12
He had slept
fitfully, and there had been several erotic dreams, but the one whose details
he could remember when the radio finally woke him featured not Megan Kenner but
Yasmina from Citibank. He felt sexually sated by his nights with Julia and
Betty, but what had stimulated him this time was what had begun as a routine
good-night kiss – if any kiss between former lovers can be considered routine –
with Claudia while they were still seated in her car.
It stretched into something longer and deeper
– it seemed that Claudia was tempted – until the spell of temptation was broken
when he whispered her name and realized too late that the way he pronounced it,
Clawed-ya, would turn her off. It was just as well: sex with a working partner
was risky. And there was no shortage of fish in the sea.
Well, what about this Yasmina? He had told the branch manager that he
would come by that afternoon with a copy of Wilner’s death certificate, so that
the bank could close out the safe-deposit-box account. He could do it at the
end of his shift, just before the bank’s closing time, and ask her out for a
drink. Would she have a drink with him? Was she Muslim? Nothing about her
appearance indicated it – her hair was bare, as were her sturdy calves over her
stylish high-heeled pumps – so that even if she was, it was only nominally. And
there was a good chance, if she had already been working at this branch the
year before, that she had known Wilner, who seemed to visit his box quite
often. He would ask her about him, and if she had known him, they could
continue the conversation outside the bank.
Given the short time that Rick had given them to work on the Wilner case,
it was important to tell him of the latest plot twist, and to seek out the
Gremnik Boys again in order to find out who might have known about their
excursion to Old Nick’s on the preceding 15th of October. True, the NYPD had
lost much of its leverage over them when they were taken out of the Lejla
Begović case. He supposed that Orsini or someone in his precinct had
already informed the Murovas about Lejla’s condition.
On the front page of the Times,
about half the stories were headed CRISIS
IN THE BALKANS. Over breakfast, Tom scanned the article titled
Kosovo Rebels Savor New Role as Serb Troops
Leave.
The concluding paragraph quoted a KLA warrior – a former French teacher –
as saying, “When we came here the people were very happy. They think they are
safe now from the Serbs.” Well, Tom thought, here’s one Serb that
some of these people may not be safe
from.
She imagined
Tom Radnovich’s long, slender hands on her skin as she spread shower gel across
her torso. But by and by she noticed something: she felt slimmer in her hips
and midriff than she had before coming to New York. She got out of the shower
and, realizing that there was no full-length mirror in the bathroom, climbed
onto the toilet-seat cover in order to see herself in the vanity mirror, and
what she saw confirmed what her hands had told her: her figure was almost back
to its May Green self, except for her breasts, and something could be done
about them. Would be done. As soon
as she could get Dr. Cox to do it, hopefully before Tom’s visit.
Only then did she remember that she hadn’t yet accepted Tom’s
proposition. Of course she would do so, she now knew. No way would she pass up
a chance for a few nights with a man like that. What about Sam? Well, her son
would just have to learn that his mommy was a woman who likes men.
The sooner the better. She had liked his daddy better than
any other man, she would tell him at some time in the future, but daddy was
gone, and...
She heard Betty and Sam giggling together. Sam obviously liked Betty a
lot. She would tell him, when he was old enough to understand, that when he
gets big he will probably like women, just like daddy.
She brushed her teeth with the hotel’s toothbrush and toothpaste, wrapped
herself in a towel – her robe and toiletry kit were already packed away – and
stepped into the room. Betty and Sam, both fully dressed, were sitting on the
carpet, rolling his ball back and forth to each other. “You guys are having a
ball!” Megan said.
“Ball!” Sam said.
They had decided that they would have breakfast at the airport. At this
time of day, the desk clerk had told Megan when she paid the bill the night
before, the ride to LaGuardia could easily take more than twice the twenty
minutes that it had taken to get to the hotel from the airport at midday on a
Sunday. She had arranged for a taxi to come and get them at eight o’clock. That
way they would be at the airport before nine, plenty of time to check in for
the 10:30 Air Canada flight and then have a relaxed breakfast before going to
the gate. Because Sam belonged to the category of Small Children, they would
get to board ahead of other passengers, or “preboard” as the airline people
called it.
