Caviar and Plombir.

Ten minutes after he walked through the door of Mama Babushka’s New York restaurant, he’d solved the case. Ash slid the old photo over the table to Mama. “Something tells me you and the body over there have more history than you are letting on, Mama.” He looked at his watch. It was now 2am.

A couple of hours ago, Ash was settling down to watch the recorded highlights of the Jets game, a newly cracked bottle of Bud lay on the table in front of his sofa, where he would no doubt fall asleep tonight.

He passed out on it most nights. The ones that he made it home anyway. In the next room, a perfectly good bed sat untouched for years now.

It was ten to midnight, and the first pass wasn’t even completed when his cell rang. If whatever crises led to Kath in control punching in his number had only waited ten minutes more, it would have been Fat Danny’s problem. Ash was off shift tomorrow, and Danny was his backup.

He could have just not picked up, of course. Ash could easily go a night without hearing Kath’s laconic Jersey drawl. Yet, if Ash was the kinda guy that shirked calls, he might still be married.

No matter how urgent the police business behind her call, Kath would always  lead with, “When ya gonna ask me out, Ash? I ain’t gettin any yunga, you know.”  For the first ten years after Mary left with the kids, he’d laughed this off, but as time passed, Kath either got better looking, or his standards were dropping. The realisation hit, one day soon, Detective Ashwood may have to hunt for that condom that lurked these last fifteen years somewhere in the glove box of his Lincoln Continental.

His mind drifted back to Mary. Of course, to say she left wasn’t really an accurate account of that day. Hell, it wasn’t accurate at all.

After a four-day stint of duty, Ash returned home to his house in Jersey to find the locks changed. To give Mary her due, she’d warned him many times that,

“The next time will be the last.” He never believed she would do it, though.

Detective Sam Ashwood served in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He wasn’t the first policeman who found the whole work/life balance hard to manage. The long shifts played hell with his family obligations. Anniversaries and birthdays went by unnoticed. Ash got busier while Mary got sadder.

Then came the lock out. After a long and heated debate that was carried out to the chagrin of neighbours at 2AM through the brass mail slot, Someone phoned the cops, and Ash was dragged off by two uniforms for a night in the local cells. A sergeant on the morning shift recognised him and released him with a tepid apology.

Mary instigated divorce proceedings, and Ash never saw her again after the court case. Well, not in the flesh. She got the house, bank balance, car, dog, and, of course, custody of the kids, Lilly and Johnny. Neither were kids now. Lilly was off to MIT to become an engineer, and Johhny worked for a law firm in the city. A few months back, Ash was a witness in a case that went to court, and there, sitting a few feet away, was Johnny. Like two pathetic strangers, they nodded briefly to each other and went about their business. Ash really regretted not talking.

Mary was good enough to send a letter each year, letting him know what his estranged family was up to. Every second one, she would add a photo. About three or four years back, these photos started including a guy that Ash’s kids now called dad.

Ash knew the man in the pictures to be Karl O’Reilly, but how he obtained that information wasn’t entirely legal, so it’s probably best left unsaid.

He tried very hard not to, but if Ash ever took the time to think about it, the situation broke his heart. Instead of reforming his behaviour and seeking a proper life balance, he did the typical cop thing and threw himself further into the job. Most of the guys in the department were now divorced; he would have had a lot of company in his misery had any of them ever discussed their situations with each other, but you know… men. Instead of reflecting on their failings, they each railed against their own personal Karl.

Karl worked in a car showroom, and to Ash, that was an extra kick in the teeth. “Your partner left you for a Toyota salesman?” the guys would ask and then snigger, as if the fact that their wife ran off with an accountant or shop owner somehow made their situation better.

That was when the really stupid stuff started. Adding the man to his department’s “usual suspects” list, Ash would have Karl dragged in for all sorts of crimes in which he couldn’t possibly be involved. There was a tenuous reason for these arrests, though. Karl, now in his mid-fifties, had been arrested for handling stolen goods twenty years previously. Karl’s story was that he took a car from a guy as a part exchange, but the vehicle later turned out to be stolen. Karl got off with a two hundred buck fine, but he now had a record. Ash was none too pleased that a criminal was bringing up his kids, let alone lying next to Mary.

Finally answering the persistently ringing mobile, he suffered Kath’s proposal and then listened to the real reason for her disruption of his evening.

