The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “It’s nothing to get upset about, Moses. Calm down. It’s just the usual sort of speech. You know that. Consciousness raising—isn’t that what you called it?”

  “Who’s writing it? You?”

  “Me? I can’t do half the job you can. What a question.”

  Calvi waited for a response. He heard only the mice, far away.

  “Don’t you want to write it, Moses?” he asked finally. He listened to the mice and had a sudden thought. “Is Grunberg there?”

  “Of course not,” Cohn said quickly. “Why would he be?”

  “I don’t know. You sound strange, that’s all.”

  “I’m thinking about the peace talks a lot these days.”

  “What about them?”

  “They seem to be going well. I wouldn’t want to do anything to spoil them. Every war seems so much worse than the last.”

  “Do you think that I want to spoil them, Moses? Do you think that I want to get my ass shot at in another war?”

  “It’s not likely that you’ll be sent to the front the next time, Simon,” Cohn said drily.

  “That’s unfair. You’re the one who always told me that anyone who waited for his rights until Israel was secure was a fool.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So I don’t understand you. It’s just the same old stuff. We’ll even tone it down a little. It might get us a few points from some of the hostile press. Why don’t we work on it tomorrow morning?”

  Cohn sighed. “All right,” he said, and hung up. Calvi held the receiver firmly to his ear, listening for any sign that the line was tapped. But he heard nothing unusual. Even the mice had gone away.

  In the late afternoon he walked home. The sun was low in the sky, radiating through the air above the city a heavy, tangible golden light that made everything seem solemn and peaceful. It even affected the pedestrians, making everyone walk slower, except the middle-aged American couple who jostled past him. He heard the man say, “The nerve of that God-damned waiter. I came this close to telling him what we give to the UJA.”

  “I don’t think it would have helped, dear,” his wife said gently. “You can’t buy politeness.”

  “Then what can you buy?”

  A black-bearded Armenian priest in a pointed cowl caught the conversation as he approached from the other direction. He directed a big white smile at Calvi as he passed. Calvi smiled back as the priest walked away, chuckling happily to himself.

  On an impulse Calvi went into an American-style drugstore. He walked up and down the sterile aisles, not sure of what he wanted. In the end he bought a small round hot-water bottle. It had two eyelets in the rubber rim and the stopper was placed in the center of one side.

  “That will take care of all your aches and pains,” said the girl at the cash register.

  At home he found Gisela in the bath. He bent down to kiss her on the lips. Her pubic hair, a shade darker than the hair on her head, waved gently under the water, like seaweed on a calm day. She followed his gaze.

  “Come in with me,” she said.

  “In this little tub?” He laughed and went to the study. It was time to work on Marie’s letter to Walter D. He looked in the bottom bookshelf where he kept his copy of Crime and Punishment, but its space was empty and the surrounding books leaned inward as though trying to cover up. He quickly scanned the other shelves, then tried the desk, and its drawers. He felt his heart beat faster. He clearly remembered replacing the book in its usual spot.

  He found it in the bedroom, on the floor by the bed. By the side of the bed where Gisela slept. He ran for the bathroom but outside the door he forced himself to stop and turn away.

  “Have you changed your mind?” she called through the door. “Hurry, I’m just getting out.”

  “Never mind then,” he said.

  He waited until they lay in bed with the lights out before he said, “Are you enjoying Crime and Punishment?” He felt the tone of her skin change beside him.

  “It doesn’t seem to be the kind of book you enjoy,” she said. “But I’ve only read a few chapters.”

  “I suppose it isn’t.” He remembered how Raskolnikov took an axe to the old woman. He wished he could remember more so that he could question her on the content, but he had read the book at the age of sixteen and everything but the murder was locked up out of the reach of his memory.

  “Why didn’t you buy a German translation?” he said. “I’m sure one is available here.”

  “I can manage the French,” she said.

  They lay quietly in the dark. After a while she touched him, and they clung together. But for the first time in his life, Calvi found himself unable. They both pretended it was not important, and Gisela soon fell asleep. Calvi lay beside her, but not touching, thinking about Raskolnikov. Much later he left the bed and went to the window. On the street below he watched a man in a broad-brimmed hat emerge from the shadows, walk through the cone of yellow light under the street lamp, and merge with the shadows on the other side. In five minutes he came walking back the other way.

  10

  “Mrs. Monette?” The manager of the little bank on Spring Street stood in the doorway of his frosted-glass office opposite the teller’s wickets and crooked an arthritic finger. “Have you got a minute?”

  “I’ll be right with you, Mr. Kettleby,” Rachel said. She performed the ritual of the deposit slip under the watchful gaze of the teller-priest who, satisfied, banged a purple stamp of approval on the dividend check from Leonine Investments and accepted the offering.

  Rachel went into Kettleby’s office. Kettleby sat behind an ugly mahogany desk which dwarfed him.

  “Please sit, Mrs. Monette,” he said. He leaned forward to counter the divisive influence of the desk. Under the translucent skin of his face delicate capillaries formed patterns like red spider webs. Two necks like his could have found room in his shirt collar and the pinstriped jacket of his old-fashioned suit would have hung just as well on a scarecrow. He was an old man stripped of extras like a Mississippi paddlewheeler before a big race.

