13
Once again
Betty had slept well in her old bed. When she got up her mother was already
sipping her coffee and munching on a roll. She put on a pair of denim shorts
and a short-sleeved blouse and, with flipflops on her feet joined her mother
for breakfast, but Mireille was already finishing. “
Bonjour, chérie, et au revoir” was all she had time to say.
She could still hear the sound of Mireille’s car driving off toward her
office when she sat down at her mother’s computer. It was slow to turn on – the
computer was four years old, and still ran Windows 95 – and, once it was on,
Betty began to search for the CD slot, realizing after a minute or so that the
computer had none, only a slot for 3-inch diskettes. Why hadn’t her mother
told her that when Betty told her, the night before, that she wanted to use her
computer? Of course: they had spoken in French and Betty had just said
disque, which could just as well stand
for disque souple as
disque compact.
She changed into jeans and sneakers, put on a bra under her blouse, got
her handbag and walked out of the house. She would take the metro back to the
apartment and, once there, call for a taxi with a request that the driver help
her carry her computer, monitor and printer down the stairs into the cab, and
then into the house.
The air was cool, considerably cooler than it had been the previous week.
She had noticed the cooling the day before, but hadn’t paid much attention to
it, but this time she felt a shiver. She went back to the house to borrow one
of her mother’s cardigans, just as she had done when she was a teenager.
Mireille liked them loose-fitting, and they felt nice and tight on Betty. She
liked the feeling around her torso. And along with it came another feeling that
began in her breast and spread throughout her body. She wasn’t sure if she
liked it but could not deny that it was there.
This is it, she thought. Maman
told me that when I was ready I would know it, and I know it.
Because of a CD drive? Why not? Not only does love work in
strange ways, but so does désamour.
Why isn’t there an English word for that? How about
unlove? She thought that had heard the word in songs, as a verb, but if love could be both a verb and
a noun, why not unlove?
She decided while mounting the steps of the Côte-Vertu
station that, when she got back to her mother’s house, she would look it up in
the Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary (Unabridged) that sat so prominently on the far right corner of
Mireille’s desk, facing Le Petit Larousse
and Le Petit Robert that stood
upright, between bookends, on the far left. She had her own
Larousse at the apartment, but she would
leave it there for now. Not so her Oxford
Canadian Dictionary, Paul’s birthday present to her the previous year,
which she found indispensable. She would take it back with her.
She already visualized herself at her old desk, in her old room, in front
of her own computer, when she boarded the train.
”I talked to
that girl Yasmina at Citibank,” Tom said as Claudia was driving them towards
the address that they had been given for Haris Karimaj. Girl?
Claudia thought. She’s close to thirty! “She knew Daniel Wilner,” Tom went on,
“and he had been at the bank just a couple of days before that night at Old
Nick’s.”
“She knew him?” Claudia asked
with a smile.
“Yes. I noticed her blushing when she talked about him, so I asked her if
they’d been in a relationship. You remember what the super said about him. ‘Not
what I would call a relationship,’
she said, ‘but, uh...’ So I asked if anything happened between them on that last
day, and she said no, he’d told her that he’d just met a girl and had had an
exhausting weekend. But the previous time that he’d been there, in May, she
admitted that something had happened.”
“How about you and her? I noticed something
there.”
Tom laughed. “Good eye, Detective. Nothing happened last
night, we just sipped some wine and had some Middle Eastern
snacks, and talked about Daniel Wilner.”
“So he hadn’t been there between May and October? No wonder they didn’t
suspect anything when he didn’t show up again.”
“That’s what Yasmina said.”
They arrived at Karimaj’s block. Claudia found a parking space about four
buildings away and they walked up to the house. Tom rang the bell.
“Yes?” a female voice said through the intercom.
“New York Police,” Tom said. “We would like to talk to Haris Karimaj, if
possible.”
“Sorry,” the woman, obviously from the South of England, said. “I’m
afraid it isn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Tom asked
“He’s not here. He went back to Kosovo to visit his family, now it’s been
liberated.”
Family? Claudia wondered. Did that mean wife and
kids, or parents and brothers and sisters?
“When do you expect him back?” Tom asked.
“I wish I knew. Soon, I hope. I’m his girlfriend.”
“May we know how long you’ve known him?” Claudia asked.
