Die For You

21

They took the ride to Queens in silence, each of them lost in their thoughts. Grady kept replaying his call with Sean, hope battling despair. Maybe the call had caused trouble, and if there was trouble already, maybe that would work in his favor. Or maybe Clara would just hate him again, hate him for being such a baby; whatever weakness had impelled her to call would be cemented over with her anger.

They emerged from a slow crawl through bumper-to-bumper traffic in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, inexplicable at that hour, and were cruising down Queens Boulevard. A twelve-lane, in some areas sixteen-lane, main thoroughfare affectionately known as the Boulevard of Broken Bones because of the high rate of pedestrian deaths, it was one of the longest streets in Queens. It was modeled after the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but to Grady it had none of that romantic aura of lost grandeur that the Concourse had, where magnificent old buildings had grayed with neglect, sagged with disappointment and sadness at the deterioration of a once-great neighborhood, modeled after the promenades of European cities. Queens Boulevard was just a thriving urban center with gigantic apartment high-rises, chains and independent businesses lining the roadway. It was New York, but somehow energetically apart, somehow its own thing, minus any of the glitz and glam of Manhattan. It was just Queens. They passed a gun shop and a liquor store, a flurry of fast-food joints, a Cuban hole-in-the-wall.

Grady pulled the Caprice into a spot across the street from a large warehouse building that bore the address he’d found on the Internet. He’d expected something garish with bright lights and lines down the block, a “gentleman’s” club maybe, with cars lining the street and all the typical losers you find at such a place-the frat boys looking to party, coming off the train in packs, raucous, self-conscious; the rich guys taking a night off from their marriages, pulling up in Hummers; the pervs, quiet and badly dressed, waiting with hands in pockets.

But the block was relatively quiet; most of the businesses-a copy shop, a pet store, a men’s big and tall-were all gated for the night. Every few minutes a cab would pull up-once with a group of a gorgeous young girls dressed to the hilt, the next an old man in a black wool coat, the next two young guys in business suits carrying sleek black laptop cases. They all disappeared behind a plain black door, opened from the inside by someone who stayed out of sight of the street.

“She was a working girl, wasn’t she?” Jez said out of nowhere.

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t think a woman would come to this place if she wasn’t in the industry-a dancer, a higher-end call girl. According to her credit report, she wasn’t employed, but that SoHo apartment? A nice one-bedroom in that neighborhood? A couple grand a month, at least.”

“Maybe our faux Marcus Raine was giving her money,” said Grady.

She nodded. “Maybe. But why else would she come here?”

“Maybe she came here to meet someone.”

“Yeah, like a john.”

“Maybe,” he admitted.

“Well, let’s go in and take a look around, ask a few questions.”

He felt the phone in his pocket vibrate. He pulled it out to see that he had an e-mail message from Isabel Connelly. He almost didn’t recognize her name, he was so accustomed to thinking of her as Isabel Raine. The subject line read: “Some things you should know.”

“Oh, brother,” he said.

“What is it?”

He held the screen up so Jez could lean her head in, and they read Isabel’s e-mail together.

WHAT GRADY FOUND interesting about people was that most of them didn’t hide well. Of course, people like Kristof Ragan were different; they slipped out of the skin they were in, wrapped themselves in a cocoon, and emerged as a different creature altogether. But most people found it difficult to stray from the places that were familiar to them, the people they knew. They might be smart enough not to go back to their primary residence, but they’d hole up with friends, or sleep on their aunt’s couch. They’d return to their favorite bar after a few days, thinking no one would look for them there.

He almost wasn’t surprised to see Charlie Shane, the Raines’ missing doorman, sticking a dollar bill in a blond strippers’ G-string while she lowered her bejeweled, gravity-defying breasts to eye level. He and Jez were about to leave, had shown Camilla Novak’s and Marcus Raine’s picture around to blank stares and pressed lips, quick shakes of heads, some frightened shifting eyes. Meanwhile, they’d been trailed, not inconspicuously, by two ridiculously pumped, thick-necked goons.

Jez looked nervous, as if she sensed some danger he did not. She tugged on his shoulder and he leaned down so that she could yell in his ear over the music.

“We should get out of here, call for backup and get this place shut down for a few hours. We might get more cooperation.”

On a T-shaped stage naked women of all shapes and sizes flaunted their goods to a hypnotic trance beat. Their mouths smiled but their eyes were empty, high or otherwise elsewhere. Some of them looked so young, too young to be here, still had that creamy fresh cast to their skin, that soft innocence about the mouth.

Grady always hated places like this. He liked a dancing naked female body as much as the next guy, but he battled an urge to run around with bathrobes, cover these girls up and take them home to their mamas. Of course, their mamas were probably in worse shape. You didn’t wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.

Watching a redhead deftly move out of reach of a groping hand, Grady thought of Clara. How long had it been since he’d made love to her? What did Sean say, nearly two years since she’d walked out the door? A year of legal separation following that. Not counting their breakup fuck-that sad, slow final hour they shared after leaving the attorney’s office. He’d convinced her to have coffee with him, and they wound up back at the new place she shared with Sean, a spacious two-bedroom in the Fifties, with a terrace and nice views, that he had no idea how they could afford. He took great pleasure in having her one last time in a bed she shared with her new boyfriend. He’d have pissed on the sheets when he was done if he could. She’d thrown him out afterward, turning from passionate, weepy, and nostalgic to angry as soon as the afterglow dimmed.

“I can’t believe how I let you manipulate me. Still! Even after we’re divorced.”

“There’s no divorce in the eyes of God. You’re still my wife.” He was only half kidding.

“Get out, Grady.”

“Come on, Clara. You know there’s still something. Don’t do this.”

She strode naked over to her bag, her perfect heart-shaped ass jiggling pleasantly with her stride. She fished out the papers, turned and held them up, utterly unself-conscious of her teardrop breasts and flat brown middle. “It’s done. Signed, sealed, delivered.”

“I’m yours.” He finished the verse, trying to be funny. But the words fell flat and sad on the ground between them.

“Go.”

HE WAS ABOUT to agree with Jez that they should shut the place down, when he saw Charlie Shane, the dirty old man, pressed up against the stage. He pointed and saw Jez’s face brighten as she reached to put a hand on the weapon at her hip. She wouldn’t need it; she could subdue the likes of Shane with one arm. But he knew she liked the feel of it; it gave her a notion of security.

They approached Shane from behind, pushing through a throng of salivating weirdoes. They each put an arm on him and he spun from the stage. His face registered surprise and alarm, then he bent at the waist and knocked through them, causing Jez to stumble back hard into the stage. He saw her knock her head. But they both gave chase, the crowd parting. Someone started to scream at the site of the gun Crowe drew from his hip. Not that you could legally shoot a fleeing suspect in New York State. Still, it tended to stop people in their tracks.

Not Shane. He threw a terrified glance behind him, and at the sight of the gun seemed to pick up speed toward the door. Crowe reached out a hand and was just inches away from having Shane by the collar, when he felt the ground come up to meet him fast, and then he was on knees and elbows on the floor. He lost his grip on his Glock and the thing skittered away from him between the feet and ankles of the crowd gathered round. Someone had tripped him. He looked behind and saw one of the goons smiling.

He retrieved his gun and was about to get to his feet when Jez scrambled over him. He looked up at the door to see Shane exit and Jez follow. He was on his feet and out the door quickly, in time to see Jez disappear into an alleyway.

She was flying and he was already breathing hard. Luckily, he didn’t have far to run. By the time he reached them, Shane was on his face in a puddle of black filth, sputtering and yelling. Jez was on his back, with his arm twisted up behind him.

“You. Stupid. Motherfucker,” she was yelling, adrenaline and anger making her red and loud. She tugged on his arm and he released a girlish scream.

“Okay, easy,” he said, coming up on them, pulling the cuffs from his waist. He grabbed Shane’s other arm and cuffed him. He pulled Jez to her feet and kept a heavy foot on Shane’s back. He pulled the cell phone from his pocket and called Dispatch for backup. They were so closing that shithole down for a few hours.

He saw that Jez’s eye was red and the skin split and bleeding at the cheekbone. There was going to be a huge shiner; he could tell by the way the skin was already bluing beneath the red.

“He hit me,” she said, incredulous. “He got a hit in on me. That out-of-shape old man.”

“Okay, Kung Fu Mama. Breathe. Relax.”

“I don’t believe it. I turned the corner and he was waiting for me. I ran right into his fist.”

“But who’s on the ground now in a puddle of piss? You win.”

She nodded, walked a breathless circle, hands on hips.

“I want a fucking lawyer!” screamed Shane as Grady recited his rights. “Unnecessary force!”

“Shut up, Shane,” said Grady calmly, pushing hard with his shoe on Shane’s back. “Really. Please shut up.”

The wail of sirens was sudden and loud, seeming to come from nowhere, drowning out the sound of Shane screaming about injustice and the violation of his various rights.

BY THE TIME they let him stew in it, wet and covered in the black filth from the alley floor, he was less passionate. They seated him in an interrogation room, cuffed to the table for the better part of two hours, promising him a public defender. Meanwhile, they tended to Jez’s injury, dealt with paperwork, went over and corroborated the information sent to them by Isabel Raine, checked Charlie Shane’s criminal history, came up with some theories of their own. By the time they reentered the room where they’d left him, Shane seemed thoroughly broken; whatever alcohol might have been in his system had worn off. He was just a sad old man in a lot of trouble.

“Where’s my lawyer?” he asked when they entered, without lifting his eyes from his hands folded in front of him.

“On his way,” Grady lied. “If that’s the way you want to go. I’ll tell you what, though. In spite of the list of charges-obstruction of justice, fleeing custody, assaulting an officer-we’re just not that interested in you. You’re more or less worthless to us.”

Shane didn’t look up and didn’t respond, but Grady could tell he was listening.

“We’re interested in the man you knew as Marcus Raine.”

Grady thought he saw Shane jump a little at the sound of the name but he couldn’t be sure.

“Did you know there are security cameras in the lobby of your building?” Jez lied. “We know you let people in to trash the Raines’ apartment. You tell us who those people are? And you’ll have your face back in underage tits before the sun comes up.”

Without his crisp uniform and smart cap, with a five o’clock shadow, reeking of booze and cigarettes, Shane seemed to have aged fifteen years since they saw him at the Raines’ building. Grady saw that his hands were covered in angry patches of raw, red skin, that his scalp was peeling, his nose red from regular boozing. His knee was pumping like a jackhammer; he was scared. Good news for them. Grady cobbled together a little story from the information they got from Isabel Raine. Some of it was true, some of it made up, like all good fiction. He’d see where it got them.

“At this point we know quite a bit. We know that Marcus Raine was really a man named Kristof Ragan. We now believe this man killed the real Marcus Raine, stealing his money and his identity. We know about Kristof’s brother, Ivan Ragan, a man with a criminal history, involved with the Albanian and Russian Mob. We suspect Ivan helped his brother in the commission of the crime. According to our research, Ivan Ragan was arrested on unrelated charges, about a week after Marcus Raine disappeared. He was recently released, serving a sentence for gun possession.

“Corresponding with his release, someone caught on that the man everyone knew as Marcus Raine was not who he said he was. So Kristof Ragan started pulling in his lines-cleaning out bank accounts, arranging for equipment to be stolen, then collecting the insurance check, taking money from his brother-in-law. Then he walked out of the life he’d made. A cleanup crew came in, trashed his office and his home, killing witnesses-four people dead so far. They destroyed or removed every possible piece of evidence. With your help.”

Charlie kept his head down, still no eye contact. But Grady watched as a bead of sweat dripped from the old man’s head and fell to the table between them. They’d managed to find some photographs-an Interpol photograph of Ivan Ragan and a picture of the woman Isabel Raine only knew as S from the Services Unlimited Web site.

Jez handed the shots to Grady and he laid them out on the table in front of Charlie Shane. Still he didn’t glance up, didn’t say a word.

“So either you were just a bit player who took a big tip to let in the cleanup crew, in which case you’ll take the line we’re offering here and tell us what you know. Or you know so much that you’re more afraid of them than you are of us, in which case we’re at an impasse and I’ll have to charge you with conspiracy.”

Charlie Shane looked up quickly. Grady suppressed a smile; he didn’t know how much of what he’d said was true-some of it, maybe a lot of it. But he thought it sounded pretty good. He was proud of himself.

“I don’t know anything,” said Shane. “Mr. Raine asked me to let some friends of his in to move some files from his home to his office, and I did that. He gave me a hundred dollars to do so, and not mention it no matter who asked. How was I supposed to know there was anything criminal going on? I’m the doorman. I do what I’m asked.”

“He asked you not to mention it, if asked. Gave you a hundred-dollar tip? That wasn’t a clue that something unsavory was transpiring?”

Shane shrugged.

“Did you know any of the people you let in?”

“Of course not.”

“Can you describe them? Would you recognize them again if you saw them?”

“Don’t you have a video? You know, from those surveillance cameras in the lobby?” He gave Grady a nasty, yellow smile. Grady hadn’t quite expected to fool him with his bit about the cameras; just introduce a shadow of doubt.

“That’s it,” said Jez. She’d been standing in the corner, silent, brooding. In spite of the ice, her eye was started to swell badly. She moved quickly to the table. Grady could see that she was pissed, wanted reason to put her hands on Charlie Shane. He thought he was going to have to intervene. But she backed away, moved toward the door. “Too much conversation. Let’s get the paperwork started.”

“Wait,” said Shane, lifting a hand. Jez paused at the door but didn’t turn around.

“Start with how you knew Camilla Novak,” said Jez.

Grady placed the only picture they had of Camilla, the one he’d found on the Internet, in front of him. Shane shook his head.

“We found her dead body in her apartment today,” Grady said. “She had a stamp on her hand from the Topaz Room, where we found you just a few hours ago. You were the doorman in the building of the man who more than probably killed her boyfriend and stole his identity. You knew her.”

More silence. Jez turned the knob and opened the door.

“I knew her,” he said quickly. “I knew her.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Jez closed the door and turned around.

“More than a few weeks ago-maybe closer to two months-I was covering Teaford’s shift and I heard yelling out on the street. It was after midnight. A woman, screaming.”

He released a deep breath, rubbed at his temples.

“I left my post and went out to the street and saw Miss Novak yelling at Mr. Raine.”

“What was she saying?”

“She was saying, ‘You love her, you love her. You weren’t supposed to love her.’”

“And what was Raine doing?”

“He was trying to calm her down, speaking in low tones. She screamed, ‘I betrayed him for you. I thought we were going to be together. I have blood on my hands for nothing.’ Something like that.” He waved a hand. “I don’t remember her exact words.”

His leg was still pumping and he was sweating as if he’d just spent an hour working out hard in the gym.

“Mr. Raine said, ‘Be patient. It’s almost through.’ He tried to walk away but she followed, yelling, ‘You liar, you liar. I’m going to burn it down. All of it.’ She grabbed hold of his arm. But he slapped her hard and she went reeling back. He saw me standing there then. ‘Call the police if she follows me,’ he told me. I was stunned. ‘Charlie, I know I can count on your discretion.’ He left her weeping on the street.”

