3 The record looked good, Tom Radnovich thought as he reread Megan Kenner’s list over breakfast. The precision was worthy of the accountant that she was: correctly spelled names, with all the Serbocroat and Albanian diacritics in place, of both people and places; the time and date of each call, and the dates on which Wilner claimed to have witnessed the subjects’ involvement. Was there any point in going to interview Dr. Bouchard, whom Daniel Wilner had called only twice during that summer, once from New York and once from Paris? Probably not. He was itching to go back to New York, get into the system and start matching the names on the list with Wilner’s initials. He called Air Canada to ask if he could change his flight to an earlier one. He was in luck: there was one at 8:40, arriving LaGuardia at 10:10. There would be a charge of fifty dollars Canadian for the change, but he decided that it was well worth his time and if NYPD didn’t want to reimburse him, so be it. At eight o’clock, the opening hour of the clinic where Dr. Bouchard worked, he would call from the airport to cancel the interview. He would also call the precinct to let them know that he would be returning early and maybe wangle a squad car to pick him up. The words adult cinema were still swirling around his mind, as they had done on the flight from Toronto to Montreal and again when he went to sleep in his room at the Comfort Inn Aéroport. At first he thought that the pretty young woman, with her casual attire, her maternal figure and her soft light-brown hair, had been putting him on. But as he did a kind of mental PhotoShop on her image, bleaching the hair, trimming the waist, inflating the breasts – a routine exercise for a detective like him – the idea became plausible. So Wilner had been banging a porn actress! But she had told him over dinner that they had already been lovers in high school. By the time he was falling asleep he was already visualizing the transformed Megan Kenner, or whatever name she worked under (something he could probably find out, from Toronto Police or from one of the cops assigned to the MOFTB in New York), performing. And she was in the vivid dream from which he woke up, with a start, at four in the morning. But in his dream she had her actual figure, and he found that he liked her just as she was. He realized that he had been awakened from the state of sexual dormancy into which he had withdrawn after his too-intense fling with Voula, the journalist from Athens who had come to New York to write about a case that he had worked: the murder of a man suspected of being one of the Greek volunteers who had participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The suspect had been a Bosnian woman who claimed to have been raped by the man. There was strong eyewitness evidence for the claim, and the woman had managed to plea-bargain for a light sentence on grounds of extreme emotional disturbance. Voula went back to Athens, to a husband who, she said, “played with women.” When Tom once referred to him as a philanderer, Voula laughed at the word, saying that in Greek it meant ‘man-lover.’ Tom thought that Voula had used him – played with him – to get back at her husband, and at the end he felt drained. Mireille insisted on driving Betty to the airport. She called the clinic and arranged for Julie, a colleague and friend, to see the patient that she had scheduled for 9 o’clock. Sylvia, the office manager, told her in turn that the New York detective who was going to see her changed his plans and was going back to New York. She would hear from him in a few days. The talk about Daniel’s paternity, the night before, had not gone well, and it seemed to Betty that her mother needed closure with her. Just as, almost three decades earlier, she had needed closure with Jean-Marc Couture in order to be free for Miki, and it was the emotions of the closure that had led to Daniel’s conception. Closure was highly overrated, Betty thought, and could easily do more harm than good. She recalled the evening’s talk and her lack of sympathy for the predicament that her mother had been in since getting the DNA results. “How could you, maman?” she had asked rhetorically. “You went to see Jean-Marc when you knew you were going to sleep with papa that night?” It had taken Betty many years to learn to call papa the man whose posthumous daughter she was, but by now it came naturally. “Sometimes... things just happen.” “Come on, maman. Give me a break. It was December. You weren’t wearing a summer dress, like what we’re wearing now, that he could have just slipped his dick under.” Mireille had winced at Betty’s crudeness, but Betty had barged on without pity. “You were dressed for a Montreal winter, so it took some work to get undressed.” “I let him. I was... like... paralyzed. I had unzipped my cardigan, and he was crying and wiping his cheeks on my blouse and I didn’t notice that he was unbuttoning it, until...” “Until what?” “Until I felt him kissing my breasts. I didn’t wear a bra in those days. C’était en soixante-dix...” So what if it was nineteen-seventy? “And then?” Betty had asked, inquisitorially. It had taken Mireille a long time to reply. She took a deep breath. “I got excited,” she had said at last. “I couldn’t