We have a better chance if we call the cops?"

"You might have a better chance of catching the men who took her."

"To hell with that. What about getting her back?"

She's dead, I thought, but told myself that I didn't know it, and that he didn't have to hear it. I said, "I don't think police involvement at this stage would increase the chance of recovering your daughter alive. I think it might have the opposite effect. If the cops come in and the kidnappers know about it, they'll cut their losses and run. And they won't leave the girl alive."

"So fuck the cops. We'll do it ourselves. Now what?"

"Now I have to make a phone call."

"Go ahead. Wait, I want to keep the line open. They called, I talked with him, I had a million questions and he hung up on me. 'Stay off the line. We'll get back to you.' Use my daughter's phone, it's through that door. Kids, on the phone all the time, you could never reach the house. I had that other thing, Call Waiting, drove everybody crazy. All the time clicking in your ear, telling this one to hold on, you have to take a call. Terrible. I got rid of it, got her her own phone, she could stay on it all she wanted. God, take anything I got, just give her back to me!"

I CALLED TJ's beeper and punched in the number on the Landau girl's Snoopy figural phone. Snoopy and Michael Jackson both seemed to play key roles in her personal mythology, judging from the room's decor. I paced, waiting for my call, and found a family photo on the white enamel dressing table, Yuri and a dark-haired woman and a girl with dark hair that fell past her shoulders in cascading ringlets. Lucia looked to be about ten in the photo. Another photo showed her alone, older, and looked to have been taken last June at graduation. Her hair was shorter in the more recent photo and her face looked serious and mature for her years.

The phone rang. I picked it up and he said, "Yo, who wants TJ?"

"It's Matt," I said.

"Hey, my man! What's goin', Owen?"

"Serious business," I said. "It's an emergency, and I need your help."

"You got it."

"Can you get hold of the Kongs?"

"You mean right away? They sometimes hard to reach. Jimmy Hong got a beeper, but he don't always have it with him."

"See if you can get him and give him this number."

"Sure. That's it?"

"No," I said. "Do you remember the laundromat we went to last week?"

"Sure."

"Do you know how to get there?"

"R train to Forty-fifth, a block to Fifth Avenue, four, five blocks to the wishee-washee."

"I didn't realize you were paying attention."

"Shit," he said. "Man, I allus payin' attention. I's attentive."

"Not just resourceful?"

"Attentive an' resourceful."

"Can you get out there right away?"

"Right now? Or call the Kongs first?"

"Call them, then go. Are you near the subway?"

"Man, I always be near the subway. I talkin' to you on the phone the Kongs liberated, Forty-third an' Eighth."

"Call me as soon as you get out there."

" 'Kay. Somethin' big goin' down, huh?"

"Very big," I said.

I LEFT the bedroom door open so that I could hear the phone if it rang and went back into the living room. Peter Khoury was at the window looking out at the ocean. We hadn't talked much on the drive, but he'd volunteered the information that he hadn't had a drink or a drug since the meeting I'd seen him at. "So I got five days," he said.

"That's great."

"That's the party line, isn't it? One day or twenty years, you tell somebody your time and they tell you it's great. 'You're sober today and that's what counts.' Fucked if I know what counts anymore."

I went over to Kenan and Yuri and we talked. The bedroom phone didn't ring, but after perhaps fifteen minutes the one in the living room sounded and Yuri answered it. He said, "Yeah, this is Landau," and glanced significantly at me, then tossed his head to get the hair out of his eyes. "I want to talk to my daughter," he said. "You got to let me talk to my daughter."

I went over and he handed me the phone. I said, "I hope the girl's alive."

There was a silence, then, "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm the best chance you've got of making a nice clean exchange, the girl for the money. But you'd better not hurt her, and if you're playing any games they better get called right now on account of rain. Because she has to be alive and well for the deal to happen."

"Fuck this shit," he said. There was a pause and I thought he was going to say more, but he hung up.

I reported the conversation to Yuri and Kenan. Yuri was agitated, concerned that I was going to screw things up by taking a hard line. Kenan told him I knew what I was doing. I wasn't sure he was right, but I was glad for the support.

"The important thing right now is to keep her alive," I said. "They have to know that they won't be able to rig the exchange on their terms, without even demonstrating that they've got a living hostage for us to ransom."

