“Right. I can’t either.”
“So what’s that prove, that we can’t trust each other?”
It proves, I tell her, that Professor Goldman’s offer is worthy of very careful consideration.
“Mmm,” she says, one corner of her mouth rising. Then the phone rings. She rolls across the pillow and takes the call. She signals for me to wait.
I fetch my watch from the side table, then wander over to the life-size portrait on the wall, some European lady dressed in Renaissance finery, lacework and ruffs. I study the face, the sloe eyes, as I strap on my watch. All the while, I cannot help hearing Jennifer talking on the phone behind me. And though I can hear only one side of the conversation, the name of Jennifer’s interlocutor and the subject under discussion are immediately clear to me. It is Ambassador Bruckner. He is telling Jennifer that Asahaki has removed himself back to Japan.
“He’s definitely gone?” she says, lowering her voice further. “Oh, Christ, you’re sure?”
My stomach sinks. This is the first she has heard. And when she finds out that I already knew, and that I chose not to inform her, all hell is liable to break loose. I consider taking my leave. But before I can, Jennifer hangs up the phone. My gaze fixed on the portrait, I wait for the eruption. Nothing happens. No object comes flying at me, no voice is raised in recrimination. Eventually I dare a glance over my shoulder. Jennifer is standing disrobed by the bed, pulling on her panties.
“Bruckner,” she says. “Some damn crisis.”
“Serious?”
Her back turned to me, she puts on her bra. “One of our guys just took unexpected leave. Bruckner wants to see me.”
I study the nape of her neck. Jennifer Dale, whom I have never known to lie, has just lied to me.
“Someone important?”
“Where are my shoes?”
I pick them up from by my feet and take them to her. She steps into her dress and places a hand on my shoulder for balance as she puts on her shoes.
“I can’t hang around,” she says then, grabbing her laptop from the floor and turning for the door. When I step over to join her, she puts a hand on my chest. “Give me two minutes,” she says, “then let yourself out.” She rises on tiptoe, presses her cheek against mine, then goes.
I stand staring at the closed door a long while. Then I turn and go back to the bed and dig through the sheets till I locate the letter from Goldman. I slip it into my pocket, and two minutes later I am wandering down a wide, empty hallway in the Waldorf-Astoria, feeling strangely torn open. Bloodlessly wounded in the silent battle of international politics and diplomacy. The world Jennifer and I both chose. Secrets and goddamn lies.
WEDNESDAY
13
“B
IG-TIME,
”
SAYS MIKE AS HE ENTERS MY
APARTMENT
laden with brown paper bags that emit the salty odor of two three-ninety-nine breakfasts from a diner up on Jolimont. “Made the front page of the
Post,
” he tells me, and I pull the folded newspaper from where he has it clamped beneath his arm.
He goes to the kitchen while I scan the headlines with a sinking heart.
DEATH OF SPECIAL ENVOY AT UN OPENING.
It’s in the bottom story inside. But the report, to my relief, is strictly factual. Toshio is named, and though it mentions speculation about the cause of death, there is a quote from Patrick saying that natural causes are assumed and that confirmation should be forthcoming by the end of the week. The rest of the piece centers on the opening speeches, certainly the last time this session that anything from the General Assembly will be given space in the
Post
. There is no mention of Ambassador Asahaki’s precipitate return to Tokyo.
In the kitchen I lay out knives and forks. Mike gets the coffee going. Every Wednesday, holidays excepted, this has been the routine for almost a year. Wednesdays, Mike’s wife, Deborah, goes to visit her mother, who lives alone on the other side of Queens. Deborah takes the Jardine family car, so Mike rides in to work with me.
Cops, it would be fair to say, have never been my most favorite people. But like so much else of my being, over the years I have come to recognize this reflexive antipathy as a legacy from my parents, two children of the dust bowl whose own parents stayed where they believed the Lord had planted them while so many other families were uprooted, driven westward before the rolling sand. They watched helplessly while the sheriff’s office was called in to evict bankrupt neighbors from their homes, folks whose only crime was their poverty. The injustice of those times remained with my parents all their lives, finally coming down to me in fragments, gossip about neighboring farms, the fireside talk of winter nights. Sheriffs, cops, all secular authority was to be quietly but firmly avoided. A God-fearing life on your own piece of earth and the good book to guide you. Raise a hand against no one, the Friends’ creed, supplemented by the more practical creed of the Kansas farmer. You still see it nailed to farm gates right across the state.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
—
KEEP OUT.
But with Mike Jardine, somehow, I connect. The reason, I suspect, is that beneath his tough and brassy New York City exterior, there is a man who still holds, however despairingly at times, a real belief in justice.
“Ketchup?” Mike says now.
“Should be there.”
Shaking his head in disappointment, he closes the refrigerator. “One for the shopping list.” He flicks on the portable TV and sits down. “I got results from the bloods,” he tells me.
The blood samples he took from Toshio. I look at him.
“Heroin,” he says. “In the syringe too. A match.”
