pinstripe pants, shiny from age, and slippers. He held an unfiltered cigarette with square-tipped fingers, sucking the tip while keeping it cupped in his fist—like a convict, thought Shadow, or a soldier. He extended his left hand to Wednesday.
“Welcome then, Grimnir.”
“They call me Wednesday these days,” he said, shaking the old man’s hand.
A narrow smile; a flash of yellow teeth. “Yes,” he said. “Very funny. And this is?”
“This is my associate. Shadow, meet Mr. Czernobog.”
“Well met,” said Czernobog. He shook Shadow’s left hand with his own. His hands were rough and callused, and the tips of his fingers were as yellow as if they had been dipped in iodine.
“How do you do, Mr. Czernobog.”
“I do old. My guts ache, and my back hurts, and I cough my chest apart every morning.”
“Why you are standing at the door?” asked a woman’s voice. Shadow looked over Czernobog’s shoulder, at the old woman standing behind him. She was smaller and frailer than her sister, but her hair was long and still golden. “I am Zorya Utrennyaya,” she said. “You must not stand there in the hall. You must come in, go through to the sitting room, through there, I will bring you coffee, go, go in, through there.”
Through the doorway into an apartment that smelled like over-boiled cabbage and cat-box and unfiltered foreign cigarettes, and they were ushered through a tiny hallway past several closed doors to the sitting room at the far end of the corridor, and were seated on a huge old horsehair sofa, disturbing an elderly gray cat in the process, who stretched, stood up, and walked, stiffly, to a distant part of the sofa, where he lay down, warily stared at each of them in turn, then closed one eye and went back to sleep. Czernobog sat in an armchair across from them.
Zorya Utrennyaya found an empty ashtray and placed it beside Czernobog. “How you want your coffee?” she asked her guests. “Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin.”
“That’ll be fine, ma’am,” said Shadow. He looked out of the window, at the buildings across the street.
Zorya Utrennyaya went out. Czernobog stared at her as she left. “That’s a good woman,” he said. “Not like her sisters. One of them is a harpy, the other, all she does is sleep.” He put his slippered feet up on a long, low coffee table, a chess board inset in the middle, cigarette burns and mug rings on its surface.
“Is she your wife?” asked Shadow.
“She’s nobody’s wife.” The old man sat in silence for a moment, looking down at his rough hands. “No. We are all relatives. We come over here together, long time ago.”
From the pocket of his bathrobe, Czernobog produced a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Shadow did not recognize the brand. Wednesday pulled out a narrow gold lighter from the pocket of his pale suit, and lit the old man’s cigarette. “First we come to New York,” said Czernobog. “All our countrymen go to New York. Then, we come out here, to Chicago. Everything got very bad. In the old country, they had nearly forgotten me. Here, I am a bad memory no one wants to remember. You know what I did when I got to Chicago?”
“No,” said Shadow.
“I get a job in the meat business. On the kill floor. When the steer comes up the ramp, I was a knocker. You know why we are called knockers? Is because we take the sledgehammer and we knock the cow down with it. Bam! It takes strength in the arms. Yes? Then the shackler chains the beef up, hauls it up, then they cut the throat. They drain the blood first before they cut the head off. We were the strongest, the knockers.” He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe, flexed his upper arm to display the muscles still visible under the old skin. “Is not just strong though. There was an art to it. To the blow. Otherwise the cow is just stunned, or angry. Then, in the fifties, they give us the bolt gun. You put it to the forehead, bam! Bam! Now you think, anybody can kill. Not so.” He mimed putting a metal bolt through a cow’s head. “It still takes skill.” He smiled at the memory, displaying an iron-colored tooth.
“Don’t tell them cow-killing stories.” Zorya Utrennyaya carried in their coffee on a red wooden tray. Small brightly enameled cups filled with a brown liquid so dark it was almost black. She gave them