22
Once again,
thoughts had kept Betty Wilner awake through most of the night.
Thoughts about her pending projects – Daniel’s book, the thesis,
the article. Thoughts about her new theory of Daniel’s
killing. Thoughts about seeing, and probably having sex with, Tom Radnovich.
There had been dreams as well. It wasn’t always possible to separate
dreams and thoughts if the thoughts were of the imaginative variety, except
when she realized that the objects that had just passed through her mind were
clearly outside the realm of reality. When her mother’s house was a six-story
building: dream. When she walked naked into a restaurant:
dream.
She forced herself out of bed in time to have breakfast with her mother
and to be ready – to save time she put on the same dress that she had worn the
previous evening – when Claudia came to pick her up at nine. Claudia had chosen
the freeway route from Lachine to Saint-Laurent and had not counted on the
morning traffic, so that she didn’t get there till a quarter past.
Fortified by the stronger-than-usual Mélange
classique that Mireille had prepared, Betty managed to stay alert long
enough to give Claudia directions for getting out of Montreal, though they
seemed unnecessary, since once they were on Boulevard Décarie, Claudia needed
only to follow the signs for Autoroute 15 south.
When they had passed Candiac and were heading due south, Betty found
herself on the western side of the car, away from the sun that kept playing
hide-and-seek amid the powder-puff clouds, and began to doze.
She slept off and on for some time. But when
she opened her eyes she would see signs for Plattsburgh, Utica, Albany, and she
understood why Daniel had done his apprenticeship as a free-lance journalist by
publishing in their papers: these were places along his route between New York
and Montreal or Toronto, and he had probably stopped off there on his many
drives between the home where he lived and his Home and Native Land.
Around twelve-thirty they stopped for lunch at a Denny’s near Saratoga
Springs. There was a long wait for a table, and service was slow, though the
food was good. It was about 1:45 when they hit the road again. Betty now felt
awake enough to notice that Claudia was driving quite a bit more slowly than
she had earlier, and asked her for the reason.
“It’s the breaking-in,” Claudia said. “You’re supposed to vary the
speed.”
A little after two o’clock Betty’s cell phone rang. It was Megan.
“Hi, Betty,” Megan began and went on immediately. “First
the good news. Sam is napping his normal hours again.”
“And?” Betty said. Here I go again, she said to
herself, communicating in conjunctions. “Is there bad news?”
“Not as bad as it could have been. No cancer.”
“Then what?”
“Most likely what your mother said. The same thing that
your pre-stepmother had.”
“My what?”
“It’s a word that Daniel made up, for the woman your father was married
to before your mother. You never
heard it?”
“No, I never heard him use it. But then he never talked to me about
Brigitte.”
There was silence on the line for a while, and
then Megan asked, “By the way, where are you, on a bus?”
“No, I’m in a car, on Interstate Eighty-Seven on the way to New York.
Not to see Cary,” Betty said with a
preemptive laugh.
“Explain.”
“Well, Claudia wanted to buy a new car, a model that’s no longer sold in
the States but still is in Canada, so she flew up to Montreal to buy one and
now is driving it back, and I need to see Tom Radnovich to get some more
details on Daniel’s case for an article that my friend Marni, who works at the
Gazette, wants me to write about it.”
I’m getting good at long sentences, Betty said to herself. “I’m flying back
tomorrow. So tell me your prognosis!”
“There’s a treatment. It’ll take three to six months.”
“Good luck, Megan! I love you! And kiss Sam for me!”
“Have fun in New York! And... never mind. Bye!”
Megan clicked off. Betty wondered if she had been about to say
Kiss Tom for me.
Afterwards they drove in silence for a while, until Claudia interjected,
“That sounded a little heavy.”
“Well, you probably know that Megan and Tom had a date scheduled...”
“Yes, I know. For Fourth of July weekend.”
“That’s right. Well, Megan had to call it off, because of a medical
condition. Of an intimate type.”
“I see.”
“Her doctor just gave her the test results. It’s not as bad as they had
feared, but it’s serious. It might take as long as six months to get it cleared
up.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“No, not in the long term, if you think about it that
way.”
