18
The night had
revealed several things about Cary Seligman.
Two things came to light at El
Rinconcito. One was that he spoke passable Spanish, though it seemed to
Betty that, just as with his French, he was translating more or less literally
from English. The other was that he was not a good dancer. He had a fair sense
of rhythm, and he had an idea of the steps, but the translation of the idea
into body language lacked fluidity. Fluidité,
which in French means both fluidity and fluency. It was what he lacked.
And in bed, after the steam of the boiling desire that had driven their
afternoon coupling had run out, it was more or less the same. It was mechanical
and, despite what seemed to be his best intentions, did not give her much
pleasure.
And he snored. Not the band-saw kind of snore, just loud sleep sounds, but
loud enough to keep her awake. And unlike Paul, who snored only when he was
lying on his back and a slight nudge on her part would get him to turn aside
and stop snoring, Cary would not be budged.
She suddenly wondered if Cary, with his foresight and planning, had
foreseen and planned a return flight for her. If he had, then she fervently
wished that it was for that same day, Sunday. She had no objection to spending
a good part of the day in his company, doing fun things in New York, but no
desire whatever to spend another night with him. She wanted
a good night’s sleep in her old bed, and then to be ready to start apartment
hunting on Monday morning.
If he hadn’t booked a flight for her she would do it on her own. If there
were no seats left on a flight to Montreal that day, she would try to get one
to Burlington and take a bus or train from there, or, in the worst case, even
take an overnight bus, as Daniel had done in his student days, and sleep it off
the next day.
Omar Murova
lived in a studio apartment on the ground floor of a dilapidated three-story
building a couple of blocks from the tire shop. Safet and Silvana lived one
flight above.
“Omar, we need to talk to you again,” Claudia said when he opened the
door a crack, with the chain left on.
“Detective Orsini said I don’t...”
“This has nothing to do with Detective Orsini,” Tom said. “We found your
gun and your cell phone in the ladies’ room at Old Nick’s.”
Omar’s face turned ashen.
“Actually,” Claudia said, “it was Daniel Wilner’s sister to found them.”
“I... I didn’t shoot Daniel Wilner,” Omar stammered.
“No, but you killed him. You called him to distract his attention, and
then you fired your gun to start the shootout in the bar, and you saw to it
that he sat at the table where he was most likely to get hit. Isn’t that right?”
Omar was grasping for words to keep him afloat. “I... I thought that Lejla
liked him better than me. I loved Lejla...”
“So you needed to get rid of him?” Claudia asked.
“Heq qafe?”
Tom added.
“You know Albanian?”
“We ask the questions, remember?” Claudia said. “Yes or
no?”
“Yes,” Omar said without hesitation. The bluff had worked,
“Did anybody know about your plan?” Tom asked.
“No.”
“Not Safet?”
“Safet? He would kill
me if he knew. Don’t tell him please.”
“We don’t need to tell him. You, Omar Murova, are being arrested for the
murder of Daniel Wilner. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you
say...”
A knock was heard on the door.
“That’s Safet,” Omar said, seeming more afraid of his brother than of the
New York police.
“Come in,” Tom said.
Safet opened the door quickly and, on seeing his brother in handcuffs,
moved toward him as if intending to free him.
Omar began an extended, rapid litany in Albanian to Safet. The words
Lejla and
Wilner could be heard interspersed.
Safet’s face gradually turned to stone as he backed away from Omar toward
the open door. When Omar stopped, Safet began to speak in the slow, formal
Albanian that Tom had overheard him speaking with Silvana, who at that moment
came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. They began to talk to each
other, and Tom could make out the word avokat.
“Would you like to come to the station with us?” Tom asked Safet.
“We go separate in our car,” Safet said.
“It’s the Fortieth Precinct, near Old Nick’s,” Claudia said.
“I know,” Safet said.
Claudia turned to Omar again. “...can
and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an
attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do
you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”
Omar, taking his right to remain
silent literally, contented himself with nodding.
