20 From the moment that Alida brushed past him as he let her into his apartment, letting the hem of her short, flared skirt sweep his pants, Tom Radnovich knew that she was bent on seducing him, and immediately decided to let her have her way with him. She was clumsy, even rude – she kissed him in mid-sentence just after he began to tell her about Betty’s adventure in Old Nick’s – but there was no point in trying to stop her. Her aggressiveness reminded him of the first time with Voula, though Voula had been far from clumsy. When Alida began to remove his shirt, she tried – being unfamiliar with Western shirts – to open the snap fasteners as if they were buttons, and the slip-up gave them both a welcome laugh. She continued the playful attack by emptying his pockets while she was pulling down his pants. His only contribution to the activity was donning a condom. Her behavior was that of an old maid who was tired of being one and eager to get laid, though it turned out that, gynecologically at least, she had not been a virgin. What little she said to him during the proceedings consisted of short phrases in Croatian. And at the end she had thanked him. “Hvala, detektiv Radnović,” she had said, “hvala lijepa.” His mind had long been conditioned to hear the Serbian hvala lepo – his mother’s parents (the only grandparents he had known) and his father (who had broken off from his devoutly Titoist parents some time before leaving Yugoslavia in 1950) had always spoken na srpskom with one another, and that was how he had learned the language – and he found Alida’s Croatian ‘thanks a lot’ strangely jarring. There had to be some special reason for her gratitude – she seemed to him to have achieved some sort of fulfillment, though it did not include an obvious orgasm – and his curiosity about her past was aroused, but he didn’t feel like inquiring. The point of the meeting had been for him to tell her about the resolution of the criminal cases into which she had interjected herself, and he had decided that the best way to do that would be over coffee in the café down the street. In English, of course. Once the sex was over, she did not say another word in Croatian and made no further gestures of flirtation. They dressed quickly. He grabbed his keys and wallet from where she had dumped them on the bed and slipped them into his pockets as he led her out the door. At the café she listened attentively, holding her cup rigidly in her left hand as she slowly sipped her coffee, to his account of the resolution of the case, but made no comment. When they parted – the café was midway between his place and the 96th Street station – she shook his hand in the European way, saying, “Good-bye, Detective Radnovich.” “Take care, Alida,” he said. What a strange girl, he thought as he walked back to his apartment. He speculated that when she was younger something had happened to her that had repressed her sexuality, and that the events around Lejla and Omar, in which she had been a not-so-marginal participant, had somehow liberated her. He remembered thinking, when he and Claudia had interviewed her on Thursday, that Alida had derived some vicarious pleasure from Lejla’s sex life. And, after seeing how riveted she had been to his words at the café, her choice of him as the physical instrument of her liberation made a perverse kind of sense to him. When he got home he found his cell phone, which he had not bothered taking with him to the café, still on his bed where Alida had dropped it, flashing with the voicemail indicator. The message was from Megan. “Hi, Tom, it’s Megan Kenner. I... I’m sorry, but I have to cancel our date for July. I... I’ve got this condition that... well... it would be... inadvisable... you know what I mean.” There was silence, as though Megan had wanted to say more without knowing what to say. But finally the message clicked off, and the voicemail voice said, “There are no more new messages.” Condition, Tom said to himself. Women and their conditions. Either they make them or they get them. He felt relief mingled with regret. He had already had second thoughts, after watching the video, about going to see Megan, and now there needed to be no further thoughts. Still, there went his chance to fuck a porn actress. He wondered if Megan’s condition might be something serious. He would, of course, call her to ask. It had been only twelve days since he had met Megan, and the meeting had somehow reawakened his sexual interest, which – as would happen to him every so often – had lain dormant for over a month. And while the interest had at first been directed at Megan, chance had given him the opportunity to act on it not with her but with four other women. What they all had in common was a connection to the Wilner case: Julia Lusha was someone he had picked up (or who had picked him up) while reinvestigating Old Nick’s; Betty Wilner was Daniel’s sister; Yasmina Sliwa had dated Wilner; Alida Lovrin was the one who had set the chain of events in motion. Ranking the four by looks was a simple matter: Betty was a beauty; Alida was pretty; Yasmina was borderline; Julia was plain. A, B, C and D. And Megan? B-plus. But there was something about Yasmina, and Yasmina alone among the four, that had made him want to pursue her beyond a