  “We at the bank were all very sorry to hear about your husband.” Even his voice sounded spare, as if he were down to one vocal chord. But the blue eyes were unimpaired, and they were kind. “Is there any news of the boy?”

  “Nothing definite,” Rachel said.

  “Well, it’s only been a few weeks …” Kettleby said, his voice trailing away. He looked down at his pink blotter. Three weeks and two days, Rachel thought. Kettleby’s eyes stayed on the blotter. There were no interesting inkblots to study because it had never blotted anything. He looked up quite suddenly and blinked at her, as if he had been startled.

  “In any event, Mrs. Monette, we’ve been reorganizing your affairs here at the bank as we always do in situations like this. On the instructions of your family attorney we have transferred the funds in your husband’s accounts to yours. These funds amount to $892 from his savings account and $136.70 from his checking account. The total is $1028.70.”

  He had the figures in his head. She wondered if he had been meandering through a forest of numbers when he fell into his stupor over the blotter.

  “We have transferred the entire sum into your savings account.” He looked up. Rachel nodded to show she had been following.

  “There is one other matter.” Kettleby paused, and licked his lips nervously. “Your husband’s safety-deposit box.” From a drawer he removed a locked tin box and set it carefully on the desk.

  The sight of it sent a chill through her body. Again Kettleby’s eyes went to the blotter. She guessed that it was common banking knowledge that husbands often had safety-deposit boxes that their wives knew nothing about. Rachel felt something tugging at her inside, very deep, like a strong current on an anchor. Her dead husband was changing the way they had lived.

  “Your attorney has instructed me to turn the contents over to you, Mrs. Monette.” He removed a key from his vest pocket and opened the small padlock. He opened it carefu
lly, his head slightly back, as if he suspected that a prankster had placed a jack-in-the-box inside.

  All he found was a sealed manila envelope, eight by eleven. There was no writing on it, no stamp, no marking of any kind. He handed it to Rachel, looking relieved. As she left she wondered what he had found in other men’s safety-deposit boxes.

  She drove home with the envelope on the seat beside her. What had he hid from her? A secret romance? She thought about the women they knew, and couldn’t imagine him with any of them. But there were female students in his classes she knew nothing about. An approaching car honked angrily and she swerved back onto her side of the road.

  She parked in the driveway. In March all the snow melts in the valleys of the Berkshire Mountains, leaving the sickly brown grass to recover slowly under gray skies. Across the street a fair-haired gardener with a squat body was scattering seed over the bare patches on Mrs. Candy’s lawn. His shiny black tool box lay in the mud by the telephone pole. Rachel walked across her own lawn to the door; with sucking noises it tried to pull her boots off.

  She sat at the kitchen table, the envelope in her hand. She tried to picture Dan’s face, at a picnic, playing tennis, in bed. But she could only see him in front of the house, with smudged unhappy eyes.

  Her hands shook as she opened the envelope. Inside she found no secret telephone numbers, no love letters, no sickening Polaroids. There were only two sheets of paper folded together and beside them a small envelope addressed to Dan care of the history department and postmarked in Nice on the tenth of January.

  The smaller envelope contained a yellowed piece of paper, partly torn. She unfolded it. There were two short typewritten paragraphs, but Rachel couldn’t read them because they were in German. Only the letterhead, a single swastika, required no translation.

  The two sheets of paper made up a letter handwritten in French on history department stationery. It began “Mon père,” and was signed “Daniel.” The neat even lettering was Dan’s and the date on the letter was February 18, six days before he died.

  French had been her major in college, and she had retained more than enough to translate the letter in her head. A word or two gave her trouble, but with the help of a Larousse dictionary she arrived at a fairly accurate English rendering. She copied it onto a note pad. It read:

  Mon père,

  How strange it is for me to write those words. How can I call someone father whom I last saw as a child? And yet I can honestly say that for the last few years at least I have borne you no resentment whatsoever. That has not always been the case: as a boy I felt that you had rejected me, and tried very hard to understand why; I even supposed for a while that you had blamed me for mother’s death—I had myself convinced that I had been on the bridge with the two of you and even less likely had somehow caused mother to lose her balance. Thank God Aunt Angela straightened me out on that!

  As I say, I have finished with all those childhood difficulties. I owe my good luck in this to two sources of strength, one from outside and one from within.

  The first is my wife Rachel. (I wrote you shortly after our marriage, if you recall. Perhaps you didn’t receive the letter.) She has taught me what loving someone is all about. At one time that phrase would have seemed like gibberish to me, and it may to you, but I assure you it is not. From Rachel I know that love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone. And we have no doubts. In case you form the impression she is an ultra-serious type, let me tell you it took me a long time to discover the seriousness in her. (She and her father have a routine that is priceless!)

  Anyway, I’m rambling, the way my students do. We also have a five-year-old boy. He’s a delight. He wants to be an ice hockey player.