The detectives also kept their
silence as they led Omar to the car. Tom suddenly had a thought. If Omar didn’t
hesitate to kill Daniel Wilner out of simple jealousy, might he not also have
tried to kill Lejla out of a seeming betrayal? Where did the DA and the cops
get the idea of an honor-killing exchange among the young men of the Brooklyn
mosque? Omar was their supposed informant. Could he have concocted the idea as
a way of covering his tracks?
Claudia was driving, more
conservatively than usual. Poor little
Omar, Claudia had said of this killer. Was it because he was “cute”? And
was it because she was pretty that Tom had thought, if
he hadn’t actually said it, poor Alida?
No, that wasn’t it. He really believed that girl’s remorse over the stupid
thing she had done, and he felt sorry for her. Maybe Claudia had been right
about having him comfort Alida. Besides, she would certainly be a witness at
Omar’s trial, and she would need to be prepared. A statement would have to be
written.
If the case came to trial, that
is. A plea bargain was much more likely, especially if Tracy Schiller were to
prosecute the case, which would be logical. She, along with the Brooklyn cops
and those of the 51st, had been taken in by Omar, and that wasn’t something
that she would want to come out in court.
He would call Alida later in the
day, and perhaps meet with her in private on Monday, his day off in a week
following weekend duty,
Betty Wilner woke up and smelled the coffee.
The coffee smelled different.
Had maman, after thirty
years of loyal devotion to le mélange classique of Les Cafés du Lion
– a devotion that had begun even before meeting the founder’s nephew, her
future husband Miki Wilner, and that she had transmitted to their daughter –
suddenly changed to a different coffee? It smelled nice, but strange.
Far more pungent, for one thing.
She stretched her right leg
outward in order to bend her knee over the edge of the bed before getting up,
but the edge wasn’t there! She was not in her old bed in Saint-Laurent! Was she
back with Paul? But then the edge of the bed would still have been where she
had sought it! Where was she?
She opened her eyes, and it all
came back. She was in Cary Seligman’s bed, where she had just spent the night
with him. She remembered having lain awake, some time before, thinking that she
did not want to sleep with him anymore.
But what she felt now was
altogether different. She wanted to have him back in bed with her, to feel his
body again.
Qu’est-ce qu’il y
a avec moi? she asked herself. What’s the matter with me?
Why am I so changeable, like a spoiled little girl? Comme
une petite fille abîmée?
She got out of bed on her left
side. Her dress was there, on the floor, and she slipped it on in order to go
and find Cary in the kitchen. She wished that her dress were low-cut. She had
always liked the way her breasts stood out, fully covered, but this time she
would have liked to display some cleavage. She left her dress unzipped in the
back and let the sleeves slip down over her shoulders. She looked at herself in
the full-length mirror on Cary’s closet door – there was enough daylight coming
in from behind the curtains – and decided that she looked enticing enough.
She was still standing before the
mirror when the door opened gingerly and Cary came in, carrying on one hand –
as a waiter might – a tray with two cups of coffee. When he saw her, he put the
tray down on a chair and grabbed her in his arms. He smelled of coffee, and
more.
”So we’ve got ourselves another arraignment
for Omar Murova this afternoon,” Tom Radnovich said before taking a gulp of his
seemingly too-hot coffee, “the second in a little over a week.”
“Hmmm,” was all that Claudia
Quintero managed to say as she slowly sipped her Nicaraguan-style
café con leche, not quite what she had
been raised on (and what Colombians called simply
café) but close enough.
Tom broke off a piece of his
croissant (or curazán, as it was
called on the menu) – no doughnuts for them, they were modern cops – and ate it
undunked. He had once told her that he didn’t like dunking croissants because
it made the coffee buttery, and she had retorted that she liked it for that
very reason. “Only this time,” he went on, “brother Safet won’t be a co-defendant
but a potential witness for the prosecution.”
“I’ve got to hand it to you,”
Claudia said. “You do come up with some fanciful theories, but eventually one
of them does pan out. I mean, what you confronted Omar with was pure theory...”
“Speculation,” Tom said with a
grin and a shrug.
“... and he didn’t even try to deny
it, though we had no evidence yet that the gun and the phone were his.”
