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.