Megan’s clothes – undergarments, blouse, skirt –
were stretched out on her bed, ready to put on. But she felt so good about her
figure that she opened her suitcase and, before stashing the blouse and skirt
in it, pulled out the tight-fitting blue dress that she would have worn on her
date with Tom Radnovich. She might as well let the world see her as she liked
to be seen.
There was a full-length mirror on the back of the closet door, she
remembered. She looked at her reflection and liked what she saw. “Time to go
down,” she announced.
Rick DePalma
had found Claudia and Tom’s new line of investigation intriguing, and agreed
that that the search for whoever had put together the plot that resulted in
Daniel Wilner’s supposedly accidental shooting death – Tom was sure that this
was an Albanian with the initial RS, SR in Daniel’s code – should take up most
of their energy. Tom would try to track him down through the Gremnik Boys, and
he would do this on his own.
She had felt nervous when she met Tom just before entering their boss’s
office. She knew that he was too much of a gentleman to allude in any way to
the previous night’s misguided kiss, but a girl can never be too sure of what a
man will do, and she felt some anxiety when they met just before entering Rick
DePalma’s office for the agreed-upon progress report on the Wilner case. “Hi,
Claudia,” Tom had said simply, pronouncing her name in his usual way, just as
he had the night before. Had he made the effort to say it in the right way, she
would in all likelihood have gone up to his place. She would not have spent the
night with him, but something would have happened. And, she was thinking, she
would probably be feeling less embarrassed than she was this morning, after
that inconclusive ending to their evening’s work.
It was now a little past nine o’clock. She went back to her desk and
decided that this would be a good time to try to call Dr. Cynthia C. Bloom.
”Doctor Bloom’s office,” a young female voice said in an accent that
might have been Haitian. “Can you hold?”
“Not really,” Claudia said. “This is Detective Claudia Quintero of the
New York Police Department, and I need to speak to Doctor Bloom urgently. You
can tell her that it’s about Daniel Wilner.” And she gave the woman her
cell-phone number.
“Yes, Ma’am,” the woman said. “I will tell her.”
The phone rang less than ten minutes later. “Detective
Quintero? This is Cici Bloom.” The name by which the psychologist
identified herself sounded much more like a Spanish nickname than the English
initials C. C.
“Yes, Doctor Bloom...”
“Call me Cici. What’s this about Daniel? Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Well, he was, and I’m afraid to say that he didn’t survive.” It seemed
silly, Claudia thought, to say I’m afraid
to say when she was in fact saying it, afraid or not.
“When did it happen?” Cici Bloom asked in a trembling voice after a
pause.
“Last October.”
There was a long pause and a sigh. “Now I understand why I didn’t get a
birthday card from him. My birthday’s in November, and
he always sends... sent me a card. Then when I was in New York in April and I
tried to call him his phone was disconnected. I thought that maybe he’d moved
away...” There was another pause. “What happened to him?”
“He was in a bar in the Bronx, and he was caught in the crossfire of a
gang shootout. It was ruled accidental, except we are now suspecting that he
may have been set up. We’re reviewing the evidence, and we found your Christmas
card in his pile of mail. Were you close?”
“Well,” Cici said with another sigh, “we were very close when we were
undergraduates at Columbia. We were a couple for a year, and we remained
friends. Of course once I moved to Florida we only saw each other rarely, when
I happened to go to New York for some reason or other, and he wasn’t always
there. By now it’s been well over a year since we last saw each other.”
“Did you know that he had a child?” Claudia wasn’t sure why she was
asking any more questions, but something in the back of her mind told her to
keep going.
“Yes, I do remember him saying something about a baby with an old
Canadian girlfriend of his. He just mentioned it casually, didn’t show me any
pictures or anything like that.” Pause. “I still can’t believe that he’s gone.
