4 It was only after putting Sam down for his nap that Megan mentioned overhearing what Betty had said in her message to Paul. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want,” Megan said, “but I have to go to New York Sunday afternoon. I have some business there on Monday.” “What about Sam?” “I have to take him, of course. I’ll have to find a babysitter when I get there.” “No, you won’t. You can leave him here with his auntie.” Megan’s face looked doubtful. “Hmmm...” was all she could say. “I have an even better idea. I’ll go to New York with you and I’ll babysit while you do your business.” “Now that’s what I call an idea, girlfriend. It so happens that when I reserved a room they were out of singles, so I got a room with two beds. And there’ll be a cot for Sam.” “That’s great! It must be fate.” “So you’re not going to be with Paul over the weekend?” “I’m having my period anyway,” Betty said with a laugh. “That never stopped me,” Megan said with a laugh of her own, “especially the kind of period you get with the pill. But you are you.” “Yes, and the me that I am wants a break from Paul. I want to spend time with my flesh and blood. Sam is the only blood relative I have, other than my mom’s family in Rimouski, and we’ve had no contact with them since my grandfather died.” “Your mom is from Rimouski? Daniel never mentioned it! I always thought she was such a Montréalaise... Anyway, make yourself at home. I’ll call Air Canada to find out if I can add another seat to my flight.” “Use my credit card,” Betty said as she pulled it out of her purse and handed it to Megan. “Does the business have to do with the New York detective?” “No,” Megan said with a visible blush, “it’s the probate hearing.” “Tell me about the detective,” Betty said with a teenager’s intonation. “Well... later. You said you wanted to do some work. Let me set up an account for you on the computer.” “Thanks, Megan.” Betty opened her suitcase, which was lying on the convertible sofa, and retrieved the printout and the CD containing her thesis draft. “Now,” she said, “I’ve never worked on anyone else’s computer, so I’m not sure...” “What have you got on that CD? A Word document?” “Yes, a whole bunch of them, one for each chapter.” “After you log in, open My Documents, create a folder – you can call it Thesis or whatever – and copy the files from the CD into it. Then you can open Word and work on them.” “What do I do when I’m done?” “Just copy the whole folder onto a blank CD, the way you did with this one.” “I didn’t do that. Paul did.” Megan smiled, and both women burst into laughter. “I’m going to call the folder Imbrication, by the way,” Betty said. “What’s that?” “It means ‘overlapping,’ like tiles or scales or... never mind. It’s in the title of my thesis. It’ll also be the name of a magazine that I’m planning to publish.” “A magazine?” “Yes, a bilingual one. I needed a word that’s sort of esthetic and that’s written exactly the same in English and French. Paul suggested Impressions, but in French impression also means ‘printing.’ I liked Imbrication.” “Piece o’cake,” Brian Lin said. “You probably already have the elements of what you need on your machine.” “I do?” Tom Radnovich said. “Yeah, it’s just a matter of writing a macro that combines sort and merge in the way you want it. And for the search, we’ll just set up a gateway that filters all the sites that you want to sift.” “If you say so, sarge,” Tom said. “So give me about half an hour.” “Good. I’ve got some reading to catch up on.” “You’re welcome at my desk,” Lin said. Tom Radnovich already had a collection of clippings from the New York Times of every news story that he could find having to do with Albanians or Albania. He started to look through it and jot down, in one column, every first name beginning with R that he could find, and in the other, every last name beginning with S. It turned that there were not that many of the former: for the first column he found Ramiz, Rasim, Rexhep, Rezart, Rifat and Riza, though of course Christian Albanians could also have western names like Robert or Richard (would that be spelled Riçard?). For last names there were more: Sadeq, Sala, Salihu, Saramati, Sejdiu, Selimi, Shala, Shehu. Shiroka, Stafa, Spahia, Sulejmani, Surroi... If he looked hard enough he might scrounge up a few more. So the possible combinations might number a hundred at most. This is going to fun, he said to himself, until he remembered that he was investigating the putative murder of a man whose quasi-widow he now knew personally. And wanted to know better. Her kid was cute, too. Wilner’s kid. Cranky in the presence of a stranger, but that was normal. Tom liked it that Megan accepted his behavior, wasn’t embarrassed or apologetic, didn’t tell him to behave or be nice. Karen, on the other hand... Brian Lin was at his own desk. “It’s done,” he said. “Come back to your desk with me and let me walk you through. Oh,” he added as he looked over Radnovich’s