8
Megan did not feel prepared.
The
first time that she had taken Sam on an airplane had been in October, when he
was 13 months old, to visit her family in Montreal and to drop in on the
memorial gathering for Daniel. Sam had been frightened at first by the roar of
the jet engines at takeoff, but quickly calmed down, and by the time the plane
landed an hour later he was such a seasoned flier that on the return flight,
after four days, he roared along with the engines amid giggles of delight.
The flight
to New York was not much longer, but this time Sam began crying even before
takeoff, and continued to cry intermittently all the way until landing. Megan
and Betty passed him from one lap to the other, and Betty tried her best to
amuse and distract him, but it would work only for a few minutes at a time.
“What can be wrong with him?” Megan wondered to Betty. “Maybe he’s just tired,”
Betty suggested. “Maybe,” Megan agreed reluctantly.
He was
calm, though uncharacteristically quiet, during the taxi ride from LaGuardia to
lower Manhattan. They got to the hotel just in time for Sam’s nap – Megan had
chosen the flight with that in mind – and he fell asleep immediately. Perhaps
he had been very tired after all.
Megan
stayed in the room while Betty, who had never been in New York, went out for a
walk. In the taxi she had mentioned again her feelings of guilt and regret over
never having visited Daniel during his nine years in New York, and just before
leaving the hotel she said that she would like to visit what she knew of
Daniel’s haunts in the city, the Columbia campus for sure, and maybe even the
bar where he spent his last evening. “Tom Radnovich can tell you where that
is,’ Megan said, “but it probably isn’t the kind of
place where you should go alone.” “Maybe he can take me there,” Betty said,
laughing.
The screen told him that the call was from Megan Kenner. Lindsey and
Brian were happily running with their kites, and Tom sat down on a park bench
from which he could watch them.
“Hi,
Megan,” he said. “Are you in New York?”
“Yes,”
she said, “I’m in the hotel with Sam. He’s asleep. He had a rough flight for
some reason, but I think he’ll be okay.”
“So
what time would you like me to pick you up?”
“What
did you have in mind?”
“Well,
the usual first date – dinner, drinks, maybe some dancing... But I don’t know if
that’s going to work within your time frame.”
“I
don’t think dinner would work, since I always have dinner with Sam. I usually
share my dinner with him. But drinks and dancing sounds lovely. I can probably
let Betty put him to sleep, so I should be ready by eight.”
“Should
we meet in the lobby?”
“No,
come up to the room, so you can meet Betty, and maybe even say hi to Sam. I
hope he’ll be friendlier this time. We’re in room...”
“You
don’t have to tell me.” Tom laughed. “I’ll just show them my badge at the
desk.”
Megan
also laughed. “I wonder what they’ll think of me,” she said, “with the police
coming to see me.”
As she stepped out of the small lobby that was decorated in an East Asian
style, with Buddha heads and orchids, Betty discovered that the hotel was right
on the edge of Chinatown. The fact that it was “downtown” did not mean, as it
would in Montreal or Toronto, that it was in the center of the city. Here, as
she had discovered by looking at the map that she had found in the airline
magazine, it meant that it was at the lowest end of Manhattan, where the Hudson
River and the East River flow into Upper New York Bay. Except that the East
River isn’t really a river but a strait.
Walking
westward along East Broadway, she was enveloped by the aromas of Chinese
cooking. It was a familiar sensation, since Montreal’s Chinatown was barely a
kilometer from her apartment house in the Plateau, and she and Paul ate Chinese
quite often. She wondered if Sam had been exposed to East Asian food. He would
probably like it, she thought. It was child-friendly, with everything cut up
into bite-size pieces. Chopsticks were another matter, but she had noticed
that Chinese kids, or at least Chinese-Canadian ones,
generally used forks.
Suddenly
the street curved and she came to a complicated intersection. Straight ahead of
her rose the patina-covered steeple of an old church, reminiscent of some of
the neighborhood churches in Montreal.
Turning
to her right as she was crossing the wide street she saw the Empire State
Building looming in the distance. It was probably some five kilometers away,
but still looked imposing. Maybe she would go up there. Maybe
with Sam, while Megan was doing her business in Surrogate Court.
After
she had crossed to a street that for some reason was called Chatham Square –
there was no evidence of a square anywhere in sight – she looked ahead to see
two scarily identical rectangular monoliths rising even higher than the Empire
State Building, and they were closer too. So these are the Twin Towers, she said to herself.