“Recreational dosage?”
“Only if Hatanaka got his jollies whacking horses.”
“Ahh.”
“Yeah,” he says, stabbing his fork into home fries. “Something else you’re gonna like. My friend down at the lab says it’s the purest stuff he’s seen for years. Says he wants to keep it for an exhibit, like. For his students.”
He chews on his potatoes, head turned to the TV. The morning news.
“Can he tell if it was the heroin that killed Toshio?”
Mike nods and speaks around a mouthful of breakfast. “I took the bloods from the veins and the arteries. Mix of heroin was the same right through the circulatory system.” He taps the fork to his chest. “Heart was still pumping when he croaked.”
I push a slice of sausage through some egg yolk in desultory fashion. Mike’s appetite seems unimpaired. After a moment I venture another question. “How long does this friend of yours think it would have taken Toshio to die?”
“Once the junk went into him?” Mike shrugs. “Few minutes at the outside. Way my buddy tells it, anyone using that stuff is gonna blow a head gasket soon as it hits the brain. Fried. Oh, yeah,” he says, turning from the TV to face me, “and where do you think it came from?”
I take a second. “Afghanistan?”
Mike laughs. “You ever think about taking this up as a job?”
The dope that was used to kill Toshio came from Afghanistan. We bat this fact to and fro a few minutes as we eat, then Mike decides that it’s taking us nowhere. Half the dope going into the arms, thighs, and groins of junkies right across the country, he tells me, comes from the Afghanistan-Pakistan crescent. It might mean something, but shooting the breeze about it over breakfast is not going to produce the answer.
“More legwork required,” Mike concludes, reaching for a last shot of coffee.
A key turns in the front door. Mike looks at me.
“Rachel,” I tell him. She rang earlier to say she was coming over to pick up some dress.
As she waltzes in, Mike says “Hi,” but all Rachel does is screw up her nose.
“You can smell it out in the hall,” she says, glancing at the remains of our breakfast. “Honestly, you guys. You never heard about calories?”
She glides on past us toward her room. Mike knocks back his coffee, his glance sliding to the hallway where Rachel has disappeared.
“How’s she taking this?” he asks me quietly.
“Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Mike, she’s moved out. I can’t watch her every second of the day even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. She’s okay, all right?”
Mike considers his empty mug. Clearly he has had the same thought as I have, that Toshio’s death might have knocked Rachel hard, brought back memories. Though Mike never saw Rachel in the hospital, he saw me often enough after my daily visits there. One time when the doctors seemed to be losing her, when I’d sat holding Rachel’s fragile, bony hand for two hours and watched her breathing with barely the strength of a sparrow, I returned home and called Mike.
She’s dying, I said.
He assured me that my daughter would not die. I gripped the phone, white-knuckled, and to the embarrassment of both of us began to cry.
Now I push my car keys across the table, asking Mike to go and gas up while I shave. I tell him I’ll meet him downstairs in ten minutes.
When he’s gone I wander down the hall, pausing outside Rachel’s open door. She is holding a long black dress, still on its hanger, against her body. She considers the figure she cuts in the mirror.
“What’s the occasion?”
“A party.” Eyes fixed on the mirror, she turns left and right. “It’s not me, is it?”
I remark that she must have thought it was her when she bought it.
“It’s not too young?”
Too young. She is all of eighteen years old.
“Dr. Covey called,” I tell her. No response; she continues to examine the dress. “He wanted to know why you hadn’t made it to your last three appointments.”
“I’m not a minor anymore.” Her brow wrinkles in vexation as she faces me. “That’s private. Why’d he tell you that? Did you ask him?”
“He just wants to know if you’re going to see him again. If you’re not, he’s got other patients who need that time with him.”
“Well, he should tell me that, not you.”
I raise my hands in surrender. I have learned by now not to argue. But I say that I told Dr. Covey she was moving out, that I gave him her new number so he could call her direct. Rachel is somewhat assuaged. She pulls a face and slips the dress off the hanger. The talk of appointments reminds me of something else.
“Has Juan contacted Mike?”
“Oh, yeah.” She points. “Juan wants to show you something.”
I lift my head. Show me what? I ask.
“He just said if I saw you, I should tell you that.” She rolls the dress into a Macy’s bag. “About Hatanaka, I guess.” Her eyes are averted now, and her whole manner brings Mike’s earlier question forcefully to mind. How is she taking this?
“Rache.”
“Hmm?”
“You don’t have to move out just because that was the plan. If you’d rather wait, you know you can stay here awhile longer. As long as you like. It’s your home.”
She looks up at me. “Why?”
“No reason. Maybe just let things settle down.”
“Things?” she says.
Will I ever again, I wonder, get back the daughter with whom I could truly communicate?
Somewhere out on the street a musical car horn blares crazily. Rachel clutches the Macy’s bag as she rushes by me. “That’s my ride,” she says, turning to face me as she reverses down the hall. “And, Dad, don’t worry, okay? I’m not the only kid in the entire world who ever left home.” Exiting out the front door, she calls over her shoulder, “Call Juan.”