“I’ll be there in ten, doll.”

“You bedda be,” she said and hung up, spurned once more.

Reluctantly eager, he donned the sopping wet McIntosh that hung dripping in the hall and made his way down the graffiti-strewn stairs to his beaten old car.

Ash, procrastinating about getting the locks fixed for months, took an age to persuade the key to open the door. Cold rain poured down the back of his neck as he cursed and wrestled with the reluctant mechanism. After finally preying to Odin, he got in out of the rain and squelched onto the cracked leather driver’s seat, got the car started, and headed back into the city on his way over the deserted bridge.

The sound of the familiar Baltimore weather channel played on his radio. Ash had no love for weather, nor Baltimore when he came to think about it, but the radio was stuck on that channel the day he bought the car, and he’d never yet found a way to turn it off. Automatically, he chanted along with the jingle,

“Heading out with something planned,

First, get the weather for Maryland.”

While the radio signal mercifully diminished, the traffic picked up as he reached the tall buildings on the island. With only his passenger-side windshield wiper working, he had to lean and drive until he saw that the uniforms had blocked off the entire road outside the 62^nd Street restaurant.

“Ash,” said the uniformed Sergeant, who stood under a canopy wearing the mandatory rain cape. “You just can’t stay away,” he added and laughed as if he’d told a joke.

Ash pointed at the sarge and smiled, but as he walked past, he swapped his pointing index finger for the middle one.

The restaurant was over-warm, and there were far too many hob-nail police boots trumping around on his murder scene. Ash raised his voice over the hubbub.

“Alright, guys, I know it’s pissing down out there, but anyone who doesn’t need to be in here, out now.” A cacophony of complaints rose and fell, only to be replaced by rubber rain capes squeaking over already sodden woollen uniforms. It took ten reluctant minutes to clear the place. Finally, Ash looked around the room and took in the scene.

Two bodies, an older man who appeared to be on the wrong side of sixty and a young woman, maybe in her twenties, sat at a table, dead, with heads on the formerly white tablecloth. By the amount of blood around, it looked as if they’d been shot through the head. The woman got it in the back of her skull, the man between the eyes. On the table next to the victims sat the obligatory candle and a tray with two small portions of what looked like caviar and two silver bowls of ice cream. At another table near the kitchens, one of the young detectives sat with a grey-haired woman in chef’s whites.

“Who’s that?” Ash asked the officer he’d spared from outside duties to take notes for him.

The young cop raised his eyebrows. “That’s Mama Babushka,” he said as if Ash was a fool for not recognising her.

“Mama who?” he asked.

Apparently, Mama was one of New York’s finest chefs. The restaurant had a two-week waiting list. Once your day arrived and you were seated, you could expect to pay up to a thousand bucks for your meal. It was the finest Russian cuisine on the Upper East Side. Ash didn’t even know they had Russian restaurants in Manhattan, but then he was more of a McDonalds man.

He walked over to the table. Mrs…?” he said, taking a seat.

“You can call me Mama,” said the woman in stern, Russian-accented English. He could tell from her face that this was not open to debate.

“Okay, Mama. Can you tell me what happened here?”

She pointed to the young detective on the other side of the table. “I have already told everything I know to Rubi here.” Rubi tried to hand his notebook over, but Ash waved it away.

“Then tell me what you told him,” Ash said.

Her story went that the place was empty except for the unlucky couple. Mama had let the staff go home early as there were no more customers scheduled to arrive tonight. Most cancelled because of the foul weather. “I still charge,” she snapped in the middle of her story.

Just about to call it a night and lock up, Romeo and Juliet here arrived and took a table. “What the hell,” Mama thought, and with nowhere else to be,  she went out and took their order. Fifteen minutes later, having served them their starters, she was in the kitchen when she heard the gunshots. “I was scared,” she said, then told Ash that she hid for twenty minutes before plucking up the courage to investigate. Long and short of it, she found the two bodies as they were now. “No sign of gunman,” she said and resumed her unhappy face stare.

Ash stood and walked over to the table. What flavour of ice cream did they order?”

“Not ice cream, Plombir,” Mama said, slightly agitatedly. “It’s a Russian dish,” she added.

Avoiding blobs of brain and blood, Ash stuck his finger in one of the bowls and tried it. “Mmm, nice,” he said. It was like a sweeter, richer ice cream. Ben and Jerry’s, but with even more sugar.