“What did you do at that point?” asked Jez.

“I couldn’t just leave her there. After he went upstairs, I brought her into the lobby, gave her some ice for her mouth, asked if I could call her a taxi.”

“Where’d you get the ice?” asked Jez with a frown.

“What?” asked Shane. It must have seemed like a stupid question, apropos of nothing. But Grady knew why Jez had asked it. Lies lived in the little things, the details people threw in to make their stories sound truer.

“From a cooler I bring my meals in. I use an ice pack to keep things cold.”

She nodded, satisfied. Shane stared at the wall in front of him. “She seemed very fragile to me, unwell. I felt sorry for her. We talked awhile. I asked her what it was all about, the argument. Who had she betrayed? She said that she’d betrayed herself-over and over until she didn’t even remember who she was or what she wanted anymore. I told her that she wasn’t so different from anyone. We all betray ourselves one way or another. She said, ‘Not like this. Someone loved me, really loved me. And I betrayed him for a life I thought was in my reach.’ She wouldn’t tell me more.”

He paused a second. “She was beautiful, you know. But she seemed like a bird or a butterfly. You couldn’t catch her or touch her. Just look.”

“But you touched her, didn’t you?” Jez had returned to her corner; she was partially hidden in shadow. “A lot of people touched her. She was a call girl, right?”

He nodded reluctantly. “We made an arrangement.”

“You kept an eye on Raine, told her anything you saw suspicious or out of the ordinary, his comings and goings? And she gave herself to you in exchange?”

He gave a weak shrug. “Herself, once. Then passes to the Topaz Room. Other girls there.”

“But why would she want to know that? What was she looking for in particular?”

“She wanted to know things like how often the Raines went out, did they look happy, did he bring her flowers. She wanted to know if he stayed out late, brought any other women back to the apartment when Mrs. Raine was out of town. Things like that-jealous girlfriend things.”

“And what about Raine? Did he mention the incident again?”

Shane nodded. “On the way out to work the next morning, he gave me a hundred dollars, asked that I keep what happened the night before to myself. I agreed, of course. He said he’d continue to appreciate my discretion. And he did-with money, once tickets to a play once a nice bottle of scotch.”

“So you played them both.”

He bristled. “I obliged them both. Gave them both what they wanted.”

“Like any good doorman.”

“That’s right, sir.” But his chin dropped to his chest, shoulders lost their square.

“And this woman?” Grady tapped the photo of S.

Shane nodded. “She was one of the women I let into the apartment. There were four of them. Two women, two men. I let them in and out through the service door behind the building. They came with big empty sacks. When they left, they were all full. I didn’t ask any questions or say a word to any of them. Of course, I had no idea people had been murdered, that crimes had been committed. Until you came that night, I didn’t understand what I had done. I was afraid then. I ran.”

“Was he one of them?” Grady asked, pointing to the photograph of Ivan Ragan.

Shane shook his head. “No. Him-I’ve never seen.”

Isabel Raine had given them a lot of information-the photographs from the thumb drive in Camilla Novak’s purse, addresses, Web sites, names. She’d even drawn a few connections. Authors didn’t make bad detectives, it turned out.

“What else, Shane? What else do you have for us?”

Shane shook his head. “I am paid to be of service. And I did that for the Raines. It’s not my job to ask questions or pass judgment. I just hold open the door.”

Grady just stared at him for a minute. Shane was an oddity he didn’t quite understand. Grady couldn’t stop asking questions; finding the answers drove him. Analyzing, extrapolating meaning, finding connections-it was his job, his life. Maybe he had it all wrong.

“Camilla was a good girl, I think,” Shane said. “She made mistakes, had problems. But she wanted to be good.” He was just thinking out loud, Grady thought. Shane was tired, sinking into the depression that follows too much alcohol.

“Wanting to be good doesn’t make you good,” said Jez quietly, maybe a little sadly. She was looking down at her feet. Grady thought she should spring for a new pair of shoes.

“SO WHAT ARE we thinking here?” asked Grady. They were back at their desks on the homicide floor, facing each other. It was late, most everyone long gone for the night. They were both exhausted, but the adrenaline blast from earlier in the evening still had them edgy and wired.

Jez’s desk was a study of organization-neat stacks of folders, a few photos of her son, and nothing else. Grady’s was a field of clutter-papers waiting to be filed, a box of pens spilling its contents, a crumpled white bag from some meal he’d eaten there in the last week, an old mug in which coffee had solidified and was beginning to send off an odor. He dumped the cup in the trash rather than wash it, cleared a space to rest his elbows.

Jez had a printout of Isabel’s e-mail in front of her and was reading rather than looking at Grady.

“Camilla Novak and Kristof Ragan, if that’s really his name, conspired to kill Marcus Raine and steal his money,” she said. It sounded as if she was certain. This was how they did it-came up with theories, tried to shoot them down, see if they held.

“Then how did Ragan wind up married to Isabel Connelly, running a legitmate business, leaving Camilla Novak weeping on the sidewalk outside his luxury, doorman building?”

She thought about it for a minute, tapping her pen. “He was a con. Isabel Connelly was his next mark. Somehow he convinced Novak to wait, promised her the payout would be even bigger after he’d run his con on Isabel Connelly and her family. Maybe he gave her money, continued their love affair, keeping her hope alive. But she got tired of waiting.”

Grady thought about it, about the e-mail Isabel had forwarded to him. “She started e-mailing Isabel Raine-trying to burn it down, like she threatened on the street.”

“He wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Isabel. But he did. He fell in love with her, with the life they made,” said Jez.

“He didn’t want to leave her,” Grady agreed.

“And his brother, Ivan Ragan?”

Grady already had a theory about this. “Okay. So Ivan and Kristof Ragan both come to the U.S. at the same time. Kristof is the good one, goes to college, gets a job at Red Gravity. There he meets Marcus Raine, decides he wants what this guy has-money, the girl. He enlists the help of his criminal brother-someone to do the dirty work, the kill, the disposal-for a share of the haul.”

“But at the end of the day, Kristof doesn’t want to share,” added Jez. She shifted through her file and found the arrest report for Ivan Ragan, handed it to Grady. “Ivan Ragan was arrested after an anonymous tip that he had enough guns in his home for a small army.”

“Kristof Ragan betrayed his brother, had him sent away.”

“Why not kill him? Why take the risk that Ivan would use what he knew to get off?”

Grady shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t want to kill his brother. Maybe he believed that Ivan wouldn’t betray him, wouldn’t suspect that his brother had been the one to turn him over to police.”

“But Kristof had to know Ivan would get out one day, that he’d have to pay his brother off at some point.”

“Maybe he thought he’d be long gone by then. He didn’t expect to fall in love with Isabel. This was the one thing he didn’t plan for, the thing that caused him to stay too long.”

Grady looked down at the photographs of Kristof and Ivan Ragan and the other unidentified men on the dock. “Ivan found out his brother betrayed him,” he said.

“Looks that way.”

Jez was looking down at her own set of prints, shaking her head slightly.

“Is money really that important?” Grady asked, thinking about Kristof Ragan and how he’d deceived and manipulated, stolen and killed. Ragan betrayed his own brother, shot him and left him for dead.

She raised her eyebrows. “Money is important. It’s very important.”

“So important that you sell your ethics, your morals, betray people who love you, murder?”

“For some. But I’m not sure that’s just about money.”

“What’s it about then?”

She looked down at her desk, tapped her fingers. “An idea, an image of what money is, what it brings to your life, how it defines your worth.”

He shook his head. “It’s hard to understand.”

“Is it?” she asked. “Before Benjy I never worried about money. I thought as long as I had what I needed to pay the bills, put some away for later, and have a few extras, that’s all I needed. I’ve seen those skells-pimps and drug dealers-with all their money. It bought them everything, cars and clothes, flat screens and leather couches. But they were still scum, still dirty, still nothing.”

“And now?”

“And now, there’s Benjy’s private school education and saving for college and the cost of health care, gas and groceries through the roof. And he goes to school with all these rich kids, and they have these sneakers that cost $200 and jeans that cost as much and more. Even the T-shirt he wanted? $150. I want him to have those things. I can’t always give them.”

Grady had never heard her say anything like that. He always thought of her as so sensible, pragmatic, not the type to worry about whether her kid had designer jeans or not.

“But he doesn’t need those things,” Grady said. “I never had them when I was a kid. Yeah, it sucked then. But I was better for it. And don’t they wear uniforms at private school?”

“Yeah, they do,” she said with a nod. “But after school and at parties, you know. Those kids are his friends. They live in homes that look like hotels. They show up in Polo and Izod. I hate sending him in less. But I have to. I won’t go into debt or sacrifice his future. And it’s almost Christmas. He wants a Wii, and a new bike. I can’t afford to get him all the things his friends will get.”

He could tell by the line of her mouth that she was sad, that these things worried her in bed at night. He wished good people didn’t have to fret over money.

“But I bet none of them has a mom who knows kung fu.”

“That’s true,” she said with a slow grin. “I am cool.”

“And cool beats rich any day. You could kick all the other moms’ asses.”

“Thanks, G.”

She looked down at her cuticles, snapping her right thumb and pinkie nail together. Something she did when she felt awkward or uncomfortable.

“I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not so hard to understand why Kristof Ragan liked what he had with Isabel Raine-the money, the lifestyle, the image. If it hadn’t been for Camilla Novak making threats, I doubt he would have fled. He’d still be running his company, maybe screwing around, but I think he liked the whole successful urban couple thing. He liked what he was with her.”

It made sense to Grady. Kristof Ragan had the life he wanted. Why would he leave it for Camilla Novak? He wouldn’t. He may have wanted her once; she was beautiful. But Isabel Connelly was the golden ticket-not just money. Class. Respect. With her, he had entrée into a whole other world.

“So who was the crew that trashed his office and home?” Jez said, flipping through the file, staring at the crime-scene photos. “How did he have associations like this?”

“Through his brother?”

Jez held up one of the frames Isabel Connelly had sent. Kristof Ragan surrounded by grim-faced, black-coated men on a Brooklyn pier. One of them his brother.

“I don’t think his brother’s allies were interested in working with him anymore, do you?”

“Maybe not,” he admitted.

Anyone else would be dead, but Kristof Ragan was still alive. He flipped through the photos, watching events unfold a frame at a time.

“He was combat-trained somewhere,” he said. “You don’t take down four armed men like that without some training.”

“The real question is: Who took these pictures? Who else was watching?” said Jez.

Somewhere a phone started ringing. Grady could hear a television set on down the hall-some kind of game, people cheering.

“And how did they get in Camilla Novak’s possession? Who was she giving them to? And why?” she went on, writing down her own questions in a notebook.

“No ID yet on the shooting victim in Central Park. I just checked with the morgue.”

“And who’s this chick?” Jez held up the picture of S.

“I don’t know but I’m glad she’s not my girlfriend. You’d never know if she was going to make love to you or kill you while you slept.”

Jez had a good laugh at that one, and he joined in until they were both doubled over, tearing. They were punchy now-overworked and overtired.

When they’d recovered, Grady e-mailed the photograph to Interpol and his contacts at the FBI, along with the photographs of the Ragan brothers on the pier, asking for an assist. They split up the paperwork. He had the banking records. Jez had the cell phone logs.

“I’m going to work this at home, catch a few hours, and take my baby to school in the morning,” said Jez.

“He’s ten. Not a baby.”

She smiled. “You sound like my ex. He’ll always be my baby. Ten, sixteen, sixty-you’re always a baby to your mama.”

“True,” he said, thinking of his own ma.

They turned out their desk lamps and walked together to the door.

“You think Shane told us everything?” asked Jez.

“Probably not,” he said, holding the door for her. “But your eye doesn’t look as bad as I thought it was going to.” The swelling had gone down some, and instead of blooming purple, the blue had started to fade.

“I’ve taken worse hits in class. You bruise less over time.”

“You’re so butch.”

Another laugh from Jez. He liked to make her laugh; he didn’t know why.

22

At night, the smaller boys cried. They tried to be quiet. But they were always heard. In the morning, those who had wept were ridiculed mercilessly, beaten if they dared to fight back. Kristof had cried; not Ivan. But no one dared to beat him, because of the size and temper of his older brother. Neither he nor Ivan joined in the humiliations of the younger children.

Sometimes, even now, he awoke in the night hearing the sound of a child’s soft whimper, despair and loneliness cutting a swath through his center. Sometimes he was back there, a little boy, still weeping for his mother. Ivan had been a sweet and loyal brother, letting Kristof climb into his cot at night, waking earlier enough to shoo him out before the other boys woke. But Kristof stopped crying eventually, didn’t need Ivan’s comfort for long.

This morning he had awoken, hearing the sound of his brother roaring in pain, bleeding on the dock where he’d brought Kristof to die.

“You betrayed me!” he’d screamed. “You’re my brother!”

The other men, he’d shot to kill. Rolled them, still alive, into the water. Ivan, he’d shot to wound, to warn. He might have survived the injury, might have time to think about things, come to his senses.

“YOU OWE ME some money, Kristof,” Ivan had said in the car. It seemed like months ago-it hadn’t even been a week. They had left Manhattan, Isabel, the life he’d made, behind and were on the Brooklyn Bridge. He was still thinking about his wife, how she’d looked in the last moments he saw her on the street, getting ready for her run. Strong, determined, ready to battle the calories of the croissant she’d eaten. He almost smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been saving it for you, Ivan. For your release from prison.”

“You’re such a good brother,” Ivan said grimly, looking at the road ahead. He spoke in Czech. Outside the sky was turning grayish black. Snow.

Ivan turned on the radio. He liked classical music, found a violin concerto Kristof didn’t recognize, kept the volume low.

“I had a lot of time to think. To wonder who might have informed the police about the guns in our apartment, Kristof.”

It was the apartment they’d shared. He’d cleared out his stuff and found another place before making the call, knowing that Ivan would never tell the police that they shared the apartment. There was no lease; his name was on nothing, not even the electric bill. Kristof felt a thump begin in his chest.

“And?”

“I was never able to figure it out.”

“Where are we going, Ivan?”

His brother ignored him. “Then, just days before my release, I had a visitor.”

Kristof thought it was best to stay silent. He knew who had visited Ivan.

“Camilla Novak. The girl you loved so much, the one you had to have. She said you betrayed me to the police. That you broke all your promises to her. That we did all the work-she getting you access to the apartment, his accounts and passwords, all his identification. I took care of the murder, the disposal of the body. And you? You took all the money.”

Kristof smiled. “Ivan, come on. She’s lying. She’s angry because I don’t want her any longer. You know how I am with women. Easily bored.”

“Then who?”

“How should I know? I’m sorry it happened. But I can help you now. There’s money, a lot of it. What’s mine is yours. You’re my brother.”