“Speaking of Tom, I think you can now safely call him and leave him a
message that you’ll be at his place between five-thirty and six.”
It seemed to
Claudia that the strong coffee – by Anglo standards, at least – with which
Betty had washed down her sandwich at Denny’s had been
enough to wake her out of her drowsy languor. After the long conversation with
Megan she called Tom as Claudia had suggested and left a message that seemed
almost impersonal, brief and to the point, as if confirming an appointment with
a receptionist.
But then she suddenly asked, “Speaking of Tom again, what’s he like as...
as a lover?”
Claudia was taken aback by the question. She’ll find out soon enough, she
said to herself. But she decided to answer factually.
“Very good,” she said. “For one thing, he’s a wonderful kisser.”
“And... and in bed?” Betty persisted.
“Very good, as I said. Considerate, patient...”
“How about his... his endowment?” Betty giggled in
her usual way.
“It’s fine,” Claudia said. What was Betty getting at?
“You know, Megan and I thought that Tom looks a little like the actor who
plays Mister Big in Sex and the City...”
“Chris Noth? I guess there is a
little resemblance.”
“So I was thinking, Mister Big...” A nother giggle.
Claudia’s memory was suddenly jogged. “As a matter of fact, I do remember
that the very first time that we were together he did get unusually big, but
only that one time. He told me that that sometimes happens to him the first
time with a woman, if he’s very
excited about her. I guess you’ll find out tonight.” She laughed.
“No, I won’t,” Betty said.
“What? You mean you’re not going to sleep with him?”
“No, what I mean is that I already did, and he
was quite big, a little too big for me.”
Why am I not surprised? Claudia asked herself.
“When was that?” she asked matter-of-factly, though trying not to
sound like a detective.
“The first time that I came to New York with Megan, the
weekend before last. He was supposed to have a date with Megan and I was
supposed to babysit Sam, but Sam got fussy and Megan decided to stay in the
hotel with him, and I asked Tom to take me to Old Nick’s. And then we went to
that Latin place, and then...”
“Yes?”
“I got turned on while we were dancing. It had never happened to me
before with any man other than Paul, but I think I was already falling out of love
with Paul, and the opportunity was there, so, you know, I asked him.”
“You didn’t tell me this last night,” Claudia said.
“I guess not.”
“Just like I didn’t tell you about me and Cary Seligman...”
“What?”
“I’m kidding. Cary’s cute, but he’s not my type.”
“Not really my type either. At least not in bed.”
Claudia waited for any details that might be forthcoming, but there were
none, and she did not pursue the matter.
Suddenly Betty exclaimed, “Oh, we’re passing Albany!”
“Yes, our state capital.”
“Do you ever call the people of Albany ‘Albanians’?”
“Some people do. I don’t. Why?”
“Daniel wrote an article about Albanian gangs, which was published in a
paper right here in Albany, and he made a joke about that.”
Claudia didn’t feel like hearing any more about Daniel Wilner or anything
having to do with his case. “That’s interesting,” she said. She was already
imagining herself back at the Four-Oh – what the hell, she might as well call
it that – looking into that supposed mercy-killing case that Tom had told her
about when she had called him from Denny’s. The matter of the language of the
farewell note seemed especially interesting.
When she passed Newburgh, Claudia turned on the car radio and tuned it to
La Mega 97.9. The reception, crackly at first, improved quickly and the sound
of merengue joined the hum of the Paseo’s engine, making Betty perk up.
“This music reminds me of that place...,” she said dreamily.
“El Rinconcito,”
Claudia said.
“That’s right. I don’t expect to go there on this trip, but this is my
third trip to New York in less than two weeks.” She paused and took a deep
breath. “In the nine years that my brother lived there, I didn’t go once.” She
sounded as though on the verge of tears.
“How come?”
“I never went anywhere without Paul.” Betty did not elaborate, and
Claudia inferred that Paul had no interest in visiting New York.
“Did Paul go places without you?” Claudia asked.
“Short trips, on legal business in Quebec, and to visit
his mother’s family in Toronto.”
“You didn’t go with him to visit family?”
