The hill rose still higher, though gently now, as if they were climbing out of some primordial lake whose waves used to lap against these midtown shores. Traffic was light, but he could tell something had happened in the distance. Lights flashed round and round from police cruisers parked on the side of the road. A car accident probably. Or a speed trap.
He slowed down, searching for the street number. He must have been almost there. Unwilling to get too close to a police car, Nesha pulled over and counted the houses to establish where she lived. With a shock, he realized police were swarming the house he was looking for. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. His hands began to shake. Something had happened to her. She was elderly; maybe she’d had an accident. Then why would the police be there? An attractive woman walked out the front door carrying a medical bag.
He got out of his car and approached a middleaged couple absorbed in the spectacle. “What’s going on?” he asked.
The man turned to glance at Nesha. “I don’t know what’s happened to this city. Some poor old lady was murdered right in her own home.” He shook his head.
Nesha’s blood ran cold. The bastard had found her. What other explanation could there be? Nesha had sent her the picture on the off chance she might recognize the man. Somehow it had killed her.
Back at the hotel, Nesha found himself filled with a rancorous energy that didn’t let him stand still. Zitsfleisch, his Uncle Sol used to call it when Nesha paced their small house as if it were a cage. Sol was long gone. Now Goldie, his only link with family. If he had arrived yesterday maybe he could’ve saved her. The old lady didn’t know anything. Why did the bastard kill her? Nesha felt powerless before the package arrived. Once he had it in his hand, there would be no stopping him. The bastard would be finished. But meanwhile, Nesha had to control himself somehow, keep the rage from destroying him.
He made his way to the basement of the hotel like a man after a drug. People in the elevator shrunk away from his self-contained sense of purpose. He seemed frightening even to himself and hurried toward the soothing promise of water.
He dove into the pastel-coloured pool and began to swim at a pace he knew he could not keep up; his energy demanded release. He had often jumped into a pool to quell the undercurrent of his energy. Up till now the source of the turmoil had been the images buried in his mind since childhood; he had somehow hoped these would run together and blur in the water as if the chlorine could seep through his skull and cleanse his brain, bleach it into oblivion.
Nesha’s torso rose and fell beneath the water, rose and fell, his arms pulling him toward racing speed. He needed to shake himself free of any doubt. He needed to fashion himself into an unswerving weapon. A seed of pain began in his stomach, he recognized its presence. He couldn’t stop now but turned at the edge of the pool in the elegant prescribed way, gliding under water, and thrashed his butterfly stroke back through the lane as fast as he could.
For years he had floated on the surface of things, feinting to the left or the right whenever anything resembling emotional confrontation drifted too close. He had been more than willing to swim himself to fatigue by day and drug his mind before the TV at night, not asking any more from life than to be left alone. But now, what was he to do? Now, with the murderer looming before him and his mother’s eyes after decades of silence coming back to him in dreams, the way she turned her head that last time to find him, the dark bun unravelling in strands, her face twisted with terror, and her eyes pleading with him to run, run, never come back. His heart had pounded to his own footfalls as he raced through the woods confused, terrified. Dead branches cracked beneath him like gunshots — did they hear? Were they following him? After an eternity of running he came to a clearing in the forest that seemed familiar. Hadn’t it been summer when he’d been there last and a silky stream had trickled through a narrow gully? Last summer. A few months. A lifetime ago. He, his mother, and little Motele had trekked leisurely to a neighbouring village for some loaves of fresh challah. Now the stream had vanished and the gully was a thin line in the snow. Was this really the place he had been so carefree, so childlike? He found the birch tree where his mother had instructed him to carve all their names in Hebrew letters and then, beneath: Next year in Jerusalem. The ultimate Jewish rallying cry. He spat on it. None of his had ever made it to Jerusalem. His had become smoke rising from the ancient synagogue, the smoke thick with blood, the realization that every person who had ever loved him was gone forever. And now the murderer before him, living his life out as if he had been born in 1945 with no memory.
His guts rose in revolt against the steady diet of mash he’d been surviving on. His body thrashed through the water, in turmoil as the pain that took root in his stomach clawed at his arms and legs, knotted his calves, clutched his biceps, pulled the muscles down, down. Yet still he churned out the stroke, though a black noise thundered in his ears. He had encountered this wall of pain before and retreated from it. They said a champion had to push himself right into the pain. When he was young he thought he wasn’t good enough to risk it. When he got older, he thought it was too late but now he pushed himself into the wall of it, partly to try to obliterate the picture of the murderer before him, partly to prepare his unaccustomed body to its new presence.
chapter eleven
Rebecca drove to her new office after dark for the first time. Beverley Street, empty at that hour but for the parked cars, had taken on a different cast. The stillness, the Victorian calm of the houses, suddenly seemed like a predator waiting. She pulled into the parking lot behind the building and killed the ignition. There was an overhead lamp fixed to the brick wall, illuminating the asphalt. Streetlights ranged along Beverley and D’ Arcy in high arcs but in her rear-view mirror she saw only shadows stretched between the disparate pools of light.
Across D’ Arcy Street the old brick schoolhouse floated behind a deep mantle of shade thrown by the mature spruce trees in the yard. The school had gone through several incarnations in its long life. Now it was an alternative high school. She wondered how tall those spruce trees had been when David attended Hebrew school there some thirty years earlier. The vision of a young David playing catch in the yard had often comforted her when she looked out the examining room window upstairs. But now, from street level, night and the memory of Mrs. Kochinsky’s crumpled body transformed the corner into a bog.
She rifled through her purse in the dark until she found her keys. Only then did she step out of the car. She knew the fear, the uncertainty, would stay with her until she managed to chase it out one day, but at the moment she couldn’t see her way clear to it. She hurried toward the back door, throwing the shadowy bog behind her a cautious glance.
She unlocked it and searched for a light switch on the wall before venturing inside. It wasn’t there. Stepping tentatively into the dark hall, she felt her way along the door frame without success. Finally she reached across to the opposite wall and flicked on the switch. The emptiness of the hall she encountered daily was suddenly foreign to her.
As she walked briskly along the corridor and up the stairs to her office, she wondered why this couldn’t have waited till morning. But she knew why. It wasn’t just giving the file to Wanless. She wanted to look something up for herself. That voice from the past. She wanted to know why it was important.
She fitted the key into her door and opened it. Suddenly she stopped. A muffled sound reached her from the downstairs hall. She told herself to get a grip. Maybe it was just an echo of her opening the office door in the empty building.
She found Mrs. Kochinsky’s file in the cabinet and sat down near Iris’ desk. Reading through her notes on the woman’s visit last week, Rebecca tried to piece together scraps of information like a jigsaw. According to Mrs. Kochinsky, a few days before the visit she had received a startling phone call from a distant cousin. Startling, it seemed to Rebecca (she could only guess since the woman’s explanations