“It must have hit him at that
moment that you can’t just wipe off prints with a tissue. Still, it was pretty
clever of him to hide them in the tissue box, in the ladies’ room yet.”
“Do you know what you remind me
of?” she asked him rhetorically. She was in an expansive mood and didn’t wait
for his response. “A book that I read a kid,” she went on, “by Jules Verne,
only I thought that they were by a Spanish writer named Julio Verne,
because my grandparents would send me the Spanish versions from Colombia, and I
didn’t pay attention to the little line that said traducido
del francés.”
“That’s funny,” Tom interjected.
“My father had – still has, actually – Verne’s books in Serbian. Serbian can be
written in either Cyrillic or Latin letters, and these were printed in Tito’s
Yugoslavia in Latin letters so that Croats could read them too, but whichever
way you write it, foreign names are transcribed phonetically, so what’s on the
spine is Žil Vern, that’s Z with a hachek, I, L, and Vern without
an E at the end. Croatian doesn’t do that, and that’s one way to tell them
apart. Anyway, what do I remind you of?”
“My favorite book by Verne is
called Los hijos del capitán Grant in Spanish, Captain Grant’s Children,
though the English version has a different title. Anyway, someone, a
Scottish lord to be exact, finds a bottle with a message from a Scottish
captain named Grant who had been lost at sea two years before. The message is
in three languages, but most of the letters have been obliterated, and the only
thing that’s certain is the latitude where the ship was wrecked. The lord and
his lady contact the captain’s kids, a boy and a girl, and together with an
eccentric French scientist they go off to try to find him. They try to locate
him by filling in the missing letters in the three languages, and several times
they get it wrong, but eventually they find him. That’s what you remind me of.
Oh, yes, there’s also a bad guy who gives them a false lead along the way.”
“That story sounds very familiar. I’m pretty sure I saw a movie based on
it on TV when I was a kid. It was called something about castaways, like maybe Searching
for the Castaways.”
“In Search of the Castaways,”
Claudia corrected.
“That’s right. In the movie, the eccentric Frenchman, Jacques
something...”
“Jacques! Of course! In the Spanish version he’s named Santiago, and I
remember thinking it was strange for a Frenchman to be named Santiago.”
They laughed. Tom was so easy to have a pleasant conversation with,
Claudia thought. If only he didn’t have this compulsion to sleep with every
woman he met. Not that he had to work at it, with his looks, except for the few
women who made a point of playing hard-to-get, as she did when she first came
to the 40th, making him believe that she was getting it on with Harry
Arvanakis, their lieutenant at the time and an old academy instructor of hers.
She and Harry had dated a few years earlier, before his promotion. Now he was a
captain in Manhaptan, as he liked to say.
“Well,” Tom went on, “he was played by Maurice Chevalier, who had just
died. My mother pointed him out to me and told me that in some other movie he
had sung a song called Thank Heaven for
Little Girls, a song that always made her sad because she had wanted to
have a little girl but after Gabe was born she was told not to have any more
kids. But after Lindsey was born she started singing it to her, and she no
longer felt it was sad. She would say to me, ‘Remember when I told you about Maurice
Chevalier, who was in that movie about the castaways?’ How could I forget?”
“That was quite a detective story, wasn’t it? By then I’d already read
Nancy Drew, and I knew I was going to be a detective. I imagined myself piecing
together texts in English and Spanish in order to solve cases.”
“Well, you actually did, in the Carlos Benítez case. But speaking of
solving cases, shouldn’t we call Betty Wilner again, to tell her about what
we’ve done, with her help?”
“We left her a message,” Claudia said, “or
I did. She’s probably been too busy with Cary Seligman to turn her
phone on.”
Tom looked at his watch. “Since the talk is turning to work,” he said,
“we’d better get back.”
Betty didn’t quite know what she felt when
Cary told her, over brunch, that he had booked a three-o’clock flight for her
back to Montreal. It was the latest he could get on such short notice, he
explained. She wondered when he had made the booking, but chose not to ask.
Instead she asked him what she owed him.
