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Python in the other, although it wasn’t pointing at anyone. Even then he didn’t handle it the way Stanislaus had his, like a closed umbrella. You find firearms in the hands of two kinds, gun people and people with guns. Mayk was a gun person.
    The old man squinted at the newcomer, then at his weapon. His big head sank deeper into the pillow. “You won’t need that to rob me. You’re welcome to everything in the house. I’d rather see it in a thief’s hands than under rubble.”
    “We’re not here to rob you, Mr. Leposava. That’s already happened once tonight.” He looked at me. “The guy broke the window in the back door and let himself in. He went out that way when we knocked on the front door. What we heard was the rest of the glass going when it slammed behind him. He dropped this in the yard.” He held up the painted item.
    This time it was a woman in the sheet, no sword, but the same many layers of existence on the dark reds and glazed blues.
    Mayk put away the gun. “It’s an icon. Magdalene, I think. Their version of a plaster saint. He’s got them all over the house; no telling how many our friend got clear with, or what else.”
    “The converted whore,” acknowledged Stash Leposava, narrowing his eyes to bring the painting into focus. “That’s appropriate, for this town. I must have slept through it. One thing I do well now is sleep.”
    “Are they worth a lot?” I asked Mayk.
    “Some stay in families a couple of hundred years. Collectors go pretty high on the better ones. Bill and me traced a hundred grand’s worth once through a fence that used to specialize in religious articles in Hamtramck. He pulled eight to twelve in Jackson.”
    “What we need is some law.”
    “No police,” put in the old man. “They won’t come anyway, and if they do they’ll just have me committed. It will save serving me with sheriff’s papers.”
    “You’ve been hit before,” I suggested.
    His translucent lids slid down and up, reptile fashion. “I never was until the city condemned my property. I kept picking bricks up off my floor until I got tired of replacing broken glass. In a few weeks it will all be dust anyway. Me too.”
    I said, “Someone should stay with you till the lock on the front door gets fixed and the hole in the back door gets plugged. Do you have any family?”
    “Not since the October Revolution.”
    “What about the priest, Father Olszanski? Would he stay?”
    “Until the conversation swung around to His Eminence,” he said, shifting the ponderous weight of his moustache. “If you must, his number is in the book on the table in the dining room. But they turned off the telephone last month.”
    “I’ll use the Stanislauses’.” Mayk laid the icon down on the nightstand and went out.
    Leposava closed his eyes again and left them that way. I listened to the house sounds: timbers settling with fat men’s sighs, a gust of wind chattering a loose pane, the furnace cutting in. Outside of the felony tank in any jail in this country there is no place quieter than an old man’s bedroom. This one had a medicine smell, sweetish under the burning-wax stench, and a skin of dust on the furniture. I stepped around the bed to where the candle was still glowing determinedly on the wooden stand in front of the window and peered at the icon it was illuminating. A Madonna and Child, with the gloss of youth shining out of their big wet hound-eyes across a gulf of time that encompassed powdered wigs and Valley Girl T-shirts, muskets and ICBMs, Napoleon and the Ayotollah, Abbott and Costello. I was punchy. I straightened up and got out a cigarette and smoothed it between my fingers. I glanced at Leposava. His eyes were open and on me, icon-bright with the candle flame squirming in their centers.
    “Who are you?”
    I told him. “I’m looking for Michael Evancek, the boy whose parents and little sister were killed across the street nineteen years ago. That’s Howard Mayk who just left to