14
Webster’s Third did in fact have entries
for unlove, both as a verb (‘to cease
to love’) and as a noun (‘absence of love,’ ‘hate’). The static definition of
the noun didn’t square, in Betty’s mind, with that of the verb. She would, she
decided, use it in a dynamic sense, that of désamour,
whenever she needed it.
She
returned to her desk, turned on the computer, opened the folder
DW/Articles/Drafts, and began to read the file titled 1998-10-10 (last modified
October 12) after she had attached it to the e-mail message that she sent to
Claudia Quintero. She felt her heart trembling, knowing that it was her
brother’s last preserved piece of writing. As usual, there was no heading.
Yesterday
I met Miss Sarajevo.
Not the Miss Sarajevo, [look up name], who
won the title in 1993 and was on the cover of the Passengers’ vinyl record. The
one I met is just as pretty, and of the right age (she just turned nineteen) to
have won the title this year. Except that she doesn’t live in Sarajevo any longer.
For the past three years she has lived in New York, with her parents and two
brothers. Her older sister did, however, remain in Sarajevo, and she was in
fact a contestant in that famous 1993 competition.
I actually
met her two days ago, last Saturday, in Greenwich Village, in the company of
two girlfriends, fellow students at Bronx Community College. After we had met
and introduced ourselves, and I had told them that I am a journalist, they
asked me not to use their real names if I were to write about them. And so I
will call her Nina. Of her friends, one is Croatian (I will call her Milena)
and the other is Albanian from Kosovo (I will call her Rita). A decade ago, all
three would have been Yugoslavian, and, had they met, talked in Serbocroat. But
Rita, while she had learned the language in school, refuses to the speak it,
and the three friends are quite content to converse in English. Milena has been
in this country the longest, eight years, speaks English like a native, and
knows her way around New York. She also smokes, and it was through her smoking
that we met.
I
was sitting at a table in the nonsmoking section of Caffé Reggio, sipping my
Cappuccino while absorbed in reading the latest of Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus
novels, when the telltale whiff of tobacco smoke reached me. I looked up and
saw the three young women at the table next to mine, and said to the smoker,
“Did you happen to notice that this is the nonsmoking section?” “I’m sorry,”
she said, and immediately put her cigarette out. The other two giggled, and
then the prettiest one (Nina) asked if I would like to sit with them. My
attention to the book had already been broken, so I agreed.
Somehow,
in the course of the conversation that followed, Nina managed to suggest to me
privately that we meet alone, the following day, and passed me a slip of paper
with her cell-phone number.
And
so it was that yesterday I actually met Miss Sarajevo.
That was all. Where are the juicy parts? He
probably “met” her in bed, Betty said to herself. And would this be of any
interest to the New York detectives?
”So there was an Albanian girl involved,” Claudia said to Tom.
“From Kosovo. Too bad there are no clues as to who she might
be.”
“Except that I think I know who Milena is,”
Tom said. “Lejla’s mother told us about a Croatian friend of Lejla’s named
Alida. She’s the one who tracked Lejla’s brothers to the mosque in Brooklyn.
I’ll bet the Five-One has tracked her down by now.”
“Let’s get the info,” Claudia said. He says
the Five-One, she thought, just like
cops on television. True, she had heard real-life cops say it, but to her it
always seemed like an affectation. It’s one thing to refer to
the subareas of a
precinct, like 40D, as Four-Oh-David over the radio, just as 145th Street might
be called One-Four-Five Street, but in ordinary conversation...
“Hold on,” Tom said. “So she had a cell phone!
I don’t think they ever found one on her! That’s something I should tell
Orsini. Let me call him.” And, without waiting, he clicked on the number stored
in his cell phone. He got an answer right away. “Listen,” he said, “you
wouldn’t believe this, but we’ve found a connection between Lejla Begović
and Daniel Wilner.” He smiled at Claudia as he paused to let Orsini express his
amazement, or incredulity, or whatever. “Well,” he went on, “she was probably
his last date. We found pictures that he took of her the weekend before he got
killed, and the draft of an article he was going to write about her. There are
two reasons I’m calling you.” He waited for the response.