shoulder, “you already have it in column form. Great.” Radnovich sat down at his desk and, with Lin’s program open, copied the contents of his two columns into those on the screen. Next, into a list of links he typed those of websites that he thought might have relevant information: Human Rights Watch (hrw.org), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (osce.org), the State Department (state.gov), and half a dozen less obvious ones. He then clicked “Go” (Brian had provided a green button like the “Walk” sign at intersections) and waited. The precinct’s Internet connection was not particularly fast; in fact it was agonizingly slow, coming as it did over a telephone line from headquarters. And so there was nothing to do but wait. He had a few other open cases, but all the relevant information was stored in his computer, whose memory at that moment was completely occupied with the search for SR. He walked over to Lin’s desk. “How long do you think this’ll take?” he asked. “I’d say half an hour, but give it an hour,” was the reply. He went out for a walk and headed west on East 138th Street, as though he were going to the subway station. He wished he were back in Brooklyn, at the 60th Precinct, where he could have walked to Coney Island. Though the weather was on the cool side, on a June day like this the beach would have been crowded with kids of all ages. But the detective position had brought him to the South Bronx, and with it the possibility of living in Manhattan. He had no complaints. At the corner of Third Avenue he hesitated between turning right toward Lincoln Hospital and left toward the Harlem River. He turned right, but then changed direction and headed toward St. Mary’s Park. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and, without any conscious volition, dialed Megan Kenner’s number, which he had already entered into the memory. He was hoping that she wouldn’t answer, and his hope was fulfilled. He left a message: “Hi, Megan, this is Tom Radnovich. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been thinking about you... while I’ve been working on Wil... on Daniel Wilner’s case. Take care.” Betty heard Megan greeting her son on his waking from his nap, looked at her watch, and realized that she had been sitting at Megan’s computer, without budging from the chair, for over two hours, writing and rewriting. She was in the middle of a chapter, not a particularly good place to stop, but she needed to get up and go to the bathroom. On her way she picked up a tampon from her suitcase. It was that time. When she came out she went into the living room, where she found Megan listening to music on the stereo with Sam on her lap, drinking juice from a bottle. “Hi!” Betty said. “Hi!” mother and child said in unison. Betty and Megan laughed. “I got your plane ticket,” Megan said. “Great,” Betty said as she sat down next to Megan. “So, tell me about you and that detective.” “There’s nothing between me and that detective,” Megan said. “Yet,” she added with a laugh. “But he told me that he’s come to believe that Daniel was not the accidental victim of a shootout between Albanian gangs.” “That’s what Paul thought, too.” “He did?” “Yeah. He didn’t think it was fair to blame Albanians. That it could’ve been anyone.” “But that’s not the point!” Megan said emphatically, but Betty was not to be stopped. “He says that the Albanians in Kosovo are just like the French in Quebec, a majority in their province but a minority in the country as a whole, and that when Milošević suppressed education and media in Albanian, that would be just like the Canadian government suppressing French in Quebec, so the Albanians were justified in fighting for their independence.” “But we’re not talking about Albanians in Kosovo... well, yes, we are, because what Tom... the detective told me was that there are ties between the KLA – that’s...” “I know what it is. Paul told me.” “... between the KLA and the Albanian gangs in New York.” “So what? They never proved that Albanians had killed Daniel!” “No, there wasn’t enough evidence.” “Well, Paul knows this Albanian from Kosovo – he’s a client actually, Paul helped him get asylum, pro bono – who’s in Canada to collect funds for refugees. I met him once, and he seemed very nice. He’s the one who told Paul about the analogy between Kosovo and Quebec, and he says that his people are always the scapegoats, just like the Jews.” “He seems good at analogies. But from what the detective told me, there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that Albanians killed your brother, because there was no one else on the scene. The only doubt is over whether it was an accident.” “Accident,” Sam said as he dropped his bottle on the floor, his thirst evidently slaked. “What?” Betty exclaimed. “He was the only one who got hit,” Megan said as she calmly picked up Sam’s bottle from the floor, “and with two bullets from different guns. They think that it might have