2 “Miz Megan Kenner?” an unknown female voice asked after Megan had clicked Talk on her cell phone without saying a word. The screen read Unknown number. “Who is this?” Megan said, wondering how the caller knew her very private telephone number. “Detective Constable Jane Lewis, at TPS. You are Miz Kenner, aren’t you?” “Yes.” “Miz Kenner, we have received a communication from the New York Police Department that they are reopening the case of your late fiancé, Daniel Wilner.” Megan remembered that when, in October, she had been informed of Daniel’s death – her number had been the most prominent in Daniel’s cell-phone call log – the policewoman who contacted her referred to her as his fiancée. “I’m not his fiancée,” she had insisted. “I’m the mother of his child, but not his fiancée.” But the label seemed to have stuck to her, and now there was no point in arguing the matter. “Reopening it in what way?” Megan asked. “There seems to be a possibility that he was not a random victim of a gang shootout, as was at first supposed, and a detective from New York would like to speak with you. They’ll be here this afternoon. Would it be possible for you to come to headquarters downtown to meet them? We know you have a young child, so if it’s inconvenient we could come to your residence. Myself and the New York detective, that is.” “Yes, coming to my place would be better.” At the moment she was not at home but in Richview Park, where Sam was showing off his newfound skill of running. “Good,” DC Lewis said. “I’ll call you again when we have a time range. Do you have any questions?” “Yes,” Megan said. “Have you contacted his family in Montreal? His mother, his sister?” “If the NYPD had done that, it would be through the SPVM,” DC Lewis said, probably aware that Megan was from Montreal and knew what the police of her hometown was called, “and we wouldn’t know about that.” A southerly wind was blowing on this Wednesday morning, but it was a gentle breeze compared to the gusts of the previous day, not to mention the tornado – a “microburst,” the weather people had called it – of the day before that. It was pleasantly warm and the sky was clear. The forecast had been for no more rain for another week. Weather forecasts were based on probabilities. Megan had learned enough probability theory to know the extremely small chance that two bullets fired at random would hit the same target. She had thought about this very low probability at the time and had even communicated her thoughts to Betty when they talked at the memorial, but she had eventually accepted the police version of events – even improbable things do happen, after all. But now she did not feel surprised. “Come on, Sam, let’s go home,” she said. “No!” “Yes!” she said, giggling, as she scooped him up in her arms, hugged him tightly and plunked him in his stroller.” “Don’t wanna go home!” “Let’s run home!” she said, and pushed the stroller as fast as she could. They were home in six minutes. “Do you want a bath?” she asked him after she helped him climb out of the stroller. “Yeah! With my duckies!” “Well, one of them is a ducky, and the other is a goosey, and the other is a swanee. They’re all different!” “Duckies are diffent!” Sam said. She ran some six inches of lukewarm water into the tub. Once he was busy with his assorted waterbirds she sat on the toilet-seat cover and, from her cell phone, called Betty. To Megan’s surprise, Betty picked up on the first ring and said, “Hi, Megan” in a somber voice that was unfamiliar to Megan. On the few occasions that they had talked, Betty always sounded cheerful, almost jaunty. “Is something the matter?” Megan asked. “Yes, but...” “You can talk to me if you want to,” Megan said. What could be troubling the beautiful, rich, academically gifted, happily married (though it was to Paul Berman) Betty Wilner? Was she still grieving for Daniel? But when, two weeks earlier, she had called Megan to invite her to her birthday party, she had sounded like her happy self. “Thanks, I probably will, but not now. I guess you have something to tell me. What’s that splashing in the background?” “It’s Sam, taking a bath. And yes, as a matter of fact, I do have something to tell you. Or, first, to ask you. Have you had a call from the police?” “The police? About what?” “You haven’t, then.” “No.” “Well, I got a call from a detective from Toronto Police Services, but it was on behalf of New York police. It seems they’re reopening Daniel’s case. As the detective who called me said, there’s ‘a possibility that he