15 It had been another restless night. There had been recurring dreams with Cary Seligman, not as an object of desire on Betty’s part but as a source of legal advice, but each time she was about to ask him for it she forgot what the needed advice was about, and woke up in a sweat of embarrassment. And during her waking spells she pondered her mother’s strangely subdued, almost indifferent response to her account of what she had found in Daniel’s computer files. Even the fact that Daniel had been writing a biography of Miki Wilner, the love of Mireille’s life, seemed to leave her cold, except for a curious remark about Betty’s need for copyright clearance if she were to edit and publish the work. Betty stayed in bed, pretending to sleep, while she heard her mother’s usual morning bustle before going off to work. She must have actually dozed off for a little while, because she didn’t hear the sound of Mireille’s car, and when she was sentient again the house was quiet. As she was showering the explanation came to her. She needed advice about the legal status of Daniel’s intellectual property! Did the will even cover that? The biography was, after all, dedicated to her, Daniel’s beloved sister – thinking about the dedication brought her to tears once again, and she let the shower wash her face – and couldn’t the dedication be construed as a gift? Did an estate lawyer like Cary even deal with intellectual property, or would he have to consult a specialist, the way a doctor like Mireille Bouchard might do? Or maybe she was thinking about Cary because, well, because she was interested in Cary again, now that it was over with Paul, and was sublimating the thoughts into the need for legal advice! She noticed that Mireille had left her a pot of coffee, and there was a clean plate for her at the breakfast table, but no note. Her thoughts turned back to her mother as she turned the radio on. It had been exactly a week since maman had told her of her shame over Daniel’s biological paternity, after the previous night’s confrontation. Maybe the pain and the shame were still there. A week is a short time, unless it is as packed with momentous goings-on as Betty’s had been. The radio was playing the West Side Story Suite. An instrumental Maria had just ended, and the music brought her thoughts back to New York. Should she call Cary? She would have to get his number from Megan. But what exactly would she call him about? Well, saying that she wondered about the rights to Daniel’s posthumous writings would be a good start. And somehow telling him that she was now, practically if not legally, single. Yes: she would tell Cary that normally she would consult Paul about legal matters, but she and Paul had split. And then what? Betty was in Montreal, and Cary was in New York. So what? What’s six hundred kilometers between friends? It didn’t seem to bother Megan, who had a date with Tom Radnovich lined up. It wasn’t much more than the distance between Montreal and Toronto, which hadn’t inhibited Greg and Marcia’s courtship. The orchestra began to play I Feel Pretty as Betty was doing the breakfast dishes. The weather outside looked cool and cloudy, but she was going to put on a dress. The idea of calling Yasmina hadn’t occurred to Tom until he got home and started to think about dinner, but she had no problem with accepting a last-minute invitation to a dinner date. After showering he walked out into the pleasant evening air – it was still light at seven o’clock – and took the 86 crosstown bus to meet her at the restaurant she had chosen. The date proceeded in just the way that New York dinner dates between single people are meant to, and with the help of some fantasizing about Megan it was quite enjoyable. Yasmina turned out to be quite uninhibited in the bedroom, in a way that might have surprised a man less experienced than Tom in the ways of New York women. He took a taxi home, got there at 11:45 and had a good night’s sleep, with vague dreams of Megan. In the morning he called Claudia even before getting to the station. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “My relationship with Megan Kenner has become personal, so I’d appreciate it if you made the calls on police business, like when we need information.” “What do we need?” “To ask her if she knew that Daniel was about to go away on a trip last October.” “Okay,” Claudia said simply. He got to the precinct before Claudia, and Rick wasn’t there either. He remembered what he had said to Claudia about extradition from Kosovo. He ought to check it out with the DA’s office, and Tracy Schiller seemed like the obvious person. He got the answering machine of Tracy’s office, and left a message explaining his query. Claudia and Rick came in together, or at least at the same time. Tom wondered if they had actually been together, maybe even talked about him. He didn’t expect them to do anything behind his back – he was, after all, closer to each of them than they were to each other – and was sure that, if any such talk had happened, one or both of them would tell him. Still, the sight of them walking into the station together, chatting softly, disconcerted him. He needed something humorous to say at the briefing, about the protean changing of the theories of Wilner’s killing. Guess what, he would say, only one new theory this time. And: do you know any more Albanians that we can implicate? It turned out that Claudia and Rick had just run into each other as they were approaching the station entrance, and that Claudia had given Rick a quick, casual briefing that the lieutenant found satisfactory, “except for some loose ends,” as he said before going into office. “What loose ends?” Tom asked her, accompanying her to her desk. “Well, there’s the fact that Lejla is a part of the Wilner case. Not necessarily what happened to her later, but... you know. We’ve been talking to two people who were close to her in one way or another...” “Omar and Alida.” “But we haven’t asked them what they know about each other.” “Hmm,” Tom said. “It’s true, Lejla may have confided in Alida. We ought to quiz her some more.” “But we also need some more definite answers from Omar about him and Lejla. He’s been cagy, pretending not to remember. Maybe we should refresh his memory.” “I suggest we talk to Alida first. She’s been pretty open with us.” “Okay,” Claudia said. “Let me just write up that report on yesterday’s case.” As he walked to his desk, Tom thought that his right-brained, linear attack might have missed some other nodes in the network of names involved in the case. Who else might have known both Lejla and Omar, besides the Begović family, the Gremnik Boys and Alida? Imam Becker? It was time to send those e-mail messages about her situation. Betty turned her computer on, and then remembered that her cell phone had been turned off since the night before. When she turned it on she found a missed-call message, and the call had been from a number with a 917 area code, earlier that morning. Where the hell was that? It didn’t figure among the Canadian area codes that she was familiar with. She decided to call the number back. “Hi, Betty,” a male voice said. The voice sounded familiar but she couldn’t place it. After a pause the voice said, “This is Cary.” She felt faint, and if she hadn’t already been sitting on her desk chair she would have had to sit down. “I didn’t recognize the area code,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say. Cary chuckled, in the way that she remembered his chuckle from Harry’s. “Nine-one-seven? That’s the code for most cell phones in New York,” he said. “I’m just floored that you called me, because I was going to call you.” “Really?” “Yes, to ask you a legal question.” “Well, for that you’ll have to call my office and make an appointment.” Cary chuckled again. “This is personal. I just heard some gossip about you from Audrey, who heard it from Harvey...” Now Betty laughed. “Then it must be true,” she said. “Is it?” “If it’s what I think it is, then it is.” “This sounds like a proposition in formal logic. I took a philosophy class at Stanford called Theories of Truth. You know, like, the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true if snow is white.” Betty laughed again. “That sounds deep,” she said. “Believe me, it is. Sometimes in court we have an argument about the truth of something or other, and then I quote Moore, or Russell, or Tarski...” “Whoever they are.” “You’ve heard of Bertrand Russell, haven’t you?” “Oh, that Russell! I read his biography. One day he just up and told his wife that he didn’t love her any more. That’s what I just did... I mean, my husband, not my wife.” She laughed yet again. Talking with Cary was so easy! “Well,” Cary said with another chuckle, “this brings us back to why I called you.” Betty waited. “To tell you that I really like you.” What should she say? I really like you too? I’m hot for you? I’ve been dreaming about you? “I dreamt about you last night,” she finally said. “About... asking you for legal advice, like I told you.” Cary laughed. “How about setting up an appointment for... for this weekend?” Betty was too stunned to answer, but Cary went on. “A client of mine here in the city has inherited some property on Lake Champlain, and I have to spend the day in Plattsburgh tomorrow and stay over tomorrow night, so I thought I’d stay longer if you’d like to join me. It’s only about an hour-and-a-half