The musical horn blares again, another two bars of
La Cucaracha.
Don’t worry. In the bathroom I sneak a look out the window, but there’s no immediately identifiable young lunatic leaning from any of the parked cars.
Shaving, I retune my thoughts, get myself focused on the day. Finding Toshio’s murderer, of course, is priority number one. While I’m trying to do that, someone will have to fill in for me at the office. Gunther Franks seems the obvious choice. Danish, a fifteen-year veteran of Legal Affairs, he is supremely reliable, the office workhorse; I can trust him not to screw up. And I will have to speak to Patrick too. I want to sit down with him for ten minutes, straighten out the ground rules on this investigation so that I don’t get left the way I was yesterday, chasing my butt in the dark. First up, though, I have an appointment with Pascal Nyeri from Internal Oversight; we are meeting at a bank uptown. The Portland Trust Bank, so Pascal assures me, is the repository of the money Asahaki defrauded from the UN. Ambassador Asahaki. Who is now quaffing sake in the far-off safety of Tokyo.
In the bedroom I check my calendar. A dinner appointment with the Cohens that will have to be canceled. A professor of obstetrics, David Cohen was a close colleague of Sarah’s; the two of them coauthored a paper on preeclampsia that launched them onto the medical conference circuit for a time. Every few months since Sarah’s death, David and his wife have invited me over for supper, and I go, but Sarah’s absence on these occasions seems to coalesce into something almost solid. We seem to spend the entire evening talking around someone who isn’t there, though on my last visit David was bold enough to remark that Sarah was still remembered and missed down at Bellevue.
Buttoning my shirt, I stand looking at the family portrait propped on the dresser. Sarah with me and Rachel after Rachel’s junior high school graduation. A regular family. Mr. and Mrs. Normal and their child. And that is what is most remarkable to me now, just how unremarkable, how ordinary, our lives seemed when Sarah was alive. A professional couple with a teenage daughter, an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and an annual two-week vacation on the West Coast. Our lives were firmly entrenched somewhere in the lower reaches of the professional urban elite, and when I got up each morning, when I went in to work, I thought about ordinary things, day-to-day hassles. I did not think about life. Or love. And now? Now I find I think about them all the time.
Remembered and missed. An epitaph that does not begin to sound the depth of longing that can still well in me at unexpected moments for the life we have all lost. I wonder about Moriko, Toshio’s sister. By now she will have contacted friends and relatives in Japan. By now the shock will be receding, the long, slow ache of life without her brother begun.
As I pull on my tie, I hear someone in the living room. Rachel, I think, in her rush to leave, has left something behind. Turning down my collar, I go to her, phrasing in my mind a delicate warning about the kind of young men who have car horns that play
La Cucaracha
clear across the neighborhood.
“Rache,” I say, passing from the kitchen into the living room. And then I freeze. The person standing there by my phone is not Rachel. Or Mike. The person standing in my apartment is not anyone I have ever seen before in my life. He looks as surprised as I am. For a split second we both simply stare. Asian, ponytail, casually dressed but his hands are gloved. And then he runs.
“Hey!” My legs finally move just as the door slams behind him. “What the hell?”
Jerking the door open, I rush into the hall in time to see him disappear down the stairwell. I shout, then go sprinting after him, but my apartment is only four flights up; within seconds I hear him race across the lobby below me and out the main door. Charged with adrenaline, I ricochet down the stairwell, leap off the last stair, and go skidding across the lobby to the main door. Out on the street I turn left and right. Parked cars by the curb; an empty sidewalk. The guy is gone. I jog up a block toward Jolimont. No sign of him. Eventually I stop, my hands resting on my hips as I lift my head and suck in air.
“Son of a bitch,” I say, breathless.
Turning back toward my apartment, I try to hold the memory. Five ten. A hundred and fifty pounds, a hundred and sixty tops. Early thirties.
Just ahead, Mike eases my car up to the curb. He rolls down the window. I turn my head to him, addressing him as I walk by.
“I’ve just had an intruder.”
“What?”
“Upstairs.”
Mike’s face falls.
By the time he joins me up in the apartment, I’ve checked my wallet. It was lying where I always leave it, on the hall table. A hundred bucks cash, all my cards, still inside.
“You get a good look at the guy?” Mike asks, casting his glance around the room as he enters. My living room. Suddenly a crime scene.
Pocketing my wallet, I explain the circumstances of my brief confrontation with the intruder. Mike chews on his lip.
“Asian, you think.”
I nod.
“Korean? Japanese?”
I hitch a shoulder. I really have no idea.
“So you’re walking through there, out of the kitchen.” Mike points. “And this guy’s where?”
When I lift my chin in the general direction, Mike wanders over that way and I sit myself down. My legs have started to tremble. Breakfast, heavy in my gut, begins to burn.
“Rachel gone?” Mike inquires calmly.