been a setup.” “A setup? Who’d want to kill Daniel?” “That’s the point, Betty. Albanians. You see, Daniel had documented some of the atrocities that had been committed in the war, by both sides, but mainly by Albanians.” “I knew he was there, but just for a few weeks.” “Yes, but it was enough, just like in Guinea-Bissau, where he’d been just before. In both places he was in the thick of the action and thought he might get killed. So he came out unscathed and got safely back home to New York and...” Megan could not go on. They put their arms around each other and, sobbing, each rested her head on the other’s neck. Sam got into a standing position, with one foot on his mother’s thigh and the other on his aunt’s, and tried to hug them both. “Mommy crying,” he said. “’tie Betty crying.” When Tom Radnovich got back to his desk the program was still running, but the completion meter in the lower right-hand corner of the screen had passed 90%. After another three minutes the screen dissolved and the list of hits showed up, just like in a Yahoo search. The results were disappointing. Only six of the name combinations came up, and as he clicked on each one it turned out that none of them referred to a KLA member. There was a doctor, a Communist Party official, a journalist, a restaurant owner, and two interpreters. Back to square one, he said to himself. The computer was now available for the other cases and he began to look into the oldest one on his list that was still open. It was two and half months old, an attempted murder – by strangulation – of a Bosniak girl who was still in a coma. Most likely a botched honor killing; all the males in her family – father, brothers, cousins of some kind – were suspects, but no one said a word, not even the mother. The case actually belonged to another precinct, the 51st, but he was called in, as usual, when a knowledge of Serbocroat was required. (When dealing with Bosniaks he of course had to pretend that it was Bosnian he spoke, just as it was Serbian with Serbs, including his father and his mother’s family, and Croatian with Croats, including Karen’s father’s family.) In most such situations the precinct detective squad commanders preferred a regular detective investigator, like him, who happened to know the language, to a detective specialist who might be a linguist. Tom had, in fact, early on been offered a choice between the investigator and specialist tracks, and he had unhesitatingly picked the former. But as he was scanning the list of poor Lejla Begović’s male relatives, he noticed one named Raif (her father) and another named Refik (one of her brothers). If those were names that Muslim Bosniaks might have, wouldn’t Muslim Albanians also have them? He added them to Column 1. He didn’t feel like running the program again, but would from now on not limit his search to Albanian names starting with R, but include Bosniak ones as well as Turkish, Arab, whatever. He stopped and thought for a moment. Was the identity of SR really the key to the case? Maybe not. But without it, there would be a hole through which the whole case might leak into nothingness. But what about the other dozen Albanians for whom, thanks to Megan Kenner’s attention to detail, he already had the full names? He should have run them through first, he now realized, if only to test whether the websites that he was mining really had the information on the KLA’s war criminals. He looked across the station and saw that Lin was busy with his computer. He sent him an e-mail message: Brian – what if I already have a list of full names? Tom. Two minutes later Lin smiled in his direction, and five minutes later Tom was ready to click “Go” again. He felt his cell phone vibrate. Could Megan Kenner be calling him back? He looked at the screen and saw that it was Karen. He put the phone back in his pocket. Let it go to voice mail, he said to himself. “I really needed that, Megan,” Betty said between sips of tea. “I haven’t really grieved for Daniel in all this time. Paul’s been distracting me.” He’s been manipulating you, Megan wanted to say but didn’t. Sam was amusing himself by talking gibberish into his red telephone. “Like with the birthday party,” Betty went on, “that he insisted on. Harvey was against it, so of course Paul insisted.” Betty smiled. “He just wants me to be happy.” “Are you?” “Generally? Yes, of course I am. I’m healthy, I’m financially secure, I’ve got a husband who loves me...” “Do you love him?” “Do I love Paul? How can you even ask? He’s the only man I’ve ever loved...” “That’s what I mean. How can you know? It took me a long time to realize how much I loved Daniel, to understand that the reason that the best sex I ever had was with him was not because of his technique – though he sure had that – but because I loved him. By then I’d had sex with maybe a hundred guys and I was, like, twenty-three, twenty-four...” “But that’s you, Megan. Because, frankly, sex has been such a