drive from Montreal.” Plattsburgh. The place-name rang a distant but recent memory bell. “I don’t drive... I mean, I have a license but I don’t have a car. But I could take a bus...” Betty suddenly realized that she had tacitly accepted the invitation with no hesitation. Well, why hesitate? The man of her dreams – literally – was inviting her to spend a weekend with him. “Saturday morning, for example? There’s a bus that leaves Montreal at nine and gets to Plattsburgh at eleven-fifteen.” So he had checked it out already! “I’ll meet you at the station.” “Sounds good,” Betty said, trying to subdue any excitement in her voice, but doubting her success in doing so. “Great! See you Saturday!” After clicking off, Betty wondered why Cary had proposed Saturday morning and not Friday evening. Did he have a dinner engagement with someone in Plattsburgh? Or did he just not want to be so forward as to propose spending the night together on a first date? She wouldn’t have minded. It was, after all, what she had done with Tom Radnovich, and that wasn’t really a date, and Tom didn’t hold a quarter of the attraction for her that Cary did. And then she remembered: one of Daniel’s published articles, “A Quebecker in New York” (filename: DW/Articles/Published_96/1996-04-22.doc), had been printed in the Plattsburgh Press-Republican. Well, it was now really time to start writing those e-mail messages. It would not be a group mailing, but she would compose one message, copy its text and paste into all the others. And she would type in each recipient’s name individually. Had it been in English only, she could have left the salutation as Dear friend, but in French she would need to shift between Cher ami and Chère amie, so she might as well make it personal. Tom Radnovich was in the process of revising his list by adding branch lines to points off the main line, and specifically lines from Lejla and Omar to two new points labeled Alida Lovrin and Imam Becker. His desk phone rang. “Radnovich,” he said. ”Hi, Detective. This is Tracy Schiller.” “Hi, Tracy. Call me Tom, please.” “Okay. So, Tom, as to that question about extradition...” “Yes?” “You’re not the only one. The issue is gathering steam. It’ll take some time for the UN administration in Kosovo to get set up, and so far extradition is not a priority, but the State Department is working on it. Madeleine Albright knows the Balkans. And let me remind you that even when there’s an extradition treaty in force, these things take time.” “So, in the meantime, should we prepare a case?” “By all means. And make it as airtight as you can. What have you got so far?” Tom gave Tracy a summary of the theory involving Rexhep Shkodra, Haris Karimaj, and his sister Vlora, with the other Gremnik Boys as perhaps unwitting accessories. “That’s pretty circumstantial,” Tracy said. “Might work for a jury, but it’s a little leaky for an extradition case that will be examined by a UN official from God-knows-where.” “We’ll keep working on it,” Tom said. “By the way, have you had any luck in finding an Albanian class?” “No,” Tracy replied with a laugh. “Would you believe it? Not even Berlitz! I also called the Orthodox church in Queens and the Catholic one up in Hartsdale, but they have classes only for kids. But someone at the Catholic one might be available as a tutor. I’m waiting to hear from them. “Good luck, or however you say it in Albanian!” “Fat të mbarë!” Tracy said with another laugh. Claudia came by as he was hanging up. “I talked to Alida,” she said. “She’s at BCC, signing up for summer classes, so I said we’d meet her there. Okay?” “Okay. Let’s not waste any time.” Alida had given Claudia a self-description that was good enough for the detective to spot her immediately. She was waiting for them, alone at a small table in the cafeteria, and was already drinking her coffee, which she took black, though, Tom guessed, with lots of sugar. He also suspected that, if smoking were permitted in the cafeteria, she would have a cigarette in her hand. She was pretty, and seemed to cultivate a kind of European film-noir look – perhaps she had been named for the actress Alida Valli – with shoulder-length black hair, large earrings, a tight-fitting black short-sleeved top over black jeans and heavy makeup, but no piercings other than earrings, surprisingly small ones at that. She greeted the detectives with a cautious smile. “Hi, Alida,” Tom said. “Hello, Detectives,” Alida said. Claudia began with no preliminaries. “We want to ask you about Omar Murova.” “Who? Oh, Omar, the Albanian guy that Lejla was, like, sort of dating?” “Like sort of?” Tom asked. “Well, she thought he was real cute, but he was like he’d never, like, been with a girl