He patted the big man on the shoulder. Ivan didn’t turn to look at him. Kristof knew it was too late. Ivan was lost to the silent rage brewing within him.

“Where are we going, Ivan?”

“Some people want to talk to you.”

“What people?”

“Friends of mine.”

Kristof’s mind was racing. How was he going to get himself out of this? Ivan had locked the doors. He was unarmed, outweighed by Ivan. He had no choice but to play it out.

“I always took care of you. I always loved you,” said Ivan. He looked so sad.

“I know.”

Kristof looked out the window of the passing landscape of concrete buildings, the gunmetal sky. Ivan was fast, silent. Kristof never even heard him reach for the gun and deliver a sure blow to the side of his head. The world just grayed out. Then, the next thing he knew, he was facedown on a cold, hard floor, surrounded by Ivan and his gloved, black-clad friends. It wasn’t much of a party and it didn’t end well.

HE THOUGHT OF this as he trekked across the uneven gray cobblestones of the ancient Karluv Most, the Charles Bridge, in Prague. The hours of unpleasantness, his ultimate escape thanks to moves he had learned from, of all people, Sara. They knew the day might come when he’d have to extract himself from a bad outcome, had planned for it. The memory of Ivan, his time in the warehouse, the last moments on the dock caused him to look over his shoulder.

The bridge was mobbed with tourists, snapping pictures of the towering saints-St. Francis Borgia, St. John the Baptist, St. Ann, St. Joseph-leaning over the edge to gaze at the swans in the gray water of the Vltava River. The bridge had stood since 1357. Now people strolled across it sipping soda and listening to iPods. He didn’t resent them. In fact, he was always glad for a crowd. Easier to be invisible.

He passed the Old Town Bridge Tower, a magnificent Gothic structure reaching into the sky with a pinnacled wedge spire. Tourists sat at its base eating ice cream cones, in spite of the cold. Shops lining the street sold wooden toys and Czech glass, T-shirts and rolls of film and candy bars.

He made a left and passed a popular chain called Bohemia Bagel and was suddenly off the main drag, alone on a narrow street. To his right a courtyard behind a high, wrought-iron gate, a dark alley to his left where a woman’s shoe lay in a puddle of black water. The street was quiet, as if the crowded street just a hundred feet away didn’t exist at all. Prague was like that. Turn one corner and you move from the modern to the ancient, as though you’ve stepped through a portal to another time and place.

For now he was home. He was safe. All threats delayed or neutralized. The streets of Prague welcomed their native son, allowed him to blend into their gray mystery, took him into their sandstone arms, hid him no matter what he’d done elsewhere in the world. It didn’t matter here. Prague was the mother he’d never had.

He ducked into the dark side entrance of the building where Beethoven himself composed during his stay in Prague, when the building was known as the Inn of the Golden and White Unicorn. He liked the romance of that, even if he doubted its veracity. Now it housed sleek, trendy condos with all the modern amenities. Real-estate ventures had come to Prague. He’d bought the apartment pre-construction in 2003 and now it was worth a fortune. There were legitimate ways to make money. Of course, one had to have money first in order to do that.

He unlocked the heavy wooden door and pushed inside. He had a futon and a large flat-screen television equipped with satellite, pulling in hundreds of channels from around the world. In one of the bedrooms, there was a simple platform bed. Then just a desk and his laptop computer. The place smelled of fresh paint and new linens.

In the kitchen, he made himself an espresso and thought of the coffee he’d shared with Isabel on their last morning together. He searched for the pain and the sadness he’d felt as he’d driven off with Ivan. But it was gone. He wondered if he’d ever felt anything at all. Or was it all part of a charade he’d played too well? What did it really mean to love someone? Did it have to last forever to have existed at all?

He took his coffee and sat on the futon, flipped on the television, scanning the menu for CNN. He didn’t have to wait long for the story. After ten minutes of enduring news of the real-estate and mortgage crisis, the discovery of a Texas cult compound, the newest way to lose those extra ten pounds, before he saw Isabel’s face on the screen, then his own. He turned up the volume.

“Detectives working the case have tied the recent crimes to the unsolved 1999 disappearance of Marcus Raine, a man they now believe was murdered. They say they are exploring connections from the current crimes, including the recent murder of Camilla Novak, who was also the girlfriend of the man who went missing in 1999.” A picture of Camilla filled the screen.

Her image faded to an image of his face. This did not disturb him; his facial hair grew quickly and he’d more than doubled his caloric intake. Within a few days, he’d look different enough to pass anywhere unnoticed. Until then he’d stay out of sight.

“This man, whom officials say is Kristof Ragan, is a Czech immigrant who came to the U.S. on a student visa in 1990 and disappeared in violation of his visa after graduating from Hunter College in 1994 with a degree in computer science, and is the husband of bestselling author Isabel Connelly.”

That disturbed him. How had they learned a portion of his true history and his given name? Of course, he wasn’t using that name now, but still. Who knew the truth about him? Sara would not betray him; he knew that. The only other possibility was Ivan. He regretted his decision to spare his brother. Another weakness, another mistake made out of love-or something like it.

“Isabel Connelly is considered a person of interest. Her whereabouts are currently unknown.”

“We urge Ms. Connelly to turn herself in,” said a handsome detective. He was well-dressed, his shield on a chain around his neck. “Kristof Ragan is a dangerous man.”

The shellacked, plastic woman who passed as a newscaster looked deeply into the lens of the camera and said, “In a case that involves murder, identity theft, and the disappearance of over a million dollars, truth, it would seem, is stranger than fiction.”

In his stomach, he felt an uncomfortable mingling of anger and fear. Sara had warned him: “You let Camilla live, and look where it got you. It will be the same with this one. She’ll rest no easier, I promise you.”

“She will,” he’d said, not actually believing it himself. “She has too much to tie her to her life-her work, her family. A threat to them will keep her in line. She can’t afford to come after me.”

“Hmm,” Sara had said skeptically. “I saw her. I think nothing could keep her from coming after you.”

“If that happens, it will be my problem.”

Another error in judgment, another knot to be tied now.

Then the cell phone in his pocket rang. It was a disposable phone he’d picked up at the airport, and only one person had the number. He answered quickly, surprised.

“I didn’t think you’d call,” he said by way of greeting.

There was a pause, a light breathing on the line. He could almost smell the peppermint on her breath.

“I didn’t think I would, either,” she said finally. Her voice was sweet, with a lilting British accent that spoke volumes of her wealth and education. “What you said, about not having time to play games. I liked it. I… don’t want to play games, either.”

“Then I’ll see you tonight?” He had a way of making his voice sound halting, nervous, and vulnerable when he was anything but.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, I’d like that very much.”

23

In the East Village studio where he lived, police found evidence of Ben Jameson’s powerful obsession with Linda Book. Stacks of newspaper clippings, photographs from interviews, as well as many taken while she shopped with her kids or dined with her husband or attended her yoga class-he’d been watching her. He’d kept a journal of their imagined affair.

He’d been married, had two small girls. But his wife had left him years ago; he had only limited, supervised time with his children. His wife had cited abuse, mental illness, finally left him after he put her in the hospital with a concussion and a broken nose. She loved him still but was afraid of his terrible rages, the deep well of depression where he often disappeared for weeks, months.

On medication, he was the kindest man, loving and gentle, thoughtful and romantic, she claimed. But without, he could be a monster. She’d been hopeful over the last year. He’d been stable, dutiful about his meds, had seemed almost happy. His visits with the girls were enjoyable, peaceful. But it was his fantasy about Linda Book that had been bolstering him. When he stopped his medication, the downward spiral was quick and final.

“We met at the gallery that was showing my work, at the opening party,” Linda told Erik. “You remember, we had an encounter over a bad review he wrote about one of my shows. But it was fine, even funny. He called a few days later to apologize. We met for coffee. I was networking, you know. But then he kept calling. A week later I bumped into him outside my yoga studio. He said that he’d been in the neighborhood interviewing another artist. But that was the first time I realized there might be something wrong.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want anyone to worry.”

“How long has this been going on, Linda?”

“Six months, on and off.”

“Linda.”

“It’s been so stressful lately. I didn’t want to add anything to our plate. Maybe I thought by ignoring it, it would just go away. He was always polite, never crazy. I don’t know, maybe I liked the attention.”

Erik was silent, his head in his hands.

“I’m sorry.”

She hated herself for her sins of omission, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell the truth, to take another brick out of the foundation of their marriage. Ben was dead. His obsession with her was obvious and documented. No one even seemed to suspect that there was an actual affair. She’d never left him a voice-mail message or sent him an e-mail. She knew his cell phone records, if it came to that, would show a lot of calls to her, but only a couple from her phone. Returning his calls, she’d say. She thought they were friendly, she’d say, if not quite friends. She didn’t want to be rude. He was a reviewer for a major paper, after all. She knew even the text messages she’d sent were purposely vague, innocuous.

“Did you sleep with him, Linda? Were you having an affair?”

She hadn’t expected him to ask the question flat out like that. She tried to muster righteous indignation, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even bring herself to answer.

“Last night on the phone you said, ‘I’ve made mistakes, too.’ Do you remember?”

She nodded. They were alone, for the first time since “the event,” as she’d heard it referred to a number of times. The event of a man blowing his head off in front of their eyes. She found she couldn’t remember anything but the sound of her own screaming. No one should have to see such a thing twice; her psyche seemed to know this and cut her a break. The event, from the moment she heard him call her name on the street, was now a vague black-and-red blur in her memory.

John Brace had left them, finally. Trevor and Emily were still with Erik’s mom and would be for a couple of days until they figured things out. Fred was back at home being tended to by Margie, with staff, of course, to do any of the heavy lifting. And Izzy was out in the fray.

Isabel had left a message saying that she was going to make things right, and not to worry. “Linda, don’t worry. I promise, I’m going to make everything all right for you and Erik again. And I swear I wouldn’t have shot him.” She sounded so young and sweet and silly. Isabel thought that it was about the money. She thought if she could get that money back, she’d fix what was broken in all of their lives, that retrieving it would begin the healing all of them needed so desperately now.

Why didn’t she see that it was about betrayal? Infidelity? That it was about secrets and lies, an erosion of trust? Why didn’t she know that those things cannot be fixed? You can’t restore torn fabric to its original state. You can patch it, you can sew it-but there will always be a seam, a place you can touch with your finger, a place that’s weaker, prone to tearing again.

“I did say that. I remember,” Linda said, looking at her husband.

She was about to deny everything because she could. Because it would be better for her, for him. She could deny any wrongdoing to her grave, and never worry about proof to the contrary, but she realized, in that moment, that more lies would only weaken them further. They needed to accept the truth of each other, to see each other for all their individual flaws and weaknesses and choose to continue on just the same. Or not at all. More lies didn’t mean less pain. Maybe in the moment, but not down the road. She was about to tell him this. She was about to tell him everything. But he spoke first.

“Then let’s move forward from here, Linda. Can we?” He had moved from the couch where he had been sitting beside her, and now kneeled on the floor. He took her hands in both of his, pressed his chest against her knees. “If we’ve both made mistakes and love each other still, can we just move ahead without looking back in regret and recrimination?”

She shook her head. “But Erik, I-”

“I’m begging you,” he interrupted. “Can you forgive me for what I’ve done?”

“Erik, yes,” she said, squeezing his hands, closing her eyes. “But I need forgiveness, too.”

“It’s already done. Don’t say another word. From right here, from this place, let’s move forward and do better for each other. Without looking back even once. Can we? Can we, Linda?”

The look on his face was so wide open, so earnest. He’d known all along she’d been having an affair, hadn’t he? She could see the pain and the understanding and forgiveness in the blue wells of his eyes. She could even see that it was the reason he’d done what he did. He thought that if he could give her the security she craved, she wouldn’t be tempted to seek the cheap and foolish comfort she’d sought elsewhere. She bowed her head in shame.

She’d not been able to keep her father from leaving her. But she could hold her family together now; she could forgive them all, even herself.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. She looked up at him. From this place, he’d said. He hadn’t meant the actual apartment, of course. But it was here that they’d conceived their children. These rooms had been the battleground for every major argument, the place where they’d first made love, where’d they laughed so hard it hurt, where they’d wept and yelled and cooked their meals. Sure, it was hocked up to heaven at the moment, but it didn’t make it any less theirs. She thought of one of Fred’s Zen adages: The journey of a thousand miles begins with just one step.

“Yes, of course we can.”

She felt grief for Ben. She’d cared for him, made love to him, considered him a friend. She felt some culpability-however irrational-for his death. But she also knew that he was a very sick man. The knowledge of what he would have done to Erik, to her, to both of their children, eclipsed the feelings of affection she’d had for him. She found she couldn’t muster much compassion for him, in spite of her sadness.

She remembered that closed-down, shut-off feeling from the night her father killed himself, as if some critical part of her had drifted off into space. When she could feel anything at all, it was only rage. If he’d loved her, he’d have remembered the moon was full. He’d have remembered the night belonged to her. He’d have known she’d find him. She’d always believed this in her darkest heart. But now she understood he hadn’t been thinking about anything except his own unbearable psychic pain.

When she wept in her husband’s arms then, she knew it was the first time she’d allowed herself to really cry for her father. She wept for him as much as she did for everything she’d almost destroyed in her life because she just couldn’t let him go.

Hello, Moonbeam.

Good-bye, Daddy.

THE MOON WAS full and high in the sky when he pulled into his driveway. It wasn’t until he’d exited the vehicle, a brand-new beefy, black Mustang that he’d bought to comfort himself after Clara left him with their new Acura, that he saw the silver RSX parked on the street. He stopped and checked the tags and knew it was hers. There was a light burning in the living-room window of his row house. He’d never asked her for her keys, hoping that she’d decide to use them one day to come home.

He opened the door and found her asleep on the couch, a light on, the television on CNN with the volume low. She’d taken a blanket from the upstairs linen closet and covered herself. She was curled in a tight ball, her hair fanned out on the pillow. She looked like a child when she slept, small and pale. He stood in the doorway looking at her, feeling his heart in his throat.

A couple of times he’d come home and saw a light in the window. Each time he felt his heart leap, only to be crushed when he realized he’d left the kitchen or the bedroom light on when he’d left for work.

But now she was here. She inhaled deeply, issued a soft sigh, as she shifted in sleep. He was afraid to move, afraid to dissolve the mirage. He did mental calculations. It was nearly four A.M.; if she was here, where was Sean? He didn’t work midnights anymore, so it’s not as if she could be out at this hour unnoticed. They must have fought after the phone call he and Grady had had earlier. She wouldn’t have had anywhere else to go. Both her best girlfriends were happily married with kids; she wouldn’t barge in on them, wouldn’t want to lose face again, after already being divorced once. She would never go to her parents, couldn’t bear the nagging and the judgment she’d surely receive from them. Her mom still sent Grady cards for Christmas and his birthday. “Be patient. She’ll come back to you,” she’d scrawled in the last one. He kept the card in the nightstand by his bed.

