19 Tom Radnovich always preferred his gym workouts in the morning, but he could indulge his preference only on rare occasions. This Monday morning was his first free one in over two weeks – the two weeks from the reopening to the sudden resolution of the Wilner case, and of the Begović case along with it – and he was thoroughly enjoying his activity. He felt relaxed. He was raising and lowering the weights in a smooth and controlled movement, just as the instructions on the machine told him to do. And just as his movements had been with Yasmina, the previous evening. Well, not the first time: then they had been rather frantic, but they had been so on her initiative. The nervous energy that he had built up over the two weeks had, by Sunday, been transmuted into the excitement of satisfaction, but his body had remained tense, and Yasmina had noticed the tension the moment she saw him. “You seem tense,” she had said after the greeting kiss, and before he could respond she had gone on, slyly, “Maybe I can help you relieve some of that tension.” As she led him to the bedroom she explained that she hadn’t changed her clothes yet since getting home, so... It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. She had later told him that she, too, had needed some relief from tension that had arisen in the course of her family reunion, but had made it clear – or so he thought – that she was not ready to talk to him about her family. It was only after getting home that it occurred to him that he had not imagined Megan for an instant while with Yasmina. In fact, he hadn’t even thought about Megan since... since the morning after his previous evening with Yasmina. Thursday morning, that was, when he told Claudia that his relationship with Megan was getting personal. But was it? he now asked himself. Or was it just the idea of fucking a porn actress, and was that idea fading away? Of course not: Megan wasn’t just a porn actress, but one who also happened to be a very interesting and intelligent person. Tom Radnovich was no less susceptible than other straight men to the attraction of conventionally pretty women, but to have any kind of relationship with one, even a casual one, he needed to find her interesting; otherwise she would be relegated to the realm of fantasy. Which, of course, was a not altogether useless domain. When he was a skinny nerd in high school (putting his long legs to use as a long-jumper on the track team didn’t make much difference), the girls who were generally acknowledged as foxy ignored him, and he ignored them in turn, or at least pretended to, though of course he did not censor his imagination. At any rate, after his experience, at fourteen, with the precociously mature Ellen Daugherty, he had no interest in girls of his own age until he was sixteen. (Ellen’s experience had come from being a plain-looking girl who got the attention she wanted by putting out.) And when the interest came, it was in girls who were themselves interesting. At Brooklyn College it was been pretty much the same at first. But when he was a sophomore he met the very athletic Kathy Hirsch, and the embarrassment of her defeating him in arm wrestling spurred him into building up his body. By the following fall he found that the very pretty – but empty-headed – girls were coming on to him. After a few flings he lost interest and once more limited himself to girls who were smart, whether pretty or not. The ones who were not so pretty were now easy. The smart and pretty ones were no longer unattainable, but – except for the ones he met while bumming around Europe during the summer after graduation – still elusive, requiring some pursuing on his part, and he usually found the pursuit not worth the trouble. With a few exceptions. There was Lauren Weinberg, when they were both seniors, until she went to Michigan for graduate school. There was Heather Harris, a Pan Am stewardess (it was what she called herself, not flight attendant), based in New York, whom he met on his way back from Europe, until she was transferred to San Francisco. And there was Karen Ivancich, working – as she still was – in a lawyer’s office to which, as a rookie cop, he was sent to get some information on a client. When they introduced themselves with their surnames, she joked that they could scratch each other’s itches, and he was hooked. Karen did not move from New York, and two years later they were married. Maybe that Spanish bitch detective had been right. Maybe Alida had been stupid to tell Omar about Lejla and Daniel. But why did she have to be so mean about it? Alida had said she was sorry, hadn’t she? How was she supposed to know that Omar was a gangster? He had seemed so simple, so innocent, such a good little Muslim boy... so not right for Lejla. Now, Alida thought as she looked at the missed-call message indicator on her cell-phone screen while sipping her coffee, Detective Radnovich was another matter. He was nice. He reminded her of... Did she dare acknowledge whom he reminded her of? Of the man that she was not supposed to think about, not even to remember... Of the man on whose account her mother had come to America with her. Her uncle Niko. Ujak Niko, her father’s youngest brother. He would regularly come from her father’s home village in Krajina to visit her family in Zagreb. He would occasionally bring her a trinket or a peasant doll, but would give most of his attention to her brothers, teaching them soccer moves and sleight-of-hand tricks. But when Alida turned ten he suddenly began to pay more attention to her, to tell her how pretty she was, to give her pretty things. And soon he began to play with her. The kind of play that she must never, never, tell her mother about. But after Alida turned eleven, war broke out between Croats and Serbs. Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, but the Serbs of Krajina declared their independence from Croatia and began killing Croats who lived there. Niko, afraid for his life, escaped from the village and came to live in Zagreb. And once he was there permanently, it didn’t take Alida’s mother long to find what was going on. When her father tried to defend Niko – telling his wife that she was overreacting, that this sort of thing was normal in their village – she promptly took herself and her daughter out of Zagreb to her family in Split, leaving her sons with their father. In Split Alida was made to see a psychologist, Dr. Marija Kunić, a friend of her mother’s. Alida hadn’t really felt all that bad about what ujak Niko had done with her – some of it had been unpleasant and some of it had been fun – until Dr. Kunić had told her that it was something to be ashamed of. Before long the war moved to Dalmatia, and once Dubrovnik was shelled, Alida’s mother decided to move to America. The world was now sympathizing with the newly independent, besieged Croatia, and she found it not too hard to get a refugee visa for the United States, since her sister Emilija – Aunt Emily – had married an American and lived in Cleveland. But Alida’s mother preferred New York, where she could find work as a graphic designer, and the small Dalmatian community in the Bronx helped them settle there. As she grew into a New York teenager, Alida could not shake the sense of shame that Dr. Kunić had instilled in her, and found it almost impossible to be alone with a male who was not at least twenty-five years her senior, her father’s age. She would be on the verge of panic if she had to be alone in the office with a male teacher or doctor who was not that old. But, she now thought, it would be different with Detective Radnovich. She imagined herself being questioned by him without the Spanish bitch, and the image felt comfortable. And as it filled her mind’s eye she knew that she had lied when she had said that her type was someone like Detective Radnovich, only a little younger. He did not need to be younger at all. He was just right. I will seduce him, she said to herself as she took the last sip of coffee, staring again at the detective’s number on the screen. Ja ću ga zavesti. She walked out of the cafeteria to look for a secluded place from which to return the detective’s call. She hadn’t slept a wink. Or that was how she felt. But when she reviewed the jumble of images that had gone through her mind, Betty Wilner knew that some of them had to be dreams: she had participated in scenes from earlier stages in her life, and Daniel was alive in some of them. Besides, the clock told her that her mother had already left for the clinic, and she had not heard. Daniel. He had been with her more in the past twelve days than at any other time in her past. She had learned more about him, from his conception in a parting lovers’ farewell to his death set up by a betrayed lover’s jealousy, than she could have imagined before. And now she had, willy-nilly, inherited his literary enterprise and felt committed to bring it to fruition. She felt doubts about her capacity to do so. She wasn’t sure if there was any more research to be done on the life and times of Miki Wilner or if Daniel had done it all. If the former, would she have to learn German? How complete were the translations of their father’s articles? She realized with some embarrassment that she hadn’t even gone beyond glancing at Michael Wilner’s famous book, The Long Seventh Day, of which both the English and French versions had a prominent place in the bookcase of Mireille Bouchard’s living room. She got out of bed and poured herself some coffee from the pot that her mother had, as usual, left for her. Good old Mélange classique. The Bermans, just like the Bouchard-Wilners, were devoted to it. But now maybe it was time to branch out and try different coffees, once she was in her own place. Her own place. Priority number one. To rent, not buy, certainly not until after the divorce. She had noticed lots of rental agencies, as well as apartment buildings with for-rent signs, on Chemin de la Côte-Vertu on her way to and from the station. No point in phoning. When she was ready for the day she would just walk there, look around and inquire. And, thinking of priorities, there was the thesis. It needed to be done and over with. She made a vow to refrain from opening DW until... until when? Let’s say for the rest of the month, she said to herself, until after Canada Day. For that morning, she would limit her personal phone calls to two: Marni and Megan. And then it struck her as she was buttering her toast: the notion of divorce, as a marker of time, had passed through her mind as though it had been the most natural thing in the world, though she had not consciously thought of it since Paul had brought it up in their last talk, five days earlier. She recalled answering something like sure, whatever to his question if she wanted an uncontested divorce, but now she felt unsure. Not about wanting a divorce – there was no contest about that in her mind – but whether to leave the entire matter in Paul’s hands. Shouldn’t she get a lawyer of her own? A Montreal lawyer, that is, who was not a Berman? What she meant, of course, was Greg and his firm. Harvey didn’t count – he did criminal law and was unconnected to his father’s firm. But he knew lawyers, and could be trusted