"But if you make them mad—"

"They're already madder than hatters. I know what you're saying, you don't want to give them an excuse to kill her, but they don't need an excuse. It's already on their agenda. They have to have a reason to keep her alive."

Kenan backed me up. "I did everything their way," he said. "Everything they wanted. They sent her back—" He hesitated, and I finished the sentence mentally: "in pieces." But he hadn't shared that aspect of Francine's death with Yuri and didn't do so now. "— sent her back dead," he said.

"We're going to need cash," I said. "What do you have? What can you raise?"

"God, I don't know," he said. "Cash I got damn little of. Do the bastards want cocaine? I got fifteen kilos of slab ten minutes from here." He looked at Kenan. "You want to buy it? Tell me what you want to pay me."

Kenan shook his head. "I'll lend you what I got in the safe, Yuri. I'm in the bucket already waiting for a hash deal to fall apart. I fronted some money and I think it was a mistake."

"What kind of hash?"

"Out of Turkey via Cyprus. Opiated hash. What's the difference, it ain't gonna happen. I got maybe one hundred large in the safe. Time comes I'll run back to the house and get it. You're welcome to it."

"You know I'm good for it."

"Don't worry about it."

Landau blinked away tears, and when he tried to speak his voice was choked up. He could barely get the words out. He said, "Listen to this man. I hardly know him, this fucking Arab here, he's giving me a hundred thousand dollars." He took Kenan in his arms and hugged him, sobbing.

The phone rang in Lucia's room. I went to answer it.

TJ, calling from Brooklyn. "At the laundromat," he said. "What I do? Wait for some white dude to come in an' use the phone?"

"That's right. He should get there sooner or later. If you could park yourself at the restaurant across the street and keep an eye on the laundromat entrance—"

"Do better than that, man. I be right here in the laundromat, just another cat waitin' on his clothes. Neighborhood here's enough different colors so's I don't stick out too much. Kongs ever call you?"

"No. Did you reach them?"

"Beeped 'em and put your number in, but if Jimmy don't have the beeper with him, it's like it ain't beepin'."

"Like that tree in the forest."

"Say what?"

"Never mind."

"I be in touch," he said.

WHEN the next call came in Yuri answered it, said, "Just a minute," and passed it to me. The voice I heard was different this time, softer, more cultured. There was a nastiness in it but less of the obvious anger of the previous speaker.

"I understand we have a new player in the game," he said. "I don't believe we've been introduced."

"I'm a friend of Mr. Landau's. My name's not important."

"One likes to know who's on the other side."

"In a sense," I said, "we're on the same side, aren't we? We both want the exchange to go through."

"Then all you have to do is follow instructions."

"No, it's not that simple."

"Of course it is. We tell you what to do and you do it. If you ever want to see the girl again."

"You have to convince me that she's alive."

"You have my word on it."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's not good enough?"

"You lost a lot of credibility when you returned Mrs. Khoury in poor condition."

There was a pause. Then, "How interesting. You don't sound very Russian, you know. Nor do the tones of Brooklyn echo in your speech. There were special circumstances with Mrs. Khoury. Her husband tried to haggle, in the nature of his race. He sliced the price, and we in turn— well, you can finish that thought yourself, can't you?"

And Pam Cassidy, I thought. What did she do that provoked you? But what I said was, "We won't argue the price."

"You'll pay the million."

"For the girl, alive and well."

"I assure you she's both."

"And I still need more than your word. Put her on the phone, let her father talk to her."

"I'm afraid that won't—" he began, and the recorded voice of a NYNEX announcer cut in to ask for more money. "I'll call you back," he said.

"Out of quarters? Give me your number, I'll call you."

He laughed and broke the connection.

I WAS alone in the apartment with Yuri when the next call came. Kenan and Peter were out with one of the two guards from downstairs, looking to raise what cash they could. Yuri had given them a list of names and phone numbers, and they had some sources of their own. It would have been simpler if we could have made the calls from the penthouse, but we only had the two phone lines and I wanted to keep both of them open.

"You're not in the business," Yuri said. "You're some kind of cop, yes?"

"Private."

"Private, so you been working for Kenan. Now you're working for me, right?"