one-night (or one-evening) stand. What that something was, he wasn’t quite sure yet. Certainly sex with her had been the best among the four – there was something comfortable and comforting about her generous thighs – and even better on the second date than on the first. But he thought that there was more than that. He would, he was now sure, call her to ask if she had made any plans for the Fourth of July weekend. Betty was about to call Démén’ Martin in order to arrange for another move when she remembered Roger and the card that he had left her after promising her a better price than she would get through the company. She retrieved the card from its temporary home in her desk and looked at it. It read Roger Bouchard. Bouchard is a common enough surname in Quebec, but Roger had made her think of Rimouski, and if he were actually from there then he could be one of her maternal cousins. Age-wise it seemed plausible. He seemed to be about forty, and Mireille’s three brothers had all been born in the thirties (the youngest in 1937, Betty vaguely remembered), so it seemed perfectly reasonable for one of them to have had a son born around 1960. Should she ask him if he happened to be from Rimouski? No, she decided. She would not call Roger but the company. This was going to be a much bigger move than the one from the Plateau to her mother’s house, and would probably require more than just one man and a small van. She would take all of her belongings from both places and, for the first time in her life, make a real home for herself. Un foyer pour moi toute seule. But after calling them she found out that there would be no movers available before Saturday. The firm had been engaged to transport sound equipment and other matériel for the celebration of la Fête nationale du Québec, to take place Thursday in Parc Maisonneuve, and they would also be doing the clearing on Friday. Betty wondered if she should try another company but decided that the move could wait five days. She had tried calling Marni at all three of her numbers – home, cell and at the Gazette – and each attempt led to an invitation, differently worded, to leave a message for Marni Clark. She didn’t want to leave three messages, so she dialed Marni’s home number once again – it was one that she knew by heart – and, after the requisite beep, said, “Hi, Marni, it’s Betty. We haven’t talked in a while, and I’ve got a ton of stuff to tell you. Bye!” She felt the urge to do some more work on the thesis. She hadn’t done any in over a week, since the time at Megan’s. And what drove her was curiosity about any insights she might gain from what her brother had written about being a Quebecker in New York. She turned on her computer, waited for Windows NT 4.0 to start up, and, renouncing her previous resolution, double-clicked on DW and then, in order, on Articles, Published_96, and 1996-04-22.doc. It was a momentary shock, seeing Tom Radnovich hanging out outside the 40th Precinct at her quitting time. Had this been a movie scene, he would be crushing a cigarette with his shoe when he saw her, but in real life he was a nonsmoker. “What brings you here on your off day?” Claudia asked him. “Wanting to have a drink with a buddy,” he said. “And which buddy might that be?” “She’s standing right in front of me.” So now I’m a buddy, Claudia said to herself. “Old Nick’s again?” she asked. “Steve might think it’s a Monday habit with us.” “Seeing as the other places are closed Monday,” Tom said, laughing. “I take it you’d like an update on the case. Cases,” she corrected herself. The Lejla Begović matter hadn’t actually been her case, but it had become so by virtue of her having obtained the confession. “You read me like a... like a tabloid. I must have a screaming headline on my forehead: Tom Wants Update.” “Come on, give me a little credit for looking past the front page. Anyway, both confessions stand up, no trial, a deal’s been made for twenty to thirty-five.” “Only a twenty min for a double murder?” “No priors, mental state and all that.” “Anyway, no trial’s a relief.” “Why so?” They had reached Old Nick’s, and Tom kept silent as he held the door open for Claudia, but when they sat down he still hadn’t answered Claudia’s question. “Let me guess,” she said softly, though the tables around them were empty. “You want to fuck Alida Lovrin.” “Not quite,” he said slowly, separating the words. After another five seconds he said, “I already did. Or, rather, she did me.” He gave her a summary account of Alida’s visit, using the phrase she attacked me several times. “And you let yourself be attacked, as you so quaintly put it” – she could see him blushing under the red light of the lantern that was illuminating their table – “before you were sure that she wouldn’t be a witness.” “I was pretty sure,” he said defensively. “Weren’t you?” The waitress came by to take their orders. She wanted something stronger than her customary glass of wine and asked for a gin and tonic. “Bourbon and branch water for me,” Tom said with an affected drawl that was supposed to match the cowboy garb (hatless) that he was wearing. “No ice,” he added. “What kind of water?” the waitress asked quizzically, in an accent that might have been Albanian, though it was different from Steve Lusha’s. Tom smiled. “Just