“About six months,” the girlfriend said. “Does it matter?”
“It would have mattered if it had been longer, but no, it doesn’t. Sorry
to have bothered you, Miss...”
“Sheila. No bother. Shall I let you know when he comes back? He’s not in
trouble, is he?”
“No, we just need some information about something that happened last
October.”
“That’s before my time, innit? Shall I tell him you called when he comes
back?”
“Yes,” Tom said, “please tell him Detective Radnovich came by. He knows
how to get in touch with me.”
“Bye, then,” Sheila said and switched off the intercom.
“Back to square one, aren’t we?” Claudia said as they began walking back
to her car.
“Not really,” Tom said. “There’s still Emrush Thelu...”
“You really like saying those Albanian names,” she said with a laugh,
“don’t you?” She had meant to add ‘unlike Spanish names like mine,’ but thought
better of it. It would only make her partner even more defensive. There was
already some palpable tension between them over his refusal to talk to Omar
Murova when they had the chance, the day before.
But Tom beat her to the punch. “I like saying all kinds of exotic names,
including Spanish ones,” he said with a laugh of his own, “if they’re really
Spanish. I have my reputation as the linguist cop, you know.”
They were back at her car. “
The Linguist Cop. That could be the title of a newspaper
column. It’s something you could get into when you retire.”
“If there are still newspapers when I retire,” Tom said, laughing again.
This time Claudia joined him.
“Maybe a book, then,” she said as she buckled her seatbelt. “So how do we
find this Em Rush, or whatever his name is?”
He gave her the directions. “What I was going to say...”
“... before you were so rudely interrupted...”
They were laughing again. “... was that Thelu is
married with little kids and is much less likely to go scooting off to Kosovo
on a moment’s notice. His wife is also Kosovar, so they would probably go as a
family, and that would take a little planning. Karimaj can just say ta-ta to
his English bird and hop on a standby flight to Rome...
“The flight wouldn’t be standby, Mister
linguist cop, the passenger would.”
“Touché. Hop
standby on a flight to Rome or Athens or wherever, and make his way to
Kosovo by way of Albania or Macedonia. I don’t think the Thelu family could do
it quite that way.”
But it turned out that they had done it, somehow. Just like Haris Karimaj,
they had left on Monday. Perhaps even together.
Claudia felt like saying,
Let’s go back and talk
to Omar, but she was tired of the runaround. They drove back to the
precinct. It’s time to look at other pending cases, she said to herself.
After inserting
the disc Betty double-clicked the icon for CD Drive (D:),
and a window with four folder icons appeared, titled
Articles, Fun, MW and Stuff.
Double-clicking on Articles revealed subfolders:
Drafts, Published_95, Published_96,
Published_97, Published_98 and Ready.
The subfolders in turn contained files, most of which were Word documents,
which Betty knew well, but some had extensions that were not
.doc and she didn’t know what to do with
them. The names of all the Word documents had the form of a date with the
format yy-mm-dd, but as she passed
the cursor over them she noticed that in each case the “Date modified” was
later than the nominal date. She concluded that Daniel had named his article
files for the day on which he began to write them, and her conclusion was
confirmed when she right-clicked on the icon and then left-clicked Properties:
the date after “Created” did in fact coincide with the one that constituted the
name.
Each of the published articles that she opened bore a title at the head,
and the date and medium of publication at the end. The drafts, on the other
hand, had neither. It appeared, then, that Daniel did not title his articles
until they were finished.
Aside from some articles that had been published in magazines, some of
which Betty was familiar with and some not, most of them had seen the light in
local newspapers in Upstate New York, in such places as Albany, Utica and
Plattsburgh.
The Ready folder contained only
one article, with a strange title: Heq
qafe. It was probably a reference to coffee, Betty thought, in some exotic
language, maybe Hebrew. But as she scanned the first paragraph she saw that it
was about Albanians. This could be important, she said to herself, considering
Daniel’s fate. She would print it out and read it later, she decided, and,
since he had marked it as ready – presumably for publication – she would perhaps
try to get it published. Marni Clark, a friend from McGill, worked at the
Gazette and might tell her how to go
about it. Its “Date modified” was 10/2/98. Was that
February 10 or October 2? Undoubtedly the latter, since Daniel did all his work
in the States, and his computer would certainly use the American convention.