was not a random victim of a gang shootout.’” “Did he say what it might be instead?” “Who?” “The detective.” “Oh,” Megan said, laughing, “it was a she.” Betty laughed too, or rather giggled. “No,” Megan went on, “she probably doesn’t know. The NYPD detective will come this afternoon and I guess I’ll find out from him or her whether he or she thinks it might be a homicide or a suicide.” They laughed again. “Here we are,” Megan said, suddenly grave, “laughing about it, silly geese that we are.” “No, we’re not. I could use a good laugh.” “What’s up? A fight with Paul?” “Not exactly a fight, just some bad feelings. I wasn’t prepared for it. It’s like I’ve been living in a bubble, and somebody burst it.” “And let some fresh air in?” Betty giggled again. “You’re like a breath of fresh air, Megan,” she said. “No wonder Daniel loved you.” “Loved me? I don’t know about that.” “As much as he could love. I used to think that he was missing the love gene, and I called him a mutant. But do you know what I just found out? That we had different fathers.” “I know,” Megan said after a pause. “You knew that?” “He told me right when he found out, back in ninety-two. I told him that I’d always thought of him as all French, not half. Whatever that means,” Megan added with a chuckle. “I mean, look at me,” Betty said, “in love with the same guy for eight years. And my father was in love with the same woman for twenty years, until he found that she’d been cheating on him all along. Or so my mother told me.” “I know that too, from Daniel.” “So I figure I got that gene from my father, and Daniel... I don’t know who his father was.” “Well, Daniel never stopped considering your dad, Miki Wilner, as his real father. He even told me that he was writing a book about him. But his biological father was your mother’s lover before your father, an artist named Jean-Marc Couture.” “I’ve never heard of him.” “He never became famous. He was bisexual and he died of AIDS, and supposedly had all his work burned before he died. My father knew him, though probably not carnally. My father is a straight slut. Daniel and I both got the slut gene from our biological fathers.” They had a hearty laugh together. “Can I come out and see you?” Betty asked suddenly. “Maybe tomorrow, if I can get a flight?” “Sure. I live in Richview, not far from the airport, and Sam and I can pick you up. Speaking of which, it’s time to get him out of that tub before he starts growing fins.” Holding Sam in a towel, she put the phone next to his face and said, “Say hi to Auntie Betty, Sam.” “Hi,” Sam said. “See ya tomorrow,” Betty said. From now on she would refer to Megan as her sister-in-law, Betty decided. Except to Paul, of course. Though Paul never argued legalistically with his wife, the missing “law” part of the reference would be too glaring. But in French people didn’t hesitate to use belle-sœur to designate a brother’s girlfriend or a boyfriend’s sister. Well, her nephew’s mother could be called her sister-in-law. Fuck Paul, she thought. Not literally, she thought further, since her period had begun. “I’m going to visit my sister-in-law Megan in Toronto,” she said to herself out loud. But that meant telling Paul when he came home in the evening. Probably late, past dinnertime. Greg had assigned Paul to work on an inheritance case of some urgency and, because he had left the office early on Betty’s birthday to help prepare the party – the Americans had it right, Betty thought, to celebrate birthdays and such on the nearest weekend and not necessarily the exact date, but Paul was such a stickler – he had to work late. How about dinner with maman? she asked herself. And why not stay over at her mother’s house, in her old bed, and go to Dorval from there? It was much closer to the airport than their apartment in the Plateau. First things first, she told herself. She called Air Ontario – it was the airline that Paul normally took for his trips to Toronto – and found out that there was indeed an outbound flight with some seats available the next day, at 10 in the morning. When asked about the return flight, she said she didn’t know, and told herself that she could always take the train if necessary; she would take the current draft of her thesis with her, both on paper and on CD-ROM, and would work on it. The one-way fare was quite steep, but it didn’t matter. She gave her credit-card number and got a confirmation number in return. She was to show up at Dorval at nine. Next she called Mireille’s clinic and asked the receptionist to have