before. She had to wear a scarf when she saw him, just like she did at home, and at first he would, like, never be alone with her. Somebody else had to be there, like his brother, or Flora or some other friend. That changed after a while, but then – oh yeah! That time I told you about, when we met Daniel? And then Lejla met him alone? Someone saw them together and told Omar, and he got mad!” “So what happened?” Claudia asked in a tone of concern. “Well, Lejla told me that she managed to convince him that it was, like, nothing, that he was a journalist who covered the Balkans and wanted to talk to her because she was from Sarajevo. She gave him Daniel’s phone number so he could check with him.” “She did?” Claudia seemed aghast. “And did he?” Tom added. “I don’t know,” Alida said with a shrug. “I just know what Lejla told me. But they kept on dating, so he must have been convinced, until she tried to have sex with him, and he couldn’t do it, but she was, like, all excited from making out with him, so she did it with his brother instead. It was a school day, so she got Safet to drive her to campus in his van, and on the way she told him to stop, and they went in the back and did it.” “On top of a truck tire?” Tom asked. “Yes. How did you know?” “Just guessing,” Tom said. Alida giggled. She seemed to get pleasure, evidently vicarious, from the salacious details of her late friend’s life. Tom suspected that she was far more guarded in her own life. She was nineteen, like Lejla, but probably without Lejla’s early sexual initiation. “But anyway, that was, like,” Alida concluded with seeming satisfaction, “the end of that connection.” Claudia and Tom looked at each other. “That was very useful information,” Tom said. “Can you remember anything else about Omar?” Claudia asked. “Well, I didn’t think he was all that cute. Not my type, I guess.” “What is your type?” Claudia asked with a chuckle. “More like Detective Radnovich here,” Alida said with another giggle. “I mean, like, maybe a little younger.” Tom felt himself blushing. He knew, of course, that women found him attractive. But to have one woman, a very young one at that, express it so openly to another made him feel like an object, a type; it was too much like the way that men banter overtly about a woman’s physical attributes. Well, he thought, turnabout’s fair play. “Did Lejla have a type?” he asked, thinking about how different Omar Murova was from Daniel Wilner, from what he knew about the latter. Alida snickered. “Lejla? Anyone was her type, as long as he was good-looking.” “Daniel Wilner, for example?” “Sure. He was, like, a fox!” “Would he have been your type?” “He would’ve been any girl’s type,” Alida said with a blush. Claudia and Tom were silent. “Actually, there’s something else,” Alida added as though guessing that the detectives expected more, “but I’m not, like, absolutely sure. When I followed Lejla’s brothers to that place in Brooklyn...” “The mosque?” Tom asked. “Yeah. And when I saw the other guys there, I thought that one of them might have been Omar. His beard may have been a little longer, but he sure looked like him. I didn’t stick around, because I didn’t want him to see me.” “Well, that’s very interesting,” Tom said. Betty had arranged with Démén’ Martin, the small moving company that had taken her possessions from Saint-Laurent to the apartment in the Plateau six years earlier, to send a van – a small one was all that was needed – for the reverse move, and she was to meet the driver in front of the apartment house at three, but she wanted to be there at two in order to put things into piles that she could then put into the boxes that the driver would bring. When she walked out of her mother’s house the weather had warmed up enough for her bare legs and arms to feel good in the sunlight, and comfortable enough when a cloud passed. She was wearing her favorite wedge sandals, the same ones that she had worn in New York when she went out with Tom Radnovich, and her body became suffused with sensuality, almost shivering at the prospect of seeing Cary Seligman two days hence. As she passed the corner house she saw the geraniums in full bloom. She remembered them from her school days. She picked a leaf, tore it and smelled it. The ephemeral scent, lingering only for a few seconds, was one of her favorite sensual experiences. It reminded her of Gérard Brunet, her first boyfriend who, on her sixteenth birthday, became her first lover (though he didn’t manage to break her hymen on that first night). Gérard had written a song for her, with the verse Tu sens à la feuille de géranium / Tu sais bien que moi je n’suis qu’un homme. She didn’t remember the rest of the lyrics very well. Somewhere, in