And October 2 was the day that he flew from New York to Montreal for his
sister’s wedding, two days later! His last article, in all probability!
She clicked on the “Back” button twice and found herself in the CD Drive
window again. She opened the Fun folder, and found that here the names of the
files were initialisms, mostly three-letter ones: AWL, BCS, MLR,
QED. AWL was a few paragraphs, obviously incomplete, under
the heading The American Way of Love.
MLR was lyrics for the Maple Leaf Rag,
which she recognized as having been sung at Daniel’s memorial by a group of his
fellow players from the Canadian soccer team at Columbia.
She opened the folder called MW with some trepidation, because she
suspected that it might have to do with their father, Miki Wilner, perhaps even
the planned book that Megan had mentioned. She was right. There were two subfolders:
Articles and Life. The Articles folder had files named by dates, like Daniel’s
own articles, but here the dates ranged from 58-09-27 to 73-09-27. Exactly
fifteen years’ worth of articles! She opened the earliest and found that it was
headed German, West German,
Germanian, by Michael Wilner, translated by Daniel
Wilner. The last one was The End of the
Seventh Day, with the same attributions. My God, Betty said to herself as
she looked at the date once again, this was just before he died, and just after
I was conceived!
She felt drained. But just before moving her right index finger to the
power button to turn off the computer, a two-word phrase jumped into her mind:
Millennium bug!
She didn’t really know what it was, but she knew that it had something to
do with years of the twentieth century being indicated with only two digits,
without the leading 19. Paul thought that it might cause serious trouble. And
Daniel’s dating and naming of files did just that!
She turned off the computer with the resolution that, once she turned it
on again, the first thing she would do would be to
convert all the years from yy to 19yy.
On their way
back to the station, Tom Radnovich and Claudia Quintero agreed that, for future
reference, they should try to find out more about Sheila, such as her last name
and her immigration status. Claudia went to her desk immediately after they
walked in, but Tom noticed that Brian Lin was motioning for him to come over to
his desk.
“I’ve been checking out Wilner’s pictures,” Brian said. “It’s quite a
job, because he used low-capacity cards, only sixteen or thirty-two
megs, so there’s quite a few of them. And any one card has
different kinds of pictures on them. Some of them are what you could call
photojournalism, some are personal, and some could be one or the other,
but there’s quite a
few shots of women in what looks like an intimate setting, nothing that I, as a
cop, would consider pornographic, but, you know...”
“Yes, I understand he was quite a ladies’ man,” Tom said.
“It takes one to know one,” Brian said with a malicious grin, “doesn’t
it?” Tom grinned back. “Well, he was a very good-looking guy,” Brian said, this
time in the out-of-the-closet tone of a connoisseur of good-looking guys.
“There’s something I’m curious about,” Tom said. “Can you open the card
that’s from... May ninety-eight?”
“Sure,” Brian said. “Here they are... fifty-four pictures.”
Tom looked at the monitor, searching for pictures of Yasmina Sliwa, and
found two of them. In one she was seated on a park bench, dressed in a low-cut
black dress and smiling at the camera in a sexy manner. In the other she was in
bed, with only her head and arms out from under the covers, her hair
disheveled, her expression that of being surprised by the camera. So it was
true that something had happened between them in May.
Then he remembered something else that Yasmina had told him. “How about
the most recent card?” he asked Brian.
“That’s from September and October,” Brian said. After some clicks of the
mouse he said, “There’s quite a few of a little boy and his mom...”
“That’s his son Sam and Megan,” Tom said. And so they were. Megan looked
plumper than she was now, and her breasts indicated that she was still nursing.
“...and then there’s what looks like a wedding...”
“That’s his sister Betty’s wedding.” Betty was radiant in a wedding dress
that was surprisingly high-necked for the current fashion and sky-blue, not
white. Paul, the groom, was handsome but stiff-looking in a beige tuxedo.
“...and here’s another girlfriend. These seem to be the last personal
pictures he took.”
Tom turned toward the monitor again to look at the pictures. What he saw
made his heart stop.