big part of your life. Do you want to know when I first knew that I was in love with Paul? I was right here in Toronto, with Daniel, just before he went to Cuba, and we went to see Romeo and Juliet. And when in the balcony scene Juliet said, ‘This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet,’ I saw Paul in my mind. When next we met was when he picked me up at the airport, and that was it.” “That’s beautiful! That could be in a movie! And I’m not being facetious,” Megan said, laughing. “Not your kind of movie,” Betty said, also laughing. “Not the kind I used to make, but, believe it or not, I like romance. I liked Sense and Sensibility, and Chasing Amy, and even My Best Friend’s Wedding.” “Me too. That’s where Paul and I are different. He calls them chick flicks. And when we saw Titanic, he liked everything except the romance part, which was the only thing that I liked.” They laughed again. Suddenly Sam brought Megan her cell phone, whose screen was flashing. “Mommy phone,” he said. “Thank you, sweetheart,” Megan said to her son. “I’ve got voice mail,” she said to Betty. She pressed the voice-mail key and put the phone to her ear. A smile appeared on her face. After thirty seconds she put the phone down. “It’s from the detective, Tom Radnovich.” “A break in the case?” “No, but he’s been thinking about me while working on it.” She was still smiling. “I thought there was something between you two. My woman’s intuition. It only works with my fellow females, though.” “Should I call him back?” “Well, he called you, so he must have wanted to talk to you.” “But he didn’t ask me to call him back.” “Yeah, but why else call you?” “I’ll think about it,” Megan said. “But if I do,” she went on after a pause, “should I tell him that I’ll be in New York in a few days?” “Are you ready to date? Because if you are, I’ll be there to babysit. My favorite nephew,” Betty said as she scooped Sam up into her lap. “You and me are going to have fun while mommy’s having fun with her friend Tom. Okay?” “Okay?” Sam echoed. Megan laughed again while Betty smothered him with kisses, making him giggle. “’Tie Betty loves you,” she said. “Loves you,” he said. “To change the subject back,” Megan said. “Did Paul’s Albanian friend also say that when Anglos like me move from Montreal to Toronto, that’s like ethnic cleansing?” Megan laughed and, before Betty could respond, added, “Daniel once said that.” She paused. “He was joking.” Tom Radnovich found hits for ten of the twelve Albanian names on Megan’s list, and eight of them had in fact been mentioned, on one website or another, in connection with human-rights abuses. Eight out of twelve! The odds, then, were two-to-one that SR, once his identity was known, would be found as well. The next step would be to approach, one by one, known members of Kosovar Albanian gangs, and specifically of the one involved in Wilner’s killing, to see if any of the names meant anything to them. Of course they would at first deny any knowledge. But when working in tandem with Claudia Quintero, his usual partner, he had a good chance of prying some information from at least some of them, especially those susceptible to Claudia’s charms, as he himself had been at one time. Claudia was on vacation with her current boyfriend, but was due back Monday. She had a knack for getting through to macho types. Too bad he couldn’t use her to interview the Begović men. There were two reasons. One was that the case belonged to another precinct. The other was that the Begović clan, which according to acquaintances had been secular back in Bosnia, was now born-again Muslim, and the men refused to be in a room with a woman. He felt his cell phone vibrate again. Karen again, he said to himself. Can’t it wait? True, he had forgotten to check his voice mail. He looked at the screen and felt his heart jump inside him when he saw the 416 area code. “Megan!” he said after pressing Talk. “Hi, Tom. I know you’re probably busy, but I thought I’d like you to know that I’m coming to New York Sunday afternoon and will stay a few days.” “Really?” He didn’t know what else to say. “Yes, it’s personal business.” “Where will you be staying?” “Downtown, because my business is downtown. Manhattan, I mean. And... and I’ll be free evenings, because my si... Daniel’s sister will be here to babysit Sam.” “Well, I should be free for dinner on Sunday, after I drop the kids off at my ex’s. I’ll call you!” “Good. See you next week!” Wow! he said to himself. It was not as if women hadn’t come on to him before. They had done so quite steadily since his separation from Karen. But by and large there were not the ones that he had found particularly desirable on his own. Not that he turned them – the likes of Voula, for example – away. He was living the life of a single guy in New York, solvent, with an interesting career and with no interest in a steady girlfriend, since he didn’t think the kids would care for that, and sleeping with a