Rebecca didn’t want to disturb any evidence. Turning left, she stepped through the dining-room and continued into the den. Through the windows, the small backyard and garage were fading into the dim evening. The room itself seemed untouched. She found a desk in the corner. On it a phone sat beside a chocolate box filled with bills and receipts. Some papers lay to one side. The detritus of daily life. Garbage now that the inhabitant was dead. How much correspondence with art supply houses and galleries had she thrown out when David had died. All his notebooks. Wipe the slate clean. Start afresh. The clichés sounded right, but they didn’t work. Envelopes for David Adler still arrived with regularity at the house. Each time she dropped one in the garbage she saw his face white against the sheet.
Using a tissue from her pocket, she draped the receiver before lifting it and dialed 911. This line had not been disconnected. The dispatcher said that police and ambulance were on their way. Rebecca wondered how quickly they would arrive, considering there was no medical emergency. While she was relaying the information, her eyes fell on the papers near the phone. On top was a card printed in Spanish outlined with a black border. She used her high school Spanish to decipher the announcement of the death of Carlos Velasco, son of Isabella, to be buried in Tablada Cemetery, Buenos Aires, in February 1977. What was this doing in a pile of current mail?
The past few years had not been good to Mrs. Kochinsky. First her husband died, then during the vulnerability of her widowhood, the regime pursued her into the torture chamber in order to catch the son who produced plodding but graphic song lyrics about bloodthirsty generals and death squads in uniform. The death of Carlos Velasco may have been history, but the card had just been received. Why else was it keeping company with Mrs. Kochinsky’s latest hydro bill? It was like a voice from the past. The expression stopped Rebecca cold. A voice from the past. Rebecca remembered the cousin and the photo of the duck. Suddenly she wished she’d gotten a better look at the picture when Mrs. Kochinsky had waved it around in the office. It hadn’t been among the papers near the phone in the den. The purse. Mrs. Kochinsky had brought it out of her purse.
Rebecca tiptoed toward the bedroom as if her steps would disturb someone. She could see everything from the doorstep of the small room. All the drawers from the white dresser stood open, the clothes from inside dumped in heaps on the peach broadloom. On the nightstand, strangely untouched, lay a grey doll in a striped dress, a crude shabby thing for someone as elegant as Mrs. Kochinsky. The police would be there any minute. She took wary steps toward the emptied purse on the dresser. She touched nothing but scrutinized the papers lying nearby. A few things had fallen to the floor. A chequebook, a recipe, some store receipts, a shopping list. The picture wasn’t there. Crouching in a clear area at the foot of the bed, she gingerly lifted the bedskirt. There was nothing underneath. She didn’t want to disturb evidence but she had to know. She poked her foot into the clothes on the floor. She inspected the piles of shoes in the closet. Nothing. It was as clear as day to her now: whoever had killed Mrs. Kochinsky had taken the picture. The inexplicable photocopy of the duck was missing.
chapter eight
Wednesday, April 4, 1979
Nesha smiled inwardly at the discomfort of the welldressed woman seated next to him on the plane. He found, since growing his hair and beard to an unruly length, that people sitting beside him in moving vehicles were less likely to engage him in conversation. He kept himself clean but untidy, no longer able to take seriously the usual daily precepts of personal grooming. He reminded himself of Howard Hughes. Yet there had been a time, many times, before he had turned eccentric, that he had found himself on a plane beside a middleaged woman who wanted to talk.
He had married a woman who was attracted to his melancholy. She said she wanted to help him forget, not realizing she was aiming to eliminate the trait that had attracted her in the first place. They had a son and Nesha had once considered himself satisfied with life. The son, Josh, was a good student, would be the scholar Nesha would have been — had he been given the chance. Josh had fine dark hair, like his father, that lay in loose waves around his head. Nesha feared for his son because he knew how easily the world could fall apart. Josh would tire of his father’s paranoia and say, “Don’t worry so much Dad, this is America.”
Over the years Margie learned she would never be able to make Nesha forget. She knew his obsession would always take precedence over her and resentment became disaffection, then finally indifference. When Josh was twenty and had been away at school for a year, Margie decided there was no longer any reason to stay. She had had a stomachful of her husband’s rage and melancholy and was ready for lighter fare. The ironic thing was that when she left, Nesha lost interest in everything, including all thoughts of vengeance.
It was still daylight when they flew over Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. For vast miles they gleamed beneath him in a kind of flat blue he had never seen on the ocean, a clear mirror of the sky, an almost blinding light in the eyes. He had looked up the Great Lakes on a map before he left and found to his relief that Toronto sat comfortably on the north end of Lake Ontario, a port city. What would he do without his precious water?
At the front desk of the hotel they eyed him suspiciously with his ragged hair and beard, but his money was as good as everyone else’s. One link with his former life he had held onto was his American Express card. It reminded him he could afford to do anything he wanted, only he chose to do nothing. Until now.
From the days when he used to travel, Nesha knew which hotels had good pools. Margie had never failed to complain about the rooms but he didn’t care about where he slept, as long as the pool was deep and long. Well, he didn’t have to worry about Margie anymore; let a new husband have the pleasure.
On such short notice he couldn’t call around for information and had to settle for whatever there was. Late that evening, long before he would be able to sleep, he visited the indoor pool in the bowels of the hotel. The place was candy-coloured, pastel green and yellow and pink, perhaps to make one forget it was a basement. And the pool wasn’t what he was used to — he took in the trendy, impractical curve — but it would do. He needed his swim the way some people needed drugs or TV — to obliterate the world, to blank out a mind that ran the same murderous pictures over and over.
Unwilling to let the old newsreel begin, he let the water take him over. He luxuriated in the kiss of the water as he plied an easy graceful breast-stroke down the middle of an empty pool. His mother wept soundlessly, her long hair unravelling from the bun. Dust whorled into the air, hid the sky. But Nesha turned away. He let the green-yellow-pink of the pool take him somewhere simpler, somewhere on a different page of history in a different millennium. This must have been the very first stroke, he thought, when hyphenated creatures slid through the primeval oceans before memory, troutlizards and carp-toads and semi-dinosaurs, this stroke where the arms pulled the body forward by pushing the water down and away, laying open a channel as welcoming as a lover. This stroke could be sweet and soothing under an ancient sun, a movement so natural you could almost sleep in it. Suddenly the dust sifted down, down, the sun blazed a path through the dust until it became a cloud of smoke, a plume of fire in the little wooden synagogue of his nightmare. Nesha shook his head. He needed something faster.
He lowered his head and shifted his arms up into the butterfly, once a knockoff of the breast-stroke, but years ago now, promoted to its own competitive category. And what a category! If this didn’t kill him, nothing would. His hands traced a fast strenuous S back to his hips, then out again, back and out again at a pace that created a corridor of foam. The once voluptuous water was now violently forced open as both his legs kicked together behind him as one, like a primitive tail. He gulped and expelled air in the trough behind the bow-wave, keeping his head low and his body flat to offer the least possible resistance to the water. He didn’t care what he looked like in his goggles and his long hair tied back in a ponytail.
When he had learned to swim, the breast-stroke was strictly for sissies.