Marni had told
Betty that, given the topicality of Kosovo, the
Gazette might well be interested in publishing a posthumous
article, even if written nine months earlier, by a journalist who had been
there and who was a native Montrealer. And so, after downloading Daniel’s
folders into a new folder that she had created and named DW, she spent some
twenty minutes putting 19 before all the yy-mm-dd dates, the article newly
named Ready/1998-09-30 being the last
to undergo the process. She then printed it out – it came to four pages – and
began to read it.
Kosovo was mentioned, of course, but so were Albania, Macedonia, Greece,
Italy and New York. There were a couple of references of the form
As I already wrote in these pages. Betty
knew that those would have to be edited out, and in any case there was no
indication of what paper the article had been destined for. It was, in fact,
about Albanians in general: their clans and clannishness, their custom of the
blood feud (gjakmarrje) codified in
the Kanun, and the expression heq qafe – which can
mean ‘dispose of,’
‘dispense with,’ ‘expunge,’ ‘snub,’ ‘get rid of’ and the like – used to
describe eliminating one’s enemy without the formalities of the code of laws
known as the Kanun.
The article went on to more details of the
Kanun, explaining that it had
supposedly been promulgated by a Kosovar prince named Lek Dugagjini, who had
fought against the Turks in the 15th century. But in Betty’s mind the various
meanings of heq qafe began to spin
and tumble like the sides of a die, until they landed on ‘dispense with.’
Hadn’t Harvey quoted Paul as saying to “Dick” that his relationship with Daniel
was one that he could dispense with? And hadn’t “Dick” confused
relationship with
relative? If “Dick” had mentally translated
dispense with as heq qafe,
then he could easily have misunderstood Paul as saying, “That’s a relative I
want eliminated.”
Betty shuddered. To think that here, in Daniel’s last completed article,
lay a possible clue to his fate!
She recalled her phone conversation with Paul, the preceding Thursday.
She had sensed, she now remembered, that Paul had left something out, and of
course it was what he had said about the relationship he could dispense with.
Paul had told her that he had not seen Dick since the time of that
exchange, and didn’t even know where Dick was. A scenario now formed in Betty’s
mind: Interpreting Paul’s comment, no doubt meant as a joke, as a desire to
have Daniel eliminated, Dick had decided to fulfill that desire as repayment
for Paul’s legal work on his behalf.
She needed to find out more about “Dick.” It was very likely that he had
connections with Albanian gangs in New York; Daniel’s article mentioned how the
various Albanian clans and clan-based gangs interconnect across the globe. Tom
Radnovich seemed to know about these things. Betty knew that she needed to
communicate her findings to Tom, or perhaps Claudia. Preferably
Claudia.
Well, she wondered, should she call back Harvey and take him up on his
offer to find out more about Dick? Or should she call Paul directly?
It gave her a start to realize that until this moment it had not occurred
to her, in the eighteen or twenty hours since her confrontation with Paul, to
talk to him. What effect would
She felt, almost physically, a void in her heart,
un
vide au cœur, in the place where that love had lived for eight
years. Except that it wasn’t painful, nor did it feel like a hunger or thirst
that needed to be sated. Counting the time with Gérard, she had loved a man (or
a boy) for nine years now. It was time to give that reflex a rest.
She could now give free rein to her lustful fantasies, like the one about
Cary Seligman, without guilt or remorse. Of course she probably wouldn’t see
Cary again, but there was no shortage of available men in Montreal.
So, she asked herself, when should she call Paul? At
lunchtime? That would be a good time. There wouldn’t be enough time for
a long conversation, which she didn’t want. She looked at her watch: 11:33.
Another half-hour...
Her cell phone rang.
“Hi, Betsee,” Harvey said, “I’ve got Dick’s name for you.
Its Rexhep Shkodra.” He spelled it out for her before
telling her a few more details and hanging up. She looked for Claudia
Quintero’s number in her call log and found it.
Tom Radnovich
got to Claudia Quintero’s desk just as she was clicking off her cell phone.
“I’ve got some hot news for you,” he said.
“And I’ve got some hot news for you.” They both laughed.
“Ladies first,” Tom said.
“Well, I just got a call from Betty Wilner in Montreal. She told me about
an Albanian guy from Kosovo who was there last year, under asylum that her
husband Paul had helped him get. And as far I can understand there was some sort
of exchange between then that the Albanian misinterpreted as Paul wanting to
get rid of Daniel. And then the guy disappeared. This was a few weeks before
October fifteenth.”
