Thursday

2:00 P.M.

"Sorry," Babsie said.

Sorry was a word he didn't want to hear again. It never changed anything; time never rolled backward to accommodate your regret. If it did, Kate would be home, Eileen still singing doo-wop. He was sorry for all the pain he'd caused, all the mistakes he'd made. What good did it do? He wanted to put a blinking purple neon billboard in the heart of Times Square, announcing that no one ever had to apologize to him again. Babsie certainly didn't have to.

"It wasn't your fault," Eddie said. "It was a stupid plan. Never had a chance. The woman is a psycho. You can't pin your hopes on the reaction of a psycho."

'The camera was a mistake," she said.

"Babsie, forget what happened."

"I just keep thinking…"

"I love you," he said for the first time. "From the first moment of this, you've been my heart, my head, everything I could have ever wanted. In my eyes, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you could ever do wrong."

Little else was said on the way back to Yonkers. The thing about apology is that no amount of it eases anyone's pain, thought Eddie. And no amount of money was ever going to get Kate home. He'd fooled himself into thinking this was about money. He wanted to believe it, because it was a tangible way to fix everything. But if it had been about ransom, Kate would have been home long ago. Cash and carry. This was something else. Some Zina Rabinovich-conjured vendetta. Zina was using Mrs. Borodenko to carry it out, and nobody in Borodenko's organization had the guts to tell Yuri his beautiful wife was hollow. Everyone knows what happens to the messenger. Eddie Dunne was not afraid to be the messenger.

"Let me have the camera," he said.

"Let's go home," Babsie said. "Ten days you've been at this. Not sleeping, not letting up. You're emotionally exhausted."

It was too late for exhaustion. It was the last round: Go for the head. He'd decided to peel the veneer off the beautiful Mrs. Borodenko. He intended to broadcast throughout the Russian community the relationship between her and a homicidal lesbian. He had no doubt it would plunge a dagger through Borodenko's macho self-image and bring him rushing home to repair the damage. It could also backfire, but he was down to last chances. Ten days had gone by. Ten days.

Babsie's cell phone rang. He heard only her part of the short hi-and-bye conversation. She answered no questions, gave no advice. She just listened to the dictates of a legal system in full gear. The ball was rolling with or without her.

"Celltech called back," she said. "The DNA sample sent to them by Zina matches ours. They're both Paul Caruso."

"Let me know when you're ready to pick her up."

"Don't worry," she said. "The thing of it is, Paulie's DNA didn't match Zina's. She's still looking for her father."

They stopped at a one-hour photo on Central Avenue. Eddie picked two pictures from the sample sheet. The photo shop was glad to see Eddie. He ordered a hundred blowups each of two pictures in which you could clearly see the faces of both women as they leaned across the table for an eyes-closed, mouths-open, tongues-engaged kiss. No mistaking it for platonic.

He dropped Babsie off at home. She went right to her car and backed down the driveway, on her way to Christ the King. Grace would never be out of her sight until Zina was in custody. Eddie opened a stack of bills from the very top layer of the boodle in his trunk. He folded them and stuck them into his pocket.

On the way back to the photo shop, he thought about the face of Mrs. Borodenko. Before today, he'd seen her only from a distance. Though pale and drawn, she was stunning. As she stood next to him asking forgiveness, her face had flushed pink from the wine and the turmoil around her. Thick blond hair, cut short and blunt, and white-blond eyebrows framed those sad blue eyes. Once-in-a-lifetime blue eyes.

Eddie paid the photo bill with two musty hundred-dollar bills. He stacked the photos on the seat next to him as he drove to Brooklyn, but he kept picking them up and looking, bothered by this face. He thought he was past the age where you believe that one woman is more beautiful than a million others. That was Hollywood hype. After all, he'd spent his life in a city where you saw dozens of beautiful women every day, on every block, all incredibly attractive in their own way. By the time you got home, you couldn't remember any of them. But beauty excuses nothing.