Dr. Bouchard to call her daughter as soon as possible. She would call Paul once she had her date with her mother confirmed. Megan’s cell phone rang – if the jingle-jangle of the tune that, as Daniel had told her, came from a classical guitar piece that he had once played could be called ringing – at eleven-thirty. She expected it to be DC Jane Lewis with a time for the police visit, but the screen showed that it was Betty. “’Sup, girl?” Megan said. “You comin’?” “Sho am,” Betty answered. “Arriving tomorrow at eleven-fifteen.” “See ya there. Oops, I’ve got another call coming. Bye!” The other call was indeed from DC Jane Lewis. “Hello, Miz Kenner.” Megan wondered if the policewoman knew that Ms. Kenner was also May Green. “Would two o’clock be all right for our visit?” “That’s just when I put my boy down for his nap. Two-thirty or three would be better.” “No problem. Between two-thirty and three it will be. Bye now!” It was time to give Sam his lunch. She had weaned him some two or three months earlier, when he was one and a half, and her breasts were back to what they had been in high school. Daniel had liked them then, but he also liked them when they were bigger, whether from the implants or from nursing. Most other guys liked them better when they were big. Maybe it was time to make them that way again. The last time she had sex was when Daniel came – with his mother – to visit her for Sam’s first birthday, back in September, shortly after his own twenty-seventh. Eight and a half months without sex! While she didn’t yet feel herself to be her old randy self, she missed it. She missed Daniel, to be sure, but there would never be another Daniel. There were lots of other men, though. It was time to make herself desirable again. Lose a little weight, just a little, so she could fit into her sexy clothes again. The gym where she had worked out before her pregnancy didn’t have childcare, but somewhere in Etobicoke – what until a year and a half ago had been the City of Etobicoke – there must be some that had it. Nothing wrong with being a sexy mom, she told herself. Not what was known in the business as a MILF – she was done with that business – just a sexy woman who happens to be a mother. Like Daniel’s mother, for example, who was almost fifty and still sexy. But what was the new information that the police had on Daniel? They had, after all, been very sure that he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time – a bar in the South Bronx that happened to belong to an Albanian from Albania and that was attacked by an Albanian gang from Kosovo – and that he had forgotten to duck. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a, chérie?” Mireille said. Betty wondered if her mother was reverting to the language they had spoken at home until she, Betty, was twelve, and then again when she was sixteen and seventeen. Or perhaps she had just seen a francophone patient and was still in French mode. “Paul et moi on s’est brouillé,” Betty said. “You had a fight?” “Not exactly a fight” she said, as she had to Megan, “but some unpleasantness.” “Do you want to tell me about it?” “Yes, I’d love to, maman. Could we have dinner together, and then I’ll stay over? I’m flying to Toronto tomorrow morning.” “Without Paul, I assume.” “Yes, to see Megan and Sam. By the way, I told Paul about Sam. That’s what started it.” She decided to postpone mentioning to her mother what Paul had told her. “But I talked to Megan, and she told me that the police have some new information about Daniel.” “I know, darling. They have contacted me too. I was going to tell you.” Why didn’t they contact me? Betty wondered. And she answered herself: because Daniel never called me from his cell phone, and so they didn’t find my number there. “So what time should I come over?” “How about six-thirty, so that I will have time to change. Then we can go out. I have nothing prepared at home.” “What if I come over early and make something for us, like I used to?” Betty realized too late that it was the wrong thing to say. Yes, she had done that occasionally, when she was in Grades 10 and 11 and CEGEP, but for many years before that it had been mainly Daniel who made dinner, with Betty sometimes helping him. “No, darling, let’s go out like two girlfriends. Comme deux copines.” “A ce soir, alors.” “A ce soir, chérie.” “This is Detective Radnovich from the Fortieth Precinct in the Bronx,” Jane Lewis said as she walked in with a tall, sharp-featured man – probably in his mid or late thirties, neatly but casually