She opened her eyes and saw him, sat up slowly. He stepped into the living room from the tiny foyer, pushing the door closed behind him.

“Hey,” he said. He shifted off his coat, hung it over the banister, sat on the bottom landing of the staircase, respecting her distance. He caught his reflection in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. He looked tired, disheveled, thick in the middle from months of fast food almost every day.

“You told him I called you.” She rubbed her eyes, then lifted her hands high above her head in a deep stretch.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Okay. No, I’m not.”

The room was exactly as she’d decorated it. She’d picked out the plush cream carpet, the suede sectional, the flat-screen television and entertainment center. It was nice stuff, expensive. He was still paying for it. Even the blanket over her was a gift from their wedding. Thick chenille, her favorite. Feeling petty and mean, he wouldn’t let her take it; it was a gift from his sister on the occasion of their marriage. She had no right to it, he told her.

“So. What? You had a fight?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, gave an annoyed shake of her head. “What do you think, Sherlock?”

He shrugged. “You left him?”

She folded her slim arms across her middle, looked at something on the floor, then picked at some invisible scab on her elbow. She didn’t want to meet his eyes. He saw her shoulders start to shake. Then she buried her eyes in the palms of her hands. He stayed put. She didn’t like to be touched when she was crying. It made her angry.

“I really am sorry, Clara,” he said from his perch. “I just wanted to make him mad. I didn’t mean to fuck things up for you.”

“Oh,” she said into her hands, issuing a mirthless laugh, “I don’t need any help with that. I do just fine fucking things up on my own, Grady”

He wanted to feel her skin, bury his face in her hair. His hands wanted to roam her body, reclaim her in this room that was the home of their young marriage. He wanted to hear her breathing in the dark of their bedroom, look at the sliver of light under the bathroom door when she got up in the night. He wanted to listen to her blow-dry her hair in the morning while she sang out of tune to whatever was playing on the radio. He wanted to sit on the porch with her on Friday nights and sip wine, watch the neighborhood kids play stickball in the street like he used to a lifetime ago. Such little things he wanted, nothing fancy-not weekends in Paris and Veuve Clicquot. But there was so much distance to cross, such rough terrain between where they were now and that warm, comfortable place. He didn’t even know if she wanted those things, too. He realized he’d never asked her what she wanted, that even now he had no idea what might make her happy.

“He didn’t get mad about the phone call. That’s the worst part. He wasn’t even angry. It’d been you? You’d be screaming like a jealous little boy.”

He took the hit and didn’t argue. She was right. He’d have blown his stack had he been on the other end of that call.

“Then what?”

She ran her fingers through her hair. “He just asked me why I’d called. Was I missing you? Was I sure I was ready to move on?”

She blew out a breath, pushed the blanket aside and crossed her legs. She was wearing black leggings and one of his old Regis sweatshirts, soft and faded from years and years of washing. Her at-home uniform, he used to call it.

“He said he wanted to know we were both there, heart and soul, before we walked down the aisle. He didn’t want to marry Angie. She was pregnant and they were young. He thought he had to do that. Maybe he did. But he never loved her enough to ride the ups and downs of a real relationship. He didn’t want to make another mistake, this time marrying someone who didn’t love him enough.”

He was about to make a smart comment about what a deep guy his good friend Sean was, so wise in the ways of love, but he could tell by the look on her face that she was actually waiting for him to say something shitty. Suddenly he knew he had to man up now, tread carefully, or watch her walk back to Mr. Wonderful. He went for a solemn head nod. In the mirror, it looked good.

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him why I called you, what I called to tell you.”

“Why did you call?”

“I told him I was pregnant,” she said, simply, quietly, still not looking at him. “That we made love after the divorce hearing and that three weeks later I didn’t get my period.”

Grady felt as if something had washed over him, some cleansing rush of air. He felt as if it would carry him away if he let it. He stood up.

“I didn’t tell him that I think about you every day, wonder where you are, what you’re doing, if you’ve found someone new. I didn’t tell him that when he and I are”-she looked up at him, embarrassed-“together, I’m remembering how it used to be with you.”

He was afraid for a minute that he was dreaming, that he was going to wake up crushed by disappointment. He’d dreamed scenes like this before, could barely get out of bed afterward from the weight of his sadness when he realized she was still gone.

“Clara.”

“And before you ask how I know it’s yours and ruin everything-Sean had a vasectomy after their second child. He intended to try to reverse it if we decided later on that we wanted children together.”

She looked up at him then, her hazel eyes-green in the center, fading out to brown at the edges-locked on him. He felt paralyzed.

“I’m pregnant, Grady. I want to come home, but there have to be changes. A lot of changes-or I’ll be on my own, raising this child without you. I’m not afraid to do that.”

“No. No,” he said, moving over to her quickly. “I know I have a lot to learn, that I have to grow up to be the man you deserve. I’m capable of that. You’ll see.” He hoped it was true; he would have promised her anything.

He dropped to his knees before her, put his hands on her hips. He took in the scent of her, the citrus of her shampoo mingling with her skin. She already felt softer to him, wider at the hips in a nice way. She leaned down to kiss him and he pressed his lips to hers. He felt her open to him like a flower. She was so soft, so sweet.

“I’ll do anything, Clara,” he said, pulling away. He pushed the hair back from her face with both hands. “I’d die for you.”

He realized then that he was crying. He hadn’t cried once in his adult life, not even when she’d left him.

“I need you to live for me, Grady” She put her hands to her belly. “For us.”

“Yes,” he said, putting his head in her lap. She rested her hands on his head. “Yes,” he said again, but his voice was just a raspy whisper. He wasn’t sure she’d heard.

24

I look back on it all now and see that my motivations were murky. Then it all seemed very clear. I remembered Ivan’s sullen anger: He betrayed me. And I thought that was it for me, too. He’d stolen my money he’d stolen from Linda and Erik, jeopardized Emily and Trevor’s education, their future. He’d taken my love and used it for his own purposes. He’d made a fool of me; I, the seer, the one who misses nothing, never once suspected he wasn’t who he claimed to be. There was a powerful drive. Sometimes I thought I was looking for justice. Sometimes I acknowledged it might be revenge I wanted. Other times I thought I just wanted to get our money back, at least something to bring to Linda and Erik, some offering. She’d warned me after all, hadn’t she? Just wait and get to know him better before you jump in. Izzy, he’s so cold.

But maybe it wasn’t any of these things. I risked my life, my best friend’s life, our futures, to get on a plane to follow a ghost of a man, when I wasn’t even certain I was heading in the right direction. But now I think I wasn’t chasing Marcus at all. I was chasing my father.

There was a light in my father’s eye for me that wasn’t there for anyone else. And even as a little girl I knew it. He loved Linda; they shared their unique bond. But when he looked at me, there was something-maybe it was just a chemistry-that I knew was unique to us. Linda and I never discussed it. We never talked about our father at all after his death. Her wounds stayed raw for years; some of them still bled occasionally. Linda chased him in life; she was always at his heels, pulling at his coat. Look at me, Daddy. She saw his death as the ultimate abandonment, which, of course, it was. And all her adoration-which in the end meant nothing to him-turned to rage. She turned away from him forever. After his death, it was my turn to chase. Daddy, why?

It’s the word that drives me, the question, the answer just on the next page if only I can get there. I write, letting a river of possibility flow through me, letting all the energy of all the stories in the world pass from the air onto the page. Some writers fear the enormity of the blankness before them, that empty white field. I live for it.

“Is it just about the knowing?” Jack asked me again. “Is that what this is about? Is it worth it?”

Could anything be more worth it? In every character is a universe, every shade of black and white, every potential darkness, even the potential to turn from darkness and walk into the light. I have to go there, into the shadow of unknowing. I’d rather die in the dark alley than bask a lifetime ignorant in the light.

“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Jack said. “In fact, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Most people run from the dark, Isabel. With good reason.”

“I’m not most people.”

“I know.” He sounded sad, nearly pitying, when he said it.

“WHAT ARE YOU thinking about?”

We were at the end of a long day that had yielded nothing, both of us tired, drained. We sat at a thick wooden table in a dark pub, much like the one where Marcus proposed. It was dark, lit by candlelight-sconces on the wall, glass votives on the table. Huge orange flames leapt in the stone fireplace.

“You know.”

“I know.”

WE’D RENTED A car at Ruzyne Airport, a big, black late-model Mercedes, and drove a highway studded with brightly colored billboards and road signs neither of us could read, while I tried to navigate us into the city with a map I didn’t understand. With the blind luck of fools, we managed not to get ourselves killed and arrived on the cobblestone streets of Prague. After another harrowing twenty minutes during which we nearly collided with a tram, narrowly avoided running over an old woman with a cane, and drove the wrong way up a one-way street, Jack suggested I consult our Prague guidebook to figure out what the street signs meant.

“Tourists should not drive in Prague,” the guide read. “The city’s complex web of one-way streets and the large number of pedestrian-only areas around the historic core of the city make driving confusing and dangerous for foreigners.”

We eventually found our way to our hotel, a narrow slice of a building at the end of a long, winding street across from a park. I have never been so glad to see a valet drive off with a vehicle in my life.

The rest of the day was spent trying to find someone to help us get around, someone to help us talk to locals, since Czech, a West Slavic language, has never resonated with me. I’ve found its pronunciation nearly impossible and continually made an ass out of myself during my two previous visits. Finally, through some arrangement Jack made, the concierge’s cousin agreed to meet us in the morning and, for one hundred U.S. dollars, spend the day with us trying to follow up the few leads I had.

“He can’t come tonight?”

“No. It’s not possible. I’m sorry.”

“Is there anyone else?” I sounded petulant, and too American. The concierge gave me an apathetic shrug.

“That’s fine,” said Jack. “The morning is fine.”

Jack smiled at the concierge and pressed some money into his hand, which seemed to simultaneously please and annoy the man.

“The morning is not fine,” I whispered to Jack as he pushed me up the flight of stairs to our room.

“It’ll have to be.”

The room was nice, a suite, everything polished and new. Hardwood floors, brocade drapes, elaborate faux antique furniture, a large comfortable bed. The bathroom featured gleaming marble surfaces and big plush towels. I had suggested the Four Seasons. Jack said that fugitives were not accepted at five-star hotels. I am sure that’s not true.

I sank into the bed and felt despair lash me to the mattress. A powerful fatigue weighted down my limbs, my head. The full scope of my folly was suddenly clear. The wound on my head throbbed.

“This is a mistake,” I said. “He’s not even here.”

Jack sat beside me, put a hand on my forehead. “We’re here. We’ll try, Izzy If he’s not? We’ll go home. At least you’ll know you did your best. It will help you to live with all of this better; it will help you to move on.”

It was then that I realized he was humoring me. He didn’t believe that Marcus was here, or that we’d find him, or that I’d get anything that I needed in this mad enterprise. He had come because he knew if he didn’t, I’d go alone. He’d come simply to hold my hand, then pick up the pieces and carry them all home. I made the decision right then and there to ditch him as soon as possible.

“Let’s get something to eat,” he said softly into the silence that followed. Somewhere there was a little girl laughing; a light strain of music came through the ceiling from the room above us. The air smelled a little too floral; too much air freshener. I let Jack pull me up off the bed and corral me toward the door.

“And don’t think you’re going to unload me, leave me in a bar or restaurant somewhere, or sneak out of here in the night and go it alone.”

“I would never do that.”

“Sure.” There was something in his tone, maybe a little anger. I realized we were talking about something else.

AT THE BEER garden, we sipped from big mugs of rich golden ale. They’d served us a ridiculously large cast-iron pan filled with pork, chicken, and potatoes. It was almost exactly like every meal I’d eaten here with Marcus. I thought we’d eat all night and never make a dent. But Jack seemed to be plowing his way through, while I pushed a piece of meat around my plate. I had no appetite, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.

“Try, Iz. You know how you get when your blood sugar is low.”

“And how’s that?” I snapped.

He raised his eyebrows at me.

It was dark and we were both exhausted when we crossed the Charles Bridge to return to our hotel. Jack went up to the room and I stopped at the single computer monitor in the lobby to check my e-mail. There were nearly twenty messages, from booksellers and fans who had seen the news, one from my editor asking if everything was okay, another from my sister. The message box was blank but the subject line was: “Goddammit, you stubborn pain in the ass… COME HOME. I love you.”

Then there was one from Detective Grady Crowe, subject “Things YOU should know.”

First of all, it’s my duty to tell you to turn yourself in, to your lawyer or to me. You are a person of interest in this case, and being unavailable to me is not in your best interest. You are out of your depth and in big trouble.

That said, much of the information you provided has proved valuable to us.

He went on to tell me about the events at the Topaz Room, Charlie Shane’s relationship to Camilla Novak, how my husband paid Shane to keep quiet about what he heard on the street and to let people into our apartment. I had been betrayed so deeply by someone I trusted completely that this small betrayal didn’t even register.

Whoever Kristof Ragan is-and we don’t know-he has no criminal record here or abroad. Whoever he is, he’s dangerous. According to what you told Erik Book, he killed Camilla Novak. If this is true, do you think he’ll hesitate to kill you when he realizes you haven’t just let him walk away with your money?

We have not been able to identify the woman you know as S. Her photograph does not match those in any domestic criminal files; Interpol will take longer. But we do know that Ivan Ragan is associated with the Albanian and Russian Mob, that he was recently released from state prison for gun possession. He was arrested after an anonymous tip was phoned into police. I’d bet money that Kristof betrayed him after the Marcus Raine disappearance-probably murder-and theft went down, which is probably why he wound up on that dock about to be fitted for a pair of cement shoes.

A question: I have been going over the banking records for Razor Tech. Every quarter there was a ten-thousand-dollar donation to an orphanage in the Czech Republic. What do you know about this?

He had a name and an address of an orphanage in a town I knew to be about forty minutes outside the city. The information caused my whole body to tingle. Was he really asking me about this orphanage, or giving me a lead?

Does this mean anything to you?

Anyway, be careful, Isabel. You’ve got a tiger by the tail. Make sure he doesn’t turn around.

The lights went off in the lobby then, making me jump, and I was alone with the glowing screen. I walked over to the front desk and saw that the clerk who’d been sitting there was gone. His computer screen was dark; he’d obviously gone home for the night. No twenty-four-hour service at this little hotel. A little sign featured a number to call for emergencies.

I went back to the computer and printed out Detective Crowe’s e-mail and the attachment, a copy of the transfer order for the money being donated to the orphanage. Then I headed upstairs to Jack. It seemed he had already fallen asleep on the couch, fully clothed, with the television on, tuned to the BBC. There was an image of my face on the screen. The sound was down but there was a ticker running beneath my picture: Person of interest wanted for questioning relating to crimes in the U.S. Notify police if spotted. It was such a surreal moment, it almost didn’t register.

One arm rested over his forehead, the other was folded over his middle. I thought about leaving Jack in that moment, my decision to ditch him coming back to me. He was a sound sleeper. I could pack a few things, leave him a note, and take off on him. He’d have to wait here or go home, not knowing where I’d gone. But the truth was I didn’t want to leave him. I wasn’t brave enough.