  Secondly I mentioned an inner source of strength. My work of course. For a number of years I have been narrowing in on the behavior of German-occupied countries during the Second World War. I suppose it has the same sort of fascination for me that the character of Macbeth has for students of drama. The book, which you must know about ($17.95 over here, I don’t know what that is in francs these days), is a culmination of the years I have spent in the field. Although Rachel thinks it’s my obsession, I really want now to get on with something else; the publication made me feel like a fat person who has lost a lot of weight.

  The book has unleashed bundles of correspondence from France, some of it quite nasty. It happens that I have received one letter with which you might be able to help me. Not a letter at all, really—it’s a document that seems to pertain to North Africa. I know you were there during the war and you may have come across information that might help to explain it. I will make a copy of it in the morning when the secretary arrives, and enclose it with this letter.

  Incidentally, I hope you read German. If not, any student with a few years of German can translate it for you without difficulty. There is no hurry on this, but I find it rather intriguing. Perhaps there is an obvious explanation that I don’t see.

  Hoping that you are in good health, I remain,

  Your son,

  Daniel

  Rachel read the letter three times. She didn’t cry; she had finished with that on Angela’s shoulder. But she felt deep shame at the thoughts she had allowed herself to have at the bank and in the car.

  At the same time she was more convinced than before that the Dan she had known was not precisely congruent with the Dan that was. The thought still made her uneasy, but it also awakened her curiosity, a curiosity related to the one that she felt for the subjects of her documentaries, but far more urgent, and darker. She wondered why he had not sent the letter, and thought of sending it herself, in the hope it would console his father. But there was also the risk it would further upset him. It was unfair to take that risk when someone else would suffer.

  Rachel got up from the table and heated coffee on the stove. When it was ready, she poured some into a large mug and read the letter again. Dan had left a legacy of problems. The big ones of course were his murder and the kidnapping of Adam, a kidnapping, she realized, that he knew was going to happen before he died. So she took a fresh sheet of paper from the note pad and wrote at the top, “How did D. know about kidnp.?” And underneath that she wrote, “Has Joyce made this conn.?”

  Then came the difficulties raised by the yellowed German paragraphs. There was nothing to suggest that these smaller problems in any way related to the two big ones, so she wrote her questions on a separate sheet of paper: “What intrigued D. about doc.? Who sent doc.? Did D. know who sent doc.? Why safety dep. b.? When s.d.b.? (letter pstmkd. Jan. 10).”

  Rachel had little hope that the answers would lead her to Adam. Yet she thought that they were answers she was capable of finding. And Dan had sought them too. He had considered it necessary to rent a safety-deposit box. She was following his footsteps, she realized, and it gave her a cold-blooded feeling she had never experienced.

  She picked up the telephone and dialed Andy Monteith’s number. He lived in a student residence. The girl who answered yelled that she would try to find Andy. She put the phone down on something that made little burping noises from time to time. In the background Rachel could hear the sounds of five thousand drunks having fun. She remembered that it was Friday, but she hadn’t thought they began so early.

  “Hello,” Andy shouted.

  “Hello, Andy,” Rachel said. “How’s your German?”

  “Not bad. Why?”

  “I’ve got something I’d like you to translate. It’s very short and it should be no trouble for someone with a few years of German.”

  “What? I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

  Rachel repeated what she had said in a louder voice.

  “Okay,” Andy said. “What is it, by the way?”

  “If I knew what it was we wouldn’t be yelling at each other like
this.” She thought Andy laughed, but she couldn’t be sure. There was a lot of laughing going on. “It’s something of Dan’s,” she added.

  “Drop it off at my carrel,” he told her. “Three ninety-one. I should be there by nine.”

  “How can you think of studying when you’ve had so much to drink already?”

  “Study? I’m going there to drink in peace.” He hung up and the party was over.

  Rachel looked at her watch: six-thirty. The bank closed at six, but someone might still be there. She dialed the number and let it ring. It rang twenty times. On the twenty-first someone picked it up.

  “Yes?” said a voice that meant anything but.

  She recognized the thin dry tone of Kettleby. “Mr. Kettleby. I’m so glad I caught you. It’s Rachel Monette. I wonder if you can tell me when my husband began renting that safety-deposit box?”

  “He didn’t rent it, Mrs. Monette. That service is free to all holders of your husband’s bank credit card.”

  “When he started using it then.”

  She had allowed too much impatience to enter her voice and she guessed he was trying to imagine what marital bombshell she had discovered in the box.

  “There’s no one here now. Perhaps if you’d call on …”

  “Please, Mr. Kettleby.”

  “Very well.” His footsteps clicked away on the stone floor, and she heard nothing but the stillness of the empty bank. And very far away tiny voices that made her think of the cartoon characters Adam liked to watch on Saturday morning television. The footsteps came clicking back out of the silence.

  “Mrs. Monette?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our records show that your husband signed for the safety-deposit box on the fifteenth of January of this year.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Kettleby.”

  “You’re welcome,” he answered, in a puzzled voice.

  Rachel picked up a pen and ran a stroke through “When s.d.b.? (letter pstmkd. Jan. 10)” on the questions sheet. The information wasn’t surprising; it had been easy to find, but she felt better than she had in three weeks and two days.