dressed in a light-blue lightweight sport coat and a many-colored Western shirt – whom Megan found very attractive, briefly reminding her of an actor she had recently seen on television. DC Lewis was also tall, about thirty, plain-faced with short blond hair. “This is Miz Megan Kenner, who was not Daniel Wilner’s fiancée but is the mother of his child. Am I correct, Miz Kenner?” she asked with a smile that left Megan with no doubt that she knew her other identity. “Yes,” Megan said, extending her hand to Jane Lewis. “Call me Jane, eh,” the policewoman said as she shook Megan’s hand, “and I’ll call you Megan.” “How do you do, Jane,” Megan said, and then offered her hand to the New Yorker. “And Detective Radnovich,” she said. “Miz Kenner,” he said. The informality was to remain between the Canadians. “Come and sit down,” Megan said as she led the detectives to the dinette. “Would you like some tea? It’s all made.” “Sure, thanks,” Detective Radnovich said. “That would be lovely,” Jane Lewis said. As Megan was pouring the tea, Radnovich got right down to business. “As my name might tell you, I specialize in East European gangs, and specifically ones originating in the Balkans, so I was naturally assigned to your... to Mister Wilner’s case. Now, it struck me right off the bat that he was the only victim of the shootout, though some six or seven or eight bullets were fired, two of which hit him, from different guns. Of course the guns were never found, and the DA – that’s the prosecutor – didn’t think there was enough evidence to bring charges. Now, it may have been just an unfortunate coincidence that the table where Mister Wilner sat was right in the line of fire, and that his cell phone rang just when the shots were fired. But then again...” “What do you mean?” Megan felt her insides churning. Had her first thought been right, after all? “I recently found out,” Radnovich said as he took a deep breath, “that both gangs were under investigation for drug dealing, one by our narcotics unit and the other by the Feds. But now it seems that the two gangs were not really rivals but had co... had worked together on some operations, and the Feds have found a link between the Kosovo gang and the KLA.” “That’s the Kosovo Liberation Army,” Jane Lewis said. “I know,” Megan said. Don’t you think I read the paper? she added silently. “Daniel told me all about it,” she said aloud. “He even called me from there.” “We know, and that’s why I’m here,” Radnovich said. “You see, when he was reporting on the war in Kosovo during last summer, he filed some eyewitness reports on massacres of Serbs and Roma – that’s Gypsies – by the KLA” “I know about them. He told me. He said that the West used to be all pro-Serb, and then it suddenly all changed, and the Serbs became the bad guys. He wanted to make it more balanced.” “That’s very interesting,” Radnovich said with a smile, “for me personally, being a Serb-American, to see a point of view that’s different from... from the Western consensus, which, as you said, is now pro-Albanian and anti-Serb. You understand, don’t you, Miz Kenner?” “Yes, I understand, Detective Radnovich.” “But in this case it’s not just a point of view, but facts and numbers and names. It seems that he had e-mailed the reports to himself, and we found them in his e-mail account, though there was nothing on his own computer, and he doesn’t seem to have published anything yet.” “Well, he had published some articles about Kosovo, and about the Balkans and Balkan people in general, but not about the really gruesome stuff.” “Oh, really? Where?” “In regional papers, in upstate New York, New Jersey, places like that. But about the heavy stuff, he was going to write a long essay, maybe a book, comparing the Balkans and Africa. But he hadn’t started writing yet, he was just collecting material.” “Wow, that’s something!” Radnovich took another deep breath. “But anyway, to get back to the point.” He smiled. “Because of that link between the KLA and some of the Albanian gangs in New York, there’s the possibility that Mister Wilner was set up. To stop him from writing that essay or book.” Megan felt herself welling up. She couldn’t think of anything to say. “But about the names,” Radnovich went on. “What we found in his e-mails to himself were just initials. So what we would like from you, Miz Kenner, is to tell us, to the best of your ability, what you can remember of what Mister Wilner told you about Kosovo, the times that he called you from there. We know that you had some fairly long