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chopstick on the table. “I’ll take an order of Peking duck with me when I leave.”
    Fred watched the girl slink away in the mirror. “Now that’s what I call a great ass, Dante. You getting any?”
    “What about you, Fred?” he asked pleasantly. “People still screwing you?”
    “They try,” she retorted, her facial muscles drawn into a tight smile, “in both senses of the word. But nobody succeeds.”
    Snickering, Martin extracted a Beedie from the tin and lit it with one of the restaurant’s matchbooks on the table. “You didn’t say how you found me.”
    “I didn’t, did I? It’s more a case of we never lost you. When you washed up like a chunk of jetsam over a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn, al arums not to mention excursions, sounded in the battleship-gray halls of the shop. We obtained a copy of the lease the day you signed it. Mind you, nobody was surprised to find you’d slipped into the Martin Odum legend. What could be more logical? He’d actually been raised on Eastern Parkway, he went to PS 167, Crown Heights was his stamping ground, his father had an electric appliance store on Kingston Avenue. Martin even had a school chum whose father owned the Chinese restaurant on Albany Avenue. Martin Odum was the legend you worked up on my watch, or have you misplaced that little detail? Now that I think of it, you were the last agent I personally ran before they kicked me upstairs to run the officers who ran the agents, although, even at one remove, I always considered that I was the person playing you. Funny part is I have no memory of Odum being a detective. You must have decided the legend needed embroidering.”
    Martin assumed that they had bugged the pool parlor. “Being a detective beats having to work for a living.”
    “What kind of cases do you get?”
    “Mahjongg debts. Angry wives who pay me for photographs of errant husbands caught in the act. Hasidic fathers who think their sons may be dating girls who don’t keep kosher. Once I was hired by the family of a Russian who died in Little Odessa, which is the part of Brooklyn where most of the Russians who wind up in America live, because they were convinced the Chechens who ran the neighborhood crematorium were extracting gold teeth from the late lamented before cremating their bodies. Another time I was hired by a colorful Little Odessa political figure to bring back the Rottweiler that’d been kidnapped by his ex-wife when he fell behind on alimony payments.”
    “You get a lot of work in Little Odessa.”
    “I keep nodding when my clients can’t come up with the right word in English and wind up speaking Russian to me. They seem to think I understand them.”
    “Did you find the dog?”
    “Martin Odum always gets his dog.”
    She clanked glasses with him. “Here’s looking at you, Dante.” She sipped her daiquiri and eyed him over the rim of the glass. “You don’t by any chance do missing husbands?”
    The question hung in the air between them. Martin sucked on his Beedie for a moment, then said, very casually, “What makes you ask?”
    She drummed a forefinger against the side of her Fred Astaire nose. “Don’t play Trivial Pursuit with me, Pippen.”
    “Up to now I’ve steered clear of missing husbands.”
    “What about as of now?”
    Martin decided that his apartment wasn’t bugged after all; if it had been, Fred would have known he’d turned down Stella Kastner. “Missing husbands are not my cup of tea, mainly because ninety-nine times out of a hundred they have settled comfortably into new identities involving new women. And it is extremely difficult, as in statistically impossible, to find people who have their heart set on never returning to their old women.”
    A weight seemed to lift from Fred’s padded shoulders. She scooped another cube of ice from her daiquiri and ate it. “I have a soft spot for you, Dante. Honestly I do. In the eighties, in the early nineties, you were legendary for your legends.