“That’s really interesting.”
“But there’s more. Guess what the Albanian guy’s initials are.”
“No!”
“Yup. His name is Rexhep Shkodra.”
“Wow! Well, let me tell you the news that
I found. Remember what I told you earlier that Yasmina told me
about Wilner, that he’d just met a girl and had a quote exhausting unquote
weekend with her?”
“Of course I remember. It was just a few hours ago.”
“Well, that girl is... was Lejla Begović.”
Claudia looked at him, dumbfounded.
“This was at the time when she may already have been engaged, or
something, to Omar Murova,” Tom explained. Claudia smiled. “Yes, I know,” he
went on. Was he poking fun at her habit of referring to her boyfriends as
fiancés? But that didn’t seem to be it. “We need to talk to Omar,” he said. So
he was admitting that she had been right when they were at the tire shop. “But
now,” he concluded, “we have an angle, which we didn’t have before.”
“But now you also have your RS or SR. At the very least we can try to
find out if someone named Rexhep Shkodra came into the US last October or late
September.”
“Yeah, of course. Rick has contacts in INS.
It’ll be faster than going through channels. But I want us to talk to Omar.”
“So what are we waiting for?”
“Lunch,” Tom said. “And a phone call I have to make.”
Megan had
thought that Sam would ask about ’tie Betty after she left, but he seemed to have
forgotten her. That, in a way, was an encouraging sign. It meant that he would
be all the more likely to have forgotten Tom Radnovich, and whatever bad
feelings he might have had about him, by the time Tom came to Toronto. She had
not called Tom back yet to tell him that he was welcome, but would do so soon.
And when, after lunch, her cell phone rang and the number displayed on
the screen was Tom’s, she was not surprised. A bit anxious, perhaps: what if he
was calling to cancel his July weekend proposal? She let the Spanish tune
tinkle on a few times before pressing Talk.
“Hi, Tom,” she said.
“Hi, Megan.” He paused, seemingly waiting for
her to say something, but at last he went on. “We’ve found something that may
be of interest to you.”
“You mean, Daniel’s hidden safe-deposit box?”
“Yes.”
“Betty told me about it.”
“Well, there are some pictures that Daniel took of you and Sam, back in
September...”
“Yes, that was the last time he was in Toronto. He sent me prints of
those.” She paused as a great big sob began to well up inside her. “They’re
very precious to me.”
“I can imagine,” Tom said with a sympathetic sigh, and fell silent again.
Still nothing about the July weekend? Was he waiting
for her? Should she just go ahead and tell him to come? Megan Kenner, the old
Megan Kenner, even before she was May Green, never had any trouble telling guys
that she wanted them, verbally or otherwise. When she saw Daniel in math class
at North Am, she looked him straight in the eye and smiled when he looked back
at her. That had been enough...
Tom cleared his throat. “About that Fourth of July weekend...”
“Yes?” she said, anxious again. Was he canceling?
“Is that a ‘yes’ I just heard?” he asked with a chuckle.
She laughed, relieved at last. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” she
asked in return, using her sultry May Green voice.
“What do you think?”
“Are we just going to keep asking each other questions?” They laughed
together. “Well, if you want it to be yes then it’s yes.” That was some
runaround, she thought.
“Good. I’m looking forward to it.” Pause. “I’m
very attracted to you.”
Wait till he sees me at my best, she said to herself before saying, once
again as May Green, “Likewise, Detective Radnovich,” pronouncing her
lover-to-be’s surname as three separate syllables: Rad. No. Vich.
It seemed to
Tom that Omar Murova, unlike his brother Safet, was not surprised to see the
detectives returning to the shop only a few hours after the first visit, and
that he was rather eager to talk to them. At first Safet had insisted on being
present at his brother’s questioning, but Tom told him firmly to stay away, and
Omar did not seem to mind. Perhaps he had resented not getting the attention
that Safet had been getting.
And his English turned out to be considerably better than Safet’s. “Is this
about the Wilner case,” he asked, “or about Lejla?”
“If you don’t mind,” Claudia said with seeming impatience, “we ask the
questions.”