His father also died young, killed while covering a war, I think, when Daniel
was a baby. And his father had survived the Holocaust...”
“Is that right?” Here was a biographical detail that was not in the file.
Was it significant? Time would tell. But there was no point in detaining the
undoubtedly very busy Dr. Bloom any longer. “Well,” Claudia said, “it’s been
interesting talking to you, I would have said a pleasure if the subject wasn’t
a painful one.”
“Likewise, Detective.”
“Call me Claudia. I’d like to talk to you again, on other matters, if you
don’t mind.
Tal vez en español.”
“Sí, cómo no, entre latinas.” Cici laughed. “
Con mucho gusto,” she added.
“Adiós, pues.”
“Hasta luego.”
The stroller
was the last piece to arrive on the carousel, long after Megan’s suitcase,
which was now standing upright with Megan trying to balance a restlessly
squirming Sam on top of it. Betty was grateful that Megan refrained from giving
her assembly instructions as she was struggling to unfold the stroller, which
bore the brand name MACLAREN. Finally, with a painful pinch on her thumb, she
had the contraption set up, and Megan put Sam in it with a swoop. Betty put her
carry-on in the stroller’s basket and began to push it in a running, zigzagging
motion. But Sam was not his cheerful self.
Nor was Betty’s mind mainly on amusing Sam. When they were passing the
domestic gates on the way to baggage claim, she had noticed that one of them
announced an Air Canada flight to Montreal departing at 3 PM. I’d like to be
on the flight, she had thought at the time, but there was no staff at the
gate, and she let it go. Now she knew that she wanted to be on that flight.
She told Megan that she needed to go to the toilet, and while there she
called Air Canada on her cell phone. She pressed 2 for French and asked if
there were any seats on that flight. “Techniquement le vol
est complet,” the agent told her, but before Betty had a
chance to ask what was meant by a technically full flight the agent said that
if Madame could be at the gate by two o’clock she was practically sure of
getting a seat.
Yes, Betty thought as she walked back to meet the waiting Megan and Sam,
it was time to go home.
If she were to get on that three-o’clock flight, and if the flight was
not delayed, she should be at home by five-fifteen if she took the Aérobus and
then a taxi from the bus station. Paul would most probably not be home yet. One
some occasions he would surprise her by coming home early – around four-thirty
– but this was unlikely. This time she would be the one to surprise him, since
she had told him the previous day that she probably wouldn’t be home before
Wednesday. And she wanted to be with Paul, more than anything else. All feeling
of désamour was forgotten. Perhaps
there would even be some pre-dinner lovemaking. Or at least
kissing. She missed Paul’s warm lips. She had not been able to bring
herself to kiss Tom Radnovich on the lips. At least in that way she had been
faithful to Paul. The unexpressed flirtation with Cary Seligman was also buried
under a deep layer of memory.
And then there was Megan. She loved Megan, and she loved Sam. But by this
time they had spent enough time together. Especially in view of Megan’s two
frustrated dates with Tom Radnovich, while Betty’s casual outing with him had
turned into a hot night of sex. And Betty felt bothered by Megan’s assertion that
she was not in her league (not in
[Betty’s] league, as she might have written it in
her thesis). Megan, May Green, the porn star whom millions,
or at least tens of thousands, of red-blooded Canadian men lusted after? And
Betty’s intuition had told her that Tom would have rather been with Megan than
with her, and that it had been very disappointing for him to have to cancel the
date because of work.
“That’s great,” Megan said when Betty told her of her plan. “Let’s go
home and have lunch, and then I’ll drive you to the airport.”
“Thanks,” Betty said, “but wouldn’t that cut into Sam’s nap time? I can
take a taxi.”
“Okay, I’ll call you one.”