variety of women – and you can’t beat New York for variety – was a part of that life. And they didn’t all have to be model types, like the ones on Seinfeld. There was a general rule, in his line of work, against getting too close to someone involved in a case, even if that person was only an informant or a potential witness. But he had known that rule to be honored more in the breach than in the observance. He himself had done so several times, and his work hadn’t suffered as a result. But the women that he found attractive from the outset tended to play hard-to-get with him. Like Claudia, when she first came to the 40th. It had taken him over a month to get into her pants, only to find out that the lieutenant at the time, Harry Arvanakis, had been banging her since the day she set foot in the station. It was much later that he found out that Harry had known Claudia before. But Megan Kenner had spurred his interest the moment he met her, and finding out that she had been a porn actress was icing on the cake. And here she was, calling him for a date... What kind of relationship would it be? It was hard to tell; Tom had no experience with long-distance dating. In his life before Karen, when a girlfriend moved away it was the end. Since Karen, the only relationship that he had even thought of as dating had been the six or seven months with Claudia, but as they got to know each other they found that they would make good partners and they ended their affair by mutual consent. He checked the voice mail from Karen. “Hi Tom, this is Karen,” it said. No kidding. He really needed to know that. “Listen, Lindsey has a toothache, and she’ll need a filling. I got her an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, but then she’ll probably need to stay home and rest. How about picking them up Saturday morning instead of tomorrow evening?” As if he had a choice in the matter. But this time he didn’t mind. He would like to spend the next couple of evenings going over case files, at home, without the distractions of the police station. And he could go to the gym after work on Friday. He made a note to himself to call Gabe to let him know that it would not be Friday dinner but Saturday breakfast with the family. Some years earlier his brother had made him a life-simplifying offer that he could not refuse. Gabe regularly commuted by car from his home in Bayside to his job at JFK Airport. He liked to spend his weekends at home, playing with his kids, who now numbered three boys (six, four and two years old), and so Tom could have Gabe’s car for the weekend and use it to take out Lindsey and Brian. Sometimes Tom wished that his kids would play with their cousins, but not only was Lindsey not interested in the mechanical hobbies – trains, Lego, model airplanes – that were practiced in Gabe’s den, but neither was Brian. These two liked the outdoors – the beach, the zoo, kite-flying. Like Karen when she was younger. Megan Kenner was preparing dinner. Sam Kenner-Wilner was in his high chair in the dinette. She had parboiled a batch of new potatoes and, after they had cooled down, gave one of them to Sam, along with a plastic masher. Before long the tray of the high chair held a relief landscape of mashed potato, flecked with patches of red skin. After admiring her nephew’s artwork, Betty Wilner turned her cell phone on to check for voice mail. Sam, without taking his eyes off his project and continuing to reshape the relief, said, “’tie Betty phone.” There was no voice mail, but there was a text message: Hi ill be home aftr 7. Pls call. P. It was now five-thirty. “What time do you think dinner will be?” Betty asked. “Six-thirty,” Megan said. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t need any help?” “Absolutely. I’d have to change my entire routine if I had help, and wouldn’t know how.” Megan laughed. “Okay, then, I’ll do some more work for an hour. I was in the middle of a chapter when I stopped.” “Go to it, girl.” The chapter, which she tentatively titled Adaptation, dealt with the influence of French on the English spoken by Quebec anglophones. She had already written down a list of actual French words that such compatriots of hers used, and discussed them. She now wrote down expressions that she had heard which were calques from French, Quebec French to be specific: close the TV, open the light, take a decision... Had she ever used them? She doubted it. There was leftover Chinese food from the evening before he’d gone to Toronto. When was that – two nights ago? It seemed longer. Tom opened the Styrofoam containers and sniffed their contents. They smelled good. China Garden had a reputation for using fresh ingredients, and it seemed justified. When the microwave oven imparted to his apartment the olfactory ambiance of a Chinatown walkup, he turned on the television for the six o’clock news, a few minutes after the hour. The beefy image of Bill Clinton filled the screen. The station was airing