"I'm just working. I'm not looking to be on the payroll, if that's what you mean."

He waved the issue aside. "This is a good business," he said, "but also it's no good. You know?"

"I think so."

"I want to be out of it. That's one reason I got no cash. I make lots of money, but I don't want it in cash and I don't want it in goods. I own parking lots, I own a restaurant, I spread it out, you know? In a little while I'm out of the dope business altogether. A lot of Americans start out as gangsters, yes? And wind up legitimate businessmen."

"Sometimes."

"Some are gangsters forever. But not all. Wasn't for Devorah, I'd be out of it already."

"Your wife?"

"The hospital bills, the doctors, my God, what it cost. No insurance. We were greenhorns, what did we know from Blue Cross? Doesn't matter. Whatever it cost I paid. I was glad to pay it. I would have paid more to keep her alive, I would have paid anything. I would have sold the fillings out of my teeth if I could have bought her another day. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and she had every day the doctors could give her, and what days they were, the poor woman, what she suffered through. But she wanted all the life she could get, you know?" He wiped a broad hand across his forehead. He was about to say something else but the phone rang. Wordless, he pointed at it.

I picked it up.

The same man said, "Shall we try again? I'm afraid the girl cannot come to the phone. That's out of the question. How else can we reassure you of her well-being?"

I covered the mouthpiece. "Something your daughter would know."

He shrugged. "The dog's name?"

Into the phone I said, "Have her tell you— no, wait a minute." I covered the phone and said, "They could know that. They've been shadowing her for a week or more, they know your schedule, they've undoubtedly seen her walking the dog, heard her call him by name. Think of something else."

"We had a dog before this one," he said. "A little black-and-white one, it got hit by a car. She was just a small thing herself when we had that dog."

"But she would remember it?"

"Who could forget? She loved the dog."

"The dog's name," I said into the phone, "and the name of the dog before this one. Have her describe both dogs and furnish their names."

He was amused. "One dog won't do. It has to be two."

"Yes."

"So that you may be doubly reassured. I'll humor you, my friend."

I WONDERED what he would do.

He'd have called from a pay phone. I was certain of that. He hadn't stayed on the line long enough for his quarter to run out, but he wasn't going to change the pattern now, not when it had worked so well for him. He was at a pay phone, and now he had to find out the name and description of two dogs, and then he would have to call me back.

Assume for the moment that he wasn't calling from the laundromat phone. Assume he was at some phone on the street, far enough from his house that he'd taken a car. Now he would drive back to the house, park, go inside, and ask Lucia Landau the names of her dogs. And then he would drive around to still another phone and relay the information back to me.

Was that how I would do it?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Maybe I'd spend a quarter and save a little time and running around, and call the house where my partner was guarding the girl. Let him take the gag out of her mouth for a minute and come back with the answers.

If only we had the Kongs.

Not for the first time, I thought how much easier it would be if Jimmy and David were set up in Lucia's bedroom, with their modem plugged into her Snoopy phone and the computer set up on her dressing table. They could sit on Lucia's phone and monitor her father's, and whenever anyone called we'd have an instant trace.

If Ray called home to find out the names of the dogs, we'd be perching on that line, and before he knew what to call the dogs we'd know where they were keeping the girl. Before he had relayed the information to me we could have cars at both locations, to pick him up when he got off the phone and to lay siege to the house.

But I didn't have the Kongs. All I had was TJ, sitting in a laundromat in Sunset Park and waiting for someone to use the phone. And if he hadn't been profligate enough to squander half his funds on a beeper, I wouldn't even have that.

"Makes a person crazy," Yuri said. "Sitting, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring."

And it was taking its time. Evidently Ray— that was how I was thinking of him, and I had come alarmingly close once already to calling him by name— evidently he had not called home, for whatever reason. Figure ten minutes to drive home, ten minutes to get the answers from the girl, ten minutes to get back to a phone and call us. Less if he hurried. More if he stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes, or if she was unconscious and they had to bring her around.

Say half an hour. Maybe more, maybe less, but say half an hour.

If she was dead it could take a little longer. Suppose she was. Suppose they'd killed her right off the bat, killed her before their first call to her father. That, certainly, was the simplest way to do it. No danger of escape. No concern about keeping her quiet.

