“Over the transom.”
“How do you know Reg sent it? Maybe it’s CIA.”
“OK March it’s all a fake, I just came over here to waste your time. What do you advise, do nothing?”
“No, we find out where this roof is, for starters.” They scan through the footage again. “OK, so that’s the river… that’s Jersey.”
“Not Hoboken. No bridge, so it’s south of Fort Lee—”
“Wait, freeze it. That’s the Port Imperial Marina. Sid goes in and out of there sometimes.”
“March, I hate to even mention this, I’ve never been up there, but I have a creepy feeling about this roof, that…”
“Don’t say it.”
“… it’s the fuckin…”
“Maxi?”
“Deseret.”
March squints at the screen. “Hard to tell, none of these angles are that clear. Could be any of a dozen buildings in that stretch of Broadway.”
“Reg was stalking the place. Trust me, that’s where this was shot. Just something I know.”
Carefully, as to a nutcase, “Maybe you only want it to be The Deseret?”
“Because…?”
“It’s where they found Lester Traipse. Maybe you want to believe there’s a connection.”
“Maybe there is, March, all my life the place has given me bad dreams, and them I’ve learned to trust.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard to check out if it’s the same rooftop.”
“I’m a regular on the freight elevator there, I’ll get you a guest pass for the pool, then we can figure a way on up to the roof.”
AFTER THREADING A MAZE of unfrequented hallways and fire stairs, they emerge into the open, high up near a catwalk between two sections of the building, suitable for teen adventurers, clandestine lovers, well-heeled wrongdoers on the run, and take this vertiginous crossover to a set of iron steps that bring them finally around up onto the roof, into the wind above the city.
“Look sharp,” March ducking behind a vent. “Some gents with metal accessories.”
Maxine crouches down next to her. “Yeah I’ve got their album, I think.”
“Is it that missile crew again? What’s all that that they’re carrying?”
“Doesn’t look like Stingers. Wouldn’t it be easier to just go over and ask them?”
“Am I your husband, is this a gas station? Go on ahead, it makes you happy.”
They have no sooner got to their feet when here comes yet another group stepping off the elevator.
“Wait,” March angling her shades, “I know her, that’s Beverly, from the Tenants’ Association.”
“March!” A wave too vigorous not to be prescription-drug-assisted. “Glad you’re here.”
“Bev, what’s up?”
“Scumbag co-op board again. Went behind everybody’s back, leased some space up here to a cellular-phone outfit. These guys,” indicating the work crew, “are trying to put in microwave antennas to irradiate the neighborhood. Somebody doesn’t stop em we’re all gonna end up with glow-in-the-dark brains.”
“Count me in, Bev.”
“March, um…”
“Come on, Maxi, in or out, it’s your neighborhood too.”
“OK, for a while, but that’s another guilt trip you owe me.”
“For a while” of course turns out to be the rest of the day Maxine’s stuck on the roof. Every time she starts to leave, there’s a new mini-crisis, installers, supervisors, building management to argue with, then Eyewitness News shows up, shoots some footage, then more lawyers, late-rising picketers, flaneurs and sensation seekers drifting in and out of the picture, everybody with an opinion.
In that slack corner of the afternoon when it’s too discouraging even to look at a clock, March, as if remembering she came up here to check for clues, stoops and picks up a screw cap of some kind, weathered gray, two-, two-and-a-half-inch diameter, dings here and there, some faded writing in marker pen. Maxine squints at it. “What’s this, Arabic?”
“Has a sort of military look, doesn’t it?”
“You think…”
“Listen… do you mind if we show this to Igor? Just a hunch.”
“Igor could be some kind of criminal mastermind, you’re OK with that?”
“Remember Kriechman, the slumlord?”
“Sure. First time we met, you were picketing him.”
“At some point a couple years later, business motives no doubt, Igor took a dislike, went up to Pound Ridge, introduced piranhas into the Doctor’s swimming pool.”
“And they all became best friends forever?”
“The message was conveyed, the Doctor ceased and desisted whatever it was and has been very well-mannered since then. So I’ve come to think of Igor as a benevolent mobster for whom real estate is only a sideline.”
THEY TAKE A MEETING in the ZiL, on its way through Manhattan from one piece of monkey business to another.
“Sure, blast from past, part from Stinger missile launcher. Battery-coolant receptacle cap.”
“You used to get shot at with Stingers,” March is thoughtful enough to point out.
“Me, my friends, nothing personal. After Afghanistan, Stingers stayed there with mujahedeen, went on black market, many got bought back by CIA. I arranged a few deals, CIA didn’t care how much they spent, you could get up to $150,000 a pop.”
“That was a long time ago,” Maxine sez. “Are there any of them still around?”
“Plenty. Worldwide, maybe 60, 70,000 units plus Chinese knockoffs… Not so much in U.S., which makes this one interesting. Mind my asking—where’d you find it?”
March and Maxine exchange a look. “What could hurt?” Maxine supposes.
“Actually the last time somebody said that…”
“You know you want to tell me,” Igor beams.
They tell him, including a quick synopsis of the DVD. “And who videos this?”
Turns out Reg and Igor have also done some business. They met in Moscow around the peak of the Russian-baby-adoption craze in the U.S., when Reg was taping eligible babies to help pediatricians stateside to advise prospective parents. Because of the potential for fraud here, the idea was not to have these babies just sit there and pose for close-ups but actually do things like reach for objects, roll or crawl around, which meant some direction or at least wrangling from Reg. “Very sympathetic young man. Great appreciation for Russian cinema. Always at Gorbushka Market buying up kilos of DVDs, piratstvo, of course, but no Hollywood movies, only Russian—Tarkovsky, Dziga Vertov, Lady with Little Dog, not to mention greatest animated film ever made, Yozhik v Tumane (1975).”
Maxine hears spasmodic sniffling and looks in the front seat to find Misha and Grisha both with tears in their eyes and quivering lower lips. “They, ah, like that one too?”
Igor shakes his head impatiently. “Hedgehogs, Russian thing, don’t ask.”
“This writing on the battery cap, what’s it say, can you read it?”
“Pashto, ‘God is great,’ maybe legit, maybe CIA forgery to look like mujahedeen, covering up some caper of their own.”
“Well now that you’ve brought it up, there’s another…”
“Let me read your mind. Spetsnaz knife, right?”
“With the flying blade, that allegedly did in Lester Traipse—”
“Poor Lester.” A strange mixture of compassion and warning in his face.
“Uh-oh.” Yet another relationship here, it figures. “The knife story is a frame-up, I gather.”