plain water,” he said in his normal accent. The way he said water was almost, but not quite, General American. The R sound was there, but the vowel was not quite as open as a Midwesterner like Doug Holtz would say it. When the waitress still seemed unsure, he added, “Not seltzer.” Yet another moment of hesitation by the waitress prompted him to add, “Still water. Not soda.” “You call that branch water?” the waitress asked, seemingly amused. “Only when it comes with bourbon,” Tom explained. After the waitress left, Claudia commented, “I’ve heard ‘scotch and branch water’ used. In fact, I just saw it in print recently. A friend gave me a book of poetry for my birthday, and I came across it in the preface.” She wondered if Tom would ask her, good conversationalist that he was, about the poetry book. Or who the friend might be. It happened to be her ex-husband Doug, who still remembered her birthdays, and the book was a new edition of the collected works of a two-decades-dead poet who had been a relative of his. But Tom was pensively silent. “Did you want to talk any more about your indiscretion with our ditzy Croatian friend?” she asked. “You mean about whether or not I was indiscreet? No, not particularly, since the question is moot. But about her, yes.” “What about her?” “Well, like I told you, she was very aggressive, and when she was finished with me she thanked me. In Croatian. I got the feeling that something that had happened back in Croatia had repressed her sexuality and that she regained control of it. Or something like that.” “I see what you mean. She was about thirteen when she came here, so whatever it was happened when she was a child.” She reflected for a moment. “Maybe you remind her, in some way, of who it had happened with, at least the nice part of him.” “That’s flattering,” Tom said with his unconsciously sexy smile of embarrassment. “Well, you are nice, my friend.” She resisted the urge to put her hand on his. She did not want a repetition of the experience in her car a week ago. “You’re a nice guy with macho looks. Maybe that combination was just what Alida needed, though a lot of women have a hard time with it.” Their drinks were brought. The waitress smiled at Tom as she ceremoniously placed the glass of plain water next to the shot glass. “Branch water,” she said. Tom smiled back at her and nodded his thanks. “Why?” he asked Claudia after the waitress left, carefully pouring the water into the whiskey. “Why what?” “Why do a lot of women have a hard time with what you said about me?” Oh, boy, Claudia said to herself, time for the psych-major shtick. “Cheers,” she said and took a sip of her drink. He did the same. “Well,” she said, “we all tend to put other people into categories, especially the opposite sex. You’ve heard of the madonna-whore complex.” Tom nodded. “That’s one extreme example, and Latinos have something similar that we call marianismo. But a lot of women also have something like that – there’s the nice guy that you’re going to marry, and the sexy bad boys that you’re going to have affairs with.” “In that order?” Tom asked with another smile that she now thought was disingenuous. “Or the other, which was my case.” She laughed. There was no need to elaborate; he already knew about her youthful flings and her marriage to Doug. “Or both,” she added with another laugh. . But Tom now seemed serious. “So,” he asked after a pause, “are you one of those women who divide men into two types?” “I was,” Claudia said. “I’ve learned better, though not as well as I’d like.” She hoped that he wouldn’t ask her about Tony Peralta. “What did you think of me?” Tom asked, still serious. “You mean, back when we had our thing? I assume that’s what you mean, since you put it in the past tense.” Tom nodded. “Well, I found you physically attractive, and you went after me like a lothario, but by then I knew better than just to categorize you as the bad-boy type, so I waited until I got to know you a little better.” She wondered if Tom would say, or ask, anything about the closeness to Harry Arvanakis that she had flaunted during that waiting time, but he didn’t. He gave the impression, in fact, of having things to say or ask but being reluctant to do so. Or maybe things were coming into his mind that had nothing to do with their conversation. Their sipped their drinks in silence for a while. She, too, was beginning to sense herself as removed from their conversation. The situation was beginning to feel awkward. They had often met for drinks during their dating relationship. Then they went on doing so occasionally, but there hadn’t such a meeting since... well, since before Tony. And she still found Tom physically attractive. She thought that she had unconsciously foreseen that something would happen between him and Alida, and she was feeling a little jealous. She had been planning to call Cici Bloom this evening, to tell her about the resolution of Daniel’s case, and then to get into girl talk. Latina psychological girl talk. Tom suddenly snapped out his thoughts. He asked her, “When you thought that you’d gotten to know me well enough to... you know... do you think that you knew me as you know me now?” It was a question that she had already asked herself. “Basically, yes,” she said. “It was a matter of putting