Suddenly
she felt a strange jiggling in the pocket of her jeans. It took her a good two
seconds to discard the possibility of a gerbil and to recognize the vibration
of her cell phone. She pulled it out of her pocket and saw that the call was
from Paul.
“Hi,
sweetheart, I was just going to call you,” she lied. “How are you doing?”
She
turned right onto the relatively less traveled Mott Street to escape the
traffic noise.
“I
miss you like crazy.” Paul spoke fast and sounded impatient. “When are you
coming home?”
“Soon,”
Betty said. “Back to Toronto on Tuesday, and then another day
or two.”
“Why
bother going back to Toronto? Why don’t you just fly back to Montreal?”
“Why? Well, for one
thing, I left my thesis at Megan’s. And...”
“That’s
okay,” Paul laughed, “I don’t need another reason.”
As
she passed the church she found out that it was called the
Church of the Transfiguration, that it dated from 1815,
and that masses were read in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.
She
turned into a street called Mosco that ran alongside the church. Why isn’t
there a simple verb in English, she wondered, that translates longer?
Une rue qui longe l’église? The street turned out to
be only one short block long – the length of the church – and it ended when it
met Mulberry Street. She remembered the book titled And to Think That I Saw
It on Mulberry Street from which, with Daniel’s help, she had learned to
read English. Another memory of Daniel that had lain buried! Across the street
lay a verdant park.
She
turned right on Mulberry Street and discovered that she was in what must have
been the very heart of Chinatown. After a few blocks she came to a very wide
street called Canal, crossed it, and suddenly found herself
amid signs for Italian cafés, ristoranti, bakeries and pizzerias. This
must be Little Italy, she thought, and though it did not resemble any place in
Italy that she had actually visited, the memory of Italy, even if a negative
one, caused another pang: she and Paul had been in Italy
when her mother called her about Daniel’s death. She didn’t want any more of
that memory, and turned back, crossing Canal Street once more until she came to
the south end of Mulberry Street.
She
noticed that at that end of the park (which she discovered was called Columbus
Park) there was a playground with brightly colored equipment and hordes of kids
playing on it. And she had an idea.
At the
corner of Mulberry and Worth she asked a middle-aged woman with gray hair and a
pleasant youthful face, walking her dog, if she could tell her how to get to
Chambers Street.
“Chambers? Sure. I’ll tell you a shortcut. Just cross the
street and walk between these two buildings”– she pointed at two neoclassical
limestone structures that were probably courthouses – “and when you come to the
next street cross that too, and keep walking on a sort of driveway till you see
a big tall building with an arch in the middle. I work there. You walk through
the arch, and you’re on Chambers Street.”
“What
building is that?”
“It’s
the Municipal Building, which is where the New York city
administration is.”
“You
mean, like the city hall?”
“No.
The City Hall is further down on Chambers, about half a block. That’s where the
mayor and the city council sit, not administrators like me.” The dog, a corgi,
was straining at its leash. “I gotta go. Have a nice day, young lady!”
Betty
walked through the arch as directed and saw that she was indeed at the meeting
of Chambers and Centre Streets. She continued west on Chambers and quickly
noticed that Number 31, the location of the court where Megan was to appear the
next morning, was just a few doors down. The walk from the park had taken her
barely five minutes.
City
Hall, across the street, was a building in French Renaissance style, also in
limestone, with a park surrounding it. The next street she came to was
Broadway. From the corner she could once again see the Twin Towers looming
above other skyscrapers. She turned left on Broadway and walked for another few
blocks till she found a lovely church, in Georgian style, reminding her of Saint
Martin-in-the-Fields in London. It turned out to be Saint Paul’s Chapel, the
oldest church in New York, in continuous use since 1766. It was open to
visitors, but she had no desire to enter. She reversed her steps and, after two
blocks, found the entrance to a subway station. Then she had another idea.
She
went down the stairs and waited in line to ask the clerk at the token window, a
heavyset black woman, if she could get to Columbia University from there.
“Sure,
honey. Just take either the two or the three uptown to ninety-six, then take
the one local to one-sixteen, and then you’re right there. You need some
tokens?”
“Yes,
sure, give me two please.” Betty began to open her purse when she suddenly
remembered something. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got only Canadian money on me.”
There
was a snicker from someone in the line behind her, but the short, bespectacled
young black man who was her immediate follower said, in what seemed to be an
African accent, “Don’t worry about it,” and, addressing the clerk, “I will pay
for them. Two tokens for the lady and a twenty-dollar MetroCard for me,
please.”