Betty laughed. It was not her usual giggle. “That side of the family
didn’t approve of me. For one thing, we weren’t married for most of our time
together, and for another, I wasn’t Jewish enough for them.”
Claudia wasn’t interested in an explanation of
Jewish enough. “It must feel good, getting away from a controlling
man,” she said. “As you know, I just did,” she added with a chuckle.
The music was now a cha-cha-cha. “Yeah,” Betty said, “except I didn’t
think of Paul as controlling. I thought of him as caring, attentive... you know.
It’s not like he told me what to do and what not to do.”
“He just did it for you, right?”
“That’s right!” Betty said. They laughed together. “But,” Betty went on,
“he would also just tell me what he liked and didn’t like, without being
demanding or anything like that, and,
like a good little wife, I wanted to please him. For instance, he didn’t like
perfume, said he was allergic, so I haven’t used any. Before Paul, when I was a
teenager, I sometimes used my mother’s.
“But one of the boutiques where I went shopping yesterday had a perfume
counter, and on a whim I went over there. My first boyfriend
Gérard used to tell me that my wet pussy smelled like a
geranium leaf, so I asked them if they had anything with the scent of geranium
leaves, and they said yes, there was a cologne called
Number Eighty-Eight from England. It was expensive, but I decided to splurge.”
“Good for you!” Claudia said with another laugh. The good mood, enhanced
by the music, stayed with them for the rest of the trip.
Betty and Tom,
Megan was saying to herself while sipping tea and idly scanning the morning’s
Globe and Mail, learning that the Blue
Jays had beaten the Cleveland Indians, 4-3, on a two-run homer by Shawn Green.
Every young woman in Toronto had the hots for Shawn Green, who looked quite
a bit like Daniel (except that he really was Jewish). But he wasn’t likely to
stay there much longer: he was becoming a superstar, and would probably be moving
to Los Angeles to play for the Dodgers, who could afford to pay him like one.
And probably also to play with the starlets of Hollywood.
Betty and Tom. Why not?
When Betty had told her, after her night with Tom, that she was not
interested in Tom per se, Megan had
already thought that perhaps the lady did protest too much. At that time Betty
was just beginning to doubt that she still loved Paul, and wasn’t ready to make
the break that she needed and that Paul – that jerk – so conveniently
facilitated for her on her return to Montreal.
Bill Clinton, with Hillary and Chelsea, had paid a visit to a camp for Kosovar
Albanian refugees in Macedonia. The article said nothing about how the people
of Macedonia felt about the refugees going home, but they were probably happy.
The Macedonians, Daniel had told Megan, didn’t particularly like the Albanians
living among them – “they breed like rabbits” was a line he had often heard –
and the fact that they had so outbred the Serbs in Kosovo as to become the
predominant ethnicity in the province was worrisome to the Slavs of Macedonia.
But the coverage in the article was of the
Albanians good, Serbs bad persuasion. It had been what Daniel had tried
to counter in his reporting. And Tom Radnovich was a good Serb.
A Serb American, not a Serbian,
but a Serb on both sides, and proud of it, but not overly so, probably no more
and no less than she was of her Scotch roots.
Scotch, she reminded herself, was what her grandparents had called
their parents, not Scottish or Scots.
If some people didn’t like to be known by the same name as their
country’s most famous export (which back home was called simply
whisky), tough luck.
She tried to think of a Serb Canadian, but could come up with no one
besides Mila Mulroney.
Tom Radnovich and Betty Wilner. He was a dozen
years older. So what? A little maturity wouldn’t hurt her, after that jerk who
was only a year older and who, no doubt about it, had
held Betty back.
New York and Montreal? It had been no barrier
for Daniel and Megan. Whoever each of them was dating at home was put on hold
when Daniel came back to Canada to visit – even after she had moved to Toronto
– or when she would visit New York.
For that matter, even the distance between Hamburg and Montreal had been
no barrier for Miki Wilner and Mireille Bouchard. And he had been fourteen
years older.
Tom, of course, had his work and his kids, but there was nothing to stop
Betty from taking a trip to New York whenever she felt like it.