to recommend someone reliable. She would call Harvey in the evening. Unlike her partner, Claudia Quintero liked to go to work on the Monday after weekend duty in order to catch up on paperwork when the station was fully staffed. She would take her day or days off later in the week. “That was good work,” Rick DePalma was saying. “Wald tells me that both confessions are airtight. They already got Omar an attorney from Legal Aid, and they’re negotiating a sentence as we speak. There won’t be a trial.” “Hmmm,” Claudia said. “I thought that the brother might come through with a lawyer. When we arrested Omar, I thought I heard Safet say avokat.” “As of this morning he hadn’t agreed yet, and Omar didn’t want to wait. The guy from Legal Aid is a Muslim, Iranian or something, and Omar is satisfied. It’ll probably be something like twenty-five to forty, instead of to life.” Claudia felt like saying, Poor kid, but refrained. She deserved the praise for the confession. While Omar’s admission that he had set up Daniel Wilner’s killing had come spontaneously when Tom had confronted him, doing the same for choking Lejla had been the result of Claudia’s careful coaxing. And when she had prepared the written version for him to sign, she had left out some potentially painful details, such as Lejla’s goading him by flaunting her exploit with his brother. Sharon Kovacs had been right, after all. It had been all about sex, or emotions around sex. Jealousy in relation to Daniel; anger over betrayal toward Lejla. Omar had shown no anger toward Safet, on the other hand. Perhaps he had simply assumed that a man is not to blame for taking advantage of an available woman. A pretty common assumption, Claudia thought. The strange phone call from Alida was still echoing in his mind as Tom Radnovich neared his apartment house on his walk home from the health club. In her greeting, announcing herself to him, she had pronounced not only his surname (as she had done before) but also her full name in pure Serbocroat, with that peculiar intonation that, coming from another woman, he would have found flirtatious. When he told her that he had some important news to tell her, she insisted – making it sound like a condition – that she wanted to hear it in person, and when he said that it was his day off she said that she could meet him at a time and place of his choosing (“like, whenever and wherever you want, Detective Ràdnović”). He had been looking forward to a free day, with time to do laundry, vacuum-cleaning and grocery shopping, but he finally agreed that she could come over to his place around three. It seemed silly, to come all the way from the Bronx and then go back – there would be no train change, but the round trip would easily take an hour – to be told something that would take ten minutes. But then Alida seemed to be a strange and silly girl. The mail had already been delivered, unusually early for a Monday. Aside from junk and the Con Edison bill, there was a squarish envelope, of the kind used to send CDs, addressed to him by hand and with no return address, but it bore a Canadian stamp and an ETOBICOKE, ON postmark. It had to be from Megan. But what could it be? A CD of her favorite music? He opened the envelope and extracted a CD case bearing nothing but a Post-it note that read Enjoy! – M. The disc inside it carried no printing of any kind, either, but in its silvery surface he could see the letters DVD. The sudden realization of what the disc probably contained made his face flush. He immediately placed it in his DVD player, but then decided to postpone playing it until he was done with the morning’s chores. Two concerns were on Megan Kenner’s mind as she was turning onto Kipling Avenue on her way to Amelia Klein’s office, crowding out, at least temporarily, the one that she was going to express to Amelia. Sam had not spoken a word since waking up. Unlike Saturday afternoon, when he had been in a surly mood and spoken in monosyllables, on this morning his mood seemed fine, but in response to yes-or-no questions he would only nod or shake his head, and with any other question he would smile and wait for his mother to rephrase it as yes-or-no. Perhaps this was nothing to be concerned about. It could simply be that, precociously verbal as he was, he was now experimenting with nonverbal communication. On a morning when Megan felt relaxed, she might join him in the game and likewise communicate with gestures only, maybe pointing to things. But on this stressful morning he irritated the hell out of her. But Sam knew his mind, and to say something like Please speak would be counterproductive. She allowed herself to wonder, for the briefest of moments, how Daniel would have handled a situation like that. And then there was the matter of the DVD that she had, on impulse, sent to Tom Radnovich on the previous Friday. Mrs. Craig at the post office had told her that it would probably get to New York on Monday. So Tom might be receiving it on that day, and, if his block had early mail delivery, might already have it. She remembered him telling her that, whenever he had weekend duty, he would take the following Monday off, and this was just such a Monday. Her cell phone rang. She let the message go to voicemail; she would pick it up once she was in the parking lot of the clinic. It had better not be Tom, she said to herself. At the moment she was feeling acutely embarrassed. What in the world had prompted her to flaunt her extinct porn career to a potential lover like Tom? He seemed to like her as she was. He might like her a little better with her breast implants back in. Or maybe