“Number one, from your point of view, is that
she had a cell phone, at least back
in October. You might want to look into that. Number two is that Wilner wrote in
the draft that when he met her she was with two girlfriends, one Albanian and
one Croatian, and I’m pretty sure the Croatian one is Alida Lovrin. Do you have
her phone number and address handy?”
He listened while Orsini gave him the
information, wrote it down and listened some more. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll let
you as soon as we find out anything.” He clicked off and turned to Claudia.
“Would you like to talk to her?” he
asked her.
“Why me?
You know
more about the case.”
“Well, let’s call her on the desk phone and
use the speakerphone.” And he punched in the digits.
“You have reached the Sprint PCS voicemail box
of...” a mechanical quasi-female voice intoned. “Alida Lovrin,” a perky young
female voice chimed in, saying the name in a fully Americanized way. Claudia
wished that it had sounded more Croatian. Tom pressed 1 and, after the
appropriate beep, said, “Hi, Alida, this is Detective Radnovich of the NYPD fortieth
precinct. We have a few questions to ask you in connection with your late
friend Lejla Begović. Please call me back as soon as possible.” After
leaving his cell-phone number he clicked off.
“We’ll just have to wait,” Claudia said.
“You’re the first person I’ve phoned about it,” Betty said to Megan
after telling her that she had left Paul, including the incident – which Megan
had called love thy neighbor – that
led up to it. “Of course I’ve told my mother, in person, and Harvey knows
because he talked to Paul.”
“So you’re starting the phone calls with me?”
Megan said. Betty’s timing had been good: her call came half an hour after Sam
had fallen asleep.
“Starting and maybe finishing. I think that
with my friends I’ll just send them e-mail. ‘Dear so-and-so, I just want you
know that I am no longer living with Paul in the Plateau but am staying at my
mother’s in Saint-Laurent. You can reach me by e-mail or on my cell phone,
number below.’ And of course the same thing in French.”
“You’re going to send a bilingual message to
every one of your friends?”
“That’s me, Bilingual Betty.
Betty Bilingue.” Megan noticed that
Betty had pronounced her name, in French, in the Quebec way, like
Betsee. As far as Megan remembered this
was not how Betty spoke French.
“Does this group of friends include men?”
“Well, yes, of course I have male friends,
mainly from McGill.”
“You realize that they will be calling you for
dates, now that you’re single.”
“What? That’s preposterous! They’re friends!”
“You’ll have them coming out of the woodwork!
You don’t know the effect you have on men, do you?”
“That’s not true! I told you about that
incident on the bus in Toronto, when I had this stupid feeling that I could get
the guy away from his girlfriend, if that’s who she
was.”
“Let someone older and wiser tell you...”
“Two years older, and
twenty years wiser...”
“In the ways of men, yes.
There are
no stupid feelings, only stupid words and stupid actions.”
Whatever Betty’s response was, it was not
voiced. “So, what’s new with you?” she asked after a pause.
“I’ve got another date with Tom Radnovich,”
Megan said and burst into laughter. “Really, I’m not joking. He’s going to come
to Toronto in two and a half weeks, when he has a three-day weekend. It’s the
American Fourth of July.”
“Did he propose it?”
“Yes, he did. And I didn’t say yes right away.”
“Is that some of that wisdom in the ways of
men that I need to learn? I mean it, Megan, especially if I am going to be
assailed with calls for dates.”
“I see you’re getting it already.”
It didn’t take Alida very long to get back to Tom. “Radnovich,” he said,
and Alida said, “Hello, Detective
Radnović,” pronouncing the name as though in
Serbocroat. “This is Alida.”
Claudia was out of the station, but he didn’t
want to wait for her and decided to question the girl right away. “Hi, Alida,” he
said. “As you know, this is not the precinct that’s handling the case of Lejla
Begović, though I was involved in the case until a few days ago. But we’re
looking into a different case, that of Daniel Wilner. Does that name mean
anything to you?”