help it.” “That’s what I find inconceivable, maman. Pun intended,” she added with a giggle that she suppressed immediately. “Je trouve ça inconcevable. You were in love with Miki, but you got excited with Jean-Marc?” Mireille had said nothing. “As soon as I had the first glimmer of feelings for Paul,” Betty had continued, “I couldn’t be with Gérard any more. Isn’t that normal?” “You are asking a doctor what is normal!” Mireille had said with a hollow laugh. “You are Miki Wilner’s daughter. He was a one-woman man... un monogame. I am also a monogamist, but a serial one. Monogame en série. And sometimes the... the elements of a series can be so close that they overlap, ils s’imbriquent...” Mireille had chosen the verb in allusion to the title of Betty’s thesis and smiled for emphasis. Betty had laughed. “Mais c’est tellement français, maman... so abstract...” She had not meant the laughter to be derisive, but she had known that her mother had heard it so. But one of the topics of her thesis was precisely the intrusion of French ways of thinking into English speech by francophones. In the morning she apologized. “I was harsh with you last night, maman,” she said over breakfast. “It’s just that I’m different from you. If I ever fall out of love with Paul, I’ll take my time before there’s someone else.” “Out of love with Paul?” Mireille asked, astonished. “I had a dream last night. For one thing, being in my old bed felt really good. And then I dreamt that Paul was coming into my room and I didn’t want him there. You know, early on we made love in my bed a few times, but it didn’t feel right for some reason, though with Gérard it had felt okay. That was one of the reasons I needed to move in with Paul.” On the way to the airport Betty finally asked why her mother had never told her about those DNA results. Because she was ashamed, Mireille said. “Parce que j’avais honte.” Just as Paul had supposed. Just before saying good-bye Mireille told Betty that the New York detective had canceled his visit with her. “He probably got what he needed from Megan,” Betty said. The cop who picked him up at the airport was from one of the northern Queens precincts and was unfamiliar with the route to the Bronx. “Just take the Triborough,” Detective Tom Radnovich said. “The way you go to Harlem?” Officer Morris asked. “That’s not how I’d usually go, but why not, it would be nice detour.” “In the mood for somethin’ different, huh?” Officer Morris said with a chortle. “You’d better believe it,” Detective Radnovich said with a chuckle, the image of Megan Kenner still on his mind. “Where’re you flyin’ in from?” “Canada. Collecting information on a case I’m working on.” “Find what you wanted?” “That and more.” And without going into the details of the case or naming names, Radnovich told Morris about the attractive young woman who gave him the information. “A MILF, huh? I like those!” And Morris went on to give an account of sexy mamas that he had managed to encounter in the course of his patrol work. “Some of ‘em,” he said, “just have this thing for a uniform.” “I was married when I was in uniform,” Radnovich said. “Who said anything about me not being married?” Morris said with a loud guffaw. “I got me a great mama at home, and three kids, with a fourth one on the way. But when there’s one on the way, that’s just when you need somethin’ on the side, you know what I’m sayin’? You got kids?” “Yeah, I’ve got two. I mean, my ex has them. I get them every other weekend.” “So when they was on the way, you didn’t need nothin’ on the side?” “No, she really liked it when she was pregnant, almost up to eight months, and then again a few weeks after. I could wait a couple of months.” Even now, as a single man, Tom would sometimes go without sex for couple of months, and at this point it had been about six weeks. “Sex was not our problem,” he went on. “And neither was money – she works, always did, as a paralegal.” “So what was it, man?” “Time. Once I made detective – and I got recruited because I speak Serbocroat...” “Serba-what?” “It’s what they speak in Yugoslavia and Croatia and Bosnia, and it means I can also get by in other Slavic languages, like Russian and Ukrainian.” No point in mentioning that Russian had been his major at Brooklyn College. “Anyway, once I made detective, I was spending lots of time working on cases, sometimes pulling all-nighters, and Karen got fed up.” “Karen? One of my girls is named Karen, the youngest.” “It’s a pretty name.” “My wife, she don’t like African-American names like Malika or Tanisha. She’s Puerto Rican, but she don’t like Spanish names either. So we got Irene, Jason and Karen.” “I, J, K,” Radnovich said. “So the next one’s going to be L?” “You got it! Besides, I’m George and she’s Helen!” They had arrived at the 40th Precinct. “Good luck on your case and with that hot little mama in Toronto!” “Thanks! I’m Tom, by the way,” Radnovich said as he shook Morris’s hand and got his overnight bag from the backseat. He went inside the station and, with only perfunctory greetings to the colleagues who happened to be along the way, made a beeline for his desk and turned on his computer. It was a little sluggish in starting up that morning, but once he entered his password the case list showed up and he