the macho front together with the nice-guy personality. And deciding that I liked them both. You really are a great guy, Tom. I know you’re not interested in a serious relationship, but if you ever are, whoever you have it with will be a lucky woman.” “You’re great, too, Claudia.” He very deliberately said her name correctly. He raised his glass and drained it. “I happen to think that the friendship that we have is a serious relationship.” “You’re right,” she said, taking her last sip, though she had drunk little more than half of her cocktail. She had to drive home, after all. She wondered if she should offer Tom a ride home. No, she decided. This would be an awful time to take the tunnel. He walked her to her car and kissed her on the cheek before he turned to go to the subway station. Daniel’s reflection had given Betty some quotable, if quirky, insights into being a Quebecker south of the border. He had separately analyzed the cases of francophone, anglophone and bilingual Quebeckers. His observation that even the anglophone ones always kept a little French corner in their minds squared with what she had just written in her thesis chapter on this subject, titled Adaptation. (His example was an observation that a former Montrealer, twenty years in New York, still called dep, short for dépanneur, what other New Yorkers called a bodega.) She would add a section on expats to the chapter. Mireille came home and, after what seemed like a hurried greeting to her daughter, withdrew to her study in order to make her usual after-hours calls to patients. It felt liberating to know that, while her mother was talking on the house phone, Betty could make her own calls on her cell phone, since the line of her own that she had had in her late teens had been disconnected once she moved out. She turned off her computer and punched Harvey’s number. He answered, “Hello,” without the expected Betsee. When she greeted him he said, “I’ll call you back in a minute.” It actually took three minutes. “Hi, Betsee,” he began, “Paul’s here.” “Can you talk?” she asked nonchalantly. “Now I can, yes, for a few minutes,” Harvey said. “How was New York?” “Incredible.” How did he know about her trip? “Have you heard from Audrey?” “Not since last week.” “Then I guess you don’t know yet. Daniel’s case got solved. It so happened that I found the...” – she remembered that she was talking to a criminal lawyer – “the key piece of evidence, and when the police confronted the killer with it, he confessed.” “What kind of evidence?” “It was a gun that he fired in the bathroom of the club, with a blank, to get the shootout started, on purpose. He had told Daniel to sit at the table where he was most likely to get hit, and called his cell phone to get him distracted. It’s murder under New York law.” “Under Canadian law, too.” “I found the tissue box in the bathroom that had the gun and the cell phone in it. I was just looking for a tissue, since they had run out of toilet paper.” “And the motive?” Harvey asked. “It was over a girl. This guy, Omar, who was a kind of junior member of one of the gangs – the one from Kosovo – thought that she was cheating on him with Daniel, which she probably was. Later that girl was found in a coma, from being choked, and eventually she died. Omar confessed to that, too.” I’ve gotten pretty good at telling the story, Betty told herself as she paused for breath. “And it had nothing to do with ‘Dick’ after all. There’s another man from Kosovo with a similar name – Shkodran, with an N, not Shkodra – that Daniel had wanted to meet, because he’s a big shot in the KLA, and Omar lured him to the bar by pretending that he had arranged a meeting.” “Fantastic,” Harvey said. “What’s Paul up to?” “Not happy. Kicking himself. Crying. Calling himself an idiot. Apologizing to me for the way he’d talked about Daniel.” “Are you feeling sorry for him?” “Not particularly. I told him that I’d rather not listen to him.” Betty was silent for a moment while rearranging her thoughts. “Has Audrey told you much about her brother Cary?” “Not much beyond him being Daniel’s estate lawyer.” “Nothing about him personally?” “No. Why?” “Well, he was the reason I went to New York.” “Really? Your mom didn’t say.” So that was how he knew! He had talked to maman. “She’s discreet. You know.” Betty and Harvey both laughed. “I’ll tell you about it, but maybe you’d better get back to your brother.” “My curiosity is killing me. I’ll call you after he leaves.” “Okay.” How could you have been such a jerk? The unspoken words were addressed to the image in his bathroom mirror as he was brushing his teeth. To assume that Yasmina, having gone to bed with him quite willingly on their first date, and even more so on the second, was therefore available to him for the asking! For an entire long weekend, yet, after having spent only a couple of evenings together! Arrogant, thoughtless, presumptuous. That’s what he’d been. And now he might well have alienated her. Had Claudia’s flattery gone to his head? Specifically, the nice-guy part? It was the same old thing. He had always thought of himself as one of the sensitive guys, the ones who respect women, who treat them as equals. The attitude had developed naturally with the strong-minded and experienced Ellen, and it seemed