Alida was silent for a few seconds, as though
searching her memory. “I don’t think so,” she finally said.
“Do you remember going to Greenwich Village
last Columbus Day weekend with Lejla and another friend?”
“Oh, yeah! I do
remember! We met a guy named Daniel at a caf... coffeehouse! It’s just that I
don’t think he, like, told us his last name. We didn’t tell him ours either,”
she said with a giggle. “What about him?”
“Well, he was killed a few days after that.”
“Oh, no!
He was so
nice! Lejla thought he was hot!”
“Did she? Well, do you know if she got
together with him again?”
“Yeah, she did.” Alida giggled again. “She
told me about it the next week. But you say he got, like, killed...”
“Yes.” Not like
killed, but killed, he wanted to say,
but didn’t.
“He said that he was going away in a few days,
to the Balkans in fact, and that it was, like, interesting to meet three girls
from the Balkans. The Balkan Babes, he called us.”
“And who was the third girl?”
“It was Flora.”
“Flora?”
“Actually it’s Vlora, with a V, but she calls
herself Flora.”
“And her last name?”
“Uh... Karimaj. That’s K-A...”
“I know how to spell it,” Tom said, trying not
to let his voice show how the revelation had affected him. “Have you seen her
recently?”
“Not since finals, three weeks ago. We’re not,
like, really friends outside of school, you know.”
“I understand. So you don’t know much about
her, do you?”
“Well, I know she came from Kosovo, like, a
year ago. She’s got a brother here.”
“Do you know the brother’s name?”
“No, she always just said ‘my brother.’ But
he’s got a girlfriend that’s, like, British.”
“I see,” Tom said.
Like British, indeed. “You’ve been very helpful, Alida. Thank you.”
“No problem, uh, Detective
Radnović.”
He couldn’t wait to tell Claudia that, of all
people, Haris Karimaj’s sister had been present at Lejla Begović’s initial
meeting with Daniel Wilner. What a tangled knot! Was it perhaps through Flora
and not, as they had previously surmised, through one or both of the
Begović brothers that Omar Murova had met Lejla? And was this Vlora or
Flora still around, or had she gone back to Kosovo with her brother? Sheila
would know, wouldn’t she?
Claudia still wasn’t at her desk. Tom walked
into DePalma’s office, the door of which was ajar. “Just the man I wanted to
see,” DePalma said. “I got the information you asked for. Sheila’s last name is
Holt, she’s legal, and her occupation is waitress slash bartender.”
“That almost sounds like a headline in the
Post,” Tom said. “But thanks, that’ll be
very useful. Do you, by any chance, know where Claudia is?” he asked.
“I do, but it’s not by any chance, but by design.
There was a homicide report that needed some looking into, and everyone else
was tied up, so I sent her out. I’ll let you know when I hear from her.”
“Do you think I’ll need to join her?”
“I won’t know until she calls.”
“It’s just that there’s been a huge
breakthrough in the Wilner case, and it may even be connected to the
Begović case. You see, we have evidence that Wilner and Lejla met the
weekend before he got killed, and they had a date. And the sister of the leader
of the Gremnik Boys was there when they met. So there’s
all kinds of possibilities.”
“There sure is... are. I’m impressed. Now, you
said ‘evidence.’ What do you have?”
“Photos that Wilner had taken of
Lejla, that were on a memory card in his safe-deposit box.
Ditto an article that he was writing about meeting her. And a third girl who
was there when they met, a Croatian girl that I just talked to. She’s the one
who gave me the name of the Albanian girl.”
“Well, if you have hot leads to follow before
they evaporate, go to it. I’ll tell Claudia about it when she checks in.”
Tom thought for a moment. “They’re not
that hot. We need to map out our
strategy, about where to go next, and I’d rather do it with her. I’ll call her
and see what’s going on.”
Rather than read any more of Daniel’s articles, Betty went back to
MW and opened
Life. Here the files had names befitting the chapters of a book:
Intro, Ch01, Ch02 and so on. So the book
that, according to Megan, Daniel had been working on was about their father!