Or they could meet halfway, in Saratoga Springs, as she and Daniel had
once done, just before her move to Toronto. What a romantic night that had turned
into, after they had toasted their newly minted degrees – her Bachelor of
Commerce from Concordia, his Master of Journalism from Columbia – at the bar of
the Adelphi Hotel...
Maybe long-distance relationships were the destiny of the Wilners. For
Miki and Betty they were to come after long and ultimately unsatisfying
cohabitations. For Daniel there had been no need to go through that. Was that
because he wasn’t genetically a Wilner?
What about Cary Seligman? Megan hadn’t thought that that would work out.
He was cute, but not sexy in the way that Betty needed.
What about her and Tom?
Tom had served his purpose: he had put her libido back on track. Once she
was cured, Sam would be two years old, ready for babysitters, and she could
resume the social life that was her due.
“Mommy, I’m thirsty,” she heard him calling.
What about love? she wondered. Well...
The first thing
Tom Radnovich noticed about Betty Wilner when he opened his door was that her
lovely breasts, of which he had had full enjoyment in the privacy of his
bedroom but of which she had previously shown to the public only the full and
shapely outline, were now on as much display as the law would allow. He
remembered thinking, when he had gone out with her, how unusual it was for a
girl like that not to show off her cleavage. Well, she had certainly gone to
the other extreme. He wondered if it was a show for his benefit or a blatant
proclamation of her new singleness.
Or maybe it was just the weather. With the official onset of summer, the
weather had suddenly turned markedly warmer. Even now, at six o’clock, it was
still over eighty Fahrenheit. Warm weather naturally led to the baring of skin.
Whatever the reason for the plunging neckline of her sundress, Betty
looked breathtakingly attractive. And her smiling face was lovely enough to
hold his gaze, with only brief excursions below her neck.
He remembered – couldn’t help remembering –
History of the World, Part I and himself as a gangly
nineteen-year-old drooling over the similarly (though somewhat less amply)
endowed Pamela Stephenson in the scene in which Mel Brooks, as the false Louis
XVI, responds to her Please, ravish me!
with Gee, I just
ate. Now Tom said to himself,
It’s good to be the
king. “Hi, Betty,” he said to her. “Why don’t we go out and have a
wonderful candlelit dinner?” He thought that she was probably too young to get
the reference, but she laughed as if she knew it. And she confirmed it.
“You mean,” she said, “look at some nude paintings, get in the mood?” She
must have seen it on TV, Tom thought.
“It’s good to be the king!” he said, aloud this time. They joined in a
paroxysm of laughter.
He took her bag from her and led her into the apartment. After he set the
bag down next to the sofa he turned around and saw her standing next to him,
less than a foot away. He was aching to kiss her, but remembered her
unwillingness to kiss a man that she didn’t love, and so restrained himself. It
was she who put her arms around him and drew his face down to hers. The kiss
was tentative, with only slight lip pressure, but prolonged, and near the end
she intensified the pressure for a moment before pulling away. “About that
candlelit dinner...” she said with a giggle.
She’s experimenting, he thought: the kiss, the cleavage – she’s remaking
herself as a single woman.
“Yes,” he said. “Around here that means Italian, of course.”
“Ooh,” Betty cooed, “I’d love some nice saucy pasta.” She sounded rather
saucy herself, and he wondered whether to say anything about it, but decided
that flirtation time would come later.
“Then I know the place. It’s right around the corner.”
All sauciness was gone from her demeanor once they were seated at the
candlelit table with its cliché of a red-checkered tablecloth, after they had
ordered linguine alle vongole for
her, osso buco with mashed potatoes
for him (he was tired of pasta), an antipasto platter to share and a half-liter
of house red.
“Like I told you,” she said, “I was asked to write an article about how the
case of Daniel’s killing was solved, and Claudia told me that you have the
whole thing at your fingertips, including the case of that girl, so maybe you
can give me a chronological rundown...”
“I’m sure I can do that. In fact, I’ve been going over the whole of the
combined case in my head like I was writing a movie script, and I just wrote an
outline last night. You know that I’m a movie fan, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know. So was Daniel. So are you ready to write THE END?”
“I’m not quite sure yet.” He felt a vague uneasiness. “I don’t know...
