by Joël Dicker
I would hasten down with my precious load and Grandma would watch me, smiling, touched. The first time I didn’t even notice that she had put two cups on the tray.
I would knock at the door of Natasha’s room, and, when I heard her tell me to come in, my heart would beat twice as fast.
“Grandma has made you some tea,” I would say shyly, half opening her door.
“Thank you, Krasavchik,” she would say with a smile.
She was most often on her bed, eating up books. After meekly placing the tray on the coffee table in front of a little couch, I would remain standing there awkwardly.
“Are you coming or going?” she would ask me.
In my chest, my heart was pounding.
“I’m coming.”
I would sit down next to her. She would serve us tea, then roll a joint. I would watch in fascination as her fingers with the polished nails rolled the cigarette paper and she then licked the edge with the tip of her tongue.
Her beauty blinded me, her gentleness made me melt, her intelligence overwhelmed me. There was not a subject she could not talk about, or a book she had not read. She knew everything about everything. And above all, much to my delight and contrary to what my grandparents asserted, she wasn’t really a cousin, or rather, we would have had to go back a good century to find a common ancestor.
Over the weeks, then the months, Natasha’s presence gave rise to a new-found animation in my grandparents’ house. She would play chess with Grandpa and have interminable conversations with him about politics. She became the mascot of the gang of old men from the butcher’s shop, now exiled to a coffee shop on Queens Boulevard. She would converse with them in Russian. She would go with Grandma on shopping expeditions, and help her in the house. They cooked together, and Natasha turned out to be an amazing cook. I found myself spending more and more time at my grandparents’ house and less and less at my mother’s.
The house was often enlivened by the telephone conversations that Natasha had with her cousins—real ones—scattered throughout the world. She would sometimes say to me, “We’re like the petals of a wonderful dandelion, and the wind has blown each of us to different corners of the earth.” She would be on the telephone, whether the one in her room, the one in the hall, or the one in the kitchen with its extendable cord, and babble into the receiver for hours on end, in all kinds of languages and at all hours of the day or night, depending on the time difference. There was the cousin in Paris, the one in Zurich, the one in Tel Aviv, the one in Buenos Aires. Sometimes she would speak English, sometimes French, sometimes Hebrew, sometimes German, but most of the time it was Russian.
The calls must have cost astronomical sums, but Grandpa didn’t say anything. On the contrary. Often, without her knowing it, he would pick up the receiver in another room and listen fascinated to the con-versation. I would sit next to him and he would translate in a low voice. That was how I learned that she often talked to her cousins about me, she would say that I was handsome and wonderful and that my eyes shone. “Krasavchik,” Grandpa explained one day after hearing her call me that, “means ‘handsome boy’”.
Then came Halloween.
That evening, when the first group of children rang the doorbell to ask for candies and Grandma rushed to open it with a bucket of cold water, Natasha cried:
“What are you doing, Grandma?”
“Nothing,” Grandma said shamefacedly, stopping in her tracks, and taking the bucket back to the kitchen.
Natasha, who had prepared salad bowls filled with multicolored candies, gave one to each of my grandparents and sent them to open the door. The children, yelling excitedly, grabbed handfuls of them before disappearing into the night. And my grandparents, watching them run off, cried in a kindly manner: “Happy Halloween, kids!”
In Rego Park, Natasha was like a whirlwind of positive vibes and creativity. When she wasn’t in class or cooking, she would take photographs in the neighborhood, or go to the municipal library. She would constantly leave notes behind to let my grandparents know what she was doing. She sometimes left a note for no reason, just to say hello.
One day when I got back from school, my grandma, seeing me walk in, pointed a threatening finger at me and said:
“Where were you, Jessica?”
When she was very angry with me, Grandma still sometimes called me Jessica.
“At school, Grandma,” I said. “Just like every day.”
“You didn’t leave a note!”
“Why should I have left a note?”
“Natasha always leaves a note.”
“But you know I’m at school every weekday! Where else would I be?”
“Bunch of jerks!” Grandpa declared, passing the kitchen door with a jar of pickled cucumbers.
“That’s shit,” Grandma said.
One of the great upheavals occasioned by the presence of Natasha was that Grandpa and Grandma had stopped swearing, at least in her presence. Grandpa had also stopped smoking his awful rolled cigarettes at mealtimes. I discovered that my grandparents could actually behave properly at the table and have interesting conversations. For the first time, I saw Grandpa wearing new shirts. (“Natasha bought them, she said my old ones had holes in them.”) And I even saw Grandma with barrettes in her hair. (“Natasha did my hair. She told me I looked pretty.”)
As for me, Natasha initiated me in what I had never known: literature and art. She opened my eyes to the world. When we went out, it was to go to bookstores, museums, galleries. Often, on Sundays, we would take the subway to Manhattan and visit a museum, the Met, MoMA, the Natural History Museum, the Whitney. Or else we would go to deserted, decrepit cinemas and see films in languages I couldn’t understand. But I didn’t care: I wasn’t looking at the screen, I was looking at her. I was devouring her with my eyes, profoundly disturbed by this totally eccentric, totally extraordinary, totally erotic young woman. She would live the films: she would get angry with the actors, she would cry, get upset, cry some more. And when the show was over, she would say to me, “Beautiful, wasn’t it?” And I would reply that I hadn’t understood any of it. She would laugh and tell me she would explain everything. And she would then take me to the nearest coffee shop, thinking that I couldn’t stand not understanding, and tell me the story of the film from beginning to end. Generally, I didn’t listen to her, just gazed in admiration at her lips. I worshiped her.
