had seen exactly what was there. Rebecca could hardly fathom it. She had been convinced of her patient’s paranoia. And yet the woman was lying dead at Rebecca’s feet.
She stood up wavering, numb with an old pain. Her last memory of David’s face flashed by, white against the white sheet, his mouth loosened at the jaw, foreign, his body empty of him, the emptiness taking her over. She felt it wring her heart the same way, the old squeezing inside her chest. Surprising how much she cared for the old woman. How the bond between them had grown stronger when David died, each understanding the grief of the other. And she needed Rebecca so much; she said Rebecca helped her stay alive one week to the next. Then why was she dead? Why was she lying there in her pyjamas, fallen awkwardly on her side, arm beneath her back? Stay calm, thought Rebecca. Look carefully. Piece it together. There must have been a struggle. Rigor mortis still clamped part of the body tight but had released the small muscles. Mrs. Kochinsky had been dead all day, maybe all night. She seemed much smaller now than when she was alive.
A pale light filtered through the brocade curtains of the front window, creating murky twilight an hour early. Rebecca realized the chandelier in the diningroom was on. Last night. He’d come last night. But who? She glanced around the littered apartment. Could she be sure it wasn’t exactly what it appeared? Why couldn’t it have been a burglar? Maybe instead of the Argentine death squad Mrs. Kochinsky anticipated every day of her life, it had been a thief caught in the act who had played out her worst nightmare. Was it impossible that she had fled persecution on two continents only to find meaningless death on the third? Yet would a thief come here? The woman was not rich. If they were looking for saleable goods, any of the houses on the winding, genteel streets off Bathurst would have yielded more.
Hovering at the edge of the living-room, Rebecca realized the side door to the apartment was open. It led to a short hall and the back staircases, one upper, one leading to the basement, then the door to the outside. This must have been the way the killer got out. He would have ended up in the laneway at the side of the house. No problem escaping unseen.
On her way to the phone in the kitchen, Rebecca passed the bedroom: everything Mrs. Kochinksy owned lay scattered on the bed and floor — cosmetics, clothes, shoes. On the dresser her leather purse resembled a dead animal, its insides pulled out. The wallet sat open, presumably empty. A robbery? A good imitation?
Rebecca stood on the threshold of the kitchen, looking for the phone. The receiver hung from the wall. Mrs. Kochinsky must have run in here, trying to call for help. The killer had torn the cord out of the wall. Then he chased her into the living-room. Trying to piece it together was giving Rebecca the creeps. He may have been gone, but the aura of his presence was strong; an evil cloud filled the apartment, it smelled of him.
Rebecca didn’t want to disturb any evidence. Turning left, she stepped through the dining-room and continued into the den. Through the windows, the small backyard and garage were fading into the dim evening. The room itself seemed untouched. She found a desk in the corner. On it a phone sat beside a chocolate box filled with bills and receipts. Some papers lay to one side. The detritus of daily life. Garbage now that the inhabitant was dead. How much correspondence with art supply houses and galleries had she thrown out when David had died. All his notebooks. Wipe the slate clean. Start afresh. The clichés sounded right, but they didn’t work. Envelopes for David Adler still arrived with regularity at the house. Each time she dropped one in the garbage she saw his face white against the sheet.
Using a tissue from her pocket, she draped the receiver before lifting it and dialed 911. This line had not been disconnected. The dispatcher said that police and ambulance were on their way. Rebecca wondered how quickly they would arrive, considering there was no medical emergency. While she was relaying the information, her eyes fell on the papers near the phone. On top was a card printed in Spanish outlined with a black border. She used her high school Spanish to decipher the announcement of the death of Carlos Velasco, son of Isabella, to be buried in Tablada Cemetery, Buenos Aires, in February 1977. What was this doing in a pile of current mail?
The past few years had not been good to Mrs. Kochinsky. First her husband died, then during the vulnerability of her widowhood, the regime pursued her into the torture chamber in order to catch the son who produced plodding but graphic song lyrics about bloodthirsty generals and death squads in uniform. The death of Carlos Velasco may have been history, but the card had just been received. Why else was it keeping company with Mrs. Kochinsky’s latest hydro bill? It was like a voice from the past. The expression stopped Rebecca cold. A voice from the past. Rebecca remembered the cousin and the photo of the duck. Suddenly she wished she’d gotten a better look at the picture when Mrs. Kochinsky had waved it around in the office. It hadn’t been among the papers near the phone in the den. The purse. Mrs. Kochinsky had brought it out of her purse.
Rebecca tiptoed toward the bedroom as if her steps would disturb someone. She could see everything from the doorstep of the small room. All the drawers from the white dresser stood open, the clothes from inside dumped in heaps on the peach broadloom. On the nightstand, strangely untouched, lay a grey doll in a striped dress, a crude shabby thing for someone as elegant as Mrs. Kochinsky. The police would be there any minute. She took wary steps toward the emptied purse on the dresser. She touched nothing but scrutinized the papers lying nearby. A few things had fallen to the floor. A chequebook, a recipe, some store receipts, a shopping list. The picture wasn’t there. Crouching in a clear area at the foot of the bed, she gingerly lifted the bedskirt. There was nothing underneath. She didn’t want to disturb evidence but she had to know. She poked her foot into the clothes on the floor. She inspected the piles of shoes in the closet. Nothing. It was as clear as day to her now: whoever had killed Mrs. Kochinsky had taken the picture. The inexplicable photocopy of the duck was missing.
chapter eight
Wednesday, April 4, 1979
Nesha smiled inwardly at the discomfort of the welldressed woman seated next to him on the plane. He found, since growing his hair and beard to an unruly length, that people sitting beside him in moving vehicles were less likely to engage him in conversation. He kept himself clean but untidy, no longer able to take seriously the usual daily precepts of personal grooming. He reminded himself of Howard Hughes. Yet there had been a time, many times, before he had turned eccentric, that he had found himself on a plane beside a middleaged woman who wanted to talk.
He had married a woman who was attracted to his melancholy. She said she wanted to help him forget, not realizing she was aiming to eliminate the trait that had attracted her in the first place. They had a son and Nesha had once considered himself satisfied with life. The son, Josh, was a good student, would be the scholar Nesha would have been — had he been given the chance. Josh had fine dark hair, like his father, that lay in loose waves around his head. Nesha feared for his son because he knew how easily the world could fall apart. Josh would tire of his father’s paranoia and say, “Don’t worry so much Dad, this is America.”
Over the years Margie learned she would never be able to make Nesha forget. She knew his obsession would always take precedence over her and resentment became disaffection, then finally indifference. When Josh was twenty and had been away at school for a year, Margie decided there was no longer any reason to stay. She had had a stomachful of her husband’s rage and melancholy and was ready for lighter fare. The ironic thing was that when she left, Nesha lost interest in everything, including all thoughts of vengeance.
It was still daylight when they flew over Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. For vast miles they gleamed beneath him in a kind of flat blue he had never seen on the ocean, a clear mirror of the sky, an almost blinding light in the eyes. He had looked up the Great Lakes on a map before he left and found to his relief that Toronto sat comfortably on the north end of Lake Ontario, a port city. What would he do without his precious water?
At the front desk of the hotel they eyed him suspiciously with his ragged