I don’t know how long I stood there staring at him, suddenly remembering the night we’d shared. What had I felt that night? I tried to remember. How had it compared to what I felt for Marcus? Was it any more or less real? Instead of leaving, I found myself kneeling beside him and touching his face. I felt a familiar warmth in my center, a feeling I associated only with him.

I trusted him completely and I always had, like I trusted my sister, like I trusted myself. Meaning that I understood the way his mind worked, what moved and motivated him, what was important to him. I never felt that way about my husband, I realized. I did trust him for a time, but on some level didn’t I always sense he was a stranger? Is that what kept me with him? The shadow of unknowing; the place that drew me inexorably.

Jack opened his eyes but didn’t startle. We stared at each other for a minute. He raised a hand to push the hair back from my face.

“Did you see your picture on the television?” he asked.

I nodded.

“We’re in trouble if someone at the hotel recognizes you,” he said. I’d kept my hat and glasses on. My hair, my most distinguishable feature, had been caged beneath my cap. I was hoping that was enough.

“Why did you come?” I asked.

He held my eyes, let a beat pass. “You know why. Don’t you?”

I nodded. Then: “You remember?”

He didn’t ask me what I meant. “Of course. Did you think I didn’t?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“You left. You were gone when I woke up.”

I thought about it a second. Why had I left him there? Snuck off in the early morning before he woke? I remember thinking that he was my only successful male relationship and I had just screwed it up for good. Maybe if I left, pretended it never happened, we could remain as we had always been.

“I didn’t know how you’d feel in the morning. If there’d be regrets. There’s never been any awkwardness between us. I couldn’t bare it.”

“Isabel,” he said. “You were drunk. I wasn’t, not really.”

“Yes you were.”

“No. I was loose, maybe. Uninhibited. But I knew what I was doing. What I was saying.”

I’ve always loved you, Isabel. The words hung between us. I looked away from him, sat on the floor. He sat up, planted his feet on the ground.

“I think I took advantage of you that night.”

“No.” I shook my head.

He hung his head, released a slow breath. “Anyway, you can trust me now. I know what you need here. I’ll be that. You take the bed. This couch is pretty comfortable.”

“Jack.”

He reached out and pulled the cap off my head, then ran his hand along my cheek. I took his hand and held it, closed my eyes.

“This is the last thing we need to talk about right now,” he said. “Let’s fix what’s broken, leave everything else be.”

I didn’t argue, and handed him the e-mail, which he read.

“I guess we know where we’re headed tomorrow. The guide will be here at six. Let’s get some rest.”

SHE WAS PRETTY. Not like Isabel, whose beauty came as much from some radiance within as the quality of her features. Not like Camilla with her desperate fire. But she was pretty, if too thin, anemic looking even, with a straining collarbone and wrists that looked as though they could snap like twigs. Her name was Martina; he’d met her at the Four Seasons cocktail lounge. She thought it was a chance meeting. It wasn’t.

There was also something else to her, a quality they all shared. Longing. Camilla longed to be lifted out of the life she was in, thought she needed money and the right man to do that for her. Isabel longed to experience “real” love, even though she claimed when they met that she’d given up on that. He wasn’t sure what Martina longed for, but he could tell by the way she was looking at him that she thought she’d found it.

He understood longing. It lived in him, always had. Even when he’d satisfied every desire, when everything he had wanted was in hand during his years with Isabel, it lived in him. He understood only recently that it was a chronic condition that might be treated but never cured.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that you have a special kind of beauty, very delicate, pure. Like an orchid.”

The color rose on her cheeks and she bowed her head. “Charmer,” she whispered with a smile. She let him take her hand.

Walking past the outdoor cafés where people sat even in winter, coated, beneath heat lamps, they moved through Old Town Square decorated with festive Christmas trees. The craft market, set up for the holiday, was teeming with people. A gypsy played an accordion, and some young people danced with his vested monkey.

They strolled along a narrow street, picking their way through the crowd, and moved toward the Charles Bridge. Kristof remembered how he’d charmed Isabel on this very walk, pointing out all the attractions, speaking to locals in Czech. It hadn’t even been Christmas then. Now it was like a fairy tale, with a light snow falling. It couldn’t have been more romantic. Martina was enchanted.

On the bridge, vendors lined up with their wares-wood carvings, watercolor paintings, marionettes. Prague had turned into a bit of a circus in recent years, mobbed with tourists. Every year since the fall of communism, the city changed, more people came. First the gray cast that had hidden the beauty of the buildings was washed away, revealing pinks and yellows, oranges, elaborately decorated facades. Heavy iron doors were finally unlocked, revealing squares and gardens no one knew were there.

During communism, no one was allowed to have any flourish or show. Now people planted flower boxes in their windows, restored what had been neglected or destroyed. It was a revival that drew the world. Tourists flocked to this jewel of Europe. But Prague wasn’t the Czech Republic, and what visitors saw while following their guidebooks wasn’t really Prague.

“Do the tourists bother you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Not really.”

“You’re frowning.”

“Ah,” he said, forcing a smile. “Maybe they bother me a little.”

He leaned in and gave her a light kiss on the lips. Their first. He pulled away to look at her face-she seemed surprised, pleased. He kissed her again, deeper, snaking an arm around the small of her back. Her body melted into his. He felt nothing really. No warmth, no affection for her. He only felt a physical arousal and the thrill of success, of conquest. He might have felt something different for Isabel, even for Camilla. But those moments were distant, like all the other lives he had lived.

It was then, with the blush of success on his cheek, that he saw that dark river of curls, that confident gait. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating, that she was so much on his mind he was seeing her where she wasn’t.

But no. Isabel moved past him, unseeing. Her face was pale; she looked so unhappy, so angry. He turned away quickly, pretended to guide Martina over to the stone wall. He pointed across the black and brooding water to an outdoor café.

“The best view in Prague is had at those tables,” he said. He wondered if his voice betrayed the adrenaline racing through his system.

“So let’s go,” she said.

Nothing could keep her from coming after you. Sara’s warnings echoed in his ears. You’re weak when it comes to women.

He kept his arm around her and watched Isabel as she disappeared into the throng on the bridge. Just before she did, he realized she wasn’t alone. Beside her was someone, a man he recognized, but it took him a moment to place the face. When he did, a cold rage filled him.

“Are you all right?” Martina asked, maybe sensing the change in his mood. “Marek, are you unwell?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Walk with me.”

He took her hand and he followed after them.

“SHE’S HERE.”

He knew Martina thought it was strange that he’d cut their date short, but he had no choice. He’d made an excuse, seizing on her question about his not feeling well, and brought her back to her hotel, promising to see her tomorrow. He could tell she was hurt. He’d make it up to her.

On the way back to his apartment, he called Sara. She sighed.

“I told you.”

“I need some help.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

He felt a rush of urgency. “I need to take care of it, Sara.”

More silence on the line. Then: “As you like it. Where is she staying?”

25

The Greek philosopher Heracleitus believed that the universe was in a constant state of flux, that the only permanent condition was change. He said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” And I believe this to be true. But I also believe that some things don’t pass over us like a rushing river, they pass through us. They leave us altered from the inside out and the river becomes a stagnant pool where we languish, our development halted by an inability to climb from the muck of it.

Even from the road there was a palpable aura of despair, though there was nothing especially grim about the building, gray and squat against the green countryside. I’d read enough about postcommunistera orphanages to be a little worried about what we’d find. But as we drew near, the building and surrounding lawns looked tidy and well kept, if barren in the winter months. Some tall trees must have, in summer, provided leafy green shade over a winding walkway, and kids who just looked like your average U.S. high-school students milled about. One girl read a book under a tree in spite of the cold temperature, another listened to headphones with her eyes closed, sitting on the steps that led up to the double-door entrance. A group of boys gathered off to the side, smoking cigarettes. They looked a little on the gaunt side, a little on the rough side, with very young eyes.

I felt all their gazes fall on us as we emerged from the Mercedes and climbed up the stairs. A youngish American couple with an obviously local guide pulling up in a Mercedes caught the attention of the place. I saw some small forms move to the windows above.

“The healthy Czech and Ukrainian infants go right away,” said our guide, Ales, in his perfect English. “But these Romas will be here until their eighteenth birthday. Then-who knows? They’ll deal drugs, become prostitutes.”

“Romas?” asked Jack.

Ales couldn’t hide his disdain, though he seemed to try to keep his tone neutral. “Gypsies. They cause a lot of problems here politically, economically.”

Marcus had told me about the hatred in Czech for the Romas, the terrible crimes that were committed against them throughout history and to this day. Even the most liberal, educated Czechs cursed the Romas, considered them only thieves and criminals, addicts, cons, a terrible drain on social systems. I thought of a line from one of Emily’s books, Madeline and the Gypsies: “For gypsies do not like to stay. They only come to go away.” But the Czech government had outlawed their nomadic lifestyle and then was forced to create housing for them, fostering more resentment and hatred from the Romas and the Czechs for different reasons. “A bad situation without end,” Marcus said. “Like so many bad things.”

“Look how they watch you,” said Ales with a sneer. “They think you are like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, come to take one of them home to your mansion in America.”

He was a young man, maybe just in his early twenties. He was pale, with light blond hair and hazel eyes. There was something wolfish about him, with his hunched shoulders and ranging gait. When he smiled, you could see his teeth were sharp and yellow. I didn’t like him, but we were stuck with him for the time being and he did seem to know his way around.

“Did you hear that?” Jack whispered. “He thinks I look like Brad Pitt.” He was trying to be funny but I didn’t have the energy to laugh.

“I hope your car is here when we get back,” said Ales, issuing a throaty laugh that morphed into a smoker’s cough. He had smoked un-apologetically out an open window the whole way here; both Jack and I were too polite to ask him to stop.

I glanced behind me. One of the boys had already left the group and was circling the vehicle while his buddies looked on laughing.

Inside, Ales said something softly in Czech to the young girl at the reception desk. She stood up from her perch, disappeared for a few moments, then returned and uttered a few words. He nodded and ushered us over to a few orange plastic seats.

“I told her you were a journalist doing a story on Czech orphanages. She said someone will come.”

I frowned at him. Not the best tack to take, I thought. Czech orphanages were not exactly the darling of the media. I remembered a recent BBC report that they were still keeping disabled children in “cage beds.” Though I have to admit that in the footage the beds actually looked more like cribs than cages. Still, it was a sensational story that captured world attention.

“Maybe we should just tell them the truth,” I said.

He shook his head. “This is better. You’ll see.”

Minutes turned into nearly an hour and, finally, Ales left us to go chain-smoke on the stairs. Jack had been mostly quiet, tense, barely saying a word all day. We’d been roaming the Czech town I’d visited with Marcus, and other towns in the area, showing pictures and asking questions, receiving only blank stares and shaking heads. Even with the help of our guide, we were treated like interlopers, a nuisance. One woman threw us out of her store.

“She said she doesn’t like Americans,” Ales explained with a sneer. “She thinks you’re all pigs.”

“That’s nice,” said Jack. “Great.”

Ales laughed, finding some humor that eluded us. By the time we’d arrived at the orphanage, I was demoralized and exhausted. By the looks of him, Jack wasn’t feeling much better.

“I wonder what it’s like to grow up in a place like this,” he said when Ales left.

I looked around at the gray institutional walls, the heavy metal doors, the harsh fluorescent lights.

“Lonely,” I said.

A young woman emerged from behind a closed door. Petite and pale, with blond hair pulled back dramatically from her face, she wore strangely garish red lipstick, though her outfit-narrow gray pencil skirt, white oxford button-down, and plain black pumps-was very conservative, professional.

“I’m Gabriela Pavelka, the director here. Can I help you?”

“You speak English,” I said, relieved. I didn’t want to have another conversation through Ales.

“Yes,” she said with a nod. I could tell in the way her shoulders squared that she was proud of this fact. “Are you a journalist?”

“No,” I said, looking back at Ales, who was leaning against a railing talking to a young girl with a tattoo on her face, something tribal looking around the eyes. She was smiling at him, took a cigarette he offered.

“Our guide misunderstood. Is there someplace we can talk?”

“May I ask what this is about? I am not at liberty to discuss anything with the media.”

“It’s about a private donation.”

“We can talk in my office,” she said, moving toward the door that led back into the building. I glanced over at Jack who lifted a hand indicating that he’d stay where he was, then I followed the director. I assumed Jack felt the need to keep his eye on our guide and the rental car, which didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Gabriela escorted me to a small drab office. The first thing I noticed was a wedding photo-her in white lace, kissing a handsome man with a wide jaw and short-cropped brown hair. Then, a small diamond ring and thin gold band on her slender finger. On her desk: A cup of coffee gone cold. A shiny red BlackBerry. A copy of British Vogue, hastily stuck under stacks of files. There was another picture of her in a frame with a dark-haired child on her hip. I recognized the background as Central Park.

“You’ve been to New York,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I was an au pair for three years after college. This is where I learn better English.”

“Your English is excellent,” I told her, meaning it but also playing to her pride in the matter.

“Thank you,” she said, her professional smile suddenly seeming more genuine. “You’re American. From New York?”

“Yes.”

She picked up the picture and gazed at it. “I miss it. I loved it there.”

“Why did you come home?”

“Because too many young people are leaving the Czech Republic and not coming back. If we all leave, what happens to this country? I wanted to do something important with children, so I came here to run this orphanage.” She swept a hand around her.

“It’s important work.”

“Yes,” she said gravely, looking down at the picture for another moment, then returning it to her desk. “Now, the matter you wanted to discuss…”

From my bag, I extracted the copy of the transfer order Detective Crowe had attached to the e-mail, held it in my hand. I stared at it for a moment while she waited.

“Have you ever been lied to?” I asked her. I saw her eyes shoot over to her wedding picture.

“Everyone’s been lied to,” she said with a shrug. “That’s life. People lie.”

I told her what happened to me, leaving out some of the gory details. I saw her inch up in her seat as I spun the tale for her. By the time I was done, she was practically lying on her desk, she had leaned so far forward.

“I’m looking for him now,” I said. “I don’t know if you can help me, but this is the only connection I have.”

She shook her head slowly. “It’s terrible. I’m sorry. But I don’t know what I can do.”

“Do you know anything about the man who makes these donations?”

“I know of the donations, of course,” she said. “To us, this is a lot of money, forty thousand U.S. dollars a year. The donations come anonymously. The rumor is that the man who makes them lived out his boyhood here, applied for scholarships to the U.S., and left to go to school there when he turned eighteen. That now he is very rich and successful and wants to help other orphans like himself. But this is just a rumor.”

Outside the window, there was a wide expanse of flat land. In the distance, a large black bird flew a low wide circle in the air. I felt myself coming to a dead end. Yes, the money had come here. But so what?

“My husband’s real name is Kristof Ragan. He has a brother named Ivan. Do you have old records?”