one of the drawers where she kept her personal keepsakes, there was a cassette on which Gérard, with his band, had recorded the song. She hadn’t heard it in the eight years that she had been with Paul. It was time... She arrived at the Côte-Vertu station and remembered, in a flash, that Côte-Vertu was the title of another of Gérard’s songs, probably on the same cassette. The anticipation of her third histoire d’amour (Tom Radnovich didn’t count) brought her back to the first, and she thought of mathematical series that skip over the even-numbered members of a sequence. A part of her wished that Cary were francophone, not another Anglo Jew like Paul; an alternation between French and English lovers would be appropriate for her bilingual nature. Did Cary know French? His sister certainly didn’t – Hebrew had been her focus – and Cary had gone to university in California, so his other language was probably Spanish. Still, she thought as the train was stopping at Bonaventure, she would ask him if he happened to know any French. But not before they made love. As the train started, she looked up. What she saw, or rather whom she saw, startled her to the depths of her being. It was Rexhep Shkodra, alias Dick, moving toward the door in order to get off at Square-Victoria. As the train slowed, he turned around, noticed her, and sent her a friendly smile. She felt paralyzed. This was the man who had undertaken to heq qafe her brother! Shouldn’t she follow him? But then she would miss her appointment with the mover! She closed her eyes as the train stopped, and when she opened them the man was no more. Up to that moment she had been standing by choice; quite a few seats were free. Now she had to sit down. She realized that she had stopped breathing. She made herself take slow, deep breaths with her eyes shut again, as though in a yoga class. By the time she heard Mont-Royal called out she was just beginning to feel normal again. Detectives Quintero and Radnovich had agreed to postpone any further questioning of Omar Murova to the next day. True, the time that they had been given to pursue the Wilner case was running out, but both had other matters to work on, both in this case and in others. For one thing, some new information had come to light on the previous day’s homicide: a third party – female – seemed to have incited the two men to fight, and had been heard to egg on the eventual killer with ¡Mátalo! It was not clear what the significance of this information was. It might make the young woman an accessory, or it might be an extenuating circumstances for the perpetrator, if he was avenging some wrong done to her, or even both. She would have to go back to the area and try to get a statement from the informant, and then, if the allegation held water, track down the woman in question. Her report was written but she would hold off on submitting it. There was also the matter of contacting those of Daniel Wilner’s acquaintances, besides Cici Bloom, who had not yet heard of his death. Claudia and Tom had also agreed to leave Betty and her mother out of the processes and, instead, Claudia would be the one to write letters to the two persons in Spain, since they would be in Spanish, and while she was at it she would also write (in English) to the actress Brigitte Wilner, once she had obtained her address from the German consulate. “Thank you for calling the German Consulate General in New York,” a German-accented female voice said after completing a message in German. “If you wish to continue in English, press two.” After pressing 2 there were more options, and of these the cultural section seemed the logical one. A real person, male, finally answered, and Claudia identified herself and explained the purpose of her call. The man said that they would comply with her request as soon as possible and call her back with Brigitte Wilner’s address. She thought that she might as well hold off writing the other letters until she got the address. She would write the one to Brigitte, in English of course, and do her best to make it as personal and non-bureaucratic as she could. She would then translate it into Spanish, make the appropriate changes and send the respective versions to Vicky Renshaw and Mauricio Rozowski. The fact that Vicky had an English surname didn’t matter; it could be like Osborne, the sherry family that had been in Spain for over two hundred years. The person that she really wanted to talk to was Cici Bloom. They had agreed, two days earlier, that they would talk personally, but Dr. Bloom had not given Claudia a personal phone number, and Claudia thought that she could justify calling her on police time if she were to inform her on the progress of