She opened Intro.
Michael Wilner
(1935–1973), known to all who knew him as Miki, was, first and foremost, a
journalist. His book The Long Seventh Day,
dealing with the Six-Day War and its aftermath and based on first-hand
reporting, was an international bestseller (in German, English, French and
Hebrew) and is still cited by Middle East analysts for the accuracy of its
predictions about developments in the region.
His journalistic writings in German,
however, covered a great many areas (he was what is known there as
Publizist), in culture and politics. I
will include samples of his writings, in my translation, in this book.
But Michael Wilner was many other
things, some of them contradictory. He was a Polish Jew (by birth), and he was
a German (by choice). He was a Zionist, and he was an anti-Zionist. He was a
public figure, and he was a very private person. He was my father, and he was
not.
This is not the place to elaborate on
what I mean by the last statement. Suffice it to say that my earliest memory
connected with him is that of his funeral, when I was just two, after his body
had been sent from Israel to Montreal for burial after the Yom Kippur War.
My quest for my father began in earnest
a little over a decade ago, when I was fourteen. This book is about that quest.
I gained knowledge about my father from
his writings and from four women who held important places in his life and in
mine. There is my mother, Mireille Bouchard, who was Miki’s wife during the
last three years of his life. There was my late great-aunt Fela Rozowski, the widow
of his maternal uncle Leon Rozowski. There is Brigitte Wilner, the famous
German actress, who was Miki’s companion during a period of twenty years (his
wife for fourteen), and who took his surname as her stage name long before they
were married. And there is Nili Rozen, his oldest friend, from his time at
Kibbutz Refadim in Israel as a teenager.
Other people helped my along on my
quest, and I will mention them in appropriate places.
I would like to dedicate this book to my
beloved sister and Miki’s posthumous daughter, Betty Wilner, in the hope that
she will let herself be inspired by our father as I was.
The last sentence was too much for her. She
began bawling as she had never remembered doing, with tears pouring down on the
keyboard, and made no effort to stop. She was hearing Daniel’s voice from the
beyond, sa
voix de l’au-delà, talking to her as
she hadn’t heard it since they were children.
Getting Daniel’s book published, with whatever
editing might be needed, would be her next project, as
soon as her thesis was done. Maybe she would even translate it into French. Why
not? Miki had spoken French with Mireille. Why shouldn’t francophones learn
about him?
When her crying had subsided she lifted her
head to look at her clock, and it came to her that her clock hadn’t been on the
wall above her window in seven years, since she took it with her when she moved
in with Paul. She looked at her watch, and calculated that it had been
twenty-two hours since she last spoke with Paul. Might as well make it twenty-four,
she said to herself. She would call him at five-thirty. No, by then
maman would be coming home. Five
o’clock, then.
When Claudia told him that she would be tied up in the current case for
several hours, Tom Radnovich thought of asking Orsini if he would be interested
in joining him, but decided against it. The Lejla Begović case was
currently on hold at the 51st while Brooklyn detectives were investigating the
mosque, and Orsini probably had other fish to fry. Whatever could be done at
the moment, Tom thought, he could do it solo. Like filling in
a crossword puzzle.
His colleagues sometimes called him a
puzzle-solver, and it wasn’t always meant as a compliment, especially when it
came from Claudia, who liked to contrast his “so-called left-brained”
personality with her own “so-called right-brained” nature. She emphasized
so-called because, having studied
psychology, she knew – and admitted – that the lateralization common in pop
psych was pseudoscientific at best. But the fact remained that her method was
intuitive while his was deductive, and that was perhaps why they worked
together so well. They had managed to solve a number of cases by combining
their approaches.
Now he felt as if he were working on one of
those theme puzzles, like the Sunday
Times crossword, in which he had managed to locate the theme clues (the
ones that in a less sophisticated puzzle would be set off with question marks)
but had not yet figured out the theme.
He tried to trace some connections, and so, on
a yellow pad, wrote out a list of names.