excerpts from his speech about Kosovo: “The skies over Yugoslavia are silent. The Serb army and police are withdrawing from Kosovo. The one million men, women and children driven from their land are preparing to return home. The air strikes have been suspended. Aggression against an innocent people has been contained and is being turned back.” An innocent people? The Kosovo Albanians? Are the Serbs being blamed again? But no, Clinton injected some fairness. “I want to say a few words to the Serbian people tonight,” he said. “I know that you too have suffered from Mr. Milošević’s wars.” And more: “As long as he remains in power, as long as your nation is ruled by an indicted war criminal, we will provide no support for the reconstruction of Serbia. But we are ready to provide humanitarian aid now and to help to build a better future for Serbia, too, when its government represents tolerance and freedom, not repression and terror.” Not bad, Tom Radnovich thought. He had been revolted by the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia when it first began, even more so when his father’s hometown was hit. But gradually he came to accept the need for getting rid of Milošević, and if the Serbian people didn’t have the will to do it, someone had to do it for them. In other news, Hillary Clinton claimed to have been a lifelong Yankee fan. Chief Louis Anemone suddenly resigned from the NYPD. (Suddenly? Tom said aloud to the screen. A surprise to One PP, maybe, but rank-and-file cops like him had known about it for weeks.) Mayor Giuliani proposed to solve the problem of overcrowding in summer school by sending some kids to parochial and private schools and to private tutoring centers; Rudy Crew, the Schools Chancellor, rejected the idea. Chicago’s anti-loitering law, which other cities looked to as a model for reclaiming the streets in gang-infested neighborhoods, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court because it gave the police too much discretion to single out innocent people. Innocent people again, Tom thought. Like the Albanians. Score one more for the bad guys. Time to get to work. Scanning the printout of the report as amended by subsequent information, he refreshed his memory on the details of the Lejla Begović case. Nineteen years old, a student at Bronx Community College, youngest of three in a Bosnian refugee family, found unconscious by kids going to Sunday school on the morning of March 28 on a sidewalk two blocks from her family’s home, taken to Lincoln Hospital. No robbery, no indication of sexual assault – clothing intact, no lesions other than unmistakable signs of strangulation around the neck (probably with the scarf that she was wearing) – but likelihood of recent sexual activity. No fingerprints; perpetrator probably wore gloves, it being a cold night. No current boyfriend identified; reticence by family to discuss the matter. Suspicion: attempted honor killing. Family: Bosnian Muslim, active in neighborhood mosque. Lejla: youngest of five. Two brothers in New York (Murat and Refik, fraternal twins), seem to be more orthodox than the parents: wear beards and study Arabic. An older brother and sister remain in Bosnia. According to one acquaintance, this sister had been a Miss Sarajevo contestant in 1993, when the contest was famously held under a Serbian siege. According to this acquaintance the fact indicates that the family had been secular back in Bosnia, but another – a member of the mosque – claimed that they had been shamed by it. (Maybe because she didn’t win? Radnovich wondered.) Miss Sarajevo. He was not a fan of U2. Maybe because Karen had been one. They had gone to New Jersey to hear the band in a concert on its first American tour, and Tom just couldn’t get into the crowd’s excitement. The music left him indifferent – he liked country and western better than rock, anyway – and he didn’t care for Bono’s political posturing. But the girl who won the contest and who was on the cover of the record was gorgeous. It would have been hard for the Begović girl to beat her. Back to the Begovićes. All three male family members had airtight alibis for the presumed time frame of the assault: except for Lejla, the entire family was at the mosque (actually in the mosque’s courtyard) celebrating Eid ul-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, called Kurban Bajram in the Balkans. Several witnesses attested to their presence, most notably the imam, the Reverend Omar Becker, a Muslim convert from Austria, married to a Turkish woman. The imam also said that the mosque was not an ethnic one but welcomed all moderate Muslims (“moderate” was underlined in the report) – Kurds, Turks, Albanians, Bosniaks... Albanians! The gang that was the supposed intruders into the bar where Daniel Wilner was killed, called the Gremnik Boys for the leader’s home village, was based in the same neighborhood at the mosque. Tom was sure that Pete Orsini, his partner in the