And if she was dead?

They couldn't admit it. Once they did there was no ransom. They were far from destitute, they'd taken four hundred thousand from Kenan less than a month ago, but that didn't mean they didn't want more. Money was something people always wanted more of, and if they hadn't there would have been no first call, and probably no kidnapping. It was easy enough to pick a woman off the street at random if all you wanted was the thrill of it. You didn't need to get cute.

So what would they do?

I figured they would probably try to brazen it out. Say she was out of it, say she'd been drugged and couldn't focus enough to respond to questions. Or make up some name and insist that was what she'd told them.

We would know they were lying and would be about ninety percent certain Lucia was dead. But you believe what you want to believe, and we would want to believe in the slender possibility that she was alive, and that might lead us to pay the ransom anyway because if we didn't pay there was no chance, no chance at all.

The phone rang. I snatched it up, and it was some jerk with a wrong number. I got rid of him and thirty seconds later he called back again. I asked him what number he was calling, and he had it right, but it turned out he was trying to call someone in Manhattan. I reminded him he had to dial the area code first. "Oh, God," he said, "I'm always doing that. I'm so stupid."

"I got calls like that this morning," Yuri said. "Wrong numbers. A nuisance."

I nodded. Had he called while I was getting rid of that idiot? If so, why didn't he call back? The line was clear now. What the hell was he waiting for?

Maybe I had made a mistake, asking for proof. If she was dead all along I was only forcing it all out into the open. Instead of trying to bluff it through, he might decide to write the operation off and scramble for cover.

In which case I could wait forever for the phone to ring, because we wouldn't be hearing from him again.

Yuri was right. It made a person crazy, sitting, staring at the phone. Waiting for it to ring.

ACTUALLY it took only twelve minutes over the thirty minutes I'd figured as an average. The phone rang and I grabbed it. I said hello, and Ray said, "I'd still like to know how you figure in this. You'd have to be a dealer. Are you a major trafficker?"

"You were going to answer some questions," I reminded him.

"I wish you'd tell me your name," he said. "I might recognize it."

"I might recognize yours."

He laughed. "Oh, I don't think so. Why are you in such a rush, my friend? Are you afraid I'll trace the call?"

In my mind I could hear him taunting Pam. "Pick one, Pam-mee. One's for you and one's for me, so which'll it be, Pam-mee?"

I said, "It's your quarter."

"So it is. Ah, well. The dog's name, eh? Let's see, what are the old standbys? Fido, Towser, King. Rover, that's always a popular favorite, isn't it?"

I thought, shit, she's dead.

"How about Spot? 'Run, Spot, run!' That's not a bad name for a Rhodesian Ridgeback."

But he would have known that much from the weeks of stalking her.

"The dog's name is Watson."

"Watson," I said.

Across the room, the big dog shifted position, pricked up its ears. Yuri was nodding.

"And the other dog?"

"You want so much," he said. "How many dogs do you need?"

I waited.

"She couldn't tell me what breed the other dog was. She was young when it died. They had to put it to sleep, she said. Silly term for it, don't you think? When you kill something you ought to have the courage to call it that. You're not saying anything. Are you still there?"

"I'm still here."

"I gather it was a mongrel. So many of us are. Now the name's a bit of a problem. It's a Russian word and I may not have it right. How's your Russian, my friend?"

"A little rusty."

"Rusty's a good name for a dog. Maybe it was Rusty. You're a tough audience, my friend. It's hard to get a laugh out of you."

"I'm a captive audience," I said.

"Ah, would that it were so. We could have a very interesting conversation under those circumstances, you and I. Ah, well. Some other time, perhaps."

"We'll see."

"Indeed we will. But you want the dog's name, don't you? The dog's dead, my friend. What good is his name? Give a dog a dead name, give a dead dog a bad name—"

I waited.

"I may be saying this wrong. Balalaika."

"Balalaika," I said.

"It's supposed to be the name of a musical instrument, or so she tells me. What do you say? Does it strike a chord?"

I looked at Yuri Landau. His nod was unequivocal. On the phone, Ray was saying something or other but the words weren't getting through to me. I felt light-headed, and had to lean against the kitchen counter or I might have fallen.

The girl was alive.