Daniel Wilner. Betty Wilner. Paul Berman. Rexhep
Shkodra. Haris Karimaj. Vlora Karimaj. Lejla Begović. Omar Murova. Safet
Murova.
Nothing clicked. There were other names, but
they didn’t fit: Steve Lusha. Julia Lusha. Alida Lovrin. Emrush Thelu.
Finding out the whereabouts of Vlora Karimaj
turned out to be simple. All it took was a call to her brother’s home phone,
which was answered by Sheila. She expressed no surprise when Tom addressed her
as Miss Holt, probably because in England, where all law enforcement is under
the Home Office, even a village constable would be able to get such information.
She confirmed that her boyfriend’s sister had gone back to Kosovo with him, and
while she had every expectation that Haris would come back – “He’d better come
back,” she said, “I’m pregnant, you know” – she was not so sure about Flora.
Great, Tom thought. What to do next?
He remembered something that Brian Lin had
said earlier: that the photos of Lejla were the last
personal pictures that Wilner took. They had probably been taken on
Sunday, October 11, when the date with Lejla had taken place. But Yasmina had
reported that Daniel had told her about an “exhausting weekend,” so that he and
Lejla may have met again on the following day, Columbus Day. What other
pictures were there from that weekend?
And the Miss
Sarajevo article: it was dated 10/12, and the time references in it (“yesterday,”
“two days ago”) were consistent with that date, but didn’t go beyond an account
of the initial meeting on Saturday. What time on Monday was it last modified?
Why was there no account of what had happened on Sunday? Maybe nothing had
happened besides sex, and Wilner didn’t seem to be the type that would brag
about his conquests. Maybe he began to write the article and decided not to
continue, at least for the time being, because he put the file on a diskette
and deleted it from his hard drive. It was something that, apparently, he had
done every so often, probably whenever he was on the verge of going away, as he
had done in the preceding May and was about to do again, according to Alida,
maybe back to Kosovo, just as NATO was threatening a bombing campaign, though
the threat was soon rescinded.
“Brian,” Tom said as Lin happened to be
passing his desk on his way back from the john, “were there any other pictures
from that last weekend?”
“Yes,” Lin said, “of the Columbus Day parade.”
“Can you tell where they were taken?”
“Easily.
From the steps of the Met.”
“Museum or opera?”
“Museum.”
The Eighties.
That was
just a straight walk across Central Park from Wilner’s apartment.
Probably with Lejla. In that case, Wilner might have been
seen in public with Lejla. But by whom? Who, of the
people on his list, might have gone to watch the parade, of interest mainly to
Italian-Americans?
He looked at the list again. Who would be the
next person to put after Safet Murova?
Of course.
Silvana
DiMaggio. An Albanian-Italian, but still Italian.
A scenario began to write itself in Tom
Radnovich’s mind. Vlora Karimaj, recently arrived from Kosovo, enrolls at BCC
at the end of August, and in the course of September befriends Alida and Lejla
who are also former Yugoslavians (of different nationalities, but all of them
hating the Serbs). Meanwhile Safet Murova and Haris Karimaj are trying to get
Omar, the youngest of the Gremnik Boys, to find himself a girlfriend, but for
the somewhat pious Omar it has to be a Muslim girl. Vlora tells them about
Lejla, whom Omar may already have seen at the mosque but was too shy to
approach. Then Safet and Silvana, watching the Columbus Day parade, see Lejla
holding hands with Daniel Wilner. How do they know who he is? Vlora would know:
she had met him at the same time as Lejla, and knew that he was a journalist
named Daniel. Not a famous journalist, to be sure, but probably known among Kosovo
Albanians, especially those connected with the KLA, and not very favorably at
that. So Safet must have told Karimaj, who checked with his sister. And the
visiting Rexhep Shkodra must have been involved as well. And so a plot to
eliminate Wilner must have been concocted between Karimaj and Shkodra. But was
Safet involved? Was Omar?
