I called Carolyn. "What I want to know," I said, "is where do they find these people?"
"Huh? Where do who find what people?"
"Page four of the Real Estate section."
"I'll call you back," she said.
It was close to fifteen minutes before the phone rang, and I picked it up and said, "Well, it took you long enough. After we finish the remodeling, what do you want to do-play with your trains or go cut the wheat in the back forty?"
There was a long, thoughtful pause, and then a voice not at all like Carolyn's said, "It didn't take me long at all, not once I got your message. An' the rest of what you said must be in English, because I recognize all the words, but I don't know what the hell you're talkin' about."
"Oh, Ray. I thought you were Carolyn."
"I'm a foot taller'n she is an' a lot heavier, an' I got a deeper voice. Not to mention the fact that she's a woman, for all the good it does anybody. Most people don't have a whole lotta trouble tellin' the two of us apart. You called me, Bern. You got somethin'?"
"I might," I said.
"It took a while findin' out who he was, Bernie. He had a wallet with enough cash in it to choke a goat, but not a lick of ID anywhere in it, or anywhere else on him."
"No money belt?"
"Not unless he was wearin' it underneath his skin, because the last I seen him he was bareass naked on a metal table with a doctor diggin' bullets out of him. We ran his prints, of course, but he didn't have none."
"The man had no fingerprints?"
"He had 'em on the tips of his fingers, like everybody else except your occasional visitor from outer space. But he didn't have 'em on file, so when we ran 'em we didn't get nowhere."
He bit into a doughnut, chased it with a gulp of coffee. He'd picked me up in a city car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo that must have been confiscated from somebody buying or selling low-grade cocaine, and now we were in a restaurant near the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Ray was partial to it, for reasons that remain unclear to me. We'd picked up our coffee and doughnuts at the counter and taken them to a table, on which Ray was now putting his cards.
"So we had nothin' to go on," he said, "an' we ID'd him anyway."
"How?"
"Good police work," he said. "How'd he get to your store? Well, you don't see too many fat guys on the bus or the subway, unless that's all they can afford, an' I already told you about his wallet."
"How much was he carrying?"
"I didn't weigh him, but he had to go over three hundred pounds. Oh, money?" He held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. "A wad this thick. Eighty-seven hundred bucks, all in hundreds, an' that's not countin' what he had in euros. That's a man who can afford to take a cab, but I knew right off that's not how he got there."
"How'd you know?"
"What's he gonna do, get a cabby to break a hundred? He didn't have any small bills, Bernie. What that tells me is he's got a car. He drove there, an' he's plannin' to drive straight home, wherever home is." He shrugged. "Course, we checked cabbies, too, lookin' for somebody who dropped a fat guy on your block of East 11th somewhere around lunchtime. You go through the motions, but I knew he drove."
"Unless he walked."
"A guy with his build?"
"I don't know, Ray. The man was light on his feet."
"Every fat man's light on his feet, Bernie. They gotta be or they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Anyway, even if you had a point, it's a mute one. We found the car."
"Oh."
"He left your place walkin' east, an' he was gettin' ready to cross the street when he got blown away instead. So that tells me to look south an' east of your bookstore, an' what did we find on 10th Street between University an' Fifth?"
"A car?"
"A Buick," he said, "pulled up smack dab alongside a fire hydrant."
"It's good you got there before the traffic squad towed him."
"Couldn't happen, Bern. He had DPL plates. Diplomatic immunity might not keep him from gettin' shot full of holes, but it kept his car from gettin' hauled off to the pound. It mighta kept us from searchin' his car, I'm not too clear on the rules, but as fate would have it I had the car open before I even noticed the DPL tags. Careless of me."
"But convenient."
"Photo ID in the glove compartment, a driver's license plus his credentials from the Latvian embassy. Guy's name is Valdi Berzins, an' accordin' to the embassy he had somethin' to do with the Latvian mission to the UN, but nothin' too important. That was all we got from him outside of his address, which was a hotel, the Blantyre on East 51st Street. He had a room there by the month. Not a bad hotel, but not the Carlyle, either. Only thing we found in the room was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, an' the last I heard they were lookin' for someone to translate 'em."
"Pardon my Latvian," I said. "I assume that's the language they're in?"
"Some's Russian, goin' by the letters. They're in that alphabet they got, that's like Greek but worse."
"Cyrillic."
"No, I'm pretty sure it's Russian. The others are in our alphabet, for all the good it does. An' there's one in English, speculatin' that the Black Scourge of Riga might be hidin' out here in America."
"The Black Scourge of Riga. Did they give his name?"
"Yeah," he said, "an' it's a whole string of vowels an' consonants. He's some kind of war criminal, would be my guess."
"Another doddering old European who might have been a concentration camp guard. Whatever he did, he probably can't remember doing it." I thought a moment. "How old was Arnold Lyle?"
"I forget. Why?"
"Because he changed his name from something, and it probably had vowels and consonants in it. If the Black Scourge of Riga was a war criminal, he'd have to have been at least twenty-five in 1945, and probably older than that. Otherwise he'd have been the Junior Assistant Black Scourge of Riga. But say he was twenty-five. That would make him what, eighty-four?"
"Forget it. Lyle was fifty tops."
"It was just a thought. There's a connection there, Ray. Not to the clipping about the Black Scourge, but some kind of connection tying Berzins to Lyle."
"They're both Russians."
"Except for Berzins, who's Latvian. But Latvia was part of the Soviet Union back when there was such a thing. Not originally, because it was independent between the two world wars, but then the Russians took it over along with the rest of the Baltics. Ray? How hard would it be to get into the murder apartment? The one at 34th and Third?"
"It's a crime scene, Bernie. It's sealed."
"Oh."
"Why?"
"I'd like to get in there."
"Oh, well, we'll just ask permission from the guys in Major Cases. 'Bernie here's a convicted burglar, plus he's an early suspect in the case, an' he'd like to poke around the crime scene. Any of youse got a problem with that?' "
"I thought we could do it off the books."
"Sneak you in, in other words. Why?"
"Two people died in that apartment," I said, "plus the doorman downstairs. They all got killed because someone went there looking for something."