not – maybe he wasn’t a boob man. Most men were, but Tom wasn’t like most men. What if Tom – if it was Tom – was calling her to tell her about the resolution of Daniel’s murder, which she already knew about from Betty? She parked the car and checked the message. It was from Betty. It was funny that she had just thought of her. But there was another message, left earlier, from Amelia! Or, rather, from the receptionist at the clinic. “Hi, Megan,” it said, “this is Joy at Doctor Klein’s office. She was running a little late with a delivery, but she’s on her way back from the hospital and will be a little late for your appointment, maybe fifteen minutes or so. I hope it’s not too much of an inconvenience.” An inconvenience! With a Trappist child on her hands! On second thought, maybe it wasn’t so bad. She would take Sam to the play area of the children’s clinic, and maybe that interlude would get him back to normal. Of course she would, as always, take him with her into Amelia’s office. To show him off? Why not? Amelia, after all, had delivered him. A sudden twinge of pain in her nether regions brought Megan out of her musings as she got Sam out of his car seat. She put him down on the ground and, hand in hand, walked into the clinic building with him. “Let’s go to the playroom,” she said to him. He nodded with a smile. It had been surprisingly easy to find an apartment, available immediately. Disponible tout de suite. The rents, for comparable places, were some two hundred dollars less in Saint-Laurent than in the Plateau. Since Betty was not employed, however, she would have to present evidence of independent income, and her assets were managed by Paul. That would have to change. She wanted no more dealings with Greg’s firm, and she would ask maman to talk to Greg about it. She told the girl at the rental agency – a francophone, but almost as bilingual as Betty – that she would bring the papers tomorrow. But that was silly, she was now telling herself, walking along Chemin de la Côte-Vertu on the pleasantly warm late morning of midsummer. She was a grown woman, and of course she could talk to Greg herself. He was one of her mother’s oldest friends, and she had known him all her life. He had never been one of her favorite grownups. For one thing, he didn’t speak French well, and Betty as a child had not related well to adults who were not bilingual, prone as she was to veering from one language to the other without thinking. For another, his way of talking, even to children, was somewhat ponderous, wordy, and relatively humorless. And when she became, at twelve, a self-conscious anglophone, she became aware of linguistic lapses on his part – like the tendency to say is is – that she thought were unbecoming an educated native speaker. But she liked him well enough, her soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law. (She mentally counted the hyphens in that compound noun, came up with six, and wondered if that was a record.) If there were to be, she concluded, any discomfort in the conversation that might result from her request for some financial paperwork, it would probably be more on his part than hers. It was eleven-twenty-five. Greg was probably at his desk, and she could call him before lunch. But the thought of lunch, combined with the aromas wafting from the restaurants on Boulevard Décarie, made her aware of being hungry. No wonder: she had had only a slice of toast and half an orange for breakfast. Now, where to eat? The Tim Hortons sign at the corner of the Norgate mall beckoned, but, though their sandwiches had improved in the past year or two, she was more in the mood for something Middle Eastern, and not from a chain like Zouki’s, which was also in the mall, but someplace local. She walked down Décarie and found a place where she had been before, in her CEGEP days. It had a different name now, but the smell was familiar. A shawarma sandwich would be very nice. As she entered the darkish restaurant, the sensation of male eyes turning to look at her was almost palpable, seeming to thicken even further the air that was already thick with smoke from the meat roasting on the spit. The waiter, a good-looking light-skinned Arab type, smiled at her, and she smiled back at him. I can get used to this, she said to herself. It’s not so bad, being an attractive single woman. “Bonjour mademoiselle,” the waiter said. “Bonjour,” she replied, wondering if French was the default language of the place. She thought that it might be so, given the history of Lebanon and Syria. Some pulsating Arab music, with a female vocalist, was playing softly on the stereo. It was soft enough that, once she ordered her lunch, she could take out her cell phone and call Greg. But her phone rang before she had sat down, let alone ordered her lunch It was Megan. Betty opened and said, “Hi Megan, I’ll call you back in a few minutes. Is that okay?” “Sure,” Megan said. He had only watched the first of the three movies on the video, a forty-minute feature called Trouble at QCI. It was enough. It was dated 1991, meaning that Megan Kenner, screen name May Green, was nineteen, and looked like the high-school girl that she was playing. (The school where the action took place was called Queenstown Collegiate Institute – the QCI of the title – but that must be, Tom thought, some kind of Canadian lingo for high school.) To say that she was a hot little number would be a major understatement. Her boobs had obviously been enhanced, and were at least a full cup size bigger than they seemed at present. (He had sneaked enough glances at the tags of brassieres that he had unhooked to be