Experience showed that when criminals arrange
such an intricate plot, only the leaders know its details, while the underlings
just do their assigned jobs, and may not even know that a plot is afoot.
Of course, if it was Safet who had fingered
Wilner, then he was at least an accessory.
It now seemed imperative to determine the
chronology of Omar Murova’s liaison with Lejla Begović. When did they
meet? And what was the status of their relationship on October 12, 1998? Did he
still, at the time, believe in her purity? It would only be necessary to ask
him some simple, factual questions. And ask Safet similar questions separately.
But also ask him if he had watched last year’s Columbus Day parade, his wife
being Italian.
Back to the tire shop. Once he had
some facts he would present the case to Rick. Probably the
next morning.
It wasn’t quite five yet, but it felt like time to call Paul. He had
probably just gotten home. Betty felt her insides churning as she pressed the
keys on her cell phone – the seven digits that, for six years now, had meant
calling home – and waited for the ring. Paul picked up even before the first
ring was complete. “Hello!” he said in an uncertain voice, probably guessing
that it might be his wife.
“Hi, Paul.”
She
paused, took a deep breath, and said, as calmly as she could, what she had been
meaning to say. “I just want to tell you that I don’t love you anymore.”
“I can’t blame you...”
“I mean it. It’s not just about what happened
yesterday. I started to feel it last week. Just as I knew that I loved you
eight years ago.”
“I understand.”
What about your feelings? she
wanted to ask him. Can’t blame, understand... She wished that he would say I
still love you or I don’t love you either; either one would be okay, or even an
English version of Je t’aime...
moi non plus. “I’m glad you understand,” she
finally said. “I’ll be getting my stuff over the next couple of days.”
“What about
our stuff?”
She laughed. “Okay, I’ll take the left half of
the bed and...” No, she thought, better not joke with
him now. “Let’s not worry about that for a while.” Were there really any of
their joint possessions that she wanted for herself? Well, under partnership of
acquests everything acquired after marriage was joint, but she had been the one
to get all the artwork on their walls and the knickknacks on their shelves, and
she thought of them as hers.
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
“Oh, I’ll miss you too. At least I’ll miss the
Paul that I loved. But I think he’s gone.”
He said nothing.
“Bye, Paul,” she said.
“Would you like to do an uncontested divorce?”
“Sure,” she said. “Whatever,” she added, in an
effort to appear nonchalant.
“Bye, Betty,” he said, and hung up.
Well, that’s done, Betty said to herself. Now
she just had to wait – impatiently – for her mother to come home so that she
could tell her of her discoveries about Daniel.
Tom was not at the station when Claudia Quintero came back. The case had
been a simple one: two Hispanic guys (one Dominican, one Puerto Rican) in their
twenties had gotten into a fight that got out of hand, with the loser’s head
knocked repeatedly into a concrete wall. There were eyewitnesses aplenty. The loser
was DOA at Lincoln, the winner was taken to Riker’s, and arraignment would be
the next morning. It seemed like a classic Man One.
“Where’s Radnovich?” she asked DePalma.
“Back to the tire shop,” the lieutenant said. “He took the subway there a
little while ago. Maybe you’d like to join him.”
“Sure,” she said. She called Tom’s cell phone and he said that, yes, he
would love her to join him. He had plenty to tell her.
He was talking to Safet Murova when she got there. “Excuse me for a
moment,” he said to Safet when he saw her.
“Pretty lady detective,” Safet said. “I excuse you.”
He summarized his scenario for her in five
minutes. “Omar was very hesitant about confirming our hypothetical timeline
with Lejla, though he didn’t deny it. He says that the memory is too painful.
But Safet confirmed it. He thinks that they met in September, claims he doesn’t
know how, though I have my doubts; they began dating in October, chaperoned
dates until November, then unchaperoned, finally sex in January, and the
discovery that she wasn’t a virgin.”
“What about Columbus Day?”
“I was just getting to that.
Waiting for you, actually.”
“I mean, in regard to the timeline. It seems
to have been right around the time that Lejla and Omar started dating, and
maybe she just allowed herself a fling with a guy who was about to go away.”
