RAMIFICATIONS
An American friend of Nicholas’s arrived for a weeklong visit – Bill Baranovsky. So Nicholas showed him around the city that was becoming more and more familiar to him. The baran part of his name meant “ram.” Bill looked like his name, with three days of stubble on his face and a shaved head and tattoos on both arms. He was a brawny former football player and workoutaholic, who pumped iron in the gym three times per week. The two had met at the NY Athletic Club in Port Jefferson Station in the sauna after a workout when Nicholas was doing graduate work at Stony Brook. The ram-named man got his degree in criminal justice from Stony Brook and was working as a detective doing desk duty in Brooklyn as the result of some overzealous arrests of drug dealers in East New York. He di