clicked on the file titled Wilner-D. It was 11:11 AM. Sporadic snatches of erotic dreams had been flickering through Megan Kenner’s nights ever since Sam’s weaning, but none that, come morning, made her feel like her old sexual self. On the morning after Detective Tom Radnovich’s visit, on the other hand, she woke up with no memory of a dream, but with the refreshed feeling in her skin that she was the Megan Kenner who was also May Green. She remembered a line, which Daniel had translated for her, from a Spanish song by a favorite singer of his: A dream on the skin. She looked outside and saw that it was another lovely spring day, the winds easterly this time. She wanted to feel the breeze and the sunshine on her skin. She put on one of her sleeveless dresses – so what if it was a little tight – and, after breakfast, took Sam for a trip to the park before going to the airport. Yes, she felt refreshed. The morning went by so quickly that before she knew it it was time to go to the airport. As soon as Betty saw Megan and Sam waiting for her outside the gate, she ran towards them, dragging behind her the little wheeled carry-on suitcase. “It’s Auntie Betty, Sam,” Megan said. “’Tie Betty,” Sam said. “He speaks Creole!” Betty exclaimed with a laugh. “He called me little Betty,” she added, and began to chatter cooingly to Sam in a strange kind of French that Megan found incomprehensible. But Megan understood the reference: she had recently read a scary, futuristic, surrealistic novel, set in Toronto, about a Creole-speaking girl who like the author had come from the Caribbean and who was named Ti-Jeanne. She would ask Betty later if she had read the book. Sam evidently liked the chatter. His smile grew and he reached his arms out to his aunt. Betty let go of her suitcase and took her nephew into her arms as she kissed him on the cheek. “Happy birthday!” Megan said, kissing Betty’s cheek in turn. “Two days late is not too late, is it?” “It’s never too late,” Betty said. “You’re only twenty-five once.” “For me, when I had my twenty-fifth, I got a double present a few days later: I got my Ontario accounting license and I found out I was pregnant.” “Wow!” Betty said. But, her mind still fresh with the revelation about another December conception, she couldn’t help wondering for a split-second if Megan had slept with someone besides Daniel around the same time. Of course not, she quickly told herself: Megan had wanted Daniel’s child for years and she certainly knew enough about sex to make it happen. “Let’s go to the garage,” Megan said. “Garage,” Sam echoed. “Car,” he added. “This is Sam’s car,” Betty said as she placed him in the stroller, which had a yellow plastic steering wheel attached to its front rail. “Sam’s car!” the boy squealed as he spun the wheel. Mother and aunt laughed in delight. “So you do have your license,” Betty said. “Paul wondered about that.” Megan suppressed the desire to say well, he would, wouldn’t he? and smiled. “Yes,” she said, “I’m a CA.” “What’s that?” “Chartered accountant. That’s the highest kind of accountant you can be in Canada. There’s also CGA and CMA. You see, when I moved here, it wasn’t just to work in front of the camera, but also behind the scenes. I got involved in script writing, in distribution – that’s how I got to go to New York a few times – and most of all I got to work in production accounting. That way I got the thirty months of practical experience that I needed.” “That’s amazing! Two such opposite kinds of work!” “Not really,” Megan said with a laugh. “I think accounting’s sexy.” “You do?” “Yeah. The two sides of the ledger – that’s like male and female. Trying to make them match – that’s like courtship. I didn’t make that up, by the way. I got it from a professor during first term. And he was sexy.” “Did you sleep with him?” “Of course,” Megan said, “but not till second term.” She laughed. “He knew his ethics.” They got to Megan’s car, a red Ford Escort station wagon. Megan deftly slipped Sam into his car seat and folded the stroller, which she put in the hatch alongside Betty’s suitcase. “I had some professors who were sexy,” Betty said as Megan started the engine. “At least the other girls thought so. But I couldn’t imagine being attracted to anyone other than Paul.” “Didn’t you have a boyfriend before Paul?” “Yes. But as I was just telling my mother last night, I lost interest in him as soon as I felt attracted to Paul. And since then there’s been no one else.” They were silent for a while as Megan wended her way through the vast maze of the garage and reached the exit. “You’re a one-man woman,” she said when the payment machine beeped as it returned her debit card and, after the gate arm swung open, she moved onward. “I guess so,” Betty said, and sighed audibly. “Why the sigh?” Megan asked with a chortle. “I don’t know.” Betty sighed again. “Sometimes I wonder if maybe I’ve lost out on something, a wild youth, une jeunesse folle as my mother would say, like her, or you, or Daniel.” “You mean sex with lots of different people? I’ve enjoyed it, but it never made me feel particularly wild. Not Daniel either. He never thought of himself as sowing his wild oats, or something like that. I don’t know about your mom. I understand that she was faithful to your