“You? Owe? Me?” Cary said, making the three
syllables sound like a shamanic incantation. “You’ve just given me one of the
most wonderful weekends in my life.” He put down his fork, which held some
home-fried potatoes that he had made – he had been singing
Keep
the home fries burning, rhythmically and on key, but somewhat
mechanically, while making them – and took her free left hand in his right.
“You’re sweet,” she said. And indeed he was. Good-looking,
smart, funny, kind, gentle. Certainly a good kisser; he had made her
overcome her distaste for kissing a man she wasn’t in love with, and this was
something she needed, just as she needed to overcome her discomfort in wearing
cleavage-revealing clothes. She was about to begin life as an adult single
woman, et
il faut s’adapter, as her mother would
occasionally say.
It was what came after the kissing that was the problem. While Tom
Radnovich had made her somewhat sore with his size, she had certainly enjoyed
the process. But with Cary there had been no enjoyment at all. Well, not so in the
afternoon, when, in the unexpected heat of desire engendered by that first
kiss, she had taken the initiative and, she now realized, used his body to give
herself pleasure.
(Women had told her that men did this as a matter of course – hence prostitution
– but it was not something she had
experienced.) But at night, with Cary in the active role, he seemed – to her
surprise – to have no awareness of what a woman’s body was about. How could
that be? A very attractive man of thirty-two, living in New York, should have
had plenty of experience to learn from. Unless...
She looked at him again, smiled, and kissed him on the cheek. His skin
was soft, almost like a woman’s. “That was nice,” he said, finally letting go
of her hand and resuming his eating.
Yes, she thought, there was definitely something about Cary Seligman that
reminded her of the gay men she had known in Montreal!
Cary might well be bisexual, but if so, his experiences with women must
have been few.
There was no doubt in Betty’s mind that he was smitten with her. Could
she be the woman who would bring him out of homosexuality? His “straightener,”
as someone at McGill – Marni Clark, as a matter of fact – had once joked?
Was that a role she wanted? Marni, she now remembered, had been talking
about herself. Betty would be talking to Marni in the next few days, anyway.
Why not bring up the subject?
But perhaps she was jumping to conclusions. Maybe Harvey knew something
through Audrey.
Marni. Harvey. She would soon be among friends
in Montreal.
“Did you say three o’clock?” Betty asked. “What time does it arrive?
Four-thirty?”
“Actually it’s three-ten,” Cary said, “out of Newark, and arrives at
four-forty. We’ll leave here around one.”
“I’d better call my mother, then.” She ate the last of her omelet, got up
and went back to the bedroom to retrieve her cell phone, which she had left on
the chair beside the bed. As she turned it on, she saw the voice-mail indicator
flashing. She pressed LISTEN and listened.
“Hi, Betty,” the now-familiar voice said, “this is Claudia Quintero.
Please call Tom or me as soon as you can. We have some important news about
your brother’s case, which we think we’ve solved, with your help.”
She felt like screaming, but contented herself with merely shouting.
“Cary! The cops called! They’ve solved” – her voice went to
subito piano when Cary walked into the
bedroom but lost none of its agitato
– “Daniel’s case! With my help, which I guess means the gun I found last
night!”
“Wow!” Cary said, putting his arm around her from behind, his forearm on
her breasts. It felt good. “Have they got the killer?”
“They, I mean she, didn’t say. I’d better call her right back.”
By this time Megan’s period should have been
waning, and it wasn’t.
It was getting heavier, and the color of the blood was different.
Darker than usual. She had noticed the gradual darkening
over the last day or two, but only now was it blatant.
She had bought enough maxi pads, she thought, for the duration of the
period, but she was running out. After lunch she would put Sam in his stroller
and take him to the drugstore. Instead of getting diapers for him, she would be
buying them for herself. She should probably restock on Nuprin as well.
What the hell’s going on with me?
