Slaughter

Renz looked surprised. “Are we doing all that?”

“As soon as you supply the cameras and cassettes.”

“Nobody uses cassettes anymore,” Renz said.

Qui

Renz stood up and said, “You are really a prick, Qui

As Qui

When Qui

Sal and Harold were still occupied interviewing witnesses to the bombing and burning. Sal had called earlier and talked to Pearl. She’d told him two witnesses had surfaced and reported glimpsing a child of about twelve ru

Pearl gave Sal and Harold names and addresses and sicced them on the witnesses.

“Could have been a small adult,” said one of the witnesses, a hard-looking but glamorous woman named Philipa.

“Or a large child,” Harold said.

They were in her living room, in a modest but cozy ground-floor apartment that looked out at ankle level at passersby on the sidewalk. It was on the upwind side of the field of wreckage left by the explosions and fire. Half the buildings on the block looked untouched, in contrast to the others.

Harold wondered about Philipa’s ethnicity. She had a certain earthy magnetism that intrigued him. When she caught Harold staring at her breasts, she gave him a look that startled him with its clarity of meaning. She knew what he was thinking she was thinking, but he was wrong.

Exactly.

“I was just curious about your ethnicity,” he said, laying it all out there. “Where you’re from.”

“Philipistan,” she said. “And before you ask, yes, I am named after my country.”

“Like Odessa,” Harold said.

Sal glared at him. “Or Miss Australia.”

Philipa’s husband entered the room then, and that was that.

“I wasn’t here during the event,” he said. Meaning he had nothing to add, and neither did his wife. Interview over.

Harold thought “event” was an odd thing to call a bombing and conflagration. And to Harold, the man didn’t look at all Philipistanese. More Irish.

“Thanks for your cooperation,” Sal told the husband, feigning dead seriousness. He gave the wife one of his cards. “If you remember anything else, please call.”

As Philipa accepted the card, she glanced at him, then up and to the side. Something in her eyes sent the ancient wordless message: I know you know I know . . .

“Where exactly is—” Harold began, as Sal pushed him out the door to the hall.

Back in the unmarked, with its engine and air conditioner ru

They drove for a while, Sal behind the wheel. He knew that sooner or later something would click. The trick was to recognize it when it happened. The legwork of the investigation was only begi

Sal continued to drive what he thought was the perimeter of the recent catastrophe. Harold sat and fiddled with his iPhone.

Fifteen minutes passed before Harold spoke: “It’s nowhere on Google.”

“What’s that, Harold?”

“Philipistan. As far as Google’s concerned, it doesn’t exist.”

After a while, Harold muttered, “Those countries come and go. Sometimes they even overlap.”

Back at Q&A, Qui

I know that you know I know . . .

49

St. Louis, Missouri, 1999

The Happy Brat sandwich shop was close enough to the ballpark that, when the ball club was in town, there was no shortage of customers. Fran and Willie had opened the place after the previous owner had put it up for sale and retired to Kissimmee, Florida. They had themselves retired two years ago, almost died of boredom, and saw it as their fate to at least make an offer when the diner went on the market. Their offer was rock bottom, but the owner knew them and liked them. And sold them the Happy Brat.

Willie was a big man, and strong, but he was in his seventies now. His hair was thi

When the Cardinals ball club was in town, it was another story. The Happy Brat couldn’t afford much, but hired a series of short-order cooks and countermen to handle the additional business. Henry helped, especially on those busy days when the Chicago Cubs were in town for day games. Baseball fans loved bratwurst on a bun with sauerkraut and mustard. And what could go better with that than beer, which Fran and Willie sold on draught and ice cold?

All went well beneath the neon bratwurst on a bun sign until, during a long home stand, a need for a dishwasher and sometimes short-order cook became too obvious to ignore.

This home stand, the Cardinals stayed in town almost three weeks. Fran was begi

“Enjoy the backbreaking work while you can,” Willie was fond of saying. “There’ll be plenty of slow days in our future.”

But this was the present, profitable even if it was a test for nerves. The economy was such that it would be easy to hire temporary help, maybe for the rest of the baseball season.

Hiring seemed the solution to their problem.

Fran put a help-wanted sign in the lower right corner of the window, and within an hour the kid turned up. He was small, said he actually wanted to become a jockey. But things other than horses were slow at the track across the river in Illinois, so he was looking for a job he could do for a while.

Fran, who was at the register, listened carefully to the boy, and motioned for him and Willie to come to her end of the counter where she could take part in the job interview.