conversations.” Megan nodded. “Yes, we did,” she said slowly. Tears were making their way to her eyes. “Mostly it was about our son. But he mentioned some pretty awful stuff he had seen. Worse than in Africa, he said, and he’d been there just before, in Bissau.” “Any names, by any chance?” Megan nodded again. “Yes. He was not going to use the real names in print. I don’t think he ever did that in his articles – he always used made-up names – but he wanted there to be a record of them, and we agreed that I would keep it. The names sounded funny to me, so he spelled them out and I wrote them down. But I should tell you,” she said, looking squarely at Radnovich, “some of the names were Serbian.” “I don’t doubt that Milošević and company committed atrocities in Kosovo,” Radnovich said with a blushing smile that Megan found very sexy, “just as they had in Bosnia. But... do you happen to have the paper or papers where you wrote down the names?” “Yes, I’ve kept every memento from Daniel, every postcard that he ever wrote me, and so on. They’re in my safe-deposit box at the bank.” The two detectives looked at each other. “I could go there around four or four-thirty, when Sam – that’s my son – wakes up.” Radnovich closed his eyes, as if making some mental calculations. “I’m flying to Montreal tonight, to see your... Mister Wilner’s mother, Doctor Mireille Bouchard, tomorrow morning. If you could have a photocopy of your papers made at the bank, I could pick it up on my way to the airport.” “Any time between five and eight would be okay. Eight is when I start putting Sam to bed. What time is your flight?” “At nine.” “So you could come by at seven-thirty, after you’ve had your dinner. Or you could come by at six-thirty and have dinner with Sam and me.” Megan laughed. “That would be very nice,” Radnovich said. “My name’s Tom, by the way.” His ready acceptance, with none of the Canadian I don’t want to impose bullshit, gave Jane Lewis a visible start. Maybe she had meant to take him to dinner and hadn’t yet gotten around to asking him. “I told you about Toronto hospitality, eh?” she said with a laugh of her own, but, it seemed to Megan, a nervous one. “Okay,” Megan said, “see you later, Tom. And Jane.” “You won’t see me later,” Jane said with another nervous laugh. “Good-bye, Megan. And thanks for your cooperation.” “Good-bye, Jane.” Other than her father and brothers occasionally visiting from Montreal – not frequently, the Kenners not being a particularly close-knit family – Tom Radnovich would be Megan’s first male guest since... well, since Daniel’s last visit. In the days before Sam, such a guest, if she found him attractive – whoever he might be, whatever his purpose – would usually end up in bed with her, sometimes helped along by a May Green video. Now, if Tom’s flight had been later... Stop it, Megan, she said to herself. But she couldn’t help wondering if Jane Lewis had told Tom Radnovich about May Green. No, she wouldn’t call Paul at his office, since she didn’t want to leave a message for him to call her back. She needed a break from talking with him. Nor would she leave him a note, since he hadn’t deigned to write one to her. No, she would call home and leave a message for him. From her mother’s? He might be home by then. From a public phone? And then it struck her: it was the last year of the nineties (of course Paul might argue, though not to her, that it was the last but one). Maybe it was time to join the decade and get herself a cell phone. There was a Bell store on Rue Saint-Denis and she could go there on her way to the metro. If she got there before five, however long it took to sign up for cell-phone service – half and hour, three quarters of an hour – she could still catch the Orange Line train that would get her to Côte-Vertu by 6:15. The same twenty-seven-minute ride that she took every school day during her five years at North Am... Too bad about North Am. It had been a good school, for its time. But by the mid-nineties people wanted their kids to learn information technology, l’informatique as it was called in French, and the North American Academy hadn’t kept up with the times. They bought their first computer the year after she had left and, according to her old friend Amy Kenner (Megan’s second cousin), who had stayed for Grade 12 because she wanted to go to university in the States, it was a lemon. Meanwhile, property values in the Plateau were rising. Starting in 1985, when Harvey and Paul first enrolled, Greg had been urging the school to buy the leased