dad, as long as he was alive.” “Yes, except at the very beginning, and that created a can of worms.” Both women laughed knowingly. They were on King’s Highway 409, but traffic was light and Megan drove at the speed limit. “I used to fantasize that maybe one day I would settle down with one guy,” she said. “Do you think you will?” “The one guy,” she said, “he’s gone.” They were silent again until, two minutes later, Megan turned off onto Martin Grove Road. “You’re so much more like my mother than I am,” Betty said with a laugh, in which Megan joined her. They were still laughing when, five minutes later, they were in the driveway of Megan’s house, one in a row of pretty bungalows facing a row of imposing slate-roofed mansions behind enormous front lawns, houses that, while different from one another, seemed to have been conceived by the same architect. “I always thought that we were kindred spirits, your mom and me,” Megan said as she turned off the engine. “Daniel didn’t think so, though. I’m not sure he knew his mother all that well.” “When did you first meet her?” Betty asked while getting out of the car. “Around the time we made Sam,” Megan said with another laugh as she pulled the stroller out of the hatch. She set it down on the porch and went to fetch Sam while Betty retrieved her suitcase. Megan’s house was fairly spacious, Betty thought, slightly scaled down from the one where she grew up: three bedrooms instead of four, a dinette section of the kitchen instead of a dining room. Of the bedrooms, one was Megan’s, one was Sam’s, and the third doubled as the guestroom and Megan’s office. Nowhere was there any memento of May Green, but there were several photographs of Daniel and, to Betty’s surprise, one of Mireille holding the one-year-old Sam, with Megan behind them. Betty surmised that Daniel had taken the picture. There was one of him, alone, next to it. Sam toddled by and, as Betty looked at what was probably one of the last images of her brother, calmly said “Daddy. Gone.” Betty was suddenly overwhelmed with grief, as she had not felt before, perhaps because her feelings had been contained by Paul’s presence. She burst into uncontrollable sobs and, putting her arms around the little boy, could only echo him: “Daddy gone, daddy gone...” And the sorrow of never having known her own father only compounded her grief. She was shaken out her feelings by the sudden realization that she had not turned on her cell phone in the morning. While learning how to use the phone she had called home from the Bell store – her only call to date – and left Paul a message telling him about her doings and giving him the cell-phone number. But when she got to her mother’s she turned the device off and, unaccustomed as she was to having it, left it in her purse and forgot all about it. She sat on the sofa with Sam on one knee and reached for her purse, which she had left on an end table. As she retrieved her phone Sam said, “’tie Betty’s phone.” “Where is Sam’s phone?” she asked him, and he slid down the legs of her jeans and scampered to his room, quickly bringing back a big red plastic telephone with a white keypad. “Sam’s phone,” he said. “Ring-ring-ring!” He pressed various keys, each one producing a different tone. He picked up the handset and handed it to Betty, saying, “’tie Betty talk!” “Hello!” Betty said into the mouthpiece and then “No answer!” to Sam. “No answer!” he parroted. She handed Sam’s phone back to him, turned hers on, and pressed and held 1, as she had been taught to do the day before, to access voice mail. There were two messages, both from Paul, but to Betty’s surprise the cell-phone voice mail, unlike the home answering machine, did not announce the time of the messages. The first one must have been sent in the evening; it said, “Hi, sweetheart, congratulations on getting a cell phone. Thanks for calling, and have a good time at your mom’s and at Megan’s. When are you coming back?” The second one seemed to be from the office, to judge from the background noise, and said, “Hi, it’s me again, I’d like to know when you’re coming back, but take your time. I’ll be super-busy at work for the rest of the week.” Pause. “Give my regards to Megan. See you soon, I hope.” Regards? But Megan was now family! You send regards to acquaintances, not to family! And did Paul not realize that they had quarreled? That her reluctance to have sex with him had come from deep inside her? Had he not sensed her mood? Was he one of those insensitive males that other women always complained about? What about his warmth, gentleness, consideration, support? Perhaps he had always used those qualities not in relation to her real moods or needs but to those that he expected her to have, and she in turn had let them be shaped to fit his expectations. But he was not prepared to deal with her need for closeness to Megan and Sam, a need that she was now fulfilling, on her own, with no help from Paul. She called home – Sam was still playing with his telephone – and after the beep of the answering machine began, “Hi, Paul, I don’t know when I’m coming back, and...” She wasn’t sure of how to continue, and she pressed the Off key. It was just as well to leave him hanging, she thought, though she probably would call again before