Tracy Schiller
called him back a little after eleven and told him that the case against
Lejla’s brothers was looking stronger by the hour, and was turning into
something much bigger: a conspiracy case. By collating Lejla’s killing with
some that had happened in Brooklyn, a pattern had emerged that pointed to a
kind of honor-killing exchange, on the principle of
I’ll kill your sister if you kill mine, operating at the Brooklyn
mosque. The imams, of course, pretended to be appalled, and promised to
cooperate with the investigation, but Tracy took the promise with a big grain
of salt.
The upshot was that the Murovas were off the hook as far as Lejla was
concerned. What this meant was that they, and some of the other Gremlins (as
Claudia liked to call them), would have to be approached as potential
informants and not suspects. And it would be by Tom and Claudia, not Radnovich
and Orsini. Right after lunch.
When Safet saw them approaching, he dropped the tire he was carrying and
rolled it along the ground toward them, propelling it with a tire iron, as a
little boy might roll a hoop. He dramatically stopped it when it was within
five feet of the detectives. “Hello, Detective Radnovich,” he said with a grin.
“Who is pretty lady?”
“My name is Claudia,” the pretty lady said, pronouncing her name in the
Spanish way, as she reached her hand out to Safet, who kissed it in the
European style. “I am Detective Radnovich’s partner.”
“Not Orsini?” Safet said.
“That was for the case of Lejla,” Tom said. “We’re here to get some
information from you, and maybe your brother if he’s here, about what happened
at Old Nick’s last October fifteenth.”
“Last October fifteen? Accident
shooting journalist Wilner? We tell you everything already. Friends get
together, take drinks, somebody shoot. Accident.”
Safet shrugged his shoulders. “Lejla Begović, no accident.”
“But there’s something that’s bothering us,” Claudia said. “Someone
telephoned Steve Lusha, the owner of Old Nick’s, to tell him that you were
coming and that you were armed.”
“Armed?” Safet asked.
“Guns,” Tom clarified.
“Guns? Maybe somebody have gun for protection.
Steve and his friends, they got armed.”
“Maybe because they were protecting themselves from you guys,” Tom said.
“So who knew about you and your friends going to Old Nick’s? Whose idea was it?
It’s not exactly in your neighborhood.”
Safet laughed. “We don’t go drink in our neighborhood. Too close wife.
Too close mosque.” He laughed again. “My wife Christian, so okay, but other
wifes Muslim, not okay. Understand?”
“Yes,” Claudia said with a chuckle of her own, “we understand. But why
specifically Old Nick’s on that night? Who proposed it?”
“Don’t remember,” Safet lied transparently.
“I think you do,” Tom said with a deliberate note of impatience, “and
you’re wasting our time by not telling us. Somebody will tell us, you know.”
“I mean,” Safet said, “I don’t remember name. Friend of
Haris Karimaj. Come from Kosovo. UÇK.”
“That’s the KLA,” Tom said in an aside to Claudia, and then, to Safet,
“Could his initials be RS?”
Safet’s face turned red. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe no.
Don’t remember. Must go back to work.”
As they walked away, Tom pointed out Safet’s brother Omar, bringing some
tools to yet another worker, to Claudia. “Shouldn’t we question him too?” she
asked. “Wasn’t he also there?”
“That isn’t quite clear. They haven’t been consistent about that. He’s
supposed to be a good Muslim boy so he’s not supposed to be in a bar. But he’s
pretty simple-minded. I think Karimaj is the guy to question next. Let’s do
that tomorrow morning. He really was in the KLA, he was injured fighting, and
he’s pretty much the leader of the gang. He’s the one who’s actually from
Gremnik.”
“Hmmm,” Claudia said.
Betty’s
planning had been optimistic but successful. The driver of the 4:30 Aérobus had
already closed the door but opened it again when he saw Betty approaching
(because of Betty’s looks, Megan would have said), and there was no shortage of
taxis outside the Central Bus Station. It was only a little after five when she
was walking up the stairs of her apartment house.
As she passed the apartment of their next-door neighbors, Catherine and
Patrick Langlois, she heard some strange noises coming from behind the door.