Daniel had told her about his father’s first wife: something like this
had happened to her. Brigitte Wilner had been brutally raped as a young girl
and had had uterine problems (infertility being one) ever since. Then she
contracted a condition that typically affected prostitutes and other very
promiscuous women, but when she was recovering from the examination, the doctor
asked Miki Wilner about his wife’s sex life, and Miki had no idea that his wife
had made a point of having sex with every one of her leading men, so the doctor
didn’t know how to interpret the symptoms until Brigitte told him the truth,
some months later, and he knew how to treat the condition. She finally told
Miki about it, and that was what led to their breakup.
Well, Megan was May Green, for
God’s sake. No secret about her promiscuity. So Amelia would know what to do,
if it was the same condition.
But it might take some time to clear up. Maybe more than two weeks. And
it was now two weeks before the Fourth of July.
What about her date with Tom Radnovich?
Her cell phone sounded. Could it be Tom? No, it was Betty. Megan had
never heard her so excited.
“Megan! I’m calling from New York! I’m here with Cary, and last night we
went to Old Nick’s, and I happened to find this gun hidden in the ladies’ room,
and I told Claudia and Tom about it, and from that they – mainly Tom, that is –
were able to piece together how Daniel was killed, and who did it, and they’ve
got him, and he pretty much confessed.”
Megan was stunned into speechlessness. Betty seemed to sense her state,
and went on without waiting for Megan’s response. It was, as Megan had
anticipated, another long sentence punctuated only with short breaths.
“What’s more, the same guy, an Albanian from Kosovo, is the culprit in
another case that Tom had been working, involving a Bosnian girl who had been
strangled, that this Albanian guy, Omar, had been dating, but she happened to
meet Daniel, and they figured that out from Daniel’s last draft of an article
which I found, and Omar got wind of it, and got jealous, and he knew who Daniel
was because of his reporting on Kosovo, and he called Daniel and found out that
Daniel was interested in meeting this KLA commander who has almost but not
quite the same name as a man that Paul had been helping in Montreal, and... God,
I’m just running on!”
“Go on,” Megan said hoarsely. “I’m following you perfectly.” She turned
the phone away momentarily in order to blow her nose.
“Here comes the part that’s like a movie. Omar told Daniel that he could
meet the KLA commander at Old Nick’s at a certain time when he knew that his
gang – I forgot to tell you, he belongs to a gang – would be going there for
drinks, and then he called the owner of Old Nick’s, who’s also Albanian but not
from Kosovo and who has a gang of his own, to tell him that
his gang would be going there armed...”
“I know that part of the story,” Megan said, tears welling up in her.
“There was a shootout...”
“Yes, but how it happened was that Omar went to the bathroom, called
Daniel on his cell phone to distract him, and fired his gun. That shot was what
started the shootout, so even though Omar didn’t shoot Daniel, he intentionally
caused his death, and that’s second-degree murder, unless his lawyer can prove
extreme emotional disturbance, which would make it, what do you call it...”
Megan felt composed enough to chime in. “Man one is what they call it on
Law and Order. Manslaughter
in the first degree, in English. In Canada we don’t have degrees of
manslaughter. So you say you found the gun?”
“Oh, yes. Omar thought that he could erase his fingerprints from the gun
and the cell phone with some tissues, and then he put them underneath the
remaining tissues in the box, and he put the box in the cabinet under the sink
in the ladies’ room, and then he sneaked out of Old Nick’s through a back door
and went home. Well, when I was there last night I had to go to the bathroom,
and the toilet paper ran out, so I looked in the cabinet for more toilet paper,
and there wasn’t any, but there was a box of tissues, but they ran out too, so
I reached inside for more, and I felt something hard. That’s when I called
Claudia.”
It all made sense to Megan, and she didn’t need to hear any more. She
would probably hear about it from Tom, maybe later that day. Maybe she would
even call him in order tell him of her doubts about their date, and then he
would tell her about the case.
“So you’ve been with Cary in New York?” she asked instead. “Not in
Plattsburgh?”
“Oh, that,” Betty said, seemingly taken aback by the turn. “Plattsburgh
didn’t work out because it was raining, so we flew to New York instead. I’m
going back to Montreal this afternoon. In fact, we’ll be leaving in a little
while, and I haven’t called my mother yet.”
“You called me before your mother?”