Borodenko had been so proud of his new wife, showing her off at their wedding at the Mazurka. That night, Anatoly Lukin had told him the Russians were all about show; that was their weakness. He told him about the Potemkin villages of the eighteenth century, where Prince Potemkin created an illusion of prosperity in the Crimea to please Catherine the Great. As the czarina rode through the poor villages, Potemkin lined the streets with scrubbed-up children wearing expensive formal clothes. The fronts of the houses had been painted and fixed up. Immediately behind the facades were decay, poverty, and despair. After the czarina passed through, the clothes were retrieved from the children and delivered to the next village. "Nothing has changed," Lukin had said. "It's still all about show." Eddie Dunne would shine a spotlight on the dark corners of Borodenko's house.

Thursday night was the big bar night in Manhattan, the night all the workers hit happy hour with the office gang, figuring they could sleepwalk through Friday. In Brooklyn, however, Thursday night was for the regulars, just the audience Eddie was looking for.

Eddie started with the place he knew would cause the most controversy. He went right to the Mazurka, then straight to the lounge. The bartender was a thick-necked Russkie with a crew cut. Eddie showed him the picture of Zina and her boss's wife in full lip lock. The kid looked at it, then back at Eddie. Eddie dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. The bartender said something in Russian to a waiter picking up a drink order. The bartender tried to return the picture, but Eddie backed away.

In the Mazurka's men's room, Eddie posted pictures above each urinal. The ladies' room received twenty copies on the sink. In the kitchen, he stuck pictures on the wall near the spot where waiters posted their orders. The manager caught up to him as he was coming out of the kitchen.

"I'm leaving," Eddie said as the manager took a quick look at the picture, then called a guy sitting near the door. The bouncer looked like he might be an off-duty cop. "Pass these around, Officer," Eddie said. "Take some back to the station house."

For the next two hours, he put pictures in every bakery, grocery, shoe store, and bar. By the time he got to the Samovar, he was down to just two dozen pictures. Lexy Petrov was behind the bar, pouring a drink, and didn't see Eddie sit down. Eddie handed a picture to the young man sitting next to him. Lexy turned to see him and snatched the picture out of the kid's hands. He ripped it up and threw it in the trash.

"Not your property, Lexy," Eddie said.

"We have enough pictures," Lexy said. "A trash can full."

Eddie reached over the counter and grabbed Lexy by the shirt collar. He pulled him forward and whispered in his ear.

"Stukatch," Eddie said in Russian. A most shameful word. "Should I tell them, Lexy? Tell them you're the FBI snitch?"

It was more than an educated guess on Eddie's part. He'd given Boland Lexy's taped confession and the pipe he'd used to bash in the skull of Evesi Volshin. As he poured a club soda, Lexy laughed as if Eddie had whispered a dirty joke. Eddie saw there were other pictures torn up in the trash can. He figured people had brought them in from other restaurants or a telephone pole. He sipped his club soda and wondered if this would work. Would it cause enough of a problem to make holding his daughter no longer worth it? He had to convince them he was determined to make their lives miserable. That he was still crazy enough to hurt them.

"How about some of that good vodka, Lexy?" Eddie said. "Those bottles you keep below the bar."

"Drink yourself dead," Lexy said, slamming a bottle of Stolichnaya in front of Eddie.

Eddie sniffed it. He loved the smell of vodka. Don't let anyone tell you it has no smell. He emptied his glass, tossing the club soda, ice and all, on the floor behind the bar. The first drink in four years spilled hot over his tongue. The burn. He loved the burn. He loved the taste. Eddie was a guy who truly loved the taste of booze. And the life. He loved the drinking life.

On the TV above Lexy's head, the evening news blinked silently; closed captioning flashed underneath. Eddie figured that more closed-captioned programs were watched by drunks on bar stools than were ever viewed by those hard of hearing. In bad lighting, a street reporter stood on a dock, the wind blowing her hair. Although he could not hear any sound, it was obvious she was yelling. Shouting over the wind and the sound of a tow truck behind her. No doubt the motor whined as the cable of the truck tightened and shivered in the glare of the setting sun. At the end of the cable, a set of wheels appeared, then the vehicle being pulled out of the soupy black waters of the Arthur Kill. As soon as it began to emerge, Eddie knew Parrot was dead. Madame Caranina should have foreseen it: No one who touched Eddie Dunne got out alive.