“Oh,
thank you very much,” Betty said. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Don’t
mention it,” the man said. “Enjoy your stay in New York.”
It can’t be jet lag, Megan thought, since they hadn’t changed time zones.
But Sam did not seem inclined to follow his usual two-hour nap routine. He woke
up about half an hour after falling asleep and sounded as though he had trouble
breathing. Please don’t get sick on me, honey, she begged him silently
as she rocked him in her lap. He gave no sign of a fever... She remembered a line
from one of her movies: a doctor saying, “No sign of a fever this morning, but
she was pretty hot in bed last night.”
Her
movies: that seemed so long ago now. Two and a half years, but it could have
been a century. May Green, by now, was a different person from her. When she
watched one of her videos, the actress that she saw there might have been
anyone. May Green, Kathy Harris, Laurie Lyon – figures on a screen.
Memories
of the filming were, of course, another matter. They were in her flesh, but by
this time only skin-deep.
Did
Tom Radnovich expect a porn routine on their date? She could do it if that was
what he wanted, but she hoped that he wouldn’t.
If, in fact, there would be a date with Tom Radnovich.
For she had not overcome her ambivalence yet. And if Sam
could plausibly be described as ill, she would have the perfect excuse for
backing out.
Her
head felt like a revolving door, with thoughts coming through one after
another, only to return after each cycle. But during one breathing space
between thoughts she noticed that Sam was asleep again. She put him down on his
cot and began to do stretching exercises on the thick carpet.
Selima Begović walked into the station at precisely four o’clock.
Tom Radnovich wondered if her punctuality was related to her husband’s trade:
he was a watchmaker.
Unlike
her previous appearances, she was not wearing a headscarf. Her hair was black,
flecked with gray. To Tom she looked like the quintessential Balkan matriarch.
Orsini
ushered her into the interview room and had her sit at the table between him
and Tom, with Tracy Schiller facing her. Tracy was a blonde with a good figure
in blouse and slacks.
“Recite
nam nešto o Lejli,” Tom began. Tell us about
Lejla.
She
began her narration about her daughter, with Tom taking stenographic notes.
After five minutes he asked her to stop.
“It
began one day in Sarajevo,” he said, turning to face Orsini and Schiller, “when
she was thirteen, and she was walking home from school with a group of girls,
when they were accosted by a gang of Serbs around twenty, who were acting as
the neighborhood Serb militia. They forced the girls into an alley and began to
rape them. There was exactly one guy for each girl, so it must have been
planned. Except that the guy who took Lejla was someone that she knew from the
neighborhood and that she had...” – he thought for a moment about how to
translate zaludjena – “had a crush on, so she didn’t resist, and in fact
enjoyed it. Her only worry was about getting pregnant, which she didn’t. She
told her older sister Nedjma about it...”
“Is
that the sister who was in the Miss Sarajevo contest?” Tracy Schiller asked.
She seemed to know the file well.
“Yes,
Miss Sarajevo,” Selima said in a bitter tone.
“Their
mother overheard them talking, but decided not to say anything to anyone, since
she had also been a little wild and crazy when she was young.”
“Crazy
girl,” Selima said, pointing at herself and rolling her eyes. With no prompting
she resumed her account until Tom signaled her to stop.
“But then Lejla started borrowing Nedjma’s sexy clothes...”
“Sexy,”
Selima confirmed, pantomiming a tight-fitting, low-cut outfit.
“... and
sneaking out to see the Serb, or maybe other boys. That’s when Mr. Begović
decided to stop it by making the family into observant Muslims. Nedjma didn’t
like the idea and moved out to live with her boyfriend, and the oldest son was
already out of the house, but the twins liked the idea and began to think of
themselves as Mujahedin, though the actual Mujahedin in Bosnia were Arabs. But
they recruited young local men, and the two Begović boys joined them. They
went from Sarajevo to Travnik, where they got Arabic lessons, military
training, uniforms and weapons. Their father was furious, because he thought
that the whole thing was manipulation by Croatia, as an excuse for them to
invade Bosnia too.”
“That’s
what I heard too,” Tracy Schiller said. Just then a clerk brought in a couple
of sheets of paper, one of which looked like a fax cover sheet, and handed them
to Orsini. The detective glanced at them, his face giving a sudden indication
of concern, and put them aside on the desk.
Tom
went on with the translation. “He had friends high up in the Bosnian army, and
he got the boys sent back to Sarajevo, but they resented it. So now he had all
five kids who were out of his control. That’s when he decided to get out of
Bosnia, and used some connections to get refugee visas to come to New York,
where he has a cousin, with the three underage kids.”