Betty giggled again. “I don’t know, it just felt
right to call you first. But I’d better call her. Bye!”
“Bye, Betty,” Megan said softly and clicked off.
Senior ADA
Leonard Wald was talking at a hastily assembled pre-arraignment meeting in a
conference room at the Bronx County Courthouse. In attendance were ADA Tracy
Schiller, Lieutenant Rick DePalma, and Detectives Pete Orsini, Claudia
Quintero, and Tom Radnovich.
“We’ve got ourselves a legal dilemma,” Wald was saying. “We could charge
Murova with double murder if we can show that he formed the intent to kill both
Wilner and the Begović girl as soon as he found out about them getting
together, only he carried them out sequentially. We would then have just one
trial and, if we win, consecutive sentences.
“The downside is, is that the defense could claim that his motive was
severe distress over his girlfriend’s infidelity, i.e. extreme emotional
disturbance, leading to a manslaughter plea.”
“With all due respect, ADA Wald,” Claudia said, “my training is not in
law but in psychology, and I’m not involved in the Begović case, but what
Omar told us when we arrested him was that he wanted Daniel Wilner
out of the way because he thought that Lejla would like him, I mean Daniel,
better. At that time he still believed that she was a good Muslim girl and
nothing had happened between her and Daniel except an interview. Getting rid of
Daniel was like a preemptive strike on his part, to keep her for himself. It’s
as if Don José had killed Escamillo in Act Three...” Tom noticed that both DePalma
and Orsini smiled at the reference, true to the stereotype of opera-loving
Italians. Claudia had, of course, pronounced the characters’ names in the
Spanish way.
“I agree with Detective Quintero,” Tracy Schiller said.
“Call me Cloud-ya.” It was a preemptive strike on Claudia’s part, Tom
thought with an inward chuckle, to inoculate Tracy against infection by Tom’s Anglo
pronunciation of Claudia’s name.”
Tracy acknowledged Claudia with a smile and went on. “It seems to have
been quite a bit later that he discovered that she was not the good Muslim girl
he had thought she was, so the motivation for killing her was quite different.
And then he misled us by concocting a story about an honor-killing exchange at
the Brooklyn mosque...”
“And volunteering to go undercover for us,” Orsini added, shaking his
head. “The kid’s got a knack for intrigue.”
Tom reflected that it had been Claudia on her own, while he took a
bathroom break, who had coaxed Omar into admitting that he had choked
Lejla. She had come to the mosque courtyard on
Eid ul-Adha to have a quick word
with her mother and then slinked out. He had followed her and caught up with
her just as she was arranging the scarf that she had worn on her head around
her neck. They called each other names, he grabbed the scarf, and...
“So I think there should be two separate charges,” Tracy concluded,
“first Wilner and then Begović, in the order in which they occurred. If
the defense moves to merge them, I’m prepared to fight.”
“What about bail?” Wald asked.
It was time for a preemptive strike on
his part, Tom thought. “I would favor remand for his own
protection,” he said. “His brother’s
enraged at what he did. Kosovar Albanians have a code called the
Kanun, which allows revenge killings,
but not in the sneaky way that Omar did it. If Safet Murova thinks that Omar
dishonored the family by doing what he did, then he would be justified in
killing him.”
“Wow!” Tracy said. “Try and explain that to the judge, especially with
Safet present at the arraignment!”
“Wouldn’t Safet be the one to put up the bail?” Wald asked.
“More likely Silvana, Safet’s wife,” Orsini said. “Her family’s got
money. But Silvana didn’t like Omar to begin with, and now she hates him, so
there may not even be any bail money.”
“So remand it will be, I guess,” Wald said. “And if we’re pursuing two
separate charges, I think we should still do both of them as a team, Miss
Schiller and myself. Would you like to take the lead on Begović, Tracy?”
The look that passed from Wald to Tracy told Tom that the offer of a lead
prosecutor’s chair to a very junior ADA was perhaps not as chivalrous as it
might have seemed. Not that there was anything new or surprising about an
ambitious and attractive young woman using sex to advance her career,
especially in a charged, volatile environment like a DA’s office. Wald was
fairly new to the Bronx – he had recently been recruited away from Richmond
County – and had no established reputation, as far as Tom knew, as a womanizer.