Begović investigation, would know if any of the gang members frequented the mosque, since it was in his precinct. So could one of their businesses be honor killings for hire? But honor killings were, by definition, supposed to be performed by a family member, like Abraham’s sacrifice, which they had been commemorating that night. Besides, they were – as Imam Becker had insisted – not really an Islamic tradition but a tribal one that had been grafted onto religious practice in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but not in the Balkans. Could the Begovićes have been convinced by their Kurd or Turkish fellow mosque members that whatever their youngest daughter was doing would dishonor them? And did they perhaps not have the stomach to do it themselves? He was about to call Orsini when he remembered that the detective (who was in his mid-forties) had a family, a wife and four kids. It can wait till tomorrow, he told himself. Meanwhile, there were the Stanley Cup finals to watch. Buffalo had won the first game, two nights before, playing in Dallas. Maybe they could get a 2-0 lead tonight. Paul answered before the first ring was over, as if he’d been standing next to the phone awaiting the call. “Hi,” he said, assuming that it was his wife. “Hi, Paul,” Betty said. “How are you?” “You can imagine how I am. I miss you like crazy. And it was so weird, the night after your birthday...” “I miss you too, sweetheart. But I need this time away from you.” “I understand.” Sure you do, Betty said inwardly. “I know we’ve never had any time apart since we were... well, kids, really... except for the times that I had to be away for a day or two. So it’s only fair...” “Thanks for understanding,” Betty said, though she wished that once in a while he wouldn’t be quite so fair and understanding. “So, anyway, Megan has to go to New York for a couple of days, on some business matter, and I’m going to go with her.” “You are?” “Yes. I’m... I’ve fallen in love, by the way.” Paul said nothing. “With my nephew Sam,” Betty went on. “He’s just the sweetest, smartest, cutest little boy you can imagine. He’s already looking a little like Daniel. So, to continue what I was saying, I’m going to babysit while Megan takes care of business.” “Where will you be staying?” “Uh... downtown Manhattan, some hotel or other. Megan’s business is downtown.” She paused, wondering if Paul would inquire into the nature of Megan’s business. He didn’t, so she went on. “How are you doing?’ “Super-busy, as I told you I would be. But I just heard the news about Yugoslavia: the Serbian army is pulling back from Kosovo. So Clinton did the right thing after all,” he concluded with a tone of satisfaction. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia had been the subject of another argument between Paul and Harvey. “Your friend must be happy.” “What friend?” “You know, your Albanian friend...” “Oh, Dick!” “Is that his name?” “That’s what he calls himself in English. But he’s not in Montreal anymore. I don’t even know if he’s still in Canada. I haven’t seen him since last year. The last time I saw him was when he said, ‘Give my regards to the beautiful Missis Berman.’” “I remember. That was a little while before the wedding and you told him that I was not Missis Berman but Miz Wilner.” “That’s right,” Paul said, “and I also said that after we were married you would still be Miz Wilner, according to Quebec law.” “Really? You said that? I don’t remember you telling me that.” “Didn’t I? Hmmm,” Paul said. There was something evasive about his tone, Betty thought, and she suddenly felt that she couldn’t bear to talk to him anymore. What’s the matter with me? she asked herself. This is my husband, the man I love. But Paul, miraculously, seemed to sense her mood. “Anyway, sweetheart,” he went on, “just keep in touch, okay? It’s fantastic that you got yourself a cell phone. Good night!” “Good night!” she echoed. And then, looking at the turned-off cell phone in her left hand – as if she could somehow see Paul’s image lingering there – she thought back to his original account of the Mrs. Berman exchange and remembered that after telling her about it he had suddenly stopped, as if more had been said that he would rather not tell her. Why wouldn’t he have mentioned his comment about her keeping her name? She remembered thinking at the time that Dick might have made a suggestive remark that Paul didn’t want to repeat to her. Megan came into the room, Sam having been put to bed. “You wanna watch hockey?” she asked. “Hockey?” “Yeah, hockey,” Megan said, laughing. “We’re Canadians, aren’t we? Never mind that the game is being played in Dallas, in June, with the temperature thirty-two Celsius.” “Perfect hockey weather, as far as I’m concerned. Who’s playing?” “Dallas and Buffalo.” “Great Canadian cities!” “Well, the players are still mostly Canadian, except for the Czechs and Russians and Finns.” “True patriot love! Yeah, let’s watch hockey!”