When we would go to bookstores—those were the days when bookstores still flourished in New York—Natasha would buy piles of books. When we got back to her room in my grandparents’ house, she would force me to read, lying down next to me, rolling a joint and smoking peacefully.
One evening in December, when she had rested her head on my chest while I was supposed to be reading a history book about Russia—I had dared to ask her a question on the way the old Soviet republics were divided up—she touched my abdominals.
“How come your body’s so hard?” she said, sitting up.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I like doing sports.”
She took a long drag on her joint and put it down in an ashtray.
“Take off your T-shirt!” she said abruptly. “I’d like to see you for real.”
I obeyed without thinking. I could feel my heart echoing through my body. I stood there bare-chested in front of her, and she peered through the half-light at my sculpted body, placed a hand on my pectorals, and slid it over my torso, touching me lightly with her fingertips.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so good-looking,” she said.
“Good-looking? Me?”
She laughed. “Obviously you, you idiot!”
“I don’t think I’m very good-looking,” I said.
She gave me a wonderful smile, and said these words, which even today remain ingrained in my memory:
“Good-looking people never think they are, Jesse.”
She gazed at me. I was fascinated by her and at the same time frozen with indecision. Finally, at the peak of nervo
usness and feeling obliged to break the silence, I stammered:
“Don’t you have a boyfriend?”
She frowned wickedly and said:
“I thought you were my boyfriend . . .”
She moved her face close to mine and briefly touched my lips with hers, then kissed me as I had never been kissed. Her tongue mingled with mine with such an erotic charge that the sensation of it ran through me with an emotion I had never previously experienced.
That was the beginning of our love affair. From that evening on, and during the years that would follow, I would never leave Natasha.
She would be the center of my life, the center of my thoughts, the center of my attention, the center of my concerns, the center of my total love. And I would be the same for her. I was going to love and be loved as few people have been loved. At the movies, in the subway, at the theater, in the library, at my grandparents’ dinner table, my place by her side was paradise. And nights became our kingdom.
Alongside her studies, to make a little money, Natasha had found a job as a waitress at Katz’s, the restaurant where my grandparents liked to go. It was there that she made the acquaintance of a girl her age who also worked there, whose name was Darla.
For my part, once I had finished school, thanks to my very good scores, I was accepted by New York University. I loved studying, for a long time I had thought about becoming a teacher or a lawyer. But sitting in the lecture halls of the university, I finally understood the meaning of a phrase so often uttered by my grandparents: “Become someone important.” What did it mean to be important? The only image that came to my mind was that of our neighbor Ephraim Jenson, the proud police captain. The righter of wrongs. The protector of the weak. Nobody had been treated with more respect and deference by my grandparents. I wanted to be a police officer. Like him.
Graduating from university after four years, I was accepted by the State Police Academy, finished top of my year, proved myself in the field, was quickly promoted to inspector and began working at troop headquarters, where I would remain for the rest of my career. I remember my first day there, finding myself in Major McKenna’s office, sitting beside a young man a little older than me.
“Inspector Jesse Rosenberg, top of your year,” McKenna said. “Do you think you impress me with your qualifications?”
“No, sir,” I said.
He turned to the other young man. “And you, Derek Scott, the youngest sergeant in the history of the State Police, do you think I’m blown away by that?”
“No, sir.”
McKenna looked closely at both of us. “You know what they’re saying at general headquarters? They’re saying you’re both champions. So we’re going to put the two of you together and see if you make sparks.”
We nodded in unison.
“O.K.,” McKenna said. “We’ll find two offices facing each other and give you all the cases of old ladies who’ve lost their cats. Let’s see how you get on with that.”
Natasha and Darla, who had been close since meeting at Katz’s, had made some progress in their careers. After a few not very rewarding experiences, they had just been hired at the Blue Lagoon, supposedly as commis chefs, but the boss had eventually made them wait on tables, claiming that he lacked the staff.
“You ought to quit,” I said to Natasha one evening. “He has no right to do that to you.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “The money’s good, it pays the bills, and I can even put a little aside. In fact, Darla and I have had an idea. We’re going to open our own restaurant.”
“That’s wonderful!” I said. “You’ll be wildly successful! What kind of restaurant? Have you already found premises?”
Natasha burst out laughing. “Don’t get carried away, Jesse. There’s a long way to go yet. We have to start by putting money aside and thinking about the concept. But it’s a good idea, isn’t it?”
“It’s a fantastic idea.”
“It’s my dream,” she said with a smile. “Jesse, promise me we’ll have a restaurant one day.”
“I promise.”
“Promise properly. Tell me that one day we’ll have a restaurant in a quiet spot. No more cops, no more New York, nothing but peace and quiet.”
“I promise.”