familiar with breast sizes.) And the eagerness and skill with which she fucked – a teacher and a classmate – were what he would have associated with an older woman, had he not experienced them in the person of the almost-seventeen-year-old Ellen Daugherty. But the effect of the movie was not to make him feel more attracted to the real-life Megan Kenner, but rather less so. In fact he no longer felt sure of spending Fourth of July weekend with Megan, and more inclined to do so with Yasmina, with whom he now felt very comfortable. Instead, the movie had made him, as porn is meant to, simply horny, feeling ready to do it with any woman who came along. And then, noting on the clock that it was almost one-thirty, he remembered that the next woman to come along – an hour and a half hence – would be none other than Alida Lovrin. Alida was a pretty girl with a nice body (shapely small breasts, slender long legs). She was also, legally, a grown woman. But she was weird, and he didn’t want to get involved with a weirdo. She had said that she found him attractive, though implying that he was too old for her. But why had she been so insistent on meeting him in person? Had she meant to come on to him? Maybe her Serbocroat intonation really had been meant as flirtatious! Of course, there would have been no question of getting involved with her if she were to be a potential witness at a trial, but it had seemed, at the previous day’s meeting, that there would be no trial. What the hell, he thought. He remembered, as a horny teenager himself, reading in some book – could it have been Zorba the Greek? – that it was a sin against nature for a man to turn down a willing woman. Ako to želiš, ćeš to dobiti, he imagined himself saying to Alida. If you want it, you’ll get it. It had been so simple, Betty reflected. Greg’s secretary Francine had noted Betty’s request and asked her for the name of the agency. To Betty’s “Pourquoi?” Francine answered, “Pour l’y envoyer par fax.” Of course: why bother, in 1999, to carry papers by hand? But her food had arrived before she’d had a chance to call back Megan, and then, just as she had begun to walk out of the restaurant, had come the call from the rental agency – it was a man named Nate, speaking English – that they had received the information they needed and that if she liked she could come back to the office and sign the papers, if she still wanted the apartment that Leslie had shown her. She had walked back to the agency without calling, had taken another tour of the apartment, which was two blocks away – a sunny two-bedroom with a balcony, on the third floor of a six-story building with an elevator that she would use as little as possible – and gone back to sign the one-year lease. She could move in any time. Finally she called Megan while meandering back to her mother’s house along the quiet side streets of her native city. She had heard talk on the radio news, recently, about merging Saint-Laurent into a mega-Montreal, though, unlike what had been done in Toronto, it would be as a self-governing borough. But if the matter came up for a referendum, Betty would, now that she would be once more a citizen of Saint-Laurent, une Saint-Laurentaise, vote against it. Megan answered on the first ring. Betty explained the reason for the delay in calling her back, and Megan said, “Congratulations.” There was a pause. “I just saw my doctor this morning,” Megan went on. “And?” Betty asked. “She’s not sure. It could be anything. It could be a virus, like your mother said. Or...” Another pause. “Or?” It felt weird, communicating in conjunctions. An unspoken word was suspended between them. “She’ll know in a couple of days, when the lab results come back. The funny thing is that I had another appointment scheduled for Wednesday, to get my boob job back. But Amelia – that’s my OB-GYN – advised me to cancel it, so of course I did.” “Of course.” Boob job back? What the hell did that mean? That Megan had had a boob job which had been undone? Betty was intrigued, but felt that this was not the time to question Megan about such matters. “But Amelia said that even if it is, you know, a malignancy, it’s probably just a CIS, that is...” “I know what that is,” Betty said. “I’ve heard it enough from my mom.” Megan laughed. “Sure,” she said. “As my Scotch great-grandparents would have said, you’re a doctor’s dochter.” “Scots, were they?” Betty said with an attempt at an appropriate accent. It was good to hear Megan laugh. “Aye, come over round about a hundred year ago, they did.” Megan’s Scottish accent sounded perfect. It occurred to Betty that Megan’s ancestry might be a factor in her liking for Ian Rankin, whose writing Betty did not enjoy. Daniel was another matter; her brother’s tastes were something she had always found strange. “Did they, now,” she said. “They did. And a randy lot they were. The Kenners, especially.” “So I’ve heard.” “The MacDougals, too. And now that my congenital randiness is coming back I have to put it on hold. I’ll have to cancel my date with Tom Radnovich.” “‘Randiness’ sounds funny. I knew a Norwegian girl at McGill named Randi Ness.” “She would have been welcome at my old movie factory, with a name like that.” “I don’t think she was quite the type,” Betty said, remembering the pale, pudgy and devoutly Lutheran Randi. She had arrived at her mother’s house, and into her mind came a list of e-mail messages to send and phone calls to make. “Anyway, Megan, it’s been great talking to you, and I wish you the best possible lab results.” “Thanks, Betty. I love you.” “I love you too.” She clicked off her phone and unlocked the door.