he came home. Megan came into the living room. “Lunch anyone?” she asked. “Lunch!” Sam replied, ran to the dinette and began to climb into his high chair. Betty, jarred out of her introspection, got up slowly. Megan walked over to her and put an arm around her maternally. “Thanks, Megan,” Betty said. By lunchtime, Tom Radnovich had found the matches between all of the names on Megan Kenner’s list and the initials in Daniel Wilner’s materials, but there were two more of the latter, which Wilner apparently had not mentioned to his girlfriend, and these two seemed to have been in command positions; PD was Serbian, SR was Albanian, and Wilner had personal encounters with the former but not the latter. It had taken the detective some twenty minutes to puzzle out that while Megan’s list had the names as first name and last name, in Wilner’s initials the last name came first. Now it was time to scour the databases of various organizations that had reports on the fighting in Kosovo, and look for the names there, possibly linking them to what he had in hand, and then to find out if any of them had connections in New York. As regarded PD, he had a recollection of reading about a Kosovo Serb commander named Dragomir Perković (there were Perkovićes in his own family tree), but in the case at hand it was irrelevant, since Wilner had been killed by Albanians, and Albanians only. But SR, in Wilner’s account, was a dangerous man with personal charisma and shady international connections. His identity might be the key to the investigation, Radnovich thought. He told his conclusions over lunch, at a pizzeria around the corner on 138th, to his squad commander, Lieutenant Rick DePalma, who had been the one to authorize the reopening of the case on Tom’s suggestion. Tom and Rick were old friends – the lieutenant had been one of Tom’s instructors at the Police Academy – and did not address each other by rank in conversation. “What I would do now, Tom,” the lieutenant said, “may seem primitive, but here goes: compile a list of all the Albanian first names you can find that start with R, and last names that start with S. Then get Brian Lin” – the detective-specialist who was the precinct’s IT maven – “to write you an algorithm to generate all the combinations and put them through the search. Because it may well be that the victim didn’t mention the name to his lady friend precisely because it was dangerous.” “That’s just what I’d thought of doing, minus the algorithm bit. That’s brilliant. I was going to match them one by one. I still think in the old way.” “You’re not supposed to. You’re younger than me.” The two detectives laughed. Their pizza slices and steins of beer were served. “Isn’t Lin busy with that kiddie porn case?” Radnovich asked. “Yeah, but he wouldn’t mind a break just to do some programming. Tell him I said so. I outrank him, you know.” Lin was a sergeant. “Laterally, of course.” “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. And if you crack this case, you’re First Grade for sure. Salute!” DePalma said as he raised his stein and took a swig. “Nazdravlje!” Radnovich responded. “To change the subject,” he went on, “do you know if there are any porn films produced in New York?” “You mean, like film films and not Internet videos that people shoot in their bedrooms?” “Yeah.” “I don’t think so. I think that’s all done in LA, since in California it’s legal.” “Hmmm.” Then where did Megan Kenner do her work as an actress? He would ponder it later. “To change the subject again: did you happen to catch the weather forecast for the weekend? I’d wanted to take my kids to the beach, but if it stays like today I’ll have to think of something else.” At the moment the sky was mostly cloudy and the temperature was barely 70. “When I left for Toronto yesterday it was nice and warm.” “Yeah, yesterday was nice, not hot like Monday and Tuesday. But I think it’s supposed to stay cool like this till Saturday and then get warm again next week.” “Well, maybe Sunday, then, and we’ll do something else on Saturday. I think they’re tired of the Zoo. As long as they live in Brooklyn, I was planning to take ‘em to Coney Island...” “Well, you can still take ‘em there. There’s the aquarium, the rides...” “Of course I can. It’s just that whenever the kids want Karen to take ‘em to the beach, she says ‘when you’re with your dad.’ True, she’s lost her beach figure,” Tom concluded with a laugh. “Haven’t we all!” Rick said. “Except you,” he added. “Time to get back to work. Except I’ve got a meeting to go to and my car’s here. See you later!” On the way back to the station, Tom Radnovich visualized Megan Kenner in a bathing suit. She’d look good even as she is now, he said to himself. And then his memory for details told him that what she had said, after he had asked her if her trips to New York had been for her accounting work, was simply that she had been an actress in adult cinema, not that her work in New York necessarily involved acting. Maybe she had been doing promotion for her movies, or maybe she had been, as an accountant, also involved in the business end of her work. She had volunteered the information to him. He might as well ask her directly for more. He would write her or call her. He had her address and phone number.