She stopped to listen, and soon realized that they were human grunts. Catherine
and Patrick, a couple in their mid to late thirties, were engaged in some
late-afternoon sex, as she was hoping to do with Paul. But the sounds were too
loud to be coming from the bedroom; they must have been doing it on the
living-room sofa, not far from the entry door. And Patrick’s grunting voice was
about an octave higher than his very low speaking voice. But Betty had always
thought that that low voice was an affectation, for Patrick’s build was more
like that of a tenor than of a traditional basso profundo.
The grunts seemed to be subsiding, and she went on to open her door. As
she had expected, Paul was not home yet.
She went into the living room, pulling her carry-on behind her, sat down
on the sofa and flipped her sandals off. There was so much on her mind that it
went blank for a few minutes. She found itself in a kind of fast-forward
daydream, with scenes from the last few days hurtling past one another. She was
brought out of it by the slamming sound of the Langlois’ door. It would seem
strange that one of them would be leaving, or that anyone would be entering, so
soon after what they had been doing. Then she heard Paul’s key opening the
door. And she understood.
She turned her head to the left so that she could see Paul through the
opening from the hallway to the living room, as he was passing on the way to
the bathroom. His jacket was over his arm, his tie was loose and askew, the
four top buttons of his shirt were open, and his belt was unbuckled. He had not
noticed her.
“Hi,” she said.
“Betty? I...” For once Paul was speechless, and Betty was glad.
“I know what you were doing.”
“I... I can explain,” he said as he walked into the living room, his belt
buckled again.
“I know you can. You’re very good at explaining. But you don’t have to.”
He sat down in an armchair across from the sofa. “No,
really. I went to the office really early this morning – I was in the
middle of a case – and I finished it, so I came home, and Catherine was coming
home at the same time. She asked me when you were coming back and I said I
didn’t know, but probably tomorrow. Then she asked me to come in for a moment,
she had something to show me. And she did. Her twat.
She just pulled down her skirt, and said that she’d been waiting for that
moment ever since they moved here.”
“And of course you couldn’t say no thanks.”
“I... It’s been a week since you and I... I just...”
Betty’s feelings about Paul’s stammering caromed between amusement,
satisfaction and pity. “It’s okay,” she said, “I also fucked a guy in New
York.” The words rushed out of her like the air from a popped balloon. On the
Aérobus she had been pondering over which verb to use –
had sex with, slept with, spent the night with, screwed, fucked and
even, if the mood were lighthearted enough, shagged
– but in the rush of words only fucked
felt right. Paul had just fucked Catherine Langlois.
Paul’s face looked strained, a visible sign of his effort to find
something to say. Betty didn’t care. Suddenly she knew what
she had to say.
“Paul,” she began, as calmly as she could, though inside her she felt the
words rushing to come out, just like the earlier ones, “I don’t want to live
with you anymore.”
Paul now looked petrified. “You mean you want a divorce?”
Why did he have to rephrase things in legal terms? Maybe he was scared,
and he felt safer amid legalities than emotions.
“Not necessarily,” Betty said. “Maybe eventually.
Or maybe we’ll get back together. I’m just talking – and I know you hate the
expression – about the here and now.”
Paul took a deep breath that was almost, but not quite, a sigh. “All right,”
he said, “I’ll move out.”
“No,” Betty said quickly, “I’ll move out. I still have my old room at
maman’s house. I spent a night there
last week, and it felt very comfortable. Where would you go? Since your parents
moved to Westmount you don’t have your room anymore.”
She felt grateful to Paul for not questioning her about her reasons for
wanting out. Not that he was deliberately refraining from asking; it was
probably the combination of guilt over his action and shock over her revelation
that kept him temporarily tongue-tied.
If he had asked her, what would she have told him? That she wanted some
freedom? That she was tired of him? That she wanted to fuck other guys? And
would he, perhaps, have suggested an “open marriage”? Better to leave these
things unsaid, at least for the time being.