natural to apply it to other girls later in his teenage life. There were those who liked it and those who didn’t, and he didn’t care about the ones who didn’t. But then in his twenties he had grown into his macho looks without changing his gentle ways with women, and, as Claudia had just told him, it was this seeming incongruity that confused most of them. The ones who liked him for his looks seemed, for the most part, to expect more of an alpha-male personality than his was, and the ones who liked him for his personality seemed threatened by his physique, fearing that it would draw other women. Only the ones who really got to know him came to accept him for who he was. Lauren. Heather. Karen. Claudia. He had called Yasmina and told her how much he had enjoyed the previous evening. Told her that the case of her friend Daniel Wilner had been solved, and another case along with it. Told her that he wouldn’t be free to see her again till the following Sunday, since he would have the kids during the upcoming weekend. And, without actually waiting for her response, told her that he would have the Fourth of July weekend free and would like to spend a good part of it with her, if she was free. It had taken her a while to respond, and it was with a question: “Where are you thinking of taking this?” He had felt taken aback. “I don’t know,” he had stammered, “I wasn’t really thinking, I just thought that it might be nice to spend more time together.” “More is not always better,” she had said. “You’ve probably heard that saying,” she had added with a chuckle that he had found faintly patronizing. “Anyway, I’ve enjoyed spending the evening with you, and having sex with you, but I appreciate the fact that you don’t stay the night, and I don’t want it to go beyond that.” He had been so nonplussed by Yasmina’s attitude that he didn’t know how to react, except to apologize for his presumption. And when he retracted his invitation for the Fourth of July weekend, he didn’t even confirm the possibility of next Sunday. He would have to call her again, he realized, but not right away. Not that evening. Not until he came to terms with her rejection. If rejection it was. There had been nothing in what Audrey had told Harvey about Cary that had given him any indication of gayness, he assured Betty when he called her back. He also promised to get back to her, within a day or so, with the name of a divorce lawyer that she could trust. When Marni finally called her, Betty decided to tell her about herself and Cary before anything else. But Marni, on the basis of her experience, didn’t think that Cary’s sexual ineptitude said anything about his own orientation. “He just might be one of those guys who think that charm is all they need,” she said. She was far more interested in discussing the posthumous writings of Betty’s brother than in gossip about her lover. And, like everyone else, she was captivated by Betty’s detective story. “Do you know if the NYPD will give a press release about it? We don’t actually have a New York bureau, but CBC does, and we could get it through them.” “I don’t know, Marni, but I could get in touch with the New York detectives and find out how you can get the official story.” “That would be great, Betty. Thanks!” After clicking off, Betty was left to wonder about her feelings toward Cary. Yes, she had definitely been charmed by him. He had all those charming little details, tous ces petits détails charmants. (That could be a line from a fashion magazine, she thought.) The way he had treated her in Plattsburgh. The way he had served her breakfast. His readiness to speak French and to dance salsa, lack of skill notwithstanding. Should she talk to her mother about it? If it hadn’t been for the unexpected dénouement of the tale of Daniel’s killing, some details of her time with Cary would have come up already, perhaps even during the ride from the airport. Well, then, perhaps this evening’s dinner would provide the opportunity, Betty thought. She had never talked to her mother about her sex life with Paul. With Gérard, on the other hand, there had been that failed consummation on their first night, and maman had reassured her... Just then Mireille knocked on her door and told her that she would be going out to dinner – avec un ami, she said with a smile, with no attempt to hide the fact of a dinner date – and that there was an ample supply of leftovers and prepared meals in the freezer. “Merci, maman,” Betty said, “ amuse-toi bien!” Well, that opportunity was lost, for the time being. But there was always the next morning. She resolved to get up in time to have breakfast with her mother. After eating a reheated portion of cassoulet (which had probably come from Tante Louise, a French traiteur near Mireille’s clinic) Betty decided to watch some television. But after clicking through the channels and finding nothing worth watching, she looked through the videotapes in her mother’s bookcase and found Le Déclin de l'empire américain, which she had been too young to see when it had first come out, and which had never been re-released. It seemed like an appropriate evening to watch a Québécois film. Especially one that dealt with sex. Even if it was middle-aged sex. Like, maybe, what her mother would be having this very evening.