property that held its campuses, volunteering his help with obtaining financing, but to no avail. On his advice and with his help, Betty and Paul had bought their flat there in 1993 – just before the spike in prices – when Betty started at McGill. (Greg’s help included advancing the necessary funds to Paul for his share; Betty, by then, already had control of her inheritance.) In 1996 the school’s lease expired and, unable to afford the new rent, it had to close. Later that year Betty’s great-aunt Fela died and when Daniel was in Montreal for the funeral, he and Harvey, along with some other friends, organized a funeral for their school. Megan was there too, trying to look as unlike May Green as she could. But Amy, who had always been plain-looking (though some, including Daniel, had found her face attractive), came with a kind of glamour look. She was in grad school at SUNY Buffalo and brought her American boyfriend, whom she seemed to be showing off, though he was nothing special. But that was in December. And Sam was born in September, like his father (though he was Libra, not Virgo). So that must have been when he was conceived! Enough musing, Betty said to herself. Time to work on the thesis: Anglo-French Imbrication in Quebec. As an undergraduate she had pursued a double major concentration, in English and French, and under McGill’s ad personam program she was “exceptionally” allowed to work for a joint Ph.D. degree in the two departments. Paul, as usual, had helped her write the application. She was now done with courses – she no longer thought of herself as being “at McGill” – and with the comprehensive exam, and the thesis needed another summer’s work. The submission deadline for the February convocation was at the beginning of October, and she couldn’t see herself not meeting it. Eight months hence she would be Doctor Elisabeth Wilner, the daughter of Doctor Michael Wilner and Doctor Mireille Bouchard. She turned her computer on. Tom Radnovich’s face lit up when Megan showed him the photocopy she had made at the bank. There were about fifteen names on the list. The first three were Serbian, the rest Albanian. The second name was Ilija Radnović, and Tom laughed when he saw it. “My evil twin,” he said. “That’s why I spell my name with CH,” he added. “I figured as much,” Megan said. But Sam didn’t take kindly to the presence of a stranger at the dinner table, and was fussy for most of the hour that Tom spent there. Megan had made pasta with chicken and peas, something that Sam always liked when she cut it up very small for him, but this time he didn’t want to eat it. Tom was understanding; he had two children of his own, a girl of ten and a boy of seven. His ex-wife had custody, but he spent every other weekend with them, including the one coming up. Police work was hard on couples, he said; your cases take you over. Megan wondered if there was a girlfriend, but didn’t quite know how to ask. “What did Jane Lewis tell you about Toronto hospitality?” she asked instead. “That outwardly the people are unfriendly, but once you get to know them they invite you to their houses.” “I guess that’s true,” Megan said, “but I’m a Quebecker, and we’re always friendly,” she added with a laugh that she hoped was sexy. After she had called for a taxi to take him to the airport, he asked her if she ever came to New York. “I used to, when I was working,” she replied. It had been only a couple of times, but what the hell... “You mean your accounting work?” he asked with no trace of irony, and she realized that he didn’t know about May Green and that Jane Lewis had told him only that she was an accountant. “Besides being an accountant,” she said, “I was an actress.” She paused. “I worked in adult cinema,” she added with a smile. His face lit up again, but in a very different way. “Well,” he said, “should you ever feel like taking a bite of the Big Apple again, for any reason, let me know. On second thought,” he added with a conspiratorial smile, “if this matter follows its course, we may need you to come and testify as to the authenticity of this list you gave me. If you’d be so kind as to give me your contact information.” “I’d be glad to,” she said and handed him the business card headed Megan Kenner, CA. He gave her his card just as the taxi honked. “Good-bye,” she said as she extended her hand to him. He shook it warmly. A hug would have been nice, but premature, as would have been telling him that in a few days she would be in New York anyway, for a probate hearing on Daniel’s will.