“I haven’t unpacked yet,” she said, “so for now I’ll just take my little
suitcase.” She would wash her dirty clothes at her mother’s house, just as she
did when she was a teenager. “I’ll come back tomorrow to get more stuff.”
While Paul was at the office. She suddenly remembered that
she was due to start her course of birth-control pills the next morning, and
while Dr. Bouchard was sure to have plentiful supply of them at her office,
there might not be any at home. “I just need a few things out of my drawers in
the bedroom.”
He was met by a
somber-looking Yasmina when he entered the bank at ten to six, the death
certificate in his attaché case. She didn’t greet him but said simply, “Daniel
Wilner is dead? I can’t believe it.”
It had surprised him that no one at that branch had learned of the
killing, which after all had been covered (though briefly) in the press and on
the television news, at the time that it happened. Maybe because, at a bank,
the big news on that day had been – Tom remembered it well – the cut in
interest rates that led to a big surge in stock prices.
“Did you know Daniel well?” Tom asked. He already knew that Wilner had
last been at the bank, to access his safe-deposit box, on the day after
Columbus Day, two days before Old Nick’s.
“Yes!” she said enthusiastically and then blushed. “Maybe not so well,”
she corrected herself, “but he used to come in quite often, at least at first.
Then he would go away for long periods of time, and suddenly he would show up
again. I was always the one who showed him to his box.” And maybe showed him
her box, he thought lasciviously. Yasmina might well have been one of the
“lot of young ladies” that, according to Eddie the super,
Daniel had brought to his apartment.
“Well,” Tom said, “we’re still investigating, or rather reinvestigating,
his killing, and if you don’t mind I would like to find out more about him from
you.”
“I don’t mind, Detective,” Yasmina said softly.
“Call me Tom. Now, it’s almost closing time, isn’t it?” Yasmina nodded.
“Well, I have to give the death certificate to your manager...”
“You can give it to me. I’ll give it to him, and then I’ll be done.”
“Would you like to have something to drink? Coffee, soda...”
Yasmina laughed, for the first time. She had a lovely laugh. “You’re
asking because you think I’m Muslim? I’m not. I’m Assyrian, Christian from
Iraq. You probably know that things got bad for us after the Gulf War, so we
got out.” She paused and smiled. “I wouldn’t mind a nice glass of wine,” she
said.
“That sounds nice. Do you know any places around here?”
“I know a lot of places. I live near here,” she said with a smile. “And
there’s my place,” she added matter-of-factly, with no hint of flirtation.
“Any place would be nice,” Tom said, trying to sound matter-of-fact for
his part.
Her cell phone
was in the pocket of her apron while she was drying the dinner dishes when it
rang. Betty dried her hands in order to pick it up and saw that the screen,
instead of displaying the caller’s number, read
Private number / Numéro privé. What did that mean? No matter.
“Hello,” Betty said after pressing Talk.
“Hi, Betsee.” It was Harvey, of course. He was
the only one, or at least the only non-francophone, who, after all these years,
still said her name in the Quebec French way that she herself had pronounced it
when they were children. She had stopped affricating her dental stops (she had
learned the terminology in a linguistics class at McGill) during a trip to
France when she was twelve. It was also the time when she decided to be anglophone
and to call herself Zoë. When, two years later, she became Betty again, it was
of course pronounced as in English, by everyone except Harvey.
“Hi, Harvey,” she said. “How did it go with Audrey?”
“Fine. It was fun. She went back to New York
Friday night, and got there Saturday morning.”
“I saw her brother Cary yesterday morning, with Megan. He didn’t say
anything about her being back. In fact, he didn’t say anything about her at
all.” Betty giggled.
“Well, as you well know, siblings don’t always know about one another’s
comings and goings.”
“That’s true,” Betty conceded with another giggle.
“Speaking of siblings,” Harvey said after a pause, “I just heard from
mine.” He paused again. “I understand you’ve moved out.”
“For now,” Betty said. “Did he tell you any more?”