As the rear end of a van rose, grayer than the water, he knew it was heavily coated with primer. Painted on the side would be sammy sosa and the flag of the Dominican Republic. The caption on the TV screen read "Seven unknown dead inside van pulled from water in Elizabeth, New Jersey." They'd like that, Eddie thought, to be labeled "unknown."

He poured another Stoli. Around the bar, the faces of old drinking buddies all turned toward him. There is no truer love than the love shared by drunken friends. He'd read that on a cocktail napkin. Funny line. All his old Russian drinking buddies, staring silently, waiting for him to self-destruct.

Not that he blamed them for not talking to him. If he had a few more drinks, he'd challenge them. They'd expect that. Booze made him talkative, aggressive, crazy. Crazy was the goal tonight. Before the night was over, he'd hit someone. Maybe take on the whole bar. Why not? "No fools, no fun," his partner, Paulie the Priest, had always said. God, he loved the taste of booze.

Ludmilla, waiting for Lexy to fill a drink order for one of her tables, moved close to him.

"Go home," she said, sliding the bottle away from him.

"The fun is just starting, Ludmilla."

"You're finished. Go home, protect your family." She stepped even closer to him and lowered her voice. "That woman in the picture, Zina, is very sad person, but dangerous," she said. "You know what subotnik is? Gang rape. Russian gangsters gang-rape her when she was just a girl, acting tough. They laugh about it. They say what the lesbian needs is good Russian dick. Now who knows what she thinks in her mind."

"I don't care what happened to her, Ludmilla."

"Zina's troubles come worse because of Sophie. Sophie, she has her problems, too. Drinking and such. Not all to blame, Sophie. The way he keeps her locked up in that house."

"Sophie is Borodenko's wife?"

"Yes. Sophie Ross, the model. Very famous in my country. She sent Zina asking questions."

"She sent Zina where?"

"In here, all around the streets. Asking questions about her family, and what happened. Questions about you and your partner."

"Me and my partner?"

"About the robbery. Her mother and father were killed in that robbery. You caught the men. The father was that mafiya lawyer, Rosenfeld. I know you remember her mother, Svetlana. Svetlana Rosenfeld."

"Lana," he said.

"Sophie looks just like her mother."

Back out on the sidewalk, Eddie saw a black Lincoln parked across the street. He waited for Matty Boland to call him over. Boland was all smiles.

"You got the Brighton Beach phone lines buzzing," he said. "We could have tracked you every step of the way tonight."

"I figured you were here to see this asshole Lexy."

"That useless piece of shit? He gave us enough to get started, not much more. He's not the wheeler and dealer he pretends to be."

"All show, like the rest," Eddie said.

"Not all of them. Just between us, we got word on one of Borodenko's freighters. Flying a Syrian flag, but it has a Russian crew. It's coming up the Pacific, outside

Mexico right now. It looks like a major drug ship. Remember, you said they weren't into drugs?"

"I've been wrong about a lot of shit."

Boland wore a dark baseball cap, j. crew across the top. He took it off and ran his fingers through his gray-flecked hair. Eddie noticed a copy of a Russian-English dictionary on the seat next to him.

"You know what your name is in Russian?" Boland asked.

"Fucking Eddie Dunne," he said.

"You've heard that before. We heard it a lot tonight. What I came to tell you is that you can stop with the pictures. We just got the word Yuri Borodenko is pissed, really pissed. That's what you wanted, right?"

"Part of it."

"He'll be home tomorrow. He's in the air right now."

'That's the other part."

"Heard you were hoisting a few in the Samovar tonight. I expected you to be in a lot worse condition than this."

"I quit again," Eddie said. "But I've never been in worse condition."