Once
again Selima seemed to know that the translation of her tale thus far was
complete, and talked some more.
“At
first things were okay,” Tom recited from his notes, “because Lejla was a
studious, well-behaved girl while she was learning English, and no one knew
about her past. But once she spoke English fluently she started hanging out
with boys again, and her brothers became militant again. Lejla would wear a
headscarf when she was at home, or at school when her brothers were still in
high school and so could see her, but otherwise she took it off, especially
when she was seeing boys. The brothers knew it, and started talking about an
honor killing. When Mr. Begović heard that, he blew up at them, saying
that Bosnians don’t do that sort of thing, and from then on they spoke with
each other in Arabic. They grew beards and started to hang Arabic posters on
the walls of their room. They also began to go away for long time periods,
neither to school nor to work nor to the mosque, and Mrs.
Begović became suspicious. There was a friend of
Lejla’s named Alida, who occasionally came to the house when the brothers
weren’t there, and Mrs. Begović would chat
with her because they spoke the same language. She asked Alida if, when she had
some free time, she would be willing to follow the young men to see where they
were going, since they didn’t know her, and Alida agreed. She followed them on
the subway all the way to Brooklyn, and then to
a building with Arabic writing on the
walls, where about fifteen or twenty other young men with beards were waiting
outside the door. Then an older man came, opened the door and the young men
followed him inside. Then she took the subway back and told Mrs.
Begović about it. So Mrs.
Begović believes that the attack on Lejla had
something to do with that Muslim group.”
“Why
hasn’t she told us about this before?” Tracy Schiller asked. Tom translated,
and Selima replied.
“Because,”
Tom said, “as long as there was a chance that Lejla would live, she didn’t want
any trouble. She thinks that these people are dangerous, that they’re
terrorists. Including her sons.”
“Teroristi,”
Selima confirmed.
“Does
she know,” Orsini asked, “where in Brooklyn the guys went to?” Tom translated
the question, and Selima shook her head. “The reason I’m asking is that the
four subway goes right from where the Begovićes
live to Atlantic Avenue, where the blind sheikh’s mosque is. We’ll have to
question Alida. Does she know where Alida lives?” Selima seemed to understand,
and shook her head. “What’s her last name?” Orsini
went on. Selima hesitated. “Prezime,” Tom
said. “Lovrin,” Selima answered. “Where does... did Lejla know her from?”
“College,” Selima said immediately.
“So,”
Orsini said, “tomorrow we’ll have to go to the BCC registrar and ask them about
Alida Lovrin. What about the arraignment?” he asked Tracy Schiller.
“Right
now there’s too much reasonable doubt, so we’ll have to drop the charges
against the Murovas, with the possibility of refiling if the information
changes.”
“But
we’ll have to talk to them,” Orsini said. “I just got a fax from the hospital.
The post-mortem on Lejla showed that she had syphilis.”
“Lejla? Sifilis?” Selima cried out, incredulous,
and burst into tears after Tom nodded. She was grieving at last, he thought.
“There
were no symptoms yet, because she was so young, but anyone who might have had
unprotected sex with her has to be informed. And that includes both Omar and
Safet. And Silvana DiMaggio.”
“I
would guess,” Tom offered, “that Safet, being married and experienced, took
precautions. But Omar seems naïve.”
Selima
was still crying. Tom asked her is there was anything else she wanted, and she
shook her had. He asked her if she wanted to be driven home. She shook her head
again. “Walk to home,” she said. Tom walked her to the door and they shook
hands before she left the station.
“Wow,”
Tracy Schiller said, “we have a whole new case. I want to stay on it. I’ll try
to get my boss to get the Kings County DA to let us investigate that group as a
Bronx case. Who knows what’s behind it!”
“Since
I don’t know Arabic,” Tom said, “you probably won’t need me anymore. The
Begović brothers speak perfectly good English, and I suppose Alida does
too.”
“You
must have other cases to get back to,” Tracy said.
“Do I
ever,” Tom said. “But it’s been great working with you,” he said to Orsini.
“Likewise,”
Orsini said.
“And
I’m looking forward to working with you in the future,” Tom said to Tracy Schiller.
“Pete tells that you’re part Albanian.”
“Yes,
a quarter, from my father’s mother.”
“Do
you know the language?”
“No,
my grandmother was actually brought up in Germany and didn’t speak it herself.
But I’m thinking of learning it.”
