Suddenly, she looked uneasy. She nervously crashed the cigarette butt in the ashtray, took a cellphone out of her bag, and walked to the kitchen. I caught only a few snatches of her conversation: “No, he didn’t … Why do you talk to me like that? … Yes, I’m going there straightaway, don’t worry …” She came back into the living room and said, “I’ve really got to be going now, I’m sorry. Are you alright? You look pale.”
“I’ve had a lot of work to do today and I skipped lunch, but I’m fine.”
“Okay then, take care. See you later.”
She put on her jacket, picked up her bag, and walked to the door. Bracing myself, I asked for her phone number. “How about I call you next week? Maybe we could get together for a cup of coffee or something.”
She cast me an intrigued glance, shrugged, and jotted down her number on a yellow Post-it. “Here’s my number.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you.”
Before she left, she did something very weird: she came closer and whispered a single word in my ear, as if she were afraid that someone might overhear us, and then she walked out before I had the chance to reply. That word was: Run!
eleven
Jack Bertrand’s diary (2)
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up early and had breakfast at a nearby café. I was tired and confused, as if I had a hangover. Without questioning what I was doing, I went home, stuffed a few things in a bag, and came back to Hale’s apartment. I spent the rest of the day stretched out on the couch in the living room, drinking coffee and reading the notebooks.
I felt an odd affection for Hale, whose life had ended so soon and in such a tragic way. What I’d read of his notes so far showed that he was a kind and sensitive person, even though his heart had been broken by those tragic events that had taken place in France. He’d met that man, Joshua Fleischer, at university, when they were in their senior year, and the guy had been his nemesis: from that moment on, everything had slowly gone downhill. After that he’d merely struggled to hold on and get by. He’d seen himself as a victim of the dramatic circumstances triggered by Fleischer because of his frustrations and his leaning for doing evil. From Hale’s writing, he’d clearly been in love with Simone and she’d been in love with him, but events had taken a different course because of his so-called friend.
At one point, something very bad must have happened on a specific night spent in a Parisian hotel with Fleischer and Simone. He didn’t describe exactly what, all he’d written was, “That night, I lost everything.” Referring to Fleischer, he’d added, “He destroyed her and me along with her. Why did he do it? Because he could, and because that’s who he is, like a scorpion stinging the being who’s trying to help it get across the stream.”
I went to the nearest corner store and bought some groceries, and then spent the entire weekend reading the notebooks. On Monday morning, I woke up early and it took me a while to realize where I was. The place seemed shady and unfriendly, and I felt kind of relieved when I left, leaving the notebooks on the coffee table by the couch. I got the bus on Elmer Avenue and headed to my office. I walked into the building feeling guilty, like I’d done something wrong and they were about to catch me out. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. Despite my efforts to put something into my change jar, I was flat broke.
It was one of those days: we were assigned to two apartments in the Heights, and a small house near Queens Boulevard. In one of the apartments, an old lady had died a week before the neighbors called the police, so the stench was still terrible when we got there. Somebody scratched our car in the parking lot nearby, and Linda almost sprained her ankle climbing the stairs to the attic.
Before heading back to the office, we stopped off for lunch in a café on 99th Street, in Forest Hill.
“Hear anything new about that guy from Jackson Heights, Abraham Hale?” I asked her, as the waitress brought our coffees and bagels.
“What guy? Sweetie, what’s this? I didn’t want extra cream cheese, but extra lox.”
“Want me to take it back?”
“No, I don’t have time for that. So, what’s up with that guy? Is there something wrong?”
“I was just curious, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“I remembered you know a guy at the 115th Precinct, and—”
“Yeah, his name’s Torres, Miguel Torres.”
“I was wondering if you could ask him if they’ve got anything new on Hale.”
“And why would I do that?”
“I told you, I’m curious.”
“I don’t remember you ever being this curious before. Did you find something at his place without telling them back at the office? Like a lottery ticket?”
“Come on, Linda, don’t be like that …”
“Like what? I’ve got plenty of troubles as it is, Jack, I don’t need to go looking for more. Fine, when we get back to the office, I’ll call Torres. What was his name?”
“Abraham, Abraham Hale. Thanks, I owe you one.”
“You’re welcome. Now eat your bagel, we’ve got to go. You okay? You don’t look okay. Maybe you should quit smoking.”
“These days we don’t talk about pollution or gangs or shitty food, but only about how bad cigarettes are. Take a look at these bagels … Do you remember how big and tasty they used to be when we were kids? Do you remember how tasty everything used to be when we were kids? Forget it. I haven’t been sleeping well, that’s all. I’m not hungry and this stuff sucks.”
“I know you’re single, but do you live with someone?”
“No, why?”
“Because I know how difficult it is to live alone. Did you hear what happened to Ralph?”
“What?”
“His uncle from upstate died, so he came into a small fortune, a five-acre farm in Mayville County, by the lake. He’s going to quit his job and move out there.”
“Good for him.”
“Yep … Now, cough up and let’s get moving.”
I spent the next couple of nights in Hale’s apartment, leafing through the notebooks time and again. I was no longer afraid of being caught there, because nobody had come by to cut off the utilities, and nobody had called.