She was already shaking her head before I finished speaking. “Since the fall of communism, all new records are being computerized. Old records were incomplete, nonexistent, or destroyed. In recent years there’s been a lot of purging.”

“But there must be something. Maybe someone who has been here for many years.”

“By purging, I don’t just mean old records. This is a privately run orphanage now but once orphanages like this were run by the state. The practices were archaic, the officials corrupt to an extreme. We’ve had to distance ourselves from those old ways to better serve the children in our care.”

She must have seen the despair on my face, offered a sad smile. What had I hoped? That someone here would know him, that they’d have a current address? That they’d open up old records for me and I’d find something there? I don’t know. I realized how pointless this trip had been. My husband was gone. His history was lost. Had he grown up in a place like this, in a communist orphanage, afraid and alone? Had anything he’d told me about himself been true? I had to face the fact that I might never know.

“I’m sorry,” the young woman said. “I don’t know how to help you. You know more about our anonymous donor than I do.”

I MUST HAVE looked dejected on returning to the waiting room, because Jack rose to his feet quickly.

“What did you find out?”

“Nothing, really.” I recounted the conversation for him as we exited and moved toward the car.

“Where’s our guide?” I asked. We looked around. The wind had picked up and the chill in the air deepened. All the kids who had been scattered about had disappeared.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “But we better find him. He has the keys to the car.”

I returned to the staircase and sat on one of the low steps.

“I saw Ales talking to some young girl,” I said. Jack walked a restless circle around the car.

“Do you think Marcus grew up here?” I said.

“It would explain a lot.”

“I suppose it would.”

The cloud cover was growing thicker, the sky taking on the silver gray cast of threatening snow. I wrapped my arms around myself against the cold. But the chill I felt came from within. Nothing would warm me.

“I have a bad feeling, Jack.”

He came to stand in front of me. The wind tousled his hair and played with his coat. Behind him, I saw Ales emerge from the trees. The girl I saw earlier followed at his heels. She had dark black hair and a thick frame, wide shoulders and narrow hips. Her eyes were black and the tattoos on her face looked like a mask. She’s hiding, protecting herself with that, I found myself thinking. Tattoos are armor; they keep the world from seeing what’s beneath them. Her hair was mussed. There was dirt and dried grass on the back of her jacket.

“We’re ready to go,” Jack said to Ales as he approached. “Where did you go with her?”

Ales nodded toward the girl. “She think she knows where you can find the man you’re looking for.”

When I looked past the tattoos and heavy, dark eye shadow, I saw someone very young, very scared, and I wondered how many different ways a girl like this had been violated. I felt the urge to wrap my arms around her. But everything about her-her appearance, her attitude-pushed me away.

“How?” I asked, looking at her. She bowed her head, refused to return my gaze.

“She doesn’t speak English,” Ales said. “But she says Kristof Ragan and his brother, Ivan, are like legends here. That they lived here during communism but then went to the U.S. and are now famous and successful businessmen, rich and living in big houses. They send money back to this place. That’s why they have computers and good school-books here.”

The girl kept her eyes to the ground. I had the strong feeling I was being played-whether by the girl or the guide, I couldn’t be sure. But I was just desperate enough to play along.

“Kde?” I asked her. Where? She looked at me, startled. “Prosím,” I said. Please. “Kde je Kristof Ragan?”

26

Kde je Kristof Ragan?

Then there is just this eerie quiet where all I can hear is my own scrambling over the snow, my own labored breathing. Before me a curved cobblestone street, disappearing beneath the falling snow gathering on steps and window frames. Two more shots ring out and I hear a whisper past my left ear and realize it has come that close. I turned to see him, a black tower against the white.

He is unhurried and yet still gaining as I limp, moving slowly uphill past a closed café, a leather shop, a store of children’s clothing. I start pounding on doors, yelling. But the city seems to swallow all sound. No one answers or comes to their door. Up ahead, there are two black iron doors ajar, opening onto a square. I move inside and pull the doors closed behind me. I can’t run anymore. I have to hide.

The wind is captive in the square, howling around the four corners. I edge along the perimeter, trying to walk where no snow has fallen so as not to leave a trail. There is an open door that leads into darkness. I reach it and enter just as I hear the creaking of the door from the street opening. I remember what I said to Jack, I’d rather die in the dark alley than bask a lifetime ignorant in the light. I didn’t mean it.

“Isabel!” he calls. He sounds so even, so measured. He could be calling me to ask if I remembered to buy razors or did I steal his gym socks. But that’s not why he’s calling me. I lean against the cold stone of the wall; the space behind me echoes. I hear water dripping. I am unarmed, trapped. I close my eyes and try to harness my breathing.

“Isabel, let’s talk. I’ll put the gun down.” I peer out the slim opening in the door and see him lay his weapon in the snow, raise his hands into the air. Every instinct in my body screams to stay still, to stay hidden, to move further into the darkness, to hide. But that one question, the one that drives me, the one that is responsible for every bad decision I’ve made over the last few days, forces me forward. Even with all he’s told me, I still don’t have the answer. I still want to know. Why?

I push open the door and it emits a loud groan. He turns to face me and the wind picks up, howls around the courtyard, lifts a flurry of snow. The world is gray and white and black. He looks different, somehow. He has let his hair and his beard grow and it looks darker as a result, closer to brown than the dark blond I was used to seeing. We stand there for a moment, regarding each other. He drops his hands to his side, then stuffs them in his pockets.

I wonder if I look as strange to him as he does to me. I am self-conscious of my tattered clothing, my one shoe. I fold my arms across my chest. He gives me a sad smile.

“Isabel,” he says. “This has always been your problem. You’re too trusting.”

Before I can ask him what he means, he’s pulling another gun from his coat, and all I really see before a white-hot, mind-altering pain in my center is a muzzle flash. The cold of the ground is shocking as I hit it hard and the sky is an impossibly silvery gray. There is another color in the world now. A deep red. The only thing I hear is the muted sound of his footfalls. He’s walking slowly away.

“KDE JE KRISTOF Ragan?”

I hear the sound of my own voice asking that question. Before that, we were still safe. If I hadn’t asked that question and the girl hadn’t answered, I’d probably be on a plane home to New York right now. I feel elevated above the pain, risen high above the fire in my gut. Not far away, I think I hear the sound of gunfire. But I can’t be sure what’s real-it might just be the beating of my heart. I watch the snow fall in big, wet flakes, a starfield through which I’m traveling. The events of the last few hours play back for me.

THE GIRL WITH the tattoos on her face answered Ales in Czech. She spoke softly, quickly. I couldn’t understand her at all.

He nodded and looked at me. “She says she can take you to a place where they’ll know.”

Jack gives me a look; it’s a warning. “This is a bad idea.”

“What does she want?” I asked.

“What does everyone want?” said Ales, lighting another cigarette. “Money. Two hundred U.S.?”

“Fine.”

Jack took hold of my arm, pulled me away from them. “This is crazy. Let’s go. I’m not letting you follow this girl to wherever. Think about it. They’re playing you.”

He looked at Ales, not releasing my arm. I could tell that he’d reached the end of his patience with what he considered a flight of my fancy, a desperate act he’d expected to yield nothing. Now he was afraid. Afraid that I might actually find what I’d come here to find.

“Make her tell us where he is,” he said. “She can still have her money. But we’re not going with you unless she tells us right now where she wants to take us.”

Ales relayed Jack’s words but it seemed to me that the girl understood, was looking at Jack with a sullen resentment. She uttered a curt sentence in Czech.

“There’s a place where they know him. You can get what you want at this place-drugs, guns, whatever,” Ales translated.

“What kind of place?” asked Jack. He was angry now, sounding hostile. His neck was shading red, and a vein was starting to throb next to his eye.

The girl turned, muttered something else to Ales, and then started to walk away. Ales shrugged. “She says forget it. She doesn’t have to help you. She doesn’t want your filthy American money.”

“Good,” said Jack, physically moving me toward the car. “Let’s get out of here.”

He stopped, still holding on to my arm, and looked over at Ales, I suppose remembered that we stupidly let our guide hold the key.

“What about you?” Jack said. “Do you want our filthy American money?”

Ales just looked at him with that same bitterness I saw everywhere overseas these days. He gave a slight nod.

“Then let’s go.”

“Wait!” I yelled after the girl. She was already halfway across the large lawn. She stopped and turned back toward us. I wrested myself from Jack and ran after her.

“Isabel!” Jack called.

“Jack. Please. Wait with the car. I’ll be right back.”

He put his head in his hands, leaned up against the Mercedes. I heard him talking to himself but I didn’t hear what he was saying.

“You speak English,” I said to her. Not a question.

“A little.”

“Can you help me?”

She nodded. “I can help you find him.”

I remember thinking she might have been pretty before all the tattoos, a series of black swirls around her eyes, across her nose, framing her mouth. I wondered how badly it hurt to have your face tattooed, where she’d gotten the money to have it done. She smelled of cigarettes and sex. Was it allowed at the orphanage to do this type of thing to yourself? Were there no counselors? Did no one care? There was something dead to her eyes, something flat and empty like the eyes of a cat. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Under other circumstances I probably would not have, but desperation made me stupid.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We returned to the car. Jack and I argued for fifteen minutes, while Ales and the girl looked on from a distance, smoking, smug and superior. Eventually, Jack and I were so angry at each other, there was nothing left to say. We climbed into the car, and a moment later the other two joined us. As the girl climbed in, I noticed that she clutched a small nylon bag.

“Don’t you need to ask someone if you can leave?” I asked her. I glanced over at the building, expecting to see someone come out, ask us where we were taking the girl, but the whole place suddenly had an aura of desertion to it, even though I knew there were plenty of people inside. She gave an unkind little laugh.

“What is your name?” I asked the girl. But she’d gone back to not speaking English, just looked at me blankly.

“Her name is Petra,” said Ales from the front seat. He was pulling from the drive onto the long, winding road we traveled to get here. The sun was sinking; it was late afternoon. And there were no other cars as far as the eye could see ahead or behind us.

“She can just leave the orphanage whenever she wants?” I asked, still fixating on this, wondering if we’d just kidnapped a child.

“She’s not an orphan,” said Ales finally, impatiently. “She doesn’t live there.”

“Then who is she?”

Petra and I sat in the backseat, with Ales and Jack up front. Jack, who had been staring out the window, not talking-sulking-turned to look at our driver.

“Then who is she?” he repeated.

Ales opened his mouth to answer, when the car seemed to lose power, to slow to a crawl, and then silently die. He deftly maneuvered it to the side of the road.

“What’s wrong?” asked Jack, sitting forward. He had a hard, suspicious frown on his face.

“I don’t know,” said Ales. Our guide reached down and pulled a lever and I watched the hood pop open. Jack got out of the car, too, and they were both obscured by the open hood. I moved to exit as well, suddenly feeling that I didn’t want Jack out of my sight. But Petra caught my arm. I looked at her; she was smiling, shaking her head. I saw the gun then.

“Jack!” I yelled, backing away from her. “Jack!”

The hood slammed down then. Only Ales stood, looking at us through the windshield. I tried scrambling for my door but the painful poke of the gun in my kidneys stopped me cold. Ales got in, started the car easily, and locked the doors.

“Where is he?” I was screaming, hysterical, in full-scale panic.

Neither Petra nor Ales said a word as Ales threw the car into reverse and then pulled back onto the road. Petra kept her dead eyes on me, the gun pressed into my flesh. Out the rear windshield, I saw Jack lying on the shoulder of the road.

“Jack! Jack!”

I nearly wept with relief when I saw one of his legs move. Then he was on his feet, running after the car, arms waving. As the Mercedes took a sharp turn in the road, he was out of sight. I barely felt the blow to the back of my head that turned the whole world black. Again.

27

I see Trevor standing in the corner of the courtyard. “Merry Christmas, Izzy”

“What are you doing here, Trev? It’s not safe.”

He walks over slowly. “Izzy, I told you. You needed a gun.”

“I know. I know. You’re a smart kid. Listen, Trevor? Tell your mom how much I love her, okay? Tell her I’m sorry.”

“Tell her yourself.” He says it with a smile.

But no, I’m alone in the courtyard still. I see that it’s filled with junk. A stack of old tires, a splintering wooden table, a box of sodden books. There’s a chair on three legs, some broken planters. A black cat leaps from nowhere onto a metal drum that sags with rust and age. The cat sits, watching me. There are voices now, I think. And the wail of sirens. I think I hear my name. But maybe it’s just the wind.

Isabel… Isabel.

How did I get here? I wonder. Memory comes back in pieces.

WHEN I CAME to again, I was lying on a cold concrete floor. Ales and Petra were gone. But my ankles were bound, as were my wrists. I went from unconscious to hyperconscious, started immediately working at the bindings. There was very little light, just a milky gray coming in from a small sliver of a window up high on the wall. A basement. I could tell by the chill, by the mold, by the dark. I was in a kind of cage. All around me, nearly empty cages. One held a bicycle and a bookshelf. Another held a stack of suitcases and a box of books, an old treadmill. It was a storage basement, I realized. Little used from the look of things.

I had seen how gigantic doors glide open by remote in Prague buildings, and cars disappear into spaces you wouldn’t have believed were there. I have seen this at embassies and luxury condos.

Trying to figure out how I got there, I imagined that my captors had driven my rented Mercedes into such a door, that I have disappeared inside the walls of this old city. Jack would not be able to find me. Panic and anger started their dance in my chest. I worked against my bindings vigorously for a few more minutes before I realized that I was not alone.

He sat in the corner of the room outside the cage, shrouded in the dark. I didn’t have to see his face to know his form.

I really didn’t want it to come to this, you know. I warned you to let me go. He issued a cough. The damp has always bothered him.

How could you think I would? Don’t you know me at all?

I hoped, Isabel. I hoped you would.

Why did you do this to me? A mutinous sob I couldn’t stop. I loved you. Did you ever love me?

Of course I loved you. I’d have stayed if I could.

Was anything you told me about yourself the truth?

No. Nothing.

Tell me now.

Why?

You owe me that much, don’t you? I don’t even know what to call you now.

Just call me Marcus. In the world we shared, that was my name. That’s all that matters.

Tell me.

There’s nothing to tell. His usual cool and disinterested tone. My father died, my mother couldn’t keep my brother and me; she couldn’t afford us or didn’t want us. What does it matter? We were taken to the orphanage you visited. We were old enough to know we’d been left. It was a painful, stark, and lonely way to grow up.

He shifted in his seat, the only sign that his memories made him uncomfortable, that they might cause him pain.

But we managed. We survived, and communism did not. Ivan and I left for the U.S. I applied to colleges, received a scholarship, came on a student visa. Ivan came on a work visa, but the company that sponsored him was not legitimate. Ivan is a small-time criminal, always has been. Even as children, he bullied and stole-

I’m not interested in Ivan.

What do you want to know?

Start with Marcus Raine.

He paused, took a deep breath as if summoning his patience.

I wanted what he had. His money, his girlfriend. I took it.