investigation of Daniel’s killing. Had there been any progress? Well, the quantity of information had grown by a staggering amount, but were they any closer to solving the case? In the light of the connection with Lejla Begović and Omar Murova, the theory involving the suspects who were now in Kosovo – Karimaj, Shkodra – no longer seemed as convincing as it had earlier in the day. Claudia was feeling confused, and talking with someone as insightful as Cici might help clear up the confusion. It was now one-thirty, and Dr. Bloom might be back from lunch but perhaps not seeing a client yet. She dialed the number. After identifying herself and saying that she wished to speak to Doctor Bloom in person, she was put on hold for about a minute. The she heard “Hola, Claudia, soy Cici. ¿Qué tal?” It didn’t seem right to speak Spanish on official business unless the other party spoke no English. “Hola, Cici,” Claudia said. “I’m calling, in part, to let you know that we’re working hard to solve Daniel’s case. The trouble is, we’ve got more information than we know what to do with.” Cici laughed. “That’s the usual lot of the psychotherapist. A client comes in with a specific problem, you ask them a few questions, and you think you have the solution. But then they tell you more, and the solution no longer seems right, and the more they tell you, the more confused you get.” “That’s exactly what it feels like, especially if you really want to get to the bottom of the case and not just send some guy to jail so the public will think that you’re doing your job. Not just the public, but the brass.” “Well, at least I’m my own brass. But you’re right: without the feeling that you’re doing your work to the best of your ability, no job is really satisfying.” “My partner – I mean my detective partner – and I just talked about that. Not all of our colleagues feel that way, unfortunately. And especially in some federal agencies the aim seems to be to fill the prisons with supposed bad guys, even if they have to use dirty tricks. It’s what they think makes them look good.” “I know,” Cici said. “I’ve had some of them as clients, because after a while they start feeling bad about it. I once had a boyfriend, a long time ago, before Daniel, who was planning to apply to the FBI, and he liked nothing better than seeing people that he thought were lowlifes arrested, especially if they were Latinos. I wonder what ever happened to him.” “Was he Latino?” Claudia asked. “Of course.” They laughed. “Before Daniel, you say? Then you must have been pretty young,” Claudia said. “I was, but he was quite a bit older than me, about eleven years, which is a lot when you’re eighteen.” “I just broke up with a Latino FBI agent. He’s still like that.” “His name wouldn’t be Tony Peralta?” Cici asked with a chuckle. “That is his name.” The two women laughed again. “Dios mío,” Claudia went on, “I thought that you and I had something in common, but I wouldn’t have dreamt that it was having been involved with the same prick!” “Literally!” Cici said. “One of the best things about him! And I actually thought I was in love with him!” Claudia suddenly realized that the talk was getting away from either Daniel Wilner or professional matters, and she was at work. “We’ve got a lot to talk about, Cici, but we’d better do it on private time. Can you give me your personal phone number?” “Sure,” Cici said, and gave it to her. It was time to go back to the Projects. Do some police work. The simple kind. The timing couldn’t have been better, Megan thought when she felt the beginning of her monthly flow. She could get back on the pill – become Realessetic again, as Betty had said, though Megan preferred a different brand – in the middle of the following week, and by the time Tom Radnovich came, a week and a half later, she would be halfway through her cycle and her body would have adjusted to it. She had medical appointments scheduled throughout the week to come: Amelia Klein, her OB-GYN, on Monday; Dr. Cox, her plastic surgeon, on Wednesday; and Dr. Cantalupo, Sam’s pediatrician, on Friday. The first and the last were routine checkups; the middle one was for new implants. With Tom she would be both Megan Kenner and May Green. Except that this period didn’t feel like her usual ones, both before and after Sam. She had never, in all her life, felt any discomfort, let alone pain, associated with menstruation. Dysmenorrhea was, to her, one of those long Greek words about whose spelling Scrabble players argued (rhea or rhoea?). While her pill-induced regularity allowed the scheduling of the shooting of hardcore scenes during her white-camellia days, in her private life she didn’t mind blood-tinged sex, especially with Daniel, whose