Reading those notes, I’d taken an instant dislike to Fleischer. I wanted to understand why a good man like Hale had ended his life in that miserable way—alone, poor, and defeated—while Fleischer, a manipulative douchebag, was so successful. It was like a fairy tale turned upside down. Was it just a case of luck? Is there a moment in your life when a decision, once taken, influences the rest of your existence, no matter what happens after that? All those questions were rolling over and over again into my mind, even in my sleep.
But there was still a man who had to have the answers. The very next week, I began tailing Fleischer.
twelve
Jack Bertrand’s diary (3)
TRACKING HIM DOWN WAS easy, because he was sitting in the catbird seat.
I walked over to the Public Library on 42nd Street and discovered from some old newspapers that he’d become famous in the mid-seventies: he’d donated his entire inheritance—thought to be worth over twenty million dollars at the time—to a foundation called the White Rose. After that, he’d lived abroad for a while, and then he’d struck it rich on Wall Street in the early eighties. He’d lost almost everything on Black Monday, in ’87, but made a spectacular comeback a couple of years later, when the Wall Street Journal dubbed him “the gentle sniper.”
That morning, I called my boss and took a few days off. I went to the Upper East Side and staked out the entrance of the tower where Fleischer lived: a luxury thirty-six-floor apartment building on East 58th Street and First Avenue.
Abraham Hale’s car, an old black four-cylinder Toyota Celica, had still been parked in the lot across the street from his building. I found the keys in a drawer, so I borrowed it to follow Fleischer when he went out the next morning. He didn’t use his car, but took a cab instead and stopped off at an elegant café on Greenwich Street, c
lose to the financial district.
He walked inside, and a few minutes later, I followed. The place was almost empty, but even so, the maître d’ asked me if I had a reservation. I told him I didn’t, and he ushered me to a table by the door, after casting me a skeptical glance. I ordered an espresso and a waiter brought me my coffee.
Fleischer was sitting at a table by the counter, in the company of an elegant woman in her thirties and a man of about the same age, both very well dressed. They looked relaxed, eating their croissants and chatting. It didn’t look like a business meeting to me.
He was tall and slim, had pleasant features, dark hair, and a tiny mustache. He looked younger than his years. If I hadn’t already known his age, I would have guessed he was around thirty-five. He wore a tailor-made suit, and his wristwatch was probably much more valuable than all my possessions put together.
I pictured Hale lying on the floor, naked, shrouded up in silence and loneliness, the life slowly draining from his body. And I wondered whether the woman I’d met in his apartment, that elegant lady with the soft strange accent, was the same one he’d mentioned in his notes, Simone. Was it possible that she might have followed them back to the States? If so, were they still in touch? I recalled how she knew where the bathroom was in the apartment, and I realized that she must have been there before. But was she still in touch with Fleischer too? Was it all some sort of perverted game, a possible explanation for why Hale had eventually taken his own life? She hadn’t seemed at all distressed by his death.
Before I knew it, he was at the entrance, helping the woman put on her raincoat. I left a five on the table and went to the door, but the waiter stopped me and told me that the coffee was $5.99. I raked through my pockets, gave him another buck, and headed for the exit, but it was too late: Fleischer and his companions had vanished.
*
On that same day, at about five p.m., Linda, my colleague, called me on my cellphone while I was smoking by the window, wondering what might have happened that night in Paris. She told me that the police inquiry was still ongoing, and so her friend had refused to leak any information about Abraham Hale. She asked me why I hadn’t come to work. I told her that I’d taken a couple of days off and hung up.
In his notes, Hale provided a lot of details about himself and about Fleischer. Why didn’t he just say what really happened in that hotel? A couple of times he’d stressed that his entire life had been ruined because of that night, but he wouldn’t take the bull by the horns and confess how that happened.
I took a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and drew a sort of diagram of boxes joined together by arrows and lines. I wrote Abraham Hale in one box, and then I connected it with another one, in which I wrote Joshua Fleischer. Everything seemed to come down to that night in Paris, so I wrote in another box, Simone Duchamp, Hotel Suite, Fall 1976.
Either one of them or both of them had done something terrible that night. That much was clear. After that, they’d come back to the States. What about Simone? Hale had stopped mentioning her after that incident; he’d written only about himself and Fleischer. All his recollections of Simone related solely to that period of time spent in Paris. But if she was really the woman I’d met at his place, they must have kept in touch after she moved to New York, ten years ago, as she’d mentioned.
Beneath the box with Simone’s name I traced another one and wrote, The Facts. She’d been seeing one of those men, but had then dumped him and begun a relationship with the other. Why? Hale had presumed that Fleischer knew how to manipulate people and make them do his bidding. Hale had probably been hurt and furious when she left him for Fleischer, especially given that he was sure that Fleischer wasn’t really in love with her, but had just wanted to hurt him. And he’d succeeded. But what happened next?
I knew that the question was rhetorical. There were only two people in the world that could provide me with some answers: Simone, if she really was the woman I’d met, or Fleischer, if he’d agree to have a talk with me.