2
Desolation
SUNDAY, JULY 27 – WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2014
JESSE ROSENBERG
Sunday, July 27, 2014
The day after opening night
Seven in the morning. Day was breaking over Orphea. Nobody had slept during the night.
The center of town looked unusually bleak. Main Street was still cordoned off, still filled with police officers and emergency vehicles, and strewn with objects of all kinds abandoned by the audience in the wave of panic that had followed the shots being fired in the Grand Theater.
There had been a lot of action at first. Until late at night, the police intervention teams had closed off the area in search of the shooter, with no success. It had also been necessary to secure the town in order to avoid stores being looted in the turmoil. First aid tents had been set up outside the security barrier to treat those lightly wounded, most of them victims of being knocked down and badly bruised, some in shock. As for Carolina Eden, she was not in a good way. She had been flown in a desperate state by helicopter to a hospital in Manhattan.
Now, with a new day breaking, peace and quiet had returned. What had happened at the Grand Theater needed to be figured out. Who was the shooter? And how had he been able to bring a weapon into the theater despite all the security measures?
At the police station, which was still in a state of great agitation, Betsy, Derek and I were getting ready to question the cast, who had been the most direct witnesses of the events. Caught up in the panic, they had scattered across town, and finding them and bringing them in had been no easy matter. They were now all in a conference room, some sleeping on the floor, others slumped on the table in the middle, waiting to be interrogated in turn. The only one missing was Jerry Eden, who had left with his daughter in the helicopter.
The first to be questioned was Hayward, and our conversation would take a turn we were a long way from anticipating. Hayward no longer had anybody to protect him, and we didn’t pull our punches.
“What the hell do you know!” Derek shouted at him, shaking Hayward like a plum tree. “I want a name now, or I’ll smash your teeth in. I want a name! Right now!”
“I have no idea,” Hayward said, “I swear.”
Derek flung him angrily against the wall. Hayward slumped to the floor. I picked him up and sat him on a chair.
“You have to talk now, Kirk,” I said. “You have to tell us everything you know. This has gone far enough.”
Hayward was on the verge of tears. “How’s Carolina?” he said in a choked voice.
“She isn’t doing well!” Derek said. “And you alone are responsible for that!”
Hayward plunged his head into his hands.
“What is it you know?” I said in a firm but not aggressive tone.
He said in a low voice, “I never had the slightest idea who committed those murders.”
“But you knew Meghan Padalin, not Mayor Gordon, was the target back in 1994?”
He nodded. “In October 1994, when the State Police announced that Tennenbaum was the killer, I did indeed have my doubts. Because Ostrovski had told me he had seen Charlotte driving Tennenbaum’s van, which I couldn’t figure out. But I would never have dug any farther if the Gordons’ next-door neighbors hadn’t called me a few days later. They had just discovered two bullet holes in their garage door. The marks weren’t obvious, they’d only noticed them because they had quite by chance decided to repaint the door. I went there, extracted the two bullets, then asked the forensics department of the State Police to make a comparison with the bullets found in the victims. They came from the same weapon. Judging by the depth and angle at which the bullets were embedded, it was clear that they had been fired from the park. That
was when I understood that it was Meghan who had been the target. Her killer had missed her in the park, she had run in the direction of the mayor’s house, presumably in search of help, but had been overtaken and killed. Then the Gordons were killed because they had witnessed the murder.”
“Why were we never told this?” Derek said.
“I tried my damnedest to get in touch with you at the time,” Hayward said. “I called you at troop headquarters, you and Rosenberg. I was told you’d had an accident and were both on indefinite leave. When I said it was about the Gordon killings, I was told very firmly that the case was closed. So I went to your houses. At your house, Derek, I was turned away by a young woman who told me not to come back and to leave you alone, especially if it was to talk about that case. Then I went to your place, Jesse, several times. I rang the bell but nobody ever came to the door!”
Derek and I looked at each other, realizing how disastrously wrong we had been about the case back then.
“What did you do?” Derek said.
“It was a mess!” Hayward said. “But in brief: Charlotte Brown had been seen at the wheel of Tennenbaum’s van at the time of the murders, but Tennenbaum was the culprit according to the State Police, and I was convinced that there had been a mistake about the primary target. To make matters worse, I couldn’t tell anybody. My colleagues in the Orphea police department had given me the cold shoulder, and the State Police officers in charge of the investigation—you two—had dropped out of sight. A real mess. So I decided to solve the case myself. I looked to see if there had been any other murders recently in the area. There weren’t any. The only suspicious death was a guy who had been killed in a supposed motorcycle accident on a road near Ridgesport. It looked worth investigating. I got in touch with the Highway Patrol, and when I spoke with the officer dealing with the incident, I learned that an A.T.F. agent had been asking him questions. So I contacted this A.T.F. agent, who told me that the biker who had died was a gangster who had always evaded arrest and that his own belief was that his death was no accident. At this point, I was afraid of poking my nose into some dirty business with underworld connections. I tried to talk to one of my colleagues, Lewis Erban. But Lewis never came to the meeting I thought we’d fixed. More than ever, I was alone, dealing with a case that was beyond me. So I decided to disappear.”
