Hidden Prey

man grappled with the concept.
    Lucas thought, Ah, shit, and glanced at Nadya.
    Then the old man rallied and said, “Come in, I suppose. I don’t have any food. My wife makes cookies sometimes but we don’t have any now . . .”
    They followed as he tottered back inside. An aging color television was stuck in the corner of a room and an old lady was sitting in a wheelchair, staring at it. She didn’t look at them.
    “Mrs. Walther?” Lucas asked.
    No reply. Walther said, “She’s not so well, today. You want me to go to Duluth? I can’t go, there’s nobody to stay with Melodie . . .”
    “No, no, we don’t want you to go anywhere . . .”
    The ensuing interview was jagged, uninformative. Walther claimed that he hadn’t been to Virginia for two years. Then he agreed that he might have been, but couldn’t remember exactly when, how he got there, or what he did. He didn’t remember Oleshev, the Svobodas, or the Witolds. He remembered Anton Spivak, though, and Spivak’s Tap, and began a wandering reminiscence of the last time he’d been to Spivak’s.
    He’d gone with a man named Frank, he said, after a Hibbing–Virginia football game in which Walther’s son had played right guard. Lucas realized a few seconds into the account that the game had taken place in the fifties or sixties, and that he was talking about the son who’d died in the car accident. He tried to interrupt, but Walther took such great pleasure in the story—his son had picked up a fumble out of theair and had run it back for a touchdown, and it turned out that the fumbler was a Spivak, which they didn’t learn until they were laughing about it in the bar—that Nadya shushed Lucas and made him listen.
    When the story was finished, they tried to press on, asking about the hospital where he’d been born.
    “My parents came here with a boat, the whole boat all to the same place. From New York to Minnesota on the train. They were called the Vilnius Boat, because they gathered at Vilnius for their tickets. Vilnius is in . . .” His mind wandered away. Then, “They all came over on the same boat, and then the farms failed because of the winter, and everything died. People starved and the mines were opening and the boat came to Hibbing. The whole boat. They went to work in the mines, the men.”
    They asked about Roger: Roger made him happy—a good boy, worked hard, he’d be a success in this life. He was studying to be an accountant at the University of Minnesota–Duluth and had a scholarship to play hockey . . .
    “I thought he was thirty or forty-something,” Lucas said.
    The old man looked puzzled, struggled with it for a moment, then sat up, his eyes suddenly sharp, sniffed, and with a new alertness, said, “I’ve got to change Melodie.” And it became apparent from the odor that he did—if he didn’t, he said, she’d get sores.
    He refused help from Nadya, said he did this every day, and he competently rolled the old woman into the bathroom and closed the door.
    “This is a waste of time,” Lucas said, when the door had closed. “He thinks Roger’s still in college. The guy’s running on one headlight.”
     
    F IVE MINUTES LATER , Walther pushed his wife out of the bathroom, now smelling of the same Johnson’s baby powder that Lucas used on Sam. He parked her in front of the television set and said, “I can’t go to Duluth unless we can find somebody to take care of Grandma.”
    “You don’t remember Spivak’s Tap two weeks ago?” Lucas asked.
    “I remember Spivak’s. Did I tell you, I told somebody, my boy played football here for Hibbing, you know—”
    Lucas jumped in. “We’ve got to go. Is there anything we can do for your wife? The county, there might be some kind of service . . .”
    “But I called them already. Are you from the county? I called them, and they said, ‘Okay, they had the papers now.’ I can’t remember, yesterday?”
    “Okay. We’ll check. Mr. Walther, thanks for your help, okay?”
     
    N ADYA SMILED AND nodded and Lucas bobbed his head and fluttered his hands and a minute later they were walking back down the sidewalk. “That didn’t work out,” Lucas said. In the car, he picked up the phone and said, “I’ll call off Andreno . . .”
    Nadya held up a hand and said, “Leave Andreno for a while.”
    “Why? The guy . . . ?”
    “Because I am a spy, I notice that the old man now knows everything we know, and we know nothing that he does. He