How?

I seduced Camilla. She loved Marcus Raine-or maybe just his money, I don’t know. But his plan was to return to Czech. He wanted to take the money he earned in the U.S. and start a business in Prague. He went to America, like me, to work, to get rich. But he wanted to go home and enrich the country. He didn’t believe all the intelligent, young Czech people should leave for good. Go, find opportunities, make money abroad, and then return to help the Czech Republic. The last place Camilla wanted to go was back to Czech.

I knew what she wanted. I promised it to her. She got me a key to Marcus Raine’s apartment, helped me get past his doorman. And I killed him-well, Ivan did. His associates helped us to dispose of him, a mortuary in Queens cremated the body. It was seamless. I took his life… his identification, his money. It was really that easy.

I told Camilla that we had to be apart for a while, that it would be suspicious if we moved too fast. Then I met you.

You sought me out.

Yes.

Why?

Because you understood Prague.

So you thought I’d understand you?

Maybe.

Camilla got tired of waiting?

Yes, seven years is a long time to ask someone to wait. For a while, I could convince her that the payoff would be worth it. I gave her money every month. Continued seeing her. Then she realized.

What?

That I had what I wanted. That I loved you. That I wouldn’t leave you unless I had to.

So she got angry, started making scenes, sending me e-mail. Why didn’t you kill her then?

I couldn’t. I didn’t know who she’d told. I suspected she’d gone to the authorities. I couldn’t risk killing her yet.

Not until you had already disappeared, destroyed evidence, transferred the money from our accounts. Then you went back to tie up that loose end. You slit her throat.

Still risky but necessary, I thought.

My mind was racing through all the million questions I had. But I was starting to feel fuzzy, confused, fear and multiple blows to the head addling my thoughts.

That morning when you left, did you know you’d never see me again?

No. I would have been gone soon, maybe even in the next day or two. But not that morning.

What happened?

Ivan came to see me. I betrayed him after the murder of Marcus Raine, called the police and reported guns in the apartment. He went to prison. Camilla went to see him in her anger, told him what I’d done. He came to see me. Not just for money. For revenge.

You killed all those men. But you left Ivan alive. You could have killed him, too. Why didn’t you?

Isabel, so many questions.

Tell me why.

The same reason I didn’t kill him years earlier. Because he’s my brother. I wanted him to think about what he’d done. I didn’t necessarily want him to die. Why does this matter now? It’s over.

It matters, how the pieces fit together. I need to know.

And that’s why you risked your life to follow me.

I can’t be other than who I am.

That’s why I loved you, Isabel. You have always been so sure of who you are.

If you loved me, then tell me everything.

Another long sigh. Another cough. All the while, I was working the bindings. Before he started talking again, I felt my wrist come free. It was dark. He didn’t see.

What else do you want to know?

Who is S?

I didn’t expect him to answer, but he did. Sara. A woman I loved a lifetime ago. My first love, I suppose. I left her in the Czech Republic. I went to college; she joined the military. Eventually, she was discharged, served some time for injuring a man who tried to rape her-as justice in Czech would have it. She sought me out in the U.S., had started her own business.

Services Unlimited. A prostitution ring?

Among other things.

You had an affair with her. She was the one who sent that message.

He gave an assenting lift of his palms.

It’s complicated, our relationship. I loved her once. But she belongs to no one now.

She trashed our office. Our home. She hated me; I saw it in her eyes in your office.

Someone like Sara doesn’t hate. She’s jealous, possessive, angry that I loved you too much to let her end your life for my convenience.

Did she take your mother’s ring? Did you give it to her?

You’re so naive. Such a little girl.

The ring never belonged to your mother.

Of course not.

Was anything you told me true? Anything?

He looked at me with unmasked pity. Why is that so important to you? What we had was real. Now it’s gone.

Just make me understand why.

What did you just say to me? I can’t be other than I am.

THE CONVERSATION IS an echo in my head, as though I am listening to it on headphones. I see the whole thing playing out on the wall across from me. There are other sounds, too, voices and sirens. Another sharp, insistent rattle. Gunfire? But it is so distant. The wind is still calling my name.

ENOUGH QUESTIONS. HE rose from his seat. He was just a shadow among other shadows in that milky light. While he spoke, I’d managed to get my hands and feet free. The bindings were careless. He’d underestimated me again.

He moved toward the door and opened the storage cage. I wondered if he’d want to cut my throat as he had Camilla’s, if he liked the power and the intimacy of that. When he was near, I lunged for him and knocked him back. I heard him release a grunt as my shoulder dug into his abdomen.

I’d surprised him; whatever weapon he’d held in his hand clattered to the floor. I tried to run past him, but he caught the neck of my sweater, ripping a long gash. Nausea and dizziness were twin forces within me, threatening to take me down. He grabbed me and threw me hard against the metal of the cage. I felt my lip split as my face connected with the metal.

But I also felt the door open, and I kept moving. Out of the cage, running blind for a rectangle of light that I knew was an open door. I heard him roaring as I found a staircase and took the stairs two at a time, adrenaline giving me more strength than I had a right to, injured as I was. At the top of the stairs, another door let me out into the cold. By the light and the hush, I figured it was right before dawn. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. But I just ran. I heard him exit, a door banging, echoing off the stone all around, not far behind me.

Isabel. His voice sounded like the moaning of the saints I always imagined on the bridge. Isabel.

I still had so many questions. But I’d finally developed, too late, enough sense to run from the darkness and hope the light still let me return.

I moved through the narrow cobblestone streets, surrounded by the muscular, ornate buildings that rose beautiful and quiet beside me, passed closed cafés and fountains turned off for winter. Then I broke free from the maze of streets into Old Town Square and thought for a moment that I’d lost him. But then I heard running footfalls behind me. A light snow started to fall. Against a bench, I lost my battle to hold on to the light. The darkness took me, if only for a moment. I heard the question I wished I’d never asked.

Kde je Kristof Ragan?

IN SPITE OF the cold, in spite of all the red around me, I am starting to feel warm now, happy, lighter. Some distant voice within me is telling me that it’s not a good thing to feel so comfortable. I hear more gunfire, voices, footfalls, closer now, then farther away. It all seems to be happening somewhere else. I think of my father, how he drifted away from us. And I think I understand the pull to nothingness. It’s such a chaos all the time-within.

I am thinking how nice it would be for things just to go quiet, when I hear a very loud, bossy voice in my head. Izzy, if you fall asleep, you’ll die. Do you understand? Get up. I know it hurts, but get up. Get moving, get help. Don’t give up. We need you. My sister’s voice. For once, I do as I am told.

The world comes into sharp focus and with it the fire in my gut. I am sick with the pain but I know I really don’t want to die here in this place. Suddenly the thought terrifies me. Fear gives me another shot of adrenaline and I pull myself to my feet. I manage not to scream, though the pain is white lightning through me-physical and beyond somehow.

The world is tilting but I use the wall and make my way to the doors through which he left. In the snow, there’s a trail of blood. I remember hearing the gunfire. Is he hurt? Has someone shot him out here in the street? But he kept moving like I plan to do now. The snow on the ground is a chaos of footsteps, slowly filling in with the falling snow. I follow the trail of his blood, leaving a trail of my own.

A quiet has fallen, or maybe I have just stopped hearing as I wind down a steep slope, past a closed café near the Little Quarter Bridge Tower. A young man passes me, gives me a strange look but keeps walking, more quickly. He doesn’t look back or offer help. Smart guy.

I grip a black metal rail and follow down a steep set of narrow steps. Before me a sloping cobblestone lane-a marionette shop, its windows shuttered, a small hotel, a new condo building rise up to my left. Ahead I see the canal they call Certovka-the Devil’s Stream.

There is more blood now-his and mine. I keep following until I come to the landing above the bank. It’s so quiet. A family of swans drift peacefully, gray water below them, snow falling, disappearing into their white feathers. Down further I see a large wooden mill wheel, slowly turning water, impervious to drama.

Then I see him. He stands on a small boat, docked below me. He is untying the lines. I can see that he is hurt, afraid. I am about to call for him, when the world explodes with sound. There are rough hands on me, pulling me away from the edge, but I hold on to the railing. I am surrounded by police officers, all of them yelling, guns drawn. I am yelling, too, calling his name, over and over. I don’t want him to die, not yet. There is too much I don’t understand.

He stands for a moment, dropping the lines, and I think he might surrender. The boat starts to drift and there is still so much yelling, still hands tugging. He and I lock eyes. But there’s nothing there. He is blank. Then he’s raising his gun.

I find myself screaming his name again, but his body is jerking, dancing with the impact of bullets. He falls to his knees and the boat rocks but doesn’t tip. I hear his gun hit the water with a heavy splash. He sinks down on his side, and I watch life leave him. That terrible stillness settles as the boat slowly drifts away in the current. I let myself be pulled back, lose my battle to stand in spite of the hands on me. And then I am on the cold, hard ground, clinging to consciousness. But the world is turning fuzzy, all the color draining. A woman is talking to me, yelling at me. But I don’t understand her, wouldn’t have the energy to answer her if I did.

I see him then. Jack. He is gold in my black-and-white-and-red world. But there’s so much cold distance between us, I am afraid I’ll never reach him now. He’s running, then being held back from me. I see uniformed men push past him with a stretcher. I want to tell Jack that he was right. No second, third, and final draft. Just the words as you first wrote them, the plot as you first conceived it. You can’t go back and make it better, change the ending so that it is happier, more satisfying. You have to live with it or die trying.

28

There’s a universe in a moment, in a single frame. Not in every frame. Just the perfect one, where light and shadow mingle, when an expression tells a story-beginning, middle, and end-when a reflection offers meaning. The “now” frozen, everything that came before and after rendered meaningless.

Linda Book stood in the far corner of the gallery and watched them looking at her photographs-pointing, smiling, frowning, nodding “ahh.” Her show, called Assignations, was drawing a lot of attention, more attention than her last few. She liked to think that her art had reached a new level, but probably not. Mimicking candid shots that might have been taken by a private eye, she’d captured lovers around the city-exchanging glances, embraces, passionate kisses. Some were candid. Some staged. She wouldn’t say which was which. Some critics called it shameless, in view of her family’s recent scandals. Others called it magnificent, sensational. Art Forum wrote, “Linda Book’s most captivating show in years-maybe ever.”

It was a week after the opening and the gallery was still packed-on a Tuesday, no less. No one recognized the photographer. Her publicity photo was far too old, airbrushed even then. She looked like a windblown goddess in her photo, untouched by grief or childbirth or disappointment, or infidelity of any kind. Only her husband, who drifted, eavesdropping on conversations, offered her a secret, knowing smile. He was the only one who knew her, here or anywhere.

To see them, the way they made love in the mornings after the kids went to school, the way they held hands again in the cab on the way here, the way he smiled at her now, one might believe that she was still that young girl untouched by life’s trials, after all.

Through the large picture window, she saw Isabel and Jack walking up the sidewalk slowly. Her sister looked so small, still leaning on Jack a bit as she walked. Her injuries-internal and external-would take much more time to heal. But heal they would. She’d see to it.

She moved away from the wall and met her husband in the center of the room. They left together to walk with Jack and Isabel back to the loft-it was still theirs for now-for dinner, and to watch something on television that none of them was quite sure they wanted to watch.

The kids were staying with Margie and Fred, so that Linda and Eric could have some couple time, something they had been sorely lacking. Now that there was a wireless hub, sixty-four-inch flat screen and a Wii in the Riverdale home, Emily and Trevor no longer considered a visit with their grandparents a hardship. There was a minimum of grousing. Therefore, Linda had only a minimum of guilt. Even when Emily called to complain that Margie was making fish and wouldn’t let them order pizza instead, Linda only smiled and told her daughter that fish was good for her and she’d have to bare up.

“You don’t want to see the show again?” Linda teased her sister, embracing her gingerly, afraid to cause her pain. Izzy gave a weak laugh; she’d been to the show several times, had seen it even before it opened. She waited for a smart comment in return, but her sister didn’t say anything. In Linda’s arms, Isabel felt fragile. Linda was still waiting for the haunted look to disappear from her face. She felt as if she hadn’t seen her sister even really smile in months. Not that she could be blamed.

BACK AT THE loft, Erik ordered Chinese and then turned on the television. Izzy hadn’t said much on the walk home and Linda was starting to worry that they were making a mistake.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Linda asked.

“I happen to think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jack. “It’s not as if we’re going to learn anything we don’t already know. This is the psychological equivalent to scab picking.”

Erik nodded his agreement. “He’s right.”

“I want to see it,” Izzy said, lowering herself on the couch. “I need to.”

No one else offered any arguments. Anyway, it was too late. The newsmagazine show had already begun.

A bestselling writer and her software designer husband are living the ultimate urban dream. With a beautiful home in Manhattan, skyrocketing careers, and an extravagant lifestyle, they seemed to want for little. Except that when it came to Isabel Connelly and the man everyone knew as Marcus Raine, nothing was as it seemed.

“We were called to the scene of a triple homicide in the West Village at the offices of Razor Technologies,” said a well-coiffed Detective Grady Crowe. He was sharply dressed and looking very much the role of the celebrity cop. “We found the bodies of Rick Marino, Eileen Charlton, and Ronald Falco, the office trashed, every file and computer removed, and Isabel Connelly unconscious in her husband’s office. We knew we were looking at something big. We didn’t realize at the time that it was international in its scope and that it reached back to the unsolved case of a missing man from years earlier.”

The hour wound on, detailing the disappearance and assumed murder of Marcus Raine after the betrayal of his girlfriend, Camilla Novak, how Kristof Ragan was able to steal the other man’s money and identity, then use Izzy’s Social Security number to establish an EIN for his new business. Some time was devoted to Kristof Ragan’s childhood in an orphanage, how he nearly made good by winning a scholarship to an American university.

He was smart, charming, hardworking, could have made a legitimate success out of himself. What made him choose murder, identity theft, fraud? lamented the reporter in a voice-over, where they showed b-roll of the modern-day orphanage, where children sat at computers, played soccer, read books at round tables. They called in an expert psychologist to offer an explanation.

“It wouldn’t be hard to understand the despair a child like Kristof Ragan felt, abandoned to an orphanage, possibly mistreated under communist rule,” said the very proper-looking gentleman with round glasses and a red bow tie. “It might cause long-reaching damage, a self-hatred, a desire to be someone else. Someone like Kristof Ragan was most likely a sociopath, operating without a conscience, using people like Camilla Novak and Isabel Connelly to further his own agenda.”

Linda looked at Izzy Her sister’s face registered no expression at all. But Linda was pleased to see her leaning into Jack. He had his arm around her shoulder.

“We’re just friends, same as ever,” Isabel had insisted just the other day. But Linda could see clearly that it was much more than that. “I’m not ready for anything else,” she’d said.

“Not yet,” said Linda.

“Not yet,” her sister conceded.