He found the old and faded photo on the wall as he circled the room, still questioning Mama. Stopping for a close look, Ash saw a young Mama in the arms of the dead dining man behind him. The pieces of the case quickly fell into place, and Ash went back over to the table and dismissed the young detective and his assistant officer.

He and Mama now sat alone. She was staring at the sepia image with a tear in her eye.

“I loved this bastard for so many years.” She looked up from the photo and across at the body. “He walked in here tonight with that bitch and never even recognised me.”

“Was he worth spending the rest of your life in prison for?” Ash asked, and Mama shrugged.

“You’ll never find the gun. Other than that picture, which I’d forgotten was still on the wall, there’s nothing in America that links me to Sergei over there. I was careful to avoid powder traces and got no blood on me. Obviously, my fingerprints are all over this place, so that can’t be used to implicate me.” She smiled at Ash. “I am now very rich. Have good lawyer. You have nothing on me.”

He sat and looked at the woman for a long time. “You were once lovers?”

She nodded. “Back in the old country. He was my husband but couldn’t keep his hands off his students.” She pointed at the young, dead girl. “Sergei now teaches physics at MIT. I guess he’s never changed.”

An alarm went off in Ash’s head at the mention of the college where Lilly now studied. His daughter and the girl at the table wouldn’t be too far apart in years. Maybe Lily even knew her.

There was just a little bit of sympathy, no, admiration for Mama. Ash didn’t want to think how many times he dreamt of blowing Karl’s bushy-haired head off. During one of the occasions the man was pulled in for pointless questioning, Ash actually stood behind him, gun drawn, until someone walked in and Ash realised what he was doing.

To this day, it seemed that Karl had no idea who Ash was. Ash guessed Mary might have put two and two together, figuring out why poor Karl kept getting pulled down to the station. If she had, it didn’t seem like she’d elucidated to her new husband.

The many arrests were not pointlessly vindictive. To be a good detective, a man needed a scheming mind, and all the while, Ash had been waiting for a night like this. He went out to the Lincoln and returned with his briefcase. Crossing the room, Ash laid a glass on the table next to the two bodies. He opened a plastic bag, and Mama watched as he randomly emptied seemingly invisible contents over the floor. After finishing, he went back to her table, sat, and leaned over to put a hand on Mama’s.

“Mama, just killed a man,” he sang quietly. She looked up at his smile.  “You shouldn’t have killed the girl,” he said but added, “I’m glad you did.”

Ash stood again. He beckoned for his assistant to return. The young officer sat across the table and Ash put his hands on the cop’s shoulders.

“Let me just run through everything you just told me, Mama. Eddie here will take notes, write up your statement, and you will sign it off, okay?” Mama looked at him a little uncertainly but then sighed and nodded.

“Right, this couple walked in just as you were about to leave. You decided to serve them. You took their order, and as you headed for the kitchen, a tall man with bushy black hair entered. You told him to take a seat, and you would return shortly.” Ash nodded to Mama and winked. “Have I got all this correct so far?” After a short delay, she nodded.

“So, you went into the kitchen and, while there, heard a heated discussion taking place. You couldn’t make it all out, but the man who entered alone seemed to be shouting about a car he bought from the older gentleman who came in with the lady. Correct?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then came the shots. As you told us earlier, you were scared and hid for a while. When you finally came back through, the tall man was gone, and the two bodies were as we see them now. Have I got all this?”

“Yes,” said mama. “That is how it was.”

Ash turned to the young officer. “Right, get that lot typed up. Mama will come down to the precinct tomorrow and sign it, okay>”

The officer nodded, picked up his notes and went to leave.

“Oh,” said Ash as the lad reached the door. “Haul in the usual suspects, please. Pay close attention to any of them that have any previous with stolen vehicles. And get a fingerprint team down here to check that table next to the bodies.” The officer nodded and left.

Ash and Mama sat silently for ages before she spoke. “Why?”

Ash smiled. Well, Mama, it seems we had a common cause tonight. Okay, maybe dual cause would be a better description, but we both had scores to settle. Yours from the old country and mine from a previous life.”

“Why me? Why now?” she said, a puzzled look on her lined face.

“Well, Mama, much like the caviar and Plombirr that you brought your ex-husband, revenge is a dish best served cold.”