“Well, he told me what happened when you came home. He feels shitty.”
“About what? Having been caught?”
“That too.” Harvey chuckled. “The
whole thing, you leaving him.” Another pause.
“I guess I can now talk to you freely. I’m no longer obligated under D. T.
Bist.”
“Under what?”
He chuckled again. “That’s my code for what Paul would sometimes say
after he told me things that he didn’t want you to know about.
Don’t tell Betty I said that.”
She felt speechless for a good fifteen seconds. “What kinds of things?”
she finally managed to ask after taking a deep breath. “Like cheating on me?”
she asked lightheartedly, sure that the answer would be
of course not.
“Well, by his definition it wasn’t cheating, because it only happened out
of town, when you weren’t with him. We had some arguments about that, as you
can imagine. This time it was you who was out of town, so he used the same
argument.”
“Paul has been fucking other women?” she asked slowly, incredulously. “So
this time with Catherine wasn’t the first?”
“The first in Montreal, I think, whatever that’s worth.”
“So what places did it happen in?”
“Toronto, Québec, Ottawa... When he would be away on legal business, or
visit our cousins in Toronto. Not that he particularly tried, but he’s
good-looking, and women go for him.”
“Did he tell you that I fucked a guy in New York?”
“Yes.”
“But I told him, and I was going to tell him anyway. I thought that maybe
we were ready for an open marriage, but really open, no hiding. Now I see that
it’s been half open all along.”
“Yeah,” Harvey said with a laugh, “a one-way opening.”
“But anyway,” Betty went on, “what other things did he tell you that you
weren’t supposed to tell me about?”
“Mostly things he said about Daniel, negative things. As if my feelings
for Daniel didn’t count. You know how
much I loved your brother.”
“Of course, Harvey. Did you know that I saw your
mother in Toronto?”
“Yes, she told me.”
“She said that Paul resented Daniel for becoming your best friend. When
Paul was little he said that he hated Daniel.”
“Yeah, I think he did, maybe still does. Last year he told me something,
under D. T. Bist. He had this pro bono client, a Kosovo Albanian...”
“I remember. He was called Dick.”
“Some time before you were married, but Dick thought that you already
were, he said something about Missis Berman, and Paul told him that you were Miz
Wilner and always would be.”
“Paul told me about that.”
“But Dick then asked if you were related to Daniel Wilner – ‘relationship
of journalist Daniel Wilner?’ is how he put the question – and Paul told him,
and then said that this was a relationship he could dispense with. I’ll bet he
didn’t tell you this part.”
Betty felt stunned, and it took her a while to respond.
“You’re right,” she said. “He didn’t. I remember thinking that there was
something incomplete about the way Paul told me that story, but I thought he
might have skipped something that Dick had said, not Paul. By the way, I just
happened to be thinking about this Dick yesterday, when I was reading in the
paper about Albanians in Kosovo. None of them had names that were remotely like
Dick. Do you happen to know his real name?”
“Not exactly. It was something that sounded a
little like Richard, but not really Richard. Maybe Richep,
or something like that. But I can find out, if you’re really interested.”
“Not really, just curious.”
“Well, you got me curious too. I’ll let you know when I find out. How’s
the thesis coming?”
“Fine. I put it all on a CD, so I could work on
it on Megan’s computer. Now I can do it on my mother’s, though at some point
I’ll get mine out of the apartment, when I feel really ready to make the move.”
“So you don’t feel ready yet?”
“I don’t know, Harvey. I feel readier now than I did ten minutes ago. You
know, my mother didn’t seem at all surprised to see me with my suitcase. And
later, after we’d talked, she said, ‘When you’re ready you’ll know.’
Quand tu sera prête tu le sauras, she
said.” She suddenly remembered something. “Speaking of computer, the detectives
in New York gave me a CD that’s supposed to have Daniel’s writings on it. They
found it in a safe-deposit box that no one knew about.”
“Wow! That should be interesting,” Harvey said.
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