Something doesn’t quite feel finished.”
“Would you let me use your outline for my article?”
“It’s rough, but, sure, I’ll make you a copy in the morning. I’ll insist
on writer’s credit, though,” he added mock-seriously.
“Sure! You can be my coauthor!”
“I’m kidding,” Tom said.
“Well, I told you that there were two things. The other thing is that I
feel the same way, but in a more definite way than you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I tried to express it to Claudia, but she didn’t seem to want to hear
it. As far as she’s concerned the case is closed.”
“I guess I feel more connected to it personally, being as the people
involved are from the Balkans. But...”
The antipasto and the wine arrived. They toasted and began to munch.
“Here’s what I mean,” Betty said. “I just don’t believe that the bullets
that hit Daniel could both have been fired at random. I don’t know probability
theory; math was never my strong point, but it
was Megan’s, and she once mentioned something to me along those
lines. Anyway, I’ve come to believe that Steve Lusha,
or one of his men, took advantage of the situation and deliberately shot
Daniel.”
“Steve? Why?”
Betty fished some paper out of her purse and handed it to Tom. “This is
an article that Daniel had published about four or five months before. Look at
the highlighted paragraph, and tell me if you don’t think that this is about
Steve.”
Tom read.
Take George. Please. Not his real name,
of course.
He owns a large bar in a rundown, mainly
Hispanic neighborhood in one of the outer boroughs of New York City. It is not
too far from Manhattan, though, and on weekends it attracts a crowd of yuppies
who go there for the cheap drinks and loud techno music, and, coincidentally,
for one another.
On weeknights it is a different world.
The drinks are still cheap, but the music belongs to that strange category
known as turbo-folk, with the lyrics, if they can be made out, mostly in
Albanian. The place is, in fact, a gathering place for Albanians of various
types and origins.
But the type that predominates is gang
member, typically huddled around a table with fellow gang members.
There used to be a code at George’s bar
(not its name), according to which feuds between gangs were left at the door.
In recent years, with the advent of more violent gangs from both Albania and
Kosovo, the code seems to have gone into abeyance, and fights sometimes break
out. Guns have yet to be used, but local observers think it’s only a matter of
time.
And where is George in all this?
Simple: he is the leader of one of the
gangs.
Well, maybe not so simple. There is
nothing about George that makes him appear gangsterlike. In the bar he is a
suave, polished European host. He enjoys offering Albanian wine from a winery
(he says) belonging to his family.
What’s more, he is sometimes called upon
to resolve conflicts between other gangs (though not ones made up mainly of
Muslims), and his gang acts as a sort of unofficial police force for the
Albanian gang community. His quasi-judicial activity does not come free, of
course.
But aside from selling legal liquor and
charging conflict-resolution fees, George has more questionable sources of
income, in the sense that they might well be questioned by the competent
authorities.
In general George believes in the rule
of jetojnë dhe le
të jetojnë, live and let live. But if someone crosses him, he doesn’t
hesitate to heq qafe, get rid of
them.
“It’s got to be Steve,” Tom said. “I know the Albanian gang scene in New
York, and no one else matches this. But where was this published?”
“In a paper in Albany. You know, Albany,
Albanian... Daniel jokes about that in the first paragraph.”
A blinding light flashed in Tom’s mind. “I know that joke. And I know how
the article could have gotten to Steve. He has relatives in Albany. I met a
cousin of his, second-generation Albanian-American, at Old Nick’s, and she’s
from Albany. Wow!”
The main dishes came, covered, and when the waiter, saying
“Buon appetito,”
ostentatiously removed the covers –
one with each hand – a momentary cloud of steam from Betty’s pasta dish have
her face an ethereal look, reminding Tom of a painting by someone like, maybe,
Puvis de Chavannes.
He stole a few glances at her breasts as he began to cut the meat – not
as tender as he had expected – away from the bone.
“It seems obvious,” he said, “that Daniel knew Steve pretty well, that
he’d talked to him. Steve lied – he said that he hadn’t seen Daniel at his
place before.”