An hour later, at about seven, the apartment’s phone rang and I answered. It was the same woman who had come to the apartment. Her voice sounded as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling well,” she told me and sighed. “Would you mind coming over? I’ve got something important to tell you.”
I was surprised. We barely knew each other, and now she was inviting me to her place in the most natural way.
“Sure … Has something happened?”
“What do you mean? I told you, we need to talk. Do you want to come over or not?”
“Okay, sorry, sure. Can I have your address and your phone number?”
“What? You have my address and phone number, remember?”
“I think I lost them.”
I jotted down her information on the pad of paper with my diagram and hung up. I put on my jacket and went out, wondering whether it would be appropriate to buy her some flowers, but then I realized that I should probably get there as quickly as possible, since she was ill. I climbed into the car and set off for Woodhaven. It was already dark and it took me a couple of minutes to realize that the headlights were off. I came to a halt on Grand Central and bought a cellphone, a small Ericsson with an expanding antenna that looked like a big black bug. The clerk, a guy barely out of his teens with a red dragon tattoo on his right forearm, showed me how to save her phone number into the device’s memory.
When I got onto Jackie Robinson, I knew that I was really taking this way too far. I was living in Hale’s apartment, using his car, his phone, his electricity, even some of his clothes. It was no longer a question of losing my job. I could get arrested for trespassing, burglary, theft, false identity, and probably on half a dozen other grounds. Sooner or later, the super or the neighbors would notice me hanging around the place and call the cops.
I turned left onto 87th Street and the address led me to an old two-story redbrick building that lay behind a derelict yard. I parked the car next to a lighting pole and crossed the turd-studded yard to the porch. There was an intercom to the right of the door with three call buttons, but the plastic slots for names were blank. A copy of a free newspaper and a few flyers were lying on the welcome rug, their pages curling. I lingered for a few moments, and then I called her on the phone to tell her I was there. A couple of seconds later I heard the buzz and went inside.
A strong smell of food was hanging in the air and the wooden floorboards creaked. I couldn’t find the light switch, so I climbed the stairs groping like a blind man. At the top there was a yellow door and I knocked.
She was almost naked, dressed only in a sheer nightgown, with no bra or underwear. Her hair was tied back in a short ponytail and she looked older than I remembered. She invited me in and headed toward the living room, swaying her hips. I closed the door behind me and followed her.
The apartment was small, dark, and almost dilapidated, rank with the smell of cheap perfume and tobacco. A few items of clothing were lying on the floor. There were no lamps in the room, just a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling like a gigantic firefly.
“Mind if I smoke?” I asked.
“Go ahead, there’s an ashtray in the kitchen. Gee, I’m so tired … Did you bring something to drink?”
“No, sorry, but I could go and get something.”
“There are no liquor stores around here. Forget it.”
She sat down on a couch and I went to the kitchen to fetch the ashtray. She asked me for a cigarette and we smoked in silence. The couch was shabby, like the rest of the furniture: a pair of decrepit armchairs, a couple of almost empty bookshelves, and a dining table with four chairs by the window. The carpet on the floor was threadbare and I spotted a couple of holes.
“Thanks for inviting me,” I said to her. “I like your place.”
“You’re being nice, it’s nothing but a shithole, but at the moment I can’t afford anything better,” she replied in a bitter voice. “How are you? I guess I�
�ve got the flu, I feel like hell. Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“You’re Simone, right? Simone Duchamp? I’m not sure I’m pronouncing it correctly, I speak very little French.”
For a few seconds she didn’t reply, and then she said, “Yes, of course I’m Simone, I thought you knew that. Why?”
“Your late friend, Abraham, told me about you: about how you guys met in Paris and fell in love and about the other guy, Fleischer, who tried to—”
“I don’t remember that period of my life very well, and anyway, I don’t feel like talking about my past tonight. Why don’t you make yourself at home?”
The hem of her nightgown had slipped aside, baring her thighs. She had a big greenish bruise above her right knee.
I tried not to stare at her legs and shaved pubis. “When did you come here, to New York?” I asked and she yawned. “About ten years ago,” she said. “Listen, do you want some coffee?”
“No, I’m good, thanks. Why didn’t you follow them here straightaway, back then?”
“Follow who?”
“Those guys you met in France, Hale and Fleischer. They were both in love with you, as far as I know and—”
“I told you, I don’t like talking about my past. What are you, a shrink or something?”
She stood up, went to the kitchen, and I heard the sound of water flowing down the sink. I took a closer look at the room: the corners of the wallpaper were peeling and in a few places the floorboards had been mended by some guy who had botched the job. There was a pile of porn magazines by the side of the couch and the curtains were grubby.
She came back after a couple of minutes with two mugs of coffee and handed me one. Her nightgown was now completely open, but she didn’t seem to care.
“You shouldn’t smoke. You told me you’re not well,” I said, feeling that my words were feeble and out of place.
“Who gives a damn?” she said, and sat down in an armchair, her legs curled up beneath her. “Look, do you want anything else from me tonight or are you going just to sit there and ask me weird questions? I told you we need to talk.”
Bad Blood Page 11