But since the two of them were to
form a team on both charges, and since
Tom was involved in both, there would be plenty of time to find out.
“I’m not so sure, Leonard,” Tracy said. So
it was
Leonard, not Len or Lenny. “I think I’m vulnerable because I
bought into Omar’s story about the honor-killing exchange.” Was Tracy really
begging off the case, or out of an affair with Leonard
Wald? He seemed to be well into his forties. There was no wedding ring on his
hand, but one never knew. A recent divorce was a possibility; it might explain
the move from Staten Island to the Bronx.
And why was he thinking such thoughts? Tom asked himself.
Because he was interested in Tracy Schiller? Well, yes, he
was.
But if anything were to happen, it would have to be after the charges
against Omar Murova had been adjudicated. If Tom were to testify at a trial, it
would not feel right to be questioned on the stand by someone he was intimate
with. Oh well, he could wait. As he was wont to tell himself, there was no
shortage of fish in the sea. And only a few hours hence, he suddenly
remembered, there would be Yasmina Sliwa.
Betty had
decided, after talking to Megan, that she would tell people about the latest
developments in person, once she was in Montreal. Even when she called her
mother and asked her, in French, if she
would pick her up at the airport, she only said
J’ai un tas de choses à te raconter, maman. Mireille didn’t ask
what those lots of things were that her daughter had to tell her, but said that
she looked forward to hearing them on the way to Saint-Laurent.
And, in fact, Mireille’s attention was riveted, all along the drive and
at home afterwards, to Betty’s tale, whose telling, unlike the breathless
telephone account to Megan, was measured and composed, almost like the
narration of a television documentary. She began in French, but when she caught
herself saying Albanien instead of
Albanais she realized that she was, at
least in part, translating – or at least calquing – and she switched to
English. The change didn’t seem to affect Mireille, whose brief responses
continued to be in French.
“Quelle histoire!” she said
when Betty finished. And then the tears came, as if from a reservoir that had
finally breached a dam. “Mon pauvre
garçon... ton frère...” she sobbed as she clasped Betty in her arms. It seemed
to Betty, who freely wept with her, that only now, knowing how Daniel died,
could her mother – though she had seen the body – fully accept the loss.
When, Betty wondered, had Mireille fully
accepted the loss of Miki, the details of whose death were never reported,
perhaps not even known?
Two men that she loved were killed far away, twenty-five years apart,
almost to the day!
“Pauvre maman,” Betty murmured
into her mother’s ear. Except that what Betty felt was that she was comforting
a sister more than a mother. And that she was comforting her over both losses.
By dinnertime Mireille was back to her serene self. Not her
usual serene self, it seemed to Betty,
but the kind of serenity that she had learned over the years to associate with
a new man in her mother’s life. And it was almost certainly a new man: Mireille
was not in the habit of reconnecting with old lovers. Only
with George Kenner (her friend Amy’s father, Megan’s father’s cousin) had
she, as far as Betty knew, resumed a relationship after a supposed
breaking-off, and there had been no one during the break. She had told her
daughter several times that when it was over it was over,
quand c’est fini c’est fini. And she would add,
pas de regrets. Of course
regret means more than ‘regret’; it also
means missing someone, and in Mireille’s heart the space for lovers who are
missed was forever occupied by Miki Wilner.
As she thought about it Betty realized that she had unconsciously
appropriated her mother’s philosophy. It was over with Paul.
Et
pas de regrets. She did not miss him. She hadn’t even thought of
him, as her husband, since...
Since when? Of course: since her talk with Harvey, Tuesday
evening.
Should she call Harvey now and tell him what had happened? No; she didn’t
feel ready to talk about it to anyone other than her mother. Besides, Harvey
may well hear about it from Audrey who will have heard it from Cary. I’ll find
out tomorrow, Betty said to herself, thinking that she would take advantage of
a talk with Harvey to make inquiries into Cary’s sexuality.
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