“That makes sense. What I meant was to find
out if Safet and his wife had been at the parade.”
“Let’s go,” she said.
Back in the chair facing Safet, she began,
“You are married, Mister Murova?”
“Yes,” he said. “Detective Radnovich, he
know my wife. Silvana.”
“Silvana?”
Claudia
asked. “Like Silvana Mangano? Is she Italian?”
“Albanian-Italian, from
Sicilia.”
“So, do you do Italian things, like Columbus
Day?”
“Sure. Every year we go to Eastchester parade.
Parents of Silvana live in Westchester. Is funny, no, Eastchester is in
Westchester?”
“Very funny,” Tom broke in. “So you went there
last year?”
“Sure. Every year we go, since before
married.”
“Does Omar go with you?” Claudia asked.
“Omar, no.
Omar,
Silvana...” Safet clenched his fists and stretched his index fingers, pointing
them at each other like guns.
“Let me ask you a different question,” Claudia
said. “Do you know Flora Karimaj?”
“Vlora?
Sure I
know her. Haris is my friend.”
“Do you know anything about her friends?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “
Lejla Begović was one
friend.”
“Any boyfriends?”
Tom
asked.
“Not sure if real boyfriend, maybe Haris don’t
allow that, but, yes, there was one American boy.”
“Could he have been Italian-American?”
“Could be.
Sure.”
“Thanks, Safet,” Claudia said. “We’ll be in
touch.”
“A pleasure, my lady.”
The partners were silent until they were well out
of Safet’s earshot. “A little hole in your scenario,” Claudia said with a smile
as she unlocked her car.
“Yeah.
I don’t
mind, though. It means Safet is not directly implicated, and it makes it
simpler.”
“You kind of like Safet, don’t you?”
“Yes, Pretty Lady Detective.” Claudia laughed,
but not altogether mirthfully. “So I figure,” Tom went on, “it was Vlora who
fingered Wilner, whether or not she had an Italian boyfriend. She may even have
been set to spy on Lejla. And Karimaj and Shkodra organized the killing.”
“And those three are in Kosovo, so no one’s
getting arrested. Don’t you care?”
“Look, Claudia,” Tom said after clearing his
throat, “we’ve talked about this before. I know my reputation: I’m a puzzle
solver. I care more about solving a case neatly than putting some bad guys
behind bars. The truth is that I want them to be the
right bad guys.”
“And the wrong bad guys walk free,” Claudia
said with a smile that Tom probably didn’t see.
“If they’re the wrong guys
for the case at hand, yes.”
“I’m with you on that, Tom. I guess we’re both
just liberals, as my latest ex would say. His world, and probably the FBI’s
world in general, is divided into good guys and bad
guys, and the bad guys belong behind bars or in the chair, regardless of how
you get them there.”
“Except when the bad guys rat on
badder guys,” Tom said, laughing.
“In which case they become
good guys.”
Tom laughed again. “But in this case,” he
said, serious again, “the right bad guys may well end up behind bars. Because as
of this week Kosovo will be governed by the UN, so there should be the
possibility of extradition. Now what we’ll have to do is build a case. We’ve
got a pretty good circumstantial one, but I want to do better than that.”
“Maybe Sheila knows something about Flora,”
Claudia said. “Her baby’s aunt.”
“Yeah, we should question Miss Holt again.”
“Did you say Holt?” Claudia said. The
resemblance of the surname to that of her ex-husband, a name that had once been
hers, startled her.
“Yeah, I forgot to tell you. Rick got us some
info on her from his buddy in INS.”
“Okay,” Claudia said after a pause, “but
tomorrow. It’s been a long day, and I’m exhausted.”
“Would you like to stop for a drink?”
“Well... somehow putting liquid in me doesn’t
sound as inviting as putting me in liquid. A nice warm bath...”
They had arrived at the station, each of them
ready to call it a day. Tom, Claudia surmised, would go to his gym before his
evening would begin.
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