“Does that mean,” Betty asked as she speared a clam out of its shell,
“that you can do something? Lying to the police, and all that?” she asked with
a smile, before she slowly – and, Tom thought, provocatively – slid the fork,
with the clam on its end and a strand of linguine wound around it, into the
small round opening that she had made with her lips.
“The case is closed, Betty. It was closed before, it got reopened, and,
as far as the DA is concerned, it got solved, getting me a promotion, by the
way. Claudia, too, of course.”
“Congratulations,” Betty said matter-of-factly. She put another clam in
her mouth, also matter-of-factly this time.
“But I don’t mean to say that I, personally, intend to let Steve Lusha
off the hook. I’m going to go after him. I’ll be one of the competent
authorities that will question him. And if I can’t get him for killing your
brother, I’ll get him for something. I promise you, Betty.”
Betty chewed slowly, took a small sip of wine, and said, “Thank you,
Tom.” He thought that he could see a tear form in each of her gold-tinged brown
eyes.
“Most of all,” he went on, “I want to know the truth. For
your sake and for mine. Now,” he said with a chuckle, “your sake isn’t
necessarily the same as my sake.”
Betty laughed, with a more womanly laugh – more like Claudia’s – than her
customary giggle. Her emotional state, he thought, was not conducive to
giggling. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, for you it’s personal: it’s your
brother. For me, I like to know the truth because it’s what I do, whether I’m
personally involved or not.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Personally involved?”
He took his time before answering, slowly chewing his meat. “More than I
ever have been in any case I worked, that’s for sure. Not even counting getting
the hots for Megan...”
Betty laughed again, this time in a sort of half-giggle. “It was mutual,
believe me. Too bad it didn’t work out for the two of you.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He
paused to swallow, and looked intently into her eyes. He felt the vibration of
his cell phone in his left pants pocket, but ignored it. “Maybe not,” he said
as he looked down at his plate again. Let’s not make this too heavy, he said to
himself. “I think Megan’s wonderful, but it was more her image as May Green
that got my lecherous juices going.” He took a large sip of his wine.
“I think you got hers going too, but she needs someone closer to home –
she’s kind of homebound – and, besides, she needs to get over whatever’s ailing
her.”
“Her condition?”
“Is that what she called it?” Betty giggled un-self-consciously. “Well,
she just found out today what it is, and it’s not as bad as she’d feared, but
it’ll take a few months to recover.” She wiped her face with the cloth napkin
and suddenly announced, “Excuse me, but I have to go to the bathroom.”
“It’s that way,” he said,
pointing to the rear of the restaurant. “And don’t find any more guns!”
She had eaten all of her clams and about two-thirds of the pasta. She was
probably finished with her main dish. He decided to finish his in her absence.
Would she want dessert? Should he suggest dessert back at his place?
Suggestively?
He thought that, with the kiss, she had made her intentions clear.
He checked his cell phone for a missed-call indication. The call had been
from Alida. Damn that girl! What does she want now?
But the momentary recall of Alida writhing on top of him gave him a surge
of excitement that was stronger than what he had felt the whole time that he
had been face to face with the beautiful Betty Wilner. What’s the matter with
me? he asked himself. Then he remembered Betty doing
the same thing on him, and the one image dissolved into the other, by way of a
similar one with Voula. He had no doubt that he desired Betty. But it was more
complicated than that. He had feelings for Betty, and desire was only a part of
them. What the other parts were, he didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure he wanted
to know. Not at that moment, anyway.
She was back sooner than he had expected. She had done little more, it
seemed, than freshen her face. But instead of returning to her chair she walked
straight to Tom’s side of the table, leaned down and kissed him again. She had
a fragrance on her that he had not smelled before and that reminded him, at
first, of Earl Gray tea, but then of a freshly crushed geranium leaf. She began
with a soft contact of the lips, as before, but this time she increased the
pressure gradually to almost full. She pulled away very slowly, smiled and
returned to her chair.
“So what’s it like,” he asked, “kissing a man that you don’t love?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said quickly and hoarsely. “Because...” she cleared
her throat and went on slowly, “I think... I love you.” She began a giggle that
she quickly repressed. “In a way,” she added with a smile.
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