But when Camilla Novak decided she no longer wanted to be a pawn in Kristof Ragan’s game, she turned to the FBI, who launched a month-long investigation with Camilla Novak’s help. But the day before a raid was scheduled on Raines office and home, another kind of raid took place.

The footage switched to the woman Izzy knew as S being led away in handcuffs from a Queens building by Detective Grady Crowe.

“By pouring over banking and cell phone records, we saw that multiple calls were made to a cell phone registered to a Sara Benes,” said Detective Breslow to the camera, looking much more polished and a bit older than she did in real life.

A former Czech intelligence officer, Benes allied herself with organized crime to run Services Unlimited, an escort service that was actually a prostitution ring. Apparently long associated with the two Ragan brothers-since childhood-and a longtime lover of Kristof Ragan, Benes was there when Ragan needed to pull up the lines on his life, assembling a team of thugs to trash Ragan’s office and home, removing any and all evidence that might have allowed for prosecution. Benes faces charges of murder, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. But she won’t face her charges in the U.S. In the country illegally, she’ll be deported to the Czech Republic.

Linda watched as her sister absently lifted a finger to trace the scar on her forehead.

Did Camilla Novak get cold feet and reveal her betrayal to Kristof Ragan in the hope that he would forgive her? Is that how he knew the FBI was closing in on him?

“We think so.” Special Agent Tyler Long headed the federal investigation that was destroyed by Sara Benes and her crew.

“Camilla Novak loved Ragan. She came to us out of hurt that he had used her and kept her dangling for so many years. In the end, I think she didn’t want to betray him. She would have gone with him if he’d let her.”

But Kristof Ragan wasn’t the forgiving sort. Beware that the following images are quite graphic. On the screen flashed the pictures Izzy had retrieved from the thumb drive, showing Kristof Ragan killing the three men and leaving his brother to die on the dock.

“When we first saw this, we thought that he must have some military training,” said Detective Grady “But the Czech government denies all knowledge of him. So we don’t really know where he learned to take down four armed men, but it’s not something everyone could do, is it?”

But in the end, it was Kristof Ragan who was going down. Isabel Raine couldn’t endure her husband’s betrayal, and when she suspected that he’d returned to the Czech Republic, she followed. Her investigation led her to the orphanage where Ragan grew up. Banking records revealed that Ragan had been making anonymous donations to the facility for years.

But Ragan, it seemed, was one step ahead of her. He arranged for her abduction and would likely have killed her if it hadn’t been for the work of NYPD detectives Crowe and Breslow.

“We knew she was gone but we didn’t know where, though we had our suspicions,” said Detective Crowe. Linda knew her sister had promised him not to tell anyone about the e-mail he sent her, and she’d kept her promise.

“After pouring over years’ worth of banking records for Razor Technologies, we learned that the company had purchased an apartment in Prague some years earlier. We contacted the local Czech authorities and they sent a team to the residence. Police arrived just as Isabel Raine was escaping from her husband. A chase ensued, ending with the shooting death of Kristof Ragan.”

More graphic footage here from the camcorder of a tourist who heard commotion out his window early Christmas morning.

A grainy, wobbly, black-and-white film sequence showed Kristof Ragan running, limping, gun drawn, across a cobblestone street, near a canal. He ran down a flight of stairs and hopped onto a small boat that was docked, stuffed the gun in his pocket, and began undoing lines. Then Izzy moved into view. She stood at the rail alone for a moment before the police moved in behind her, started pulling her away. Linda watched her sister struggle and scream as Kristof Ragan raised his gun and the police started to fire.

Now, sitting on the couch, Izzy covered her eyes and started to sob, while Jack wrapped his arms around her.

“Turn this off, Erik,” Jack said quietly. Erik reached for the remote and started fumbling with it.

Kristof Ragan died at the scene, his reign of deception and murder at an end on Devil’s Stream in Prague.

“No,” said Isabel. “I want to finish it.”

Isabel Raine, known to millions as Isabel Connelly, declined to be interviewed for this segment, but we know from her agent and spokesperson, Jack Mannes, that she is recovering from injuries inflicted upon her by her husband, and is fully cooperating with the ongoing investigation. When the investigation is complete, some portion of the funds stolen from her and her family will be returned, though much of it seems to have disappeared without a trace.

The reporter wrapped up with the same old cliché they’d been hearing for weeks about truth being stranger than fiction. Erik clicked off the television, and for a minute they all sat there looking at the blank screen, lost in their own thoughts.

When the buzzer rang, everyone jumped, then laughed at themselves a bit.

“The Chinese food,” Erik said, getting up.

As they all rose to pull dishes from the cabinets, set the table, open the wine, Linda thought about how even in the shadow of the extraordinary, the ordinary still occupied them. They still slept, still cared for the children, still made love and ordered takeout.

She and Erik were both guilty of terrible betrayals of trust, and yet he still kissed her as he handed her a glass of Pinot Grigio. Isabel had been injured in every way a person could be, but she offered an ironic smile as Jack mentioned that some of her books were back on the bestseller lists because of the recent events of her life. A man Linda had an affair with and cared for had almost laid waste to her life before ending his own, but she still said things like, “This soup is too salty.”

She looked around the loft that they loved. They weren’t sure yet if they would have to sell it. Some of the money Kristof Ragan wire-transferred before he fled had been traced. No one would tell them how much or when they might see it. But her show was going well; she’d had some good sales. And Isabel had a new book contract. So they’d be all right. In comparison to everything that was almost lost, the money didn’t seem as important as it once had. What was important was that they were all together, safe, and if not happy exactly, if still damaged and haunted and unsure of the future, then at least hopeful.

No one seemed to know what to say until Jack raised a glass and they all joined him.

“Onward and forward. No looking back.”

As she sipped her wine, Linda thought they’d all endured awful, life-changing events-some, maybe all, of those events invited through their own blindness and selfish deeds. But the foliage of mundane life just grew over the past a bit every day if you let it. And maybe that was the most extraordinary event of all.

29

I am alone with my keyboard again, weaving a universe culled from my experiences and my imagination-though I struggle with the idea that nothing I can imagine would compare to the actual events of my recent life. But I write because I have to, because I cannot do anything but this. I must metabolize my experience on the blank page, put it down, order it, control it in my way. This is how I understand the world. How I answer the question: Why?

I write about a boy who was abandoned by his mother to an orphanage in communist Europe. I imagine his frightening early days and lonely, miserable nights. I imagine his longing for the mother who left him, for the comfort of the bed to which he was accustomed. I know about abandonment, about loss, about fear. I know about longing to be anyone, anyplace else. This boy is not known to me. But his feelings are; I can manage compassion for him even if the man he grew into almost destroyed me, put a bullet in me, tried to end my life to save his own. It is on the page that I can answer the question: Why? And the answers I find here are enough. They have to be.

I hear Jack downstairs hammering. He is at work again on the house, building shelves for a room he calls my study. I tell him that we are not living together. That I am just staying with him until I can sell the apartment I shared with my husband and figure out how to move ahead with my life. Of course, he says. I know.

Kristof Ragan was never my husband, not legally, not in any way. Just someone I loved and thought I knew. I still hear his voice, the wisdom he had and shared with me. I have happy memories of him. I do.

The other morning I met Detective Grady Crowe for coffee in the East Village at Veselka’s on Second Avenue. I got there early and sat in the back watching the students, the goths and clubbers for whom it was late, not early, artist types, professionals-the typical New York City mix of people, not typical anywhere else.

He looked fresh, well and happy as he walked in, scanned the crowd, then made his way over to me.

“You look good,” he said, smiling, shaking my hand. “Don’t get up.”

He sat across from me. We’d been through all the professional stuff, the questioning, the accusations, the reprimands. I found I actually liked him in spite of what had passed between us when he thought we were on opposite sides.

“You look happy,” I said.

He held up his left hand, tapped his ring. “My wife. She came back. We’re having a baby.”

The information hurt more than it should, made my stomach bottom out with a powerful regret and sadness. He saw it.

“I’m sorry. I’m an insensitive jerk sometimes. A lot of the time.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You deserve to be happy.”

“So do you.”

I thought of Jack. “I’m getting there.”

We ordered some coffee and potato pancakes.

“So what’s up? Or did you just miss me?” he asked with a smart smile. He was a handsome guy, I realized. Much better looking happy than bitter and angry-like everyone, I suppose.

“I don’t know. I guess I just wondered if there’s anything I don’t know. Something you held back from that news show, from me?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I was wondering about the FBI. When they started their investigation, how Kristof found out about it. Why they didn’t act sooner.”

“Camilla went to the FBI about a month before Ragan disappeared. They started their investigation right away, but the feds are all about collecting evidence for their case. They take their time.” He took a sip of his coffee. “They suspect that Camilla told Ragan at the last minute, giving him time to get away before their raid. She felt guilty about betraying him. Maybe she thought he would forgive her. He didn’t.”

“But who was Camilla meeting in the park? The man I watched die? Why was she bringing those pictures to him?”

“The man who died that night was identified as Vasco Berisha, an Albanian thug with ties to Ivan Ragan, among others.”

“Why would they want those pictures? What use would they be? And if they were surveillance shots, how did they come to be in her possession?”

“They weren’t technically surveillance shots. Camilla Novak took them. She was following Ragan, using information Charlie Shane gave her about his comings and goings, working for the FBI. We found them on her digital camera, too. She turned over a set to the FBI and was apparently bringing them to Berisha. My personal theory is that after she confessed her betrayal to Ragan, and before he killed her, she realized she’d misplayed her hand. She knew he wasn’t going to forgive her and take her away after all. I suspect she didn’t think the FBI would be able to find Kristof Ragan, but his brother’s associates would. He killed some of their men; they’d want revenge. She wanted them to have it.”

I shook my head.

“What?” Grady asked.

“Then Berisha couldn’t have known where Kristof Ragan had gone. He was just a lackey. He was the reason I went to Prague. I thought he said, ‘Praha.’ Prague in Czech. But maybe he didn’t say that.”

“But Ragan was in Prague. Maybe Berisha-whatever he said-just gave you an excuse to follow your instincts. Or maybe he did know. It’s possible.”

“I heard what I wanted to hear.”

“Maybe. You knew where he would go, but maybe you didn’t trust yourself anymore. You needed something else besides your gut to follow.”

I thought about that night in the park. I am sure that’s what he said. But Detective Crowe was right, I didn’t trust myself very much about these things.

“Do you have a contact at the FBI who might talk to me about all of this?”

“It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

It matters. How the pieces fit together. It helps me to understand what happened to me. But that’s the problem with life, as opposed to fiction; sometimes the pieces don’t fit. The waitress brought our order and I poured some cream in my coffee.

“I’ve been guilty, as you know, of not asking enough questions. Of seeing what I wanted to see and editing out the rest. I don’t want to do that here.”

He nodded his understanding.

“There’s nothing I haven’t told you. I promise. But I’ll put you in touch with Agent Long. He’s a good guy.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He gave me a sly look. “You’re not writing a book about all this, are you?”

I smiled at that but didn’t answer.

We chatted a bit. He told me he’d read one of my books and liked it but mentioned that I’d gotten some procedure wrong. I asked him if I could call with questions in the future. He agreed, seemed to like the idea.

“So-are you going to write about what happened to you?” he asked, again not letting me off the hook.

“Probably. One way or another, it will turn up. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. It’s more elliptical, more organic.”

He nodded, looking thoughtful, but he didn’t say anything else about it.

We said our good-byes on the street, shook hands and parted. I was a half a block away when he called me back.

“Hey, something you said helped me,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Remember in your apartment that time? You said, ‘Love accepts. Maybe forgiveness comes in time.’ That helped me.”

“I’m glad.”

He lifted a hand and then turned to walk away. I watched as he climbed into an unmarked Caprice where Detective Breslow waited at the wheel. I wondered briefly what was next for them.

LOVE ACCEPTS. FORGIVENESS comes in time. It makes me think of Linda and Erik. It makes me think of my father-the “why” I have never been able to answer in all my years trying. It makes me think of the man I knew as Marcus, a man I loved, one I forgave, when his first betrayal really should have set me to asking questions about him, about myself. But there’s no point looking back in regret.

ON MY WAY back home from meeting the detective, I stopped at the post office box I maintained but which I hadn’t visited in months. I knew it would be packed with junk and fliers and maybe one or two important items, like invitations to conferences and maybe a fan letter or two. But I figured I should check it, get back into some of my old routines, let normalcy return.

I used my key to unlock the box and pulled out the mass of paper that was crammed in there, tossing most of it into the recycle bin, as it was, indeed, the predicted junk. I retained the envelopes with handwriting on the front and stuffed them into my bag. I peered inside one more time before closing the door and saw a small brown box, all the way in the back. I reached for it and held it in my hand. There was no return address.

DOWNSTAIRS JACK IS still hammering. I open the drawer in the desk and take out the box. I’ve been keeping it there but haven’t told anyone about it. Not even Jack. Not even Linda. I lift the lid and hold the ruby ring between my thumb and index finger.

I think I know what it means. I don’t have to write it, make it up. I think it means he would have loved me if he could. That’s what he wanted me to know. I feel a twinge in my abdomen, the wound that hasn’t yet had time to heal. I look into the fire of the red stone and remember how he left me to die, slowly, alone, and in terrible agony in a cold, strange place. If it hadn’t been for Jack getting to the police, for Detectives Breslow and Crowe figuring out where Marc was staying, I’d be dead. I remember Rick’s shirt that last time I saw him: Love Kills Slowly.

Kristof Ragan set his sights on another woman after me. Her name was Martina Nevins. I heard it on the news, had seen her interviewed, a wealthy British heiress who’d lost her fiancé a few years earlier and had been despondent since then. She was celebrating the holidays with her family in Prague. She’d have been Kristof’s next mark. She had the look about her. The fragility of loss. The vulnerability of hope.

He might have given her the ring, said to her what he said to me, “This is my heart. I’m giving it to you. I’d die for you.”

Instead he sent it back to me. And I’ll keep it to remember that love is what we do, not what we say. That not everyone has the strength or the ability to love another, or even himself. And that some of us have a secret heart that cannot be shared.

I close the lid on my laptop and take the ring down to Jack. I want him to see it. I want him to know what it means to me and how it has helped me to understand Kristof Ragan, my father, and myself. Because I want Jack to share his heart with me. But I think that to ask him to do that, I have to share mine first.

He turns from the tall shelves he is building-an effort I recognize as his act of hope-when he hears me come into the room. I hold the ring in my palm and show it to him. He takes it with a frown and holds it up to the light, then looks back at me. There’s worry on his face.

“Where did this come from?”

I tell him.

“What are you going to do with it?

I tell him that, too. I think he understands. He puts his strong, thick arms carefully around me and leans down, brings his mouth gently, tentatively to mine. We share our first kiss since the night we spent together a lifetime ago.

There’s no why to Jack, no questions to answer, no curiosity to satisfy. He is not a mystery, not a stranger. He is my dearest, most beloved friend. My sister thinks that is enough for a start. And she is, as always, so right.