“Okay,” Omar said. “Excuse me.” He smiled at Claudia, who half-smiled
back at him.
“Let’s take a walk,” Tom suggested, and they went the same way as he had
done with Safet and Orsini on Friday. “First of all,” he went on, “there’s
something we need to settle once and for all. Were you or were you not present
at Old Nick’s on the fifteenth of October last year?”
Omar hesitated. “Yes or no?” Tom asked again.
“Yes,” Omar said, “I was there. I ran away because I didn’t want it to
get back to the mosque that I had been in a bar, even though I didn’t drink.
Well, I did drink, a Pepsi.” He smiled at Claudia again.
“So you were present at the shooting?” Tom asked.
“I was in the bathroom when it happened. I heard some shots and I ran
outside. I didn’t wait for the others. I took the subway home.”
Claudia took her turn, from an unexpected angle. “Does the name Rexhep
Shkodra mean anything to you?”
Omar began to blush. “Sure, everybody knows about Rexhep. He’s a big man
in UÇK... I mean KLA.”
“We know UÇK,” Tom said.
Claudia’s cell phone rang. She looked at the screen, and her face showed
an impatience to take the call. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked away about
ten paces. Tom took over the questioning about Shkodra.
“Was
he in New York last October?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Omar said, and, in response to Tom’s stare, added, “yes, I think
so. He is a friend of Haris Karimaj. Maybe cousin. I
am not sure.”
“Did you ever meet him?” Tom asked.
“No,” Omar said firmly.
“Are you sure?”
“Look, Detective Radnovich, I know that if I lie to police and later you
find out I lie, I am in trouble. So if I tell you I never met Rexhep, please
believe me.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “Do you know anything about where Rexhep Shkodra might
be now?”
“Probably back in Kosova. Everybody is going back there now that it is
liberated.” He paused. “From Serbs,” he added with a malicious smile.
“From Serbs like me, huh?” Tom said in an
attempt to treat Omar’s remark as a joke.
“Not like you, Detective Radnovich. You are American. Honest police
officer. Serbian police, milicija,
they are crooked and brutal.” Tom happened to know that a few years earlier the
name had been changed from milicija
to policija, but it didn’t matter.
“Specially to Albanians in Kosova.”
“Are you thinking of going back to Koso...” He had begun to say
Kosovo in the usual way, stressing the
first syllable, but changed to the Albanian accent. “... to
Kosova?” Omar seemed to appreciate
the detective’s linguistic sensitivity.
“No,” he said. “I would not go without my brother, and he is married to
Silvana.” There was only the slightest hint of dislike in Omar’s enunciation of
his sister-in-law’s name, and Tom probably wouldn’t have caught it if Imam
Becker hadn’t talked about it. “Also, he is partner in this business.” This was
something that Tom hadn’t known, and might be of some importance. He wondered
if Orsini knew, and, if so, why he hadn’t told Tom.
Claudia was back. She gave Tom a meaningful look, as if to say, that was an important call.
“Why don’t you go back to work?” Tom said to Omar. “Detective Quintero
and I need to talk, and we’ll talk to you again.”
“I am at your disposition,” Omar said. Tom resisted the urge to say, it’s disposal.
They walked back to the shop, Omar approached the workspace, and Claudia and
Tom went to the sidewalk.
“That was Betty Wilner,” Claudia said. “When you were making your phone
call after lunch, I had the idea to call her and ask her if she’d found
anything among Daniel’s documents on the disk that might be like a journal or a
diary, and she said no, but there were lots of drafts of articles that read
like they could be journal entries, and the last one is from October twelfth.
Guess what it’s about.”
“Tell me.”
“A girl from Bosnia that he’d just met. He calls her Nina, but it’s
you-know-who.”
“I remember Megan telling me that he always changed the names of the
people he wrote about,” Tom remarked.
“Betty is sending it to me by e-mail. And I think we should read it
before we talk to Omar any more.”
“You’re right,” Tom said. “The more we know in advance the better, as
they taught us in the academy.”
“As long as we don’t give away what we know,” Claudia said.
They went back to find Omar, who was talking to Safet in Albanian. “We’ll
come back and talk to you some more later,” Tom said.
“Thanks for your cooperation,” Claudia said.
“You are welcome, Detectives,” Omar said with another smile at Claudia.
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