“So am
I,” Tom said, though the idea hadn’t occurred to him until that moment. But it
might well prove useful in his work. Besides, it might be fun taking a class
with the bright, attractive Tracy Schiller. Only five years
out NYU Law, but pretty knowledgeable about the world. “If you know of a
place, let me know.”
“I
will,” Tracy said as she reached her hand out to him. “Take care, Detective Radnovich.”
“You too, ADA Schiller.”
He
looked at his watch and found that there would be time for a workout before
going home to get ready for his date with Megan Kenner.
“You had quite an outing,” Megan said when Betty came into the room,
carrying the thick pile of paper called the Sunday
New York Times under her arm. She had bought it just before returning to
the hotel so that she would have something to do once Sam was asleep.
Sam
was walking in circles around the room, holding something – Betty wasn’t sure
what it was – from which he took an occasional bite. “He’s having his dinner,”
Megan said with a laugh. “I can’t get him to sit.” She was sitting on the sofa,
dressed as though ready to go out, in black pants and a low-cut lavender top,
but still in slippers, though a pair of black high-heeled shoes was standing at
attention on the floor next to her.
Betty
put the paper on the coffee table and sat beside her. “I walked and walked and
walked,” she said as she removed her sturdy walking shoes and then her socks.
The carpet felt good against her bare feet. “I also took the subway to
Columbia. I was so stupid, I didn’t have any American
money! But a kind gentleman bought me two tokens.”
“A
woman who looks like you will always find kind gentlemen,” Megan said with a
chuckle. “I’ve found my share, and I’m not even in your league.”
“What
are you talking about? You’re gorgeous!”
“I’m
pretty enough – I mean, enough to get what I want using my looks – and I can
make myself look gorgeous when I need to, but you just are. Anyway, what
happened then?”
“I
took the subway to Columbia, and on Broadway I found an ATM and got me some
greenbacks. The campus was practically empty, but it was interesting seeing the
place where Daniel spent five years. What’s Sam eating, by the way?” She
realized that she was talking incoherently. “I’m babbling! I must have low
blood sugar!”
“There’s
pizza in the microwave,” Megan said. “I had it delivered. Authentic
New York pizza, by the way, not Domino’s or Pizza Hut.”
“Is
that what Sam’s having?”
“Yeah.”
“Is
the pizza good?” Betty asked Sam.
“Pizza
good,” Sam said.
“Okay,
then I’ll have some.” She got up and pulled a large slice, already on its own
paper plate, out of the microwave oven. She began eating it even before getting
back to the sofa. “Wow, what a thick crust!” she said between bites.
“There’s
wine and beer, too,” Megan said. “Which do you want?” she asked on her way to
the minibar.
“A
little glass of wine would be nice.” Megan brought two glasses of red wine to
the coffee table, and each woman took a sip before both of them burst into
laughter. “Cheers!” Megan said. “To a hot date!” Betty
said. “I’m not sure about that,” Megan said. “Sam hasn’t been quite right.”
“Are
you calling it off?”
“Playing it by ear. If I don’t feel up to it, would you like
to go? You said that you wanted him to take you that bar in the Bronx...”
“But I
didn’t mean tonight! This is my night for babysitting my favorite nephew!” Sam
was just walking past her, and she set her slice of pizza on the paper plate
and pulled him into her lap. He didn’t resist, but didn’t produce the happy
giggle that she had heard in Toronto. “It’s you and me tonight, Sammy boy,
right?”
Sam
said nothing, but squirmed out of Betty’s lap and into Megan’s. “Mommy,” he
then said.
“See
what I mean?” Megan said.
Betty
finished her pizza and wine. She got up and went to the bathroom to brush her
teeth and freshen up, in case she actually did go out with Tom Radnovich. She
had not brought any clothes for going out, but then this wouldn’t actually be a
date.
A
date! Betty Wilner, a married woman, monogamous for eight years, had actually
thought in terms of going on a date, even if the terms were negative!
No,
she reflected while looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she wasn’t
really thinking of herself, but of Tom. If he is out with a woman for an
evening, whatever the circumstances, the woman should look decent. And she
would look decent enough in her casual clothes, she decided,
if she put on the medium-heel wedge sandals that she had brought just because
she enjoyed wearing them.
She
went back into the room and sat on the sofa again. This time Sam,
on his own, moved into her lap. “’Tie Betty’s pretty,” he
said. Maybe there’s hope for Megan’s date, she thought as she hugged Sam and
planted a big kiss on his cheek.
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