visits did not conform with her menstrual calendar. The sensation she was now feeling in her abdomen went well beyond discomfort; it was pain. Well, there was no point in calling Amelia on a Thursday afternoon if she was to see her on Monday, when she would get her Pap smear and general pelvic exam. By then her period should be over; her periods since weaning Sam had been only three days long, and very light. On this day she probably wouldn’t get to see Amelia anyway, but one of her associates, and this kind of situation called for a doctor that she knew and trusted. For now, she would take some Nuprin and rest until Sam woke up from his nap. Oh, yes: she would turn her cell phone off, as well as the ringer on her land phone. The new information about the previous day’s incident had proved worthless. The supposed informant, a plump young Dominican woman who spoke almost no English, seemed to have accused another woman of complicity out of sheer spite, and had no facts to back up her story. There would be no need to revise the report. When Claudia came back to the station she found a message from the German consulate with the address of Brigitte Wilner’s agency; it was where her mail was normally sent. But now Claudia felt like writing the Spanish letters first. She had always enjoyed writing formal Spanish, and had lost the opportunity for doing it when the last of her Colombian grandparents died, the year before. She adhered to the protocol of writing each name exactly as she found it written, and so composed the following letter, thinking in Spanish as she wrote it. Estimada V. Renshaw, En nombre del Departamento de Policía de Nueva York, tengo la triste obligación de informarla de que su amigo Daniel Wilner falleció el pasado 15 de octubre al ser atrapado en el fuego cruzado de un tiroteo entre pandillas. Por entonces el incidente fue juzgado como accidental, pero ahora está investigado con la presunción de un crimen premeditado. Con simpatía por su pérdida, Detective Claudia Quintero. For the letter to Mauricio Rozowski, she did a copy-and-paste of the same text, and then changed informarla to informarlo and amigo to pariente. To Brigitte Wilner she wrote: Dear Brigitte Wilner, On behalf of the New York Police Department, I have the sad responsibility of informing you of the untimely death of Daniel Wilner, the son of your late ex-husband, last October 15. He was unfortunately caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout, and while his death was judged accidental at the time, it is now being investigated as a homicide. With my deepest condolences, Detective Claudia Quintero Betty had told Roger, the driver, that he could back the van into her mother’s driveway for easy unloading, but as they drove up she was surprised to see her mother’s car occupying it. It was only four-thirty, quite early for her to be back at home on a Thursday. She went inside the house and found Mireille at her desk talking, or rather listening, on the telephone. Betty pantomimed the turning of a key and the steering of a car, and Mireille pointed to a spot on her desk where her car key was indeed to be found. Betty drove the car out of the driveway and directed Roger to back in. Within five minutes all the boxes were in her room. She wrote a check and handed it to Roger with Au revoir, merci, and a twenty-dollar banknote as a tip. He expressed his thanks not only with Merci bien but also by giving her a card with his phone number and the suggestion that, should she need moving services again, she could call him directly without going through the company and get a better price. He spoke in a broad Quebec French, and his accent lingered in her mind after he had left. It reminded her of Rimouski. She had gone there a few times with her mother to visit the family from whom Mireille had become estranged, typically when some family member was dying or had died. There was her mother’s aunt Clotilde Bouchard, Tante Clo, the only one to whom Mireille had felt close, when Betty was nine. And then there was Mireile’s father, when Betty was fourteen. That had been the last time. By the time Mireille went there again for her mother’s funeral Betty was no longer living with her. Daniel had never gone on those trips. He had been flatly rejected by his maternal grandparents as le petit bâtard juif. Bastard because had been conceived, though not born, out of wedlock. And a Jew! What irony! For some reason the fact that Betty had had the same (putative) Jewish father as Daniel had not bothered them; they had doted on her. Had they only known that Daniel was, biologically, just as French as they! She put Roger’s card in a pigeonhole of her desk and began to unpack her boxes.